The Bad Mother's Handbook Read online

  ‘Touch it.’

  I still didn’t know the proper technique but it didn’t seem to matter. Whatever I did he rolled his eyes back as if he was having a fit, and panted. There was all this loose skin below the tight, shiny stalk. I fiddled experimentally and he began to swear quietly.

  ‘Like that, yeah. Fuck. Fucking hell.’

  When my hair fell forward and brushed his stomach he drew his breath in sharply.

  ‘Wait a minute.’

  He groped around on the bedside table and snatched up a condom, which he dropped with shock when I dipped my head and kissed his navel.

  ‘I’ll get it.’ I leant over and retrieved the little foil packet from off the floor.

  ‘Put it on for me. Go on. It’d be so sexy.’

  I must have looked doubtful.

  ‘I’ll show you how.’

  I thought, you have to learn these things if you’re a woman, it’ll be another string to my bow.

  He tore off the packet end and squeezed out the slimy ring. I watched closely, the way I used to in science lessons when Bunsen burners were being demonstrated. Then he handed it to me. I tried not to flinch.

  ‘Keep it this way up. Pull that pointy thing in the middle, just a bit, gently. Gently! It’s my last one. Now, put it on the top like this – ’ he guided my hands to his groin – ‘and, that’s it, roll it down – Jesus—’

  And then he was on me, in me again, jerking his hips and burying his face against my shoulder.

  ‘I’m going to make you come,’ he whispered savagely. It sounded like a threat.

  I moved my hips under his and he slowed his pace, adding a sort of grind to the thrust.

  ‘What does that feel like?’

  ‘Ni— fantastic,’ I breathed. But I was panicking. I didn’t know how to rise to the occasion. Perhaps I had come and didn’t realize it. No, because the girls at school said you definitely knew when you’d had an orgasm. It was like a sneeze, Julia had said. A sneeze?

  Meanwhile Paul ground on. ‘Ooh, that’s so good.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Should I fake it? I tried panting heavily and moaning a bit, but I didn’t have the confidence to pull it off. He would guess, and then it would be awful. But what to say?

  He humped away and I stroked his back absently, gazing round the room at his collection of football programmes pinned to the walls, his red and white scarf draped over the lintel, the rosette stuck to his computer. The rhythm of his pelvis became a playground skipping song: Keep the kettle boiling, keep the kettle boiling—

  Suddenly he stopped. ‘Have you come yet?’

  There was a brief pause then I smiled dazzlingly.

  ‘No, but it was great. Have you?’

  He looked hurt. ‘Yeah. Ages ago. At the beginning. I was only keeping going for you. Do you think you might be close?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully.

  ‘Do you want to try a bit longer?’

  I shook my head and tried not to shudder.

  ‘Look, Paul, it really doesn’t matter. It’ll, it’ll sort itself out. I probably just need to relax more. Don’t worry about it. I’m not.’ I smiled again, reassuring. ‘It’s great. You’re great.’

  ‘OK, then.’ He grinned. ‘God, I’m knackered.’ He pulled away, then, ‘Shit.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ He was looking down in a horrified sort of way. ‘Have you hurt yourself? Have I hurt you?’

  ‘The condom. It’s . . .’ he gestured at his limp and naked cock. ‘It’s still . . . Can you . . . ? Look, I think it’s still inside you. Bloody hell. Do you want to, er, have a feel?’

  I was seeing stars of panic but I did what he said. I leant flat on the bed, drew my knees up and put my fingers gingerly inside myself. ‘Don’t watch!’ It felt raw and strange in there. I kept trying to take deep breaths and not clench up. ‘I can’t . . . Oh, God! Paul!’

  ‘Let me have a try. I’m at a better angle.’ He giggled nervously.

  As he turned back to me I closed my eyes. It was like being at the doctors. Once there’d been a girl at school, in the first year, who’d got a tampon stuck up her and a teacher had had to fish it out: I remember the horror of simply being told. I wanted, now, at this very moment, to die with fear and shame. I opened my eyes a fraction as he probed and concentrated, and saw his tongue poking out slightly between his lips.

  ‘Sorted!’ He pulled out the slimy thing and held it up for inspection. Then he nodded. ‘Phew! We’re OK, it’s not bursted or anything. I’ll stick it in t’ bin.’ He threw it across the room. I hoped he wouldn’t shout Goal! like he normally did, but he didn’t. He just said, ‘Christ, I can do without that!’

  You can, I thought, rolling miserably up in the duvet. That was, would be, without doubt, the worst moment of my entire adult life.

  ‘Cheer up. It weren’t nothin’.’ He ruffled my hair. ‘I’ll go and get us a Wagon Wheel in a minute. I’ll stick t’ kettle on too. Do you want to play Tomb Raider when you’ve got dressed? I nicked it off Dan this morning.’

  He was throwing on clothes as he spoke. So it must be all right, then. But why don’t they tell you sex can be so bloody embarrassing? I have to admit, it isn’t like I thought it would be. Perhaps I don’t love Paul enough, or perhaps it’s me. Either way, I need some answers and I think I know where to get them.

  *

  THE QUESTION IS, is Nan telling the truth? And if she is, what then? I have to, have to find out.

  Chapter Two

  BY GOD, Bill were a clever man. I don’t know what he saw in me. Sometimes, when he was a lad, they sent him home early from school because he’d done all his work. Teacher used to say, ‘Hesketh! Come out with your sums, an’ if they’re not finished, you’re in trouble.’ An’ he’d go up to t’ front and it’d all be done, all correct, and he’d be sent home at half-past three instead of four. He should have stayed on, he had a ’ead for learning, but he had to leave at thirteen for the wage, same as me.

  So he went down the mines, like his father had, and hated it. He never got any proper rest. In the evenings he used to go to Bob Moss’s grocer’s shop and pack orders, then tek ’em round in a wheelbarrow. Then he started with TB and that was it, off to the Co-Op Convalescent Home at Blackpool, where he met his fiancée. Her name was Alice Fitton, she lived up Chorley way, and she was a bonny woman. She was brokenhearted when he finished with her to start courting me. I should have felt sorry but I didn’t. I had what I wanted. I’d seen the way my mother suffered and I knew the value of a good man.

  After we married he got a job at Cooks’s paper mill, and took up with Bank Top Brass Band, playing tenor horn. He used to say they were one of the finest second-class amateur bands in the league. They practised every other day in a barn over the smithy, and paid a penny a week into funds. Once they played at the Winter Gardens at Southport in front of an audience of four thousand, and won a cup, it were t’ first time ever. The conductor, Mr Platt, was overwhelmed. By the time they got back home it was past midnight but he insisted they play Souza’s ‘Semper Fidelis’ as they walked through the main street. ‘I don’t think as we’d better. We’ll wake everyone up,’ Bill had said. ‘Well, then,’ Mr Platt told him, ‘we’ll tek our shoes and socks off.’

  His chest stopped him playing in the finish; there was the TB, and he’d been smoking since he were thirteen. It kept him out o’ t’ war too, more or less; he stayed at home and was an ambulanceman for th’ Home Guard. We were never short of crepe bandage in this house. But it were his lungs that killed him in th’ end. He was only sixty-three. We’d been married forty-two years. And it was a happy marriage, oh it was. Except for the one thing.

  *

  Where do you go to get the answers when you’re seventeen? Well, you start by pushing your way through the Enchanted Forest of people around you who think they know the answers: parents, teachers, solve-your-life-in-twenty-minutes-magazine-article writers. Mum thinks ballsing up her own life makes her an expert o
n mine (now where’s the logic in that?), but what she fails to see is that I am about as much like her as she is like Nan, i.e. not at all. To look at us both you’d think I’d been found under a hedge. Bit of a relief if I had been, in some ways. It would certainly explain a lot.

  Dad, of course, is conspicuous by his absence. Oh, I know where he lives, and it’s not so far away, but if I turned up on the doorstep and started asking for Advice about my personal life, he’d have kittens. It’s not his field. Anyway, I think I scare him.

  Teachers, they mean well, most of them, but they just see everything in terms of exam results, as if your ‘A’-level grade print-out will have magically at the bottom a projected CV to tell you exactly where you’re going next. ‘A A B B, Accountancy at Bristol, followed by a meteoric career with Touche Ross, marriage at twenty-six, a nice house in Surrey and two healthy children by the time you’re thirty (suggested names Annabel and Max).’

  I suppose a normal girl would ask her friends, but I only have acquaintances, people I hang around with but never Talk to. Is it geography or psychology? John Donne wrote, ‘No man is an island’, but he didn’t live in Bank Top. Lucky bastard.

  Part of the problem is that the village is at the back of beyond and there’s no one else from my form lives there. All the other kids from my class at primary school swarmed off to the Comp, sneering over their shoulders at me as they went: I see them around but they don’t want anything much to do with me now I’m officially A Snob. Most of the people who go to the Grammar live on the other side of Bolton (in, it’s got to be said, much bigger houses). I can’t drive – no money for lessons and though Dad’s promised faithfully to teach me I know this will never happen – and the buses stop running at 10.30. Mum can’t be ferrying me about because she doesn’t like to leave Nan unattended for fear of mad accidents. So here I am. It’s never worried me till now.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not Billy No-mates, I know where to sit in the Common Room, I go out (and return early). I just don’t seem to have that need for intimacy that some girls do. Strolling around the field at lunchtime, sharing confidences, not my thing. But maybe I’d be like that wherever I lived. I was always on the outside at St Mary’s; the one helping Mrs Ainscough in the library at dinner break rather than playing Scott and Charlene by the bins. ‘You spend too much time in your own head,’ my mother once told me during a blazing row over nothing at all, and I hate to say it, but I think she was right.

  So where was I going? Here, to this ordinary-looking modern semi on the outskirts of Bolton, a mere bus ride away from our house. Behind this front door with its glass panels of tulips, a figure moved.

  ‘Hang on a sec. I’m trying not to let the cat out.’ The door opened a fraction and a woman’s plump face appeared, squashed against the crack. ‘Can you – oh damn.’ A grey shape squeezed past our feet in an oily movement and was gone. ‘Never mind. Come in.’

  I stepped into a white hallway full of swathed muslin and stippled walls, church candles and statuettes, Changing Rooms gone mad.

  ‘Hiya, I’m Jackie. Is it Charlotte? Great. Come through. Mind the crystals.’

  I dodged the swinging mobiles as she led me along to a room at the back. This was all black and red and stank of patchouli. On the walls were pictures of Jackie when she had been younger (and slimmer) together with framed testimonials and a poster of a unicorn rearing up under a rainbow. The table was covered with a scarlet chenille cloth. Jackie lit an incense burner in the corner.

  ‘Now. Take a seat and we’ll start with a palm reading.’

  We sat with the corner of the dining table between us and she took my hand. The contact made me shiver and it was all I could do not to pull away.

  ‘Relax,’ she murmured, touching the soft pads of skin carefully. It felt really freaky. What the hell am I doing here, I thought. Jackie’s blonde head was bent and I could see her dark roots. Her nails were immaculately manicured and her fat fingers full of rings.

  ‘I bet you’re wondering what you’re doing here,’ she said without looking up.

  Shit shit shit. ‘No, not at all.’ I could feel myself blushing. ‘You were recommended. A girl at school, you told her not to panic when suitcases appeared in the hall, and then her dad left home, but he came back again two weeks later. She was dead impressed. She’s been telling everyone.’

  ‘Right.’ She shifted her bottom on the chair and leaned back, scrutinizing my face. ‘Only a lot of people feel self-conscious consulting a psychic.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll be honest . . . I don’t know what to think. Does it matter? Am I going to interfere with the vibrations if I don’t, er, completely believe . . . ?’

  ‘No.’ Very assured. ‘What is it you want to know, Charlotte?’

  ‘I, um, oh God, now you’re asking. I think I need to know what to do with my life. I want somebody to tell me how to get out of Bank Top, ’cause it’s a dump, and where I’d be happy. Is there, like, somewhere I should be headed? Point me in the right direction. Show me how to change things.’ She was really listening, which unnerved me, I wasn’t used to it. ‘Because I thought I had, but everything’s just the same . . . Does any of this make sense?’

  Her lids and lashes were heavy with make-up as she frowned, leaned forward again and studied my hand. Then she began to talk quickly and confidently, her gaze still fixed on my palm.

  ‘You’re an independent person. You are surrounded by conflict. You have moments of confusion and at times you feel nobody understands you.’

  Welcome to the World of the Average Teenager, I thought.

  ‘There are a lot of choices coming up for you. You don’t know which path to take. Difficult times are ahead but things will resolve themselves by the end of the year.’

  Presumably I’d have sorted out my university application by then.

  ‘You need to take particular care of your health over the next twelve months.’

  ‘My mother’s always on at me to eat fruit,’ I joked. No reaction.

  ‘Your love life will be complicated. Basically you have too soft a heart, but you try to hide it. You will find true love in the end, though.’

  Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have expected to hear anything else. She wasn’t going to say, ‘You’ll shack up with a one-legged dwarf from Adlington and he’ll beat you nightly.’ My lips were forming a cynical smile when she pulled in her breath and whispered, ‘There’s somebody from the Other Side looking after you. He’s here now.’

  A faint sad cry, like a child, made me freeze.

  ‘Oh, God.’ I half turned round, appalled. ‘A dead person?’ But there was only my reflection in the patio doors and the grey cat mewing to be let in.

  ‘A little boy.’

  She waited for my response. I shrugged.

  ‘About eight or nine I’d say, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, a cloth cap and short trousers. Big thick boots, like clogs. He won’t tell me his name, he’s too shy. But he’s holding out forget-me-nots to you.’ Jackie’s face had gone blank-looking and she was focusing on a spot by my shoulder. It was beginning to spook me.

  ‘I don’t know any dead children. God, this is so weird.’

  ‘He’s very cold, very cold. He says you’re lucky, you’re a lucky person. He says you should make the most of your opportunities in life.’

  The tension made me laugh. ‘He’s been talking to my mum. It’s a conspiracy.’

  Jackie glared at me and let go of my hand. ‘He’s gone now.’ She made it sound as if it was my fault.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But he’s never far away.’

  ‘Christ, don’t say things like that, I’ll never sleep at night.’

  ‘He’s a friend.’

  ‘Right.’

  She got up and pulled the curtains across roughly. I could tell she was annoyed with me and I smirked nervously in the gloom. Then she lit candles and brought over a Tarot pack.

  ‘Do you want me to carry on with this?’ She had a penetrating star
e; I felt like I was back in the first year at school.

  ‘Yeah, absolutely. Sorry.’ Might as well get my money’s worth.

  ‘Pick a card, then,’ she said.

  ‘Dirty little bugger,’ said Paul when I told him. ‘Here, this’ll shift him.’ He aimed a trainer at the empty space by the end of my bed. ‘Shoo. Go spy on someone else, kinky devil. Go back to your cloud and play with your harp or your pitchfork or whatever.’

  ‘Do you think there could be anything in it?’ I was sitting up with the duvet wrapped round me. I hadn’t felt properly warm since I’d come home. ‘Well, it’s the middle of bloody winter, in’t it?’ had been Paul’s response when I told him.

  ‘Ghosts in cloth caps? Sounds like one of the Tetley Tea folk. Get a grip, Charlie.’

  I giggled in spite of myself. ‘I didn’t believe her up till then. But she went sort of creepy after that. You’d have been rattled. You would. Stop laughing.’

  ‘And how much did you pay this old hag?’

  ‘Sod off. I only told you because I thought you’d be interested.’

  ‘I am. Take off your bra.’

  I unhooked resignedly. ‘I know it was all just a load of rubbish . . .’

  ‘So stop worrying.’ He was kissing my neck and shoulders and his body heat was wonderful.

  ‘Anyway, you’re in the clear.’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘She told me a dark-haired boy would hurt me “more than I’d ever been hurt before”. It was in the cards. So you’re all right.’

  ‘How do you mean? Because I’m blond?’ He took his mouth away from my skin reluctantly.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Smashing. Do you want to stop talking now?’ he said.

  There wasn’t the usual mad scramble afterwards because Mum had taken Nan for a hospital appointment and the Metro had died so they’d gone by bus. The journey to hell and back, I’d have thought.