Sweet (21 page)

‘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 hill 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:

‘I have a little boat and her name is Gloriette

Across the brave horizon her prow is boldly set

Gloriette, sail away, to where your fortunes lay

Then come back safely ’cross the bay.’

Ren looked thoughtful, then blew a raspberry. We both laughed in sheer delight.

‘That’s my girl!’

I started crying then so quickly strapped her back into the buggy, turned around and set off back in the direction I’d come. Story of my life. I started wheeling her along the seafront pavement in the direction of Hove until we came to the Pirates Playground and paddling pool.

I knew I’d made a mistake the minute we sat down. The place was full of those posh old birds who like to think of themselves as Yummy Mummies; the kind of old broads who look right down their noses at young single girls who invest in looking good, and dismiss them as bimbos. But then they’re so desperate, they even have to make having kids something that adds to their sex appeal! Like the tots are tiny pimps or something. As for that MILF crap – yuck! They started that themselves, obviously. It’s like, ‘I may have a kiddy and be staring the menopause in the face, but I’m not slack, honest!’ My arse!

It’s meant to be ‘chav’ parents that are loud and sweary, but these broads broadcast every boring thought they have at the tops of their voices; all that mindless crap about how child-friendly France is, and how dyslexic kids are actually super-bright rather than thick, and how the additives in oven chips turn people into serial killers. It’s like they think they’re being permanently watched by some CCTV camera that’s doing some perfect-parenting test on them. Well, from where I was sitting, they were far from perfect; one of them was responding to a pre-school brute, who was repeatedly screeching at the top of its voice, with a tinkling laugh and a ceaseless, ‘That’s a lovely scream, darling! – can you do it again, only louder this time?’

Another was leeringly droning, over and over, ‘India, do you want to do a wee? Do you, India? Want to do a wee? Or would you rather do a poo?’ And though they, the mums, don’t swear, the kids themselves have filthy mouths – the boys are often perverts. Rather than curtail their creativity or whatever, the mums let them run riot; one of them here, called Rory apparently, was running around with his nasty little cock out shrieking, ‘Look at my willy, isn’t it silly!’ – in front of little girls and everything! And all the stupid cow mothers were just laughing appreciatively! Then one of them started breastfeeding a dirty great ‘baby’ big enough and ugly enough to open beer cans with its teeth!

Me, I was staring at the rapist-in-waiting Rory through narrowed slits of eyes, just daring him to come over to me and Ren and show us his manky miniature dick. The little shit obviously had a death wish, because eventually he capered right up to us and waved his nasty chipolata right in Ren’s amazed face. ‘Look at my—’

I moved so quick I surprised myself. Before he could say the offending word I had him by the throat and was hissing in his face, ‘If you don’t put that dirty little worm away, I’ll yank it off and stick it so far up your bum you’ll have an umbilical cord. There’s ladies here –’ and with this I rattled Ren’s buggy so roughly she yelped – ‘and I don’t care how your slag of a mum’s brought you up, you don’t do that in front of ladies!’

With this I jumped up, grabbed the buggy and hightailed it out of there. I wasn’t scared, not of what a bunch of wusses like that would do, but I suddenly couldn’t stand the way I felt about them. Not the hate or the repulsion – that was easy and familiar and enjoyable. No, this time there was envy too – cos of Ren. Don’t get me wrong – the last thing I wanted was for her to grow up like those posh prats India and Rory. But I wanted her to have the freedom that they had, to choose what they were gonna do with their lives. And what choice was she gonna have growing up on Ravendene, with me as a mum?

As if on cue, to remind me of my shortcomings, she vomited her Happy Meal all down herself. At the same time a seagull dropped a message on my head. It was a proper wake-up call.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you home. Proper home.’

Susie looked like she might try and change my mind when I announced that Ren should stay with Cathy, but then she must have seen my face, really seen it, and made the wise decision to keep her mouth shut. And it wasn’t like she could never see Ren again. Now Cathy knew I wasn’t going to try and keep Ren I reckoned she’d be happy to visit a bit more often. When she took Ren away, I lay down on my bed to have a think. I could hear Susie and the kids tiptoeing around. But I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself – far from it. Rather, I was feeling I’d done the right thing. For once.

I’m not pointing the finger here – that sort of life was fine for some people. My mum had always wanted the life she had, basically – OK, she’d probably have chosen to have a bit more money and a man who stuck around a bit longer than his sperm did, but she had always wanted to have kids young and have a family around her – hence her insane recent desire to conceive yet again, and our eventual trip to the abortion clinic when she realized that the economic practicalities were beyond her. (How long ago that seemed now!) But that just wasn’t me, and it never really would be. And even if I could have made a wish and made myself like that, for Ren’s sake, I wouldn’t have. That was the truth. I cared about myself more than I cared about anyone else – and the idea of changing that seemed like suicide. I reckon being big enough to know I’d be a crap mum was about the best parenting skill I had. (Irony or something, Kizza would have said.)