My Mum's from Planet Pluto

by Gwyneth Rees

  We sat drinking tea and talking politely for twenty minutes or so. Then Dad thanked Susie for looking after us, and I was just getting ready to go upstairs to collect my stuff, when Dad asked if Susie would do him one more favour. He wanted to go straight up to the hospital to see Mum and he wondered if we could stay on at Susie’s place while he did that. He would come back and collect us afterwards. I felt funny when he said that. I don’t know why. I mean, of course he had to see Mum. I just didn’t see why he had to do it right now, that was all, when we’d only just got him back again. Susie said that was fine and Dad said he’d call a taxi and go straight there.

  ‘Dad, they’ve put Mum on this horrible ward up at the hospital,’ I warned him.

  ‘I’m sure Doctor White knows what he’s doing, Daniel. It’s your mum’s safety that matters most at the moment, not her surroundings.’

  I hadn’t said it to criticize Dr White, but now I suddenly did feel critical. Dad might not care about Mum’s surroundings, but I did. ‘I don’t see how safe she is on a ward with a whole load of mad people,’ I spat out, ‘but go and see it if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Daniel . . . Mum’s getting the best possible care—’

  ‘How can you tell? You haven’t seen her, have you? You’ve been in New Zealand!’

  Dad looked taken aback. ‘I know you want her back again, Daniel, but we have to be patient.’ He got up to phone for his taxi.

  ‘Daddy, I don’t want you to go,’ Martha said, trying to pull him back down on to the sofa again. Her face was crumpling up.

  ‘Mummy needs me to go and see her, sweetheart,’ he told her gently.

  Martha started to cry. ‘I don’t want you to go!’

  ‘I’ll be back soon, Martha, I promise.’

  Suddenly I felt really angry. ‘Don’t say that to her!’ I shouted, jumping up from the sofa. ‘Tell her exactly what time you’re going to be back! Exactly!’

  I stopped abruptly. Everyone was staring at me.

  13

  That night Dad came into my bedroom as I was getting ready for bed. ‘How are you doing, kiddo?’ Calling me kiddo had been a bit of a joke between us a year or so back. Mum hated it and said that both Dad and I were watching too many American movies.

  ‘I’m OK. Dad . . .’ I felt sort of achy inside all of a sudden as if, now that he was back, it was really hitting me how much I had missed him while he was away. ‘Is Aunt Helen angry with us?’

  ‘Why would she be angry?’

  ‘Because you had to come back before the funeral.’

  ‘Of course she’s not angry. She understood that I had to come home. The important thing was being there with Grandma before she died. Actually, she’s feeling really guilty for not listening to you when you tried to tell her Mum was getting poorly. She didn’t tell me about your phone call at the time and now she wishes she had.’

  I looked at him. He looked terrible. His face was all saggy and his eyes were red. He looked like he was the one who was sick, not Mum. But I still had to ask him this.

  I swallowed. ‘Dad . . .’ I had to ask him even though I was almost too scared to hear the answer. ‘Is there other stuff you and Mum haven’t told me?’ My voice went hoarse. ‘Stuff about Martha?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Dad, look at this.’ But just as I was about to show him the photograph I hadn’t dared show anyone else until now, the phone started ringing.

  ‘Wait a minute, Daniel. It might be the hospital.’ He hurried through to his bedroom to answer it.

  ‘Who?’ I heard Dad say. ‘Oh, right. Kate.’

  I immediately got out of bed and went out on to the landing so I could hear better. It was just as well I did, because Dad closed the bedroom door before he carried on speaking in a low voice. ‘Well, she’s in good hands now at least. No, the children are OK. Well, as OK as can be expected.’ He listened for a bit longer. ‘I don’t think so, no . . . It’s OK . . . No, she didn’t, but don’t worry . . . Yes, I’m happy to leave it as it is . . . If you still feel it’s the right thing for us to keep yours, that is . . .’

  I leaned back against the landing wall, scarcely able to breathe. If you still feel it’s the right thing for us to keep yours. What did that mean? Did it mean that there had been a swap in the past that they both knew about?

  I hurried back into my bedroom as I heard Dad put down the phone. Nothing in my life was making sense any more. I sat down on my bed and looked at the photograph. Had the swap Mum had talked about really happened after all? Was it true that Martha really was Kate’s daughter and Sophie really belonged to my family?

  Dad stuck his head round my door. ‘That was Kate asking how Mum is.’

  I knew I had to ask him about it, no matter how scared I was to hear the answer. I took a deep breath. ‘I heard you on the phone, Dad,’ I said. ‘I heard you talking about the . . .’ I swallowed. ‘. . . about the swap.’

  Dad didn’t react how I’d thought he would. ‘Oh, you know about that, do you?’ He didn’t seem particularly surprised that I knew or even like the subject was such an important one. ‘I wish you wouldn’t sneak about listening to other people’s private conversations, Daniel. Yes, we were talking about the swap. Kate was worrying about it and I told her not to. Martha’s happy. Sophie’s happy. I don’t want to upset them if we don’t have to.’

  Suddenly Martha’s voice came from the other room. ‘Daddy!’ She sounded scared, as if she’d just had a bad dream or something.

  ‘I’m coming, sweetheart!’ Dad called out to her. He looked at me with narrowed eyes. ‘I don’t want you mentioning this to Martha, OK? I don’t want her getting all upset about it.’

  ‘But, Dad—’

  ‘I mean it, Daniel. Put out the light now and get some sleep.’

  I got into bed and switched off the light, but I had never felt so bewildered and let down in my whole life. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep easily that night.

  I found that I was too scared to ask Dad again about what he’d told me. He spent most of the next day sleeping. He didn’t put up a fight about me going back to school. It was Friday and next week was half-term. I reckon he didn’t think another day off would do much harm and it didn’t seem to enter his head that I wouldn’t want to go back after half-term either.

  I kept thinking about what he’d said. Sometimes I reckoned I couldn’t have heard him right, but then I reran our conversation in my head and I knew that I had. My main worry was that Martha might get taken away from us. And then there was the fact that Martha obviously knew nothing about any of this. I mean, she was going to find out one day and then how would she feel? I thought about what Mum had told me – that the swap must have happened when that mad lady took the babies off the ward. If both Mum and Kate were mentally ill then maybe that’s why they didn’t notice at the time, but the whole thing still seemed really weird to me.

  When had Dad and Kate found out the truth? And why had they decided that they didn’t want to swap the babies back again? And what about Mum? What about what she had wanted?

  I had a lot more questions, but no time seemed to be the right time to ask them – even after Dad had recovered from his jet lag and had stopped falling asleep whenever he sat down.

  Over the next few days I tried a few times to bring up the subject when Martha wasn’t around, but as soon as I started, Dad and I seemed not to be able to connect up. It was almost as if we were talking about two separate things.

  ‘Dad, you know what Kate and you were talking about on the phone . . . the swap . . . ?’ I began one day when Martha was round at Sally’s house.

  Dad looked at me as if he suspected I was trying to stir up trouble. ‘I’ve told you, Daniel. I don’t want you getting Martha all upset.’

  ‘But, Dad—’

  ‘Just drop it, OK?’ he snapped, and he turned his back on me and left the room.

  I stared after him, biting my lip. Dad was starting to seem more and more of a stranger to
me since he’d come home, and less and less like the father I’d known before he left for New Zealand.

  It was half-term and Susie had the week off work, so I spent quite a bit of time at her place while Dad went to visit Mum. Abby took me down to the park to play football with her and her friends and I met Rachel’s brother, Michael. We hit it off really well and he invited me back to his place to watch his video of the World Cup. Michael said that Abby and Rachel were pretty good football players considering they were girls, and that got Abby all fired up saying that girls were just as good at football as boys and getting Rachel to agree with her. Thankfully she didn’t try to get me to agree with her, because then she might have ended up falling out with me as well as with Michael. I didn’t tell any of them how worried I was about Martha.

  Martha either came with me or went round to Sally’s. Nobody suggested that we visited Mum yet and I just assumed it was going to be the same now as it had been when I was little. Mum would be too ill for us to visit her for most of the time she was in hospital and we wouldn’t see her again until she was nearly ready to come home. I tried not to think how long it might be before that happened.

  Towards the end of the week Dad started to talk about me going back to school. He had spent quite a bit of time talking to the deputy head over the last week, and the school had been making arrangements to cover Mum’s post. They were going to keep the job open for her for the moment and in the mean time our deputy head would be acting head. An announcement to the effect that Mum was unwell was going to be made in assembly, and the teachers had been instructed to be extra-supportive of me when I first went back. Dad seemed to think that I was going to be satisfied with that.

  Well, he was wrong. I told him there was no way I was going back to that school after everything that had happened with Mum there. Besides, I reckoned I’d sort of grown out of school over the last few weeks and I told him that. I mean, I didn’t see why I should have to do all the stupid work the teachers set when I knew now that there was more important stuff going on in the outside world. Dad said I was being silly. He said that everyone had to go to school in order to prepare themselves for the outside world, and how did I think all the doctors and nurses who were looking after Mum had got to be doctors and nurses if it wasn’t through going to school?

  ‘Anyway,’ he added firmly. ‘You’re only twelve. You have to go back. It’s the law.’

  ‘Well, I want to change schools then.’ I was lifting one of Mum’s ornaments off the mantelpiece and fiddling with it as I spoke.

  ‘Daniel—’

  ‘You should have let me go to a different school in the first place. I told you it would all work out badly.’ I put down the ornament with a bit of a bang. I really didn’t see what right he had to be telling me what to do. Not now that I knew what he had done.

  ‘Daniel, none of us could have predicted that this would happen.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. She’s been ill before, hasn’t she?’ I picked up a glass candlestick and started to roll it about in my hand.

  ‘Daniel, put that down.’ He waited for me to put the candlestick down before adding carefully, ‘It’s been years since your mother had a manic episode.’

  ‘A manic episode?’ It was the first time I’d heard him use that word.

  Dad nodded. ‘That’s what’s been wrong with Mum. It was what was wrong with her when she was pregnant with Martha too. That’s why she had to go into hospital then. Mania is like the opposite of depression. You get high in your mood instead of low, only it doesn’t always feel good, because you can’t sleep and everything speeds up inside your head. Sometimes you start losing touch with reality, so you think you’re more important than you really are, which was what you saw happening with Mum.’

  ‘So the way Mum acted at school was because of that?’

  ‘That’s right. She thought she was more and more important the sicker she got. In the end it sounds as though she thought she was the queen of the school instead of just the headmistress. She’s got an illness called manic depression, which means that her mood isn’t as stable as other people’s. Bipolar mood disorder is its other name. Bipolar, see?’

  I stared at him blankly. I didn’t see. I’d waited years for him to give me any information at all about Mum’s illness and now I felt like he was giving me too much information to take in.

  ‘Bipolar because there are two opposite poles – depression and mania,’ Dad explained. ‘Think of it as like the North Pole and the South Pole – you’re either feeling on top of the world or at the bottom of it.’

  I frowned at him. I still didn’t understand as well as I wanted to. ‘I thought you could tell really easily if someone was mentally ill,’ I said. ‘But with Mum, I didn’t know. I mean, she was acting weird but I didn’t think she was . . . you know.’ I couldn’t bring myself to actually say the word mad.

  ‘Everybody gets mentally ill in different ways, Daniel. And it’s not always easy to pinpoint exactly when it starts happening.’

  ‘Dad, why are you telling me all this now?’ I asked him. ‘I thought you said it wasn’t any of my business until I was a grown-up?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Daniel. Come on.’

  ‘Well, you should have told me more about Mum’s illness when I was little,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Then I would have understood it better.’

  Dad looked thoughtful. ‘I’ve always believed that children should be protected from certain things for as long as possible.’

  I didn’t reply. I didn’t think children could always be protected. Not from all the things Dad wanted to protect Martha and me from, at any rate. Like the fact that Martha and I weren’t really even brother and sister.

  I was watching Neighbours the next afternoon when they showed that mad coffee-shop bomber again. This time his family were talking to the doctor – the one who’s a GP like Dad, but who always seems to be running the hospital as well whenever any of the other characters get admitted there. He was explaining that the treatment the doctors were giving the man wasn’t working. He said there was one more medication left to try but it would mean the man having loads of blood tests to check his blood cells weren’t being knocked off. Apparently that was one of the possible side effects of this medication – that it could kill off your blood cells.

  ‘And what if that doesn’t help?’ the man’s sister asked. (She was one of the regular characters and had only just discovered that the coffee-shop bomber was her long-lost brother.) They did a closeup shot of her looking all trembly.

  ‘Then we may have to accept that he won’t ever fully recover. If that happens he’s going to need to live somewhere where he can be properly cared for,’ the doctor replied.

  I switched the TV off. I knew it was Neighbours and not real, but it was freaking me out all the same. What if Mum had to have some extra-strong medication that killed off her blood cells? Or what if she never fully recovered and had to go away somewhere to be looked after? What if I never saw my normal mum ever again?

  I felt my throat closing up and my eyes starting to prick, and for the first time since Mum had gone into hospital I started to cry. I was on my own, so there was nobody to see me and I ended up bawling my eyes out like a baby.

  Dad wouldn’t drop the subject of school, and on Sunday night he said I had to start back the next morning with everybody else now that half-term had ended. If Martha was able to go to school, Dad said, then I should be able to go too.

  ‘It’s not the same for Martha,’ I protested. ‘She’s not going to the same school as Mum, is she? She won’t have everyone coming up to her asking what it’s like having a mum in the loony bin.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Dad said. ‘It’s true, they might say that . . . So what we need to do is plan what you could say back to them.’

  ‘I told you! I’m not going to be there!’

  ‘Daniel, you’ve got to go back to school some time and the longer you leave it the more difficult it’s going to get.’


  ‘I’m not going,’ I said again.

  ‘Look . . . after a week or two the fuss will blow over . . . The teachers will help you out and if any of the other children say anything, perhaps you could say Mum hasn’t been well but she’s recovering now. Or that she’s had an illness which made her behave strangely but that she’ll soon be back to normal. Or you might even tell them that you’d rather not talk about it . . . What sounds best to you?’

  I screwed up my face and swore under my breath. Didn’t he get it? I wasn’t going back and he couldn’t make me. He couldn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do ever again.

  ‘Don’t swear at me, Daniel.’

  ‘I wasn’t swearing at you. I was just swearing.’

  He sounded like his patience was wearing thin. ‘You’re going back to school tomorrow whether you want to or not. It’s not up for discussion any more.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said like I didn’t really care. I knew what I was going to do tomorrow anyway, and it didn’t involve school.

  Dad was waiting for me when I got home on Monday afternoon. ‘Daniel, sit down,’ he said sternly. ‘I want to speak to you.’

  I didn’t sit down. I started walking round the room, tidying up. Martha had dumped her PE kit on the floor as soon as she’d got in and her nightie was still lying on the sofa where she’d left it that morning. ‘This place is a tip,’ I complained to Dad. Goodness knows what he’d been doing all day.

  ‘It can stay a tip for a few minutes longer. Now, sit.’ He sounded stern, and normally I would have done what he said at that point, but I was finding that I didn’t feel like reacting very fast to Dad’s instructions since I’d overheard him on the phone that night to Kate. ‘Daniel!’ He grabbed me by the arm and pushed me down on to the sofa. ‘Will you please do as you’re told?’

  ‘I’m not a kid, Dad!’ I glowered up at him.