A Fucked Up Life in Books

A Fucked Up Life in Books Литагент HarperCollins The most fucked up memoir you’ll ever read.A foul-mouthed memoir about a dysfunctional life.Each chapter recounts a key moment in the author’s life through the books she was reading at the time including:• Howard’s End, the only text she had read whilst engaging in sexual intercourse.• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, which she had in her bag while on holiday in Tangier when a market trader offered her to buy her from her mother for 30 camels.• Angela’s Ashes, her chosen reading material during her breast reduction surgery.• Wild Swans, the book she read the day she decided to have nothing more to do with her mother.It is funny, it is shocking, it is heartbreaking, it is very rude and it is totally unforgettable. A FUCKED UP LIFE IN BOOKS Anonymous To Boy, love from Stumpy Table of Contents Title Page (#u43d9bc2b-1c3f-5f65-99aa-58a0f4015181) Dedication (#u96b17241-245a-50dc-bd94-bfc21a59ec27) Introduction (#u16113124-7590-58f6-95c0-5fcc6b94bcd4) Childhood and school (#ud71f58f0-b5ca-530a-83e7-a74bc0530023) Owl at Home (#u8ccfe76a-42ff-5650-93a3-9f152ec55785) Mr Meddle’s Muddles (#u274d71f1-3a26-5e7d-a15d-7177ec38e782) Burglar Bill (#u51d9e34f-4629-560f-ac4a-95d8f313369a) Thelwell’s Riding Academy (#udcaef283-4acc-532f-96e8-654f854297a3) Flight of Dragons (#u32868ef6-e2a0-5d91-a4a7-6c7a8ea5f610) Goosebumps (#u33afa6e3-1fbd-5b85-843a-9ff0f8a4df2f) Grimms’ Fairytales (#u8c48ffa0-b0c9-5942-95b9-400d53e0f09d) The Silver Brumby (#u6d1fe53b-0675-5c38-87de-3fc9c849191e) The Diary of Adrian Mole (#ue200bbb0-7af8-508a-9747-220e21867ce4) Angela’s Ashes (#u26ada626-a551-5b0e-b164-0d5d27fc6f2e) Stark (#ua77c89ba-297d-5577-af3b-55b598b28e1a) The Caucasian Chalk Circle (#u0366c55f-583b-5e20-8191-6b3dce86ed2e) Birdsong (#u4886f4c2-eea1-5a43-8265-53fa046d31c4) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (#litres_trial_promo) Wizard’s First Rule (#litres_trial_promo) Liverpool Daisy (#litres_trial_promo) Towards Tomorrow (#litres_trial_promo) Teenage years and university (#litres_trial_promo) Beloved (#litres_trial_promo) A Game of You (#litres_trial_promo) The Princess Bride (#litres_trial_promo) Howards End (#litres_trial_promo) Stone of Tears (#litres_trial_promo) Wild Swans (#litres_trial_promo) The Dice Man (#litres_trial_promo) The Lord of the Rings (#litres_trial_promo) Trainspotting (#litres_trial_promo) Lolita (#litres_trial_promo) Smoke and Mirrors (#litres_trial_promo) The Da Vinci Code (#litres_trial_promo) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (#litres_trial_promo) Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales (#litres_trial_promo) Confessor (#litres_trial_promo) Guards! Guards! (#litres_trial_promo) Nineteen Eighty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) A proper grown-up (#litres_trial_promo) A Prayer for Owen Meany (#litres_trial_promo) A Hell on Earth (#litres_trial_promo) The Eye of the World (#litres_trial_promo) A Wild Sheep Chase (#litres_trial_promo) Delta of Venus (#litres_trial_promo) Twilight (#litres_trial_promo) The Godfather (#litres_trial_promo) Beowulf (#litres_trial_promo) Memoirs of a Geisha (#litres_trial_promo) A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian (#litres_trial_promo) Dragon’s Gold (#litres_trial_promo) Brick Lane (#litres_trial_promo) Persepolis (#litres_trial_promo) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (#litres_trial_promo) Glamorama (#litres_trial_promo) A Game of Thrones (#litres_trial_promo) The Master and Margarita (#litres_trial_promo) The Periodic Table (#litres_trial_promo) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (#litres_trial_promo) How To Be a Woman (#litres_trial_promo) A Dance with Dragons (#litres_trial_promo) All My Friends Are Superheroes (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction I started writing a blog because I wanted to talk about books anonymously. The reason I did it anonymously was because I didn’t, and still don’t really, think that I am at all clever or insightful enough to have decent opinions on books. If I love them, I can’t really tell you why; and if I hate them I tend to just swear a lot and get frustrated. The best and most fitting anonymous name that I could think of for me was BookCunt. I fucking love books and I have a cunt. Job done. The first book I reviewed was The Tiny Wife by Andrew Kaufman that had been given to me by a friend. After I reviewed that I didn’t really know what else to do. I didn’t have any other new books to review, and no one really knew about the blog so I wasn’t getting sent any review copies by anyone, so I posted a story about the time that a man chased me down the street because of Isaac Asimov. People liked it, they thought it was funny. And it was easy to write because it was true. It had happened just before I left to go to university as I was hanging around in town trying to find a job to make some money so that when I got to university I had some money to piss away. So, I asked my (ten or so) followers on Twitter what they wanted from the blog; did they want book reviews or did they want stories? And they all said stories, which was fine by me because I had a fucking shitload in my head just ready to tell. I carried on with reviews, as I started to get authors and publishers sending me things to read, but every Saturday I’d post a story of something that had happened to me. I can remember every single book I’ve ever read, and I can remember where I was and what I was doing while I was reading them all. This is a collection of my stories, some that have been posted on my blog and some that have not, of some of the mental shit that has happened to me. They’re not all directly about me, sometimes I was just observing. And some of the links to books are pretty tenuous. But they’re all true and they’re all as honest as I can be with a bunch of strangers on the internet. I don’t think that my life has been as fucked up and mental as some of these stories would suggest. I don’t think that I’m the only person that this sort of stuff happens to, and I don’t think that any of it is particularly new or exciting. It’s just a bunch of stuff that has happened over the last 27 years, to someone who has spent most of their life hiding behind the pages of a book. Some of it makes me sad and makes me cry, and some of it makes me feel so fucking lucky to have been there. All of it is given to you, with love, from an anonymous book blogger. BookCunt, August 2012 Childhood and school Owl at Home The first book I ever remember reading is Owl At Home, by Arnold Lobel. I’m not sure whether I ever actually read it as a child, or whether it was read to me so much that I memorised the words, but I did used to sit and turn the pages and recite the stories from it. I don’t know where the copy came from, but it is full of library stamps, which means that my Mum or possibly my Grandma probably got it from a library sale to read to me. I’ve still got my copy of the book. It currently sits on my bookcase nestled in amongst the rest. But Owl At Home is more special than the others, because it is my oldest book and because it features in my earliest memory. I must have been about three years old. I used to sit in the garden, reading Owl At Home out to myself. We had a pretty big garden, and I was sitting in the middle of the lawn. Mum was in the kitchen preparing dinner, Dad was at work, and my younger brother was zipping about all over the patio in his walker. I wasn’t particularly fond of him at the time. He was always in the way, he smelt, and in that walker he could come at you out of nowhere pretty fast. When I was on the lawn he couldn’t get to me. At the end of the patio was a path. The path led down to where the big bin was – one of those metal jobbies with a lid with a handle, like they had in Stomp. You couldn’t see the path from the kitchen window. I looked up from my book just in time to see my brother, in his walker, zooming down the path. It was Thursday. Bin day. Instead of the bin at the end of the path there was an empty space, an empty space where the path abruptly ended leaving a little step and a small hole. I watched him get to the end of the path, watched the front wheel of the walker drop down into the hole and all of a sudden my brother was horizontal and screaming his fucking head off. I glanced to the kitchen window. I could see Mum chopping vegetables. I could hear music, she was listening to a tape, the one that I called Coca Cola (Peanut Man by Tim Buckley). She couldn’t hear my brother crying in the hole. I put my book down and walked over to him to have a look. He looked like a twat. Red-faced and crumpled eyes from all the tears. One of his shoes had fallen off. I picked up the shoe and headed for the kitchen. Mum was dancing around. I handed her the shoe. She shouted at me ‘Why have you taken your brother’s shoe? For God’s sake, Jesus …’ and headed outside to replace the shoe. I followed her. She saw my brother, screaming in the hole. She gasped, ‘Fuck’, but instead of going to help him dashed back inside. I waited outside. She came back moments later with a camera, walked towards the hole, took a picture, and then lifted my brother out of the walker, pulled the walker out of the hole and popped him back in it, giving him a little shove towards the safety of the patio. He promptly shut his fat face and started wandering around the patio, as if nothing had happened. Mum went back to chopping the vegetables and dancing to Tim Buckley, and I went back on to the lawn to finish reading Owl At Home. Mr Meddle’s Muddles I grew up mostly in the garden. We lived in the countryside, fucking miles away from anything. My best friend was my brother and my second best friend was the cat. On the right hand side we had an elderly neighbour, and on the left a newly engaged couple. My brother and I were the only children and so spent our days playing together. It wasn’t bad growing up in the garden, because it was a shit-hot garden: a big lawn and loads of trees and flowers and bushes. A vegetable patch at the back, a patio at the front. Plenty of space for running around and hiding from each other and finding new things to discover. My parents had bought us a Wendy house each. I say Wendy house, but mine was some plastic sticks assembled into a house-like shape with a canvas slung over the top that was decorated like a house, with windows and a roof and all of that kind of shit. My brother’s was a tipi, a bunch of plastic sticks that met at the top with a similar canvas sheet thrown over the top with decoration on. When you’re playing in the same garden every single day you have to get creative with your games. On this day, I’d decided (I made almost all of the decisions) that my brother and I were going to play ‘decorate the houses and then move in and be neighbours’. First things first: decorate the houses. I had this wonderful picture in my head of daisies growing around the bottom of my house. As daisies don’t just grow where you want them to, this meant picking daisies and placing them around the edges. I decided that instead of daisies that my brother should decorate around his tipi with tufts of grass, because daisies were a bit girly and also because I didn’t need the little shit taking any of my precious daisies. Now, being a clever and scheming child, I knew that picking enough daisies would take a fucking age. I also knew that picking grass was a piece of piss. So, I lied to my brother. I told him that he could decorate with daisies and I’d decorate with grass, so he’d better pick all the daisies from the lawn and put them in a basket, and I’d do the same but instead fill a basket with grass. We got to work. After ten minutes my basket was overflowing with grass, but my brother, having to painstakingly pick each daisy one by one, was not doing so well. His basket didn’t even have the bottom covered in daisies. I told him to hurry up and that I was moving in now. I went inside and picked up my things. Into my lovely house went Mr Meddle’s Muddles, a swan Keyper (do you remember those toys, Keypers?), a notepad and pen, and the cat. The cat did not stay in the house for long. Even after I’d moved in my brother was still picking daisies. He was so slow and shit. I went into my house and looked at the pictures in Mr Meddle and waited for him to finish. After what felt like hours, he came to show me how much he’d got. It wasn’t great, to be honest, but he’d probably been at it two hours and I really needed to decorate my house. So I took the basket from him and told him that there had been a change of plan and that he was decorating with grass and I’d have all these daisies. He was not happy. He screamed at me that they were his. I told him that no, the grass was his, he didn’t want flowers to decorate a tipi anyway. Unfortunately, being my only friend, he knew my weakness: the flowers that hung up on the side of the wall of the house to dry. That old woman that lived on the right was teaching me about drying and pressing flowers and all of the other shit that old ladies do because they are bored to tears. He told me he was going to pull the flowers down, and began to stride purposefully towards the house. Little cunt. He was angrier and quicker than me, but he was also shorter. He got to the wall of the house, reached up his hand to destroy my hard work and I came up behind him, snatched my flowers away, and smashed his head against the brick wall of the house. I don’t know why at the age of four my first instinct was to smash his head against the wall rather than just take the flowers and run. I wonder now why my brain had managed to make my first instinct so violent. He screamed. He screamed so fucking loud that it scared me. I ran to the bottom of the garden and climbed up a tree. I couldn’t see him any more, but I could hear my Mum shriek as she found him. I waited in the tree for what felt like forever until my Dad came and found me and told me to come inside, my brother had gone to accident and emergency with mum and that we were having pizza for dinner. When I got to the patio before going through the back door I noticed some splashes of blood on the tiles. No one had told me off though. If anyone asked then I’d just say he tripped. Mum came home with my brother. He was not talking to me. He’d had to have stitches in his forehead. We all ate pizza for dinner and I didn’t get told off. I don’t think at the time that he had told anyone what happened. As I got older I felt guilty that no one knew what I’d done. Almost a year ago to the day my brother visited my flat in London and stayed over because he was working nearby the next day. He pulled out of his bag a package wrapped in dinosaur wrapping paper and told me that it was my birthday present. I could open it now or later. It didn’t matter. My birthday wasn’t for another six weeks, so I chose later. That evening I sat in my flat with my brother and we drank some wine and watched some TV, just what we do any time he visits. And when I left for work in the morning I said bye without saying thanks for my birthday present, which sat at the foot of my bookshelves waiting to be opened. Six weeks after he visited it was my birthday. I sat in my flat with my boyfriend opening my presents. I’d left the one from my brother until last. I tore off the dinosaur wrapping paper, and the masses of bubble wrap underneath and found this: It’s a poem that he wrote for me, in a clip frame. A poem about that day when I smashed his head against the wall, and about our childhood together and about some of the shit that has happened between then and now. And it’s fucking wonderful, and as much as I’d like to write it all down for you to show you I won’t, because it’s mine. But I’ll give you the last two lines. ‘… Of each other’s part we played alongside the games those childhood ways the times we’d play,Hide away all night and day from our important lives.’ Now, have a closer look. Burglar Bill I was in reception when I met my first love. He was in year one so we didn’t share a classroom, but we used to see each other in the playground and would poke around at the worms on the concrete together, or make aliens out of the grass cuttings on the field. He was the most handsome boy in school, and all of my friends were well jealous. At the end of one day, the school sent letters home with us about helping to litter pick on the field at lunchtime the following day. Mum asked me if I wanted to do it, and I did. She packed some gloves into my schoolbag so that I didn’t scratch my hands on the bushes and didn’t touch anything unsavoury. The day of the litter pick our teacher was reading us Burglar Bill before our morning break. She was one of those teachers that fucking loved reading out to us, and after reading out each page she would turn the book around and sweep it slowly in front of us all sitting on the carpet so that we could see the pictures. Then we went out for break. I found him waiting by the water fountain. He asked what story we’d had and I told him it was Burglar Bill. Then he told me that we weren’t allowed to play on the field at lunchtime. I told him I was allowed to go on the field because I was going to litter pick. He looked at me a bit funny. ‘Why do you want to litter pick, I thought we were going to play?’ he said. ‘Because my Mum asked me and I said yes. She’s packed my gloves. I think it will be fun, did your Mum forget to pack your gloves?’ I asked. He scrunched up his face at me. ‘I don’t want to litter pick, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid game and the stupid teachers are doing it.’ He said. I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I’d told my Mum I wanted to do it and she’d packed my gloves. I’d given my little slip with her signature on it to the teacher saying that I was going to help out. There was no way out. ‘Maybe if I pick up all the litter really fast it will all be gone and then I can come and play!’ I told him. He looked really, really grumpy. ‘No you won’t. We won’t get to play. I don’t think I love you anymore.’ Fucking hell. Heartbreak. ‘But I thought you were my boyfriend?’ I said. ‘Well if you go and pick litter then we won’t get to play and you won’t be my girlfriend any more,’ he said. ‘But I have to pick litter!’ I shouted. He shrugged and walked away from me. At lunchtime I headed out with the other volunteers and picked crisp packets and other shit out of the thorny bushes. I looked over at the playground and there he was, poking at the worms with my best friend. Traitor. Cunt. We didn’t talk at school anymore after that. And when I went into year six he went to a secondary school. And when I went to secondary school it was a different one to him. I saw him a few years later when I was about fifteen and out playing and called him a fucking bastard. He said that he was sorry. I got off with him for a bit, but he wasn’t very handsome anymore so I sacked him off after a couple of weeks. We didn’t want the same things, anyway. I still wanted to pick litter and he still wanted to flirt with my mates. Young love, eh? Thelwell’s Riding Academy I used to be one of those cunts that went to Pony Club. Where I lived there were loads of fields and loads of people with money to spare, and loads of fucking awful children, so it made sense that there was a branch of Pony Club that met a few miles down the road. If you’ve never seen a bunch of Pony Club bastards trotting around, then let me tell you it is pretty much exactly as you’d imagine: mums standing around smoking and looking confused as tiny children bomb about on fat ponies that are too big from them, just like the drawings in the Thelwell books. The problem that I had with Pony Club is that I didn’t fit in. I was an incredibly awkward child (and I have managed to grow up to be a pretty awkward adult), and by awkward I mean that I didn’t really like talking to other children, and if they did talk to me then I would make my excuses and go and stand next to my Dad/Mum/brother/pony. Somewhere safe that would hopefully make them fuck off and leave me alone. The worst bit about Pony Club is that you are expected to have a right old fucking knees up with the other kids. You’re supposed to all talk to each other, and the mums are supposed to all smoke and drink gin together. It was fucking horrible. One particular Pony Club camp my Mum made friends with some awful bitch and pushed me towards her daughter so that she and I could get chummy. This girl was something else. I can’t remember her name for the life of me, but I remember that her fucking fat little pony was called Lupin. She said things like, ‘Oh, Lupin and [my pony] will be the best of friends, I just know it!’ And that shit made me feel a little bit sick and want to be as far away from her as possible. So one day I was with my pony and my Mum, getting the pony ready to go out as part of a massive group hack to somewhere picturesque and lovely. You have to do a lot to a pony to get it ready to go out, the time spent is much longer than that of your most appearance-conscious friend preceding a massive night out. You have to brush it all over, wipe its nose and eyes and arse, pick out its hooves and put oil on them so they don’t crack, and then you have to put all the gear on it so you can actually ride the fucking creature. I was at the head end of my pony, Mum was at the arse end. I do not know exactly what she was doing to my pony, but she said to me, ‘Hold her head’. So I did. And the next thing I knew, the cunt bit me. It didn’t hurt, as far as I can remember, and it just looked like a graze. Mum saw half a drop of blood and went mental and dragged me to the ‘medical tent’. The medical tent wasn’t a tent, it was a caravan. And the nurses were chain smoking and gossiping when we arrived. Mum chucked me at them and I wondered whether they actually had any medical training at all as they got on with cleaning and bandaging my arm. Not a fucking plaster, a fucking massive bandage that made me look like a comedy extra in a play about people that don’t actually have anything wrong with them. The bite scarred, and these days very few people ask me about it, even though it is quite prominent. I think that they worry that it is the result of some kind of self-harm. When someone does ask they are always ever-so careful. ‘What’s that … mark … on your … arm …?’ When I tell them that a horse bit me it’s 50/50 whether they laugh, or nod ‘knowingly’. Flight of Dragons As far as I know, my Dad has never read a book in his life. While I grew up reading everything I could get my tiny hands on, he was always there looking after the vegetables and herbs growing in the garden, playing guitar, or watching films. All stuff that I could sit near him doing while I was reading. Him not being interested in books didn’t matter to me, for as much excitement as I could get from reading a story, I could get ten times that from my Dad and his storytelling. He didn’t read to us at bedtime. Instead, he’d make up some bizarre story. Often these stories would be heavily dependent on things like science and history, but he scrapped all that shit to make them brilliant. Any finer points that we wanted information on he’d just make some more shit up and tell us so matter-of-factly that I believed everything he said. His stories were fucking ace. There was one about a voice powered car, which ended up with the car and driver going over a cliff because he forgot the code word for ‘stop’. There was one about how the giraffe got to have such a long neck (he got his head caught in a tree and ran round and round which stretched it out), and once he came and woke us up in the middle of the night to take us outside and show us how the daisies closed their petals inwards which he told us was to keep the pollen warm until the sun came back out. When he lit a match and the petals opened it blew my fucking mind. He’d tape films off the telly and let me believe that they were real. Two examples stick out to me here, once with Laputa: Castle in The Sky where, when I told him I thought I might be Lusheeta, Toel Ul (true ruler) of the Castle Laputa in the Sky, he agreed. And when by some weird coincidence my Grandma gave me a necklace with a glassy blue stone on it and I fastened it around my neck truly believing that it was Sheeta’s levitation stone, he watched as I climbed up into a little tree to jump out and see if I’d float. Over and over again. And when I didn’t, he said that Grandma had obviously got the wrong stone, and we put it away somewhere safe, just in case all it was waiting for was me to learn the special spells to awaken its magical powers. The second one was a bit more special, because it was magic. He’d recorded a film off the telly called The Flight of Dragons. He was really excited about it so Dad, my brother and I all sat down to watch it. If you haven’t seen it, and I understand that not that many people have, it is about a guy called Peter Dickinson who makes up a board game with characters that he has crafted based on what he knows about fantasy. There are four wizards who represent different shit, a bunch of dragons, a princess, a knight, and all of that kind of gubbins. He ends up in the game with the characters he’s created and at the end fights the evil red wizard Omadon by using science against Omadon’s magic. It is fucking amazing. In the film Peter is writing a book about dragons, he’s fucking fascinated by them, but he doesn’t know where the book is going or if he’s good enough to finish it, but when he goes into the game and lives amongst the characters he’s made, Carolinus the green wizard takes him to his library of unfinished books, where Peter’s book The Flight of Dragons is nestling in amongst classic and well known and loved books of today. So we watched this film and my brother and I were hooked. We watched it almost every day for fucking ages, and I used to ask my Dad questions about it. The only question that I really wanted an answer to, though, was whether that book that this animated character Peter Dickinson had written was real or not. Dad didn’t know, and told me that. He said that he wasn’t sure whether it could be real or if it was even finished, because we didn’t see the inside of the book in the film, did we, Carolinus had snapped it shut before we got chance. Oh well, I could just continue to watch the film and to think about dragons. Maybe one day I could even write a book about dragons myself. Months later I was rummaging through the shelves in the spare bedroom to pass the time and hidden away, on the second layer of the double layer of books on the shelves I found it. I ran through to Dad, who was outside in the greenhouse and thrust it in his face. ‘Dad! Look! We’ve got it! He did finish it!’ Dad put down his watering can and looked puzzled. ‘Where did you find that?’ he asked. ‘On the shelves! It was hidden on the shelves!’ He took it in his hands and turned it over and told me that he it wasn’t his. And it wasn’t Mum’s or my brother’s either, it must be there by magic. He handed it back to me and told me to look after it, that someone must have put it there for me, maybe even the green wizard Carolinus himself! And then he went back to watering the tomatoes. For years that book was what magic meant to me. And now that I’m older and have spoken to Dad about it I know that he left it there for me, knowing that he couldn’t give it to me himself because that would ruin everything that I believed, it would take that magic away. And that is why although my Dad has never read a book in his life, he is the best storyteller that I know. Because he made me believe in magic. Goosebumps About a year before my Mum left, a couple moved in next door. This was really exciting because where we lived no one ever really moved house, and the other houses had old people in them, and when they died their sons or daughters would come and do up their house and live in it themselves, and that wasn’t really exciting because you’d see them around all the time anyway and it wasn’t new or interesting. But the people who had lived next door had gone, and in their place was a youngish couple. The man had two children from his previous marriage. This was exciting too, there were never any other kids around for us to play with. The children were a fair bit older than my brother and me, but we all became friends and we used to play in the garden when they’d visit every other weekend. The girl had Down’s Syndrome, so although she was about seven years older than me, she kind of had roughly the same mental age and we liked the same games and books and things like that. She had all of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books, and she let me borrow them whenever I liked. She was lovely. Once she knocked on the door with a present for me. It was a frog that she’d caught in the pond in her garden. We put it in a bucket and called it Froggy. We were both really upset when it managed to hop out of the bucket and escape the next day. On New Year’s Eve, in whatever year it was that they moved in, they invited us all round. The kids were there, and while our parents sat in the kitchen drinking and smoking we were all playing in one of the bedrooms. After a lengthy game of ‘turn the lights off and chase each other round the room’ we decided to play hide and seek. Brilliant. I was fucking excellent at hide and seek because I was so small and skinny I could fit into the tiniest of nooks without being discovered, because the other kids would look and think to themselves ‘no one could possibly fit into that tiny gap.’ But I could. The grown-ups were all outside in the garden when we started hiding. The girl was going to search for us all, so as she counted to one hundred, I snuck quietly into the kitchen and squeezed myself into a gap that I’d spotted earlier between the washing machine and the wall. Best. Hiding. Place. Ever. I was so pleased. No cunt would find me in there. As the girl began to look for us all, my mum and our neighbour, the man, came back inside and sat at the kitchen table. The woman and my Dad had gone back to our house to find a record or some more wine or something, and after a bit of small talk my Mum started talking about stuff that was a bit weird. ‘So,’ she asked the man neighbour. ‘Your divorce, in total, how long did it take to have everything, you know, sorted out. All the loose ends tied up and so on?’ ‘Probably a year,’ replied the man, ‘a bit longer maybe, because of custody of the kids, but roughly a year.’ I could see them at the table. My Mum took a sip of her wine and a drag of her fag and looked thoughtful. ‘So if I were to pack up and leave tomorrow, a year from now everything would probably be okay,’ she said. She wasn’t asking a question, she was thinking out loud. The man laughed. ‘Well, yeah. I suppose.’ My Mum turned to the man. ‘The truth is,’ she said, ‘I don’t want my husband and I don’t want my kids. I just want my freedom.’ The man looked at her but didn’t say anything. My Mum didn’t say anything. I sat in the gap between the washing machine and the door wondering if this was a joke, and she’d seen me on the way in and was trying to get me to reveal my hiding place. Could they hear me breathing? My heart beating out of my chest? They didn’t seem to know I was there. The man continued to look at my Mum. He looked very serious. ‘I’m going outside for some air,’ he said. ‘Yeah, yeah I’ll come with you,’ she said, finishing her wine and grinding her fag out in the ashtray on the table. And they both walked out of the patio doors and went through the garden into our garden next door to go and find my Dad and the woman. The girl stumbled into the kitchen looking for me. I wriggled out of the gap. ‘You’re supposed to HIDE!’ she screamed at me. ‘You’ve ruined my go!’ I apologised. I didn’t feel much like playing anymore. I went and got my brother and took him back to our house. Dad tucked us into bed and I wanted to tell him what I’d heard but I didn’t really understand it. I didn’t want to fuck everything up. Maybe if I just kept my mouth shut it would all go away. A year later, in court, my Mum was battling my Dad for custody of us, and I told them that I wouldn’t go with her because she didn’t want us. I repeated her words: ‘She doesn’t want her husband, she doesn’t want her kids, she just wants her freedom.’ We stayed with my Dad. Years later still, when my Mum was having one of her trademark freak-outs and said how much she loved my brother and I, I told her what I’d heard that night while I was hiding in the kitchen. She stopped crying and shouting and looked at me for a long time. ‘You misheard,’ she told me seriously. ‘I did not,’ I said back, just as seriously. She looked at me for a long time and then laughed. ‘Oh, well, you know it all don’t you? Get the fuck out of my house.’ And so I went. It wasn’t the first time I left her house, and it wasn’t the last time I let her fuck my head up. It’s just another chapter in the ‘why my Mum is a fucking cunt’ saga. Grimms’ Fairytales My Mum used to work nights. In the evenings before she left she would tuck my brother and me up in our beds in our shared bedroom and put on a storybook cassette for us to listen to before we went to sleep. The content that she supplied was sometimes questionable: where we could easily drift off to sleep listening to some old dear tell us fairy tales written by Enid Blyton, it was much more difficult when she put in the cassette of some mad bastard reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales. When it was a Grimms’ night, as soon as she’d left the room my brother and I would leap out of bed and play, because we were fucking terrified of the dark stories pumping out of the little speaker on top of the chest of drawers. One night we were particularly restless, so while we played quietly with the stories still on in the background, I decided that I would do a magic trick that would knock his fucking socks off. Earlier in the day, Mum had given us both a shiny new ten pence piece each. We’d never seen one before, but the old ones were big and fat and dull, and these were all beautiful and sparkly and new. I told my brother that that with the new ten pence piece you could do magic far more easily, because they had loads more magic in them. He didn’t believe me, so I had to prove it. I popped the ten pence piece into my mouth and told him that when I opened my mouth it would have disappeared. I closed my mouth and moved my tongue to try and push the coin to the floor of my mouth to conceal it, apart from I fucked it up and accidentally swallowed the coin. I started crying. ‘Has it gone?’ my brother asked innocently. I ran out of the bedroom and into the living room where Dad was sat with a fag on watching Red Dwarf. ‘DADISWALLOWEDTENPEE!’ I cryscreamed at him. He asked me why and after a lengthy discussion he realised that I was an idiot and chucked both my brother and I into the car for a trip to accident and emergency. ‘DADAMIGOINGTODIE?’ I cryscreamed at him all the way there. He told me of course I wasn’t going to die. We got to accident and emergency and the doctor told me off for trying to be magic and I was x-rayed and stuck in a bed to be monitored. Now, I don’t know the technical medical term for it, but this fucking coin was hovering somewhere in my throat. The doctor was worried that it would go into my lung and if the shiny little shit didn’t move the right way (into my tummy) then there would be problems. I stayed in hospital for fucking ages waiting for it to move. It did move, eventually, and it moved the right way. Down into my tummy. I got sent home and my Mum was given loads of those cardboard sick/shit holders and some lollypop sticks. I had to shit in a cardboard pot for the next three days until one day my poo had a shiny bit in it and I was free. Needless to say when I got back to school I was a fucking legend. I was the girl who shat out the new ten pence piece. The Silver Brumby If I told you where I was brought up you’d laugh your fucking heads off. The village has such a fucking twee name that as soon as I tell anyone they dissolve into crazy laughter. The place was full of people who were middle class. We were never middle class. My Mum and my Dad both worked hard at vocational jobs though, so we did have enough money for me to fulfil my Mum’s childhood dream of having a pony. We kept my pony at an old farm. The farmer who owned the farm was the father of the man who my Mum would eventually leave me, my Dad and my brother and our home for. But not yet. Mum was, and maybe still is, a care worker. That’s one of those people who go round to old people’s houses and tuck them in at night and chat to them a bit and wipe them down when they shit themselves. One of the people that she cared for was the old farmer that owned the farm that we kept the pony at. I didn’t like the old farmer. After school and on weekends when I was down at the stables I could see him sitting in his chair by the window in his front room looking out at me and my Mum. I’d always ignore him, but Mum would wave, and sometimes, before we’d go home, she’d make us both go in to his house to ‘check he was doing okay.’ When I wasn’t reading Enid Blyton, I was reading stories about ponies. Silver Brumby was one that I read over and over and I’d keep in the car as an excuse not to go into that old bastard’s house. Sometimes I’d sit in the car for an hour after I’d finished riding, reading Silver Brumby and waiting for Mum to come out of the house. One day, after we’d finished cleaning up the horse’s shit and piss and fed her and tucked her in for the night, Mum told me that she was going to check on the Old Man. I went to the car and tried the door but it was locked. Mum told me that I had to go with her this time, he’d been asking why I hadn’t been in to see him in so long. She took the spare key from under the pot in the back porch and we let ourselves in. His house always smelt the same: of tobacco and fried eggs and dust. We walked through to the kitchen, across the hallway and into the living room, where he was sat on his big leather armchair in front of the window, as usual. He drank a lot. Sometimes my Mum would have to dash to the shop for him to buy him more booze when he ran out. It was always Bell’s whisky, about a bottle each day. By his chair there was a bottle with a couple of inches left in it, and in his hand was a glass. He turned to greet us and put his glass down on the table at his side. ‘You haven’t been to see me for quite some time, young lady,’ he said to me. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. The room was fucking filthy. Fag ends and empty bottles everywhere and mud ground into the carpet. There was a single bed in his living room because in the winter he couldn’t make it up the stairs to his bedroom and so slept there. He turned to my Mum. ‘Hello, my darling,’ he said. ‘Hello, ___,’ said my Mum. ‘She wanted to stay in the car and read again, she’s always reading, but it’s about time she came to say hello, isn’t it?’ She turned round and smiled at me. Told me to sit down. Where? I wondered. Everything was covered in shit. I remained standing. ‘Come here, ___’ the Old Man said to my Mum. She walked over and sat on his lap. ‘Did you know that your Mum is my girlfriend?’ he asked me. ‘The other girls from Social Services won’t come and see me but I can always rely on my ___.’ Mum was giggling like a schoolgirl. His hand reached up and started to fondle her breasts. ‘You’re a good girl, ___,’ he said. ‘You always look after old ___.’ Mum sat, still giggling on his lap. Letting him touch her, letting this vile old cunt touch her fucking tits. I felt sick. After what felt like forever of standing and watching, Mum got up. ‘Go and give ___ a kiss,’ she said. No. I didn’t move. ‘___, go and give him a kiss.’ I looked at my Mum. She was smiling at me. ‘She’s shy,’ she said to the Old Man. He smiled. ‘Come here, ___, come and say hello to me.’ I walked over to him, slowly. As soon as I was in arms’ reach he grabbed me and plonked me on his knee. ‘See? It’s not so bad, is it?’ he said. I sat very still. I was fucking rigid. I hated this old man. I hated him so much. His hands that had been clasped around me, resting on my lap, released and he put one hand on my thigh and squeezed, as the other hand moved up and began to stroke my stomach. I jumped up and ran as fast as I could out of the house and back to the car. The fucking door was fucking locked. I ran to the barn where we kept the straw for the stables and hid. I don’t know how long passed, but eventually my Mum came looking for me. As soon as she opened the door to the barn she saw me and called my name. I can’t have been hiding as well as I thought I was. ‘Is he with you?’ I asked, not moving. ‘Of course not, silly. Why would he come out here? He’s gone to bed. Come on, time to go home.’ I came out. We got in the car. I was shaking and frightened. Mum said ‘He’s a very lonely old man, ___, it’s very sad to be out here in the countryside with no one to talk to, and my friends at work, they won’t come out to him. It’s not very nice, is it?’ I shook my head. ‘So that’s why we have to go and see him sometimes. You know, cheer him up. He’s a sweet man, really.’ I didn’t say anything. Mum drove us home and when I got home I went straight to bed and never told anyone about what had happened. About five years later, when my Mum had left me and my brother and Dad for the farmer, she rang me to tell me that the Old Man had died. I said I was glad, and she called me an evil bitch and hung up. Another couple of years after that, at my Mum’s house, the farmer started talking about his Dad. I told him that his Dad was an evil cunt, and I got thrown out of the house. The farmer doesn’t speak to me any more. Neither does my Mum. You’re not allowed to speak ill of the dead, you see. The Diary of Adrian Mole I was about 12 or 13 when Mum decided that she was taking my brother and me on holiday to Gibraltar. She chucked some Goosebumps books at my brother and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole at me to shut us up. About her reading selection for me, she said, ‘You probably won’t understand most of it, but it’s funny.’ I read some of it on the plane over, and it was funny, but rather than making me want to read more Sue Townsend, it just made me keep an incredibly cynical diary for the next two years. Mum had made all these plans for stuff to do in Gibraltar. Gibraltar is not that big at all, so once we’d gone up the rock and looked at the monkey things (scary, grabby, I didn’t like them) she decided that we were going to get on a ferry the next day and have a trip over to Tangier in North Africa. A very common thing to do after you’ve spent a day in Gibraltar, apparently. Gibraltar, if you’ve never been, is very, very English. Tangier is not very, very English. It was very foreign and exciting and frightening. I’d never been abroad before and nipping over the water to North Africa was my first experience of being completely surrounded by a difference culture and way of life. I loved it. We wandered around the markets, and ate some weird food, and watched a bloke with a snake do some weird shit, and stroked a camel. It was brilliant. Then we went into an indoor market thing, where Mum and my brother went off to look at rugs, and I was left wandering around some pots. A man approached me and asked me where I was from. I told him that I was from England. He nodded and looked very thoughtful. He asked my age and where my Mum was. I told him and pointed to the room with all the carpets in. He said, ‘Come with me.’ I walked with him up to my Mum. He introduced himself to her as a very rich man and then pointed to me. ‘I like your daughter. She is very beautiful. How much for your daughter?’ My Mum laughed. ‘She’s not for sale.’ He looked puzzled. ‘I want to marry your daughter when she is sixteen. I take her now and pay you. How much?’ Mum laughed a little less easily this time and told him again, no. He looked thoughtful. ‘I give you thirty camels for your daughter.’ My Mum’s eyes bulged. She turned to me. ‘Thirty camels! Thirty fucking camels!’ ‘Mum, what the fuck are you going to do with thirty camels?’ She looked back at the man and said again, no. He upped his offer. Forty camels. ‘FORTY CAMELS! Forty FUCKING camels!’ she said to me, a kind of weird pleading look on her face. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘you are not selling me for forty camels to this man. You don’t need any camels. Where would you keep forty camels?’ ‘I could sell them!’ she said, seemingly delighted that she’d found a solution. Time to put my foot down. ‘Mum, if you sell me to this man I will never speak to you again.’ She looked at me for a long time, and then turned to the man and told him for the last time: ‘No.’ We left the weird indoor market and got back on a ferry over to Gibraltar. Mum drank a lot of wine. My brother and I stood out on the deck watching North Africa vanish. I still don’t know whether she actually would’ve sold me. Angela’s Ashes I was fifteen years old when after many doctor’s appointments and consultations I was referred to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge for breast reduction surgery. (I’m not really comfortable with that term. When talking about it I am much more likely to say ‘when my tits got chopped off’.) We travelled down on the train, arrived at the hospital, I was poked and prodded at and then put in a bed on a ward with other women who were waiting for various kinds of cosmetic surgery. Then my family went home and I began to unpack my bag. The book of choice for this trip was Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt. Before I left home a family friend named Anne had shoved it at me saying, ‘I saw the film of this, it was quite good. You don’t really like films, do you? I got you the book.’ I unpacked this, and my clothes, and my toothbrush, then got in to bed and began to read. After about an hour, I was visited by the surgeon. He wanted to talk some things through, so we did. He told me that I might lose sensitivity in my breasts, that I may not be able to breastfeed my children if I ever chose to have any, that he was confident that this would fix my depression and sore neck and back, that my breasts may still grow after surgery, and that the worst case scenario was that I could die from a blood clot, but he didn’t think that likely. This is almost twelve years ago now. I was a lot slimmer but the same height. Standing at a mighty five feet and rocking a size eight figure, my 28G tits looked ridiculous, and made me very sad. I was worried about the operation, of course, but I knew that the feeling afterwards would override any discomfort, and hopefully make me a little bit more confident and social. Maybe my tits would turn black and fall off, who knew? I did feel in safe hands with the surgeon, though. He seemed like a nice enough man. Now, as you may or may not know, Addenbrooke’s is a teaching hospital. This means that student doctors and nurses from The University will pop along every so often to get a lovely bit of hands on experience. So there I was, in my hospital bed reading Angela’s Ashes when my surgeon comes back. ‘I’ve got a couple of students that I’m going to bring in, okay?’ I had already consented to this by signing a bit of paper, and didn’t see the harm anyway as soon these tits wouldn’t be mine anymore. However, when he said a couple, what he actually meant was seven. Five boys and two girls. He unbuttoned my rather fetching hospital gown and pointed at my tits with his pen. I have no idea what he was saying to the students but they were all fucking entranced by my chest as he gabbled away telling them what he was going to do and how it was going to look. Then he got a big pen out and did some scribbles around my nipples. I looked down. What the fuck is he going to do to me? I wondered. The scribble was an incredibly arty shape. Mr Surgeon then invited a couple of the student to have a draw on my tits. I watched them – you should always watch anyone who is drawing on your tits. The first one stepped up and drew what looked remarkably like a cock and balls on one tit. The surgeon hmmmmed and the next student came at me, pen in hand and drew an even bigger cock and balls on the other tit. A lovely fat cock, it was. I was vaguely impressed. I’ve always loved drawing penises. He tentatively looked up at the surgeon for approval. ‘Very good,’ he said. He was right. It was very good. They all left, thanking me nervously, and I picked up my book again and read all evening, right through to the end. I had my surgery and it was fine. However, twelve years on, the combination of putting on some weight, and the fact that I did a considerable amount more ‘growing’ from the age of fifteen to eighteen means that my tits almost completely grew back. I don’t mind though, they look fucking fantastic now that I’m old enough to appreciate the power of a pair of good tits. Stark Like most people I knew at the time, when I turned 16 I started working in a high street clothes shop on weekends and after school so that I would have money for all the important shit I needed like cider and fags and condoms. Unlike most people I knew at the time, instead of going outside and talking to people on my breaks, I used to stay in the staffroom and read Ben Elton books. I fucking loved Ben Elton. He was my first real dabble with swearing in books. If I finished a book on a break, it was just a five minute walk to the bookshop to get another. On one lunch break I nipped out and bought Stark and sat pissing myself in the staff room at the description of a family eating some bad oysters and then shitting themselves. Teenage comedy gold. I was still laughing when I emerged from the staffroom to continue my shift. I went and checked the rota, grinning like a fucking moron, and then went to the front of the shop: it was my turn to spend an hour tidying the rails and greeting people and helping customers and doing all the other shit that you’re supposed to do. They tell you that it is a very important job because you are the ‘first contact’ that a customer will have. I didn’t like it so much because it was a bit far away from what everyone else was doing, and I fucking hated talking to customers. A man walked in. As I worked in a shop that sold clothes for women, men walking in on their own were usually either: 1 Looking for the wife/girlfriend/daughter/mate/mum/sister/mistress they had lost 2 Looking to buy something for their wife/girlfriend/daughter/mate/mum/sister/mistress These were the men that we were supposed to attack with our knowledge of all things clothesy. We’d confuse them with words and they’d end up spending 200 quid in about five minutes because they were frightened and alone and vulnerable. A quick glance around revealed my manager at the tills, clocking the lonely man, so I thought I’d better do what I’d been trained to do. ‘Hello, are you okay there?’ I asked him. He looked at me, and then back at the clothes rail he had been touching, and then to the till, and then back at me. ‘Not … reaaaaally,’ he said. ‘I need to buy something for my … girlfriend.’ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What kind of thing do you have in mind?’ He glanced around the shop, and whispered, ‘Maybe some underwear?’ Not a problem. I knew all about the underwear. I was fucking great at underwear. I led him over to the back of the shop where the stands where all the bras and knickers (that I had tidied fucking beautifully earlier) stood. ‘If you’d like to have a look at these and think about what she might like. I’ll be just over here if you need any help.’ ‘Could you help me now?’ Fuck sake. ‘Of course! So, erm …’ I picked up what I would describe as a ‘pretty’ bra and pants set. ‘How about these?’ ‘Do you like those?’ ‘Well, they’re very pretty.’ ‘I want something more … sexy.’ I put the pants down and picked up a lacier set. ‘These?’ ‘No … more … sexy.’ I put down the lacy pair and picked up the set that had come in a couple of weeks earlier and I had bought for myself. Proper slaggy bra and tiny little pants. Silky lacy slutty goodness. I fucking loved them. ‘These?’ I offered, holding them toward him. ‘Do you like those?’ He asked. ‘I love them.’ I replied. ‘Maybe those then,’ he said. ‘And the other set, the lacy ones.’ ‘Do you know what size your girlfriend wears?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh. Well is she quite petite? Maybe have a look at the mannequins and tell me which she is most shaped like?’ He looked at me. ‘Well, she’s your size, I’d say.’ Righto. I picked up my size bra and my size pants from the stands and handed them to him. I told him that she could bring them back if she didn’t like them or if they didn’t fit, and that he should keep the receipt. He nodded. ‘I’ll just pass you onto my colleague now …’ I told him, taking his things over to the till. ‘Have a nice day.’ And back I went to the front of the shop to tidy all the shit there. About an hour later the phone rang and I was called over. ‘It’s for you,’ said a colleague, thrusting the receiver at me whilst greeting her next customer. I put the phone up to my ear and said hello. ‘Oh, hi, ___. It’s erm ___, I was just in the shop, I bought two underwear sets. You see, the thing is I don’t actually have a girlfriend. I was outside the shop and I saw you working and I thought you looked really nice. So I came in and when you spoke to me I didn’t know what to do so made that up. But anyway, I got the phone number and your name off the receipt and I was wondering if you wanted to go for a drink when you finished?’ He’s mental, he’s going to rape and murder you, was the first thing that went through my mind. ‘Where are you?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, I’m just outside the shop, on the bench.’ I looked to my left. Just outside the door on some crescent shaped wooden benches, there he was. Looking at me. I looked away. ‘That’s very kind of you, ___,’ I said. ‘However I’m afraid I have a boyfriend and so it wouldn’t really be appropriate.’ ‘Oh. Well, do you want the underwear? It’s your size, after all …’ He laughed. I pressed the panic buttons under the desk, hung up the phone and looked out of the door. He wasn’t there anymore. I spent the next week at work being monitored by plain clothed security people in the shopping centre. He came back once, they said, and was escorted away by the police. A lot of very strange people came in and out of that shop, but he was probably the one that fucked my head up the most, and guaranteed for the 18 months that I’d work there before leaving for uni, that I’d never go out on a lunch break and instead would stay safely inside the staff room reading Ben Elton. The Caucasian Chalk Circle When I was in sixth form a friend and I used to spend Thursday mornings in the city centre in our local Wetherspoons pub. What we’d do is go into school, register, and then get the bus into town to spend the first two free periods in the pub. At the pub we’d each get a massive fry up and a pint, and then sit quietly and read our books together over another pint. On this occasion we were both reading The Caucasian Chalk Circle for part of one of our English modules. The pub was loud and busy because it was right next door to the city centre college, and all of those college students had more or less the same brilliant Thursday morning plans as us. I wasn’t 18 yet, and so I was drinking illegally. So was my friend. This wasn’t a problem in this pub. It was back in the day before everything got really strict and you had to have fifteen forms of ID just to get into the pub, and then hand over said ID again at the bar along with something important and sentimental to you in order to get a sniff of a Bacardi Breezer. So we were there. In the pub. Reading a play and talking about what a fucking great guy Brecht was when I needed to go for a piss. Me and this girl were not the kinds to go to the toilet in pairs, so while she waited at our table I wandered up the stairs to the loo. The toilet had six cubicles. Let’s name them, from right to left, 1-6. 2, 3, 5 and 6 were taken, so I went into 4. I pulled down my pants and did a massive piss. I’m not sure how much description you need here, but I was a bit wobbly from the beer and I wanted to be in and out of there as quickly as possible. Wetherspoons toilets are not a great place to be. I wiped, pulled up my pants, flushed, unlocked the doors and went over to the sinks, which were facing the toilets. I turned on the tap and heard coming from one of the cubicles: ‘OH MY GOD HE’S GOT A MIRROR! OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OHMYGOD!’ I turned around as the door to cubicle 3 flew open and a man in a long grey coat rushed out with his head down. As he was at the door the door of cubicle 2 flew open and a girl ran out with her shirt all untucked and her flies open. She turned to me. ‘THAT FUCKING PERVERT CUNT WAS WATCHING ME PISS WITH A MIRROR! THAT FUCKING CUNT!’ ‘Shit, man,’ I said, ‘That’s bad.’ She huffed and puffed and sorted her shirt and flies out and stormed out. I followed her downstairs where she left the pub immediately and I went back to sit with my friend. I was telling my friend what had happened when two policemen came over to our table. ‘What are you doing here, ladies?’ Shit. They know we’re underage. They’re definitely going to put us both in prison. ‘Err, we’re at the college studying English …’ I held up our books. ‘And we are here for a … meeting.’ ‘Have either of you been into the toilet? We’ve had a report of a man hiding in the toilet.’ Thank fuck! I’m not getting arrested! I’m helping to condemn the filth, like a proper fucking brilliant hero. And so I told the policeman about what had happened in the toilet. I fabricated a brilliant description of the man because I was 17 and high on power and then they thanked us and we left. We were late back to school though, and a bollocking was in the air. Our head of year was waiting at the fucking gate for us, the jobsworthy cunt, and sniffed our mouths and looked in our eyes and declared us drunk. I tried to tell him that there had been a pervert in the pub toilet but he roared at me for admitting to being in the pub, and they rang my Dad and I got told off when I got home. Unluckily for my mate, her Dad was the head of drama so she had the pleasure of being bollocked in front of the entire school. She couldn’t get a fucking word in. I don’t know if that man was watching me piss. At the time I didn’t care. I’m not sure I even care now. I just hope that some poor cunt didn’t get arrested based on my ropey description of a tall man (6’2") in a long grey coat with a pointy beard, thin moustache and cold dead, eyes. I wonder if the police even used that description at all. Birdsong Being a fucking massive geek, rather than asking my parents for a party or a car for my 18 birthday present, I asked for a trip to the Normandy beaches so that I could go on a D-Day tour. My Mum happily booked us tickets for everything that I wanted to see. I was going with her because I knew that she would fuck off and leave me alone. This way I could really learn about War. Mum’s friend heard that we were going, and decided for the first time ever to give me a birthday present: Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. She’d bought me it because it was about ‘The War’. I decided not to tell her what was wrong with this, but instead thanked her graciously and packed it in my bag for the journey. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/litagent-harpercollins/a-fucked-up-life-in-books/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.