How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright Page B

Crow Street, climbing on the rooftops and creeping down the entries, that one in the suit, the ones with guns and balaclavas, looming up outside the window of my nan and grandad’s house, smashing their way inside, coming up out of the trees at the back of our house. They are coming. I know it. No one else seems to think so. They are coming, if we try to get rid of Margaret Thatcher, like the police banging on the front door or the plague of spiders coming for their revenge, that’s for sure.
    I started to go to the library on my own about then. My mum used to leave me there if she was shopping in Dudley; much later I’d walk down there on my own after school if nothing else was going on. When I’d read all the books I liked in the children’s section, the Narnia books, The Wind in the Willows , Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Willard Price’s adventure books, Shakespeare for Children , Oliver Twist , I would go and sit upstairs at the big table where the college students did their work, to read history books. I started with what we did at school, that was how I read so much about the Victorians, but once I’d started, one thing led to another. I used to carry an exercise book with me and write down anything interesting. I ended up with a pile of them that ran from when I was nine until I was fourteen, thirty or forty of them: my assassination diaries. I would think about the books on the shelves, the way the light moved around the reference library depending on what time of day it was, and all the knowledge inside the books, and I’d look at the growing pile of books in the corner of my room; in our house to start with and then, later, back at my nan and grandad’s and the room I’d fallen out of.
    I burned them later, my assassination diaries, out the back, in an oil drum, letting the wind take the smoke and ash out over the abandoned allotments. Burning books is where I ended up.

‘ ‌ And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.’
    â€Œ
    That night my mum sits at the kitchen table and cries and my dad smashes his fist on the table three times. I get up from bed and listen from the stairs. I doh know what we’ll do, my mum says.
    I’ll think of summat.
    I just doh know what we’ll do. I told yer, Francis.
    Listen to me.
    I day vote for em. So whatever happens yer cor blame me. My mum is crying really hard now but I can tell my dad isn’t going to hit her or anything; he’s standing at the kitchen table ready to thump it.
    It ay nothing to do with that, my dad says and slams the table again and then he starts speaking slowly. I doh want yer to worry abaht any of it. It’ll be fine, we’ll be fine. If I lose me job I’ll get another.
    It ay as simple as that, Francis.
    It is.
    The next morning my dad takes me to the park to play tennis before he goes off to work, even though it’s Sunday. When I get back I sit in the garden for a bit and watch a squirrel climb up the scaffolding for the new houses while the radio plays inside and my mum does some work in the kitchen and everything is okay.
    I swear that bastard Eric has took the camera.
    My grandad spent months rummaging in drawers for it, muttering to himself.
    It ud be just the sort of trick he’d play. I knowed he was no good all along.
    Every night after school Little Ronnie likes to walk over to the Ash Tree, find a stick from somewhere, and rattle the gates until Caesar, the big Alsatian, goes for us; howling and dribbling and jumping up at the gates. Sometimes the woman who keeps the pub leans out of the window to shout and we run off or flatten ourselves against the wall so she can’t see us. I don’t like doing it. I’m scared of the dog, that he’ll get his jaws through the railings and bite us; or