The Bad Mother's Handbook (27 page)

I wandered over to the window and gazed down at the
back yard. It wasn’t so different from a two-up, two-down
in Wigan. It was more the
feel
of the place; it had to be
London, somehow. It just didn’t feel northern.

‘Right.’ She was back on. ‘Can you manage tomorrow
morning? Say, ten? Or is that too early? Where are you
coming from?’

‘Ten’s fine. I’ll be there.’

‘I’ll look forward to seeing you,’ she said, and my heart
dropped like a stone with terror.

*

That night
it was antenatal class. I plonked myself at the
back and tried to look older than I was, also as if I’d just
left my loving husband at home instead of an angry dad
and a mad grannie.

The midwife held up a plastic pelvis and forced a
doll’s head through it. I sat there, thirty-four weeks pregnant
and still thinking:
This isn’t me, this is not going to
happen to me. I’m not ready. I can’t do it
.

‘Burned your bridges now, girl, haven’t you?’ I heard
my mother’s voice say.

*

I
SAT ON
the chaise longue, waiting for Mrs Beattie to make
tea, feeling exhausted. All night long I’d been running after
trains. One was going to America and I said to John Noakes (because he was with me), ‘How can it go across the sea?’
and he said, ‘Oh, anything’s possible.’ I got up far too early,
felt cold, got back in bed again and painted my fingernails.
I turned on the radio but it was all still Diana’s death. I had
a little weep – half of it was nerves – and then went down
to breakfast which I couldn’t eat. My landlady was clearly
a big Elvis fan and all through the meal I kept my eyes
fixed on the Love Me Tender wall clock whose hour hand
was the neck of a guitar. Time moved so slowly I thought
the thing was broken. Then I got dressed and was all ready
to go by nine twenty, so I had to walk up and down the
road several times. Even though Mrs Beattie wasn’t my
mother I’d put on the suit.

‘Here we are,’ she said, passing me a china cup and
saucer. I looked in vain for a safe place to put it down.
If I spilt tea over this nice chintz! I perched the cup on my
lap and took in the room.

‘This is such a lovely house,’ I said. It was too. Everything
I’d seen, I wanted.

‘It’s rather big for me now I’m on my own. The stairs
are becoming difficult too.’

I wondered how old she was. Seventy? Very elegant,
though. Nothing like Mum. ‘You could get one of those
stairlifts.’

‘It might come to that.’

We sipped our tea. What was she thinking? Inscrutable,
that’s what she was.

‘Well, about my birth mother,’ I announced.

She pressed her lips together and put down the cup
on the slate hearth. ‘Yes. There are some documents on
the bureau, if you’d like to fetch them over. Bring the side table and we can have it between us. I need to take you
through this.’

My heart thumped as she separated the sheets of paper
one by one.

‘Do I take it you know nothing about your mother
at all?’

‘Only that she was very young and she wasn’t married.
Oh, I knew she’d stayed in London. Probably couldn’t wait
to escape!’ I squeaked with nervous laughter. My voice
was too loud in that quiet room.

‘Right,’ said Mrs Beattie carefully. She pushed a piece
of photocopied paper towards me. ‘I want you to read
this.’

It was a newspaper report dated April 1971. A man
and a woman living in Croydon had been charged with
manslaughter after a child had died in their care. The
six-year-old’s body showed signs of serious malnourishment
and was covered in bruises and sores. She – it was
a little girl – was described as looking like a child two
years younger because of her small frame. Neighbours
had become suspicious after seeing the girl foraging in
dustbins and reported what they had seen to social services,
but somehow the messages hadn’t got through.
School noticed nothing because she was never there.
She hadn’t even been on the At Risk register when she
died.

The little girl’s name was Emma and Jessie Pilkington
had been her mother.

I read it and read it and read it and it still didn’t make
sense. Mrs Beattie reached out and took my hand. I was
shaking.

‘Would she have been my sister?’ I whispered.

‘Half-sister.’

‘Oh, God. My little sister.’ I started to cry. Mrs Beattie
sat back and let me, patting my hand. The clock ticked
and traffic swooshed past the window; I wasn’t aware of
anything else. We stayed like that for a long time.

At last she said, ‘I have a photograph, but you may not
want to see it.’

I wiped my eyes. ‘Of Emma?’

‘Of all of them. Taken from a newspaper.’

‘I think it might break my heart.’

She put her arms round me and I felt like I was a child
again, Nan holding me the first time we knew Dad was ill.
There was a ticking clock then as well, and the radio in the
kitchen playing ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.

I’m on your side.

‘Did Mrs Fitton know all this?’

‘Yes.’ Mrs Beattie wiped her eyes. ‘But because I’m a
trained counsellor and I used to work for social services
she thought I’d be the most suitable person to talk to you
about it. And, of course, I knew your mother.’

‘How could she do something so
awful
? I mean, your
own child
?’ Charlotte, baby Charlotte crying in her cot,
toddler Charlotte throwing porridge on the floor, wetting
the bed; beautiful Charlotte.

‘She became involved with a violent man, as a lot of
women do, you’d be surprised by how many, all walks
of life. She was a very . . . needy person, not at all able to
stand up for herself, despite the big talk. So she stayed
with this man even after he began to abuse her daughter
– it wasn’t his child, she’d got pregnant by another man, which didn’t help matters. She always maintained she
never actually hurt Emma herself. I don’t know if that
was true or not. There certainly wasn’t enough evidence
to convict her of direct cruelty; her defence claimed the
only reason she hadn’t acted to save her daughter was
that she was frightened he might start beating her as well.
It may have been true. She got four years; he got fifteen,
but he died of cancer before he was released.’

‘Good.’

‘Then when Jessie came out of prison she changed her
name and moved. There was terribly bad feeling towards
her from the public, as there always is in these cases,
though I don’t think the press was as intrusive then as it
is now. She’d had hate mail, death threats, so she tried
to walk away from what she’d done and reinvent herself.
By and large she succeeded.’

I put my hands to my temples. ‘I still can’t take it in.’

‘It must be a great shock for you. Can I get you anything,
a glass of brandy?’

‘No. I’ll take a couple of paracetamol, I’ve some in my
handbag.’ But I knew paracetamol would never take away
the cold clamping sensation in my heart, or stop me reliving
those horrific phrases from the report.

Mrs Beattie went off to get a glass of water and I found
myself opening the file again, scanning for those pictures.
Don’t do it! part of me was screaming, but I had to know.
And there she was, a fine-featured little girl in a check
dress and a cardigan, smiling away and looking as if
she didn’t have a care in the world. I closed the file
quickly. My heart felt as if it was going to burst with grief
and fury.

‘So my m— Jessie Pilkington’s still alive?’ I asked when
Mrs Beattie came back.

‘Yes, she is. I have a contact address for her, even
though I haven’t spoken to her for many years now. She
sends a card at Christmas, that’s all.’

How could a child-killer send Christmas cards? ‘Don’t
you hate her?’

‘It’s difficult . . . I hate what she did, certainly, but
there are other factors. She’s been punished, of course,
she’s served her time. You have to remember too that she
was a victim herself in many ways. Her own father . . .’

I put my hands over my ears. ‘Stop. Oh, please stop.’

Mrs Beattie took the file and slid it under her chair. I
wished I could have done that with the new knowledge in
my head.

‘I feel like a different person,’ I said. ‘Nothing will
ever be the same again.’ She nodded. ‘I need to go away
now and think about this. Can I have Jessie Pilkington’s
address?’

‘I have no right to withhold it from you.’

‘But you don’t believe I should have it?’

Mrs Beattie pulled her cuff straight and smoothed her
skirt. ‘I’m not sure you could do anything very constructive.’

‘All the same.’

She went back into the file and pulled out an envelope.
‘It’s in there. Think carefully about how you want
to handle this situation tonight, and come and see me
tomorrow. We’ll talk it over together.’ She clasped my hand
again. ‘You’ve been very brave. Whatever your life has
been like, it’s made you a strong person.’

‘I don’t feel strong.’

‘Well, you are.’

Then she hugged me again and I left.

I
DON
’
T KNOW
why I did it. I should have gone straight
home but I knew I’d never settle till I’d seen Jessie
Pilkington, or whatever her name was, and talked to her
face to face. I trailed back to the B & B, collected my stuff
and set off for the Underground.

Back on the Tube everything seemed squalid and
threatening. People looked at each other out of the corner
of their eyes; hardly anyone spoke. Even the beautiful
young couple strap-hanging seemed like they were
mocking the rest of us when they laughed together. The
diversity was frightening too; every race, language, class
and sub-class seemed to be on our train and it made
my head spin. I unfolded the envelope and checked the
address for the umpteenth time. Lewisham. What was
that like, then? You hear the names of these London
boroughs they don’t mean a right lot. Certain ones have
memory-tags attached – Brixton (riots), Peckham (Del
Boy), Lambeth (Walk) – but mostly it’s all pretty vague.
Well, how many Londoners know the difference between
Worsley and Whalley Range?

Maybe she’d make it all right. She might say something
that would explain and make it not so bad. It
couldn’t be any worse. In any case it was what I needed
to do.

It didn’t take me long to suss out that Lewisham isn’t
a top-class area full of millionaires. There were a lot of
boarded-up windows, for one thing, and metal grilles on some of the shops. Big difference to Hemmington Grove.
I got the feeling terracotta pots wouldn’t survive that
long here. A filthy man with a droopy eye came up to
me as I stood turning my street map round, and shouted
something in my face. I put my head down and started
walking.

It took me nearly twenty minutes to find her street,
Bewely Road, and it was grubby and depressing. I
followed the numbers down until I came to a sixties block
of flats, two storeys high, with coloured panels, orange
and blue, stuck to the bricks under the windows. There are
some flats like that in Wigan, just as you get near the town
centre. They smack to me of desperate mothers caged up
with screaming toddlers, and teenagers pissing in the
stairwells. Maybe I was being a snob; your house doesn’t
make you who you are, I should know that. But I didn’t
feel sure of anything much any more.

She lived on the ground floor. I rang the bell – by now
I was so nauseous and swimmy I had to lean against the
jamb – and waited. The plain front door swung open and
there she was.

It was the toes I noticed first; she was wearing sandals
and her toenails were painted red, but dirty underneath.
Leggings, a baggy T-shirt, much like I knock about in when
I’m at home, and a face that was mine but old and twisted
with sourness.

‘I know who you are,’ she snapped in an accent that
was still northern. ‘Mary phoned me. She warned me you
might turn up.’

‘Can I come in?’ My mouth was very dry and the words
sounded odd as I said them. ‘I’ve come a long way.’ Behind her I could hear a television going but I couldn’t see
past her into the hall.

‘I don’t care how far you’ve come. You’ve to go away.
I never asked to see you. What do you want to come rooting
round and stirring up trouble for? Haven’t you got a
life of your own?’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, tell you
what I’ve done with myself over the years. I thought you’d
like to know. There’s things I need to ask you.’

She pushed her greying hair behind her ears and
lowered her voice. ‘Look, I just want you to sod off. If I
didn’t want you when you were a sweet little baby I’m
hardly likely to want you now you’re a bitter-faced thirty-year-old, am I? For God’s sake. I owe you nothing.’

‘I’m thirty-four, actually.’

She made to shut the door.

‘Wait!’ I wedged my shoulder painfully into the gap
and forced it open again. A smell of chip pan floated out.
‘Tell me about my dad at least. He might want to see me
even if you don’t.’

‘You’ll have a job. He’s dead.’ She laughed meanly.
‘And a bloody good job an’ all.’

‘Well, who was he? I’ve a right to know.’

‘Oh,
Rights
, is it? We’ve all got Rights, love. Well, I’ll tell
you, since you’re burning to hear the truth. He was an evil
bastard. He just wanted rid of you. He’d have done it
hisself if I’d let him, he did it to another lass. D’you get
me?’ I must have looked blank. ‘
With a
– ’ her face screwed
up and she made a kind of clawing movement with her
hand – ‘
coat hanger
.’

I clapped my palm to my mouth and took a step back, and she slammed the door. I noticed my suit had a black
mark all the way down the front.

*

Daniel had
come round again and we were watching
children’s TV prior to our frozen pizzas. It was so relaxing
without Mum there.