Read How I Killed Margaret Thatcher for Free Online

to crowds of men in the front bar. In the rebellion, in 1842 , the people made tiswases in the nail yard that was next door, three nails hammered together to throw under the army horses’ hooves. When they got taken to Worcester Assizes the nailers would be asked for their plea and they’d say, I plead starvation, before being led off to the cart that would take them to the boat for Australia.
    That Saturday morning we stopped on the corner at the bottom of the High Street. There’d once been a pub here called The Welch Go By, meaning the Welsh. They must have driven their sheep this way to the markets, maybe my great-granny had come with them. Round the corner, where the bus station was, was where both my nan and grandad grew up. They got married at the end of the war. This was after all the houses had been knocked down and everyone moved out to the estates. We stopped outside the television shop. People would stand there to check the cricket scores or wait for the football results on Saturday teatimes. That day, all the screens in the window had Margaret Thatcher’s face on them.
    All the screens have Margaret Thatcher’s face on them. There are hundreds of them. She’s giving a speech. Hundreds of screens, faces; she looks down at us. It’s like she’s telling us all off, but we can’t hear her.
    Oh, bloody hell, my grandad says, like he’s forgotten all about something and remembered it suddenly. He unravels the bandage from his hand and then wraps it back up again.
    From then on she was always there, a picture on the television hundreds of times over; sometimes only her voice, nagging away across the allotments and gardens and factories; the meanness of it, her voice, working away at you like rust.

‌ ‘Now, with increasing frequency, neighbour strikes against neighbour, and common humanity is being displaced by action against the most vulnerable of our people in the battle for pay and power.’
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    All the standing up after my injury makes my legs strong. I can feel them grow, feel the muscles harden. For a few days I drop my trousers at the start of playtime to show everyone the bruise. The first time I do it, it’s for Ronnie, who’s already seen it on his back step, and Paul and Jermaine, but the next couple of days the whole class crowds round, girls too, which makes me feel a bit funny, especially when Michelle Campbell shouts, I can see his willy, when she can’t because I’ve got my hands over it. She’s got a big mouth. I try to be angry with Michelle, but the feeling I get is different from being angry with her. I stand behind her in the classroom and look at the bobbles in her hair and her shiny ear-rings, even though it’s against the rules to wear them. I wait for her to turn around and laugh.
    Everyone gets bored of my arse as the bruising fades. I have to stop dropping my trousers anyway because Miss Wright gets suspicious of what’s happening in the cloakroom and starts to stand at the door at break-times.
    Her wants to see yer willy, Michelle whispers.
    Someone has been to the boys’ toilets two days running and gone all over the floor. Miss Wright gives us a long speech about how it’s dirty and how whoever did it might need some help so we have to come straight out and own up or tell her who it was if we knew.
    Nobody’s telling tales. Nobody knows who it is, anyway.
    Jermaine turns to me and says, Is it yow?
    I try to do a face like my grandad when he thinks my uncle Johnny has said something stupid. I am worried, though. I think Michelle might go and tell Miss Wright it’s me for a laugh. My mum has written a note to allow me to stand up in lessons after my accident. Miss Wright might think the two things are connected.
    The toilet stayed a mystery for a long time. We’d go in there at break and there’d be a long brown turd on the tiled floor waiting for us. Miss Wright went frantic. We had an