OK, so how I meet my dad is really unpleasant, but I thought I’d better say exactly how it was.
You know there are loads of things that everyone thinks are true that aren’t? Such as, ‘you can see the Great Wall of China from space’. No you can’t, not even from the International Space Station, which is only 173 miles up in space.
All right, here’s another one that I looked up on the internet. “Hats stop you getting cold because you lose half of your body heat through your head.” Mum is always telling me this, so I checked, and in children it’s actually only about ten per cent.
But you can be pretty sure that this one – that I have just made up – is true: ‘Kids who mistreat animals are Bad News.’ This is about to be proved to me.
It’s 1984, July 30th, a bright day, but there’s a chilly breeze coming off the sea (Mum calls it a ‘fret’, which I think is a Geordie word) and a slight haze in the air. I’ve come out of the garage, I zip up my hoodie and head down the alleyway towards the seafront. The alley cuts through another row of houses and comes out on the seafront road, and I cross the road towards the beach.
Straight ahead of me on the sand, as I come down the slipway to the beach, is a group of kids a bit older than me, mostly, though there’s one little kid of about six in an anorak with the hood pulled up.
I have turned the corner and seen them, and I would turn back, except the biggest one has seen me, and there is something about him that tells me that if I turned and backed away he would follow.
It’s like a sign of weakness. So I decide that the only thing I can do is shove my hands in my pockets, hold my head up and walk past them, being very, very careful not to catch anyone’s eye, especially the big kid’s, who in any case has turned his attention back to the group having evidently decided that I am not worth his attention, which is fine by me, thank you very much.
By now I’m about twenty metres from the group, and I can see there’s five of them, and they’re kind of circled around the big kid whose back is to me. He’s picked up a shoebox from the ground and taken the lid off. They gather round to look in and there’s a collection of noises that they all make.
“Eugh, Macca, man! Where’d you get it?”
“It was trespassin’. An’ trespassers will be persecuted. With me air rifle!”
“Awww! That’s nasty!”
“Uuuuuurh!”
Then, most chilling of all, from the kid with a high-pitched voice, like a girl’s, “Aw, Macca, man – it’s still alive!”
“Not for long, hur hur! Gan on, Chow – gan on an’ do it,” says the big kid, and the others laugh. It’s not a good laugh, there’s a meanness to it and it’s a bit forced. It’s hard to describe, but it puts me further on edge.
I’m about five meters away now, and I am so not looking in their direction and all of this is happening to the side of me.
Again the big kid says, “Do it, Chow – do it now, or are you too chicken?” and again the others cackle, and the kid called Chow, who has his back to me, takes something out of his pocket, like a flattish, square tin, and as I pass them the big kid says, “Ha’ad on,” and the others glance in my direction. He’s holding up the action until I pass, and at that point, I run towards them, deliver a flying kick in the groin to Big Kid. The others all scatter and I am a hero.
Nope, not really. What I really do is dart past as quickly as I can, and my not-looking-at-them bit has become so extreme that I practically have my head turned to one side because the thing that anyone in my position would dread at the moment is hearing the words, “Oi – what you lookin’ at?”
I’ve already seen enough of the big kid to know that I really don’t want anything to do with him. His hair’s cut bristle-short, and despite the chill breeze, he’s wearing only a red-and-white striped football shirt stretched over his stomach, which is almost fat, but not quite. It’s his neck that scares me, though: thick and short and pink and aggressive.
I’m at a safe distance, and there’s a sort of bend where the beach path goes around a cliff and I’ll soon be out of their sight, when I hear the chant start:
“Do it! Do it! Do it!”
I try to imagine what it is that they’re going to do, and to what, but I can’t, or perhaps my imagination just won’t go far enough in that direction.
“Ha’d on, ha’d on,” says the big kid, who must be the one they are calling Macca. “Have you ever seen a cat bark?”
And that’s when my stomach kind of drops because: A) I know the answer to this question. It’s a joke that went around our class. And: B) I’m going to have to stop them. I know that. I just don’t know how.
“No, I’m telling you, I can make a cat go woof. Give me that.” There’s a pause and I can hear some splashing on the ground. The others are like, “Oh, man! C’mon, Macca, don’t be mental.”
I’m sort of paralysed.
The joke goes like this.
“How do you make a cat bark? Soak it in petrol and set fire to it: Woooof!”
OK, so perhaps it’s not the funniest joke in the world, and it’s a bit cruel. But when I first heard it, I laughed, because it’s so silly. When Hector Houghman told it to me in the playground he made a little pause before saying “Woooof!” which I suppose is ‘comic timing’ which made it funnier, and besides, no one would really set fire to a cat, would they?
“Right, who’s got the matches?” says Macca.
In my jeans pocket, my hand closes around my mobile phone, and I get an idea.
There’s the rasp of a match being struck on the box. “Listen,” says Macca. “You are about to hear, for the first time in nature, a cat go woof.”
I step out from behind the jutting out rock, and shout, “Stop! Stop!” just like that and start running towards the group. I thought it would be Macca holding the match, but it isn’t: it’s the kid called Chow who chucks it away behind him as soon as I approach. In fact all of them edge back a little and look down at the sand.
All but one. Macca folds his arms and takes one step forward, nearer the box so that he’s standing right over it. I can see into the box, and sure enough, there’s a cat in there, and it’s alive (I think) and its fur is wet, and I can see the container that the kid they call Chow is holding: it’s lighter fluid.
They really were going to do this.
Macca cocks his head back and looks at me through his piggy, bulbous eyes. He isn’t moving anywhere for anyone.
“Who. The hell. Are you?”
Now I hadn’t really thought this through, as you will gather. I’m kind of winging it.
“The cat. It belongs to me, well, to my, er … my gran. Me nan. Me nanna. It’s me nanna’s cat. I came out lookin’ for it.” In the space of a sentence, my voice has shifted to a slightly stronger Geordie accent. I need to get Macca on side and this is one way of doing it.
I can see Macca is a bit thrown by this. It’s one thing to fire an airgun and set fire to an anonymous cat. It’s different when the supposed owner of the cat’s grandson is standing in front of you. Even morality can be relative.
Macca’s eyes have narrowed to tiny slits. I’m not sure that Macca’s morality is like other people’s.
“He was trespassin’ in me garden. Me garden’s full of cat crap. Me little brother Stokoe got it on his bare feet the other day.” He says all of this as if it means that the subsequent torture was justified.
“Look, I’m sorry. How about …” and I hesitate, because I know this is risky but I can also see that Macca isn’t much moved by my imaginary grandmother’s plight. “How about we swap?”
I take my phone out of my pocket and held it up.
The others peer at it curiously. Macca, arms still crossed, glances at it.
“A pocket calculator? What do I want one of them for?”
“It’s not just a pocket calculator. It’s got a built in camera too! Look –” I point it at Macca – “Smile,” I say, and – amazingly – he does. Not a proper smile, it doesn’t reach his little eyes, but the corners of his mouth turn up. I show them the picture, and they gasp appreciatively.
(I should point out, by the way, that my phone is rubbish, with push-buttons and everything, and I can’t make a phone call with it, because:
For a brief moment, though, I wonder if I’d be able to call through spacetime to Mum or someone. That would be so cool. But there’s no signal, obviously. Anyway, this lot are impressed.)
I take another picture, this time a selfie of me and the kid, Chow. I show Macca which button to push, and how to make it show the photo. He has it in his hands and is turning it over, impressed.
“A swap, eh? This thing for a half-dead cat?”
I nod.
“What are gonna do wi’ the cat?”
I shrug. “Dunno. Take it back to me nanna’s?”
Macca looks at me fiercely. “One word. One word of this gets out and you, my friend, are history.” At that moment, I believe him. He pockets my phone and says to the others, “Ha’way. Leave this loser with his nanna’s cat.”
Then he walks away, and the others follow.
And I’m stuck with a cat I don’t know what to do with.