Bad Mothers United (5 page)

The morning began with body parts in the garden and ended with a dead neighbour.

It was Will who spotted the debris. There were tiny plastic limbs strewn across our back lawn, a 9-inch propeller lodged in the flowering currant. He came running to me with a fistful of pieces
he’d gathered. ‘Little man broken,’ he said, which was a pretty accurate assessment.

Together we hunted down the rest and brought them inside to reassemble. It helped that I knew what I was making. Old Mr Cottle’s lumberjack windmill has been poking up over the top of our
back fence for at least two years. The structure sits on a pole, like a bird-table, and with every passing breeze the blades rotate and the miniature man bends forward and mimes a chopping action.
Pointless as well as ugly, not to mention way too light and flimsy for the job. Three times now the lumberjack’s ended up on our side, blown from his moorings
Wizard of Oz
-style.
Sometimes he arrives intact, sometimes he’s been blasted apart. My impulse today was just to bin the bloody thing, put him out of his windy misery.

I didn’t owe Tommy Cottle anything, either. He wasn’t a nice man. Never one of these grandfatherly types who handed out sweets and smiles and liked to pass the time of day. If he
spoke at all it would usually be to moan about Will being noisy. In the last eighteen months he’d tipped grass clippings down the gap behind our currant bushes, phoned the council to say we
were breeding rats under the shed, and prised a fence panel apart to help his bag-of-bones cat use our flowerbed as a toilet. Not so much a character as an old git. Once he even made the front page
of the local paper for trying to nick crocus bulbs from round the War Memorial.

So basically he’s been a crap neighbour from the moment he arrived, and no court in the land would have convicted me if one night I’d set his lumberjack on fire and danced round the
flames cheering. But I knew he’d been in hospital again recently and that nobody had visited him – he told me that himself, as if he’d been expecting me to trot up there with a
bag of fruit and a copy of the
Racing Times
– and overall my feeling’s been I’ve enough on my plate without encouraging a war in my own back yard.

For this reason Will and I took the trouble to snap the plastic lumberjack into working order, spent a fun time testing him out, then put on our coats and trooped round the corner to Mr
Cottle’s front door.

There was no reply to our ringing or knocking, but the car was in the drive and I could see his mobility scooter parked in the hall behind the bevelled glass. Given he can’t walk to the
end of the street these days unaided, I guessed he must be inside. I opened the letterbox and shouted his name.

‘Watch, Grandma,’ said Will, running down the metal disability ramp with thumping, clanging strides.

‘Shh,’ I told him.

All I could hear from inside was the muffled sound of the TV.

‘Let’s try round the back,’ I said, laying the lumberjack on the gravel next to the ramp and taking my grandson’s hand. I had a sudden prickle about what we might find,
and though I’d rather Will had stayed outside, he was just too young to be left unsupervised.

At the rear of the house the garden was neat, wheeliebins labelled, planters and tubs emptied ready for spring. Will poked at the cat-flap and I tried the door handle. It gave, and we were in.
The kitchen smelled of toast overlaid with menthol and chemical toilet; in the sink sat a milk pan half-full of water, but aside from that the room was fairly tidy. A clutch of money-saving coupons
was bulldog-clipped to a
Bonnie Scotland
wall calendar, pots of Brylcreem were stacked into a tower, his mugs hung symmetrically from a wooden rack. Even his pan scourer was tucked into
the mouth of a china frog sitting on the windowsill.

‘Here, play with this,’ I said, picking up the frog and handing it to Will. Needs must as the devil drives.

I could see across the hall into the lounge. On the TV screen, a blonde presenter was helping a middle-aged woman step onto some weighing scales. The top of Mr C’s head showed over the
back of an armchair. I led Will into the hall, closed the kitchen door behind us, set him to feed his frog on the floor. Then I made myself walk into the room.

Tommy Cottle was sitting upright with his eyes open, and for a split second I thought he was OK. I’d been a fool crashing in, over-dramatic. Words of apology formed on my lips. But the
next second I knew.

‘Mr Cottle?’ I said hopelessly. A quick glance at Will to check he was occupied, then I leaned forward and pressed the old man’s shoulder. ‘Mr Cottle? Tommy?’ There
was no response. His face was perfectly peaceful.

‘OK, Grandma has to make a phone call, we need to go,’ I said. I stepped backwards and, though I was trying to be careful, my leg caught against a small table with a mug of coffee on
top. The mug slid off and bounced onto the floor, sloshing beige liquid across the beige carpet.

Will looked up, only mildly interested. ‘Frog’s hungry. Yum yum.’

I knew it wasn’t the time to be worrying about stains, but I couldn’t stop myself picking up the mug and placing it back on the table. The action made me shiver and almost drop the
mug again: the china was still very slightly warm. However Mr Cottle had died, it had been both recent and quick.

After the ambulance men had been and gone, the niece turned up. She was what Mum would have called hard-faced. Older than me, bone-thin, dyed black hair. ‘You’re
the one who found him?’ she asked.

‘I’d fetched his little chopper.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Eh?’

‘He has this . . . thing, plastic, windmill. A man.’ I seemed to have lost the power to construct a sentence. ‘A garden ornament. It blew over. Our fence.’

She was only half-listening, her gaze roving round the room, and I thought, She’s doing an inventory. She’s thinking, What did he leave me in his will? I felt like saying,
‘Sorry, am I in your way?’

‘And he was in this chair?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What’s this mark here?’ She pointed to the carpet. ‘Did he wet himself?’

‘That was me,’ I said.

‘Eh?’

‘I mean, I knocked over a drink. He’d made a drink. Before he died. I don’t mean I made a drink while I was here.’
I haven’t
filched anything, you
grasping cow.

‘You live over the back?’

‘Yes. With my grandson.’ Will was at the table, good as gold, scribbling over a colouring book. ‘We didn’t see a lot of Mr Cottle. I know he’d had a spell in
hospital a while ago.’

‘Creaking gate. It was a shock, though, I thought he’d go on forever.’

‘Well, you do. When my mother died, we knew she was ill, but even so—’

‘Can you take the cat?’

She took me completely off-guard. ‘Cat?’

‘He has a cat.’

‘Oh, yes, I know, but I don’t think—’

‘Otherwise we’ll have to get it put down. Which would be a shame.’

‘Can’t you have it?’

‘Not allowed. I’m allergic.’

Bet you aren’t, I thought.

‘It can’t have that much longer to live. Six months tops, I’d say. It’d be nice for your little lad there, to have a nice pet. You’d like a cat, wouldn’t you,
love?’ she called across to Will.

Straight away I should have said,
Sorry, I can’t manage that, but shall I look up the vet’s number for you?
There was this small window of opportunity where I could have
turned my back and not left the house seething at myself, a tatty basket under my arm. ‘What about the RSPCA?’

‘I don’t think it would survive. On its last legs, that one. It’d be cruel to stick it in a pen at this stage.’

‘And Mr Cottle’s got no other family?’ Because who were all these framed photos of? I’d barely registered them till now, but suddenly they were everywhere, the same
dark-haired woman over and over. She looked familiar, too. Then the penny dropped. It was Carol Vorderman.

‘No, he had no one. Just me.’

Poor beggar
, I heard Mum say.
Take his cat. It’s t’least you can do. Don’t you remember our Chalkie? You loved him. He was never any bother.

‘I suppose we could look after it till you find a proper home,’ I heard myself saying.

The deal was done. She relaxed visibly, even allowed herself a slight smile.

I said, ‘I’m sorry about your uncle. My mum died last year and it’s hard, incredibly hard. Adjusting, coming to terms with the fact they’ve finally gone, that
you’ll never speak to them again. All the things you meant to say . . .’

The room was hushed. Somewhere a tiny clock was ticking. I searched her face for some flicker of sympathy.

She said, ‘Yeah. Anyway, there’s some tins of Whiskas in the kitchen if you want them. Daft to let them go to waste, isn’t it?’