Wake Up, Mummy (7 page)

What saved me, however, was the love of my grandparents, aunts and uncles. Although it couldn’t completely compensate for my parents’ blatant dislike of me, it did help me not to mind so much. Sometimes, after having had to listen to a prolonged bout of my mother’s catalogue of complaints against me, I’d cheer myself up with the thought that someone as wonderful as my grandmother wouldn’t love someone as horrible and useless as my mother believed me to be. I couldn’t quite manage to convince myself that my mother’s opinion of me was wrong, but there was at least a possibility that it might be. My grandmother was the single most important person in my life, and I knew that as long as I lived with her, I’d be all right, whatever my mother said or did.

AT THE AGE
of six, after two years of living with my grandparents, I was confident and happy. But that was about to change.

My grandfather was working away from home on a contract, and for some reason my grandmother hadn’t gone with him. So she and my youngest aunt were in the house when I was woken up one night by a strange
noise. I lay in bed listening, trying to identify the sound. At first, still confused by sleep, I thought it might be my grandmother singing. But she had a good voice and although it did sound a bit like her, I realised after a few moments that it was really more like wailing than singing.

‘What is it?’ My heart seemed to stop beating as my brother appeared like a ghost in my bedroom doorway.

‘I think it’s someone crying,’ I answered, still hoping I might be in the middle of a very realistic dream.

Suddenly, the crying stopped, and someone screamed, in what was unmistakably my grandmother’s voice, ‘No! Please, no,’ and then, ‘Anna!’

I wanted to shut my eyes and cover my ears to block out the terrible sound of my grandmother’s distress. But I loved her more than anything else in the world, and I knew I couldn’t just ignore her when she had called my name. Trembling with fear, I slid out of my bed, reached out to take hold of my brother’s hand and crept down the stairs with him.

As we stood huddled together by the open kitchen door, I could see my aunt leaning against the sink, one arm raised in front of her face. My grandmother was near the back door, trying to fend off my mother, who was standing very close in front of her, making quick, jabbing motions towards her with a carving knife.

‘They’re
my
fucking children,’ my mother shouted, suddenly lunging forward and drawing the tip of the knife along my grandmother’s arm. ‘And if I want to take my fucking children to live somewhere else, you can’t stop me.’

I tried to stifle a whimper as a line of dark-coloured blood began to trickle towards my grandmother’s wrist. Immediately, my mother spun round towards the open door, slamming her fist down on the kitchen work surface and shouting, ‘Get your shoes and coats! We’re leaving.’

My brother tightened his grip on my hand and we both began to cry.

‘Stop snivelling,’ my mother snapped, taking a few quick steps towards us and grasping my shoulders roughly as she propelled me back up the stairs. ‘We’re going to live somewhere else. It’ll be fun. It’s an adventure!’

She was drunk and her words were slurred and unconvincing. In any case, who in their right mind would want to go on the kind of adventure that began with their mother attacking their grandmother with a knife? It was obvious that my grandmother had been trying to persuade my mother to leave us behind. But my mother was determined, and when she was determined there was no point anyone arguing with her or trying to make her see sense.

A few moments later, still in our nightclothes, with our bare feet crammed into our shoes and our arms shoved hastily into the sleeves of our coats, Chris and I followed our mother back down the stairs, where our aunt and grandmother were huddled together in the kitchen doorway, holding each other and crying softly.

‘Please, Judith,’ my grandmother whispered. ‘Please don’t take the children. Why don’t you come back for them tomorrow, when you’re feeling better?’

‘Because I want to take them
now
, you old witch,’ my mother shouted. She staggered slightly as she spoke, lurching towards the kitchen doorway as she tried to steady herself, and causing her mother and sister to back hastily away from her.

‘Go! Go!’ my mother snapped at my brother and me, opening the front door and pushing us out ahead of her into the darkness. As we stumbled down the garden path and out through the gate on to the pavement, my mother hissed at me, ‘Don’t bother looking back at the old bitch.’ But I couldn’t help myself. Glancing quickly over my shoulder, I could see my beloved grandmother standing in the front doorway, leaning against my aunt and sobbing as though her heart would break. Then, gripping Chris’s hand, I followed my mother’s swaying path down the road.

We seemed to have been walking for hours – although we were probably only a few streets away from my grand-
parents’ house – when I plucked up the courage to ask where we were going.

‘We’re going to live with Carl,’ my mother told me, in an exaggeratedly cheerful tone. ‘You’ll like him.’ She concentrated for a moment on negotiating her way around a post box before adding, ‘I met him at the pub’ – as if that might be a surprise to anyone who knew her – and then, ‘You’re going to have to behave yourselves, though, and remember that you’re bloody lucky he’s prepared to let you come and live with us.’

I didn’t feel bloody lucky. I felt as though the most terrible thing I could ever have imagined was about to happen to me. But I was wrong, because the reality turned out to be far, far worse than anything I could possibly have imagined.

WE TRUDGED DOWN
one cold, deserted, dimly lit street after another, until my mother finally stopped on the pavement in front of a large, imposing brick house and then pushed us impatiently up the path ahead of her. I looked around me at the house’s neat, well-maintained front garden and felt a flicker of optimism. Perhaps, for once in her life, my mother had found a decent boyfriend. Maybe Carl was completely different from all the other drunks and low-lifes who were the only people she ever seemed to know. He certainly lived somewhere that was even smarter than my grandparents’ house, smarter, in fact, than anywhere I’d ever been with my mother.

As she lifted the polished brass knocker and rapped twice on the front door, I took a step backwards to stand behind her. But she reached round and grabbed the sleeve of my coat, pulling me back beside her again. At that
moment, a light came on in the hallway, illuminating the stained glass in the long, narrow windows on either side of the door, which was opened by a grey-haired man wearing a striped dressing gown and leather slippers.

‘The kids and I have had a bit of a mishap,’ my mother told him, putting her arms affectionately around our shoulders and speaking slowly to try to mask the slur in her voice. Then she added, in what sounded like an embarrassing parody of the way someone posh might have spoken, ‘I need to call my friend to give us a lift. Would it be an awful inconvenience if we used your phone?’

It had seemed too good to be true, and it was. My mother didn’t know the people who lived in the house. She wanted to make a phone call and she’d chosen to knock on that door simply because, unlike most of the other houses in the surrounding streets, there were still lights on in some of its downstairs rooms.

My heart sank. But the man must have seen how miserable and exhausted Chris and I were and taken pity on us, because he stepped back into the long, high-ceilinged hallway and stood, smiling slightly at us, while my mother made her phone call. Then we waited on the pavement for Carl to arrive in his car, and he drove us to the grim, run-down terraced house where he had his lodgings.

What I couldn’t understand for a long time after that was why my mother took Chris and me with her. It
certainly wasn’t because she loved us and couldn’t bear to be parted from us as she set out on her new life with Carl. In fact, she knew almost nothing about us; she’d never tried to get to know us and she had no interest in our likes and dislikes. And if someone had offered to buy us in exchange for providing her with a year’s supply of alcohol – which, admittedly, would have been quite a substantial offer – she’d have sold us without a second thought.

Later, I realised that taking us to live with them had probably been Carl’s idea. He must have been aware of my mother’s resentment towards my grandmother – it was something anyone who ever spent more than a few minutes with her knew all about. So maybe he played on that to manipulate her into doing what he wanted. It isn’t hard to believe that my mother – who was never someone to think things through and imagine what might be involved in the long term – would have agreed readily once the idea was planted in her head. Taking us away from my grandmother must have seemed like the perfect opportunity to get back at her and to vent some of her anger and hostility towards her family. What it might mean to my brother and me, however, was something that wouldn’t have even crossed her mind, and certainly wouldn’t have changed it if it had.

What was much more difficult to understand was what my mother could possibly see to attract her in Carl. He
was in his fifties, with dirty-looking grey hair, uneven, nicotine-stained teeth and yellowish-grey skin that seemed at some time to have stretched until it was several sizes too large for his body. His arms and neck were completely covered in tattoos, and he wore thick glasses that magnified the permanently cold expression in his bloodshot eyes. He was very unattractive – in a grimy, creepy way – with his sallow skin, wispy hair, which was badly cut and too long, and the dark shadow of stubble that always covered his chin.

That first night when we arrived at his miserable flat, he must have thought he’d won the lottery. Somehow, he’d managed to get himself a young, pretty girlfriend who’d brought with her – most importantly of all to Carl, as it turned out – her vulnerable six-year-old daughter. And not only did his new girlfriend share his love of drinking, she was also usually too drunk to notice what was going on around her and too indifferent and self-engrossed even to think about trying to protect her children.

When we arrived at Carl’s place, he opened a door off a dirty, dimly lit passageway and, without even looking at us, told Chris and me, ‘That’s your room. Go to bed.’ My mother didn’t come into the bedroom with us or try to reassure us that everything was going to be all right. She simply pushed at the door with her foot, nodded towards
the narrow single bed in what was just a small, dingy box room, and told us we’d have to sleep head to toe. Then, giggling and having already forgotten we even existed, she followed Carl into what I assumed was his bedroom and shut the door.

Chris and I stood in the middle of the bare, cold little room and looked at each other. Then, trying not to cry, we climbed into the narrow, damp-smelling bed, fully clothed. Chris fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow but, although I was exhausted, I felt too uneasy and frightened to sleep. So I lay there on my back in the dark, tears dripping through my hair and on to the dirty sheet, and thought about my grandmother.

I didn’t even know where we were. Sitting in the back of Carl’s car on the way to our new home, I’d looked out of the window, searching for a familiar landmark that might help to orientate me. But I only knew a few of the streets around my grandparents’ house, and I was already lost by the time we’d walked to the house of the man who let us use his phone. So I hadn’t recognised anything as we sped through the dark, empty streets in Carl’s car, and I knew that, even if I did manage to phone my grandmother at some time, I wouldn’t be able to tell her where we were. And if she didn’t know where we were, she couldn’t come and find us, which meant I might never see her again.

I tried to stifle the sob that rose up from the pit of my stomach, and at that moment the door of the box room was pushed open just far enough to allow a thin shaft of light to fall across my brother’s face where he lay at the foot of the bed. I shut my eyes. Much as I might be longing for someone to comfort me, I wasn’t going to give my mother the satisfaction of thinking I’d ever forgive her for dragging me from my grandparents’ house in the middle of the night, and for taking me away from everyone and everything I loved.

I could smell the stale odour of cigarette smoke and alcohol that surrounded my mother wherever she went. But she didn’t seem to be coming into the room, so I opened one eye just far enough to be able to make out the outline of her body through my eyelashes. And then I realised that the figure standing in the doorway was not my mother, but Carl. I quickly shut my eye again and my heart began to race as Carl staggered into the room and bumped against the side of the bed.

A moment later, I felt his hand moving under the bedclothes. I wanted to turn on my side so that I was facing away from him, but instead I lay perfectly still, as he touched my legs and then suddenly pushed his rough-skinned fingers inside my knickers. I was shocked, and terrified that he’d hear the thumping of my heart and know I wasn’t really asleep. He continued to touch me for
what seemed like an eternity, although in reality it was probably only a few seconds. Then he withdrew his hand and left the room, shutting out the light as he closed the door silently behind him.

My brother hadn’t stirred in his sleep, and I lay there feeling very alone and trying to understand what had just happened. I was used to living with my mother’s erratic, often inexplicable behaviour, but what Carl had just done seemed odd, even by my mother’s standards. The room had a musty, dirty-clothes sort of smell, which suggested it hadn’t been used for some time, so I decided eventually that Carl, who was clearly drunk, had probably just remembered he’d left something in the bed and had been trying to find it without waking us up. It wasn’t a very convincing explanation, but it was the only one I could come up with.

I could still hear in my head the sound of my grandmother’s sobs and I could see the anguished, heartbroken expression that had been on her face as my mother dragged Chris and me down the garden path earlier that night. And before I fell into an exhausted, fitful sleep, I silently prayed that when my mother woke up in the morning she’d decide she didn’t want us to live with her after all and she’d take us home.