The Wrong Mother (2 page)

There’s no time. The bus is too close, and it isn’t slowing down. I flinch, turning away from the huge wheels and using all the power in my body to roll away. I throw my handbag and it lands a few feet in front of me. I am lying in between it and the bus, and it occurs to me that this is good, that I am a barrier—my phone and diary won’t get crushed. My Vivienne Westwood mirror in its pink pouch will be undamaged. But I can’t be lying still. I must be moving; the tarmac is scraping my face. Something shunts me forward. The wheels, pressing on my legs.

And then it stops. I try to move, and am surprised to discover that I can. I crawl free and sit up, preparing myself for blood, bones poking through torn flesh. I feel all right, but I don’t trust the information my brain is receiving from my body. People often feel fine and then drop dead soon afterwards; Nick is for ever accosting me with gloomy anecdotes from the hospital to that effect.

My dress is shredded, covered in dust and dirt. My knees and arms are grazed, bleeding. All over me, patches of skin have started to sting. A man is swearing at me. At first it appears that he is wearing beige pyjamas with a funny badge on them; it is a few seconds before I realise he’s the bus driver, my almost killer. People are shouting at him, telling him to lay off me. I watch and listen, hardly feeling involved. There has already been shouting in the street today. This afternoon, screaming in public is normal. I try to smile at the two women who have nominated themselves as my main helpers. They want me to stand up, and have taken hold of my arms.

‘I’m all right, really,’ I say. ‘I think I’m fine.’

‘You can’t sit in the road, love,’ one of them says.

I’m not ready to move. I know I can’t sit in the road for ever—the team from the Consorzio are coming, and I have to cook supper for Nick and the kids—but my limbs feel as if they’ve been welded to the tarmac.

I start to giggle. I could so easily be dead now, and I’m not. ‘I’ve just been run over,’ I say. ‘I can sit still for a few seconds, surely.’

‘Someone should take her to a hospital,’ says the man who hit the side of the bus.

In the background, a voice I sort of recognise says, ‘Her husband works at Culver Valley General.’

I laugh again. These people think I have time to go to hospital. ‘I’m fine,’ I tell the concerned man.

‘What’s your name, love?’ asks the woman who is holding my right arm.

I don’t want to tell them, but it would sound churlish to say so. I could give a false name, I suppose. I know which name I would give: Geraldine Bretherick. I used it recently, when a taxi driver was showing too much interest in me, and enjoyed the feeling that I was taking a risk, tempting fate a little bit.

I am about to speak when I hear that familiar voice again. It says, ‘Sally. Her name’s Sally Thorning.’

It’s odd, but it’s only when I see Pam’s face that I remember the firm, flat object that rammed into my ribs. That’s why I fell into the road. Pam has a face like a bulldog: all the features squashed in the middle. Could the hard flat thing have been a hand?

‘Sally, I can’t believe it.’ Pam crouches down beside me. The skin around her cleavage wrinkles. It is dark and leathery, like a much older woman’s; Pam isn’t even forty. ‘Thank God you’re all right. You could have died!’ She turns away from me. ‘I’ll take her to hospital,’ she tells the people who are bending over me, their faces full of concern. ‘I know her.’

In the distance, I hear someone say, ‘That’s her friend,’ and something in my brain explodes. I stand up and stagger backwards, away from Pam. ‘You hypocrite! You’re not my friend. You’re an ugly, evil gremlin. Did you push me into the road deliberately? ’ Today it is normal to slander people in the street. But the onlookers who until now have been keen to help me don’t appear to know this. Their expressions change as it dawns on them that I must be mixed up in something bad. Innocent people do not fall in front of buses for no reason.

I pick up my handbag and limp towards the car park, leaving Pam’s astonished face behind me.

When I pull into Monk Barn Avenue with my cargo of children, an hour later than usual, I still have that lucky-to-be-alive feeling, an unreal glow that coats my skin, even the patches that are throbbing, where the blood is congealing into scabs. It’s similar to how I felt after I had Zoe, with diamorphine coursing through my veins: unable to believe what has just happened.

I am pleased to see my house for the first time since we bought it. Relieved. Given a choice between being dead and living here, I would choose the latter. I must remember to say this to Nick next time he accuses me of being too negative. I still think of it as our new house, although we’ve lived here for six months and it’s only a flat, part of what must once have been a spacious, elegant house that had some integrity. More recently, a team of architectural philistine vandals has divided it into three, badly. Nick and I bought a third. Before we moved here we lived in a three-hundred-year-old three-bedroom cottage in Silsford with a beautiful enclosed garden at the back that Zoe and Jake loved. That Nick and I loved.

I pull up beside the kerb, as close to our house—flat—as I can get, which today is reasonably close; it won’t be too much of a slog getting the children and their bags and toys and comfort blankets and empty bottles to the front door. Monk Barn Avenue is two neat rows of four-storey Victorian terraces with a narrow strip of road in the middle. It wouldn’t be so narrow if there were not cars parked bonnet to bumper along both sides, but there are no garages, so everybody parks on the street. This is one of my many gripes about the place. In Silsford we had a double garage with lovely blue doors . . .

I tell myself not to be absurdly sentimental—garage doors, for Christ’s sake—and turn off the ignition. The engine and radio fall silent and in the silence the thought rushes back: Pam Senior tried to kill me today.
No. She can’t have.
It makes no sense. It makes as little sense as her screaming at me in the street.

Zoe and Jake are both asleep. Jake’s mouth is open as he snores and grunts softly, his plump cheeks pink, sweaty brown curls stuck to his forehead. His orange T-shirt is covered in stain islands, remnants of the day’s meals. Zoe, as always, looks neater, with her head tilted and her hands clasped in her lap. Her curly blonde hair has expanded in the heat. I send her to nursery every day with a neat ponytail, but by the time I arrive to pick her up the bobble has vanished and her hair is a fluffy gold cloud around her face.

My children are breathtakingly beautiful, which is odd because Nick and I are not. I used to worry about their obvious perfection, in case it meant they were likely to be snatched by a ruthlessly competitive parent (of which there are many in Spilling), but Nick assured me that the blotchy-faced, snot-encrusted little characters at Kiddiwinks nursery look every bit as irresistible to their parents as Zoe and Jake do to us. I find this hard to believe.

I check my watch: seven fifteen. My brain is blank and I can’t decide what to do. If I wake the children, either they will be manic after their early evening recharge and up causing chaos until ten o’clock, or they’ll be groggy and whiny and have to be rushed straight to cot and bed, which will mean they will miss their supper. Which will mean they will wake up at five thirty and shout ‘Egg-IES!’—their pet name for scrambled eggs—over and over again until I haul my exhausted body out of bed and feed them.

I pull my mobile phone out of my handbag and dial our home number. Nick answers, but takes a while to say, ‘Yeah?’ His mind is on something else.

‘What’s up?’ I ask. ‘You sound distracted.’

‘I was just . . .’ Full marks to me. Nick is too distracted, apparently, even to finish his sentence. I hear the television in the background. I wait for him to ask me why I’m late, where I am, where the children are, but he does none of these things. Instead, he startles me by chuckling and saying, ‘That is
such
bollocks! As if anyone’s going to fall for that!’ I know from long years of experience that he is talking to the
Channel 4 News
, not to me. I wonder if Jon Snow finds him as irritating as I sometimes do.

‘I’m outside, in the car,’ I tell him. ‘The kids are both asleep. Turn the news off and come and help.’

If I were Nick, I would be outraged to find myself on the receiving end of a command like this, but he is too good-humoured to take offence. When he appears at the front door, his dark curly hair is flat on one side, which I know means he has been lying on the couch since he got in from work. On my phone I can still hear Jon Snow.

I lower my window and say, ‘You forgot to put the phone down.’

‘Jesus, what happened to your face? And your dress? Sally, you’re covered in blood!’

That’s when I know I’m going to lie. If I tell the truth, Nick will know I’m worried. He’ll be worried too. There will be no chance of pretending it never happened.

‘Relax, I’m fine. I fell over in town and got a bit trampled, but it’s nothing serious. A few scrapes and bruises.’

‘A
bit
trampled? What, you mean people actually walked over you? You look a state. Are you sure you’re okay?’

I nod, grateful that it never occurs to Nick not to believe me. ‘Shit.’ He sounds even more concerned as his eyes move to the back seat of the car. ‘The kids. What shall we do?’

‘If we let them sleep, we could be sitting in the car till nine o’clock and then they’ll be up bouncing on the sofa cushions until midnight.’

‘If we wake them, they’ll be a nightmare,’ Nick points out.

I say nothing. I would rather have the nightmare now than at nine o’clock, but for once I don’t want to be the one to decide. One of the main differences between me and Nick is that he goes out of his way to put off anything unpleasant, whereas I would always prefer to get it over with. As he regularly points out, this means that I actively seek out the problems he sometimes gets to avoid altogether.

‘We could order a takeaway, bring a bottle of wine outside and eat in the car,’ Nick pleads. ‘It’s a warm night.’

‘
You
could,’ I correct him. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re married to someone who’s too old and knackered and grumpy to eat pizza in her car when there’s a perfectly good kitchen table within reach. And why only one bottle of wine?’

Nick grins. ‘I could bring two if that’d swing it.’

I shake my head: the party-pooper, the boring grown-up whose job description is to spoil everyone’s fun.

‘You want me to wake them up.’ Nick sighs. I open the car door and ease my wounded body out. ‘Jesus! Look at you!’ he shouts when he sees my knees.

I giggle. Somehow, his overreaction makes me feel better. ‘How did an alarmist like you ever get a job working in a hospital? ’ Nick is a radiographer. Presumably he would have been sacked by now if he made a habit of startling prone patients by shouting, ‘Jesus! I’ve never seen a tumour that size before.’

I open the boot and start to gather together the children’s many accessories while Nick makes his first tentative advance towards Zoe, gently urging her to wake up. I am a pessimist by nature, and guess that I have about twenty seconds to get through the front door and well away from the danger zone before the children detonate. I grab all the luggage and my house key (Nick has, of course, forgotten to put the door on the latch and it has swung closed), and head for shelter. I sprint up the path with nursery bags and blankets trailing in my wake, let myself in, and, gritting my teeth against the pain that I know will come when I try to bend and unbend my stinging knees, begin my ascent.

Number 12A Monk Barn Avenue has one extraordinary feature: it consists almost entirely of stairs. Oh, there’s a strip of hall, and a narrow stretch of landing, and if you’re really lucky you might stumble across the odd room, but basically what we bought was stairs in a good location. A location, crucially, that we knew would guarantee places at Monk Barn Primary School for Zoe and Jake.

Perversely, I already resent the school for making me move house, so it had better be good. Last year it was featured in a television documentary, the verdict of which was that there were three state primaries—Monk Barn, one in Guildford and one in Exeter—that were as good as any fee-paying prep school in the country. I’d have opted to pay, and stay in our old house, but Nick had a miserable time as a teenager at a very expensive public school, and refuses even to consider that sort of education for our children.

From our bathroom window there’s a good view of Monk Barn Primary’s playground. I was disappointed when I first saw it because it looked ordinary; I’d uprooted my family to be near this place—the least they could have done was carve some scholarly Latin texts into the concrete.

I wince as I drag my battered, stiffening body up the first stretch of stairs, past the downstairs loo, the bedroom that Zoe and Jake share, and the bathroom. The centrepiece of our flat is a large rectangular obstruction that looks as if it might have been sculpted by Rachel Whiteread. Inside this white-walled blockage is the house’s original staircase that now leads to flats 12B and 12C. It annoys me that there is a big box containing someone else’s stairs inside my home, one that eats up half the space and means I keep having to turn corners. When we first moved here, I kept leaping to my feet as I heard what sounded like a stampede of buffaloes on the landing. I soon realised it was the sound of our neighbours’ footsteps as they went in and out, that the thudding wasn’t coming from inside my new home—it only sounded as if it was.