The Home

by Sarah Stovell

  She let me hold her, but wouldn’t look at me.

  I carried her into the living room and sat down with her on the sofa, trying to soothe the tears away. It hurt to see her like this, knowing that she’d felt so abandoned, that she’d been crying for me for ages and I hadn’t come.

  She did calm down eventually, until the sobbing was just huge and occasional, as if she would suddenly remember how upset she’d been and let out one last gasp at the thought of it. I looked around at the chaos of the room and thought about my mother still lying outside in the grass and said, ‘I suppose we’d better go and see how she is.’

  She was still flat out. Not dead, but it seemed to me that there were long spaces between each breath, and each breath was shallow and not how it ought to be. I put Jade down on the ground and let her toddle over to the hedgerows while I knelt beside my mother and shook her. ‘Mum,’ I called. ‘Mum, wake the fuck up, you fucking disgrace.’

  My mother didn’t move. I noticed her trousers were wet and realised that she had pissed herself. I stood up and kicked at her stomach – not hard, but enough to rouse someone sleeping the sleep of ordinary people.

  I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and sent a text to Ace:

  Mum passed out on ground outside house. Looks almost dead to me. Can’t sort her out. Got Jade to look after. Come over, would you, and deal with this shit for me. I’ve had enough.

  Ace replied straight away: Give me five minutes. I’ll be there.

  I took Jade’s hand and led her up to the flat. Thank God for Ace. I didn’t know where any of us would be without him.

  There was no food in the flat, except for a few packets of noodles and two tins of tomato soup. Nothing at all for Jade’s lunch – or breakfast, as she’d clearly not been fed yet today. I’d need to go down to the Spar on Newlands Road, or maybe get Ace to drive me to the big Asda on the roundabout. There was money in my pocket from this morning, but I wasn’t spending that. It was supposed to be my mother’s job, making sure there was food in the house. I opened the hall cupboard, where my mother kept her cash in a toy treasure chest that had a tiny, flimsy padlock; her idea of security.

  Inside was just a single twenty-pound note. I knew how much she’d been working recently. There ought to have been hundreds, maybe even thousands. She’d blown the lot.

  I took the note and shoved it in the back pocket of my jeans. There’d be no point waiting for Ace and heading to the supermarket with only twenty quid. I wanted to get out of here quickly, anyway – let him deal with my mother, let him bring her back to consciousness while Jade and I were out of the way and didn’t have to see it.

  Quickly, I got Jade dressed in a stripy top and dungarees, then washed her face and brushed her teeth. I carried her down to the lobby and wheeled the pushchair out from under the stairs, the place where everyone in the building stored the stuff they couldn’t take up to their flats. I bundled Jade into it and clipped the straps together, and noticed again how badly it was in need of a wash: dirt and stale biscuit crumbs filled the creases in the seat; the fabric was stained with apple juice; and even the handles were somehow oddly grimy, perhaps from when my mother had been pushing Jade around while suffering the sweats of withdrawal.

  I wheeled the pushchair outside and there was my mother, still lying unconscious on the ground. I felt as if I ought to be crying, or at least alarmed enough to have called an ambulance, but when I looked at my mother like that, now with saliva trailing from the corner of her mouth, all I felt was disgust and a need to not let Jade see it. Jade deserved more than this, I thought, as I walked her away towards the main road.

  It was only half a mile to the Spar, past the park where there were never any children, and up the hill to the parade of shops, the chippy and the launderette. That was where I saw him, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette.

  My first thought was that he hadn’t noticed me; I could turn and leave before he did, but then I thought perhaps it would be good to see him like this, away from work, away from Ace. Maybe we could talk properly and I could apologise for having spoken so harshly to him that morning.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  He looked up, surprised. ‘Bella.’ He said my work name. ‘Do you live around here?’

  ‘Yes.’ I made a gesture with my hand roughly in the direction of the flat.

  I noticed he was staring at Jade. I said, ‘This is my sister. I’m looking after her for the day. Giving my mum a rest.’

  He eyed Jade doubtfully, as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe me. He shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other while he finished his cigarette, and I became gradually more and more conscious of the fact that this bloke had seen me naked, had paid me to suck his dick, had paid me for the chance to perfect his own oral sex technique so he wouldn’t have to be too nervous when he did finally meet a girl he wanted to impress…

  I looked away from him.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry about what I said to you this morning. I know I shouldn’t have. It’s just…’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said, still keeping my gaze fixed on the ground. ‘Sorry I was rude. I…’ I wanted to say I like you, too, but it felt all wrong to say it here, while he was leaning against the wall of the launderette and the smell of vinegar and chip fat hung all around us, in some cruel mockery of romance.

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  I waited a while, to see if he was going to ask me out.

  He threw his cigarette butt in the gutter and said, ‘Maybe I’ll see you next week.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  He glanced again at Jade. I couldn’t work out his expression, but it looked to me like he couldn’t wait to get away, and I knew at that moment I was never going to see him again.

  38

  Annie

  Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was obsessed with my mother. At the home, they gave us all therapists. Hope and I had conventional, talking ones, because we were old enough. Lara had play therapy. ‘She has to act out her mum’s murder using little Playmobil babies and dolls’ houses,’ was Hope’s guess. She was probably right, though obviously we never knew what really went on.

  My therapist was called Lucy and she came to see me for an hour twice a week. Usually, she let me lead the way. She’d say, ‘How are you this week, Annie?’ and I’d say, ‘Fine, thank you,’ and she’d tilt her head to one side and ask, ‘Fine?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, not fine. Not exactly,’ and then I’d tell her everything that had pissed me off or upset me since I last saw her.

  Now, though, she’d obviously decided we’d been dancing around the edges of my life too long and the time had come to wade into it.

  ‘I’ve been wondering … Do you think about your mother, Annie?’ she asked.

  I could feel myself harden, my whole body becoming rigid, as if I were turning to rock, or perhaps a tree. She’d have to cut me down if she wanted that story.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not often.’

  This wasn’t true. I thought about her a lot. I could write a book about it.

  Significant Moments in My Life with My Mother

  By Annie Cox

  Part One

  My mother, Caitlin, was eighteen when she had me; young by anyone’s standards but folly for someone like her, who was so vulnerable she was usually only one bad night away from total collapse. My father, she told me as soon as I was old enough to listen, was a scoundrel. Caitlin liked that word. It had something of the nineteenth century about it, a time when women were pure and helpless, and too easily undone by the wicked desires of bad men.

  Like most scoundrels, my father left when my mother announced she was pregnant. She always paused at this point in the story, allowing me to fully absorb the deep dreadfulness of my father and begin to hate him, but my grandma said Caitlin became pregnant on purpose. They’d been two years into the new millennium, for God’s sake, and my grandmother had made absolutely certain that her feckless daughter – always a disappointm
ent, brought up for quiet studiousness, but preferring to lurch from one sexual drama to another– was on the pill. ‘But she’d become terrified he was going to dump her, so she stopped taking it and made sure she got pregnant. She actually thought he’d marry her if she did this, but of course he didn’t. His parents were furious. Everyone spoke of abortion; his parents said they’d pay for it, so she could have it done straight away – but she refused. She made herself out to be the only one taking responsibility for this terrible accident.’ Caitlin always said she’d ‘fallen pregnant’. A strange term, which added to all the mysterious accidentalness of the business.

  And so there it was. My mother became the victim, and the heroine, of her own story. Abandoned into motherhood too young, all hopes of a career and the love of a good man dashed, she descended into a yawning pit of melancholy. But she did her best. Always, she did her best. And her best was too much for her. She would kill herself, doing her best for me.

  When I was born, my grandmother bought me a bag full of gifts, one of which was a small, cuddly pig. Every afternoon, so my grandmother said, Caitlin would lay me on the old brown sofa, wave the pig in my face and say, ‘Look, Annie. Daddy.’ No one knew what the purpose of this was, apart from perhaps her own amusement, but she was reportedly devastated when, at ten months, my first word turned out to be ‘Daddy’. She threw herself on that old brown sofa and howled her sorrow into its dusty fibres. ‘After all I’ve done,’ she wept. ‘After everything that happened.’ As if I, the baby, had done this just to spite her.

  I wondered often if this was when my mother started to hate me.

  My mother had a chequered career. Sometimes she worked, and sometimes she didn’t. She tried a bit of everything to keep the wolf from the door: shop work, cleaning, telesales, waitressing, caring, cooking in a chip shop, admin … ‘You name it, I’ve done it,’ she said. ‘And what for? Work every hour God sends and still there’s not enough to pay the bills.’

  We were often having our electricity, gas, or telephone cut off. Caitlin went to money-management classes at the Job Centre but they were no good. ‘If you’re going to learn how to manage money, there needs to be some money there to manage in the first place. They told me to open three bank accounts – one for rent and bills, one for food and one for saving. These people have no sodding idea, Annie. Once I’ve paid rent on this place and we’ve eaten three meals a day, there’s nothing left. Three bank accounts, for God’s sake! Three bank accounts on five pounds eighty-five an hour. What do they think this money is? Fucking elastic? Bastards, they are, Annie. Bastards. They think we’re skint because I don’t manage my money properly. I’m skint because I’m not bloody paid enough.’ And then she curled up in a ball on the sofa and cried for the evening, and for days after that, there was no food.

  One of the problems with the jobs was they never lasted very long. My mother would become ill again, or she’d get laid off because the bosses couldn’t afford to keep her anymore, or she’d fall out with someone who annoyed her – she was flammable, my mother – and get fired. So she’d end up back on Jobseeker’s, and that meant there’d be nothing. No food, no heat, no light. Nothing. Every penny had to go on rent. ‘Your bloody father. He needs to pay some bloody child support before we end up on the streets.’

  She had no idea where he was. ‘He went off to university,’ she said. ‘Probably earns a fortune by now. Pockets the lot of it without a thought for the mess he left me with.’

  The mess, of course, was me.

  But then there were the times when she’d suddenly think we were rich. One morning, when I was about eight, she burst into my room at 7.30, opened the curtains and said brightly, ‘Don’t go to school today, Annie. Stay with me. Let’s live like the queens we are.’

  I sat up in bed and squinted against the light. My mother had her back to me. She was peering into my wardrobe, muttering something, then suddenly she spun around and said, ‘None of this will do. We’ll go out and get you something decent, shall we?’

  ‘Alright,’ I said.

  ‘Something that will make you look beautiful.’

  I liked the sound of this. I’d never looked beautiful in my life before.

  My mother was wearing a bright-pink cotton dress and a tiny cream-coloured cardigan – I later knew it was called a bolero. Her hair was down and her eyes had a wild, excited look about them. ‘We’re rich, Annie!’ she cried, then pulled me out of bed and danced me around the room. ‘We’re rich!’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘We are. Let’s buy you a dress, and then we’ll have lunch somewhere posh and expensive. Or maybe tea. You like tea, don’t you?’

  ‘Tea’ to me meant corned beef and chips, but I had a feeling my mother was talking about something very different. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I love tea.’

  ‘Then we’ll go somewhere wonderful. That big hotel by the river.’ She laughed and rained kisses down on my face. ‘Come on, darling. Get dressed and clean your teeth. We’ll go in a taxi, shall we?’

  I nodded.

  Excitement had made my mother sound like a young woman. Her dress was crisp and smart. She was smiling in a way I had hardly seen before, but the wear and tear was still there on her face.

  ‘Come on!’ she said again. ‘Get dressed!’

  I got dressed and cleaned my teeth and then we walked down to the Oxford Road and hailed a cab. It dropped us outside The Oracle, a place I didn’t often go – a sterile, shining shopping centre, everywhere luring us in with its promise of the brand new.

  Caitlin took my hand. We walked quickly, purposefully, until we came to a shop that displayed girls’ dresses in the window. ‘This looks good,’ she said, and took me inside.

  We chose a white cotton dress with pink flowers and a black net petticoat that made it puff outwards. Wearing it – which Caitlin made me do straight away – I felt like a frog in a ballgown. Uncomfortable. I barely recognised myself.

  Caitlin hurried me out again, to a taxi rank where we caught a cab to London. ‘That big hotel by the river, please,’ she said to the man. She turned to me and winked, and held my hand as we travelled. Her joy was frenzied. She shook with it.

  I had no idea how we’d suddenly become so rich. The hotel, when we arrived, was lavish and pillared, and guarded by smiling men in suits and hats. They asked if we’d booked, and my mother said importantly, ‘No, but I am Caitlin and this is my daughter, Annie,’ and the guards stood by and let us in, as though these were the names of people who mattered.

  My mother giggled. ‘See, darling?’ she said. ‘See?’

  I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  Someone showed us to a dining hall, set out with round tables draped in ivory linen. Surrounding them were palm trees and golden cherubs, the gold ceiling held up by marble columns and weighted down by chandeliers.

  A black-uniformed waitress seated us at a table. I watched my mother and copied her as she tucked her serviette into her collar and let it hang over her chest, thick and heavy as a blanket. The waitress returned to take our order. ‘Afternoon tea for two?’ she asked.

  My mother said, ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘What tea would you like with that?’ And the waitress recited a list so long it sent my head spinning: royal English, rooibos, mint rooibos, chocolate mint rooibos, rooibos red, lemon verbena, orange and passionfruit, Ceylon orange, Lapsang souchong, Assam, Earl Grey, Lady Grey, Moroccan mint, chai, chamomile flower, jasmine tea, rose tea, Darjeeling…

  My mother said, ‘Have you got normal tea? Yorkshire tea’s what I like.’

  The waitress’s lips twitched, as if she found this very funny. ‘We don’t have Yorkshire tea. If you like ordinary breakfast tea, I recommend the royal English.’

  ‘Fine. We’ll have that, please.’

  The waitress went away.

  Over in the corner, a man was playing the grand piano.

  ‘Listen.’ My mother leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes serenely and began softly humming th
e tune he was playing, mostly getting it wrong.

  She sat like that for ages: leaning back, eyes closed, gently swaying, humming the wrong notes at the wrong time. I noticed a few people around us look at her curiously. Nervously, perhaps.

  The waitress brought our tea, laid out on a three-tier silver stand. Crustless sandwiches cut into small rectangles, some white, some brown, some with grains, some with olives, some with tomatoes, all sat on the bottom tier; four tiny scones in the middle; and on top, delicate cakes like none I had ever seen before – pastel yellows and greens and deep chocolate browns, with shards of caramel and drizzles of dark-pink sauce.

  It was as if I’d lived with my nose pressed up against a sweet-shop window for years, and now someone had opened the door and let me in.

  While my mother went on in her musical trance, I reached over and took a chocolate cake. It was soft in my hand, a small velvet luxury. My eyes filled with tears. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I saw someone else simply bite into theirs, half a cake in one go, so that’s what I did too and suddenly, my mouth erupted into life. Tastes I’d never known before ran over my tongue. I swallowed, and chocolate fondant slipped down my throat. Nothing I’d ever eaten had prepared me for this. My stomach received its new riches, then ached with the desire for more.

  I did it again. Chocolate, mint, caramel, strawberries, cream.

  My mother was still there on her chair opposite, eyes closed and swaying.

  I went on eating.

  The next day, things went wrong again. My mother didn’t get out of bed and I didn’t go to school; then the landlord came round and shouted through the letterbox until I opened the door.

  ‘Your mum in?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. ‘She’s not well.’