Caz's Story

Mally wasn’t like that, to begin with. We met in 2004. We were working for Littlewoods then, selling credit cards to people already buying on tick. Paying our own debts off by getting other people further into debt. Is it worth it, a bicycle on the boy’s birthday? It wasn’t something that we questioned. It was money.

Mally had ideas then, better ones, ones that weren’t just about who got everything while people like us got the shaft. He wanted to study psychology, took a course at the college, got into university, he was so proud. I was too. He loved the buildings, by the river. Said it was beautiful. Took me there once. The canteen smelled funny and I wasn’t impressed with the food. The bogs were a sauna. He took me to the library. The reading room. Just us.

‘It’s so quiet,’ I remember telling him. Whispering.

He nodded. ‘This is what they’ve had all their lives,’ he said. ‘Toffs. Oxford. Eton. To us, this is amazing. They think it’s normal. Think about that.’

He was always thinking, Mally. That was the problem.

He got on with the Africans, at first. I remember him sitting in the Littlewood’s canteen, laughing with Raymond from Ghana about King of Queens. I said I liked the woman in that show and it was true, I did. She had the cutest face but she was spikey and aggressive.

‘Ah aye?’ He smiled. ‘Bit of a Carrie, are ya?’ Then him and Raymond laughed.

We got talking after that, coffees at break, found out what he was doing with himself.

It was only when I got to know him better that I realised that he wasn’t doing well.

He’d come back home on Monday complaining that it was all numbers.

‘It’s all fucking maths,’ he’d spit. ‘Graphs an’ statistics an’ shite. I wanna know how people think, not how to put dots on a fucking graph!’

Mally struggled with the statistics part of the course. Even the computer program they used to make it easier was hard for him. So he got me to help. I’ve always liked numbers, maths, equations. They’re clean, they’re balanced, they’re evenly matched. They prove things. I would take him through the equations used for the test, explaining how they worked, as much as I could, as much as I could make him see. I would explain how the program allowed him to shortcut, to save on his labour. I got him through and he just scraped a pass in that module.

Looking back, this was maybe the first sign of what he’d become. He would say little things, snap. I could tell that he found it humiliating, him at uni and me with a handful of GCSEs having to help him. Being better at running the numbers than he was. When he got his mark back for the module he looked at it and said Thank fuck that’s over. That isn’t fuckin’ psychology.

There were other signs too. He began to feel the lecturers didn’t like him. The statistics lecturer predictably came in for stick. Patronising yank dyke bitch, he’d call her, coming back from lectures, telling stories of classroom humiliation. It didn’t seem fair to me. I met her, when he took me to the canteen. She seemed alright. I don’t know if she was a dyke. She was warmer to me than to him but she would be, I think. We were both numbers people. Mal wasn’t. And I liked that she came from Charlotte, North Carolina, because that made me think of Ric Flair.

Once, one afternoon, I was alone in the house and he was off in the library, the reading room, I looked at his statistics book and worked out one of the tests by hand, on paper, doing the sums in my head. It took me three hours and four cups of coffee but I did it. It made me feel clean. Clean and safe. Numbers, balanced and matched. Like a spell, like a Tarot card spread.

He came back with another complaint about class. Not the fucking dyke bitch this time but the bearded lefty wanker, the older lecturer who dressed like a geography teacher and quoted people called Popper and Hegel. He’d been talking about patterns in science or some shite like that, and Mal mentioned something he’d read in a business book he’d bought a year ago, NLP bollocks.

‘The guy fucking laughs at us,’ Mally said. ‘Smiles and says while I understand the popularity of that idea I’m afraid I have to say it’s just not even wrong. But that shows that you’re reading around this! That’s great! Just think a little bit more critically and then moves on. Practically patted my head. Fucking cunt.’

Needless to say the dyke and the bearded wanker were now both recruits in the conspiracy against him.

After 7/7 he really began going wrong. He came home from work that day crying. ‘You see what they’ve done?’ he said, nodding his head at the news. He’d began reading stuff about atheism, watching videos online. It didn’t help that there were Asian students on his course, doing better than he was.

‘You know how much they get?’ He’d say. ‘The University? For taking foreign students? More than they get paid for taking me. Now what do you think that means, huh? It means we’re educating foreigners instead of British students. Diabolical.’

I wanted to point out those students were probably paying for him, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. He’d started snapping more now, coming home drunk, bitching about other students. He hadn’t hit me yet, but I was starting to think that he might. I got myself a separate bank account, a new one, unknown to him. I applied for one of our credit cards at staff rates, never used it, kept it hidden. I thought about mum, and dad, and how she’d got away. You need fuck-off money, she’d tell me. In case you have to get away. I dismissed them at first, all her warnings. They start out nice, they start out smiles and love, she said, but you see how they are in the end. Fucking men.

Kizz and my mum would get on, I think. She began to bring home women about a year after dad left. She said they wouldn’t hurt her.

She was wrong about that.

Mally knew about my mum. That put an extra little sting in it, every time he mentioned his dyke lecturer. Even before he’d been funny about it. They say it runs in families, jokes about threesomes. It annoyed me but I used to let it by.

He began saying he was an infidel. He stopped talking to Raymond from Ghana.

‘It’s not a race, it’s a religion,’ he would say, ‘but you have to know who you can trust.’ That meant people like him. White British. The box on the form nobody even wants to tick they’re so ashamed, he’d say.  Bought a badge with a flag on it.

‘You ought to get involved too,’ he told me. ‘You’ve seen what they do to people like your mum. And you.’

He got himself thrown off the course, for swearing at a lecturer, but that wasn’t really what it was about, in his head. ‘When they can’t disprove you then they look for an excuse,’ he spat. ‘I wouldn’t toe the line. I wouldn’t jump through hoops.’

When I asked him what line he was toeing, what hoops he wouldn’t jump through, he explained. ‘Black blokes. They have more mental health problems. You’re supposed to say it’s society’s fault, but what if it’s genetic? I was only asking. But that’s what you get.

’

Only asking. By this point I knew how he’d have been only asking. Only asking again and again, in a different way each time, probing, provoking. Only asking about women I was friends with, about mum. Only asking why I wouldn’t go to protests with him, against mosques. Only asking where Obama had been born.

Why did I stay with him? We didn’t have kids. Partly it was to spite mum. Partly because I thought he’d see the light eventually. He didn’t. Instead, I slowly joined him in the darkness.

‘We need women,’ he’d say. This was after he’d fully signed up to it, got the tattoos, put a flag in his window. ‘People just dismiss this if it comes out of male mouths. And women get less aggro. And the camera loves them, Cazzy, even you! You should do more.’ At first I humoured him, went to the protests but kept a low profile. Then he began getting fired, getting his picture on blogs. He would laugh and call the antifa his fan club, but it meant we were drifting away, into a self-contained world. He got work through some self-employed mates, cash in hand, company names changed so often, personal accounts used to bank the coin and skip the charges, wages in an envelope on Friday. Hi-viz jackets. Working with my hands, he’d tell me, man’s work, not selling some bitch tracksuit bottoms. Got away with this for years, until the crash, until the firms began to fold, until the owners went to prison. He tried going it alone but he just couldn’t deal with the figures. He would shout at me to help, then grumble all the time while I worked it all out, twice, to show I wasn’t wrong. He started going to the pub after our money talks. And hitting me when he got back.

You can only fight so long before you go under. I began to give in, to really hate the people that he hated, to accept his explanations for the way things were fucked up. To laugh with him when he came back from the callcentre, where he got a job after his tree surgery folded, joking about their diversity training. ‘The pink fucking pound!’ He’d sneer. ‘Be nice if we had some of that, huh? Where are you hiding all that pink money from your mum, eh? Or is that just for faggots, not for dykes?’

I started to go on the demos and heckle the antifa, got off on the cheers from our lines, the cries of ‘stick it to ‘em, Caz!’ when I would try to break the standoff, get bundled away by the bizzies. Got tattooed. Became an Angel, at least to the boys in the pubs which had flags in their windows. It wasn’t so much that I believed as that it meant I fit in somewhere. And when Mally and I were on demos he wasn’t hitting me. And I could put my anger somewhere else, at least a little.

Eventually one of the guys at the pub asked about that. Said it wasn’t right, he shouldn’t do it. Said the lads had had a word with Mally and advised him to lay off. He came home that night and apologised, said he hadn’t treated me the way he should. Said he would be better and he was, at least for a while. And for a while I felt closer to those radgies than I ever had, I started siding with them in my heart. Believing? Doesn’t matter. It was us v them now. The people who’d stopped Mally beating me versus smug lefty bitches calling me worse than shite? I’d picked my side.

It didn’t last, of course. The bank began having recorded meetings with him. Points were raised. Some customers complained. He was careful at work, never used the words, told them that, but they said it was more than just words it was values, and Mally was stressed.

He started hitting me again.

This time I didn’t take it. I withdrew the money from the fuck off bank account, saved over twelve years, still less than I liked, but what I would need. After a demo I excused myself from Mally, said I needed to get tampons, bought those and a pay-as-you-go. Threw the box for the phone in the toilet, kept it switched off in my pocket ‘til I needed it.

And then I emailed Mally’s work.