The Perfect Mother (9 page)

‘I can come and live with you, then,’ I said.

‘Just give me a bit of time,’ she said. ‘Karl and me have got to get ourselves sorted. We’re just getting the flat together.’

Afterwards Lesley sat on my bed, asked how I was feeling. Really, I thought, she doesn’t need to bother any more, I won’t be here much longer.

‘My mum’s all right now,’ I said. ‘She’s got this flat with Karl. I’m going to go and live with them. Any day now.’

Lesley put her arm round me. Her voice was gentle, hesitant.

‘Catriona, my love, that’s not what she’s saying to us.’

My mother never came again.

They tried to get me foster parents. They were going to advertise in the
Evening Standard,
they said.

Lesley took the photograph with her smart new Polaroid.

‘Smile!’ she said. ‘Give me a lovely big smile. That’s wonderful—you look like Meg Ryan.’

I stood there, smiling my most important smile ever. I tried to make my whole self smiley, the corners of my mouth ached with smiliness.

Lesley showed me the ad. It said, ‘Catriona is a bright, pretty teenager with a real artistic talent. Her record of school attendance is excellent. Because of her troubled past, Catriona can be rather demanding at times. Catriona needs firm and consistent parenting.’

I thought about this, lying in bed at night in the orange light of the streetlamps, chilly under the candlewick, missing Aimee. I let myself think, just for a moment, about my foster family, what they might be like: nice food and lots of it, gentleness, and a soft bed with a duvet that tucked in at the back of your neck. And I wondered what it meant to be demanding.

No one was interested; no one even enquired about me. No one wants to adopt a fourteen-year-old girl who can be rather demanding, however bravely she smiles. I told
myself I’d never thought it would happen, really, but there was a messy secret shame in admitting that I’d hoped.

I left the day I was sixteen. Two months before my birthday, Kevin from the Leaving Care team came to see me. My mother had been asking about me, he said. She’d moved abroad but she wanted to make contact, and did I want to see her. I said I didn’t, really. It was my decision, he said. He sorted out my benefit, found me a flat above a chip shop in Garratt Lane, and a furniture grant from a charity.

My birthday was Lesley’s day off, but she came to say goodbye. She held me close for a moment, a quick, hard, awkward hug. It embarrassed me; I wanted her to let go of me. But then, when she’d let go of me, I wished that she’d hold me again.

‘I hope you get them,’ she said. ‘Your wishes, the things you wanted. I’m wishing them for you, too.’

That evening, in my flat in Garratt Lane, I sat at my flimsy new table and such loneliness washed through me, and I briefly longed to be back at The Poplars, just to have people there.

But slowly I put some kind of a life together. I did some temping—I’d learnt to type at school. There were always boyfriends. I guess I was attractive enough: I wore my skirts short and my blonde hair long and did whatever they wanted. I used to worry that my clothes, my skin even, stank of the chip shop, but the men didn’t seem to care. I was, I suppose, promiscuous: I needed company in the evenings; I could only sleep through the night with
somebody beside me. And if some of them were married—well, I reckoned, that was their responsibility. I never told them about myself and if they asked I made up something, recasting my life as unexceptional. After a month or two they usually drifted off, sensing I guess something in me that would for ever elude them. But from time to time there’d be one who said he loved me, and then I’d stop returning his calls, or say I was washing my hair, and after a while, he’d drift away, however keen he’d been.

Sometimes I thought I’d ring Kevin, and go and find my mother. I’d start to picture a reconciliation: her welcome, her apology, wrapping me in her arms and her scent of Marlboros and lily of the valley. But then I’d think how she’d neglected me and lied to me, and such rage would flare in me, and I knew I wouldn’t do it. So the days dragged on: a life of offices, all looking much the same, and vaguely unsatisfactory sex that was paid for with meals at Pizza Express and shots of tequila. It was lonely, but it was better than I was used to.

There are moments when everything changes. I believe that. Moments of destiny, of serendipity. And one hot summer evening much like any other, when I’d just got off the bus in Garratt Lane, I bumped into Miss Jenkins.

‘Catriona. What a nice surprise.’

She still had the hoops and the hippy cardigan, and she seemed so pleased to see me. She asked what I was doing. I shrugged a little, told her about the temping, though not the men.

She stood there for a while, her steady eyes on me. There was this school, she said. A nursery school, in Chelsea: private, expensive. Not really the sort of thing she approved of: nursery education ought to be free for everyone. But the headmistress was a friend of hers, they’d been at college together, and she happened to know they had a post going. I reminded her that I only had three GCSEs. She said it didn’t matter, it was a nursery assistant post, they needed someone who could help with the art. The reference wasn’t a problem, she said, she’d be more than happy to be my referee. I felt cool air against my face; I remember that, a sudden shift in the weather. We neither of us had anything to write on, so I borrowed her biro and scribbled the number on the back of my hand.

CHAPTER 10

T
he school was in a hushed street off King’s Road. There was a cottage, old and rather crooked, at the turn of the road, and a little arched door in the wall. I rang and the door opened: children’s noise rushed out into the stillness of the street. Miss Parry, the headmistress, introduced herself; she was tall, gangly, flatfooted as a heron, with vivid bird-like eyes. She took me through the cloakroom, where every peg had a different hand-painted picture—a duck, a tulip, a blue umbrella. This amazed me, the generosity of it, such detail lavished on every child, every name. And we went through the airy
playroom, and out into the garden at the back, a storybook garden, a secret between high walls, with a labyrinth of twisty stone paths and trampled scraps of lawn, and, in the middle, steps down to an old well—now filled in, of course, said Miss Parry—where there grew an old catalpa tree with leaves as wide as hands; and over there by the sandpit, she said, the two mossy stones set into the lawn were Carolingian graves. The whole place was exuberant with children, and messy with the tumbled detritus of their play, plastic animals faded by the sunlight, and the tyres and boxes and blankets they used to make castles and dens; anarchic and disorderly, but the disorder held and contained by the walls of yellow London brick, and the narrow bright beds of hollyhocks and lupins that fringed the edges of the garden.

She showed me round, asked a few obvious questions, then left me in the playroom to see what I’d do. Cast adrift in that sea of children, I did what made me feel safest, and sat in the art corner drawing extravagant pictures, of flamboyant animals with wings and wicked fangs. The children gathered round, adding their own details, colouring in. After a while my self-consciousness fell away. I was surprised to turn and see Miss Parry behind me. She reached out to touch a doleful tiger I’d drawn. ‘I think you’ll do quite nicely here,’ she said.

It wasn’t perfect. There was a lot of drudgery, toilets to be cleaned, floors to be swept and swabbed, little plastic bits of things to sort and put back into boxes. And it was physically exhausting, particularly demanding
perhaps because it was so unstructured, all these children who tugged at your sleeve with their urgency and demands. The pay was minimal—enough to pay the rent on my flat and to buy a bit of food, though mostly I lived on what I ate at the nursery, the lunches of sausage or stew followed by jelly and bland glossy custard; and just about enough for mascara, and bleach for my long hair, and occasionally a new pair of clingy jeans or a faded knitted top with rainbow beading from one of the second-hand stalls in King’s Road market. But mostly I was happy there. I found I had a skill with children, that I could join in their play, enter their worlds: I don’t know where it came from, this easy instinctive ability—it seems surprising given the fractured nature of my childhood. But for me there was something so satisfying in the company of these children, with their openness and freshness and unanswerable questions. Where was I before I was born? Are the birds cross? Why do winds in cartoons have faces? Maybe I had some sense that this was what I needed—these years spent eating toad-in-the-hole and playing and reading picture books in a place that was kind and generous, where every child was so precious they had their very own picture next to their peg. It was perhaps a kind of healing for me: a reliving or a recovering of childhood.

Miss Parry believed with a passion in children’s innate goodness, and held what I realise now were highly unfashionable ideas about the value of play. Tests and phonics lessons and neat rows of wooden desks were
anathema to her. Every week there’d be a staff meeting in her flat above the playroom, when we’d sit on her squashy floral sofas and talk about the children’s social and emotional progress: it was gossip, really, in the guise of psychology, singling out children who seemed troubled or reserved, and in the process enjoying the gratifying if dubious pleasures of disapproval. In their passion for the children’s welfare, Miss Parry and Mrs Bates, her pink and excitable deputy, did a lot of disapproving: of parents who left their children with nannies too young to know better; of mothers who spent all day at the gym and the hair salon; of fathers who came home too late to kiss their children goodnight. Divorce particularly agitated them: husbands or wives—but especially wives—who abandoned their responsibilities and their beautiful children in pursuit of some cheap and transient sexual thrill. They loved to conclude, their mouths thin and tight, their voices fat with satisfaction, that the children of the affluent can be deprived in a multitude of ways, just as surely as the children of the poor; and at this point Miss Parry and Mrs Bates could grow quite dewy-eyed about the privileges of the poor—who may at least have stay-at-home mothers, and aunts and uncles living cosily round the corner, and granny in the corner by the gas-fire. During these discussions, I said nothing.

I stayed for seven years in that garden of children. I remember winter mornings, with the leaves fallen from the catalpa so the braided branches patterned the clean bright sky, and a crust of ice on the grass round the graves which
the sun took a while to reach. All of us stamping our numb feet in our Wellingtons, and feeling even through our gloves the tingling of frost on our fingers; and at orange-juice time the cook, who was hugely fat, with a kind of picture-book rightness to her corpulence, bringing us syrupy mugs of coffee made with boiled milk and sugar, rich with a thick creamy scum, and toast that dripped with melting yellow butter.

And especially I remember summer days, the blossom blowing on the catalpa tree, the smells of exhaust from King’s Road blending with the heavy scent of pollen from the dusty lilies in the flowerbeds, the children bare-legged and freckled and their hair warm to the touch. Hot afternoons that unfolded like tumbled bales of cloth, stretching on for aeons, pleasant but exhausting. And then the children would go, and silence would creep back into the place like a cat coming home for his supper. We’d sweep and tidy the garden in the warm and sudden stillness, and I’d feel a deep contentment washing through me.

Sinead came in the summer, when the catalpa was just beginning to flower. She was a three-year-old elf: disorderly Celtic hair, black and thickly curling, her face flushed pink by the heat. Her clothes were expensive but none of them seemed to match. She was troubled—unsmiling, virtually mute, with shadowed eyes.

Sinead’s father had talked quite openly, said Miss Parry, leaning forward on her squashy sofa with an excessive eagerness in her bright bird eyes: and she wanted
to share it all with us, every detail, in the interests of the child. The mother, it seemed, had a high-powered job in PR. She’d walked out, gone off with a man ten years her junior, a photographer, abandoning her husband and her child. The other staff were gleefully amazed that any woman could walk out on these two people—that delectable little girl, that father. For her father had caught everybody’s eye, with his easy elegance, the cut of his shirt, his silk tie, gold cufflinks; and there was also something a little bemused and vulnerable about him, as though for a time he’d lost his way—making him vastly attractive to these women with their hunger to nurture. And then there was his palpable affection for his child.

Sinead was allocated to me, in the face of some competition for she was a perfect subject—an appealing child with emotional problems that were interesting but manageable. She played for hours with Playmobil figures on the steps that led down to the catalpa tree: acting out intricate stories, never speaking. I sat by her, sometimes moving an animal, joining in a little, and she started to let me in, to talk in a hushed monotone, so I could share in these tales of hers, entangled histories that had their genesis in the traditional storybook world of kings and witches and magic, but were far too full of losses and reversals. As the sunlit days spilled one into another, and the hollyhocks flowered then faded in the beds behind the sandpit, she started to sit nearer me; sometimes she hummed a little scrap of song. The plastic figures spread out onto a wall and a pathway; and one or two other
children, sensing she might now notice them, appeared, forthright and curious, at the edges of her game. Her stories changed. The princesses became dogmatic and triumphant and accomplished amazing feats of daring; the queens and kings were reconciled, though they lived on opposite shores with between them wastes of ocean; and there began to be comfort in her games, small animals that were soothed to sleep in shoeboxes or under the fallen satiny petals from the catalpa tree. Till one day, when I was for a moment drawn away inside the playroom, I turned to see her careering round the garden with three of the rowdiest boys, waving a stick, noisy, engaged, connected: showing the first signs of that casual exuberance that’s so much part of her now. I knew she didn’t need me any more.