Wild Tales Read Online Free Page B

everything was changed and our privacy was shattered. All of the neighbors knew. When the police come to your door, everybody knows. The jungle drums beat along the Salfordgrapevine all night long. It was a crushing blow to a man who’d kept to himself all these years.
    In the long run, we didn’t think it was serious. My dad wasn’t any kind of thief, and even if they thought he was, you don’t go to jail for stealing a lousy Agfa camera.
    One night, soon afterward, I’d been fast asleep for hours when I heard my dad creep into my pitch-dark bedroom. I could tell something was up right away.
    “Son, I need to talk to you,” he said, and from his tone I knew things had gotten serious. He laid the whole thing out for me, assured me he was innocent, but how none of that mattered in the tangled legal process. “I’m going up on trial, and there is a chance I’ll have to go away for a while. If that happens, I’m counting on you to be the man of the family.”
    I didn’t quite grasp what he meant; it didn’t make sense to me. But I nodded and gave him a powerful hug. It was the most emotional conversation we’d ever had.
    The trial came up quickly. None of the judicial red tape like you have now, where someone lingers for months or even years while the system grinds on. Only a week or two later I was bumping around the house when my mother burst through the front door into the kitchen. She slumped back against the wall and said, “He got a year!” Then she burst into tears. I was shocked, just blown away. It didn’t make any fucking sense. Even if they thought he was guilty, he was nothing more than an accessory. A year seemed excessive for such a penny-ante charge. I didn’t even have a chance to see him afterward. They took him directly to jail. He never came home until a year later.
    My mother told me our situation was going to be different from now on. We’d have to fend for ourselves and all stick together. She tried to put a brave face on things. “We’ll make it through,” she assured us, but I wasn’t so sure. It was obvious the family had been barely scraping by. Without my father’s salary, we’d have to sacrifice what little we had.
    Sure enough, everything soon turned to shit. They carted my dad off to Strangeways, a brutal high-security prison, with an execution shed and a permanent gallows. You’d see it as you walked through downtown Manchester, dark and ominous, a scary fucking place right out of a Dickens novel. I couldn’t imagine my dad being in there with hardened criminals. And neither could my mom—she just came undone, which was so unlike her.
    Things got really tough at home. I had to become the man of the house—make sure the front and back doors were locked at night, the oven was off. Kept the outside looking respectable so the neighbors wouldn’t talk. My sister Elaine became my responsibility. I’d be going to meet my friends, and as soon as I put my hand on the door, my mother would yell: “Take your sister with you.” Awww, fuck! “Okay, c’mon, Elaine.” If you think there were no luxuries before this fiasco, now we had to cut back on necessities to pull through. Food was in extremely short supply. Most of my clothes came from the Salvation Army, clothes that neither fit nor matched. I was wearing tops that seemed like Grandpa’s nightshirt, coats that hung off me like a tent. One time, after wearing out the soles of my shoes, I was forced to wear a pair of my mother’s flat brogues, which was fucking humiliating for a twelve-year-old kid. This came at a time when I was supposed to be cool, trying to attract girls and friends in general. Here I was in these shitty clothes, looking stupid, anything but cool. Man, it’s affected me to this day. Even after all the great things in my life, I still have trouble with my coolness quotient.
    Before all this had happened, I’d kept my grades up in school and passed the Eleven plus exam, which separated those of us