Cally Phillips' Another World is Possible
Episode Four – SET UP
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1974 Bayswater – ROISIN
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1974 Bayswater – ROISIN
Roisin is nine. It’s September and the kids are going back to school. Patrick is going to school for the first time, though he’s been in the nursery for a year. Roisin likes school. There’s an order and structure to things which is lacking at home where freedom has disintegrated into disorganised chaos.
Agamemnon Road is a place of the past. A memory like so many other memories. Roisin counts about four places since then but she may have missed the odd one out. She thinks it’s possible they may even have been homeless for a while. She thinks it every time she passes a beggar outside Notting Hill tube with a sign ‘Hungry and homeless please help’. She clearly remembers camping for a couple of nights under the Westway construction. Everyone said it was ‘fun’ and that they were ‘campaigning’ but Roisin remembers it being cold and scary and anything but fun. She doesn’t like the vagaries of living like this, she likes things to be ordered and secure.
In September 1974 Roisin is living in Bayswater. They’ve gone west and are to keep going west for a while. Liam, like Agamemnon Road, is little more than a memory though he still comes to take Patrick out from time to time. Roisin can’t imagine how he finds them, they seem to move around constantly without leaving forwarding addresses. She half expects to come home from school one day to discover they don’t live there any more and no one can tell her where they’ve moved to.
Patrick is ‘disturbed’ at the moment. He doesn’t like not having his dad around. Roisin feels luckier than Patrick. She may never have had her dad hold her, or help her with her homework but he’s always there, on the wall, for company. A constant in a fickle world. Because however quickly they’ve flit and whatever else gets left behind on the move, the poster of Che comes with Roisin through everything. It’s a bit battered now but it’s still there. Che looking with those burning eyes at her is the last thing she sees when she goes to sleep and the first thing she sees when she wakes up.
So. New school uniforms have been bought (at great expense and with much complaining). Mary doesn’t like wasting money on such things but Roisin is determined to have the right uniform. She doesn’t want to ‘stick out’. This infuriates Mary to whom conforming is denying one’s identity. But Roisin wants her hair tied up neatly, her shoes polished and her skirt the ‘appropriate’ length. She knows she isn’t like all the other girls so she is desperate in her attempts to conform, in the hope that they won’t notice. But of course they do.
Term has been going on for two weeks when Roisin comes home and discovers she won’t be going back to St Mary of the Angels RC primary school again. At first she thinks it’s Patrick’s fault. Patrick spoils everything and he’s been so much trouble in the first two weeks that Roisin has given up trying to cover for him.
It turns out that it’s not Patrick. It’s God. Mary has decided that God doesn’t exist any more and that consequently she’s not going to be a Catholic any more. Roisin and Patrick will go to Paddington Green Primary School where (apparently) God is less in evidence.
Roisin cries. It’s the last time she cries in front of anyone as a child. It’s the time she realises that crying won’t solve anything and a display of weakness is less effective than a display of strength. Roisin begs Mary to let her stay at St Mary’s.
‘But all my friends are there.’
‘Friends won’t help you through life. You have to stand on your own two feet.’
‘We’re always moving, why can’t we stay in one place?’
This one is bound to get a poor reaction. And does. Life is taking more of a toll on Mary than she imagined it would and loving your children is one thing but putting up with their ‘nonsense’ on a day-to-day basis ‘without any support’ is becoming less than amusing. Mary’s friends have moved on, everyone moves on when things start getting difficult. Some follow the drugs, some follow the squats, some just move and some disappear. Stacey was found dead of an overdose in her bed just last year and Mary and the kids moved on the same day. Keeping one step ahead of the law. Well, you don’t want the questions to be asked.
The men are mostly a thing of the past now too. God is dead and all men are bastards. Mary has switched her religion to feminism and she’s passionate about it. Roisin is to become a lawyer. A professional, someone who will make a difference in the world. Roisin tries to use this plan to her advantage, ‘If you want me to be a lawyer, I need to stay at the same school. I need…’
‘I don’t WANT you to be a lawyer. I want YOU to want to be a lawyer. You have to make something of your life….’
Mary’s notion of free spirited living seems to have limits these days. Never say ‘no’ becomes an impossible policy when you have two young kids ‘running roughshod’. Roisin and Patrick are no longer funny and charming; they are ‘annoying brats’ who ‘get in the way’. When Patrick flushes a huge stash of Jonno’s drugs down the toilet because Jonno sold the TV, the kids become a liability. On reflection, that might have been just before the Westway ‘holiday’ experience.
So. We’re not going back to St Mary of the Angels. Not tomorrow. Not ever. Not even to pick up books, pencils, cardigan, or say goodbye to friends. That’s it. The end of St Mary’s. The end of God. And for a while it looks like the end of school. Roisin thinks she may never go to school again. This is a horrific idea to her. She can think of nothing worse than being at home all day every day.
Fortunately, it also doesn’t suit anyone living in the squat. Even though we are in a feminist squat, so there should be plenty of earth mothers around, most of them are off their faces all the time and kids and drugs really don’t mix.
Roisin becomes a child of the streets. For as long as it takes for Paddington Green Primary to capitulate and take pity on her and Patrick. But there’s no new uniform. Roisin has to go to Paddington Green in her old uniform until she’s outgrown it. The embarrassment nearly kills her and it certainly doesn’t help her to make friends. She goes from being a ‘bright, lively’ child to being ‘withdrawn’ and ‘isolated’. Patrick just keeps riding roughshod over every rule and challenging everyone by using his fists. Mary says it’s because of his ‘exposure to male dominance and aggression’ when young. It’s why she discourages Patrick from seeing Liam. And over the next year or so, Liam needs less and less discouraging. But even being surrounded by women 24/7, Patrick still curses and spits and resorts to his fists whenever challenged. Everyone knows you don’t upset Patrick. Not if you want a quiet life.
Paddington Green is all right, eventually. The work is the same and Roisin finds it easy. The kids are different and Roisin finds it hard. So she turns in on herself. She begins to read. Voraciously. Anything she can find. The house is full of Cosmopolitan and She magazines and The Female Eunuch and all sorts of feminist tracts but Roisin pretty quickly decides she’s not reading them. She gets a library card and starts using the library. Mary has to go with her the first time, and so Mary gets a card as well, but Mary has no use for a library card. This is the time before plastic cards, library or credit, are used for cutting lines of cocaine. The drug of choice is still LSD. Cannabis for daily use, like coffee, and LSD for treats. Heroin is beginning to make an entry on the scene but it’s expensive.
1974 is a time when drugs dull the pain. It’s before drugs become ‘recreational’, before Ecstasy and Coke and ‘having a good time’ are the way to go. Numbing and dumbing the senses is the order of the day. Uppers and downers have gone out the window and everything is about hiding from the reality that the swinging sixties are long gone and the seventies are one long downer. Acid takes you to a different plane and heroin is for the times when even an alternative reality is too much to bear. Paranoia and reality are equally challenging.
So Roisin takes hold of Mary’s library card and now she can get books from the children’s or the adult library. Six at a time. She just has to hide them, to make sure that they get back to the library and don’t go the way of everything else from Bayswater Villas– to Bangladesh.
By October 1974 Roisin learns not to become too attached to things. St Mary of the Angels is a memory. Agamemnon Road is a memory and most of her possessions become memories pretty swiftly. Mary has various explanations. They give a lot of Roisin’s old toys to ‘the poor’. Roisin isn’t sure that the children of Bangladesh really want her toys and on occasion she’s beginning to think that maybe they are being turned into drugs like the TV was. But she doesn’t say anything. She just learns not to want things. Not to be attached.
Roisin thinks that kids are just too hard for Mary. Life’s too hard and kids are definitely too hard. Roisin thinks she’ll become a child psychologist when she grows up. She feels like she understands her own mind so well and adults don’t seem to understand anything. Roisin is sure that when she grows up she’ll be able to help kids like her who need someone to help them. Mary can’t help her. Roisin realises she has to help herself. It’s a big ask for a nine year old but what else is she to do? She doesn’t want to end up like Mary or any of the ‘sisters’.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. In 1974 Mary exchanges one set of sisters (the religious ones) for another (the feminist ones). And Roisin decides that whatever else she’s going to do with her life, being a ‘woman’ is not high on her agenda. Roisin looks at the world and realises being a man is far better. And feminists are not men. They are just women who complain about men. Roisin hasn’t got any time for feminism. It’s a man’s world and fighting them won’t get you anywhere. Understanding them and living by their rules, that’s the way to go. Roisin begins to seek out men wherever she is. She makes friends with any stray man she comes across. In the parks, at the tennis courts, on buses, on tubes, anywhere.
Roisin gives up playing with girls and starts playing with boys. She plays football, and is rather good. She learns how to spit and fight and spends all her spare time out on the streets trying to get grownup’s to call her ‘son’. She has her hair cut short into a bob and in the seventies this is a ubiquitous haircut for boy or girl, so a lot of the time she gets away with it. She spends a lot of time looking at how boys walk and run and sit and apes it, often very effectively. She becomes unfeminine and unfeminist at the same time.
Mary’s stopped noticing, to be honest. Kids are just a hassle. You feed them and clothe them and whatever you give them they don’t like it. You try to spend time with them and they don’t want to do what you want to do. You give them things and they aren’t grateful. You take things away and they whine. They are useless in a crisis and they are a constant source of guilt. Maybe some time later it will be good but right now she wishes she could get away from them. The party is most definitely over and Mary doesn’t like what’s left. She feels like life is one long hangover. Things change but they never get any better. And she can’t see any future, bright or otherwise. It’s all just a grind. Mary is nearly thirty and feels like her life’s slipping away. Nothing is how she thought it would be. Reality is a con and the alternative is harder and more expensive to achieve and even then it’s bad as often as it is good. She really doesn’t know why she bothers.
Roisin starts to avoid Mary. And the sisters. These days she’s either out on the streets or shut in her room. But even a policy of avoidance can’t keep her safe. One day in November Patrick is on the rampage. As usual. Roisin listens to the noise outside and it seems to be that Patrick wants to see his dad and Mary is telling him that his dad is a good for nothing and doesn’t want to see him. Suddenly Patrick bursts into Roisin’s room. He’s in the kind of fury you don’t mess with and Roisin isn’t quick enough anyway. Before she knows what’s happened, he’s ripped the poster of Che off her wall and is shredding it.
‘Mum…mum…. Patrick…..’ Roisin knows she can’t cry and it’s too late to do anything else so she just shouts for Mary. By the time Mary has got into the room, Patrick is sobbing on the floor…. ‘No daddies, no daddies,’ with bits of red and black poster all around him.
‘Look what he’s done, mum,’ Roisin says weakly. However unattached she’s become to things, everyone knows that the poster is Roisin’s one precious possession. This is a violation beyond reproach.
Roisin wishes she’d never told Patrick last summer that the poster was of her dad. She knew she should have kept it to herself and now she’s paying the price. If she’s expecting sympathy, she’s mistaken.
‘It’s just a bloody poster, Roisin. Grow up,’ is Mary’s only comment as she scoops Patrick up bodily and removes him from the room, still clutching some scraps of the poster.
Roisin sits on the bed. Shocked. Alone. Why is Mary like this? The poster is now a memory like all the others. Her dad isn’t even a memory. Not her memory at any rate. She can do nothing now but remember the memory of her dad Mary gave her. The secret. Roisin remembers clearly sitting on Mary’s bed one night, the night before they left Agamemnon Road, when she was seven years old. She remembers saying, ‘Tell me about my dad on the wall.’
And she clearly remembers Mary saying, ‘I’ll tell you Roisin, but it’s a secret. You have to keep it as a secret. In your heart. I’ll tell you about your daddy, if you promise to keep him in your heart, always. And never tell anyone.’
And Roisin promises, with the conviction only a seven year old can muster.
Agamemnon Road is a place of the past. A memory like so many other memories. Roisin counts about four places since then but she may have missed the odd one out. She thinks it’s possible they may even have been homeless for a while. She thinks it every time she passes a beggar outside Notting Hill tube with a sign ‘Hungry and homeless please help’. She clearly remembers camping for a couple of nights under the Westway construction. Everyone said it was ‘fun’ and that they were ‘campaigning’ but Roisin remembers it being cold and scary and anything but fun. She doesn’t like the vagaries of living like this, she likes things to be ordered and secure.
In September 1974 Roisin is living in Bayswater. They’ve gone west and are to keep going west for a while. Liam, like Agamemnon Road, is little more than a memory though he still comes to take Patrick out from time to time. Roisin can’t imagine how he finds them, they seem to move around constantly without leaving forwarding addresses. She half expects to come home from school one day to discover they don’t live there any more and no one can tell her where they’ve moved to.
Patrick is ‘disturbed’ at the moment. He doesn’t like not having his dad around. Roisin feels luckier than Patrick. She may never have had her dad hold her, or help her with her homework but he’s always there, on the wall, for company. A constant in a fickle world. Because however quickly they’ve flit and whatever else gets left behind on the move, the poster of Che comes with Roisin through everything. It’s a bit battered now but it’s still there. Che looking with those burning eyes at her is the last thing she sees when she goes to sleep and the first thing she sees when she wakes up.
So. New school uniforms have been bought (at great expense and with much complaining). Mary doesn’t like wasting money on such things but Roisin is determined to have the right uniform. She doesn’t want to ‘stick out’. This infuriates Mary to whom conforming is denying one’s identity. But Roisin wants her hair tied up neatly, her shoes polished and her skirt the ‘appropriate’ length. She knows she isn’t like all the other girls so she is desperate in her attempts to conform, in the hope that they won’t notice. But of course they do.
Term has been going on for two weeks when Roisin comes home and discovers she won’t be going back to St Mary of the Angels RC primary school again. At first she thinks it’s Patrick’s fault. Patrick spoils everything and he’s been so much trouble in the first two weeks that Roisin has given up trying to cover for him.
It turns out that it’s not Patrick. It’s God. Mary has decided that God doesn’t exist any more and that consequently she’s not going to be a Catholic any more. Roisin and Patrick will go to Paddington Green Primary School where (apparently) God is less in evidence.
Roisin cries. It’s the last time she cries in front of anyone as a child. It’s the time she realises that crying won’t solve anything and a display of weakness is less effective than a display of strength. Roisin begs Mary to let her stay at St Mary’s.
‘But all my friends are there.’
‘Friends won’t help you through life. You have to stand on your own two feet.’
‘We’re always moving, why can’t we stay in one place?’
This one is bound to get a poor reaction. And does. Life is taking more of a toll on Mary than she imagined it would and loving your children is one thing but putting up with their ‘nonsense’ on a day-to-day basis ‘without any support’ is becoming less than amusing. Mary’s friends have moved on, everyone moves on when things start getting difficult. Some follow the drugs, some follow the squats, some just move and some disappear. Stacey was found dead of an overdose in her bed just last year and Mary and the kids moved on the same day. Keeping one step ahead of the law. Well, you don’t want the questions to be asked.
The men are mostly a thing of the past now too. God is dead and all men are bastards. Mary has switched her religion to feminism and she’s passionate about it. Roisin is to become a lawyer. A professional, someone who will make a difference in the world. Roisin tries to use this plan to her advantage, ‘If you want me to be a lawyer, I need to stay at the same school. I need…’
‘I don’t WANT you to be a lawyer. I want YOU to want to be a lawyer. You have to make something of your life….’
Mary’s notion of free spirited living seems to have limits these days. Never say ‘no’ becomes an impossible policy when you have two young kids ‘running roughshod’. Roisin and Patrick are no longer funny and charming; they are ‘annoying brats’ who ‘get in the way’. When Patrick flushes a huge stash of Jonno’s drugs down the toilet because Jonno sold the TV, the kids become a liability. On reflection, that might have been just before the Westway ‘holiday’ experience.
So. We’re not going back to St Mary of the Angels. Not tomorrow. Not ever. Not even to pick up books, pencils, cardigan, or say goodbye to friends. That’s it. The end of St Mary’s. The end of God. And for a while it looks like the end of school. Roisin thinks she may never go to school again. This is a horrific idea to her. She can think of nothing worse than being at home all day every day.
Fortunately, it also doesn’t suit anyone living in the squat. Even though we are in a feminist squat, so there should be plenty of earth mothers around, most of them are off their faces all the time and kids and drugs really don’t mix.
Roisin becomes a child of the streets. For as long as it takes for Paddington Green Primary to capitulate and take pity on her and Patrick. But there’s no new uniform. Roisin has to go to Paddington Green in her old uniform until she’s outgrown it. The embarrassment nearly kills her and it certainly doesn’t help her to make friends. She goes from being a ‘bright, lively’ child to being ‘withdrawn’ and ‘isolated’. Patrick just keeps riding roughshod over every rule and challenging everyone by using his fists. Mary says it’s because of his ‘exposure to male dominance and aggression’ when young. It’s why she discourages Patrick from seeing Liam. And over the next year or so, Liam needs less and less discouraging. But even being surrounded by women 24/7, Patrick still curses and spits and resorts to his fists whenever challenged. Everyone knows you don’t upset Patrick. Not if you want a quiet life.
Paddington Green is all right, eventually. The work is the same and Roisin finds it easy. The kids are different and Roisin finds it hard. So she turns in on herself. She begins to read. Voraciously. Anything she can find. The house is full of Cosmopolitan and She magazines and The Female Eunuch and all sorts of feminist tracts but Roisin pretty quickly decides she’s not reading them. She gets a library card and starts using the library. Mary has to go with her the first time, and so Mary gets a card as well, but Mary has no use for a library card. This is the time before plastic cards, library or credit, are used for cutting lines of cocaine. The drug of choice is still LSD. Cannabis for daily use, like coffee, and LSD for treats. Heroin is beginning to make an entry on the scene but it’s expensive.
1974 is a time when drugs dull the pain. It’s before drugs become ‘recreational’, before Ecstasy and Coke and ‘having a good time’ are the way to go. Numbing and dumbing the senses is the order of the day. Uppers and downers have gone out the window and everything is about hiding from the reality that the swinging sixties are long gone and the seventies are one long downer. Acid takes you to a different plane and heroin is for the times when even an alternative reality is too much to bear. Paranoia and reality are equally challenging.
So Roisin takes hold of Mary’s library card and now she can get books from the children’s or the adult library. Six at a time. She just has to hide them, to make sure that they get back to the library and don’t go the way of everything else from Bayswater Villas– to Bangladesh.
By October 1974 Roisin learns not to become too attached to things. St Mary of the Angels is a memory. Agamemnon Road is a memory and most of her possessions become memories pretty swiftly. Mary has various explanations. They give a lot of Roisin’s old toys to ‘the poor’. Roisin isn’t sure that the children of Bangladesh really want her toys and on occasion she’s beginning to think that maybe they are being turned into drugs like the TV was. But she doesn’t say anything. She just learns not to want things. Not to be attached.
Roisin thinks that kids are just too hard for Mary. Life’s too hard and kids are definitely too hard. Roisin thinks she’ll become a child psychologist when she grows up. She feels like she understands her own mind so well and adults don’t seem to understand anything. Roisin is sure that when she grows up she’ll be able to help kids like her who need someone to help them. Mary can’t help her. Roisin realises she has to help herself. It’s a big ask for a nine year old but what else is she to do? She doesn’t want to end up like Mary or any of the ‘sisters’.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. In 1974 Mary exchanges one set of sisters (the religious ones) for another (the feminist ones). And Roisin decides that whatever else she’s going to do with her life, being a ‘woman’ is not high on her agenda. Roisin looks at the world and realises being a man is far better. And feminists are not men. They are just women who complain about men. Roisin hasn’t got any time for feminism. It’s a man’s world and fighting them won’t get you anywhere. Understanding them and living by their rules, that’s the way to go. Roisin begins to seek out men wherever she is. She makes friends with any stray man she comes across. In the parks, at the tennis courts, on buses, on tubes, anywhere.
Roisin gives up playing with girls and starts playing with boys. She plays football, and is rather good. She learns how to spit and fight and spends all her spare time out on the streets trying to get grownup’s to call her ‘son’. She has her hair cut short into a bob and in the seventies this is a ubiquitous haircut for boy or girl, so a lot of the time she gets away with it. She spends a lot of time looking at how boys walk and run and sit and apes it, often very effectively. She becomes unfeminine and unfeminist at the same time.
Mary’s stopped noticing, to be honest. Kids are just a hassle. You feed them and clothe them and whatever you give them they don’t like it. You try to spend time with them and they don’t want to do what you want to do. You give them things and they aren’t grateful. You take things away and they whine. They are useless in a crisis and they are a constant source of guilt. Maybe some time later it will be good but right now she wishes she could get away from them. The party is most definitely over and Mary doesn’t like what’s left. She feels like life is one long hangover. Things change but they never get any better. And she can’t see any future, bright or otherwise. It’s all just a grind. Mary is nearly thirty and feels like her life’s slipping away. Nothing is how she thought it would be. Reality is a con and the alternative is harder and more expensive to achieve and even then it’s bad as often as it is good. She really doesn’t know why she bothers.
Roisin starts to avoid Mary. And the sisters. These days she’s either out on the streets or shut in her room. But even a policy of avoidance can’t keep her safe. One day in November Patrick is on the rampage. As usual. Roisin listens to the noise outside and it seems to be that Patrick wants to see his dad and Mary is telling him that his dad is a good for nothing and doesn’t want to see him. Suddenly Patrick bursts into Roisin’s room. He’s in the kind of fury you don’t mess with and Roisin isn’t quick enough anyway. Before she knows what’s happened, he’s ripped the poster of Che off her wall and is shredding it.
‘Mum…mum…. Patrick…..’ Roisin knows she can’t cry and it’s too late to do anything else so she just shouts for Mary. By the time Mary has got into the room, Patrick is sobbing on the floor…. ‘No daddies, no daddies,’ with bits of red and black poster all around him.
‘Look what he’s done, mum,’ Roisin says weakly. However unattached she’s become to things, everyone knows that the poster is Roisin’s one precious possession. This is a violation beyond reproach.
Roisin wishes she’d never told Patrick last summer that the poster was of her dad. She knew she should have kept it to herself and now she’s paying the price. If she’s expecting sympathy, she’s mistaken.
‘It’s just a bloody poster, Roisin. Grow up,’ is Mary’s only comment as she scoops Patrick up bodily and removes him from the room, still clutching some scraps of the poster.
Roisin sits on the bed. Shocked. Alone. Why is Mary like this? The poster is now a memory like all the others. Her dad isn’t even a memory. Not her memory at any rate. She can do nothing now but remember the memory of her dad Mary gave her. The secret. Roisin remembers clearly sitting on Mary’s bed one night, the night before they left Agamemnon Road, when she was seven years old. She remembers saying, ‘Tell me about my dad on the wall.’
And she clearly remembers Mary saying, ‘I’ll tell you Roisin, but it’s a secret. You have to keep it as a secret. In your heart. I’ll tell you about your daddy, if you promise to keep him in your heart, always. And never tell anyone.’
And Roisin promises, with the conviction only a seven year old can muster.
About the Author
Cally Phillips has written fiction and drama in English and Scots, much of which is published through HoAmPresst. She also currently works as editor for Ayton Publishing Limited and runs a number of online projects, including The Galloway Raiders, which is the online hub for Scots writer S. R. Crockett. Her latest project to hit the virtual shelves is the #tobelikeche serial, which started in October 2016.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.