A Fucked Up Life in Books Read Online Free

trying to get me to reveal my hiding place. Could they hear me breathing? My heart beating out of my chest? They didn’t seem to know I was there.
    The man continued to look at my Mum. He looked very serious.
    ‘I’m going outside for some air,’ he said.
    ‘Yeah, yeah I’ll come with you,’ she said, finishing her wine and grinding her fag out in the ashtray on the table.
    And they both walked out of the patio doors and went through the garden into our garden next door to go and find my Dad and the woman.
    The girl stumbled into the kitchen looking for me. I wriggled out of the gap.
    ‘You’re supposed to HIDE!’ she screamed at me. ‘You’ve ruined my go!’
    I apologised. I didn’t feel much like playing anymore. I went and got my brother and took him back to our house. Dad tucked us into bed and I wanted to tell him what I’d heard but I didn’t really understand it. I didn’t want to fuck everything up. Maybe if I just kept my mouth shut it would all go away.
    A year later, in court, my Mum was battling my Dad for custody of us, and I told them that I wouldn’t go with her because she didn’t want us. I repeated her words: ‘She doesn’t want her husband, she doesn’t want her kids, she just wants her freedom.’
    We stayed with my Dad.
    Years later still, when my Mum was having one of her trademark freak-outs and said how much she loved my brother and I, I told her what I’d heard that night while I was hiding in the kitchen. She stopped crying and shouting and looked at me for a long time.
    ‘You misheard,’ she told me seriously.
    ‘I did not,’ I said back, just as seriously.
    She looked at me for a long time and then laughed. ‘Oh, well, you know it all don’t you? Get the fuck out of my house.’
    And so I went.
    It wasn’t the first time I left her house, and it wasn’t the last time I let her fuck my head up. It’s just another chapter in the ‘why my Mum is a fucking cunt’ saga.

Grimms’ Fairytales
    My Mum used to work nights. In the evenings before she left she would tuck my brother and me up in our beds in our shared bedroom and put on a storybook cassette for us to listen to before we went to sleep. The content that she supplied was sometimes questionable: where we could easily drift off to sleep listening to some old dear tell us fairy tales written by Enid Blyton, it was much more difficult when she put in the cassette of some mad bastard reading
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
.
    When it was a Grimms’ night, as soon as she’d left the room my brother and I would leap out of bed and play, because we were fucking terrified of the dark stories pumping out of the little speaker on top of the chest of drawers.
    One night we were particularly restless, so while we played quietly with the stories still on in the background, I decided that I would do a magic trick that would knock his fucking socks off.
    Earlier in the day, Mum had given us both a shiny new ten pence piece each. We’d never seen one before, but the old ones were big and fat and dull, and these were all beautiful and sparkly and new. I told my brother that that with the new ten pence piece you could do magic far more easily, because they had loads more magic in them.
    He didn’t believe me, so I had to prove it.
    I popped the ten pence piece into my mouth and told him that when I opened my mouth it would have disappeared. I closed my mouth and moved my tongue to try and push the coin to the floor of my mouth to conceal it, apart from I fucked it up and accidentally swallowed the coin.
    I started crying.
    ‘Has it gone?’ my brother asked innocently.
    I ran out of the bedroom and into the living room where Dad was sat with a fag on watching
Red Dwarf
.
    ‘DADISWALLOWEDTENPEE!’ I cryscreamed at him.
    He asked me why and after a lengthy discussion he realised that I was an idiot and chucked both my brother and I into the car for a trip to accident and emergency.
    ‘DADAMIGOINGTODIE?’ I cryscreamed at him all the