A Last Kiss for Mummy (8 page)

‘She sometimes used to forget I even existed. Would piss off somewhere for hours on end and forget to buy food and stuff. Then after days of me begging her to take her tablets, she’d suddenly spend every penny we had on a new TV or a big bike for me or something.’ She turned to look at me. ‘Honestly, she’s mad!’

I listened in growing amazement. What a childhood Emma had endured. It must have been so hard for her growing up with this see-saw existence. What a life sentence it must have been – still was, in fact – the business of having a mother whose life was dominated by bouts of depression.

‘Well at least you know that it’s a sickness, love. I know it must still hurt, and God knows how I would feel in your shoes, so let’s hope she gets better again, and soon.’

Emma stood up, and her expression seemed to say that, actually, she’d heard this before – many times before. ‘I won’t hold my breath,’ she said flatly. She then glanced over at Roman, who was now fast asleep in the Moses basket. ‘Is it okay if I get a shower while he’s quiet?’ She sighed as though resigned to her fate. She looked suddenly worn out. I wondered what effect her mother might imagine her note would have on her. Did she even think that clearly? Think at all?

‘Course you can, love,’ I said. ‘Go on – go and have your shower. I’ll see to him if he wakes up.’

I watched her go, noting the dejected slope of her narrow shoulders, and weighing the single sheet of cheap paper in my hand. This was terrible. I needed to find out more about the poor girl’s history. And, now I thought about it, how come her mother had been given our home address? I gave it five minutes, then got on the phone to John Fulshaw.

January is never my favourite month – is it anyone’s? Such a depressing come-down from Christmas and New Year, it’s the sort of gloomy month that could do with being cancelled – and the whole ‘twelfth night, decorations down’ thing with it. If I ruled the world, I mused, as I drove the short distance to Kieron’s, I’d decree that all fairy lights stayed in position at least till the clocks all went forward.

But it wasn’t just the short days and long nights that were getting to me; it was Emma, who had seemed so stuck in glumsville since Christmas that if I didn’t know her problems were way too big to be addressed by quick fixes, I’d have gone and ordered her one of those light boxes off the internet. It was mid-January now and the mother and baby group were meeting again, but I’d been unable to coax her out to attend the day’s session – or come to Kieron’s with me either, for that matter. I almost offered to take the baby with me but pulled back from actually saying it; much as I knew she could use the sleep (or, more likely, the time on the laptop) it wasn’t the sort of thing I was supposed to be doing, so in the end, telling her I’d only be gone an hour or so and suggesting she could perhaps write to Tarim, I left her and little Roman to it.

‘I can’t say I blame her,’ Lauren said, leaving the flat just as I was arriving. She was off to teach her first dance class of the New Year, and seemed to be wearing three woolly scarves all at once, one of them almost the same shade of pink as her nose. ‘If that church hall is anything like as cold as the community centre I work in,’ she laughed, ‘she’s made a shrewd decision staying put in the warm.’

I knew that, and I didn’t want to press her to socialise. She was obviously still hurting badly from the memory of her mother’s cruel invective, and it didn’t matter how much she had told us that she knew it was just the drink talking and that she’d become used to it over the years – I’d yet to meet a child who didn’t crave a parent’s love, or hope that one day, just one day, they might get some. She’d also been particularly quiet on the subject of Tarim, and I had this persistent itch about what might be going on there. I had no grounds for my worries – well, no more than I’d had since day one – but she’d just been so uncommunicative since the day she’d had her mum’s letter, and though I was pleased in one way that everything we were doing was so baby-centred, I felt frustrated about the wall there still was between us. Still, chatting with Kieron always made me feel a bit better, and though I’d popped round to see how he was doing in his new job I always valued his refreshing brand of black or white insight.

‘It’s much harder with teenagers, isn’t it?’ was Kieron’s sage comment, once we’d waved Lauren off and made coffee. ‘I remember you saying that to me once. It’s always stuck.’

‘Has it?’ I smiled. My son looked so grown up all of a sudden, his blond bum-fluff replaced by a coarse mat of designer stubble. He was growing more like Mike by the day. ‘So what did I say exactly? I’m assuming you were on the receiving end of one of my moans after doing something despicable – yes?’

‘I wasn’t, actually,’ he said. ‘It was when we were watching something on the telly about teenage runaways, and I remember you saying that the teenage bit was the worst bit. That everyone always said that the hard part was the first part, with all the sleepless nights and terrible twos and so on, but that, actually, that wasn’t true.’

I grinned at him. ‘I did?’

Kieron nodded. ‘You said it was hard because with little ones you could almost always solve their problems, and that with teenagers you couldn’t – that a lot of the time all you could do was support them through them.’

I didn’t recall the conversation, but I wasn’t surprised Kieron had. He was good at remembering things, and very often verbatim. And I didn’t doubt I’d said that, and I could probably pinpoint when, too. It would have been when I was working in pastoral care in our big local comprehensive – running what was informally (not to mention infamously) called The Unit – and usually filled with a number of adolescents who had the sort of family and social problems that didn’t lend themselves to fixes, quick or otherwise. It was one of the reasons I went into fostering in the first place, so I could better provide support, one on one.

And this one was proving intractable. The fact was that Roman was still a baby and, grim though the thought was, if he was taken from Emma he’d barely even remember her. He’d more than likely get placed within a lovely foster family, and, given his age, be adopted in no time. No, it was Emma who needed my support here, if she was going to be allowed to hang on to him. And if they didn’t let her – if they took him from her – what then? Kieron was right; I had been clear on what I thought was the most challenging part of parenting. But I don’t think any amount of sage advice could have prepared me for what I found when I got home an hour or so later.

Even before I put my key in the front door I could tell something was wrong. Babies have all sorts of different cries, as any mother soon learns, all of them transmitting a different need. As with Inuits, and their endless reams of words to describe snow, a mum soon gets used to identifying all the different ways their infant tries to communicate their needs; the ones that say I’m hungry, the ones that say I’m tired, the ones that say, ‘Leave me alone! I’m over-stimulated! Just put me down and let me lie here …’

I knew the nature of the cry that I could hear from the other side of the frosted glass. It was a distressed cry, but at the same time had a very specific quality. It was the cry of a distressed baby who was also exhausted from long crying. The sort of cry that baby manuals tell you to try and ignore in the small hours, when you’re trying to get them to settle themselves and sleep through the night. But a baby of Roman’s age shouldn’t be left to cry like that, ever. He was a scant four months old, bless the little mite.

I twisted my key in the lock and called out to Emma as I stepped inside. Fallen asleep, was my guess, and I exhaled in exasperation, knowing precisely what I’d find when I got up to her bedroom – Emma spark out, with her earphones in, oblivious to Roman’s wailing, the sound drowned out by whichever cool R&B star was currently flavour of the month.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that I got no response to my call, and, shrugging off my coat, I made my way up the stairs. But when I went into Emma’s bedroom, where Roman was indeed lying in his cot crying, there was no sign of Emma herself. I scooped him up, rubbing his back and nestling him tight against my neck, which he nuzzled against, rooting for milk.

‘I haven’t got anything for you, lovely,’ I whispered, feeling an automatic stab of anger and irritation that he had been left to get into this state. That’s what a baby’s cry did to you. Put you all out of sorts. ‘Where’s mummy, eh?’ I asked him as I carried him out of the room again, his sobs, though no less anguished, at least becoming quieter, now he was at least being cuddled and rocked.

But now Roman was a little quieter I could hear something else – a new noise. It was the sound of retching and it was coming from the bathroom. I crossed the landing in two strides. The door was partly open and as soon as I reached it, it was obvious what was happening, as I could immediately see a pair of feet, encased in fluorescent yellow socks. I pushed the door open further to see Emma kneeling over the toilet bowl, heaving, though nothing much seemed to be coming out.

‘Emma?’ I asked, my previous concern for Roman being supplanted by a rush of sympathy for her instead. ‘Emma, love,’ I said again. ‘Are you all right?’

Her response was to let out a long anguished groan, which turned almost immediately into a coughing fit. And then into a flood of shoulder-shuddering tears. Since I couldn’t look after both of them, I took an executive decision, grabbing a couple of big bath towels off the rail and throwing them in the bath, then laying a startled Roman unceremoniously onto them. I then turned my attention to Emma, whose tears had been truncated by another bout of retching, even though all she was bringing up was bile. I pulled her hair from her neck, feeling the clamminess of her pale skin. ‘Love,’ I said, confused, there having been no inkling she was feeling queasy when I left her, ‘when did this start? Have you been feeling sick for long?’

She reached for some loo roll, then shook her head miserably. And then, as I watched, it seemed to crumple in on itself all over again. ‘Oh Casey,’ she wailed. ‘I took a load of aspirins …’

‘
Aspirins
?’

She nodded wretchedly. ‘I took an overdose. I just wanted to … I just couldn’t … but now I don’t, and so I tried to …’ She trailed off then, seemingly incapable of continuing, her eyes swimming. ‘Oh,
God
, Casey!’ she said next. ‘Am I going to
die
?’

I called an ambulance and Mike, in that order. Emma was hazy about how many pills she’d taken, so though she thought she’d sicked up quite a lot (she’d opted for the traditional salt-water trick) there was no knowing how many had already been absorbed once she’d done that, and as one of the main ‘musts’ I remembered from training was that I must never take any chances, I wasn’t about to try and make a judgement about it either. Instead I got a plastic bowl and then relocated from her station by the toilet bowl to a chair at the kitchen table so that I could keep an eye on her while I made up Roman’s bottle.

Roman, by now exhausted, had fallen asleep in the bath, so that’s where I’d left him while I helped Emma downstairs. I knew he’d wake again soon enough and begin howling. And I needed to be ready for him – whatever happened now I knew we’d probably be headed off to hospital. I didn’t remember everything off the top of my head, but one thing that had stuck when it came to aspirin overdoses was that, even if the patient appeared to have got most of it out of their system, there still needed to be a period of medical observation. Which, given the time, probably meant a night in hospital.

Mike was back first. ‘Never rains in this house, does it?’ he quipped wryly as I shuffled him straight upstairs to change out of his work clothes and retrieve the baby. I knew I’d also need to get some night things and toiletries together for Emma, but I could do that once Mike was back down and feeding Roman. In the meantime, or so the remnants of my first-aid course seemed to be telling me, the important thing was to keep Emma upright and conscious. Though this was clearly no time for light-hearted small talk. Nor did she seem to want it to be.

‘I can’t believe I did it, honest I can’t,’ she said, as I bustled round getting teats from the steriliser while trying at the same time to keep an eye on how she was looking. I was pleased to see that she had a slightly better colour now she was up off the floor, though her skin still looked damp. She was crying still, but not convulsively now – just a steady stream of miserable tears, which she mopped intermittently with sheets of kitchen roll.

‘That makes two of us,’ I said, just stopping short of asking her any of the questions that were teeming in my head. Had she planned to do this? Had she just been waiting for her opportunity? Because chief among the answers I was after was where precisely she’d got all the aspirins. We never used them. In keeping with most people with youngsters in the house, we had ditched them when it came out that, albeit in rare cases, giving them to children under twelve could be fatal.

Which meant Emma had either had them all along or had been secretly stockpiling them with just this eventuality in mind. It was a depressing thought – potentially a whole other can of worms – and it made me more angry at her mother than ever. I knew alcoholism was a disease and needed to be treated accordingly, but I couldn’t help thinking how much I’d like to see Emma’s ‘sick’ mother witness what her daughter had just tried to do.

But it seemed I was way off beam.
Way
off.

‘I just wanted to
show
him …’ she continued. ‘Just punish him. Just make him realise …’ her voice was rising now. ‘And all I’ve done is –’ she broke down again, but she didn’t need to finish. I knew what she was thinking about. About her child.

But him? She had said
him
. ‘What, you mean Tarim?’ I asked her.

Her voice hardened now. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I mean Taz! The one fucking person I thought I’d could fucking rely on! But, oh, what a surprise – I
fucking
can’t!’

Emma grimaced then, just as I was taking all this in. ‘Oh, God!’ She grabbed the bowl. ‘I think I’m going to be sick again …’

At which point the doorbell rang, Mike appeared, and Roman recommenced his screaming. Mike was right. No rain in our house. It
always
poured.

I had made more visits to our local A&E than I cared to remember, so after Emma had been examined, reassured she wasn’t about to die and given some medication to counteract the acid, I steeled myself for the long stint ahead. No, she wasn’t going to die – in all probability she would need a ‘gastric lavage’ to be on the safe side, but that was that – but now we were on a road without turn-offs. The paramedics – two lovely guys, one very young, one close to retirement – were as patient and upbeat as they always were, but even through their smiles I could see them taking in an all too familiar situation. They’d seen most things, done most things and above all knew one main thing – that it would be a very long-drawn-out evening, as, once in the care of the NHS, as she was now, procedures had to be carried out and protocols followed. Still, I thought, as I climbed into the ambulance with one very disconsolate and whey-faced fourteen-year-old, at least this might be the start of some proper conversation between us.

And I was right. ‘I feel so bad, Casey,’ Emma said as we pulled up outside the ambulance entrance of A&E and the paramedic jumped down to sort out the ramp. ‘Will Mike be all right? You know – with Roman? Will he manage okay on his own?’

I gave her a smile. ‘He’ll manage
fine
,’ I reassured her. ‘Why on earth would you think he wouldn’t?’

She shrugged. ‘I dunno. It’s just – well, it’s not really men’s stuff, is it? Looking after babies and that.’