by Dawn French
Piers whispered in Julius’s ear, ‘Well, got off lightly there!’ as he, too, started to pack away so that they might all vacate the neutral meeting room and be done with it.
Anna looked across the big polished table at Julius, who had pulled out his phone in a gesture of affected boredom as Claire had started to speak. Truculent as ever. He was avoiding her gaze, as he typically did when a truth was stinging him. As always, Anna felt a fleeting sympathy for him. Not for any of his awful decisions or behaviour, but for the pathetic wretch he’d become.
The Julius she’d fallen for was at least a substantial person; this husk of a man in front of her was not. She was racking her brains to remember the things she once loved about him. What were they?
Anna had loved that he confided in her back then, that he told her about the bullying he’d experienced at school, about the lack of a father in his life, and the scars that both of those unfairnesses left on him, as well as his actual scars from his childhood heart surgery. Anna had always felt that he was somehow emotionally stunted, stuck at a juvenile stage of his life, since he didn’t seem to be very mature or warmhearted. All the time she loved him, she had defended his actions to herself in this forgiving way. When the love dripped and finally dwindled away, the creeping surety that he was, in fact, a psychopath dawned on her. At the least, he was a sociopath, but he ticked more of the psychopath boxes. Sort of psychopath light.
Here today, though, she didn’t need to go to her default setting of forgiveness. The only real abiding affection she had for him was to do with the fact that they’d made Florence together, and she was beautiful, but she wasn’t here any more and neither was their love.
The lawyers both left the room, and as Anna walked around the table, heading for the door, he took her hand as she passed by. He pulled her gently down towards his face. For a horrific moment, she thought he was going to attempt to kiss her, but he didn’t.
He said, ‘I saw you looking at me. I still do it for you, don’t I?’
Yep, a psychopath, for sure. He couldn’t have been more insensitive. Or wrong.
‘Bye, Julius. I hope you find someone to love you as much as you love you. I couldn’t.’
Anna swept out of the door, leaving all her feelings of inadequacy and doubt in his lap.
Minnie Grows Up
When Minnie was ONE, she fixated on one word and applied it to everything. The word was ‘Wawa’. Hope was wawa. Nanna Doris was wawa. Food was wawa. All animals were wawa. Her body parts were wawa. She sounded like an ambulance on an emergency call. She once stuffed a small bead from a broken necklace of Hope’s in her mouth, and swallowed it before Hope could fish it out. Hope rushed her to A & E, where she was told there was nothing to do but wait for it to pop out the other end. When it did, and Hope showed it in her nappy to an amazed Minnie, she pointed at her bumhole and said, ‘Wawa.’ From then on, all bums were wawas in that small family.
When Minnie was TWO, she could walk and even run a little, and she loved fetching things for Hope. One day, Hope was in the front room with a cup of tea watching TV, and, feeling extra lazy, she thought she’d utilize Minnie’s new skills.
‘Minnie Moo! Can you get the sugar for Mummy’s tea please from the kitchen? Mummy has two sugars in tea, one … two, there’s a good girl.’
Minnie listened carefully and waddled off to the kitchen; she reappeared and placed one grain of sugar in Hope’s tea; then she repeated it, back to the kitchen for another grain, so that Mummy had the right number of sugars.
When Minnie was THREE, she loved climbing, and if Hope lost her anywhere in the flat, it was a surety that she’d be on top of a wardrobe, or dangerously high up a tree in the garden. She loved being taller than she actually was, so would strut about in Hope’s heeled shoes, which is why she fell when she was walking around in Hope’s red weekend wedges. To soothe her injured pride, Hope took Minnie to the charity shop and they bought two more pairs of high-heeled shoes, this time in as small a size as they could find, so that Minnie could strut around in them whenever she liked. One pair were ballroom-dancing-type shoes in silver, very fancy, and the other pair were old-lady beige comfies with a tiny heel. Minnie loved them so much that she slept in them on alternate nights.
When Minnie was FOUR, Nanna Doris gave her a yellow tricycle for her birthday and she hammered around the park on it, forcing Hope to run to keep up with her. She made up a song she sang over and over: ‘My yellow bike, it’s a trike, it’s got spikes, and I like … it.’
She started primary school in September, and spent more time with Nanna Doris while Hope took a couple of part-time cleaning jobs. By then, Hope could finally begin to trust her mum, rely on her again. Hope was nervous when she first suggested some regular childcare to Doris, but she had to take the ultimate trust plunge at some point, and Doris had been sober for three years. Doris and Minnie had a very special bond. Minnie was allowed more Haribos than Hope would approve of and to stay up later than at home – their secret.
Minnie liked school a lot, and already enjoyed learning letters and how to spell her name. She mixed up some words, of course. Hope laughed so loud when Minnie came home at Christmas, after they’d done the nativity, and told her emphatically that she’d spent the morning telling the ‘big story of cheeses …’
When Minnie was FIVE, she proudly told everyone her full name and address. Because she could. She chatted to anyone she met. Once, when Hope took her into a public toilet and they were dutifully washing their hands afterwards, a middle-aged woman came out of the next cubicle, and Minnie said, ‘Well done, good girl,’ to her as she approached the sink.
When Minnie was SIX, she could dress herself and was starting to form her own style. She would add little flourishes, a bow here, a hairclip there, and she’d borrow a scarf from Hope and wear it as a belt. She noticed when other people wore interesting clothes; she was observant about things of beauty. On the way into school one day, she suddenly stood stock still, yanking Hope’s hand back and looking up; and she said, ‘Stop, Mummy, I have to get my eyes full of sky coz I won’t see it again ’til playtime …’
When Minnie was SEVEN, she was very much in love with her group of friends, especially with a little chap in her class called Majeet who wore a navy-blue turban. He was clever and liked words, just like her. The junior school had a prize-giving each year, to encourage the children to be confident enough to walk across the stage. Of course, they structured it so that each child received a prize for something, however arbitrary. One time, they gave a book voucher to Danny Eccles for ‘Using His Handkerchief Regularly’. He was delighted. This year, the legitimate prize for ‘Best Reader’ went to Minnie. Hope and Doris were there, bursting with pride, as she walked across the stage to collect it from the headmistress. Halfway over, however, Minnie stopped and turned to the audience, and said, in a very nervous, wobbly voice, ‘I can’t have this nice prize without saying thank you to Majeet. He reads with me, and it’s for him too. Thank you, Majeet. There he is, that’s him.’ She pointed at him and everyone clapped, and then she continued on to the headmistress. Minnie’s little heart was giant.
When she was EIGHT, Minnie started to be grumpy occasionally and she would lose her temper over unlikely things and stomp off like a teen. Hope tried to clamp down on this bratty behaviour by encouraging her to manage her temper and stay calm. Hope completely recognized herself in eight-year-old Minnie when she took her to one of Doris’s Pentecostal church services one Sunday. The service was loud and boisterous with lots of wonderful singing, and when the preacher was going at it full pelt with the fire and brimstone, several of the older ladies in the front pews started in with the garbled ‘speaking in tongues’ and Minnie suddenly stood on the seat of her pew several rows back and said in a strong, authoritative voice, ‘Carpet-level calm, please, people!’ and sat back down again, mission accomplished. Hope wanted to die a thousand deaths.
When Minnie was NINE, she had a few bouts with ill health; she was extra
tired sometimes and short of breath. Hope waited to see if it would pass, assuming she had some kind of infection. Hope lived in fear that Minnie might ever be ill, because the doctor’s would be the riskiest place, with the questions they might ask about her genetic background, so Hope was pleased when it seemed to pass. Perhaps it was because she felt under the weather that Minnie started to fixate on how bodies work and she became anxious about Hope or herself possibly getting sick … or worse. Minnie asked lots of questions about dead Grandad Zak that were hard for Hope to answer, but she did, as honestly as she could. Hope tried to alleviate Minnie’s worries by reassuring her that nothing bad was going to happen, and even if it did, someone would come to help …
‘What if you got poorly?’ Minnie asked.
‘If I was just lying on the floor?’ Hope replied.
‘Yes, if I couldn’t wake you up, like Nanna Doris couldn’t wake him up?’
‘Well, OK, you would call 999 on the phone, tell them our address, which you are very good at knowing, and then you would wait …’
‘Would you still be asleep on the floor?’
‘Er, maybe, yes.’
‘So … I could eat all the biscuits until the people came …?’
Minnie was going to be OK.
When Minnie was TEN, she started to ask more about her father. She knew he was called Isaac and that he lived in Africa. Hope was longing to tell her all the beautiful things about him: his courage, his kindness, his eye with a flash of green lightning in it; but she only told her tiny fragments, for fear she would want to find him and that wasn’t the promise she’d made to Isaac. Minnie often asked questions about her father when she was in the front of the car with Hope. That way, she could say difficult stuff without having to look at her; it made things easier. Hope answered as best she could whilst she navigated annoying traffic all the way to Nanna Doris’s house.
When they walked in, Nanna said, ‘Did you have a good journey?’
And Minnie replied, ‘Yeah. Mum saw a lot of people on the way called twat.’
When Minnie was ELEVEN, she and her cousin Princess started a vigorous campaign to be allowed to have their ears pierced. Neither Hope nor Glory wanted this to happen so young, but the determined girls conspired to persuade their mothers by drawing pictures of themselves with multiple piercings all over their faces, noses, lips, eyelids, claiming that this was what they really wanted and that they would both definitely go ahead and get this done, exactly as in the pictures, as soon as they were legally allowed to at sixteen, UNLESS they were permitted to have the smaller, simpler dainty ones now with parental permission. It was business. It was a formidable transaction. It was blackmail. And it worked. Both of the cousins had their ears pierced and tiny studs placed there whilst the holes formed. They shook hands on the way out of the shop. Canny. Teamwork.
When Minnie was TWELVE, Hope bought her a kitten. Minnie named it CAT. She was a rescue cat from the Cats Protection League, and was very thin when she arrived. Minnie was devoted to Cat, who slept on her bed and adored her. One morning, Minnie woke up to find that Cat had brought a tiny baby mouse in from the garden. Far from trying to kill or eat it though, Cat was nursing it, protecting it. Minnie researched how to feed a pinkie mouse, and so she religiously fed it watered-down kitten formula from a pipette until it grew. She named it MOUSE and, ironically, Cat and Mouse became inseparable. Hope found the whole situation difficult. A mouse, an actual rodent, being welcome inside the flat …? She was pretty much appalled, but Minnie was insistent that these two strange bedfellows were her very best friends, and she pleaded with Hope to let them be. Again, Hope acquiesced. Of course she did.
When Minnie was THIRTEEN, she owned one cat and between one to thirty mice at any time. She was beginning to flex her independence muscles and would have wild mood swings. She spent too much time in her bedroom alone (except for creatures) and Hope would find endless notebooks full of dark stories about lost love, death and vampires. Sexy vampires, of course. She became morose and monosyllabic. Her skin had also broken out in spots and, because she’d had flawless skin since she was a baby, this came as a huge blow. In an effort to help, Hope tried to introduce more fruit and vegetables into Minnie’s diet, much to her dismay. Minnie only liked Coco Pops for breakfast; nothing else would do. One morning, before school, Hope prepared a fruit salad for her instead. She arranged it in the shape of a rainbow on the plate, using different fruit to form the coloured arches, raspberries, then mango cubes, then kiwi, then blueberries, then melon, then strawberries as the top arch. She was pretty pleased with herself. Minnie walked into the kitchen rubbing her eyes and yawning. She stopped still when she saw the fruity platter.
‘Um. Excuse me. What the actual …?’ she said.
‘I thought we could share it. Y’know, maybe start a health kick together?’ her mum replied hopefully. After all, this expensive fruit had put a big dent in Hope’s shopping budget.
Minnie blinked a lot, as if in total shock, then grabbed her school bag and coat and flounced out, shouting back over her shoulder, ‘Thanks for ruining my whole bloody life!’
When she returned that same evening, she was contrite to a degree, and told Hope, ‘Look, sorry, right? But the thing is, I love you and I would never kill you or anything, but please never cause me trauma like that again.’
It was a year before Minnie ate fruit. Not because she didn’t like it, but because her pride prevented her.
When Minnie was FOURTEEN, she wrote rap songs about sexism and being a girl, which she performed to her mirror. Very, very occasionally, she would run a couple of rhymes past her mum, or practise them with Princess; otherwise, it was a private activity. She also waged a war of loathing against her own body. She disliked so many things about herself: her forehead, her thighs, her feet, her growing breasts, her fingers and on and on. Hope noticed this slide into low self-esteem and decided to step in.
She knocked on the bathroom door one evening when Minnie was in the bath, and asked her to come and join her when she got out. Minnie trudged into Hope’s bedroom in her PJs with a towel around her wet hair. Hope invited her to stand in front of the full-length mirror alongside her. Hope was in her PJs too. Minnie was reluctant until Hope gently persuaded her with, ‘Please. For me …’
Minnie stood next to her mother and looked in the mirror.
Hope said, ‘What do you see?’
‘A lump. Look at me. God. Stupid fat lump.’
‘Well, OK, that’s NOT what I see, but OK, it’s your body, you see it as you see it, you are the only one that has a right to it, no one else does. BUT … can I just ask you: if someone on the bus called Princess a stupid fat lump, what would you think of them?’
There was silence for a moment …
‘Bully.’
‘Yeah, a bully. You seem to be prepared to bully yourself about your own body. So can I ask you, just for a couple of weeks, to try and stop that? And maybe, Minnie Moo, if you can’t exactly love yourself yet, maybe you could at least not hate yourself, eh? Maybe you could try to be a bit tolerant and at the very least be kind to Minnie? Be a bit more gentle? Maybe think about the fact that she might feel a bit raw sometimes and need some understanding? Be a good friend to her, to you, just as you would for Princess. You deserve that at least, surely?’
Hope held her breath. Had she pushed it too far?
Minnie squirmed a bit, but then muttered, ‘Yeah. S’pose so.’
‘Thanks. Wanna know what I see, out of interest?’
‘No.’
‘Well. I’m going to tell you. I see a strong-minded, unique, interesting, talented, mighty young woman with a huge heart, who’s a bit confused about who she is, and while she’s trying to find out, which takes time, she’s a bit anxious, and that fearful bit of her makes her unkind to herself. But y’know what? Even THAT is lovely, because it shows me you’re not at all conceited. Can’t bear conceited people.’
Minnie raised the ghost of a smile. Hope felt confident en
ough to continue.
‘And, by the way, as it happens, what I also see is BEAUTY. Solid beauty. Twenty-four carat. But then, I see a lot of me in you, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?’
Minnie laughed. ‘Shut up, Mum.’
Hope went on, ‘Seriously, li’l darlin’, what YOU are is an extraordinary ray, and that is a ray which doesn’t obey the ordinary laws of refraction. It’s different.’ She whispered: ‘And better! I learnt it in school, I’ve never forgotten it, and now I’m looking right at it. My own extraordinary ray. Yes, thank you, Lordy Lord!’
Minnie’s eyes were welling up, and Hope saw it. Perhaps her sentiments had landed in Minnie’s heart after all.
Hope finished it with, ‘So, we’re agreed, yeah? You ain’t gonna beat yourself up any more, right? In fact, why don’t you just leave that to me …?’
With that, she grabbed Minnie and pulled her down on to the bed and they wrestled and giggled and shouted ‘WAWA’ until they were drained.
When Minnie was FIFTEEN, she got a Saturday job working on a market stall selling clothes. Her uncle knew the woman who owned the stall, Bibi, and she agreed to give Minnie five pounds per hour, cash in hand. On top of selling the gear, Minnie offered to customize some of the denim jackets. Bibi was hesitant at first. She thought it would ruin the jackets, and that altering them was just silly, unnecessary additions, but when Minnie bought one of the jackets and customized it for herself, wore it on the stall and had tons of praise and interest in it, Bibi saw the value. She gave Minnie one to do at first and Minnie embroidered the pockets and lapels with tattoo designs of hearts and anchors. It sold for four times the price within an hour of being on a hanger. So Bibi gave Minnie a free rein and some float to buy the appliqué and beads and various other bits ’n’ bobs she needed to do her best work. They came to a deal where Minnie would get five pounds for every jacket sold.
