No Nonsense Read online

  Peter Kay gave me the key to fast-forwarding my decisions. I never had the ability to say to myself, ‘If I do X and Y, the consequences are Z.’ I had no concept of consequence. Now I understand the outcome. It is a skill I have needed to practise, because, as Tagger says, I am emotionally driven, so that a relapse is always a possibility.

  I can still be the young boy who sees sweets and eats as many as possible, as quickly as possible, before he is violently sick. I am in a profession that infantilises young men, showers them with material rewards and gives them an excuse never to grow up. It tells them what to do, what to think, how to act, without rationalising the process.

  I make no excuses because I am still the child who gets so consumed by what he is doing that he has no concept of time and space. My timekeeping is erratic, to say the least. I get caught up in things because I am so passionate about what I am doing. That might be analysing a coaching video, or obsessing when I’m beaten at golf or snooker.

  Part of me, the more organised side, says, ‘For fuck’s sake, get that in order.’ But the other side of me won’t have it: ‘This is the most important thing in the world, Joseph, because it is in the here and now. Nothing else matters.’ At least, I suppose, I can now identify the difference.

  This book is important to me, not merely because I want to reach out to those who feel isolated or frustrated, but because it is time to bury the caricature. I promise full disclosure, because I have finally come to terms with instincts and experiences that brought out the nastier aspects of my character.

  I’ve learned that being so dogmatic, seeing everything in black-and-white terms, slows me down. I’ve tried to replace aggression with inquisitiveness. I won’t waste my natural energy on anger and recrimination. I’ll merely channel it in different ways.

  The one thing I didn’t understand when I was dealing, badly, with a whole range of issues was my place in the world. Peter Kay encouraged me to seek out the past. I would speak to my nan about my grandad, about their parents. A light went on inside my head. Instead of blaming Dad for not forewarning me about life’s difficulties, I began to realise he was doing the best he possibly could.

  One by one, the dominoes fell. Change was possible, because I represented a new generation, with an opportunity to write its own history. At precisely 4am on 28 December 2011, I discovered the power of unconditional love . . .

  CHAPTER TWO

  FAMILY

  For once in my life I was lost for words. My mouth moved, but nothing intelligible emerged. I was awestruck, dumbstruck. I had no real idea of how I reached the corridor outside the birthing suite at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and I made no sense when I got there. My dad, who was sitting with Tony, Georgia’s father, simply burst out laughing.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘What is it?’ I paused, for what seemed like an age: ‘Er, um, it’s a boy.’ Cassius Joseph Barton, my first child, weighed 7lb 3oz, but he tilted the world off its axis. His first breath gave me perspective. His first cry gave me clarity. The everyday miracle of his birth brought my planets into alignment, and my family into focus.

  I’m told I cut the cord, but I was in a daze. I need only close my eyes to recall the most powerful moment, when the midwife cleaned him up and gave him to Georgia to hold close to her chest. It is an eternal freeze-frame image, lodged in my brain. I had done nothing, but the love I felt for both was overpowering, humbling. I revelled in my insignificance, and marvelled at her strength.

  I was not the first father to find it a surreal experience, and I am sure I will not be the last. I had been fascinated by the progression of pregnancy, from the gently swelling stomach to the other-worldly experience of watching a baby wriggle in the womb, but nothing prepared me for this. Robbie Fowler told me he was at the business end for the birth of his four kids, but I took my orders from my nan: ‘Stand up this end of the bed. Hold Georgia’s hand. And don’t get in the way.’

  I had played the previous evening in a 1-1 draw for Queens Park Rangers at Swansea. The club were brilliant: one of the staff on the bench had my mobile, with orders to haul me off the pitch and place a private jet at my disposal should the message get through from London that Georgia’s labour pains had intensified. I did not need to take advantage of the gesture, but I have never forgotten it.

  Bradley Orr, my team-mate and childhood friend, who has subsequently become my agent, drove me to the hospital at around midnight. He had two children, and a telltale smirk. ‘Oh, this is going to change you,’ he said. How could I be expected to understand such a simple truth? I was still the lone wolf. My ego was not only intact, but seemingly bombproof.

  Brad knew . . .

  Love is such a powerful emotion, subtly different for each of us but a uniquely unifying force. The energy shift, when the bond between parent and child is formed, takes the breath away. Everything changed that morning. That was the point when I said to myself, ‘Get out of the way. You are no longer at the centre of the universe. You are not important.’

  In a sense, it signalled my rebirth. Cogs were whirring in my head. The momentum of my life had shifted. I was still several months away from Manchester City, and the Carlos Tevez clusterfuck, but things felt different. I understood, instinctively and instantly, why Dad swallowed me in a bear hug. Until then, again to quote my nan, I was one of those ‘kids who don’t realise what a parent is’.

  I suddenly felt closer to him than it seemed possible. I understood how much I had hurt him when I shunned him because of the way I felt he lived his life. It took Cassius, innocent and unknowing, to superglue us back together. I realised he loved my very bones. After all, I was his first born, too.

  At that moment, in that corridor, the years fell away. I was little Joe again, the baby who had a shock of blond hair when he arrived on the planet at Whiston Hospital, weighing 8lb 2oz, on 2 September 1982. My dad reminded me he had celebrated my birth by getting pissed with my grandad, and was evidently up for a nostalgic pre-breakfast livener.

  I had to make my excuses, as I had a game three days later (we lost to a Robin van Persie goal at Arsenal), but I reconnected with my childhood. Dad wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t batter us, he didn’t lock us in cupboards, as some did on the estate. He did what he could. He tried to give me what he thought I needed to survive, and thrive, in any environment.

  He was a grafter and left home for work before 6am in all weathers. A roofer from the age of 15, his hands had the consistency of sandpaper. His face was wind-blasted, reddened and rough. He was an active man, who played sport four nights a week and drank the other three. Occasionally, he would come home exhausted, sit on the couch in his torn long johns, open a can of lager and simmer gently in front of the fire.

  Cassius unknowingly created an extended family. Georgia’s parents admitted they had thought me quite cold, clinical. I probably was, to be honest. Maybe not with my own flesh and blood, but I had a capacity to cut people dead, to isolate them in a heartbeat. I had a complicated relationship with my mum, but I wanted her to be part of her grandchildren’s lives. I think that meant a lot to her.

  The media mistakenly ran away with the idea that Cassius was named after Muhammad Ali, a lovely conceit since I admired him greatly, not only as a phenomenal athlete but as a principled man for his stance against the Vietnam War. His death on 3 June 2016, at the age of 74, triggered a global outpouring of grief and reflection that confirmed his status as The Greatest. He also featured, unwittingly, in one of the strangest experiences I have ever had at a sporting event. The jockey Martin Dwyer, a friend and fellow Evertonian, invited me to watch him ride in the French Derby at Chantilly one Sunday. It involved the works: private jet, paddock access and dinner with the owners of his horse. There were about 20 of them, from a quirky, indiscreet and deliciously mischievous family from Lexington, Kentucky.

  The owner’s son, Joseph Clay, took a shine to me. We got to talking about our children; it emerged we both had sons named Cassius. I made the inevitable reference to C
assius Marcellus Clay, and he replied, casually, that Ali’s paternal great-grandfather John had been a pre-Civil War slave on one of his forebears’ many plantations. John and his wife Sallie adopted the surname of their owner.

  The original Cassius Marcellus Clay was an imposing figure, six feet six inches tall. He returned to Kentucky from war in Mexico to free the 40 slaves he had inherited, including John and Sallie, and became a prominent abolitionist. Stabbed during a debate with a pro-slavery campaigner for public office, he fought back with a bowie knife of his own. Abraham Lincoln sent him to St Petersburg in Russia for a year on government business, and he was married, at the age of 84, to a 15-year-old girl.

  On reflection, that is some act to follow.

  I was named after my dad, who was named after his grandad’s brother. Cassius just felt right for my son. Georgia liked it, and I didn’t want to burden him with the emotional baggage of naming him after me. Those closest to me have always called me Joe or Joseph, incidentally. Derek Fazackerley let the monster loose by referring to me as Joey on the Manchester City teamsheet before my Premier League debut, a 2-0 defeat at Bolton on 5 April 2003.

  We are branded as Bartons, and I resolved immediately that I was going to change what the family name meant to other people. There must be another way, because every mistake, each indiscretion, all the aggravation, builds a reputation that impacts on your kids. Peter Kay visited us after the birth and was so happy, because he saw in me the man he knew existed, despite my doubts.

  I was convinced I was too selfish to have children. I wasn’t ready for them and honestly didn’t know whether I’d have enough love to go around. I was adamant it wasn’t fair to bring them into a world I didn’t truly understand. I was the product of a broken home, and didn’t want to put my kids through that pain.

  When Georgia became pregnant, Pete called it as it is: ‘Look. You’ve just got to throw yourself into this. Nobody’s got every box covered. You’ll learn on the job, basically.’ He believed in me, long before I did. I often think of his advice during my favourite part of the day, the 10 minutes I have with Cassius before his bedtime, reading him a story or watching a Donald Duck cartoon.

  I tell him I love him all the time. I never had that closeness with my dad because of the macho mindset of his generation. I knew he loved me, that he would do anything for me. I even saw him fight on my behalf. But as for intimacy, well, men didn’t do that sort of thing. They demanded their dinner on time, made sure they had the biggest helpings, but quietly deferred to the strength of their women when they thought no one was looking.

  My nan, dad’s mum, is a traditional matriarch. Her warmth is wonderful and her wrath is best avoided. Peter, my grandad, converted to Roman Catholicism to marry her. Faith got her through pancreatic cancer; she could see the lights of Liverpool’s two cathedrals from her hospital bed as she prayed before her operation. She told anyone on the ward who would listen that, ‘I can’t die because my family need me.’

  She was right, you know. We named our daughter Pieta Giulia after my paternal grandparents, who acted as surrogate parents at a key stage in my life. Grandad, who started out as a slaughterman in the local abattoir and ended alongside his son on the roofs, didn’t live to see her born. He didn’t trust hospitals and died quickly when his cancer was diagnosed. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but he was a disciplinarian, who balanced Nan’s instinct to see the good in me.

  He was a clever man, the first from the family to win a grammar school scholarship, but had to take his turn in a queue of eight children. The ridicule, when he was forced to tell the PE teacher he couldn’t afford a pair of cricket whites, left an indelible scar. He wasn’t hung up on his humble background but he never forgot the embarrassment. Both he, and Nan, told us never to accept inferiority, real or assumed.

  They were products of the terraced streets and tenements off Scotland Road in Liverpool, where pride was taken in scrubbing the solid stone steps until they gleamed. Wage packets were left, unopened, on the kitchen table on Friday night. The front room, dominated by a statue of the Virgin Mary inside a glass dome, was used on Sundays only.

  Grandad was brought up to play his cards close to his chest, but prided himself on being the provider. He hated it when Nan bought a colour TV out of her part-time earnings, managing the payroll at a local factory. No one else in the close had one, and he knew that more than a few net curtains were rustling when the delivery men turned up: ‘People will think I’m selling drugs if we’re buying stuff like that,’ he said, before demanding, in vain, that she send it back.

  The ritual was repeated when she learned to drive without telling him, and bought a fifth-hand runaround after passing her test, first time. She pre-empted his complaints with a simple statement of fact: ‘Trust me, Peter, if you were up to no good I’d have bought a better car than this.’ Resistance was futile.

  Pieta is a play on Grandad’s name, and also refers to Michelangelo’s statue, which depicts the body of Jesus on his mother’s lap following the Crucifixion. I realise this is contradictory, since I don’t believe in God and consider organised religion repressive and exploitative, but Nan loved it when she saw it in St Peter’s Basilica. I’ve never been to Rome, but was struck by its softness and scale when I saw it in a book I was reading about artists from that period.

  Nan cried when we told her Giulia was the Italian version of her name, Julia. She is a lot like me, stubborn to a fault and fiercely loyal to those who offer loyalty in return. I’ve got a long way to go before I can hope to match her compassion and common sense. She has lived in Molyneux Close, just off St John’s estate, for 50 years. Grandad is still with her; his ashes, in a blue porcelain urn, are beside her favourite chair in the bay window.

  Nothing much got past my nan, but she didn’t notice my dad sneaking out along the back alley to visit a neighbour, Rita Rogers. She was in her late twenties when her husband left her with two daughters, my half-sisters Sharon and Joanne. Dad was 19, didn’t drink and apparently loved nothing more than to sit in front of the telly with a tub of ice cream. Appearances were deceptive, and helped by the alibi provided by his debut for the pub football team.

  Truth be told, it wasn’t exactly a case for Poirot. It didn’t take long to twig his bed hadn’t been slept in, though the covers were disturbed. His van remained parked outside. Nan told a white lie at work that she had an early dentist’s appointment, and lay in wait. When she discovered the deception, all hell broke loose. Dad was told he was stupid, an easy mark for a gold-digger. Nan, who had given birth to him when she was 17, wanted him to live a little, on her terms, before he settled down.

  Nan’s misgivings about Rita’s family were well founded. Her four brothers, Eddie, Stephen, Paul and Tony, have all had drug-related issues and been in and out of prison. Her dad, Ned, was by all accounts an utter bastard. My dad came to loathe them, but not before he’d defied his family and walked out to set up home with Rita in Wingate Towers, a high-rise block of flats on the nearby Bluebell estate.

  My nan refused to speak to him for two years, until she was accosted while out shopping one morning and congratulated on her new grandchild. She knew nothing about my birth, but managed to bluff her way through the small talk by insisting, ‘The baby’s lovely, a chubby little thing like our Joe.’ Her sister advised her to be a good Christian, buy a pot plant as a present to mark my arrival, and pay her respects. She saw me, announced that I was ‘gorgeous’ and gave Rita, my mum, the benefit of the doubt.

  A truce of sorts was established, but any resemblance to the Little House on the Prairie was entirely coincidental. Dad disliked Mum’s brothers so intensely he refused to allow them over the threshold. They used to wait until he was out, playing football, before visiting. No wonder, really. They tended to bring their dubious business home with them.

  I was alone, following football stories on Teletext in my parents’ bedroom one afternoon, when I was startled by someone hammering on the front door. It was my one o
f my uncles, sweating and short of breath. When he knew the coast was clear, he barged past me and bounded up the stairs into my bedroom. I just managed to make it in behind him, before he locked the door.

  He went to speak, but evidently decided actions were better than words. He tipped his bag upside down, so that the contents cascaded on to my Everton duvet. There were more £5, £10 and £20 notes than I could count, screwed up in dishevelled bundles. ‘I’ve borrowed this from the post office,’ he said, as I wondered briefly whether my eyeballs would ever return to their sockets.

  ‘Hide this for me for a couple of days and you can keep the coins.’

  Now he had my attention. It was worth risking Dad’s backhander, which carried an infinitely greater threat than the long arm of the law. There was about £16 in loose change on the bed, enough for half a dozen Subbuteo teams. It was hardly the Great Train Robbery, so what passed as my conscience was clear. I didn’t give the morality of the situation a second thought. I was well on the way to being a St John’s boy.

  I grew up on Boundary Road, literally the wrong side of the tracks. It was another world on the other side of the railway, where Nan ruled the roost, but even she could not be protected from tragic, terrifying reality. Her daughter Julie was six months pregnant with my cousin Josh when his father Joe was killed in the Bluebell pub, which used to dominate the estate in Huyton on which Steven Gerrard grew up.

  Joe worked in London during the week and played local park football, but was originally from Manchester, never something to advertise when the beers are being thrown down in a Scouse pub on a Sunday afternoon. He got into a loud argument over a game of pool, stupidly started by a smartass comment about a sponsored head-shaving event involving the regulars. Two lads followed him into the toilet; one hit him on the back of the head with a pool cue. He died instantly.