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day, I scratched my name into the wall of the landing outside our flat’s front door. I carved:
    JANEY CURRIE – 1970
    ‘Janey, fucking stop it, ye wee bastard!’
    Mammy had just climbed the stairs and was dripping wet holding two plastic bags full of cans and butcher meat.
    ‘Ye cannae write yer name in the wall!’ she shouted.
    I wanted to be myself, yet I wanted to ‘belong’. I joined the Brownies, who used to hold their meetings in an old church in Shettleston, because I enjoyed all their reassuring rituals and games and I loved the code flags. My Mammy could not afford to buy me a uniform but I made do with a second-hand shirt and skirt. I would pore over my Brownie Rule Book and would vow to try hard to be a ‘good girl’. I studied hard for all my badges and one night, in the dark cold December of 1970, I was preparing for my Road Safety Badge. Such was my concentration reading the booklet and trying to remember all the rules for Road Safety that, as I crossed the road, I walked in front of a car. I can still feel the impact of the vehicle. It felt as if something sharp had just cut off my right leg and had crushed my thigh. I was unconscious for a couple of seconds, then sat at the side of the road staring down at my mangled leg. I was in total shock but could not feel any pain. I couldn’t understand why people around me kept telling me to lie back down.
    ‘I have to cross the road,’ I told them. ‘I don’t want to be late for the Brownies.’
    Fortunately for me, the speeding drunk who smashed his car into me was a doctor but, unfortunately for him, soon afterwards my Dad walked past going to his late shift. He spotted me lying on the pavement and asked the crowd calmly:
    ‘Who knocked down the wee girl?’
    ‘That man over there,’ he was told.
    My Dad beat the doctor up so badly at the scene of the accident that the police – the Polis – sent the drunken and battered man off to hospital in the same ambulance as me. I sat in my second-hand Brownie uniform and shouted at him for the whole journey to the casualty department:
    ‘Ye fucking bastard! You hit me with your car! Ye fucking bastard!’
    At the hospital, a nurse washed my legs and feet saying disdainfully: ‘Look at the
dirt
that came off you!’ as if it was my fault I came from a dirty home. It upset me. Worse still, the Brownies wouldn’t let me back into their club as I had to wear a big plaster cast on my leg for months because the hospital had not set my leg properly. The Brownies said I was a liability and there were insurance problems with me having a plaster cast on their premises; I had to attend Hospital Out-patients for a year – it took that long for me to learn to walk properly again, not helped by my frequent handstands.
    ‘Watch this!’ I’d tell my friends in the stone stairwell of our block. ‘I can go all the way upside-down with my plaster on!’
    ‘Yeeesaaah!’ they’d all yell.
    It felt great doing handstands. The plaster counter-balanced my body’s weight when I was upside-down, but coming down tended to crack the cast, so I would put water on it to soften the plaster and hide the crack. Eventually, after a year, I was back playing football and running around but, even then, the Brownies would not let me rejoin them.
    * * *
    When my Uncle was not sexually molesting and raping me, he kept himself busy by joining in and wanting to ‘belong’ just like me. He became a member of the local Orange Order, a very influential Protestant organisation; there were around 30 Orange lodges in Glasgow’s East End. Religion divided and defined communities in the city. Catholics supported Celtic Football Club – which flew the Irish Republic’s tri-colour flag over its stadium on Saturdays – and Protestants supported Rangers Football Club – which flew the Union flag of the United Kingdom. I knew a young boy who was stabbed to death just for wearing a Celtic scarf and walking along our street. He was 18 years