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direct family had ever been ashamed of their booze problem. After I discovered my aunt’s secret drinking, I grew to like my cousin – we had at least that one thing in common – and, during that summer, we would go out to the nearby woods with his pals, but I found he was not very confrontational and could not fight for himself. One day, a big friend of his walked us into a dark, densely wooded area and grabbed at me.
    ‘We don’t think you are a girl!’ he snarled. ‘You have short hair and you always wear trousers and you play football! Show us your fanny or we will call you a boy!’
    The big boy pushed me and told my cousin to hold me down while they had a look at my fanny. I was way too fast for them and was annoyed my cousin did not defend me. I grabbed a large stone, leapt at the big boy and whacked him on the side of the head. He squealed like a little girl and I just kept hitting him around the head –
crack! crack! crack!
– cracking the stone down on his skull;
he had tried to look at my fanny!
My cousin had to pull me off him. The big boy bled so badly that I had to wrap my T-shirt around his bloodied head and we had to take him home. His mother was furious and, despite my protestations of self-defence, I was not believed. She marched down the street, confronted my aunt at her front door and, within hours, I was back in Shettleston with my Dad.
    In the meantime, my Mammy was benefitting from her stay at the mental asylum. She resisted any real therapy and ended up helping the nurses organise the in-patients’ routine. Helping other people helped her. She would chat to everyone in her usual familiar way, pretending to herself that she was not really ‘one of them’ – only a helper temporarily staying in a mental ward who happened to have some burns on her legs and a bit of a stress problem. She got to know all the nurses by their first names, something that wasn’t common in those days. They genuinely liked her and had great laughs with her. She came out with a whole catalogue of funny stories about all the poor women she’d met and how they were all totally mental.
    I was overjoyed to have her back home. I loved to hang around with her and go shopping every Saturday. I liked the local Asian corner shop in Darleith Street, the next road to Kenmore Street, which was owned by a wee Indian man called Aslim – Mammy took to calling him ‘Asylum’ and he politely corrected her for at least the next eight years. But I hated the local butcher’s shop round the corner from Darleith Street. It had beautiful hand-painted ceramic tiles on the walls depicting cows and bulls grazing happily in a field and standing beneath lush trees with blue skies in the background. I would look at these stunning animals in the picture and then at the big scabby dead and bloody carcasses hanging on hooks in the shop. I hated the dead animals touching my face, which they sometimes did. The butcher’s shop smelled of blood and had dirty sawdust on the floor. One day, when it took forever to get served and I got really bored, I took a look up inside one big cow carcass. I actually stuck my head in the animal’s hollow flank and slowly climbed up into its ribcage until I was completely inside the dead beast. When I was completely encased, I boomed out in a low, deep voice:
    ‘This is the cow talking! You must all stop eating me or I will haunt you! MOOOO!’
    There were gasps of horror from all the women in the queue.
    My Mammy was embarrassed and angry. All the women shouted at me as she pulled me out of the cow. I was all greasy and bloodied. The butcher came and slapped me round the head, at which point my hungry dog Major, who was waiting outside for his weekly scraps, ran in snarling and took a bite at the butcher but missed. He then realised the cow was a better target – and tastier – bit into the carcass and hung onto its sides as everyone tried to remove both mad dog and child from the shop. The butcher yelled at