Pete: My Story

‘I think there’s someone there, but I can’t see anyone,’ I explained.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Heather said and flounced down the hall in exasperation. She threw the door open, with me standing behind her, peering out.

A collie/Labrador dog walked straight past both of us, into the room where the party was happening, and rested its chin on Mum’s lap, whimpering and staring up at her with pleading eyes. Her feet were all sore and bleeding from walking on pavements.

‘Said I was going to get a dog, didn’t I?’ Mum said, as if it was perfectly normal for a stray dog to come knocking on a stranger’s door.

Sometimes it seemed to me like my Mum had magical powers.

We called her Lassie and took her home with us at the end of the party, although we should have been able to see that she was really too much of a street dog to ever be happy cooped up in a first-floor flat. We couldn’t leave her in the flat when we went round to Heather’s house to work because she would crap on the carpets and chew the furniture, so the next day we took her with us. Bonzo jumped on her the moment she arrived, just like the horny little rabbit. I could see them stuck together in the garden and immediately had a feeling things had got serious. We tried turning the hose on them, but nothing worked and a few weeks later we had eight puppies in the flat. There was one honey-coloured one, four black ones and three browns and they all yapped like seagulls whenever Lassie escaped through the window and left them on their own, which seemed to happen most days, driving the neighbours into a frenzy of annoyance.

I thought the whole pet thing was really cool – the more the merrier as far as I was concerned – but Mum had just bought herself her first fitted carpets ever and Lassie was crapping all over them whenever the urge took her. As if that wasn’t enough, there was some sort of back surge in the plumbing system in the flats at the same time and everyone else’s sewage came roaring up into our toilet and overflowed over the rim, like some sort of horror scene from Trainspotting. We were back to bare boards and for a while Mum thought the Devil might be coming after her again.

Eventually it was obvious we couldn’t keep Lassie any more, although Heather gave a home to the honey-coloured puppy, which lived to a great age and finally passed away while I was in the Big Brother house. I was heartbroken to see Lassie go because I really loved her. Someone came in a car to take her away. She jumped in through the back door, all excited about this new adventure, and as the car drove off she gazed out the back window at me as if she was waving goodbye. It was horrible.

After that we just had cats.

Nan and Grandad had a black mongrel called Buster who I used to draw all the time. Grandad knew a bit about art and he was always telling everyone how brilliant my pictures were. Buster was a good friend to me and one night I had a vision about him. In the vision we were staying at Nan and Grandad’s house and Buster was beckoning me to the end of the garden because he wanted to say goodbye. He turned round, gave me one last look and then disappeared into a golden light, a bit like the light that had surrounded the Angel Michael. I knew immediately he was dead and told Mum. The next day my aunt rang to tell Mum that Buster had been put down because the vet had said his bones were starting to snap with age. We worked out that the vet must have been doing the deed at the same moment I had the vision.

Having visions like this frightened me sometimes. At the same time it was also pretty cool to be able to see little glimpses of the future, as if I had a few magical powers myself, an in-built crystal ball.

CHAPTER SIX (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

DAVE (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

Even though Mum had lots of men friends, not all of them were raving poofs; they were mostly colleagues, street performers and fellow musicians. She didn’t get another actual boyfriend though until Dave came along. She met him in the Peckham Tenants’ Hall where he was part of a party. She had gone into the hall to get a coke for me and my friend, Zoe. She only had a pound on her and so she couldn’t afford anything for herself, or even any crisps for us. The party was in full swing and no one seemed to mind us crashing it. Everyone was very friendly and welcoming. There was a big fat strip-o-gram doing her thing, which was really funny and not even remotely sexy, so Mum didn’t mind us watching. Mum got chatting to this tall guy at the bar who had all this long dark hair. He was dressed up as a woman, with a pair of plastic tits.

‘Got your true colours on tonight then, have you, love?’ Mum teased.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

They both burst out laughing and got chatting while Mum bought our cokes.

‘I’ve never asked a bloke to buy me a drink before in my life,’ Mum said, ‘but would you buy me a half of lager and I’ll pay you back one day? I can give you a song I’ve recorded if you like.’

He obviously liked her style because he bought her the drink and accepted the tape she had in her bag as payment. He seemed really excited about the transaction, saying he couldn’t wait to listen to it. It seemed he had an interest in music too. What Mum hadn’t realized was that she had written her telephone number on the cassette box – probably in case it fell into the hands of a record producer and he wanted to offer her millions of pounds to sign to his label. She had started to feel better about her life by then and had gone back to playing and writing a bit of music. Anyway, this bloke with the plastic tits, Dave, got in touch a few days later, having listened to the tape and decided he liked what he heard. He then went to see Mum in a concert at Covent Garden, and he started coming round to the flat once a week on his motorbike, just to hang out with us.

He was wicked, really into his music. He had a studio in the garage where he lived and let me use it without ever making a fuss or worrying I might break anything. Totally cool. I called him Dad from the first day he came to visit, which made Mum a bit nervous, but he didn’t seem to care. He actually seemed to quite like it; nothing much seemed to bother Dave.

As well as getting her music together again, Mum was also trying to do something with her art, which she felt she had been neglecting for too long. She had been making some enquiries and had been accepted as a mature student on an art course at Brighton University. She was really keen to go down there to study. Her dad had insisted she give up art so she could concentrate on her music when she was at school and she had always regretted it. She was so happy to be accepted and we moved out of Peckham and down to Brighton for a year – living by the seaside! Brilliant!

Mum enjoyed the course, but it was hard for her to hang out with the other students, most of whom were just out of school, when she had already lived a colourful life, travelling the world with famous pop groups, having me, and all those experiences that change you and make it hard to go back to thinking the same way you thought when you first set out on adult life. I would go to school during the day and then would often go round to the university to wait for her to finish her classes. I liked it there because the people Mum knew in the music department used to let me play around in the sound studios and would show me how everything worked. I was never afraid to ask questions or to show an interest, and adults always responded well to that. It would have been difficult to have been shy in the life we led, with so many different people coming and going all the time.

Dave used to ride down from London at weekends on his bike to visit. When he asked Mum to marry him, and told her his mother had offered to lend him some money for a deposit on a house, Mum decided it was time to give up the student life and get on with being a grown-up. So she accepted his proposal and we headed back to South London. Married! Dave was going to be my actual dad, it was perfect, couldn’t have been better.

Taking on a new dad meant I also got to take on a whole new family, including a new set of grandparents. Dave’s mum and dad, my new grandparents-to-be, were a bit of an entertainment all on their own. I had never seen anything like them before. Richard, his dad, hadn’t spoken for six years, apart from muttering ‘Bootsie, Bootsie’ at the cat all day long. He used to clomp back and forth through the house, nailing open the back door and then the front door to get a gale blowing through the rooms. Alice, Dave’s mum, was the maddest Irish woman ever, always talking in sayings.

‘Bad company’ll lead yer to the gallows,’ she’d announce out of the blue, leaving us all struggling for a suitable response and trying to suppress our giggles.

She found out Mum had some Romany blood in her and from then on referred to her as ‘the filthy feckin’ tinker’. I always liked the idea of being descended from gypsies; it seemed glamorous and romantic. I pictured them in painted caravans, living on the open road, breaking in wild horses, wearing gold earrings and brightly coloured headscarves, sitting round the camp fires recounting folk tales into the small hours of the night. It conjured up a hundred different images. It was my great granddad, Nan’s dad, who had been the real Romany, working as a rag-and-bone man and living on a campsite somewhere in Mitcham. Mum used to be able to speak a bit of their language when she was young and Nan still remembers a lot of the folklore of her youth. But none of these romantic images were coming to Alice’s mind when she thought of ‘filthy feckin’ tinkers’.

Richard would plod out into the garden occasionally with a large pair of scissors and snip all the buds off the rose bushes, just as they were about to open, like a character from Alice in Wonderland. There was a big vine covered in grapes growing up the wall, until he just took an axe to it for no reason one day. It was all mad, but endlessly funny to a small boy hungry for eccentricity. Alice used to buy potatoes by the ton and be boiling up urns of soup all the time, but it always used to have things like chicken’s feet floating in it and I would get uncontrollable giggles whenever I was confronted by a bowl of the stuff.

All the time she was preparing a meal she would be muttering to herself as she gathered up the ingredients: ‘We’ll boil the hell out o’ that! And we’ll boil the feck out o’ that!’

I would spend hours drawing cartoons of her because she fascinated me so much, with a cigarette permanently glued to her lips, always spitting and sneezing into the food and then, when accused, swearing blind she hadn’t, filled with indignation at the very suggestion. I eventually managed to animate the cartoons on Photoshop, turning the adventures of Alice into a little home movie.

At Christmas she would find an old plastic toy, discarded from a McDonald’s Happy Meal in the distant past, which had been gathering grime in the corner of a cupboard somewhere ever since, and would wrap it up as my Christmas present. She would take her teeth out at the end of a meal, swish them clean in her teacup, put them back in and then drink down the contents of the cup. I would watch every move with fascinated, open-mouthed horror.

‘What the feck are you laffing at?’ she would demand whenever she caught me laughing and, when I couldn’t answer with a straight face, she would push her finger into my face. ‘Laff at that!’

Alice, however, for all her madness, was the first person to see I had developed some funny little twitches. They had crept up so slowly and gradually that Mum and I hadn’t even noticed them. They were just what I did, part of who I was.

‘Look at yer!’ Alice would snap. ‘What’s all this?’

She would do an imitation of me and Mum would become indignant, thinking she was picking on me, particularly when she described me as ‘the Divil’s child’. I didn’t like that suggestion at all, but the Devil played a large part in Alice’s life. She had all these statues of Jesus and Mary on the walls and every so often she would get them down on the floor and start wailing about how she wasn’t a prostitute, even though nobody had ever suggested that she was – it was wild, like visiting the set of Father Ted for real.

I felt that having Dave as a dad was going to bring all sorts of extra entertainment my way.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

WARNING SIGNS (#u80da8568-69d6-5a2b-91f8-ad9c966a4df8)

We had a couple of friends called Lizzie-Anne and Kaye. Lizzie-Anne was in the process of changing from being Alan. It seemed a bit wild to be changing sex in order to have a lesbian relationship, but variety always makes life a bit more interesting. They were lovely people and they used to look after me sometimes when Mum had stuff to do. We met them through Poofy-Cousin-Marcus, who had known Alan when he was a man, and actually believed he might have been the reason Alan got a bit confused about his sexuality in the first place, finding him wandering about the house in women’s shoes after their first night together. Lizzie-Anne was working as an usherette at the Palace Theatre and got us free tickets to go and see Starlight Express – great show, I thought, but a crap storyline! A theatre critic already and hardly even out of short pants!

After I’d been staying with Lizzie-Anne and Kaye one time they spotted something funny about me and asked Mum if she’d ever noticed that I seemed to have little absences, where I would just drift away from the world and not seem to hear or see anything for a few minutes, almost like I’d gone to sleep with my eyes open but the lids drooping. I think the official name for such attacks is ‘petit mals’ and they are little seizures. I hadn’t realized I was doing anything odd, just thought I was a bit of a daydreamer I suppose, because I still liked to live inside my head much of the time.

Apparently they’d woken up in the night to find me standing bolt upright at the bedroom door, being a bit strange, like Damien in The Omen – ‘Pete the Anti-Christ’. Anyway, whatever they told Mum got her thinking a bit and she decided to take me to the doctor just to check there wasn’t anything she should be worrying about. The doctor didn’t seem to have much idea what was going on either and suggested it might be some mild form of childhood epilepsy that I would grow out of in time. I felt fine, so I wasn’t worried, perfectly happy to have ‘little absences’ now and then.

I had a thing about the parting in my hair at that time. The line had to be exactly and perfectly razor straight before I felt I could safely leave the house. People used to call me ‘Peter Parting’ because it became such an obsession. It was just the tiniest warning rumble of the storm that was soon to come, so quiet and small that nobody, including me, took much notice. These things were just part of being Pete. Now and then a faint suspicion would flit across my mind that there might be something different about me, but I wouldn’t have had a clue how to explain it to anyone, or ask for help, and none of it gave me any problem, so why worry? If the doctor and Mum weren’t worried, then there was nothing to concern me, was there?

I was about nine when Mum got pregnant. I liked the idea of having a baby brother or sister, especially with Dave there to be our dad. I was always going on to Mum about getting one, as if you could buy them in the same markets as the baby rabbits.

When she had Alex it was great. I had my own baby brother and I instantly loved him to death. We had become a proper family unit, Mum, Dad and two kids, like something from the television ads.

I didn’t have any trouble getting friends at that stage, particularly girls. I had a best friend from school called Sarah and we used to spend hours making tapes for our own radio station. It was our version of Capital Radio, which we listened to a lot, and we called it ‘Completely and Utterly Ballsed Up Piece of Birds’ Droppings, Mixed up in Beaver Sweat Sauce and Totally Crappy and Unorganized Big Turd Radio’ – catchy eh? It was a great jingle. We would record all the links and interviews and make up our own songs on the spot on a Casio keyboard or any instruments we could find, even though neither of us could play any of them properly.

I was the host of the show, and most of the guests as well. I would use different voices to interview myself, then I would use two tape recorders together to overdub myself over and over again, so there would be a great big group of me to interview, hundreds of mad voices all interrupting and talking over one another, a bit like they did inside my head most of the time. I think I imagined I would work in the music business when I grew up, maybe as a producer or something.

I wanted to spend as much time as I could fiddling about in the studio and to create a whole album of my own songs. I didn’t have any particular musical taste at the time. I mostly just liked whatever group Mum was playing with and whatever music I was exposed to as a result. I had a period where I was really into The Prodigy, who had come out of the underground rave scene and also did hard-core techno at the time. Their song ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ had caused a bit of controversy. But I could just as easily trip out to pre-packaged stuff like the Spice Girls. I was open to anything, having been brought up on all the different sorts of music Mum was involved in. I was in the choir at school and I could hold a tune, although to be honest I had a bit of a shit voice.

As well as the radio station, I was also creating my own world in cartoon form, making up the sort of stories you would normally find in magazines like Viz, which I read avidly. Mum grumbled that I was obsessed with turds and poo, but aren’t all small boys? I was always writing poems about things like that, and drawing little cartoon illustrations of talking turds with flies buzzing around their heads.

‘Why can’t you write poems about nice things?’ Mum would complain, but that just made me laugh. Where would be the fun in that? Turds were hysterical, weren’t they?

She might have tutted and said grown-up things like that from time to time, but Mum still liked to sit and watch Beavis and Butt-head with me and I often caught her laughing at the jokes. I thought those two guys were so cool. The jokes were so good, and the words like Assmunch, buttwipe, penis breath, schlong, dil-hole, dil-weed, asswipe and butt dumpling brought me endless hours of sniggering happiness. Ren and Stimpy, the cat and the Chihuahua with a fiery temper, brought me the same kind of joy. Their writers seemed to see life from a whole new perspective, catching me by surprise but at the same time saying things that summed up exactly how I felt about things.

Big laughs come from the unexpected; the unexpected prat fall or unexpected slant on something familiar. I think that is why I am sometimes able to make people laugh, because I take them by surprise. Half the time I take myself by surprise with the things that plop out of my mouth, or the positions my body arbitrarily falls into. I loved to laugh and I loved to make other people laugh. I wanted to be as funny as Beavis and Butt-head, I wanted to draw them and write for them and be them. I wanted to be a genius like their creator, Mike Judge.