Byron Easy Read Online Free PDF Page B

neurotically fastidious about secrecy. She had learnt her lesson from the married headmaster up in Leeds. I once asked her why she kept referring to Delph as my uncle, when my father had reliably informed me that I didn’t have any, only aunties. I remember my mother suddenly averting her eyes and straightening the mauve headscarf which she always wore in those days.
    ‘Well, your father’s not always right.’
    ‘But either he’s right or you’re right or someone is fibbing.’
    ‘Jesus wept!’ moaned my mother, her eyebrows raised at this interrogation. ‘Will you give it a rest. He’s your bloody uncle. You’ve been asking the same question all week. Now go and play.’
    ‘But I don’t like to play,’ I pleaded. ‘The big boys say they will steal my bike.’
    ‘You tell me which boys next time, and we’ll see how big they are.’
    I remember Delph entering the room at this point. Unreliable Uncle Delph—long before he became my stepfather. He always appeared from nowhere, like a gargoyle-faced ghost. He was tall, physically taut and overbearing. I hated him.
    ‘Are you my real uncle, Delph?’
    He didn’t answer. He merely gave his equivocal smile which often looked like a sneer to me. My mother flashed him a glance of desperate appeal.
    ‘Will you hark at him!’ she cried. ‘He’s like a stuck record. As if I didn’t have enough books to mark.’
    Delph turned to me, and spoke in a voice much louder than I had expected. This always scared me.
    ‘Don’t cheek your mother!’ he boomed in his porridgy Yorkshire accent. Then, with real nastiness, when mother was out of earshot: ‘One day your bloody mouth will get you hung.’
    For eighteen months nobody in the school knew about their ‘shenanigans’ (as Sinead herself described them). Their affair had been conducted as espionage ; with coded meeting times left in pigeonholes or playground bins. Now she didn’t care. Let the world know she had been neglected; that she was deliriously in love with an assistant school caretaker! Let the net curtains twitch until they fell to pieces in the hands of those with nothing better to do!
    Somehow I made it through to my thirteenth birthday alive.
    I am standing in the mica-bright khazi of the train, sweating. I’m also shaking, hyperventilating and invoking Allah. I can’t be sure if my teeth aren’t chattering too. My forehead, that dome of shameful retreat, that Dunkirk of the follicles, is resting on the mercifully cool plane of the steel mirror. Once I’ve squeezed the tears from my eyes I find I’m staring at a thundering stream of my own urine as it hoses away the fascinating stains already present in the aluminium thimble of the toilet bowl. Impressive. That’s a lot of puke for four in the afternoon. The part of my mind that is still rational informs me that it would take a Scottish football team a number of hours to produce that much vomit. I’ve seen troughs on cross-Channel ferries or in the Gents of a rugby club at six in the morning on New Year’s Day that held approximately the same amount of sick. But never in the cramped can of a British Rail train at four in the afternoon. We haven’t even moved yet. The bar isn’t open for another twenty minutes!
    As I watch the expressive rope of piss (still going strong one minute in) churn through the regurgitated prawns of a thousand hors-d’oeuvres, the carrots of a main course, then finally the laval swirls of a colourful dessert, I start to laugh. The kind of laugh that sounds like sobs to anyone who doesn’t know you well, or isn’t in the immediate vicinity, like the queue that’s surely beginning to form outside the bolted door. I start to bang my forehead rhythmically against the sheen of the metal, producing a pleasing concussive effect every time I pull away. Oh dear, oh dear. The pain of providing all that—it must’ve been close to childbirth. Whoever came up with that much spew must be walking around with half their