The Bad Mother's Handbook Read online

  ‘How old are you, Miss?’ asked Dale. They do that, remedials, constantly try to distract you with personal chat.

  ‘That’s rude,’ said Lisa promptly. ‘You shouldn’t ask a lady that.’

  ‘I think she’s about twenty-five,’ persisted Dale. He had a long face with a large jaw, and chewed his pencils compulsively.

  ‘No,’ I smiled. ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit older than that.’

  ‘Fifty?’ offered Lisa. ‘You’ve a look of my gran, and she’s just had her fiftieth birthday.’

  ‘When’s your birthday, Miss?’ asked Dale, spitting splinters of mashed-up wood across the table.

  ‘Mine’s next week,’ said fat Philip, waking up. ‘I’m gettin’ a Furby.’

  ‘You big poof,’ said Dale. ‘You big girl.’

  The groups moved round and I helped put up some backing paper for a display on Transport. Mr F’s disappointed face and Sylv’s peevish one were printed on every sheet of sugar paper. Each time I pulled the trigger on the staple gun it felt like I was driving staples into my own temples. Finally I asked Pauline if I could go and get a paracetamol.

  ‘Then go and sit in the staff room,’ she said. ‘There’s only ten minutes to break, I’ll clear up here.’ I must have looked really poorly.

  Sylv’s the guardian of the paracetamol unfortunately but, hooray, she wasn’t in the office so I unlocked the cabinet and helped myself, swigging them down with a mug of cold water. From there I went straight to the staff room where I heard through the half-open door: ‘. . . saw them embracing in the car park of the Feathers, apparently’. So I did a smart U-turn and walked back along the corridor, and met Mr F coming in the opposite direction.

  ‘Thanks for the, ahm, bag, ah . . .’ he said as he drew near.

  ‘Oh, no bother. Thanks.’ I couldn’t look him in the eye. Keep walking, I told him silently. He did, and I pushed out through the swing doors into the playground and breathed again. My whole body felt hot and I knew my cheeks were burning. Maybe it was the menopause, come early. That’d be just about my luck.

  The bell went and children began to trickle out. I walked across the rec over the patches of slush and perched with the edge of my bottom on the low wall by the gates, wishing I had a coffee. ‘Hey, Miss?’ Dale appeared at my elbow. There were tiny flecks of red paint all over his lips off the crayon he’d been eating. ‘Look! I did you a card. For your birthday. You can save it, like, and bring it out when it’s time.’ He handed me a folded piece of centimetre-squared paper with two pencil figures drawn on the front. One was lying down in what appeared to be a pool of blood. ‘It’s OK, he’s a baddie,’ explained Dale, pointing. ‘The other’s Gravekeeper, he saves the world.’ He spread his arms out like wings, then let them flop to his sides.

  ‘Nice trick if you can do it,’ I said, opening the card up. To a grat teasher, it said. Meny happy retuns. You’re not supposed to touch the pupils, the times being what they are, but I leant forward and gave him a hug. On these slender shafts of sunlight sanity seems to turn, at times. ‘You’ve made my day,’ I told him warmly. He stepped back slightly. ‘No, really. You’ve redeemed the moment, you’ve given me the impetus to lurch forward into the next inevitable crisis. You’ve provided a tiny spark of light in a tunnel of gloom. Dale, you are a superhero within your own galaxy.’

  ‘Steady on, Miss,’ he said.

  *

  I waited a week and did another test, also positive, so that was that. Then I sorted all my clothes out and ended up with a capsule wardrobe of fleeces and baggy jumpers and tube skirts and leggings. Standing naked before the mirror now there was no doubt. My whole body had started to change. It wasn’t mine any more. It belonged to the thing inside.

  At school I avoided Daniel, avoided everyone, really. Spent a lot of time in the library, books open, looking out the window. Well, how could I join in the common-room chit-chat about clothes, and boys, and weight, and fallouts? In the smart corner it was all Tony Blair and his New Vision, but I couldn’t engage with any of it. The very word Labour turned my insides to water. None of it seemed real; it was as if there was a big glass wall between me and the others. I’d realized in the park, nothing was going to be the same ever again, but it was taking time for the extent of it to sink in. I mean, I couldn’t see further than the pregnancy. There was the immediate problem of trying not to look fat, and (more hazily) steeling myself up for the hoo-ha when everyone found out, not least my mother, who was definitely going to have some kind of breakdown. On the very far horizon was the prospect of giving birth, which I’d heard was quite painful, and I wasn’t very good with pain. But after that? I knew there was going to be a baby at the end of it, but I couldn’t get my head round it. Not me, not a baby.

  Unless I decided there wasn’t. But, as Daniel, damn him, had pointed out, I was going to have to get my skates on if I wanted to go down that route. I didn’t even know what they did. Hoovered you out, a girl had once told me. It didn’t sound too awful in that respect, but even I could see there was probably more to it than a quick trip to the Outpatients’.

  I think it was the toes that were bothering me. We’d had a video on pregnancy, in Year 10. It showed the foetus wiggling about, sucking its thumb and kicking its skinny legs with their little splayed toes, then the narrator had said, See if you can guess how old this baby is. The teacher had paused the tape and we’d had a go, most of us thought about five months. Then she switched the video back on and the answer had been fourteen weeks. See how the heart, with its four chambers, is already beating, the narrator had continued. In fact, a heart beat can be detected at just six weeks of development. The miracle of creation. It was a sod.

  So what a mature and sensible person would have been doing at this stage of the game was weighing things up, the fucked-up life versus the other, differently fucked-up life, and seeing which she thought she could honestly cope with. What a mature person would do was tell their mother, see a doctor, get a counsellor. Face up to it all, and pronto.

  But I was frozen. Because it still couldn’t be true; it couldn’t be me who was going through this. I was going to slide the pregnancy under the lining paper of the chest of drawers in the spare room of my mind. Something would turn up, surely.

  *

  HE CAME STRIDING across the tarmac, kids buzzing round him like flies.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘No sugar.’ I took the steaming mug off him and studied the ground while he scanned the sky above my head. ‘Don’t worry about Sunday, anyway. These things happen. I was once very ill after a rogue sausage roll from a garage.’ He nodded at my bare forearms; my coat was still in the staff room. ‘Don’t catch cold, will you?’

  He walked away, and was immediately accosted by a very small Year 1 boy, tugging at his trouser leg and pointing over to the football pitch. Mr F bent down to hear the tale and it was like a scene from Goodbye Mr Chips, except that Mr F looks more like Syd Little than Robert Donat.

  I’d give them breaktime to get it out of their system, then I was going back inside.

  *

  I was having a conversation with Daniel in my bedroom. He wasn’t actually there, I’d just conjured him up for the purposes of rational debate.

  ‘I know you want to see Paul again. But all I’m asking is, have you thought through the reasons behind it?’ Daniel sat scrunched up in the beanbag chair, his knees to his chin. I was at the desk, doodling boxes and clouds on the flyleaf of Sense and Sensibility.

  ‘He’s got a right to know,’ I said sulkily. I wanted to see Paul so much it was like toothache; I couldn’t keep still, couldn’t get comfortable. Today was Sunday, which always makes things worse. There’s something about Sundays which makes you rattle around inside yourself, even in these exciting days of car boot sales and extended trading hours. Mum had gone to Do-It-All to get some polystyrene coving and Nan was downstairs playing dominoes with Ivy. I’d paced up and down my room so much I had a stitch in my groin; I thought I was going to go mad with indecision.
Hence Daniel.

  ‘He will know, sooner or later. You can’t keep it a secret much longer. Unless you . . .’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ I said testily. ‘I know the score.’

  ‘What do you honestly expect his reaction to be?’

  I wasn’t ready to answer this question, even from myself. We tried again.

  ‘In an ideal world,’ Daniel pushed his imaginary glasses further up the bridge of his imaginary nose, ‘what would you expect his reaction to be?’

  That was better. ‘Well, he’d be totally supportive, for a start. He’d say, “Whatever you want to do, Charlie, I’ll stand by you.” ’

  ‘And what do you want to do?’

  ‘I want . . . I want not to be pregnant in the first place.’ I heard my voice rise to a wail.

  Daniel sighed heavily. ‘Come on, Charlotte, grow up now. Are you saying you want an abortion?’

  ‘I—’ Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door handle turn and my heart jumped in horror. The door swung open and Nan shuffled in. ‘Ivy’s doin’ some toasted teacakes, d’ you want one?’

  ‘Oh, Nan, thank God it’s only you. I thought it was Mum.’

  Nan smiled blankly. ‘Toasted teacakes,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, no, you’re OK. I’ll wait till later. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Eeh, I don’t know. Not hungry. I could eyt a buttered frog.’ She chuckled at her own joke and retreated, pulling the door to after her. I waited till I heard it click, then turned my attention to Daniel again.

  ‘Well, are you going to . . . ?’

  ‘It depends what he wants. If he came with me while they did it, if he was really nice and we got back together and he let me talk about it afterwards, and he never mentioned Jeanette Piper or Chrissy . . .’

  ‘If pigs went flying past the window.’

  ‘Oh, ha-fucking-ha.’ I vanished him, then sat in a temper drawing cartoon bombs and lightning bolts.

  Julia and Anya materialized on the bed, unbidden.

  ‘Isn’t it the absolute worst thing you can think of, though,’ Anya was saying.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Well, cancer would be pretty bad, and losing both your parents in a car crash.’

  ‘Or being permanently disfigured, with, like, acid or something. You know, having a glass eye or whatever.’

  ‘Or being a quadriplegic.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But being pregnant’s pretty horrendous. I mean, your whole life messed up. Can you imagine what your mum would say?’

  They both pulled manic faces and Julia put her hands round her throat and made strangling noises. ‘I’d just die. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, God, yeah. Awful. Completely fucking awful.’

  ‘What I don’t understand, though,’ Julia wound a strand of glossy hair round and round her finger, ‘what I don’t get is, how she let it happen. I mean, she’s supposed to be so clever. She got an A in that last History module, the one she was supposed to have ballsed up.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. And I tell you what, I didn’t even really know she had a boyfriend. Actually, she can be a right miserable cow, she never tells you anything. To be honest, I still had her down as a virgin.’

  ‘They say it’s the quiet ones,’ sniggered Julia. Anya began to giggle, then Julia started too. ‘Oh, shit, we are awful. ’S not funny. Poor Charlotte.’

  ‘Yeah, poor old Charlotte.’

  Three identical culs-de-sac run off Barrow Road; Paul’s house is down the second. Not much had changed since I last went, except the bus shelter now had no roof at all, and the form was completely slatless, just two thick concrete stands five feet apart rising out of the tyre-marked grass. I remembered when I was a little girl, three old men in caps and mufflers used to always be sitting there, smoking away, gossiping. They were sort of like custodians of the highway, Neighbourhood Watch. Nan knew who they all were, used to say howdo and get a nod. Then after a few years there were two, then only one old man, sitting on his own, clouded in blue smoke. One day there was no one at all, and after that the bench started to get taken apart. I think maybe Bank Top didn’t used to be so crap, something went wrong with the people.

  The Alsatian had gone too. The yard was bare except for a chewed rubber ball and a length of chain.

  Mr Bentham let me in; I could tell he was surprised.

  ‘Paul! Paul!’ he shouted up the stairs. ‘You’ve gorra visitor!’

  Paul’s face peered over the banister and he mouthed ’kin ’ell when he saw me. But when he didn’t move I climbed up after him.

  By the time we got inside his room I was out of breath and sweating.

  ‘What d’you want?’ he asked gracelessly.

  I saw with a pang that he was still as handsome, that the Man U duvet looked sex-rumpled, that someone had bought him a white teddy with heart-shaped paws which he’d stuck on top of his computer.

  ‘Can I sit down?’

  He just shrugged, so I stayed where I was, shoulder to shoulder with David Beckham. The moment twisted slowly on its long thread. I couldn’t make my mouth work, though my brain was racing, until:

  ‘Nice bear,’ I said, like a pillock.

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’ He snickered awkwardly, looking all round the room, everywhere except at me. ‘Shit, y’ know, seems really weird—’ He allowed himself a glance in my direction. All those times I was here, I was thinking, and the last few weeks, we never knew, I had cells dividing inside me. 2, 4, 8, 16, an exponential time bomb. Cells all drifting to their allotted place like synchronized swimmers. Shape-shifting: amoeba to blackberry, to shrimp, alien, baby. There’s a baby under this fleece. Hallo, Dad.

  ‘Hey, are you all right? You look a bit – funny.’

  I took heart from what might have been concern in his voice and stepped forward. ‘Paul, I – no, I’m not all right. I, I’m—’ My hand dipped automatically to my stomach and his eyes followed it, then widened. Then his brows came down and his whole face went hard.

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Oh, no. Oh, no, not that one. I do not want to hear this! I do not fucking want to hear this!’ He turned right away and put his hands on the back of his neck, blocking me out. Any minute now, I thought, he’s going to put his fingers in his ears and start humming.

  ‘Paul, you’ve got to know—’

  ‘Fuck OFF!’ he shouted over me. ‘Don’t try and put this one on me. This is your fault. Christ! You stupid, stupid bitch!’ He thumped the wall, then leant on it, shoulders hunched, still with his back to me. He looked like a three-year-old whose mum has refused to let him go on the Tigger ride outside Tesco’s.

  There was silence while I fought the urge to run down the stairs, through the door and across the Continent; run for ever, run the pregnancy away.

  ‘I’m sorry, Paul, it’s true.’

  ‘Aw, Jesus.’ He groaned and finally turned back round to face me. ‘You’ve gotta be wrong. It weren’t like we didn’t use owt. Loads of girls have scares, it dun’t mean a thing. You’ve just got yourself in a state.’

  ‘I did a test.’

  He put his hand over his mouth and swore behind it.

  ‘It is yours.’

  He took his hand away from his chin and stared at me. ‘No, Charlotte. That’s where you’re wrong. It’s yours. It’s all yours. I don’t want fuck all to do wi’ it.’

  At least you know where you stand. At least you know where you stand.

  I don’t remember walking back home but here I was under the duvet in my bedroom, so I suppose I must have done. Maybe I’d been asleep, because I was very hot and my mouth was dry. Maybe it had been a dream. – Maybe it had all been a dream! – But no, my hand strayed down over my bump, and Paul’s parting shot still rang in my ears. I’d put my Walkman on but it’d made no difference, Paul was louder. That exact intonation would be etched into my brain all my life, long after his features had become vague. I’d probably die with that last sentence replaying itself.

  I snuggled down further into the bed.
When I was very little and Mum and I still got on, she used to let me make a Nest at bedtime out of the duvet. Then she’d peer in and pretend she couldn’t see me and that she was going. I’d shoot out from underneath, all flushed and ruffled, and shriek, ‘Story!’ and she’d pretend to be incredibly surprised. She used to read to me every night, long after I could read myself. If only I could be little again. You don’t appreciate it at the time.

  I must have drifted off again because the tape was on side two and Nan was shaking me gently.

  ‘A shut mouth keeps flies out,’ she was saying when I lifted up the earphones.

  ‘You what?’

  Nan settled on the bed and leant over to stroke my hair. Normally I’d have had to fight the urge to squirm away; not that I don’t love her, I just get really touchy about my personal space sometimes. But this time I lay there quietly, glad of the sympathy. After a while she said; ‘You’re havin’ a baby, then.’

  I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  ‘Nan!’

  ‘Don’t you worry, it’ll be awreet. We’ll see you through.’ She fished under the duvet for my hand and took it in her gnarled fingers. The flesh moved loosely over the bones, as if it was ready to come away. I shuddered and closed my eyes, tears brimming out from between the lashes.

  ‘Oh, Nan.’

  ‘Charlotte, love.’ She gripped my hand tighter.

  ‘Please don’t tell Mum. Not yet. I can’t face her.’

  She half-smiled. ‘I know all sorts as I’ve never towd.’ (Of course you do, I thought.) ‘Tha maun fret, I’ll not say owt till you’re ready.’

  Beside my ear the Walkman played:

  You walk out of trouble

  Into trouble

  Out of trouble

  Into trouble

  And this is your life

  This is your life

  ‘Oh, Nan, why is everything such a mess? Why me?’