by Gwyneth Rees
I shook my head to let her know that I didn’t have a light, but she stopped to talk to me anyway. ‘You on this ward?’
‘No.’
‘You ever killed a cat?’
‘No.’
‘They were living in my loft.’
I gulped. ‘Pardon?’
‘People. Killing cats in my loft. Had to wear earplugs at night so I couldn’t hear them.’
I felt a bit queasy as she sat down on the spare seat beside me. Surely Mum couldn’t ever have been like that. The woman leaned towards me and peered at my face. Her breath smelt of cigarettes. I stood up abruptly and headed speedily down the corridor away from her. I pushed through one set of swing doors, then another set, and found myself in a large room where a television was blaring away in the background. The room was full of cigarette smoke and everybody was slouched around the TV. A few of the people in the room turned to stare at me. One of the women had long dark hair and from the back she looked a bit like Mum.
I stumbled out into the corridor again, back in the direction I’d come from. The cat lady wasn’t anywhere in sight, thank goodness. Mum and Dr White came out of his office just as I was panicking about whether or not I was back in the right passageway. Dr White was a tall thin man with curly hair. He was younger than I’d expected him to be. Mum was clutching a piece of paper which, even though I was halfway along the corridor from her, I recognized as a prescription.
‘Daniel, what are you doing down there?’ Mum called out.
‘Nothing,’ I mumbled, hurrying to join them.
Dr White looked concerned. ‘Are you all right?’
I gulped. ‘Yeah.’
He put his hand on my shoulder. He reminded me a bit of Dad when he did that. ‘Some of the patients here are very poorly and they might behave a bit strangely. Did one of them give you a fright?’
‘No,’ I tried to look chilled, adding, ‘There was a lady going on about killing cats.’
‘Well, she’s poorly too. Don’t worry. She hasn’t really killed any cats.’
‘It wasn’t her she said was killing them. It was the people in her loft.’
Dr White nodded like he wasn’t hearing anything new or anything particularly concerning. Or maybe he just didn’t rate cats. ‘I’ve had a look at your mum, Daniel. That rash is nothing to worry about and I’ve given her something to stop the itch.’ He smiled at her. ‘OK, Isobel?’
Mum nodded. ‘Thanks again.’ She turned to me. ‘Come on, Daniel. We’ll go to the chemist and then we’d better both be getting to school.’
We said goodbye and left.
I should have asked what he’d told her to do about the lithium, but I forgot. I was too busy trying to make sense of what I’d just seen on the ward. Was that how Mum had been when I was little? Had she been like those people in there?
‘Mum, I don’t like this hospital much,’ I told her as we passed through the reception area where the receptionist was talking to a loud man who had his nose pressed right up against the glass partition. ‘Even if it does help people get better.’
‘I don’t like it either.’ Mum shuddered.
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t ever let anyone put you in here, no matter how sick you got.’
‘If I was very sick you might not have a choice,’ Mum said lightly.
‘Yes I would,’ I said, putting my arm round her protectively. ‘I wouldn’t let anyone, no matter what. Not even Dad.’ I don’t know why I added that.
‘Oh, Daniel!’ Mum smiled, shaking her head at me. She grabbed hold of my hand suddenly. ‘Come on. Let’s run.’
And the two of us ran back to the car together, laughing, because she was escaping with me and not staying behind inside that horrible, scary building.
6
The next two weeks were weird. I couldn’t get used to Dad not being there in the evenings and I knew Mum was really missing him too. I knew because she ran to the phone every time it rang in case it was him – even when the time difference meant it wasn’t likely to be since Dad would have to be phoning in the middle of the night at his end. New Zealand was twelve hours ahead of us. Before he left, Dad had said he’d ring us every two or three days to see how we were getting on, but in those first two weeks he was ringing us almost every day. He sounded really close on the phone, not like he was across the other side of the world at all. He told us a little bit about what was going on at his end – Grandma was very poorly now – but mostly he just wanted to hear about us.
Mum had started bringing lots of paperwork home with her and was doing it after Martha and I were in bed. That wasn’t new. Dad was always having to tell her off for working too hard. But now Mum seemed to be staying up half the night judging by the times I’d woken up and seen the downstairs light still on. Often it was three or four in the morning.
On the Sunday night, after I woke up to use the bathroom, I went downstairs to see what Mum was doing. I found her sitting at the dining table with a mug of coffee, surrounded by bits of paper. She was in her pyjamas and dressing gown, so she’d obviously intended to go to bed at some point. Her hair was all messy as if she’d been running her hands through it.
‘Are you OK, Mum?’ I asked her.
Mum looked up, starting slightly at the sight of me standing there. ‘God, Daniel, don’t creep up on me like that!’
‘I wasn’t creeping.’
‘Well, you gave me a fright!’ She sounded wide awake.
‘Sorry. Mum, why aren’t you in bed?’
‘I can’t sleep so I’m making a list of ideas to raise funds for the school. You know they’ve got this annual book sale that your Mrs Lyle keeps going on about . . . well, I think we should vamp it up a bit.’
I didn’t know what vamp meant.
‘Look it up in the dictionary, Daniel,’ Mum said when I asked her. She handed me the one that just happened to be sitting on the table. (Even at four in the morning she can’t stop being a teacher.)
‘Vamp . . . to improvise inartistically or crudely,’ I read out. I wasn’t sure what improvise meant either, but I couldn’t be bothered looking that up as well. Besides, inartistically and crudely pretty much gave me the picture. ‘Don’t you think Mrs Lyle might be a bit offended if you just take over like that?’ I asked her.
‘Mrs Lyle is a very competent teacher, but she’s very dull, Daniel. She has dull ideas. So do a lot of the other staff. They mean well enough, but they’re so boring. If you ask me, the whole school needs livening up a bit.’
I couldn’t believe she was criticizing my teachers. Normally she’s always saying that teachers do a really tough job and they don’t get the respect for it – or the salary – that they deserve.
‘Back to bed, Daniel,’ she said. ‘Go on. You’ve got school tomorrow. I don’t want you nodding off in class. I used to hate that when I taught English. I never knew if the kids who fell asleep were just sleep-deprived or if I was boring them unconscious.’ She started to laugh.
I could still hear her laughing as I climbed the stairs. It sounded a bit weird in the middle of the night.
I was seething as I walked home the following day. I had agreed to stay in the school library doing my homework until half-past five so that I wouldn’t get home before Mum did. But I hadn’t agreed that she could come and find me when she was ready to leave, and call out in this really mumsy voice, ‘Sweetheart, do you want a lift home?’
She said afterwards that she hadn’t realized anyone else was in the library at the time because the older boy who’d been studying there had just gone to put a book back. I felt really angry with her. What if that boy repeated what he’d heard? Everyone in my class might find out and start making fun of me. Calum might find out.
I had stubbornly refused a lift, so she had gone off to fetch Martha.
I was dawdling because I was in no hurry to get home, when I saw the two girls I’d seen yelling at Abby on my first day. They were sitting on the wall at the bus stop. Their school blazers were tossed on
the ground on top of their school bags and their ties were hanging loose around their necks. Abby was standing at the bus stop too. She had changed out of her uniform and she was obviously waiting for a bus. The girls were goading her about her mum again.
‘So how much does she drink then? Two bottles a night . . . ? Three . . . ? Does she know her liver’s gonna pack up if she doesn’t stop?’
I could have walked straight past. After all, Abby hadn’t been all that friendly to me so far. But something about the way she was standing there looking so humiliated stopped me.
‘Hi, Abby.’ It was all I could think of to say at such short notice.
She looked at me as if she didn’t know if I was her saviour or someone who was about to start having a go at her too. I pretended I couldn’t hear the comments the other girls were making. (‘Oh, look. She’s got a little boyfriend. Isn’t that sweet?’)
‘Where are you going?’ I asked Abby.
‘My friend’s,’ she grunted. ‘I have got some, you know.’
I ignored that. After all, I hadn’t said anything about her having no friends at school, had I? She ought to know that I’d be the last person to bring that up. ‘What time’s the bus?’ I glanced down at my watch. It was now nearly six.
‘Dunno. I think I must have just missed one.’
‘Right.’ We both stood looking in the direction the bus was meant to come from. ‘If you like you can come round to mine instead,’ I offered in a rush. ‘Mum won’t mind. She’s probably not even back yet.’
Abby bit her lip, glancing over at the girls, who weren’t showing any signs of leaving. She looked down the street again, but there was still no bus. ‘OK,’ she said quickly.
We walked side by side away from the bus stop, with the two girls shouting after us. ‘Who are they?’ I asked when we’d turned the corner.
‘We went to the same primary school. They know about my mum.’ She flushed.
Her embarrassment made me feel embarrassed too and, before I knew it, I had blurted out, ‘You mean about her drinking?’ I don’t know why I always have to come right out with things like that. ‘I won’t tell anyone else,’ I mumbled quickly.
‘Everyone else knows anyway,’ she said. ‘I wanted to start at a secondary school where the other kids didn’t know about Mum, so I asked to go to this one. It’s not the one the rest of my primary school were going to, but it’s where my big sister went. But it turns out that a girl who was in my class last year is Calum’s cousin, so he found out really quickly.’ She sighed. ‘So I may as well not have bothered switching schools. I may as well have just gone to the same one as everybody else. At least I had some friends who were going there as well as the people who picked on me.’
‘Sorry.’ I didn’t know what else to say. Now I understood why she didn’t seem to know any more people at school than I did. ‘You can still come back to my place,’ I said. ‘If you don’t want to go home right now, I mean.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘My sister should be back from work soon anyhow. I’ll ring my friend and tell her.’
‘OK.’ I hadn’t really expected her to come back with me, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed just the same. It would have been nice to start making a friend my own age here. A car horn tooted at me and I saw it was Mum driving past with Martha, who she must have just picked up from her after-school club. ‘Well, see you tomorrow then,’ I said, turning to Abby.
She was already walking away, but she lifted her hand to wave to me as she called back, ‘See ya!’ I stood watching her leave, thinking that from the back she reminded me a bit of my friend Kirsty from my old school. Kirsty had walked home with Mark and me sometimes. Abby paused to kick an empty can out of the gutter and started to dribble it along the pavement. That wasn’t like Kirsty. Kirsty used to hate it when Mark and I went on about football all the time.
When I got in, Mum was heading across the hall, her arms piled high with books and sheets of paper. ‘Those other teachers are getting to be a real pain,’ she grumbled as I followed her into the kitchen. ‘One useless opinion after another! I’m telling you, if I have to listen one more time to Margaret Lyle’s pathetic plan for her dreary book sale or the deputy head droning on about—’
‘Mum, maybe you shouldn’t be saying this to me?’ I interrupted her crossly. It made me feel uncomfortable. Besides, she seemed to have totally forgotten about what had happened before in the library. I had expected at least one more apology for that.
‘Who else am I going to say it to?’ Mum snapped, pushing her hair out of her face and plonking all her stuff down on the kitchen table without even checking to see if we’d wiped it clean from breakfast this morning. Mum was getting much snappier since Dad had left, I’d noticed. She had also started to talk quite a lot about the other teachers at home in a way she never did normally. Like about how the deputy head had bad breath when you got up close to him, and how the head of science, Mr Gregory, kept looking at her legs. I hated it when she said stuff like that about my teachers. I mean, they were my teachers, for goodness sake!
I decided to try a different tack. ‘If you’d let me go to a different school, you could’ve moaned about the other teachers as much as you liked. It wouldn’t have mattered then, because I wouldn’t know them. And what happened just now in the library wouldn’t have happened either.’ My campaign to get her to let me change schools wasn’t completely dead and buried. Last week I’d tried to recruit Martha on to my side by pointing out that in a few years’ time, she’d have to go to the same school as Mum as well, but she just got all excited and wanted to know if she’d be allowed to eat her school dinner with Mum.
Mum just grinned. ‘Still finding me an awful embarrassment, are you?’ She opened the door of the fridge and discovered that we had nothing left in it except cheese. She opened the freezer instead. ‘Chicken nuggets!’ she announced triumphantly. She bounded over to the vegetable rack and pulled out a bag of potatoes. ‘How about helping me peel these?’
‘Mum, are you stressed?’ I asked her. She seemed really tense and sort of hyper-alert or something.
‘Quite the opposite!’ Mum said. ‘I feel full of energy! Ever since I stopped those stupid tablets as a matter of fact. Now, don’t use that knife. Use the potato peeler. I’ve told you before, I don’t want chopped fingers in my dinner.’
I stared at her. ‘What? The lithium tablets?’
‘Of course! I wasn’t on any others last time I looked.’
‘But you’re not meant to stop them,’ I protested. ‘Dad said. He said you got really ill last time you stopped them.’ Really ill, really quickly, had been Dad’s exact words. That had been when Mum had come off the tablets during her pregnancy with Martha. Dad had explained that much to me when I’d asked why Mum had got sick then. He’d said that Mum had really wanted to have another baby, so she’d decided to stop taking the lithium, because it’s risky taking lithium when you’re pregnant. There’s a chance that it might harm the unborn child. Mum had stayed on the tablets ever since as far as I knew.
‘Your dad isn’t always right, Daniel. It’s time you learned that,’ Mum said briskly.
‘Well, what about Doctor White?’ I asked, starting to peel a potato. ‘What did he say? Did he say you should keep taking them?’
‘Of course he did! You’d think he had shares in the company that makes lithium, the way he was going on about it. Sometimes I think that’s how all these doctors earn their living – by being in a conspiracy with the drug companies. I’ve been telling your father for years that these lithium tablets do more than just make me put on weight, but he won’t listen! They slow my mind up too. I know they do. And they must have caused that rash, because as soon as I stopped taking them, it disappeared.’
‘But you put that cream on it too,’ I pointed out. ‘The stuff you got from the chemist.’
‘Well, I had to keep him happy, didn’t I?’ Mum said. ‘Doctor White, I mean.’
‘But, Mum—’
‘And I don’t want you telling tales to your father next time he phones. He’ll only freak out and insist on coming home and missing his mother on her deathbed and we don’t want that, do we?’
I swallowed, feeling even more confused. It was important that Dad got to spend this time with his mother. Dad had told me that himself. But if Mum had stopped her medication . . .
‘Daniel, did you know that your father’s mother – and the rest of his family – tried to get him to dump me when we were engaged?’ Mum suddenly said. ‘It was when they found out I’d been in a psychiatric hospital. Your grandmother nearly had a fit when she heard her precious son was going to marry a mental case. She called me that once, you know – said it to your dad when she thought I wasn’t listening. And when he did marry me, she had to get as far away from me as possible, so she emigrated to New Zealand. I mean, how pathetic is that?’
‘Mum . . .’ I suddenly felt I shouldn’t be listening to this. It just wasn’t like Mum to tell me all this. And anyway, I was almost sure that it wasn’t true. ‘I’ve still got homework to do, OK?’
I left off peeling the potatoes and went upstairs. Martha’s door was open and I could see her sitting on the floor in her bedroom, playing with her toy fire engine.
‘Look, Daniel!’ she shouted, pointing at her dolls’ house. ‘That house is on fire and there are ten children inside it. It’s a case for . . .’ She grinned at me, pointing up at the ceiling as if she could see him coming.
‘Superman!’ I finished, flinging out my arms and swooping wildly around her bedroom, because pretending to be Superman suddenly seemed a whole lot easier than just being me.
7
Mum was right. She didn’t get ill like Dad had said she would if she stopped her lithium tablets.
But certain things about her behaviour started to seem a bit odd. She often stayed up half the night now and yet she still seemed wide awake in the mornings. Over the next week she switched from hardly going to the supermarket at all, to going there almost every evening and stocking up on masses of things. She also started buying lots of really expensive chocolates from a delicatessen she had discovered near the school, and was eating her way through at least two boxes a day. When I asked her if she was worried that the chocolates would make her put on weight, she just laughed and said, ‘No! Isn’t it wonderful?’ She seemed very happy about it. She was buying in loads of other stuff which she normally avoided and there was plenty of great food in the house for Martha and me – cakes and biscuits and loads of crisps.
