Nicola (Edinburgh, 1990)

She walked into the living room, her brown polyester school skirt hiked up above her waist. No knickers on. She twirled and did a little dance, proudly displaying her hairless cunt. As quickly as it happened she disappeared back into her room. Without as much as a shrug I went back to playing Super Mario on the Nintendo. Her ownership of such a device being my primary reason for visiting in the first place. After all, it was 1990 and compared to my Commodore 64 the Nintendo was pretty damned high-tech. Nicola was older than me, maybe that’s what older girls did. It was a passing thought before I went back to flattening Goombas.

Actually, to be precise, there were two Nicola’s during this time in my life; one of them lived below me in the grey Gorgie tenement building where I shared a small one bedroom flat with my mother, the other, at the end of the street. Neighbour Nicola didn’t like me, I was young and awkward and a constant target for bullies. Fuckin’ bitch! Ye daft wee hoor! Whut ye lookin at, eh? Wan a fuckin’ photie it’ll last longer! These were the words that echoed in my ears as I walked past them on the street daily. I was eight and they were twelve, at that age four years made a hell of a difference and I was terrified. Then this one Saturday I was going home to have soup for my lunch I’d probably been to North Merchiston Cemetery which I liked to go to as it was always quiet and I could climb a wall and see into the city farm. My goth stage was inevitable even by that age. But on this day instead of the usual juvenile insults from Neighbour Nicola, it was the main and primary Nicola who spoke to me and she invited me to go out and play with them in the street. They liked chap-door run. I didn’t, but I also didn’t have any friends so joined in anyway relishing the fact that I was in on a prank and the camaraderie felt when fleeing the scene of the crime. Neighbour Nicola was tall and a wee bit chubby and had a cheap perm, the sort you saw where it looked like every strand of her hair could snap off at any given moment. But to me she was older, she was already at secondary school and that instantly made her cool. She said she smoked too, but I never saw her do it. Despite her harsh words it was the other Nicola who was the leader, she had the air of a know-it-all and I believed that she did know it all. She went to one of the fanciest private schools in the city and wore her uniform with pride. In fact I only ever saw her in her uniform, never normal clothes. It was weird but I thought she was just showing off a bit. It was this horrible brown colour with a yellow shirt and she wore a matching head band, one of those ugly foamy ones that makes the sides of your head hurt, over her brown and meticulously straightened hair. She would wrap brown paper around her iron and actually iron her hair straight. I thought this was a very grown up thing to do, and admired her dedication. My unruly curls stuck out every which way kept at bay with a constant ponytail. There was no way my mum was going to let me iron my hair especially not after the time I got second degree burns by pulling a tube out of the washing machine. With an iron that close to my head I’d probably have ended up missing an ear.

The one time I saw Nicola not in her school uniform was when I slept over at her house. She wore one of those elaborate nighties that you see in M&S that are probably for old ladies. They have frilly collars and they go all the way down to the floor and sometimes they have tiny flowers all over them. I remember her room being pink and she had one of those raised beds with a desk underneath, I’d always wanted one of those. Sleeping high-up above the ground appealed to me. I’d seen a film called Cat’s Eye about a goblin that lived in the skirting boards that would come out at night and suck the breath out of you and I believed the further off the ground I was the better. I also made sure my cat slept on my bed as it was a cat in the film that killed the goblin and saved Drew Barrymore. I was jealous of Nicola, she had the perfect little girl’s room and she even had her own telly next to her bed. I felt like it put my new record player to shame, something I’d been immensely proud of at the time. We watched Purple Rain on the telly and I knew the songs as I had it on cassette tape but I didn’t really understand the film. The lyrics to Darling Nikki had been confusing me for years. I’d hoped Nicola could shed some light on the matter but she didn’t say anything about the songs. Instead she had an asthma attack. Then because of the asthma attack I got her tickets to see Disney on ice at Murrayfield the following day. Her dad couldn’t take her as she ended up in the hospital. I was excited but I knew my mum didn’t really want to take me, with hindsight it was because even with the free tickets she couldn’t really afford to take me, I still feel bad for begging her to buy me an overpriced light up Tinkerbell. Which I ended up playing with precisely once. I loved Disney although Alice in Wonderland gave me recurring nightmares. It was the blue caterpillar. Whooo… are…you? He asked over and over. I didn’t know. Scary little fucker.  I’d recently been traumatised by a school visit to the Edinburgh Butterfly & Insect World where I’d had to touch a giant millipede so my relationship with bugs and butterflies was already fairly fragile by that point.

Once Nicola took me and Neighbour Nicola to her school, it was after the school was closed but we walked around anyway. She knew where everything was. I was worried we’d get in trouble, but she was wearing her uniform so I figured it would be okay. I couldn’t believe how fancy their gym looked, even just peering in from the outside. The gym at my school was small and decrepit and doubled as the theatre and assembly hall. Her school has its own separate theatre. I thought going to a posh private school would make you immediately more intelligent and I admired her for that. She told me once that I wouldn’t be able to go to a school like that though, that I wasn’t smart enough for the entry exams and that my twenty-seven year old single mother would never be able to afford the fees. I was confused as to how her elderly single father could afford it, but Nicola had 2 tellies and a Nintendo so I knew they must have some money.

Then there was Ajit, his parents owned the corner shop. Other kids called him a Paki which I thought was weird because he was from Scotland and his parents were from India. I’ve never rated the intelligence of children though and those words came directly from the mouths of their small-minded parents. Nicola befriended him too, he was very quiet and I hoped that if we were friends his parents would give me free ice lollies but they never did. Instead I still had to clamber around the scaffolding surrounding the tenements and scrounge together empty Irn-Bru bottles left by the builders until I had enough to trade-in for pocket change to buy sweets. A dangerous pastime for someone as clumsy as me, by that age I’d already managed to fall and crack my head open four times. I was born with wonky feet and even though I’d been to a clinic to learn how to walk straight I still had my moments. Ajit was a Hindu and I an Atheist. Nicola was a Catholic and she invited us to go to mass on Sunday. I think we went because she invited us and we looked up to her and didn’t really understand the full implications of what we were doing. It was a surreal experience. Catholic churches are intimidating places at the best of times, ornate and huge and there’s a lot of talking, so when the priest asked us to carry the sacramental wine and bread to the altar I felt like I couldn’t refuse. A little blasphemer who still had baked bean stains on her shirt and a near silent brown boy under the scrutiny of the elderly uptight congregation must have been a sight to behold. We never did go back again after that.

Nicola’s dad was a strange man. He seemed really old to me but he loved her and gave her everything that she wanted. I guess at the time I hadn’t given it much thought having been an only child with a single mother I’d always been a little uncomfortable around other people’s fathers,  I didn’t have one of my own I wasn’t sure how to behave around them. I guess the assumption was that because her mother had died he’d coped by spoiling Nicola rotten. They lived in an equally tiny flat where she had the only bedroom and he slept on the sofa in the living room. It was a dark little flat on the ground floor that has back facing windows all the furniture in the living room looks old and grey. Again, because I had the only bedroom in my flat I didn’t question the fact that her father slept in the living room. It seemed like a fairly normal thing to do. Especially as so much money seemed to go on toys and games for Nicola.

On my ninth birthday we went out for lunch it was just Nicola, my mum and me. She showed up in her school uniform, I was used to this by now and had stopped thinking it odd, but my mum questioned about it her and Nicola mumbled and avoided eye contact and seemed uncomfortable. She was uncharacteristically quiet throughout and hid behind her razor straight bob. I didn’t really care because I had ice-cream with hot fudge sauce and I had a birthday and a friend.

Then one day my mum came to meet me after school, which was unusual. I generally walked home by myself or went to an after school club ran by a charity for kids whose single parents worked or went to university. In fact I even joined the chess club as it was the only non-sport related thing I could do that would mean I wouldn’t have to go to the after school club, which I hated with  the burning passion of a thousand hells. It was populated with the most fucked up and socially awkward kids I’d ever met, it didn’t really dawn on me that I was one of those kids too. So there she was in the playground and then she was taking me to the police station and I didn’t understand what was going on. When we got there she started asking the policeman about Nicola. The policeman asked me about Nicola and her father too but I still didn’t understand what was going on. She was my only friend but she wasn’t who she said she was. Nicola wasn’t a twelve year old girl. Her name was Irene and she was a Polish woman who was thirty-seven years old. She’d done this before. Irene had a growth deficiency caused by complications with her asthma as a child. She would run away from home and pose as a lost child. Her father wasn’t her father, he was a lonely old man and they’d lived a lie. Pretending to the outside world that they were father and daughter. They’d never been anything other than nice to me. Afterwards my mum saw the man who pretended to be Nicola’s father in the street and she screamed and yelled at him. He was upset and started to cry and whether what he said was true or not he seemed to really believe that Nicola had been a child, he said that she had gone to school every day and he’d found her as a runaway and taken her in and loved her as a daughter. I always wondered where she went during the days and why he thought she went to private school if he wasn’t paying. I guess people will let themselves believe anything if they want to badly enough, it’s perhaps why I never questioned her sometimes bizarre behaviour. I just wanted a friend. It was all over the papers too causing a bit of a local scandal.

Neighbour Nicola went back to the name-calling and Ajit wasn’t allowed to see me after that. We moved less than a year later and I never knew what became of Nicola or her father.

 
This is a true story. I’ve changed some names and of course I’m sure my 22 year old memories make me somewhat of an unreliable narrator but I’ve checked the major details with my mum which she confirms to be true. I’ve often thought of this incident over the years and have never known what to do with it. I’ve toyed with the idea of seeing if I can research the story enough to make a doc or even turn it into a screenplay or a novel but it almost seems too personal and odd. I guess part of the reason I’ve decided to write it down now is that bizarre things seems to happen to me with frightening regularity and I wanted to just do something to record my memory of these events, I’m thinking of making it part of a series maybe. I’d appreciate any thoughts or input from anyone who has actually made it to the end of this especially as it’s my first time writing something autobiographical in a stream of consciousness sort of style.