Snow
Sometimes when I was about nine and Peppa was six and Maw wasn’t too bad with the drink she would tell us about our das. It was before Robert came and after a man called Eddie Bean who used to come and smoke weed with Maw and stay the night.
Maw was sixteen when I was born and my da was called Jimmy and he was blond and he supported Rangers and Maw went to school with him and she said she loved him and they got a flat together when I was in her belly. Then my da got killed in a car he was in with three other lads going into Glasgow and the other boys all survived, one was in a wheelchair and was called Pally and you sometimes saw him in his chair going in the Spar. My da got killed because he was in the front seat and he didn’t have a seat belt on and they were all drunk.
Maw said she cried and cried and the council gave her a new flat – our flat in our block that has a balcony and you can see the firth and the wall and the lighthouse right out at the end of the wall and at night it flashes once every forty-five seconds.
Our flat had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom with a shower and a bath and a living room with a door out onto the balcony. I mostly had washing drying on the balcony.
She brought me back to that flat after I was born and for nearly two years she looked after me and she says she didn’t drink or smoke weed and she was doing an apprenticeship at Cutz in the precinct learning to be a hairdresser.
Sometimes when she was out I got looked after by Mhari’s papa, Ian Leckie, and her nanna who was called Pat, and they knew my mum because she had been in school with Mhari’s mum and Mhari was born three months before me. Mhari’s mum wasn’t there and when I asked Maw where she was Maw made a face and said ‘I cannae tell you darlin’, but she got in a bad way is all I know.’
Mhari and me were babies together a lot and we had a playpen in her papa’s house which was down by the wall and had a garden and a shed.
Maw said she met Peppa’s da in a nightclub and he was a Nigerian student who was from the southeast of Nigeria and was from a tribe called the Igbo. He was tall and his skin was brown and Maw said he was gorgeous. He was learning to be an architect and he played football for the college and he could speak English and Igbo and four other Nigerian languages and also French and a bit of Arabic and Italian and he knew Latin. I think that is maybe why Peppa is clever and learned to read very quickly and she also likes words especially swearing and she reads books which I don’t, except the SAS Survival Handbook.
Peppa’s da’s name was Kenneth and Maw said he liked her because she was curvy which means she had big tits and she liked him because he was a gentleman and had a lovely speaking voice. She said Peppa is like her da and I am like my da because I am tall and blond and I have got big eyes and a big mouth like him and I am getting muscles on my arms. Peppa’s da was a Catholic and my da was a Protestant.
I think I remember Peppa’s da from when I was only about three and I was on the balcony and he was with me and he lifted me up and he was laughing. He smelled of perfume and his hands were soft and he held me and we looked at the lighthouse.
There was about ten centimetres of snow in the morning and we got the fire going again and had tea and then went to check the snares and we’d got another rabbit. There were tracks in the snow, I found rabbit, red deer, fox and, I think, red squirrel under an oak tree, but I think squirrels hibernate, so it might’ve been a bird.
We collected more wood and then I had to look at the shelter because the snow had dragged the tarp down. I made the shelter the day we got here in the afternoon after we had walked five miles in the sun with all the gear. It was hard and we had to keep stopping and having drinks of water. I used the map and the compass to plot the route we took right up the side of Loch Trool on a forestry road opposite the other road where we saw some cars through the trees. It was easy on the forest road but when we got to the end of the loch we had to go up and ascend over 500 metres to the top of the ridge. There was a sheep path on the first bit up over grassy slopes with big rocks but it got steeper as we went higher and Peppa had to stop and so did I. We just did a bit at a time and took it slow, which is what they all say on the websites when you are climbing up.
The shelter was made by stringing paracord across between two birch trees and then fixing the tarp with the Velcro flaps to it and pulling it back to the ground so it was at an angle of about sixty degrees which is the best angle for shedding water. Then I held it down at the back with rocks and used more rocks to make three plinths under it then cut poles of birch to make the bed. Peppa got spruce branches and we laid them all over the poles and we used a lot so they were thick and insulated. And they prickle a bit but once they are pressed down they are very soft and comfortable. You have to build the bed platform off the ground to stop heat loss. We did all this after the five miles with all the gear to the most remote part of the forest I could find on the map which also had access to water and was in the trees.
But after the weight of the snow the tarp had got all pulled and rucked at the bottom and the paracord had stretched and sagged, and the middle of the tarp was getting a V in it which would let in water if it rained. So I decided we needed to make a bender.
A bender is a type of shelter that is loads of saplings arched across each other to make a dome shape. There was a diagram of one in the handbook and it said it was a good shelter for longer-term use which is what we wanted. I would cover it with the tarp and then spruce branches to insulate it.
When I told Peppa we were going to make a bender she grinned and said ‘Aye, we are going to make a bender because you are a bender!’ and she giggled a lot.
She is always saying I am a lesbian, but I’m not and she is only joking but it is a bit homophobic, but it isn’t because I am not gay. But when my hair is pulled back or I wear it under a hat I do look like a lad.
Some things make Peppa laugh so much she can’t stand up and she has spasms and sometimes you think she is an epileptic. One thing that makes her laugh like that is the word ‘houmous’.When we were wee and I used to steal her food I got her some houmous in a tub and she loved eating it with bread dipped in it and then she asked what it was called and I told her and she nearly pissed herself. She also laughs a lot at the word ‘meconium’ – which is the name of a baby’s first poo when they are just born and it is full of very dangerous bacteria. The word ‘bender’ for a gay makes her laugh and so does the word ‘menstruation’ for having a period. She also likes swear words like ‘wanker’ and ‘bollocks’ and she loves the word ‘jobby’, especially if you call someone a jobby.At school she got in trouble for writing ‘Mrs Gammon is a jobby’ on sugar paper on a display when she was in P6.
If she sees fat people in town or in the precinct, she goes ‘Quick – hide the pies!’ and this makes me laugh too. And sometimes she goes ‘Oooh . . . someone’s found the key to the pie cupboard!’ She also likes the word ‘bumhole’, and she sometimes says ‘Stop being a drippy bumhole’ if someone is annoying her or going on about stuff.
She likes Scots words as well like ‘glaikit’ which means that you are thick and your mouth is open and you look like you haven’t got an idea in your head. And she also likes saying ‘guy’ for very and she likes the word ‘dreich’ for when it is damp and drizzling and dark, and if it is she’ll go ‘It’s guy dreich the day.’
There was a kid in her class with a really big head called Robert McCulloch and she started calling him ‘Heid’ which is Scots for head. And soon all the other kids in the class were calling him ‘Heid McCulloch’ and he liked it because he had a nickname but Mrs Gammon said it was bullying and Peppa said ‘Aye, but it is a guy big heid Mrs Gammon.’
She did Burns in school and learned the Mouse poem and she sometimes says them and the bit that is best is ‘. . . still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! the present only toucheth thee: but Och! I backward cast my e’e on prospects drear! An’ forward tho’ I canna see I guess an’ fear!’ which he says to the mouse in the nest he’s ploughed up and that is true and that is how I was in the flat and how I was for