I sip my wine and go back over the conversation with Dr. Carey. I don’t understand why she wouldn’t take Daisy’s illness seriously.
I must have done something wrong. Should I have cried? Should I have sounded more desperate? Maybe I was too assertive — or
not assertive enough? Perhaps there’s a code I don’t know about, some good-mother way of behaving. I once heard a famous female
barrister speaking on the radio: If she was defending a woman accused of murder, she said, she’s urge her to wear a cardigan
to court, ideally angora and fluffy, so no one would think her capable of committing a terrible crime. Maybe there’s a dress
code for taking your child to the doctor that’s unknown to me: a frock from Monsoon perhaps, with a pattern like a flowerbed,
or a tracksuit and pink lipstick.
There’s a clatter from the hall: Richard, closing the door behind him, putting his briefcase down. Relief washes through me;
I’m always so glad when he’s home. He comes in, and I see he’s tired: He’s somehow less vivid than when he left in the morning,
as though the dust of the day has settled on him and blurred him. He’s brought me flowers, blue delphiniums, wrapped in white
paper, with a bow of rustling ribbon. He’s good at choosing things — orchids, silver bracelets: His gifts are always exact.
“Thanks. They’re so lovely.” They’re an icy pale blue, like a clear winter sky, the flowers frail, like tissue. I hold them
to my face: They have the faintest smoky smell.
He kisses my cheek.
“There’s pollen on you,” he says. He rubs at my nose with a finger.
“Was the meeting OK?”
He shrugs. “So-so,” he says.
I’m not sure this is true; he looks strained, older.
“D’you want to eat?”
He shakes his head.
“I’ll get you a drink,” I tell him.
“Thanks. Scotch would be good. Just tonight.”
I smile. “It was that bad?”
He shakes his head. “It was fine. Really.”
He has a still face: He’s always hard to read. I don’t pursue it, don’t know the right questions. There are parts of his life
that are opaque to me.
I get him a large glass of scotch, with ice, the way he likes it. He doesn’t sit. He’s restless — as though the uneasy energy
that’s built up through the day won’t leave him. He leans against the mantelpiece, sipping his drink.
In the silence between us, I hear Sinead upstairs, the clumping of her slippers and water from the shower running away. I’m
worried she will wake Daisy: I’ve become alert again to all the noises of the house — like when you have a baby and skulk
round like a conspirator, and every creak on every stair is marked on a map in your mind.
“We went to the doctor,” I tell him.
“Good,” he says. “How was it?”
“We saw someone new. A woman. She was rather young, I thought.”
“And was it OK?”
“Sort of. Well, Daisy liked her.”
“Excellent,” he says. “There. I told you it would be all right.”
“I’m not sure. I wasn’t happy, really.”
“What is it?” he says, solicitous.” What’s wrong?”
“I told her that Daisy wasn’t eating, and she said I needed nutritional advice. It felt so patronizing. Like she couldn’t
really hear what I was saying. I keep worrying I handled it all wrong — you know, said the wrong thing or something. D’you
think sometimes I don’t express myself right — d’you think I’m not assertive enough, perhaps?”
I want him, need him, to say, Of course not, of course you didn’t handle it wrong — it’s nothing to do with you.
“Darling, you do rather brood on things,” he says.
He’s standing just outside the circle of light from the lamp. Half his face is in shadow and I can’t see what he’s thinking.
“And then she launched into this thing about how it was all psychological,” I tell him.
There’s a little pause.
“Well, maybe there’s something in that,” he says then.
For a moment I can’t speak. The smoky smell of the flowers he’s brought clogs up my throat.
“But how can there be?”
“Look, darling,” he says, “you do worry a lot. Maybe that affects Daisy in some way.”
“I’m worrying because she’s ill. How could that make her ill? I don’t understand. Is that so bad, to worry?”
“Well, I guess it’s not ideal,” he says. “But with your background, it’s maybe not so surprising.”
I hear a sound of splintering in my head. There’s a sense of shock between us. He shouldn’t have said this; we both know that.
But instead of taking it back, he tries to explain.
“You know, all those things you went through. It’s bound to affect you.…”
He turns a little away from me. I see his face in the mirror, but his reflected image is strange to me, reversed and subtly
wrong. The darkness reaches out to me from the corners of the room.
“You’re a bit of a perfectionist,” he says. “We both know that. You want everything to be just right; you can’t just go with
the flow. That’s understandable. It’s perhaps one of the effects of …” His voice tails off.
“One of the effects of what?” My voice is small in the stillness.
“Darling,” he says. “You know I think you’re a wonderful mother. No one could care for those girls better than you. But maybe
sometimes you try almost too hard.”
His eyes are narrow; for a moment he looks at me as though I am a stranger.
“How can you try too hard?” I ask.
“All I mean is — of course it’s a worrying situation. But you get worried perhaps a bit more than you need to. And maybe in
some ways that makes things worse. Maybe you expect things to go wrong.”
There’s a sense of pressure in my chest, like something pushing into me, making it hard to breathe.
“I just don’t see how that could make Daisy ill,” I say.
He hears the catch in my voice. He comes to sit beside me.
“Cat,” he says, “now don’t go getting upset.”
He ruffles my hair, as though I am a child. His hand on me soothes me, as he knows it will.
“What about the hospital?” he asks.
“We’re getting the referral.”
“Well, that’s all that matters, really,” he says.
“What if she puts it in the letter — that she thinks it’s psychological? They won’t take Daisy seriously. If they think that,
no one’ll bother to try and find out what’s wrong.”
“Of course she won’t put it in the letter,” he says. “I mean, these are the experts, aren’t they? She’ll leave them to make
up their own minds. None of this adds up to anything,” he says, and puts his arm around me.
Yet still I feel that something has been broken.
T
HERE’S A ROAD I WON’T GO DOWN
. Poplar Avenue. A harmless name, a name like any other. There’s a house in that road, a wide-fronted house set well back
from the street. There are rooms in that house with doors with panels of glass, panels that once were covered with brown paper.
Richard started to drive down Poplar Avenue once, by mistake, when we were coming home from Gina and Adrian’s and a car crash
in the one-way system had caused a massive tail-back. He turned round when he realized: He knows; I’ve told him some of it,
and he read about it in the papers during the inquiry. But nobody knows all of it, except those of us who were there.
I was thirteen when I went there. My mother couldn’t cope with me — or so she told the social worker, as I lurked behind the
bead curtain in the squalid kitchen of our tiny flat, which I’d tried to clean up, knowing the social worker was coming, hearing
everything. “I need a break,” said my mother. “Just for a month or two. To get myself together.”
The social worker said she admired my mother’s honesty and it probably was for the best. She asked if there was anyone I could
go to. “No,” said my mother. “We only have each other.” The social worker said not to worry, she was pretty sure that there
was a place at The Poplars. And I wouldn’t even need to change schools, so really it didn’t have to be too disruptive.
My mother was drinking three bottles of sherry a day. It had crept up on us gradually, through the years of living in rented
flats, or in rooms at the top of pubs where she worked behind the bar. I knew the story of how we came to be in this predicament
— or, at least, the part of it she chose to tell. Her family had been reasonably well-off —her father was a cabinetmaker —
but they’d been Plymouth Brethren, very strict and excluding. She’d always chafed against it — the beliefs, the extreme restrictions.
She’d truanted a lot, left school to travel round Europe with an unemployed actor, ten years older than she was, who smoked
a lot of dope. Her family had rejected her totally — wouldn’t see her again. In the Vondelpark in Amsterdam, the man had drifted
off. She’d wandered back to London, existed for a while on the edge of some rather bohemian group, people who squatted, who
liked to call themselves anarchists, who had artistic pretensions. She wore cheesecloth blouses, worked as a waitress. It
was the pinnacle of her life, the time to which she always yearned to return. She was still only nineteen when she met my
father. She fell pregnant almost immediately. He went off with somebody else when I was six months old; my mother was just
twenty. She never talked about him, except to say that she wasn’t going to talk about that bastard. I only knew he’d been
part of that arty group and that his name was Christopher.
It was OK when I was younger. She had standards then; she was quite particular. She talked a lot about manners, and she always
laid the table properly for tea. We were happy, I think, happy enough, though there was never much money, and often she left
me alone in the evenings, even when I was young. I remember how as a little girl I’d sit on the bed and watch her getting
ready, perhaps for her evening shift behind the bar, or maybe for a night out on the town with one of her long succession
of temporary men. She’d be all sheeny and glossy, with high heels and a gold chain round her ankle, her skin a sun-kissed
brown from her weekly session at the Fake It tanning studio, with the smell that was then so comforting, so familiar, of Marlboros
and Avon Lily of the Valley. I’d sit on the bed amid the heaps of her clothes and accessories, her belts and bangles and gloves
and floaty scarves. She had a particular passion for gloves, in pastel cotton or silk, with little pearl buttons or ruched
wrists. It was eccentric, perhaps, giving her an air of spurious formality, but she liked to hide her hands, which were always
rough and reddened from the work she did, all the washing of glasses in the sink at the bar. I’d watch how she’d choose from
her glittery sticks of cosmetics, how she’d do her mouth, first drawing the outline with lip pencil, making her narrow lips
a little more generous, then the lipstick, coral bright, eased on straight from the stick. She’d press her lips together to
spread the color out. I thought she was so beautiful. Yet my pleasure in these moments was always shot through with fear —
that one day she’d go and leave me and somehow forget to return. Or maybe the fear of abandonment is something I’ve added
since, thinking back, laying my knowledge of what happened later over my memory of those moments, as frost lies over leaves.
There was one man called Marco, whom she met through a lonely hearts column in the local paper. He was, or claimed to be,
Italian. She always said she liked a man with an accent. He moved in with us. He was smooth, flash, with lots of chest hair
and gold jewelry. The flat was clean and tidy while Marco was with us; sometimes I heard my mother singing as she worked.
When he left, taking all her savings and even the money from the gas meter, and she realized she’d been conned, that all his
protestations of love had been just an elaborate charade, something seemed to die in her. That was when she started buying
sherry instead of wine. She lost her job. Sometimes she’d be virtually insensible when I came in from school, and I’d have
to take off her outer clothes and tuck her up in bed. One day I came home all excited, bursting to tell her I’d won the second-year
art prize. It was one of those moments when life feels full of promise and shiny, like a present just ready and waiting for
you to unwrap. But my mother was snoring on the sofa, the front of her blouse hanging open, and there was no one to tell.
Sometimes she’d be coherent but maudlin, full of platitudes, weeping and saying again and again how she’d tried to give me
a good life but it had all gone wrong, and eating Hellmann’s mayonnaise from the jar with a tablespoon. I started taking money
from her purse, to buy food. I spilled nail varnish on her skirt and she hit me with a clothes hanger. When I got into a fight
at school because someone had called me a lesbian — the usual schoolgirl term of abuse, I shouldn’t have got so upset — she
turned up drunk and belligerent in the school office, demanding to see the headmistress, and had to be seen off the premises
by the caretaker.
That was when the social worker started visiting. The third time she came, she told me to pack and took me out to her car.
The Poplars. It’s the smell I remember: disinfectant, cabbage, adolescent sweat. And the texture of it: everything rough,
worn, frayed. Lino, and thin blankets, and flabby white bread and corned beef, and having to ask for every sanitary towel.
The sofas had springs sticking through, and when Darren Reames in one of his moods ripped off some of the wallpaper, it stayed
like that for months, with a great gaping tear. There weren’t enough electric points: You had to unplug the fridge to watch
the television, so the milk was usually sour. There was never enough to eat. Once I said I was hungry and Brian Meredith told
me not to talk because talking wasted energy.
Brian Meredith ran the place; he’d been in the SAS. He was short, dapper, smart in his red or blue blazers; he was pleasant
to visiting social workers, who liked his ready handshake and his poster that said “I’m the Boss” with a picture of a gorilla,
and his friendly yellow Labrador stretched out on the floor by his desk. He looked like everyone’s favorite uncle — and he
knew how to hit without leaving a mark on you. Looking back, I can see why he got away with it: He took the really difficult
kids that nobody else would touch. Girls with shiny, sequiny names — Kylie, Demi, Sigourney — and wrecked lives. Boys who
set fires, who used knives. All of them lashing out at the people who tried to help them with what I see now was the terrible
rage of those who have nothing to lose: children who couldn’t be consoled. Like Darren, who’d set fire to his school and then
to his house with his grandfather in it. Or Jason Oakley, who said his dad had interfered with him, who kicked a pregnant
care worker in the stomach, so she miscarried; though in the end even Brian Meredith couldn’t cope with Jason, and he was
sent to Avalon Close, an adolescent psychiatric unit with a grim reputation. Girls like Aimee Graves, whose father had held
her head in the loo and flushed it, who came into Care and had seventeen foster placements: Aimee, who was so misnamed, for
no one loved her. Except me, for a while. Except me.