Story for performance #813
webcast from London at 07:25PM, 11 Sep 07

Ron’s parents called him, Ronald. It was one of those things that, though obvious, seemed hilariously funny. The way they rolled the ‘r’ around their throats turned him into quite a different man.

As my parents were living abroad, I was visiting the Brennans as the family representative. Ron and my sister had been engaged for over six months but it was the first time any of us had met his family. It was also my first visit to Glasgow.

Ron and my sister had picked me up at the station and driven through the city. I was surprised by its Georgian charm. Alongside the usual shopping centre and the long drag out to the suburbs, there were pretty crescents, islands of green and elegant architecture.

Ron’s parents’ house was red brick, probably Victorian, with a large bay window overlooking the front garden. The whole street was set at a slight angle, sloping down to the left, away from the town.

‘First visit to Glasgow?’ Ron’s father, Alan, said. ‘You’re in for a treat.’

Alan was neat with a short frame, a careful comb-over and a fierce, immutable energy. He was a school inspector, once teacher, and showered me with opinions about the education system, bemoaning paperwork and the loss of corporal punishment. The last did not surprise me. Ron had told me about his father’s liking for the belt and I had turned this predilection into the basis of my theory on Ron’s misspent youth.

On arrival I was ushered into the front room. Rather unnervingly, nearly every one of Ron’s family was there to greet me: his grandmother, his sister, her husband, Andrew, and his cousins, Warren and Craig. Ron’s mother, Dominique, bustled in the background, brewing tea for everyone.

It was soon clear that I wasn’t the only attraction that afternoon: there was a football match on. All of Ron’s family, apart from Andrew, were Celtic supporters. Poor Andrew, whose face quickly turned the bright orange colour of his hair, had to suffer constant jibes because he supported Rangers. Not really understanding the whole Celtic, Rangers rivalry, Warren, whose hair was also red, but of a more murky, biscuit colour, explained that the football teams’ supporters were divided along sectarian lines: Celtic for Catholics, Rangers for Protestants. They were a tolerant family—he raised a mocking fist in Andrew’s direction—but football was serious business in Glasgow. The son of a cousin of theirs, only eleven, had been knifed to death when he got off at the wrong bus stop wearing a Celtic cap.

His words conjured an image of one of the long, grey roads we had driven down to reach Ron’s parents’ street. I could see a small boy lying slumped beneath the bus shelter, his body curled protectively around the knife-wound, left to die alone after enduring sharp kicks to his head and kidneys.

Alan, sensing my unease, changed the subject.

‘Ron tells us you went to Oxford. What did you read?’

He proceeded to flatter my ego, asking my opinion on the changing nature of academic standards, until the pre-match discussion was over and the game was about to start. I thought Alan really didn’t seem that bad.

I sat back in my armchair and pretended to watch the game. But football has never interested me. Even though the atmosphere in the Brennan’s front room was electric, I couldn’t get involved, not even when Craig yelled at the referee, calling him a cunt. I couldn’t stop thinking about the little boy and somehow it affected my feelings for Ron.

When he got engaged to my sister, he arranged a business trip to my local town. He wanted to talk to me alone, he said, explain a few things. We met in a bar and had a few drinks.

He told me that for four long years he’d been chasing the dragon but now he was clean and wanted to live a new life, have a family, with my sister. She was the pinnacle of all his dreams. He wanted to tell me about his drug-taking past because he wanted me to understand what she meant to him. He wanted me to know all about him, but, he had added, he thought it best not to mention it to my parents. Why cloud their feelings about the marriage unnecessarily?

Part of the way through our conversation, he got up to go to the gents. As he crawled out over the bench, I noticed the last button of his shirt was undone. Something about the glimpse of cool, white flesh beneath, something about the vulnerability of this lapse in etiquette, alongside his unceasing praise of my sister, gave him my sympathies.

Thinking this through took me to half time when a sudden flash of the news caught my eye. Further unrest in Iraq; an all too familiar headline. I swirled my cold tea in the mug, wondering if my sister could be happy with Ron. When I looked back at the television, they were showing the aftermath of another bomb that had caused civilian casualties. It was situated around a checkpoint, still guarded by a policeman in a blue-checked uniform.

‘These checkpoints are useless,’ one Iraqi man was saying. ‘The city has become a maze of concrete walls and isolated neighbourhoods, dividing Shia and Sunni. You risk death to pass between. Even policemen. Look at them. They are militiamen.’

The camera followed the man’s out-stretched hand to the policeman, focussing in on his Kalashnikov. Near the handle of the gun that hung close by his waist, I noticed the last button of his uniform was undone. I could see the folds of his loose heavy flesh falling over the buckle of his belt.

As the image on the screen flicked back to the studio, a wave of utter defeat pinned me to my chair. I closed my eyes. I wished someone else could have been sitting there. I didn’t even know the rules of the game.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone.