I stood there, smiling my most important smile ever. I tried to make my whole self smiley; the corners of my mouth ached with
smiliness.
Lesley showed me the ad. It said, “Catriona is a bright, pretty teenager with a real artistic talent. Her record of school
attendance is excellent. Because of her troubled past, Catriona can be rather demanding at times. Catriona needs firm and
consistent parenting.”
I thought about this, lying in bed at night in the orange light of the street lamps, chilly under the candlewick, missing
Aimee. I let myself think, just for a moment, about my foster family, what they might be like: nice food and lots of it, gentleness,
and a soft bed with a duvet that tucked in at the back of your neck. And I wondered what it meant to be demanding.
No one was interested; no one even inquired about me. No one wants to adopt a fourteen-year-old girl who can be rather demanding,
however bravely she smiles. I told myself I’d never thought it would happen, really: There was a messy, secret shame in admitting
that I’d hoped.
I left the day I turned sixteen. Two months before my birthday, Kevin from the Leaving Care team came to see me. My mother
had been asking about me, he said. She’d moved abroad, but she wanted to make contact, and did I want her address? I said
I didn’t, really. It was my decision, he said. He sorted out my benefit, found me a flat above a chip shop in Garratt Lane,
and got me a furniture grant from a charity.
My birthday was Lesley’s day off, but she came to say good-bye. She held me close for a moment, a quick, hard, awkward hug.
It embarrassed me; I wanted her to let go of me. But then, when she’d let go of me, I wished that she’d hold me again.
“I hope you get them,” she said. “Your wishes, the things you wanted. I’m wishing them for you too.”
That evening, in my flat in Garratt Lane, I sat at my flimsy new table and such loneliness washed through me, that I briefly
longed to be back at The Poplars, just to have people there.
Bur slowly I put some kind of a life together. I left school once I’d done my GCSEs. I did some temping — I’d learned to type
at school. There were always boyfriends. I guess I was attractive enough: I wore my skirts short and my blond hair long and
did whatever they wanted. I used to worry that my clothes, my skin even, stank of the chip shop, but the men didn’t seem to
care. I was, I suppose, promiscuous: I needed company in the evenings; I could only sleep through the night with somebody
beside me. And if some of them were married — well, I reckoned that was their responsibility. I never told them about myself;
if they asked, I made up something, recasting my life as unexceptional. After a month or two, they usually drifted off, sensing,
I guess, something in me that would forever elude them. But from time to time, there’d be one who said he loved me, and then
I’d stop returning his calls, or say I was washing my hair, and after a while, he’d drift away, however keen he’d been.
Sometimes I thought I’d ring Kevin and go and find my mother. I’d start to picture a reconciliation: her welcome, her apology,
her wrapping me in her arms, and her scent of Marlboros and lily of the valley. But then I’d think how she’d neglected me
and lied to me, and such rage would flare in me, and I knew I wouldn’t do it. So the days dragged on: a life of offices, all
looking much the same, and vaguely unsatisfactory sex that was paid for with meals at the Aberdeen Steak House and glasses
of Bacardi. It was lonely, but it was better than I was used to.
There are moments when everything changes. I believe that. Moments of destiny, of serendipity. And one hot summer evening
much like any other, when I’d just got off the bus in Garratt Lane, I bumped into Miss Jenkins.
“Catriona. What a nice surprise.”
She still had the hoops and the hippie cardigan, and she seemed so pleased to see me. She asked what I was doing. I shrugged
a little, told her about the temping, though not the men.
She stood there for a while, her steady eyes on me. There was this school, she said. A nursery school in Chelsea: private,
expensive. Not really the sort of thing she approved of: Nursery education ought to be free for everyone. But the headmistress
was a friend of hers, they’d been at college together, and she happened to know they had a post going. I reminded her that
I only had three GCSEs. She said it didn’t matter, it was a nursery assistant post, they needed someone who could help with
the art. The reference wasn’t a problem, she said; she’d be more than happy to be my referee. I felt cool air against my face:
I remember that, a sudden shift in the weather. We neither of us had anything to write on, so I borrowed her Biro and scribbled
the number on the back of my hand.
T
HE SCHOOL
was in a hushed street off King’s Road. At the turn of the road, there was a cottage, old and rather crooked, with a little
arched door. I rang and the door opened: Children’s noise rushed out into the stillness of the street. Miss Parry, the headmistress,
introduced herself: She was tall, gangly, flat-footed as a heron, with vivid birdlike eyes. She took me through the cloakroom,
where every peg had a name and a different hand-painted picture next to it — a duck, a tulip, a blue umbrella. This amazed
me, the generosity of it, such detail lavished on every child, every name. And we went through the airy playroom and out into
the garden at the back, a storybook garden, secret between high walls, with a labyrinth of twisty stone paths and trampled
scraps of lawn and, in the middle, steps down to an old well — now filled in, of course, said Miss Parry — where there grew
an old catalpa tree with leaves as wide as hands; and over there by the sandpit, she said, the two mossy stones set into the
lawn were Carolingian graves. The whole place was exuberant with children and messy with the tumbled detritus of their play
— plastic animals faded by the sunlight, and the tires and boxes and blankets they used to make castles and dens — anarchic
and disorderly, but the disorder held and contained by the walls of yellow London brick and the narrow bright beds of hollyhocks
and lupines that fringed the edges of the garden.
She showed me round, asked a few obvious questions, then left me in the playroom to see what I’d do. Cast adrift in that sea
of children, I did what made me feel safest, and sat in the art corner drawing extravagant pictures of flamboyant animals
with wings and wicked fangs. The children gathered round, adding their own details, coloring in. After a while my self-consciousness
fell away. I was surprised to turn and see Miss Parry behind me. She reached out to touch a doleful tiger I’d drawn. “I think
you’ll do quite nicely here,” she said.
It wasn’t perfect. There was a lot of drudgery: toilets to be cleaned, floors to be swept and swabbed, little plastic bits
of things to sort and put back into boxes. And it was physically exhausting, particularly tiring, perhaps, because it was
so unstructured, all these children who tugged at your sleeve with their urgency and demands. The pay was minimal — enough
for the rent on my flat; enough to buy a bit of food, though mostly I lived on what I ate at the nursery, the lunches of sausage
or stew followed by jelly and bland glossy custard; and just about enough for mascara, and bleach for my long hair, and occasionally
a new pair of clingy jeans or a faded knitted top with rainbow beading from one of the secondhand stalls in King’s Road market.
But mostly I was happy there. I found I had a skill with children, that I could join in their play, enter their worlds. I
don’t know where it came from, this easy instinctive ability — it seems surprising given the fractured nature of my childhood.
But for me there was something so satisfying in the company of these children, with their openness and freshness and unanswerable
questions. Where was I before I was born? Are the birds cross? Why do winds in cartoons have faces? Maybe I had some sense
that this was what I needed — these years spent eating toad-in-the-hole and playing and reading picture books in a place that
was kind and generous, where the children were so precious all had their very own pictures next to their pegs. It was perhaps
a kind of healing for me, a reliving or recovering of childhood.
Miss Parry believed with a passion in children’s innate goodness, and held what I realize now were highly unfashionable ideas
about the value of play. Tests and phonics lessons and neat rows of wooden desks were anathema to her. Every week there’d
be a staff meeting in her flat above the playroom, when we’d sit on her squashy floral sofas and talk about the children’s
social and emotional progress: It was gossip, really, in the guise of psychology, singling out children who seemed troubled
or reserved, and in the process enjoying the gratifying if dubious pleasures of disapproval. In their concern for the children’s
welfare, Miss Parry and Mrs. Bates, her pink and excitable deputy, did a lot of disapproving: of parents who left their children
with young and flighty nannies, of mothers who spent all day at the gym and the hair colorist, of fathers who came home too
late to kiss their children good-night. Divorce particularly agitated them: husbands or wives — but especially wives — who
abandoned their responsibilities and their beautiful children in pursuit of some cheap and transient sexual thrill. They loved
to conclude, their mouths thin and tight, their voices fat with satisfaction, that the children of the affluent could be deprived
in a multitude of ways, just as surely as the children of the poor; and at this point Miss Parry and Mrs. Bates could grow
quite dewy-eyed about the privileges of the poor — who may at least have had stay-at-home mothers, and aunts and uncles living
cozily down the street, and granny in the corner by the gas fire. During these discussions, I said nothing.
I stayed for seven years in that garden of children. I remember winter mornings, with the leaves fallen from the catalpa so
the braided branches patterned the clean bright sky, and a crust of ice on the grass round the graves, which the sun took
a while to reach. All of us stamping our numb feet in our Wellingtons and feeling even through our gloves the tingling of
frost on our fingers; and at orange-juice time, the cook, who was hugely fat, with a kind of picture-book rightness to her
corpulence, bringing us syrupy mugs of coffee made with boiled milk and sugar, rich with a thick, creamy scum, and toast that
dripped with melting yellow butter.
And especially I remember summer days, the blossoms blowing on the catalpa tree, the smell of exhaust from King’s Road blending
with the heavy scent of pollen from the dusty lilies in the flower beds, the children bare-legged and freckled and their hair
warm to the touch. Hot afternoons that unfolded like tumbled bales of cloth, stretching on for eons, pleasant but exhausting.
And then the children would go, and silence would creep back into the place like a cat coming home for his supper. We’d sweep
and tidy the garden in the warm and sudden stillness, and I’d feel a deep contentment washing through me.
Sinead came in the summer, when the catalpa was just beginning to flower. She was a three-year-old elf: disorderly Celtic
hair, black and thickly curling, her face flushed pink by the heat. Her clothes were expensive, but none of them seemed to
match. She was troubled — unsmiling, virtually mute, with shadowed eyes.
Sinead’s father had talked quite openly, said Miss Parry, leaning forward on her squashy sofa with an excessive eagerness
in her bright bird eyes, and she wanted to share it all with us, every detail, in the interest of the child. The mother, it
seemed, had a high-powered job in PR. She’d walked out, gone off with a man ten years her junior, a paparazzi photographer,
abandoning her husband and her child. The other staff were gleefully amazed that any woman could walk out on these two people
— that delectable little girl, that father. For her father had caught every-body’s eye, with his easy elegance, the cut of
his shirts, his silk ties, gold cufflinks; and there was also something a little bemused and vulnerable about him, as though
for a time he’d lost his way—which made him vastly attractive to these women with their hunger to nurture. And then there
was his palpable affection for his child.
Sinead was allocated to me, in the face of some competition, for she was a perfect subject—an appealing child with emotional
problems that were interesting but manageable. She played for hours with Playmobil figures on the steps that led down to the
catalpa tree, acting out intricate stories, never speaking. I sat by her, sometimes moving an animal, joining in a little,
and she started to let me in, to talk in a hushed monotone so I could share in these tales of hers, entangled histories that
had their genesis in the traditional storybook world of kings and witches and magic, but were far too full of losses and reversals.
As the sunlit days spilled one into another, and the hollyhocks flowered then faded in the beds behind the sandpit, she started
to sit nearer to me; sometimes she hummed a little scrap of song. The plastic figures spread out onto a wall and a pathway,
and one or two other children, sensing she might now notice them, appeared, forthright and curious, at the edges of her game.
Her stories changed. The princesses became dogmatic and triumphant and accomplished amazing feats of daring; the queens and
kings were reconciled, though they lived on opposite shores with between them wastes of Ocean; and there began to be comfort
in her games, small animals that were soothed to sleep in shoeboxes or under the fallen satiny petals from the catalpa tree.
Till one day, when I was for a moment drawn away inside the playroom, I turned to see her careering round the garden with
three of the rowdiest boys, waving a stick, noisy, engaged, connected: showing the first signs of that casual exuberance that’s
so much a part of her now. I knew she didn’t need me anymore.
Mostly, the nanny collected Sinead from school; sometimes it was her father. There was a late-summer day, a day of thick heat
and white sky, when he arrived a little early and came out into the garden to find her. She rushed to him and leaped into
his arms. I saw how he bent his head to her, only half heard what he said, but heard my name.