The Perfect Mother (8 page)

Brian Meredith ran the place; he’d been in the SAS. He was short, dapper, smart in his red or blue blazers, and pleasant to visiting social workers, who liked his ready handshake and his friendly yellow Labrador stretched out on the floor by his desk. He looked like everyone’s favourite uncle—and he knew how to hit without leaving a mark on you. Looking back, I can see why he got away with it: he took the really difficult kids, that nobody else would touch. Girls with shiny, sequiny names—Kylie, Demi, Sigourney—and wrecked lives. Boys who set fires, who used knives. All of them lashing out at the people who tried to help them with what I see now was the terrible rage of those who have nothing to lose: children who couldn’t be consoled. Like Darren, who’d set fire to his school and then to his house with his grandfather in it. Or Jason Oakley, who said his dad had interfered with him, who kicked a care worker in the stomach when she was pregnant, so she miscarried: though in the end even Brian Meredith couldn’t cope with Jason, and he was sent to Avalon Close, an adolescent psychiatric unit with a grim reputation. Girls like Aimee Graves, whose father had held her head in the loo and flushed it, who came into Care and had seventeen foster placements, Aimee who was so misnamed, for no one loved her. Except me, for a while. Except me.

Brian Meredith solved some big problems for the council. He did what he liked, and his methods were all his own. Two rooms on the second floor. The secret of his success. Pindown. Each room with a bed, a table, a flimsy electric fire, and the glass-panelled door, the glass screened with brown paper. There were no locks, no keys, but saucepans were hung on the outside of the door handle, and someone was always there, the other side of the door. If you misbehaved or ran away, that’s where they put you. They took your clothes and shoes: you had to wear your pyjamas. If you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to knock on the door. They sat you at the table to write down the wrong things you’d done. The rules were stuck on the wall, a list with lots of ‘no’s: no smoking, TV, radio, books; and no communicating out of the window without permission—because you could see the woman who lived in the flat next door, her sitting room was level with your window, you could see right in. You’d watch her dusting, watching television, sitting on the arm of the sofa and having a quiet smoke, and you’d want to bang on your window, to see if she might wave to you. Sometimes you felt she was your only friend.

Most of the staff were young. Some were doing it for experience, they wanted to get on courses and become proper social workers, the kind who sat in offices and went to case conferences, and visited places like The Poplars then drove away in their cars. Some of them just couldn’t get anything better. Most of them wanted to help, really. They wore denim and had piercings and said how
much they liked the music we listened to and tried to get us to talk about our feelings. You could see when they talked to you, trying to get near you, how they yearned for some kind of revelation—that you would give them the gift of some confidence, a disclosure or confession about your family and what had been done to you, they were longing for your trust, though not knowing what the hell to do with it if you gave it. They were OK, most of them. Only Brian Meredith hit us. But they all used Pindown.

Lesley was the nicest. She arrived soon after me. She was perhaps ten years older than me, twenty-three to my thirteen. Lesley became my key worker. She was different from the others, rather awkward and clumsy, with feet too big for her body, but her eyes were quiet when they rested on you.

Lesley was very conscientious. She took me off for individual sessions. We sat on the square of carpet in the staffroom—the only bit of carpet in the place—and did exercises from a ringbound manual she had, called
Building Self-Esteem.
She drew a self-esteem tree on a big piece of paper with felt tips; there were fruit on the branches, and you had to write something about yourself that you liked in each of the fruit. I remember the dirty cups on the coffee table, and the smell of Jeyes from the corridor where someone had been sick. I couldn’t think of much to write in the fruit. She turned a page of her book. ‘If I could wave a magic wand, what would you wish for?’ she said. ‘When you’re grown-up and all this
is behind you, what would you want to have?’ I sat there in the smell of cabbage and disinfectant. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. I closed my eyes, and saw it all, clear, vivid. Perhaps it was the tree she’d drawn, triggering something in me. I saw lots of trees, a garden; I saw a house and children and a husband, all these images welling up in me, precise as though I’d drawn them. ‘I’d like to have children,’ I said. ‘I’d like to have a family of my own. And a place to live, just us and nobody else.’ I saw, heard it all in my head: a lawn, a lily pool, the splashing of a fountain in the pool, the laughter of children. In a moment of hope that warmed me through, there on the thin frayed carpet: I will have them, I thought, these things.

My mother visited, occasionally, erratically, dressed up, but not for me. Always in a hurry, as though there was somewhere else she needed to be. Like someone at a party, looking over your shoulder for the person they want to talk to, and shifty, as though she was implicated in some guilt by merely being there. Sometimes she brought presents: exuberant cuddly toys, large fluffy rabbits with satin hearts on their chests. I put the toys on the window sill of the room I shared with Aimee. Sometimes my mother was drunk when she came, sentimental, and full of self-pity; saying over and over how she’d done her best for me, done everything she could.

‘When can I come home?’

‘Soon. Very soon, Trina.’ Smoking her Marlboros,
fiddling with her rings. ‘I just need to get myself together. You’re OK in here, then, are you?’

‘I hate it.’

‘Oh,’ she’d say. ‘They seem nice enough.’

Afterwards Lesley would sit on my bed and talk to me.

‘How do you feel about your mum, my love? How does it all make you feel?’

I never knew how to answer these questions.

During the week we were meant to go to school. The others mostly didn’t; they’d go off to the towpath, where they’d sit on rubber tyres and inhale lighter fuel and throw stones into the water; or to the Glendale Centre, where when they got bored they’d steal things from the shops. I was the only one who went on going to school.

It was a sprawling comprehensive, full of children I envied, with homes to go to and trainers that were regularly replaced. I didn’t do well: I was always rather hungry and distracted. I went because of the art: because the art rooms were always open at lunchtime. You could mess about with pens and paints and do whatever you wanted and nobody bothered you. It was quiet, in a way that The Poplars never was—just Capital Radio playing, and a few other girls softly talking, and the drumming of the rain on the mezzanine roof: it always seemed to be raining, that’s how it is in my memory, the windows clouded with condensation so no one could see in. And there I discovered this sweet surprising thing—that with a pen or paintbrush in my hand, there was a flow to my life, and I could draw things that pleased me, and the
other girls would stop and look as they passed. However tired I was, however hungry, this flow and freedom still happened, till The Poplars faded away, to a smoky blur on the edges of my mind, and I entered a different place, a place of shapes, of colours, viridian and cobalt and burnt sienna, where I felt for a while a secret guarded joy.

There was a teacher called Miss Jenkins who took an interest in me. She had an ex-hippy air—she wore hoops in her ears and liked embroidered cardigans. She never asked me how I felt or wanted to talk about me. She must have known where I came from, but it didn’t seem to matter. She showed me things—a book of Impressionist paintings; a postcard of a picture by Pisanello that I adored, of a velvety dark wood studded with birds like jewels; a book of botanical drawings she’d bought at Kew. She gave me pictures to copy, to explore; and suggested materials I could try—fine pens, oil paints, acrylics, and plaster to make a 3-D picture—which they only used in class at A-level. I was privileged, I knew, and at moments like these I felt rich. So I went on going to school, for the quiet hours in the art room and the complicated sweet scent of acrylic paint that I could still smell hours afterwards, and Miss Jenkins whose first name I never knew.

I never got to know the other girls. I kept myself a little apart, not wanting them to find out about me. I saw this as a temporary thing. When things are OK, when this bad bit is over, when I’m back with my mother, I thought—then I will talk to them, make friends, be one of them. Not till then. Aimee at The Poplars was my only friend.

She was wild, Aimee: a sharp, knowing face, hair like fire, tattoos all down her arm. She had a razor-blade sewn into the hem of her jeans. For emergencies, she said. She never went to school.

Aimee got picked on a lot by the staff at The Poplars. They told her she was trouble. She wasn’t like me, she wouldn’t just go along with things and bide her time. I’ve always been able to do this—blend into the background, not be conspicuous, not be seen—but Aimee couldn’t or wouldn’t: there was something in her, some flame that wouldn’t be quenched. Brian Meredith hit her more than the others—for nicking stuff and getting into fights and being lippy. She used to call him Megadeath. ‘He’s got it coming,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll do him over. Just you wait. One day.’ Once he kept her for three weeks in Pindown. When she came out she’d ripped all the skin from the sides of her fingernails and sometimes she’d shout in her sleep.

She ran away often. Sometimes she took me with her. She showed me how to do it, how to travel on a train without a ticket by hiding in the toilet, how to steal. We’d plan it all together in the room we shared, the street light leaking through the thin curtains onto the battered candlewick of our bedspreads. Each time it was like falling in love: each time we thought this was the day, the time, the Real Thing. Usually, we’d head for Brighton, where Aimee had heard you could live in a squat and find some people who’d help you. Brighton was our promised land. We knew how it would be. We’d sell jewellery, those little leather thongs with stones on, we’d live on chips,
read fortunes: we’d be like the older girls you saw there on the seafront, with their impossible glamour, their ratty ribboned hair and Oxfam coats and thin thin bodies and wide, generous smiles.

We’d pack our bags with a change of clothes and Kit Kats we’d nicked from Woolworths or mini-packs of Frosties, and put on our trainers and go. And maybe we’d get there, and sleep on the beach by the pier, and the police would come and pick us up, and we’d be put in Pindown.

The third time, they let me out after a week of Pindown. I was quiet and sensible and sat at the table and wrote down the wrong things I’d done. But Aimee was kept there for fifteen days, and when she came out she had a chest infection. They’d taken the fuse out of the fire because she’d been stroppy, she said.

I woke that night to see her sitting up in bed, the bedspread pulled up to her chin, her fists all bone, clasping it so tightly. The orange light through the curtains made her skin look sickly.

‘I’m going to tell,’ she said, through her coughs. ‘What it’s like here. What he does, that motherfucking bastard.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t. You can’t.’

‘Just watch me,’ she said.

Her social worker from the Civic Centre, Jonny Leverett, was a pallid man who wore heavy-metal sweatshirts. The next time he came, he took her out in his Skoda, and they were gone for hours.

‘Well?’ I said, when she came back.

‘I told him,’ she said. Tearing at the skin at the sides of
her fingernails. ‘They’ll have to do something now. They’ll have to come and get Megadeath. They’ll have to lock him up. Life would be too short for him.’

Two days later there was a case conference in the staffroom. The car park was full of smart cars and Lesley served coffee in the china cups that were kept for visiting professionals. Jonny Leverett came to take Aimee in.

I was watching television when she found me.

‘I’m going to Avalon Close,’ she said. Defiant still, but her eyes were far too bright.

‘You can’t be,’ I said. ‘For Chrissake, they’re all nutters in there.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s got to be better than here.’

She kicked a Pepsi can that was lying on the floor, sent it ricocheting across the room, her flaming red hair flying. But I could see she was frightened: there was shaking at the edges of her smile. I’d never seen her frightened.

‘What about Megadeath?’

‘They didn’t believe me,’ she said.

The day she went, she cut her wrists—with the blade she’d kept for emergencies. Lesley told me, when I got back from school. She was all right now, said Lesley, they’d stitched her up in Casualty. Lesley said not to worry too much about her, that Avalon Close would be right for her as she clearly needed help.

I think back to that sometimes. I try not to, but I still do, even now. Because I know there were things I could have done to help her. I could have gone to the police or
phoned the Civic Centre and told them Aimee was telling the truth—that someone was lying, but it wasn’t her. I didn’t have the courage. Only silence seemed safe.

I missed Aimee terribly. What I could bear before, I couldn’t bear without her. Sometimes when I’d wake in the night, I’d think for a moment she was there in the other bed beside me; then with a lurch of cold I’d see it was Jade Cochrane, my new roommate—who was sad and mousey and never laughed at all.

My mother came again. She had a dark tan and new jewellery. She brought me an extra-big rabbit, with a satin heart on his chest that said ‘Yours 4 Ever’.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘I was going to wrap it up,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t have any paper.’

She was excited, skittish, pleased with herself. She smelt of alcohol but I didn’t think she was drunk. She looked different. This was it, I knew. At last. The time had come.

‘I’m living with Karl now,’ she said. ‘He comes from Dresden. I always did like a man with a nice accent. Karl’s an entrepreneur.’ She pronounced this carefully. ‘We’ve got a new flat in Haringey.’