Sweet

by Julie Burchill

  Susie looked at me amazed. ‘How d’you know that, love?’

  I didn’t really feel like telling her about Asif right now. ‘Never you mind.’ I looked at her sternly and held the door open. ‘Outside. Now.’

  We went into the sitting room, and immediately she launched into a justification of the farce – albeit a rather exciting one – about to be played out. ‘Ria love, I was only thinking of you – you said you wanted to get her back. You were gonna get that private detective, remember? Well, she’s here now, love, and . . .’

  I was about to launch into one about how I never said I wanted her back. In fact she only had to check with Asif (not that she’d met him) to find out I’d been pretty damn vocal on that point. But then I remembered I had kind of agreed to find Ren, just to shut Susie up, back when she was going on about the need to hold another baby in her arms and all that crap. And I’d never bothered to set her straight that the only baby girl I’d given much serious thought to tracking down was Kizza.

  Susie was looking all wounded-puppy-dog eyes at me now. ‘It wasn’t easy, Ria, you know, getting Cathy to agree to this day-out idea. She was all, “No disrespect to your daughter, Mrs Sweet, but are you sure she’s capable of looking after Ren by herself? Ren’s been through such a lot with her dad being taken away, and I couldn’t stand her to suffer any more.” Took me a while to persuade her that that was exactly why Ren should be with her mum. I mean a baby needs to be—’

  I’d stopped listening a couple of sentences back – so that sanctimonious cow, who had aided and abetted my ex to run off with both my baby and my iPod, thought I was incapable of looking after my own daughter, did she! ‘Susie, it’s fine, no worries. Course I wanna spend the day with her – can’t wait. It’ll be sweet – loads of catching up, loads to do. Quality together time . . .’

  I clocked the stunned look on Susie’s face as I buzzed out the door, back to my room to get ready. I’d show them. I sat there on the unmade bed, shaking and slugging away at my stash of voddy until I felt my heartbeat get back to something like normal and my hands stop trembling. Yeah, I know, if the thought of being left alone with Ren for a day spun me out so much why hadn’t I just told them where they could shove it? Or easier still, just agreed to it all then buggered off outta there till the whole thing had blown over. They didn’t expect me to be any good at it, so why bother trying? But that was the whole point, Mark’s patronizing mum with her, ‘No disrespect, Mrs Sweet.’ – bitch! But course what she meant was no respect as in she had none at all for me – and for some reason that made me want to show the old cow she was wrong. For one thing, if she was such a shining example of good parenting, how come her pride and joy had walked out on his darling wife, breaking up their family and depriving his baby daughter of a mother’s love and then, just to make sure he really screwed things up, gone and got himself banged up in some foreign jail? I might not have been mother of the year, but at least I wasn’t pretending to be.

  And in the last few weeks I’d been disrespected by just about everyone, from a couple of child-molesters to a sodding gherkin, and I wasn’t about to let my bastard ex’s mum join the list. I finished the vodka, stood up and held my head up high. I’d never won a prize in my life – but I was ready to win my daughter.

  I’d like to report that I was wrong, for once, and that Ren threw her arms around me and clung with all her little might when she and Cathy came calling. I showered, slapped on a bit of fake tan, flowery scent and pink lippy and sallied forth to charm my daughter. But as luck would have it, I also pulled on my favourite monochrome shift dress – black and white striped, with black opaques and white shoes. As I opened the door with the broadest and most welcoming of motherly smiles, I realized that I could be mistaken – if only by an easily excited eighteenth-month-old child – for a –

  ‘PANDA!’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘LANGUAGE!’ tutted Mum and Cathy as one, as I huffed off and changed into Susie’s second-best dress so Ren could put her sticky hands all over me without me having an epi. See, I was a natural at this mother stuff! Didn’t seem to make much difference though: the minute Ren reset eyes on me, her little face crumpled up and turned bright red, and she was wailing into Catherine’s neck before I even opened my mouth.

  Cathy prised her off and held the bawling little bundle out for me to take. She was only wearing a sort of grey smock frock with a picture of a gurning teddy bear on it! – what’s a panda if it’s not a bear in its PJs, I ask you! And she had a really filthy bit of blanket in her hand, which obviously she’d been using as a hanky or something. It was totally rank and I felt smug that Mark’s mum obviously wasn’t as perfect a mother-substitute as she liked to make out.

  ‘Here you are, Maria. And this bag has her things in it . . . Ren, love, Mummy’s going to look after you today . . .’

  ‘PANDA OFF!’ She kicked her legs, hitting me in the mouth.

  ‘Fuck off!’ I exclaimed instinctively.

  She stopped kicking and stared at me with her big hot-toddy eyes. Then smiled hesitantly. ‘Panda off?’

  ‘Off!’ I agreed, nodding like a nutter. ‘Off, off, OFF !’ It was a small thing, but sadly all we seemed to have in common for now.

  Cathy saw her chance. ‘OK, Maria, we’ll be back around six. See if you can get her to sleep by then, but if you can’t, no worries.’

  ‘Bye, love – don’t forget to take the twins’ old buggy out!’ called Susie as Cathy pulled her away.

  Ren stared wide-eyed at this betrayal, from me to where her grandma had stood and back again. For a moment I thought I had her – and then the door closed. Between glass-shattering screams the poor panda-hating little scrap called for her daddy, her granny – anyone but her mum – and as I stood there holding my squirming, crying daughter in my arms, I felt as lost and scared and abandoned as she did.

  23

  Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. What do kiddies like? – telly! I carried her into the living room, singing the theme from that Tots TV show that the twins had loved at the top of my voice –

  ‘I’m a Tot

  Je suis une Tot!

  Tilly, Tom and Tiny

  We’re the Tots on Tots TV

  One, two, three – boo!’

  She seemed to like this; at least, it stopped her howling. And it had French in it too, which’d be useful when it was time for her to chat up language students like her mother before her. It’s good to be bilingual – and no cracks about me and Kim, thank you; this is a little kiddy we’re talking about!

  As this bit had gone down a treat, I racked my brains for another song from the show and came up with ‘Tom’s Trumpet’ –

  ‘Follow Donkey all the way home,

  He knows where we’re going.

  Follow Donkey all the way home,

  He knows where we’re going.

  We got lost all on our own,

  Now home is where we’re going.’

  But, pathetically, I felt a lump in my throat at the ‘We got lost all on our own’ bit, and it must have communicated itself to Ren, because she started crying her little heart out twice as bad as before.

  What else did kids like? – softies and snacks! One thing about Susie, she always has the fridge crammed with tasty and nutritious scran. I juggled Ren on one hip, feeling like an Italian earth mother out of a pasta ad or something, and bent down to investigate. Of course, the first thing Ren saw was a bottle of the Panda Pops cola the twins threw back like water, and the crying gave way to wild screams of ‘PANDA OFF!’ once more. I slammed the door shut, but not before grabbing a packet of Cheestrings; kids couldn’t get enough of these, in my experience. And cheese was just milk that had learned to stand on its own two feet anyway, so naturally it was good for babies.

  Where should I sit her while she had her snack? – she’d fall straight off the chair. Then I saw the twin buggy that Mum had held on to in the hope she’d get lumbered again. I sat her down in it, strappe
d her in before she knew what was happening, unzipped the Cheestrings and handed them to her. She looked astonished but not sad, so I took advantage.

  ‘That’s it! – clever Ren! Now, darling, you sit there like a good girl and eat your nice lunch while Mummy puts a nice DVD on.’ I scooted into the front room; luckily there were loads of old tot-orientated ones that the twins had long outgrown but Susie didn’t have the heart to get rid of. Best vet them first to make sure none of them had a bloody panda in; I selected a Postman Pat and dodged back into the kitchen to fetch Ren.

  Bless; she’d got the Cheestrings and, instead of eating them, hung them all over her little head. Some hung from her ears like manky earrings; some hung down over her eyes like a really badly peroxided fringe. She smiled angelically at me, and what was left of my heart seemed to melt like a Cheestring left on a radiator.

  ‘There’s a clever girl!’ I clucked, running up to her and grinning like a loon; I was really good at the ‘unconditional love’ thing too, it seemed. ‘Shall we go and see Postman Pat?’ I wheeled her into the living room, pushed the buggy right up against the screen and pressed play. The familiar theme song started up, then just when I was congratulating myself at the length of time I’d managed to keep her happy – must’ve been at least five minutes since she last had the abdabs! – the wail went up –

  ‘NOOOOO! – ICKLE PANDA! OFF, ICKLE PANDA!’

  It was only stupid Jess, the sodding black and white cat! I turned it off straightaway. ‘There you go, baby, nasty panda’s gone!’

  ‘NASTY PANDA!’ heaved the poor little mite – and that’s when I realized that she had actually eaten some of the Cheestrings after all, as they shot out of her tiny mouth and all down Susie’s second-best dress. How clever of me not to have worn my own clothes!

  ‘GRAMMY, GRAMMY!’ Ren was wailing now. For a minute I was well impressed that she knew about stuff like important music awards at such a young age, but then I clocked she was crying for Cathy. I know it was only natural, Cathy having been around her for so long, but I still felt a flash of jealousy. ’Specially when she started up with, ‘DAPPY, DAPPY!’ That’d be the Bible-bashing jailbird who stole my iPod and made my baby a stranger; thanks, you bastard, I’m SURE that’s what Jesus would do!

  I decided to get her out and about; as things stood, there seemed a lot less chance of running into a panda than there was inside. And that was a whole nother tale of woe. When Ren’d been tiny, we’d had this sort of dinky doll’s pram and of course I’d had Mark to help me; alone, with a big baby and a double buggy, it seemed like a particularly punitive sort of novel deterrent to the high rate of teenage pregnancy in Britain. Boy, if they showed you films of this in school, forget STDs, this’d have all the little girls keeping their legs crossed! Of course, the lift wasn’t working, so I had to fold it back down again while holding a howling Ren in one arm, then carry it and Ren down five flights of stairs, the buggy bumping against her legs and covering my gorgeous caramel gams with bruises. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s bruises that weren’t any fun to get; they’re probably what Kimmy used to call an oxymoron.

  Outside of course it was raining, so I had’ta get Ren under that plastic cover thing before heading off. Where to go with a baby that age? – too young to take shelter in the cinema, and anyway chances were some pixelated panda bastard would come prancing on and unleash the forces of chaos. We could trail around the shops, but I didn’t have the spending cash to buy anything and I was a teen mum with a big buggy – Security would be watching me like a hawk, which with my recent brushes with the law was the last thing I wanted.

  So in the end we went to Macky D’s, sharing a Happy Meal. And you know what, for a while it did what it said on the box; looking at her, so seriously chewing her chip with her tiny front teeth, I felt a massive wave of love and pride.

  Well-off, well-fed, well-smug types, like Jamie sodding Oliver, see teenage mums like me sitting in Macky D’s feeding our kids chips – and straight off they feel totally free to make these judgements about us, in a way that if a person made judgements about, say, a black kid just by looking at them, they’d be run out of town as a racist. But they know nothing about the way we live. They’re not even smart enough to realize that we feed them chips NOT because we don’t know that there’s these things that grow on trees and taste dead boring called fruit and veg, but because we want to see our kids smile. Because soon enough we know the smiling’s gonna stop, when they find out that because of the address they call home and where they went to school, everything in life’s gonna be loaded against them. We buy them Happy Meals because we want them to be happy. And we know there’s a strong chance they’re not gonna be, even if we stuffed them full of fruit and veg till the cows the Happy Meals are made of came home. Which obviously, they ain’t gonna!

  All that non-stop crap Jamie and his followers spew up about what mindless evil sods poor parents are for not stuffing salad down their brats’ throats till it comes out through their tear-ducts! And saying that where you get in life can be changed by what you eat. It’s just a total stinking big fat lie! The simple fact is that you are not what you eat. You are where you’re born, you are how rich your parents are, you are where you went to school, what you are lucky enough to be handed on a plate. Fair play to his little girls, but no matter how dumb they turn out to be, they’re going to have a lovely life, cos their dad’s rich. And no matter how bright Ren turns out to be – well, let’s not bring the party down, shall we!

  All of a sudden I felt like crying, and I didn’t want to spoil things when I’d only just got her to stop. So to take my mind off it, I put these two chips in my mouth like fangs, and I rolled my eyes back in my head. And you know what? – she may have had a cob on about pandas, but even at eighteen months she didn’t give a toss about vampires – or zombies. That’s how brave she was. My brave little girl. Just like me.

  And I thought how if Aggy and Baggy came along right now, how if they looked through the window they wouldn’t see the beauty of me and her sharing our first lovely moment together – they’d just see the cliché, a deadbeat mum and a doomed daughter. Because despite all their airy-fairy arty-farty alleged creativity, they simply had no imagination. All their life there’d be beauty right in front of their eyes and they wouldn’t recognize it, because it was ordinary beauty. Aggy, Baggy, Jamie Oliver – it was easy to have a good time when you had hard cash and big expectations. But we, Ren and me, were having fun on chips and thin air – and that was something those stuck-up pricks would never be able to achieve, never in a million years.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  And sweet as you like, she smiled like a baby angel and puked a massive mouthful of watery ketchup right down her front. She looked down at it, and laughed in amazement, her big hot-toddy eyes engaging mine in what looked like pure delight. I laughed right back – it was the exact colour of watermelon Bacardi Breezer!

  ‘Just like your mum, intcha! Well, we’ll see . . .’

  And then the sun came out.

  I couldn’t keep her laughing forever – but I could keep her laughing for now . . .

  ‘Come on,’ I said, getting up. She lifted out her arms to me, and tears came to my eyes. ‘Let’s have some fun, before they stop us!’

  24

  Kizza used to say, when the sun shines all roads in Brighton lead to the pier – not the sad old ruined one, but the big bright brash one. The old West Pier is the one we sit on the shingle by and stare at when we’re determined to look on the dark side and bang on about the death of love, time ‘like an ever-rolling stream’ bearing all her sons away and all that Indy crap. But the Palace Pier is the place our feet take us to when we come to our senses and admit that, generally, however hard life gets, there’s always candyfloss to be spun and fun to be had. So naturally that’s where I took my Ren, for our day in the sun.

  She was gurgling as I wheeled her down West Street – a Happy Meal indeed. But when we got to the bottom of the hil
l and she saw the sea the gurgling stopped and she turned back to look at me with this amazed ‘What the fuck!’ look. I was so proud that she was looking to me as an authority, that I began to talk softly to her as we crossed the road to the Esplanade, even though I’ve always thought that women look totally dumb doing that.

  ‘That’s the sea, darling, isn’t it lovely? Because you were born here, in Brighton, and your dad and me used to bring you down here when you were very tiny. Then I had to . . . go away, and so did you. But now you’re home again, where you belong.’

  Jeez, where did that come from!

  Of course, we couldn’t go on any of the pier rides, even the teacups; she was too little. But it felt like a ride in itself, albeit a very quiet and tranquil one, pushing the buggy slowly along the boards of the near-deserted pier, seeing the sea glint beneath us and hearing Ren’s gentle cooing as she took it all in. As we stood looking out towards the Marina, a seagull came and landed on a pier post nearby, doing that weird sideways look they give you, trying to suss out if you’re carrying grub on your person. It reminded me of the way Kim used to sidle up to likely lads when I tried to get her to score pills for me off strangers on the seafront, and I laughed.

  To my delight Ren laughed too, kicking her legs and waving her arms at the gull. ‘NAUGHTY – NAUGHTY! OFF, NAUGHTY!’ I was impressed that she didn’t call it a panda – see, already I was having a good effect on her!

  I wheeled her through the flashing lights and kerchinging machines of the pleasure dome, and out the other side past the Victorian fish and chip restaurant where they played those songs that sounded happy but were really quite sad, all those songs about being taken away from home like ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. We stood at the end of the pier and looked up wide-eyed at all the scary rides, and I thought they were nothing compared to the one I was on. I lifted Ren out of her pushchair, held her up so she could see what a big wide world it was and quietly sang her a song I’d only just remembered: