The Bad Mother's Handbook
KATE LONG
HANDBOOK
PICADOR
For Lily
I’ll tell thee a tale
About a snail
That jumped in t’ fire
And burnt its tail
I’ll tell thee another
About its brother
Did t’ same
Silly owd bugger.
In the battle between handbag strap and door handle,
far better to knacker your handbag
than let the door handle feel it’s won.
NAN DREAMS:
When I was twelve I fell and broke my elbow. It was election
day 1929 and we were mucking about on top of the wall by the
polling station. It was about six feet up and you were all right
as long as you sat astride the coping stones, only I’d turned
side-saddle so as to spot the people who’d voted Conservative,
my dad said you could see it in their faces. Jimmy nudged me
and we started singing:
‘Vote! Vote! Vote for Alec Sharrock
He is sure to win the day
And we’ll get a salmon tin
And we’ll put the Tory in
And he’ll never see his mother any more.’
I swung my legs to make the words come out better and the
next thing I knew I was sprawled on the ground with my arm
underneath me. Jimmy tried to make a sling out of the yellow
muslin banners we’d been waving but I screamed and he
started to cry in panic. It hurt so much I was afraid to get up in
case I left my arm on the floor.
The following day, when we heard Labour’d got in, Dad got
so drunk he couldn’t open the back gate.
‘I’ll go and let him in,’ Jimmy volunteered.
‘Tha’ll not!’ said Mother. ‘Leave him where he is.’
So I lay on the sofa with my arm all strapped up and
watched him struggle. Finally he fell over and my mother drew
the curtains on him.
It was funny, we’d never known him touch a drop before.
His vices lay in other directions.
JANUARY 1997
The day after
it happened everything seemed normal.
Even from behind my bedroom door I could hear Mum
going on at Nan. She tries not to get cross but it’s the only
emotion my mother does these days.
‘Come on, Nan, it’s time for your bath.’
‘I can’t. My arm hurts.’
‘No, it doesn’t. You’ve been dreaming again. Come
on
.’
Ours is a house of lost things; keys, hearing aids, identities.
There was a row about sausages this morning. My
mum had cooked two sausages for Nan’s dinner and left
them on a plate to cool. Then the window cleaner came
to the door, and when she got back they’d gone.
‘What have you done with them?’ she asked Nan
(patient voice).
‘I han’t touched ’em.’
‘Yes, you have, you must have.’
‘It were t’ dog.’
‘We haven’t got a dog, Nan. Where are they? I just
want to know, you’re not in trouble. Have you eaten
them?’
‘Aye, I might have done. Yesterday. I had ’em for my
tea.’
‘How can you have had them yesterday when I’ve
only just cooked them? God Almighty, it’s every little
thing.’ My mother ran her hand wearily over her face and
sighed. It’s something she does a lot.
‘By the Crin! There’s no need to shout. You’re a nowty
woman. You’re like my daughter Karen, she gets her hair
off at nothing.’
‘I am your daughter Karen.’
‘Hmph.’
It was me who found the sausages next day, wrapped
in two plastic bags inside the bread bin.
Not that Nan has the monopoly on confusion.
I know my name is Charlotte and that I’m seventeen,
but on a bad day that’s as far as it goes. ‘Be yourself’
people, older people, are always telling me: yeah, right.
That’s so easy. Sometimes I do those quizzes in
Most!
and
Scene Nineteen
. Are you a Cool Cat or a Desperate
Dog and What’s Your Seduction-Style, how to tell your
personality type by your favourite colour, your favourite
doodle, the hour of your birth. Do I
a) believe this crap?
b) treat it with the contempt it deserves?
Depends on my mood, really.
Sometimes my nan thinks I am her own childhood reincarnated. ‘Bless her,’ she says, rooting for a Mintoe,
‘her father beat her till she were sick on t’ floor and then
he beat her again. He ran off and her mother had to tek
in washin’. Poor lamb. Have a toffee.’
This drives my mum up the wall, round the bend and
back again. She doesn’t like to see good sympathy going
to waste, particularly in my direction, because she thinks
I Live the Life of Riley.
‘You have chances I never had,’ she tells me. ‘Education’s
everything. How much homework have you got
tonight?’ She bought me a personal organizer for Christmas
but I lost it – I haven’t had the balls to tell her yet.
‘You must make something of your life. Don’t make the
mistake I made.’
Since I am part of the Mistake (‘I was a mother by
the age of sixteen, divorced at twenty-one’) this leaves
me in an unusual position: I am also her redeemer, the
reassurance that her life has not in fact been wasted. My
future successes will be hers and people will say to me,
‘Your mother was a clever woman. She gave up a lot for
you.’
Or so she hopes.
Actually I’m in a bit of a mess.
When Nan walked in on me and Paul Bentham having
sex yesterday afternoon she didn’t say a word. She’s
surprisingly mobile, despite the bag. The colostomy was
done donkey’s years ago, pre-me, to get rid of galloping
cancer.
‘THE QUEEN MOTHER HAS ONE, YOU KNOW,’
the consultant had shouted.
‘Ooh. Swanky,’ replied Nan, impressed. ‘Well, Ivy Seddon reckons Cliff Richard has one an’ he dances about
all ovver.’
I thought she might let it slip that evening while we
were watching
Coronation Street
. Suddenly she said: ‘She
were too young, she didn’t know what she were doing.
I towd her, tha maun fret, I’ll tek care of it.’ My mum,
coming in with a cup of tea for her, banged the saucer
down so that the tea spilt on the cloth, and gave me a
look.
Christ, Nan, please don’t say anything or I’m done
for. (‘A thirty-three-year-old woman was today formally
accused of bludgeoning to death her teenage daughter
with what police believe may have been a personal organizer.
Neighbours reported hearing raised voices late into
the night . . .’)
It still hurts a bit. I didn’t know it would hurt like that.
I knew there’d be blood because I read somewhere about
them hanging the bed sheets out of the window in olden
days so that all and sundry could see the bride had been
virgo intacta. I used an old T-shirt and rinsed it out afterwards;
if she asks, I’ll tell my mother it was a nosebleed.
I’m not a slag. It’s just that there’s not a lot to do
round here. You can walk through Bank Top in fifteen
minutes, a small dull village hunching along the ridge of a
hill and sprawling down the sides in two big estates. From
the highest point it affords panoramic views of industrial
Lancashire; factories, warehouses and rows and rows of
red-brick terraces, and on the horizon the faint grey-green
line of millstone-grit moorland. To the south there’s the
television mast where a German plane is supposed to have
come down fifty years ago; to the north there’s Blackpool
Tower, just visible on the skyline. I used to spend hours
squinting to see the illuminations, but they’re too far
away.
There are three types of housing in Bank Top.
Victorian two-up two-downs line the main street, while
on the fringes of the village it’s all modern boxes with
garages and uniform front lawns. None of the people in
these Prestige Developments talk to each other but you
can hear everything your neighbour’s doing through the
cardboard walls, apparently. Beneath these shiny new
houses the foundations shift and grumble over defunct
mine shafts – the last pit closed forty years ago – making
Bank Top a sink village in every sense.
Then there’s the council estate, thirties semis, where
dogs roam free and shit on the pavement with impunity.
This is where we live. We bought our house in the boom
of ’84 (also Divorce Year) and my mother celebrated by
having a Georgian front door fitted and mock leaded
lights on the windows. The front box room, which is mine
and minute, looks out over the Working Men’s Club car
park; some rum things go on
there
of a Saturday night,
I can tell you.
In the centre of the village is the church and the community
centre and a rubbish row of shops, a newsagent, a
launderette, a Spar. Two pubs, more or less opposite each
other, battle it out but one is for old people and families
off the new estates with quiz nites and chicken tikka
pizza, and the other’s rough as rats. I don’t go in either.
For kicks I get the bus to Wigan from a bus shelter
smelling of pee. Fuck off, it says over the lintel, so I
generally do.
I don’t belong in this village at all. Actually, I don’t
know where I do belong. Another planet, maybe.
So there I was,
on my back, entirely naked and rigid as
a corpse, when Nan totters into my bedroom and says to
Paul, ‘A horse has just gone past the landing window.’
‘Which way did it go?’ asks Paul.
‘
Which way did it go?
’ I said later. ‘What are you, mad
as her?’
‘I was only trying to make conversation.’ He shrugged
his bony shoulders under the sheets. ‘What’s up with her?
Is she mental, like?’
‘No more than a lot of people,’ I said, a bit sharply.
I get defensive about her, even though she is a bloody
nuisance. ‘Some days she’s more with it than me. She’s just
old. You might be like that when you’re old.’
‘I’d shoot myself first.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. That’s what everyone says, but
they wouldn’t.’
Part of the problem in this house is hormones. There
are too many undiluted women for one small ex-council
house. Huge clouds of supercharged oestrogen drift about
and react sending showers of sparks into the atmosphere;
the air prickles with it. Nan hasn’t got any left, of course,
although she hung onto hers longer than most (had my
mum at forty-six! Didn’t realize people even had sex at
that age), but I’ve got more than I know what to do with.
Certainly more than my mother knows what to do
with. She suspects I have tart DNA (passed on from her,
presumably). If she finds out I’ve been having sex she will
kill me. Really.
This would be my worst nightmare:
B
LOODY BLOODY
bloody hell. Bloody Nan for making
a mess on the bed. Again. Not her fault but I DON’T
CARE, nobody cares about me. COME OFF, you
bloody fitted sheet, bastard son of a sheet HELL.
Trailing this armload off to the washing basket and
HELL I’ve dropped a pair of tights HELL I’ve
dropped a pair of knickers trying to pick up the
tights, whole bloody lot’s gone now all over the
floor. Navy sock in with the whites, that was a close
shave. Charlotte WILL NOT put her dirty clothes in
the right baskets, what kind of a slut have I produced,
you’d think she’d have more consideration. Dying
for a cup of tea, cotton with pre-wash, heavily
soiled, everything’s heavily soiled in this house. Not
Nan’s fault, that bloody tape doesn’t stick to her skin
if she gets Nivea under it, what’s this, what’s this?
What’s just fallen out of the dirty pillowcase onto the
floor?
Oh, Jesus, it’s a condom. Charlotte’s been having
SEX.
I’ve known
Paul Bentham since primary school. Funny
to think of all the small events that lead up to a big one.
Once, when I was about ten, we were down on the rec,
watching the lads play five-a-side. Paul went for an extra
big kick, got it wrong and smacked me really hard in the
face with the football. The girls all marched off to tell on
him and he thought he was in big trouble. Even his ears
went red. But I didn’t cry, even though I thought my nose
had changed shape. I think he appreciated that.
Then there was the Valentine’s Day before we moved
schools. I knew he’d made a card for me, his friends
had all been teasing me about it, and I waited; morning
playtime, dinnertime, afternoon playtime. It wasn’t till
four o’clock he thrust it into my hand, and even then he’d
changed the words on it:
 | Vilots are blue Roses are red If I went with you I’d be off my head |