Read Bad Mothers United Online
Authors: Kate Long
After they’d all gone home Will really crashed, and I only just got him into bed before he was sparko. I, on the other hand, was buzzing, couldn’t settle at all. I
wondered whether a Horlicks might help – that was always Nan’s drug of choice – so I took myself to the kitchen.
It was dark outside already. I’d have quite liked to do some therapeutic tidying but Eric had cleared every surface and there was nothing left to put away. So while the kettle boiled I
stood by the window and looked out at the garden. The moon was full and bright; you could pick out the groove in the lawn caused by Will’s trike wheel, and the row of clothes pegs he’d
stolen and planted in the side border. Come tomorrow I’d have to go out and dig those up. And drag the wheeliebin round the side, and scrape up the cat poo by the gate. Now the cover of
leaves was coming away I could see that the back fence had sagged more than ever; it was so low you could have stepped over it. Which meant that would need sorting at some point. Not now, though.
There were more important things to fix than a larch lap panel. Once upon a time I might have taken the broken-down fence as a sign about me and Eric, the state of our relationship. But that dream
was past. Across the other side of Bolton my ex-husband lay on a metal bed and waited for visiting time to crawl round.
I made my Horlicks and drew down the blind. I still had Will’s cards to Sellotape round the mirror.
As the train pulled into York I tried Walshy, but the phone just rang out. Obviously he’d have switched off his mobile because of the funeral, maybe forgotten to switch
it back on again. I reconsidered. Roz was off-limits for a moan till I’d seen her face to face. Gemma sounded as if she was in bits already; I wasn’t going to bother her. Who else
could I talk to? Not Mum – all I’d get there was a guaranteed bollocking which I didn’t need on top of everything else. Not Dad, obviously. Not Daniel. Who was there left to
save me from the wretchedness of my own thoughts?
The carriage door swished open and an old woman came through. She must have let a draught in with her because the things on the table began to stir; my essay notes lifted and the voucher
flipped over and the paperback slid off the heap of scarf and fell on the floor. I bent to pick it up before she trod on it, and something fluttered out. It was a postcard of a Dalmatian dog
wearing a bowler hat. I recognised it at once. Martin had sent it at the start of the summer, I suppose to cheer me up. He’d written simply,
Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll.
The optimist sees the doughnut, the pessimist the hole.
It had made me laugh, it had worked. Martin always knew what to say. I always felt better for speaking to him.
Suddenly I realised where I needed to be this dark and lonely night.
KAREN: I found this under the kitchen cupboard yesterday. Is it your ladle, Mum? Mum?
CHARLOTTE: It’s not. She said it had a shell bowl and brass round the handle. This is plain nickel.
KAREN: Is it, Mum? Put it in her lap, Charlotte.
CHARLOTTE: There you go, Nan. What do you think? Do you recognise it?
NAN: You’re a bonny girl.
CHARLOTTE: (laughs) Thanks.
(Sound of spoon dropping to the floor.)
CHARLOTTE: Stay where you are, I’ll get it.
NAN: My granddaughter’s in York.
CHARLOTTE: Is she?
NAN: She’s very clever. They’re all very pleased with her.
CHARLOTTE: That’s good to hear.
KAREN: I think you’re tired today, Mum?
NAN: Aye, I am.
KAREN: What are you having for your tea? It’s Saturday, so what do you have here on Saturdays? Isn’t it Sandwich Selection? That’s your favourite, I think?
And fruit cake or plain sponge.
CHARLOTTE: Sounds yum!
(Pause.)
KAREN: Did the vicar come this week?
(Pause.)
CHARLOTTE: I brought you some flowers, Nan, did you see? I’ve put them on the windowsill. So you won’t knock them over.
(Pause.)
KAREN: Bertie’s just gone past, wagging his tail. You like Bertie, don’t you?
(Pause.)
CHARLOTTE: (whispering) God, she’s bad this afternoon.
KAREN: She has these blank days. She could be different again next time I come.
CHARLOTTE: Let’s hope so. Look, I’m just nipping downstairs, get a Twix out of the machine. Do you want anything?
KAREN: No, I’m fine.
(Long pause.)
NAN: Eeh, it’s a struggle to keep my eyes open today. (Pause.) What time is it?
KAREN: Coming up to four.
NAN: Aye.
(Pause.)
KAREN: What is it?
NAN: (sighing) I don’t remember who you are, but I know I love you.
KAREN: Well. That’ll do for now. We’ll sort out where we are tomorrow, I expect.
CHAPTER 11
He was in better fettle than I’d seen him since the accident. When I stuck my head round the door of the ward he was actually sitting in a wheelchair, trying to turn the
pages of a magazine using his uninjured hand. It turned out they’d earlier had him practising transfer from bed to chair and back again, and though the effort had taken it out of him
physically, mentally he was on a high.
A nurse appeared carrying a sheet of paper. She attached it to his clipboard, then turned to me.
‘Before he goes home, Mrs Cooper, we need to know he can get himself on and off the toilet and in and out of bed independently. Otherwise we’re not allowed to release him.’
‘I see.’ I felt as if I was standing in the path of an advancing steamroller. Just because it was still a way off didn’t mean it wasn’t going to flatten me
eventually.
‘Release me back into the wild?’ said Steve.
‘Only if you behave and do your physio like a good boy.’ She picked up the empty pill pot on his locker, then bustled off and left us to it.
‘All right?’ I said.
‘Oh aye, champion. Never better.’
‘What hurts the most?’
‘My shoulder. Definitely.’
I cast a glance at his leg which was splinted and about twice the size it should have been. ‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Karen, I’m in pain all over. But the shoulder’s agony.’
They’d fitted him with a replacement steel ball joint, like the Terminator.
‘What do they say about the knee?’
‘They’ve managed to keep it free of infection, so it doesn’t look like they’ll have to amputate. I won’t be able to bend it much, though. I’ll never be able
to run, or kneel, or go down the stairs one-two, one-two, you know.’ He mimed a walking action with his fingers. ‘Physiotherapist woman reckons I’ll have to do exercises every day
to get any movement back in the joint at all. Which would be OK except for the fact it nearly kills me.’
‘Don’t the drugs help?’
He beckoned me closer and I leaned down to him. ‘I tell you what
would
help.’
‘What? What is it, love? Just say the word.’
‘If you came in here with that thin white shirt and no bra on.’
I sat back. ‘Clearly not everything’s broken, then.’
‘Oh, not by a long shot.’
‘Bloody hell, Steve.’
‘Aw, come on. Would you deny an ex in distress? I’ve missed you, stuck in here. I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t come and visit me. Anyway, it’s not as
if Lusanna’s going to be walking in on us any minute.’
The moment I’d dreaded. I glanced round the ward. ‘She’s probably been too upset to come in. Not everyone can cope with hospitals. Do you not remember when our Charlotte was in
here having Will? I more or less had to drag you across the car park and shove you through the doors.’
‘’S’all right, Karen. I know the score, I know she dunt want to see me. She texted me.’
‘She
texted
you? She broke up with you in a
text
?’
He shuffled uncomfortably in his chair. I could see the pain lines etched on his face. ‘To be honest, I weren’t that surprised.’
So he’d already got the measure of her, had he? Heartless bitch. You didn’t walk away from folk you cared about when they were damaged. That was the time you stood by them, if you
had any decency in you.
He said, ‘Thing was, she’d been through it before. She’d had this boyfriend six year ago, came off his bike and he were in a coma, and she was praying he’d recover and
then he woke up and the doctors thought he were sound. Sent him home, everything back to normal on t’surface, and then it turns out he’s completely changed. It’s like he’s
had a personality transplant. Moody, violent, he’d go for days without speaking a word to her and then explode over nowt. Put his fist through a window, kicked a neighbour’s bird-table
over. Started hitting her. One night he pulled a knife so she threw him out. It broke her heart. She said she couldn’t go through it again.’
Lusanna’s lips tight with unspoken words. The sound of her boots on the hospital stairs as she ran away.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry for her. But none of that’s true in this case, is it? You haven’t changed. You’re still you.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes! Never mind your dodgy limbs. What matters is you’re still Steve.’
He looked hopelessly at his splint, then at his sling. ‘It’s nice of you to say so, Karen. But this is going to be a long haul. However they manage to patch me up in t’finish,
I’m not going to be t’same daft bugger I was before. Stands to reason.’
Across the ward an elderly man tried to manoeuvre his feet into slippers. It was impossible to think of wiry, active Steve hobbled, confined. That would be hard for him to bear. I remembered his
jaunty walk as he came down our front path, the way he’d do a little skip up onto the doorstep. Gone forever, that had.
‘You never know, the crash might have knocked some sense into you.’
‘You reckon?’ His hand reached out for mine, grasped it hard. ‘I do love you, Karen. I do need you.’
‘I know,’ I said.
For the first few seconds I couldn’t work out where I was. I knew this wasn’t my bed – not my Bank Top bed or my York one – because the mattress was
firmer and the light coming in under the curtains was wrong and the smell around me was different: male, and inexplicably orangey. Next to me, his head hidden by the duvet, someone stirred.
That’s when it all came back to me.
I’d been to Martin’s place twice before because every year he held a social evening for his tutor group. The flat itself was part of a Georgian block, tall and elegant with arched
windows and black railings round the front area. The stone doorstep was worn away in the centre, a detail that made me wonder about all the feet that must have passed over it in the last two
hundred years. Martin opened the door in jeans, slippers and a jumper that looked as if it had been unravelled from a dog blanket and then knitted up again.
‘I was passing,’ I said. ‘Can I come in?’
He’d hesitated for a moment, then stepped aside. ‘Of course. Though you’ll have to excuse the mess.’
Once I was in he offered me a lager, and when I refused, milk. ‘Well, you won’t touch my vile coffee, will you?’ he said, and we laughed. I hadn’t drunk milk in a glass
since I was about ten. I had to pick my way across to the sofa because the floor of his living room was covered in notes and books, spread out in what I could tell was a really important order. I
suppose he can do this because he lives alone, and no one’s going to tidy them away or kick them around or spill juice or scribble on them. I asked what he was working on and he said it was
a chapter on courtly love for an A level study guide. He said it was hard to simplify the concept enough, to make it bite-size and instantly accessible because the whole process went against the
grain for him, that the study of literature was about expanding English and opening up and exploring every nuance and cadence and technique. He said, ‘Synopses are anathema to me,’
and postured like an actor, which made me laugh again.
I said, ‘It must be hard for you having to dumb-down to your students,’ and he said he never dumbed-down for me.
Still, though, he didn’t ask me what was wrong even though he could see I was on the edge. And I didn’t want to just launch in. The signals weren’t right yet.
More out of nerves than anything I picked up a photo of his daughter and asked how she was going on.
That seemed to break the ice. Martin came and settled at the other end of the sofa from me and launched into how Isabella had been having a problem with her knee joint, and she could have an
operation on it now or wait for six months and see how it developed because it might be that the bones would fill in themselves and an operation wasn’t needed in the end. Except Martin
wanted it dealing with straight away whereas his ex-wife thought they should hang on, and she’d gone to see another specialist without telling him and they’d had a major row about it.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t handled it well,’ he said.
I asked him what Isabella wanted and he said, ‘She’s siding with her mother, of course. What nine-year-old volunteers to have an operation? Although, actually, I’m always in
the wrong. She always takes her mother’s part.’
I said, ‘I bet she doesn’t,’ and I told him about how I used to play my parents off against each other, pretending to agree with whoever wasn’t in the room. It was a
power-thing, the thrill of being able to wind an adult up. Sometimes if I was angry with a friend at school or with a teacher or just feeling generally down, that would be the trigger to start
stirring. Why do you hurt the people you love? Because you can.
I said, ‘Has she got you to promise anything recently, or give her a present?’
Martin nodded. ‘She has, actually. I handed over one of these Baby Annabell dolls last week.’
‘Well, there you go. Ten-to-one she’ll have been showing off to her mum and using dolly to make
her
feel bad. You don’t live under the same roof, you don’t get
to see. This situation you’re describing, it’s not like your daughter thinks, Mum’s a hero and Dad’s a villain. Honestly. It doesn’t work like that. From a
child’s perspective, parents are like a set of scales; you’re balancing one against the other all the time.’
He looked at me and said, ‘So young and yet so wise.’ But he wasn’t taking the piss. You could see he was genuinely grateful. I told him some more, about how I’d twice
threatened Mum I was going to go and live with Dad, even though I’d never in a million years have moved into the junk-pit that was his house and he’d never have had me. Then Martin
listed some of the gifts he’d bought Isabella since the divorce, and described how she’d always put on this total lack of interest as she unwrapped each one. ‘She’s like
an empress accepting tribute,’ he said. ‘Nothing engages her. I don’t necessarily ascribe it to the separation; she was becoming spoiled long before we got divorced. And
I’m very aware the clock’s ticking here. She’s nearly ten now, which is coming towards the end of primary school, and once she turns into a teenager I shan’t have a clue.
I see these knots of giggling girls in the shopping centre, and frankly they scare me.’
‘Sounds like Isabella needs someone to pull her up on a few things. She’s old enough to say thank you, for a start. This pretending you’re not important in her life,
it’s a bluff. Don’t fall for it. And there is time, but she needs putting straight before she goes all moody and hormonal.’
‘Are you offering?’
I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. Even so it felt good to be the one giving advice, sitting in this lovely book-lined room on this squashy sofa and being treated as if I actually
knew what I was talking about. Taking my mind outside my own problems. And I had this flash of an idea: me escorting Isabella round the museums, coffee bars, clothes shops, letting her chat,
offering wisdom and guidance. Maybe letting her play with my make-up or crimpers. She’d love that. She’d open right up. Then I could put her dad’s case. And maybe – now,
this was a plan – we could go out, the three of us, Martin as well, take a boat up the river, or nip over to Fountains Abbey for a picnic or something. Have a trip away from the city where
she could talk on neutral territory.
Shit, did I dare suggest it? Was he really seriously asking me to help him?
I suppose it was all the tension of the last few hours building up, but suddenly the earnest tilt of his eyebrows made me want to giggle. ‘What?’ he said.
I tried to stiffen my face, but that only made me worse.
‘I was thinking,’ I managed. ‘Right, if we got this boat . . .’
‘ A
boat
? I’m sorry, what boat, Charlotte? Have I missed something?’
That made me giggle harder. ‘Any boat. Like, if we hired one and went up the river together, you, me and Isabella, I could talk to her; it would be like counselling but fun.’
Martin started laughing as well. ‘Well, I’m intrigued. You want us adrift? For what particular purpose? Flotation therapy?’
‘Forget the boat. We could hire bicycles instead.’
‘Why bicycles?’
‘To keep us moving while we chatted, because I think that can be quite productive. I’ve read that somewhere – no, stop it – being in motion alters your focus and makes
you feel more relaxed. Or we could hire some horses. Does Isabella like horses?’
‘She’s potty about them. But really, me on horseback? Have you lost your wits, girl?’ He had no idea how hilarious his outraged face looked.
‘I’m not – you could stay behind – what I’m trying to say . . .’ I fell back against the sofa, shaking with mirth. But the sofa was squashier than I’d
anticipated and I found myself rolling right into him, actually bumping shoulders.
I’ve been in close proximity to Martin before but I’d never felt this jolt of electricity that shot through my body now. The room seemed to pitch, the laughter vanished in an
instant.
‘Oh. Oh my God, Martin.’
‘Charlotte.’ His voice was a warning note.
‘No, listen, it’s time, I have to tell you something.’
‘I think it’s probably better if—’
‘Martin, this is important. I really like you. Seriously.’
Within seconds he was on his feet, staring down at me.
‘OK, right. Hold it there. Don’t say any more. You’re muddled and emotional. You’ve clearly had a bad day which I guess you came here to tell me about and I
didn’t let you – I’m sorry, I’ve had rather a rough one myself and I didn’t quite feel up to it – so I bear part of the blame here. I should have allowed you
to vent. But strictly speaking, you oughtn’t to be here. Not in my flat, not over a non-academic issue.’
At last full realisation dawned. What the hell had I been thinking? I’d invaded his personal space and totally taken advantage. I’d embarrassed us both, I’d put his job in
danger. Fool, Charlotte. Selfish, selfish fool.
‘Oh, God,’ I wailed.
‘No, don’t panic. Come on. You know I enjoy our chats in the Department. Only there are protocols. It could do us both harm if we disobey them.’
‘You hate me now! You think I’m rubbish!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. The stress you’ve been under, I’m not surprised you were looking for somewhere to offload. But I’m not the right person. Not here, at this
late hour. You need to be somewhere you can think straight. Perhaps the time’s come to make an appointment with Student Services? They’re a great team.’
‘I hear what you’re saying: you never want me in your office again.’
‘Of course I do. I’m looking forward to our next tutorial. As always. Truly, Charlotte, everything’s OK.’
‘
I’m
not. Not now.’
‘Trust me, you are. Go home and get some sleep. I suspect you need it.’
I stood up, and to his credit he didn’t back away. ‘My head’s just such a scramble. Sorry. God, Martin, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing.
It’s been a week like you wouldn’t believe and I’m all over the place. But that’s no excuse. It’s out of hours and I should never have come round. I’m such an
idiot. Only, I’ve always looked up to you and I thought, I thought . . .’
‘Forget it. It’s wiped. It’s unrecorded history. And don’t waste any more angst on me or on this evening. You’re better than that. Yes?’
I couldn’t answer.
‘Come on, Charlotte. I’m not letting you go till I get at least a nod.’
Eventually, when I’d calmed down, he’d led me to the door and let me out over that worn-away stone step. He’d watched me down the road – probably to make sure I
didn’t turn and run back in tears or something nutty like that – and given me a last, reassuring smile before I rounded the corner. I thought I would probably die of shame right there
on the pavement. The last person on earth who’d believed I was sane and level, and I’d contrived to mortify myself in his very own living room.
So I’d gone straight back to the house and slept with my landlord.
Next to me the duvet stirred again, then flopped back. Walshy’s head poked out, flushed and ruffled. He sniffed suspiciously.
‘How long’s it going to be before my carpet doesn’t stink of Cointreau?’ he said.