Dustbin Baby

by Jacqueline Wilson

  I glared at her.

  ‘Ooh, look at April!’ said Daddy. ‘Somebody’s gone green-eyed all of a sudden.’

  He tried to get me to dance with him but I sat in the corner of the hall and sucked my thumb. I wasn’t the least bit jealous. I didn’t want to dance with Daddy. I was furious that Mummy could be so easily won over.

  I suppose she adored him. That was why she put up with so much. She must have held her tongue when they were being grilled about adopting me. They had to present themselves as the perfect couple. Maybe Daddy was perfect in Mummy’s eyes. Though he couldn’t give her children. That was why she was so keen to adopt me. She felt it was her best chance of hanging on to him. Give him his own little girl. Little Danielle. Only I wouldn’t play the game properly so it didn’t work.

  Daddy stayed out again. And again and again. He came back with one more bunch of flowers. Then he came back drunk. Then he came back in a towering rage, shouting at Mummy, yelling at me, as if it was all our fault.

  Then he didn’t come back. Mummy waited all day. Another night. Then she rang the office. I don’t know what he said to her.

  I found her sitting on the carpet by the telephone table in the hall, her legs stuck out, as ungainly as my Barbie doll. Tears ran down her cheeks. She didn’t try to mop them. She didn’t even blow her nose though it was running right down to her lips. I hovered beside her, terrified.

  ‘Mummy?’ I leant against her, wanting her to put her arms round me. She didn’t move so eventually I wound my arms round her neck instead. She didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Mummy, please talk to me!’

  She didn’t respond, even when I shouted right in her ear. I wondered if she might be dead but she blinked every now and then, her lashes stuck together with tears.

  ‘It’s all right, Mummy, I’m here,’ I said, but of course it wasn’t all right.

  She didn’t care whether I was there or not. No, that’s not true. She did care. She tried to look after me over the next few weeks. She didn’t bother to wash herself and she pulled the same old jogging trousers and jerkin over her nightie when she trailed me to the Infants and back but she still supervised my bath every night and stuffed my arms down fresh blouse sleeves every day. She wasn’t totally systematic. She remembered my school uniform but forgot my growing pile of grubby socks and underwear so that one day I had to go to school in Mummy’s own large white nylon knickers, pulled up at the waist with a safety pin. It took me ages to get the pin undone in the dark lavatories and I wet myself a little but nobody found out. I tried washing the damp knickers at home with soap in the bathroom. This seemed to work so I washed all my own underwear and hung them all along the bath and over every tap. But I didn’t rinse them through properly so they were stiff and uncomfortable and made me itch.

  Mummy couldn’t manage meals now. She didn’t seem to eat at all, she just drank endless cups of tea, taking it black after we ran out of milk. I ate my breakfast cornflakes straight out of the packet. I ate a lot of school lunch because we were just using up all the tins of baked beans in the cupboard for tea. I had baked beans on toast, and then when we’d used all the bread in the freezer I simply had baked beans. When Mummy just sat and stared into space I ate the baked beans cold.

  One teatime I couldn’t get her to open the tin. I tried and tried with the tin opener but I couldn’t work out how to do it and ended up cutting myself. It was only a tiny cut at the end of my thumb but it frightened me and I howled. Mummy burst into tears too and sobbed that she was sorry. She said she was a useless mother and an awful wife and it was no wonder he’d walked out on us. He was much better off without her and I’d be much better off without her too.

  She said it over and over again, louder and louder, her pale face almost purple with emotion. I was so scared that I nodded, imagining she wanted me to agree with her.

  7

  I DON’T WANT to remember any more. I’ll only start crying. It won’t be April Showers, it will be April Downpour.

  What am I doing here, snivelling in a corner of this dusty old train? I’m meant to be having a special day. It’s my birthday. I don’t want to be thinking about deathdays. It’s weird – each year you pass the date of your own deathday and yet you obviously don’t know it. Unless you choose it for yourself.

  That’s what she did. Mummy. They think I can’t remember because I’ve never talked about it to anyone. Not the social workers. Not the child psychiatrist. Not even Marion. They think five is too young to remember which is mad because I know every detail of that day. I overheard one social worker say I must have blanked it out. I don’t know how they think I can do that. Take a blackboard eraser and go swish, swish, swish across my brain and there it is, sponged clean, good as new, no memory of any messy suicide.

  It must have been very messy. She cut her wrists in the bath. She didn’t want me to see. She locked herself in the bathroom on Sunday night, after she’d phoned a woman down the road and asked her to take me to school in the morning because she wasn’t feeling very well. It was a kind plan but I mucked it up.

  I woke up early and needed to go to the bathroom – only of course it was locked. I twisted and turned the door knob. I knocked. I called.

  ‘Mummy? Are you in there? Mummy!’

  She wasn’t in her bed. She wasn’t drinking tea in the kitchen. She had to be in the bathroom. I didn’t panic too much at first. I was used to Mummy not answering when she was in a mood. Maybe she’d gone to sleep in the bath? She never seemed to go to bed at nights now which made her doze a lot during the day. I knocked again and again. I was worried I might wet myself so I padded downstairs, knock-kneed, and struggled with the bolt on the back door until I was able to let myself out into the garden. There was a dark toilet in a wooden shed at the back. I hated using it because I was frightened of spiders. They scuttled over my bare feet and made me squeal but I managed not to leap up mid-wee. I trailed back into the garden, wondering what to do next. I looked up and saw the bathroom window was open at the top.

  ‘Mummy!’ I called up. ‘Mummy, please!’

  She didn’t call back. Mrs Stevenson next door peered out of her bedroom window. She and Mummy had once had words because of the Stevenson boy’s loud music so I scuttled away like the spiders, scared she was going to tell me off.

  ‘April! April, don’t run away! I’m talking to you!’

  I’d got to the back door but couldn’t quite get inside.

  ‘April!’

  I turned round very reluctantly. Mrs Stevenson was leaning right out of her bedroom window. She was in her nightie. I could see a lot of pink bosom from my underneath angle.

  ‘Why are you out in the garden at this time of the morning? Where’s your mum?’

  ‘In the bathroom,’ I said, and I burst into tears.

  I sobbed out a lot of stuff about locked doors. After a minute Mr Stevenson joined his wife at the window, his hair all sticking up sideways, wearing a vest instead of pyjamas. Mr Stevenson had a temper. I was scared he’d shout at me for waking him, but to my surprise they both came downstairs and out into their garden, and then Mr Stevenson fetched a ladder and tipped it over the fence and climbed over afterwards and propped it up against the back of the house, next to the bathroom window.

  I was getting very agitated because I knew Mummy would be appalled if she saw Mr Stevenson’s big red face suddenly looking at her. I begged Mr Stevenson not to, but he explained that Mummy might have fainted.

  Mr Stevenson was the one who nearly fainted when he got to the top of his ladder and peered in.

  He swayed for a moment and then climbed down again, his feet missing rungs so that he almost fell. When he got to the bottom he took several deep breaths, his hand clamped to his mouth. Little beads of sweat trickled down his forehead.

  ‘Joe? You all right?’ Mrs Stevenson called over the fence.

  ‘Is it Mummy? What’s the matter with Mummy?’ I whispered.

  He jumped, as if he’d forgotten all abo
ut me. He looked appalled.

  ‘Where’s your dad, April?’

  ‘I don’t know. I want Mummy!’

  ‘Well . . . she’s not very well,’ he said. ‘You’d better come into our house for a bit while I call some people to see to your mum.’

  He took hold of my hand. His was damp and I didn’t want to hold it. I didn’t want to go off with him. I knew Mummy wouldn’t like it. But I didn’t seem to have any option. I had to do as I was told.

  He passed me over the fence to Mrs Stevenson. I felt very undignified just in my nightie, worried that my bottom might show. She took me into her house. It had a funny smell of old cooking and it was very bright with orange walls and yellow kitchen units. I stood blinking at the oddness of being in a house exactly the same as mine but back to front and totally transformed. It was like being in a dream. I began to wonder if I could still be dreaming because everything was so bewilderingly strange. I wanted Mummy to come and wake me up.

  But she was the one who was sleeping. That’s what they said.

  I was kept indoors with Mrs Stevenson while an ambulance and police cars drew up outside. There was enough thumping and carrying on to wake the dead. Only it didn’t.

  Mrs Stevenson kept glancing anxiously at me. She wouldn’t tell me what was going on. She tried to divert me by pouring me a big glass of milk. I wasn’t very keen on milk now but didn’t like to tell her in case she thought me rude.

  ‘Drink it all up, dear,’ she said, and so I did my best, though the milk smell turned my stomach and it tasted sour when I swallowed. I sipped and sipped and sipped until I felt so full of milk I expected it to slop straight out of my mouth and spout from each ear.

  ‘That’s it, dear, have some more,’ she said, refilling my glass.

  I was still sipping when the policewoman came to see me. She knelt down beside me.

  ‘Hello, April,’ she said. Her voice was odd. She didn’t quite look me in the eye. My stomach clenched, the milk churning into rancid butter.

  ‘I want Mummy,’ I whispered.

  The policewoman was blinking a lot. She patted my hands.

  ‘I’m afraid Mummy’s gone to sleep,’ she said.

  I was used to Mummy sleeping. ‘You have to keep shaking her and then she wakes up.’

  ‘I’m afraid Mummy can’t wake up now,’ she said. ‘She’s going to stay asleep.’

  ‘But she’s in the bathroom! Has she gone to bed in the bath?’

  They’d lifted her out of the bath and wrapped her up and removed her. There was no trace of her when they eventually let me back into the house. The policewoman helped me pack a small suitcase, telling me she was going to take me to a kind lady’s house and she would look after me for a while. She probably had an Auntie Pat in mind.

  But someone tracked down Daddy at his office and he suddenly burst into the house.

  ‘Where’s my poor little April?’ he called, and he rushed into my room and swept me up into his arms, squeezing me tight. Too tight.

  I was horribly, milkily sick all down the back of his suit.

  8

  I’M SURPRISED DADDY didn’t back off there and then the minute he’d sluiced off his suit. But he took me to his new flat. Was it his place – or hers? She was called Sylvia. There’s some silly song that goes ‘Who is Sylvia, what is she?’ and Daddy kept singing it. I knew exactly who Sylvia was. She was Daddy’s new girlfriend. I knew what she was too. She was wicked because she had enticed Daddy away from Mummy.

  Maybe that’s not fair. I don’t know how they met or when they started their affair. I just knew that if Sylvia hadn’t come on the scene Daddy might have stayed with Mummy so she wouldn’t have slit her wrists.

  I didn’t see her, of course. Nobody told me what she’d done but I heard them whispering. I imagined Mummy and her lady’s razor and her pale body and the crimson bathwater. It seemed clear that it had to be their fault, Daddy and Sylvia.

  I had to stay with Sylvia while Daddy went to the funeral. I didn’t properly understand what a funeral was so I didn’t clamour to go. Daddy bought me a new Barbie doll and a big tub of wax crayons and coloured drawing paper and a pile of picture books but I didn’t touch any of them. I asked for scissors and cut pictures out of magazines. Sylvia was into fashion in a big way so I carefully cut out long lanky models with skinny arms and legs, my tongue sticking out as I rounded each spiky wrist and bony ankle, occasionally performing unwitting amputations as I went.

  Sylvia found me an old exercise book and a stick of Pritt but I didn’t want to make a scrapbook. I wanted to keep my paper girls free. They weren’t called Naomi and Kate and Elle and Natasha. They were my girls now so I called them Rose and Violet and Daffodil and Bluebell. I weakened over the wax crayons and gave my girls’ black-and-white high-fashion frocks bright red and purple and yellow and blue floral patterns to match their names.

  ‘That’s this month’s Vogue,’ Sylvia said irritably, but most of the time we didn’t speak. She fixed me lunch and then watched me warily. Perhaps she’d been the one who had to wash the sick out of the suit. My peanut-butter sandwich and Ribena stayed in my stomach so she relaxed and switched on the television. And then at long last Daddy came back.

  ‘What did Mummy look like?’ I asked.

  Daddy flinched, not knowing what to say. I wasn’t being deliberately awkward. I didn’t understand that Mummy was dead – and now indeed buried. I’d been told she was asleep and that she wasn’t coming back home but I’d be able to meet up with her again in Heaven. Mummy had read me fairy tales so I imagined her sleeping in a castle surrounded by briars in some distant holiday resort called Heaven.

  Daddy didn’t answer. He had a lot of whispered discussions with Sylvia. Sometimes they got angry and forgot to whisper. Then they made up passionately and I’d come across them in an unpleasant embrace. I tried hard not to take any notice. I clutched my crumpled paper friends in my hands and in my head I played Big Girls, going out dancing with Rose and Violet and Daffodil and Bluebell.

  I couldn’t dance for ever. I cried at night when I was supposed to be sleeping on Sylvia’s sofa. I cried during the day too, in the toilets at school, though I always blew my nose and scrubbed my face with crackly paper before I sidled out of the cubicle.

  People tiptoed round me at school. I think the other children had been warned not to mention my mother. They played safe and didn’t talk to me at all, not even my best friend Betsy. She acted as if maternal suicide was catching. We still had to sit next to each other but she edged as far away as possible and charged out every playtime so as not to get stuck with me. She started going round with another little girl called Charmaine. They circled the playground arm in arm whispering secrets. I tried bribing Betsy back by giving her my new Barbie doll but she said witheringly that dolls were for babies – though I knew she had a big girly gang of Barbies back at home because I’d played with them when I went to tea at her house.

  I couldn’t ask her back to our house any more because we didn’t live in it.

  But then we did. Daddy moved us back – and Sylvia came too.

  ‘But it’s Mummy’s house!’ I said. ‘She won’t let Sylvia in.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, April. You know Mummy’s passed away. It’s my house and so of course I’m going to live in it. With Sylvia. She’s your new mummy.’

  I wasn’t having it. Sylvia didn’t seem keen on the idea either.

  ‘I hate this house. I hate the way everyone round here looks at me,’ she shouted. ‘I don’t want to live here. I don’t want to look after your creepy little kid. I want to have fun! I’m out of here.’

  So she went. So then there was just Daddy and me. He didn’t know what to do with me. He asked Mrs Stevenson if she could fetch me from school and look after me till he got home from work. Mrs Stevenson made it plain that she didn’t want to, except in emergencies. I begged Daddy to ask Betsy’s mum, seeing it as a brilliant way of making Betsy be friends again, but she turned me down too, saying
she didn’t want the responsibility.

  ‘One well-behaved quiet little girl?’ said Daddy impatiently.

  I tried hard to be well-behaved around Daddy then because he was very bad-tempered, and I was very, very quiet in the real world. Inside my head I shouted all sorts of stuff with Rose and Violet and Daffodil and Bluebell. We played all day and danced all night. We could look after ourselves. We didn’t need mothers or fathers.

  Daddy employed an old lady to ferry me backwards and forwards. She came into our house and settled herself down in front of the television as if it was her place. I couldn’t bear her to sit in Mummy’s chair. I didn’t want her big bottom squashing Mummy’s pale lilac cushions. I raced to sit on Mummy’s chair myself and wouldn’t get up when she asked me. She smacked me hard on the back of my skinny legs. I kicked her. She walked out there and then.

  So Daddy employed a young woman student instead. Jennifer. She was pink and plump and gentle and showed me how to paste my frail paper girls onto cardboard cornflake packets so they became reassuringly sturdy. I liked Jennifer a lot. Unfortunately Daddy did too. She showed him a lot more than cardboard cut-outs. Jennifer moved in. She didn’t just commandeer Mummy’s chair. She moved in on Mummy’s bed.

  I wasn’t allowed into the bedroom now. I slumped outside in the hall, feeling lonely. For once Rose and Violet and Bluebell and Daffodil failed to keep me company.