Marabou Stork Nightmares Read Online Free

became impossible for people, as much as they tried, to keep their lives from each other. In stairs, on balconies, in communal drying areas, through dimpled-glass and wire doors, I sensed that there was a general, shared quality kicking around which we seemed to lack. I suppose it was what people would call normality.
    All those dull broadsheet newspaper articles on the scheme where we lived tended to focus on how deprived it was. Maybe it was, but I'd always defined the place as less characterised by poverty than by boredom, although the relationship between the two is pretty evident. For me, though, the sterile boredom outside my house was preferable to the chaos inside it.
    My old man was a total basket case; completely away with it. The old girl, if anything, was worse. They'd been engaged for yonks but before they were due to get married, she had a sort of mental breakdown, or rather, had her first mental breakdown. She would have these breakdowns intermittently until it got to the stage it's at now, where it's hard to tell when she's not having one. Anyway, while she was in the mental hospital she met an Italian male nurse with whom she ran away to Italy. A few years later she returned with two small children, my half-brothers Tony and Bernard.
    The old boy, John, had got himself engaged to another woman. This proved that there were at least two crazy females in Granton in the early sixties. They were due to be married when my Ma, Vet (short for Verity), reappeared in the lounge bar of The Anchor public house. As Dad was to remark often: Ah jist looked acroass n met yir Ma's eyes n the auld magic wis still thair.
    That was that. Vet told John she'd got the travelling out of her system, that he was the only man she'd ever loved and could they please get married.
    John said aye, or words to that effect, and they tied the knot, him taking on the two Italian bambinos whom Vet later confessed were from different guys. I was born about a year after the wedding, followed about a year later by my sister Kim, and my brother Elgin, who arrived a year later again. Elgin got his name from the Highland town where John reckoned he was conceived.
    Yes, we were a far from handsome family. I suppose I got off relatively lightly, though I stress relatively. While my own face and body merely suggested what people in the scheme would, whispering, refer to as 'the Strang look', Kim and Elgin completely screamed it. 'The Strang look' was essentially a concave face starting at a prominent, pointed forehead, swinging in at a sharp angle towards large, dulled eyes and a small, squashed nose, down into thin, twisted lips and springing outwards to the tip of a large, jutting chin. A sort of retarded man-in-the-moon face. My additional crosses to bear: two large protruding ears which came from my otherwise normal-looking mother, invisible under her long, black hair.
    My older half-brothers were more fortunate. They took after my mother, and, presumably their Italian fathers. Tony looked a little like a darker, swarthier version of the footballer Graeme Souness, though not so ugly; despite being prone to putting on weight. Bernard was fair, slim and gazelle-like, outrageously camp from an early age.
    The rest of us took 'the Strang look' from the old man, who, as I've said, was an Al basket case. John Strang's large, striking face was dominated by thickly framed glasses with bottom-of-Coke-bottle lenses. These magnified his intense, blazing eyes further. They had the effect of making him look as if he was coming from very far away then suddenly appearing right in your face. It was scary and disconcerting. If you were in possession of a Harrier Jump-jet, you could have chosen either his chin or forehead as a landing pad. He generally wore a large brown fur coat, under which he carried his shotgun when he patrolled the scheme late at night with Winston, his loyal Alsatian. Winston was a horrible dog and I was glad when he died. He was instantly