The Perfect Mother

by Margaret Leroy

  I never got to know the other girls. I kept myself a little apart, not wanting them to find out about me. I saw this as a temporary thing. When things are OK, when this bad bit is over, when I’m back with my mother, I thought—then I will talk to them, make friends, be one of them. Not till then. Aimee at The Poplars was my only friend.

  She was wild, Aimee: a sharp, knowing face, hair like fire, tattoos all down her arm. She had a razor-blade sewn into the hem of her jeans. For emergencies, she said. She never went to school.

  Aimee got picked on a lot by the staff at The Poplars. They told her she was trouble. She wasn’t like me, she wouldn’t just go along with things and bide her time. I’ve always been able to do this—blend into the background, not be conspicuous, not be seen—but Aimee couldn’t or wouldn’t: there was something in her, some flame that wouldn’t be quenched. Brian Meredith hit her more than the others—for nicking stuff and getting into fights and being lippy. She used to call him Megadeath. ‘He’s got it coming,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll do him over. Just you wait. One day.’ Once he kept her for three weeks in Pindown. When she came out she’d ripped all the skin from the sides of her fingernails and sometimes she’d shout in her sleep.

  She ran away often. Sometimes she took me with her. She showed me how to do it, how to travel on a train without a ticket by hiding in the toilet, how to steal. We’d plan it all together in the room we shared, the street light leaking through the thin curtains onto the battered candlewick of our bedspreads. Each time it was like falling in love: each time we thought this was the day, the time, the Real Thing. Usually, we’d head for Brighton, where Aimee had heard you could live in a squat and find some people who’d help you. Brighton was our promised land. We knew how it would be. We’d sell jewellery, those little leather thongs with stones on, we’d live on chips, read fortunes: we’d be like the older girls you saw there on the seafront, with their impossible glamour, their ratty ribboned hair and Oxfam coats and thin thin bodies and wide, generous smiles.

  We’d pack our bags with a change of clothes and Kit Kats we’d nicked from Woolworths or mini-packs of Frosties, and put on our trainers and go. And maybe we’d get there, and sleep on the beach by the pier, and the police would come and pick us up, and we’d be put in Pindown.

  The third time, they let me out after a week of Pindown. I was quiet and sensible and sat at the table and wrote down the wrong things I’d done. But Aimee was kept there for fifteen days, and when she came out she had a chest infection. They’d taken the fuse out of the fire because she’d been stroppy, she said.

  I woke that night to see her sitting up in bed, the bedspread pulled up to her chin, her fists all bone, clasping it so tightly. The orange light through the curtains made her skin look sickly.

  ‘I’m going to tell,’ she said, through her coughs. ‘What it’s like here. What he does, that motherfucking bastard.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t. You can’t.’

  ‘Just watch me,’ she said.

  Her social worker from the Civic Centre, Jonny Leverett, was a pallid man who wore heavy-metal sweatshirts. The next time he came, he took her out in his Skoda, and they were gone for hours.

  ‘Well?’ I said, when she came back.

  ‘I told him,’ she said. Tearing at the skin at the sides of her fingernails. ‘They’ll have to do something now. They’ll have to come and get Megadeath. They’ll have to lock him up. Life would be too short for him.’

  Two days later there was a case conference in the staffroom. The car park was full of smart cars and Lesley served coffee in the china cups that were kept for visiting professionals. Jonny Leverett came to take Aimee in.

  I was watching television when she found me.

  ‘I’m going to Avalon Close,’ she said. Defiant still, but her eyes were far too bright.

  ‘You can’t be,’ I said. ‘For Chrissake, they’re all nutters in there.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s got to be better than here.’

  She kicked a Pepsi can that was lying on the floor, sent it ricocheting across the room, her flaming red hair flying. But I could see she was frightened: there was shaking at the edges of her smile. I’d never seen her frightened.

  ‘What about Megadeath?’

  ‘They didn’t believe me,’ she said.

  The day she went, she cut her wrists—with the blade she’d kept for emergencies. Lesley told me, when I got back from school. She was all right now, said Lesley, they’d stitched her up in Casualty. Lesley said not to worry too much about her, that Avalon Close would be right for her as she clearly needed help.

  I think back to that sometimes. I try not to, but I still do, even now. Because I know there were things I could have done to help her. I could have gone to the police or phoned the Civic Centre and told them Aimee was telling the truth—that someone was lying, but it wasn’t her. I didn’t have the courage. Only silence seemed safe.

  I missed Aimee terribly. What I could bear before, I couldn’t bear without her. Sometimes when I’d wake in the night, I’d think for a moment she was there in the other bed beside me; then with a lurch of cold I’d see it was Jade Cochrane, my new roommate—who was sad and mousey and never laughed at all.

  My mother came again. She had a dark tan and new jewellery. She brought me an extra-big rabbit, with a satin heart on his chest that said ‘Yours 4 Ever’.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘I was going to wrap it up,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t have any paper.’

  She was excited, skittish, pleased with herself. She smelt of alcohol but I didn’t think she was drunk. She looked different. This was it, I knew. At last. The time had come.

  ‘I’m living with Karl now,’ she said. ‘He comes from Dresden. I always did like a man with a nice accent. Karl’s an entrepreneur.’ She pronounced this carefully. ‘We’ve got a new flat in Haringey.’

  ‘I can come and live with you, then,’ I said.

  ‘Just give me a bit of time,’ she said. ‘Karl and me have got to get ourselves sorted. We’re just getting the flat together.’

  Afterwards Lesley sat on my bed, asked how I was feeling. Really, I thought, she doesn’t need to bother any more, I won’t be here much longer.

  ‘My mum’s all right now,’ I said. ‘She’s got this flat with Karl. I’m going to go and live with them. Any day now.’

  Lesley put her arm round me. Her voice was gentle, hesitant.

  ‘Catriona, my love, that’s not what she’s saying to us.’

  My mother never came again.

  They tried to get me foster parents. They were going to advertise in the Evening Standard, they said.

  Lesley took the photograph with her smart new Polaroid.

  ‘Smile!’ she said. ‘Give me a lovely big smile. That’s wonderful—you look like Meg Ryan.’

  I stood there, smiling my most important smile ever. I tried to make my whole self smiley, the corners of my mouth ached with smiliness.

  Lesley showed me the ad. It said, ‘Catriona is a bright, pretty teenager with a real artistic talent. Her record of school attendance is excellent. Because of her troubled past, Catriona can be rather demanding at times. Catriona needs firm and consistent parenting.’

  I thought about this, lying in bed at night in the orange light of the streetlamps, chilly under the candlewick, missing Aimee. I let myself think, just for a moment, about my foster family, what they might be like: nice food and lots of it, gentleness, and a soft bed with a duvet that tucked in at the back of your neck. And I wondered what it meant to be demanding.

  No one was interested; no one even enquired about me. No one wants to adopt a fourteen-year-old girl who can be rather demanding, however bravely she smiles. I told myself I’d never thought it would happen, really, but there was a messy secret shame in admitting that I’d hoped.

  I left the day I was sixteen. Two months before my birthday, Kevin from the Leaving Care team came to see me. My mother had been asking about me, he said
. She’d moved abroad but she wanted to make contact, and did I want to see her. I said I didn’t, really. It was my decision, he said. He sorted out my benefit, found me a flat above a chip shop in Garratt Lane, and a furniture grant from a charity.

  My birthday was Lesley’s day off, but she came to say goodbye. She held me close for a moment, a quick, hard, awkward hug. It embarrassed me; I wanted her to let go of me. But then, when she’d let go of me, I wished that she’d hold me again.

  ‘I hope you get them,’ she said. ‘Your wishes, the things you wanted. I’m wishing them for you, too.’

  That evening, in my flat in Garratt Lane, I sat at my flimsy new table and such loneliness washed through me, and I briefly longed to be back at The Poplars, just to have people there.

  But slowly I put some kind of a life together. I did some temping—I’d learnt to type at school. There were always boyfriends. I guess I was attractive enough: I wore my skirts short and my blonde hair long and did whatever they wanted. I used to worry that my clothes, my skin even, stank of the chip shop, but the men didn’t seem to care. I was, I suppose, promiscuous: I needed company in the evenings; I could only sleep through the night with somebody beside me. And if some of them were married—well, I reckoned, that was their responsibility. I never told them about myself and if they asked I made up something, recasting my life as unexceptional. After a month or two they usually drifted off, sensing I guess something in me that would for ever elude them. But from time to time there’d be one who said he loved me, and then I’d stop returning his calls, or say I was washing my hair, and after a while, he’d drift away, however keen he’d been.

  Sometimes I thought I’d ring Kevin, and go and find my mother. I’d start to picture a reconciliation: her welcome, her apology, wrapping me in her arms and her scent of Marlboros and lily of the valley. But then I’d think how she’d neglected me and lied to me, and such rage would flare in me, and I knew I wouldn’t do it. So the days dragged on: a life of offices, all looking much the same, and vaguely unsatisfactory sex that was paid for with meals at Pizza Express and shots of tequila. It was lonely, but it was better than I was used to.

  There are moments when everything changes. I believe that. Moments of destiny, of serendipity. And one hot summer evening much like any other, when I’d just got off the bus in Garratt Lane, I bumped into Miss Jenkins.

  ‘Catriona. What a nice surprise.’

  She still had the hoops and the hippy cardigan, and she seemed so pleased to see me. She asked what I was doing. I shrugged a little, told her about the temping, though not the men.

  She stood there for a while, her steady eyes on me. There was this school, she said. A nursery school, in Chelsea: private, expensive. Not really the sort of thing she approved of: nursery education ought to be free for everyone. But the headmistress was a friend of hers, they’d been at college together, and she happened to know they had a post going. I reminded her that I only had three GCSEs. She said it didn’t matter, it was a nursery assistant post, they needed someone who could help with the art. The reference wasn’t a problem, she said, she’d be more than happy to be my referee. I felt cool air against my face; I remember that, a sudden shift in the weather. We neither of us had anything to write on, so I borrowed her biro and scribbled the number on the back of my hand.

  CHAPTER 10

  The school was in a hushed street off King’s Road. There was a cottage, old and rather crooked, at the turn of the road, and a little arched door in the wall. I rang and the door opened: children’s noise rushed out into the stillness of the street. Miss Parry, the headmistress, introduced herself; she was tall, gangly, flatfooted as a heron, with vivid bird-like eyes. She took me through the cloakroom, where every peg had a different hand-painted picture—a duck, a tulip, a blue umbrella. This amazed me, the generosity of it, such detail lavished on every child, every name. And we went through the airy playroom, and out into the garden at the back, a storybook garden, a secret between high walls, with a labyrinth of twisty stone paths and trampled scraps of lawn, and, in the middle, steps down to an old well—now filled in, of course, said Miss Parry—where there grew an old catalpa tree with leaves as wide as hands; and over there by the sandpit, she said, the two mossy stones set into the lawn were Carolingian graves. The whole place was exuberant with children, and messy with the tumbled detritus of their play, plastic animals faded by the sunlight, and the tyres and boxes and blankets they used to make castles and dens; anarchic and disorderly, but the disorder held and contained by the walls of yellow London brick, and the narrow bright beds of hollyhocks and lupins that fringed the edges of the garden.

  She showed me round, asked a few obvious questions, then left me in the playroom to see what I’d do. Cast adrift in that sea of children, I did what made me feel safest, and sat in the art corner drawing extravagant pictures, of flamboyant animals with wings and wicked fangs. The children gathered round, adding their own details, colouring in. After a while my self-consciousness fell away. I was surprised to turn and see Miss Parry behind me. She reached out to touch a doleful tiger I’d drawn. ‘I think you’ll do quite nicely here,’ she said.

  It wasn’t perfect. There was a lot of drudgery, toilets to be cleaned, floors to be swept and swabbed, little plastic bits of things to sort and put back into boxes. And it was physically exhausting, particularly demanding perhaps because it was so unstructured, all these children who tugged at your sleeve with their urgency and demands. The pay was minimal—enough to pay the rent on my flat and to buy a bit of food, though mostly I lived on what I ate at the nursery, the lunches of sausage or stew followed by jelly and bland glossy custard; and just about enough for mascara, and bleach for my long hair, and occasionally a new pair of clingy jeans or a faded knitted top with rainbow beading from one of the second-hand stalls in King’s Road market. But mostly I was happy there. I found I had a skill with children, that I could join in their play, enter their worlds: I don’t know where it came from, this easy instinctive ability—it seems surprising given the fractured nature of my childhood. But for me there was something so satisfying in the company of these children, with their openness and freshness and unanswerable questions. Where was I before I was born? Are the birds cross? Why do winds in cartoons have faces? Maybe I had some sense that this was what I needed—these years spent eating toad-in-the-hole and playing and reading picture books in a place that was kind and generous, where every child was so precious they had their very own picture next to their peg. It was perhaps a kind of healing for me: a reliving or a recovering of childhood.

  Miss Parry believed with a passion in children’s innate goodness, and held what I realise now were highly unfashionable ideas about the value of play. Tests and phonics lessons and neat rows of wooden desks were anathema to her. Every week there’d be a staff meeting in her flat above the playroom, when we’d sit on her squashy floral sofas and talk about the children’s social and emotional progress: it was gossip, really, in the guise of psychology, singling out children who seemed troubled or reserved, and in the process enjoying the gratifying if dubious pleasures of disapproval. In their passion for the children’s welfare, Miss Parry and Mrs Bates, her pink and excitable deputy, did a lot of disapproving: of parents who left their children with nannies too young to know better; of mothers who spent all day at the gym and the hair salon; of fathers who came home too late to kiss their children goodnight. Divorce particularly agitated them: husbands or wives—but especially wives—who abandoned their responsibilities and their beautiful children in pursuit of some cheap and transient sexual thrill. They loved to conclude, their mouths thin and tight, their voices fat with satisfaction, that the children of the affluent can be deprived in a multitude of ways, just as surely as the children of the poor; and at this point Miss Parry and Mrs Bates could grow quite dewy-eyed about the privileges of the poor—who may at least have stay-at-home mothers, and aunts and uncles living cosily round the corner, and granny in the corner by the gas-fire. Durin
g these discussions, I said nothing.

  I stayed for seven years in that garden of children. I remember winter mornings, with the leaves fallen from the catalpa so the braided branches patterned the clean bright sky, and a crust of ice on the grass round the graves which the sun took a while to reach. All of us stamping our numb feet in our Wellingtons, and feeling even through our gloves the tingling of frost on our fingers; and at orange-juice time the cook, who was hugely fat, with a kind of picture-book rightness to her corpulence, bringing us syrupy mugs of coffee made with boiled milk and sugar, rich with a thick creamy scum, and toast that dripped with melting yellow butter.

  And especially I remember summer days, the blossom blowing on the catalpa tree, the smells of exhaust from King’s Road blending with the heavy scent of pollen from the dusty lilies in the flowerbeds, the children bare-legged and freckled and their hair warm to the touch. Hot afternoons that unfolded like tumbled bales of cloth, stretching on for aeons, pleasant but exhausting. And then the children would go, and silence would creep back into the place like a cat coming home for his supper. We’d sweep and tidy the garden in the warm and sudden stillness, and I’d feel a deep contentment washing through me.

  Sinead came in the summer, when the catalpa was just beginning to flower. She was a three-year-old elf: disorderly Celtic hair, black and thickly curling, her face flushed pink by the heat. Her clothes were expensive but none of them seemed to match. She was troubled—unsmiling, virtually mute, with shadowed eyes.

  Sinead’s father had talked quite openly, said Miss Parry, leaning forward on her squashy sofa with an excessive eagerness in her bright bird eyes: and she wanted to share it all with us, every detail, in the interests of the child. The mother, it seemed, had a high-powered job in PR. She’d walked out, gone off with a man ten years her junior, a photographer, abandoning her husband and her child. The other staff were gleefully amazed that any woman could walk out on these two people—that delectable little girl, that father. For her father had caught everybody’s eye, with his easy elegance, the cut of his shirt, his silk tie, gold cufflinks; and there was also something a little bemused and vulnerable about him, as though for a time he’d lost his way—making him vastly attractive to these women with their hunger to nurture. And then there was his palpable affection for his child.