Read How I Killed Margaret Thatcher for Free Online Page A

assembly about it. The teachers kept saying that the person doing it might need help, but I remember realizing that what they really meant was whoever was doing it was in big trouble. Then one morning, the word SHIT was smeared on the toilet wall. The S and H were thick and big and the I and T were smeared greasily across the tiles, falling away, like the writer had run out of shit and energy at the same time, as if the weight of it had pulled them earthwards. There was a handprint on one of the white china sinks. Michelle told us we were going to get our fingerprints taken so they could find who it was.
    They used their poo as a pen, Jermaine kept saying and couldn’t stop laughing. That was it, then; the teachers locked the toilets. If we wanted to go a teacher had to go in there with us.
    It was Jermaine, and no one gave him any help. Not long afterwards he got shunted to his real dad’s family in Birmingham and we never saw him at school again. Miss Wright made sure we all knew it was Jermaine. He got into trouble, spells in secure units and, later, Winson Green. He came in the pub not long after I first took it on. He’d have been twenty-eight, twenty-nine then, visiting his mum who had gone back to live with her own mum and dad on the Rosland estate somewhere. He wasn’t in a good way, probably shouldn’t have been drinking with his medication. His face was scratched with tattoos, like a Maori warrior. I asked him if he still did any drawing or anything like that and he just looked at me. It was a stupid question, I know; his left hand shaking and the other holding his pint. He showed me photos of his kids. He didn’t see them much; three of them, different mothers, different areas, round and about. He hanged himself on Christmas Day a few years ago in a flat above a row of shops in Darlaston. I’d have gone to the funeral if I’d found out in time.
    When that lad said piss artist when I told him about his dad’s drawing I swear it took me all my strength not to get the bat from under the bar and give him the hiding he was asking for.
    The shit on the toilet floor at school makes me think of that spring of the hunger strikers, although they came a couple of years later, when things started to get really bad. I remember some terrible arguments between Johnny and my grandad.
    It’s stopping up, Johnny said, from the landing.
    An I’ve tode yer iss comin down.
    It ay.
    This is my house an I’ll decide what gos up on the walls. Iss comin down.
    Johnny had a poster of Bobby Sands up on his wall. I knew that Bobby Sands was in prison and on hunger strike. The idea of having nothing to eat or drink on purpose was so extraordinary to me that I’d watch every news bulletin and try to snatch glimpses of the hunger strikers in my grandad’s paper. When Johnny told me about the dirty protests, of the prisoners going on the blanket, naked, shitting and pissing in their cells, it created a kind of ghoulish glamour that appealed to an eleven-year-old boy, and made some foreboding echo of Jermaine’s behaviour in my head.
    My mum told me that I couldn’t watch the news, that she wasn’t watching it either because it was too horrible, but I’d catch her with my nan, their hands to their mouths, watching updates about the state of the prisoners’ health and Margaret Thatcher’s voice saying she would let them die before she gave in.
    What’s the point, though? I asked Johnny.
    Well, the point is, they’m taking a stand, they’m shaming Margaret Thatcher.
    Her’s got no shame, that’s what Grandad says.
    Well, I agree with him, for once, but the point is her will be shamed because either they’ll die, and her’ll have let them die, or her’ll have to back down.
    And what is it they want to happen?
    They want to be not treated like criminals. They’m political prisoners. That means they’re in prison because of what they