My Mum's from Planet Pluto

by Gwyneth Rees

  8

  Mum didn’t say anything else about the woman called Kate – or her daughter – for the rest of the week, and I thought it was best not to ask. She had organized for a local removal firm to take our two sofas up to the school in time for the book sale on Saturday morning. That was enough to worry about for one week, I reckoned. I’d tried to talk her out of it but she wouldn’t listen. She said that as Head Teacher she had a duty to set an example to the rest of the school by donating our furniture.

  When we got to the school ourselves on Saturday, our sofas were the only ones there. They looked really silly sitting on their own in the middle of the assembly hall. Martha immediately ran over and curled up on one of them and a parent who was helping out gushed, ‘Oh, isn’t she a cutie? You’d better watch someone doesn’t try and buy her today! Look at that lovely blonde hair! Where does she get that from?’

  Mum looked at Martha. ‘Not from anybody in our family,’ she said, and walked away abruptly. I thought that was a really weird thing to say.

  Mrs Lyle was busy setting up the book stalls when we arrived. As soon as she saw Mum she came over and explained that since we only had the two sofas she’d thought we should have stalls after all. But she was also going to set up a sort of cosy corner with our sofas, so that people could relax there when they wanted to have a break from book-hunting. There was a plant stall, I noticed, although there weren’t very many plants on it. Mum spotted that too. ‘I’m going home to fetch some more things,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘What things?’ I asked, but she didn’t reply.

  She came back half an hour later carrying Dad’s massive cheese plant.

  ‘But, Mum, Dad likes that plant!’ I gasped. ‘He’s had it since he was a medical student!’

  ‘Yes, and if I don’t get rid of it, he’ll have it until he’s an old-age pensioner,’ Mum replied.

  ‘But, Mum, he won’t want you to get rid of it.’

  Mum just ignored me. She’s not very good with plants. She says the big ones take up too much room and block out the light and the little ones make her feel like a failure because they’re always going brown and dying on her. She’d already thrown one in the bin the day after Dad left. (It still had one green leaf, which Dad had insisted was a good enough reason to keep it.) I could understand Mum wanting to throw out that one, but I still couldn’t believe she was going to sell his precious cheese plant without telling him.

  It turned out Mum wasn’t just selling the cheese plant. She had loaded all our house plants into the car and now she was bringing them into the hall one by one. ‘Mum, you can’t do this!’ I gasped as I watched her place Dad’s favourite cactus plant – which sprouted pink flowers in the winter – on the table.

  ‘I can do anything!’ she grinned. ‘I’m the head, aren’t I?’

  She went over to the home-made-cake stall next. That looked like the part of Mum’s idea that had really caught on. Lots of people had brought stuff for it. Mum had bought six jam-and-cream sponges from Tesco and got me and Martha to ice them last night and now she was telling everyone that my sister and I had been up all night baking them. It was going to be really embarrassing if we got found out, and I just hoped Martha wasn’t going to open her mouth and give the game away.

  Mum had this other idea for the cake stall too, which wasn’t anything to do with cakes. She’d bought a whole load of eggs and left some of them whole and broken the others and emptied out the insides. She’d put the upturned empty eggshells back in the box with the whole eggs and people had to pay to have a go at choosing one. If they picked a whole egg instead of an eggshell they got the egg and a rasher of bacon to go with it. She’d got the idea because it was something they’d done at the Christmas fair when she was at school.

  ‘Mrs MacKenzie, I really don’t think we can do that,’ Mrs Lyle said, looking worried when Mum pulled the packets of bacon out of her bag and started to rip them open. ‘There are food hygiene regulations for things like this. We don’t want to give people food poisoning and get the school into trouble.’

  ‘Yes, Mum – people might die!’ I blurted out, eager to back up Mrs Lyle, because I thought it was a crazy idea too.

  Mrs Lyle flushed. ‘Of course, if people were to die that would be more important than the school being in trouble,’ she said, as if she thought I was implying that she valued the reputation of the school above human life.

  I flushed too. I hadn’t meant it like that. I’d only been trying to help. Trust Mrs Lyle to take it the wrong way. But I couldn’t think of anything to say to make it clear that I hadn’t been having a dig at her and, anyway, at least Mum was taking the eggs off the stall.

  At ten o’clock Mrs Lyle opened the doors and people started to come in.

  Mum stood behind the cake stall for a while, then she said her main role as Head Teacher was to mingle. She told me that while she was mingling she was going to distribute some leaflets she’d made and she wanted me to do the same. She gave me a bundle to hand out and disappeared off to speak to the parent who had just purchased Dad’s favourite cactus.

  My stomach flipped over when I saw what was on the leaflets. DO YOU WANT TO CHANGE OUR SCHOOL UNIFORM? it said. IF SO, PLEASE TICK PREFERRED COLOURS. There were boxes for GREEN, PURPLE, RED, ORANGE, YELLOW and BLUE (NOT NAVY).

  I stared at my mother, who was wearing a red dress with a bright orange cardigan over it, which actually looked quite nice in a traffic-lightish sort of way. Was this a joke? Apparently not, because she was handing out leaflets to everyone within arm’s length and also trying to stick one to the front of the nearest book stall.

  ‘HEY! DANIEL!’

  I looked up. Abby was heading towards me. A young woman with short dark hair was with her. When Mrs Lyle saw her she rushed over ‘Susie, you’ve come back to visit us! How lovely!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘That’s my big sister,’ Abby explained. ‘She was sort of like Mrs Lyle’s pet, though she goes mad if you say that to her!’ She looked at the leaflets in my hand. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Mum told me to give these out.’

  ‘Let’s see.’ She took one from me. ‘Wow! Is she serious? I’m going to show this to Susie. She’ll think it’s a hoot.’

  ‘Abby – wait!’ I put out my hand to stop her from taking the leaflet over to her sister, who was still deep in conversation with Mrs Lyle. As far as I could tell, Mrs Lyle hadn’t actually seen one of Mum’s leaflets yet.

  Abby looked at me expectantly.

  ‘So does your sister still live at home then?’ I blurted out. It was the first thing I could think of to say to keep her there.

  ‘Susie’s the only one at home,’ Abby answered. ‘Dad’s up north somewhere. We never see him.’ She kept looking at me steadily, as if she was testing me in some sort of way. ‘My mum lives in her own place. I used to live with her but it didn’t work out, so now I live with Susie.’

  ‘Right.’ I didn’t know what else to say. I hadn’t expected my question to generate quite that much information. I felt like I ought to make a suitable response only I couldn’t think of one. ‘Umm . . . Do you want a cheese scone?’ I shoved the plate under her nose. They had been baked by Mrs Lyle and they looked like the best thing on the stall, chiefly because they didn’t have hideous pink icing on them like all the things Mum had donated.

  Abby picked up the biggest one. ‘You buying?’

  ‘Sure.’ I dropped enough money for two into the margarine tub we were using to collect the cash.

  Abby grinned suddenly, looking across at Mrs Lyle’s cosy corner. ‘I can’t believe your mum really brought in your sofas.’

  ‘I know,’ I muttered gloomily.

  ‘And I can’t believe she’s really thinking of changing the colour of our school uniform! I mean, is that wacky or what?’

  ‘Listen, Abby,’ I said, feeling irritated. ‘Shut up about my mum, OK?’

  She looked at me in surprise. I thought she might be going to say something
snappish back, which I guess I deserved, but she didn’t. She just said, ‘OK, mate,’ and gave me a sympathetic smile, as if feeling embarrassed by your mother was something she understood only too well.

  Mum was in a bad mood with me in the car on the way home and not just because I kept playing with the buttons that make the electric windows go up and down. She was cross because I had bought Dad’s cheese plant back and only told her when the sale was over that the RESERVED sticker attached to one of its leaves meant it was reserved for us. Mum had refused to let me bring it home with us and said it could stay in the corner of the school hall, where hopefully it would die from lack of water. I didn’t tell her that I’d asked our school caretaker if he would water it until Dad got the chance to fetch it back.

  As soon as we got home, Martha ran over to feed her goldfish and let out a scream. One of the fish – the one with the white spot on its side – was floating on the surface, obviously dead.

  ‘Look!’ Mum pointed at a fish who was taking a bite out of the dead one. ‘You should have called that one Jaws!’ She banged on the side of the tank with her fist. ‘Hey, it’s Hannibal the Cannibal!’

  ‘Mum, Martha’s really upset!’ I hissed.

  ‘Oh, baby!’ Mum crooned. ‘Don’t be upset. We’ll have a funeral. A proper fishy funeral. It’ll be fun! No flushing down the loo for this fish! Daniel, you fish out the fish. I’ll fetch a coffin.’ She whizzed off into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s R-Rupert,’ Martha sobbed as I used the little fishing net we’d bought from the pet shop to scoop out the little orange body. ‘He was my f-favourite.’

  ‘Da-dah!’ Mum boomed, like she was a magician at a kiddies’ party instead of a mother in charge of a sobbing little girl who had just lost her favourite fish. I couldn’t believe she was behaving like this. It was as if she didn’t have any idea how Martha was feeling at all. ‘One fishy coffin!’ She rammed Rupert into the matchbox she’d just emptied as I tried to comfort my sister. ‘We’ll give him a funeral to die for!’ Mum started laughing. ‘A funeral to die for! Get it?’ She grabbed Martha’s hand and pulled her towards the door. ‘We’ll bury him at sea – just like they bury sailors!’

  ‘But Rupert’s not a sailor,’ Martha sniffed, trying to twist her hand free from Mum’s.

  ‘No – he’s a floater!’ Mum dropped Martha’s hand to do an impersonation of a dead fish with two sticky-out fins and staring eyes.

  I tried to keep a straight face, because I thought it was a really sick joke, but I have got to admit that it was difficult. As dead-fish impressions go, Mum’s was pretty funny.

  Mum and I had a huge row the following day. Mum accused me of being a stick-in-the-mud and too big for my boots. I told her she was a rotten mother. I ended up getting sent to my room, which I didn’t care about. I was just glad to get away from her.

  The thing that started the row was me having a go at Mum – again – about how she’d gone swimming in the sea in her bra and knickers after we’d thrown Rupert off the end of the pier the day before. Mum told me I was a prude and that if she wanted to go swimming in the nude then she’d do that too. I couldn’t believe it when she said that. Normally she gets self-conscious even lying in a swimsuit on the beach, and she won’t wear a bikini because she says it shows too much of her fat tummy. Mum was acting differently to how she’d ever acted before and I didn’t know if it was because Dad wasn’t around or because she was a headmistress now or – and this was the thought that worried me the most – because she’d stopped taking her lithium tablets.

  Dad had said that when Mum had stopped taking her lithium before, she had become really ill, really quickly. I’d been trying to remember what Mum was like when she was ill but I couldn’t. I tried to imagine what a person would be like if they were ill in a mental sort of way, but the only mentally ill people I’d seen were on television. That man in Neighbours who had put the bomb in the coffee shop had turned out to be stark raving mad in the next episode. He’d started shouting that he was the Chosen One and that he’d heard the voice of God telling him to blow everybody up and that was why he had done it. And then he’d started running around the hospital with no clothes on. Mum certainly wasn’t anything like him.

  I decided to phone Dad that night when Martha was in bed and Mum was in the bathroom. I had to talk to him. If Mum was feeling stressed because Dad wasn’t here then maybe if I told that to Dad, he’d try and come home a bit sooner.

  It was my aunt who picked it up. It would be nine o’clock in the morning over there. ‘Oh . . . Daniel. Your father can’t come to the phone right now. He’s helping our mother choose the hymns for her funeral.’ She sounded tired.

  ‘Can you ask him to phone us as soon as he’s done?’ I asked. ‘It’s really important.’

  Aunt Helen coughed, like she’d just swallowed something that had stuck in her throat. ‘You did hear what I said, didn’t you? Malcolm is choosing the hymns for our mother’s funeral? I think he might be just a little upset and not up to a big phone conversation when he’s done, don’t you?’

  I realized I wasn’t being very tactful, but I just really needed to speak to Dad. ‘Yes, but I think Mum’s really . . . really missing him. I think maybe he should come home sooner.’

  There was a long silence at the other end. My aunt sounded upset and angry when she finally spoke. ‘And I think this might be a time when Malcolm should put his family first.’ She slammed the phone down before I could agree with her that that was what I thought too.

  It was a few minutes later when I registered that by his family she’d meant them and not us.

  I decided I’d wait and phone again tomorrow.

  Mum had finished in the bathroom and now she was crashing about in the spare room where there were still lots of boxes that we hadn’t unpacked. I went to see what she was doing.

  She stared at me, looking up from a cardboard box she had just opened. ‘I can’t find the photos.’

  ‘What photos?’

  ‘The photos of Martha. My Martha. In the hospital.’

  ‘Do you want me to help you look?’

  We carried on searching together, and eventually she came across the box she was looking for. Shoved at the back of an old photo album were some baby photographs of Martha that I’d never seen before.

  ‘Your dad doesn’t like seeing these pictures,’ Mum told me. He says it reminds him of a time he’d rather forget. But that’s not the real reason he won’t look at them.’

  ‘What is the real reason?’ I asked, curious.

  Mum didn’t reply. She was peering closely at a picture of herself holding Martha in her arms.

  I stared at the picture. I had never seen it before. It was a really bad photo of Mum. She was sitting up in bed in hospital, wearing a pink nightdress, and her dark hair was all over the place. It was her face that was the most disturbing though. She had this really fixed grin and her eyes were staring at the camera in a frenzied sort of way, wide open with too much of the whites of her eyes showing. She looked just like you’d ask an actress to look if they were playing the part of a mad woman in a horror movie. No wonder Dad had never wanted anyone to see it. She was clutching a tiny baby in her arms tightly, as if she were afraid it was going to squirm away from her if she let go. The baby was wrapped in a blanket and the cover had been pulled over its head like a hood. It looked all tiny and wrinkly. I couldn’t take my eyes off the mother in the picture though. I mean, I knew that was Mum, but somehow I couldn’t feel as if it was. I picked up the other photographs that had been taken at the same time and thankfully she looked pretty normal in those, apart from looking tired and not smiling at all. There was a photo of her and the woman called Kate both standing with their babies. The babies were wearing identical pink knitted bonnets and matching cardigans and they looked like twins.

  ‘This is my baby!’ Mum said, pointing at the baby in her arms in the picture.

  I nodded. ‘That’s Martha, right?’

  ‘My baby had d
ark hair.’

  ‘You can’t see her hair,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I don’t have to see it to remember it!’ She turned to look at me. ‘I’m not saying they did it on purpose. But after it happened, nobody would admit it. They’re like that, these doctors. They all close ranks.’

  ‘After what happened?’ I frowned. ‘What are you talking about, Mum?’

  Mum suddenly seemed angry. ‘They thought I was too mad to know my own baby! That’s what they thought!’

  I took a step back from her. What was wrong with her? She wasn’t making any sense.

  We heard the door creak and Martha was standing in the doorway. Her face was screwed up and she was rubbing at her eyes. She saw the photographs Mum was holding and came over to look at them. She giggled when she saw the really bad picture of Mum. ‘You look funny, Mummy.’ Then she pointed at the baby. ‘Is that me?’

  ‘No,’ Mum said. ‘It’s not!’

  I stared at her. ‘But I thought you just said—’

  ‘Who is it then?’ Martha asked, reaching up to smooth down Mum’s hair. Martha is always trying to tidy Mum’s hair. ‘Is it Daniel?’

  Mum didn’t reply. She was starting to cry silently. ‘Go away,’ she whispered, in a choked voice, pushing Martha away from her.

  Martha looked shocked and screwed up her face as if she was about to start crying too.

  I felt scared then, though I wasn’t really sure why.

  I took Martha back to her room and, as I kissed her goodnight, her bottom lip trembled as she asked, ‘What’s wrong with Mummy?’