Читать книгу Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny - Limmy - Страница 10

I’ve not said much about my brother and my mum and dad, so here’s a bit about what they were like when I was wee. I’ll try and keep it short in case you’re not interested in that sort of thing.

My brother David is about three years older than me, I think. I can’t remember him playing much with me when I was wee, but I remember him telling me stories, making lots of shite up that fascinated me. Like, when we’d get the ferry over to Millport, he’d point down at the foam at the side, caused by the propellers or whatever it was, and he’d say that the foam was caused by sharks biting the water. It’d normally be scary stuff, but it wasn’t to scare me. I’d just be slack-jawed, imagining it all. He probably saw that I was into that type of thing.

But he never played with me much. He’d be playing with older boys, and I think I cramped his style. I didn’t like his pals, though. One of my earliest memories of David is of his pals being pricks to him.

They did this thing called the Heil Hitler. They held him down on the ground, while another boy stood with his feet at each side of David’s head. Then the boy would click his heels like a Nazi, and say, ‘Heil Hitler!’

It wasn’t dummy fighting. It looked like it hurt, and nobody else got it done to them. They just did it to him. But he still hung about with them. That was the worst thing of all, that these were his pals.

I hated them. I must have only been about five, but I fucking hated them. I remember one of them emailed me when I was in my 20s, when my website Limmy.com was doing the rounds. He emailed to say he liked my stuff, and asked if I remembered him. I said, ‘Aye, I remember you were a prick to my brother, mate, right in front of me.’ He didn’t reply.

I think David then started hanging about with these other pals. Bad boys. I’d want to hang about with him, but he’d always tell me to beat it. He told me years later that it was because him and these bad boys used to get up to trouble, and he didn’t want me joining them.

It sounds like he was on a tragic path, but by the time I got to secondary school David had a reputation as somebody you didn’t want to fuck with. Which is a happy ending, depending on how you look at it.

Anyway, my mum …

My mum was a volunteer in the Carnwadric Community Flat, which was a kind of citizens’ advice bureau. Folk would come round to ask advice about a leak or some other thing wrong with their council house, and my mum would get the council to sort it. Other than that, my mum would spend her time in our house, looking after me and my brother, or watching the telly. She was just like most mums where I lived.

But she had this photo album that I used to look through. She was from Glasgow, a working-class area in Glasgow, but in this photo album she had these pictures of when she used to live in New York, when she was younger. She’d moved there during the 60s when she was 20-something, and I always thought that was amazing. My mum used to live in New York, like on Cagney & Lacey.

There were photos of her wearing all these 60s clothes, with skyscrapers in the background, or in an office, or on a train with all these people going to a party. She never looked like a tourist. She was never just standing still in front of a landmark. She always looked like she was doing something, like talking or having a laugh or just getting ready to cross the road. She looked like somebody living their life there.

There was a man that kept appearing in the photies, a guy who looked a bit like Clark Kent. Sometimes the pictures were just of him, doing things like fixing a motor. I asked my mum who he was. She said it was her husband. She’d got married over there to this guy. Then, for whatever reason, the marriage didn’t work out, and she moved back to Glasgow about a year later, where she met my dad.

She just looked like anybody’s mum, but the photo album and everything else gave me a feeling that I wasn’t just talking to my mum. She was this person who’d been places and done things, she had this whole other life before me, she’d even been married to another man before my dad. She wasn’t just my mum.

But what you really want to know is, ‘Did she give you enough cuddles, Brian? Did your mammy never tell you that she loved you?’

No, she didn’t, now that you mention it. I don’t remember her ever telling me she loved me or her giving me a kiss or cuddle or any of that. It’s not that she neglected me or treated me badly. We’d talk about things and she was funny. We’d watch films together. Her favourite film was Calamity Jane, this camp Western musical from the 50s. We watched it over and over. She loved it, and so did I. My dad didn’t love it, my brother didn’t love it, but me and my mum did. But she never told me that she loved me, and I didn’t tell her. I didn’t really notice, and I didn’t care. But I think I must have, because I tell my son I love him. I tell him all the time. He sometimes says, ‘I know, you’ve told me a million times.’ And I’m very glad to hear it. That way he won’t grow up wondering if his dad ever loved him.

My dad never told me he loved me.

Thank fuck. Imagine it. Your smelly fucking da telling you he loves you.

My dad was kind of like my mum. He was from some working-class area in Glasgow as well, and he was funny. Him and my mum were always having a laugh, I never heard them have an argument once. And like my mum, he also seemed a bit different to everybody else.

On one hand, he had an ordinary job. He was a joiner, he’d go away for the day and come back smelling of sawdust. But he was also an artist. He went to the Glasgow School of Art when he was younger. He’d do oil paintings and pastels and silhouettes, he’d do portraits and landscapes. We’d have them hanging up in the house, and he’d get asked to do them for other folk. I think that was a bit different for Carnwadric, it was a bit middle class for back then, and my dad wasn’t like that. He was a bit of a hard cunt, actually, which makes the artist thing seem so unusual. He wasn’t aggressive, but he could handle himself. I saw him in this fight once.

I was coming home from primary school, which was just across the road from my house. As I started walking to my street, I could hear shouting and screaming, and there was my dad outside my house with blood on his face. And there was this hardman cunt, a big angry guy that lived a couple of doors down. He was a debt collector for the local moneylenders, an evil bastard. I stood far away, watching. I don’t remember seeing any punches, but I remember this other guy’s wife screaming something like ‘Hit him with your shoe!’ But then the fight was over. The guy had battered my dad.

My dad didn’t want to leave it, so he started training. He hung a punchbag up in this lock-up garage that he’d rented, and he’d punch fuck out of it. Then, when the time was right, he squared up to this cunt, and punched fuck out of him. I didn’t see it, so I had to ask my dad the other day for the story. He said he was kicking into the guy’s face and everything.

When my dad finished telling the story, he said it brought back a lot of happy memories. I was happy to hear it. We hated the cunt.