Mummy Knew (8 page)

‘When have I ever said that?’ protested Mum, more than a hint of appeasement in her voice. ‘I love you, Frank. Just calm down.’

The shouting went on for what seemed like hours. I occupied myself by playing schools with my dollies, trying my best to block out the screams and shouts in the room next door. One of the neighbours rang the front doorbell to see if Mum
was alright, and she shouted at them to ‘mind your own fucking business’.

Shortly after that it went quiet for a while, and just when I thought it was all over, Dad yelled, ‘I’ve had enough of you and this shit-hole, you fucking whore. I’m going.’

‘Please, Frank,’ Mum sobbed. ‘Please don’t leave me.’

I heard the front door nearly slam off its hinges then Dad’s voice shouting through the letterbox: ‘And don’t think I’m ever coming back. You were a shit fuck anyway.’

I was over the moon that Dad had left, but Davie told me not to count my chickens.

‘He’ll probably be back later,’ he predicted miserably, ‘off his head on drink.’

I was worried Davie was right, but I kept my fingers and toes crossed anyway.

The flat looked as though a tornado had sped through it, with broken cups and upturned furniture strewn about. It was a couple of days before we began to believe that Dad wouldn’t be back, but then we gradually reappeared one by one, as if we’d been taking shelter from a storm. In a way we had been. Diane came back from her boyfriend’s, Cheryl came home from Nanny’s and Davie and I emerged from our bedrooms, just in time to see Mum slam the door to her own. She didn’t want to be a part of the family reunion.

‘Just leave me alone, will you?’ she shouted if any of us tapped on her door.

It was a shame Mum was so upset. I thought she would have been pleased to get rid of him. Grown-ups were too complicated for me.

The flat felt different without Dad. It was bliss to be able to walk around without fear and watch TV and use the kitchen when we wanted to. When Dad was at home he dominated every room. If he was in the front room we’d all be too frightened to go in unless we knew for sure he was in one of his better moods, and even then we had to remain on guard for a change in the wind. If he was slouched over the kitchen table, we’d go and get a drink from the bathroom tap rather than show up on his radar. It just wasn’t worth the risk of upsetting him. But all that had changed now. It was like being released from some sort of prison, and best of all, now that he had gone, I didn’t have to be careful of accidentally mentioning Nanny’s or Jenny’s names. I was free to pop across the road and visit them any time I wanted to.

Everyone, apart from Mum, seemed happier than they’d been for a long time, including Eddie the dog. Poor Eddie had suffered so much. Dad had taken to kicking and cursing him every day. Now that Dad wasn’t around to torment him, he was like he was a different dog, almost reverting to a playful puppy again.

Mum remained in her room. I often heard her crying and muttering things into her pillow. When Diane and I took her in a cup of tea and some jam sandwiches, she was lying on her bed, a roll of loo paper resting on her tummy, and a cigarette burning between her fingers with an inch-high tower of ash. She lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling with puffy, red-rimmed eyes.

‘Here, Mum,’ said Diane, making a space on the bedside table. ‘You’ve got to eat.’

‘I don’t want anything,’ said Mum, pulling herself up to stub out her cigarette. ‘Just leave me alone.’

‘Come on, it’s not the end of the world,’ said Diane.

‘It might not be for you,’ said Mum angrily. ‘But I love him, Di, and I deserve a bit of happiness.’ Her eyes welled up, and she pulled off a length of loo roll to blot away her tears.

‘What about us?’ asked Diane, a slight edge creeping into her voice. ‘Don’t you love us?’

Mum ignored her question and lit another cigarette. After she had blown out a long stream of smoke she said, ‘I’m over fucking forty. This is my last chance, and none of you wants me to be happy–not you lot, not me mum, no one. I’m gonna end up on me own forever.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Diane.

‘I bet they’re having a right laugh over the road, aren’t they?’ said Mum, referring to Nanny and Jenny.

‘They’re just worried, that’s all,’ said Diane. ‘They can’t work out why you haven’t spoken to them for the past four years.’

‘I bet she’s going, “Oh, that Donna, she’s always picking the wrong men,”’ Mum said, imitating Nanny’s Geordie accent.

Even though I was only eight, I knew that Mum had definitely picked the wrong man in Dad, and I vowed to be a lot more careful when I grew up. I remember wondering why she couldn’t just find someone else, someone nicer who wasn’t rude all the time. Why wasn’t she happy that Dad had gone? He hit her and yelled at her even more than he did to the rest of us. What did she love about him? But instead she moped around, gazing out of the window as if waiting for him to return and smoking endless cigarettes.

Our happiness and Mum’s misery were short-lived. I got home from school a couple of days later to see the familiar leather coat on the kitchen door and heard grunting noises from the bedroom and I stopped dead, feeling as if there was a lead weight in my chest. He was back.

Mum and Dad spent the first few days in bed together, then Mum gathered us all into the front room. She said they had an announcement to make, that they were getting married. Cheryl and Davie both cried. Cheryl’s tears slid down slowly, but Davie let out huge wracking sobs and cried in a way I’d never seen him cry before, even worse than when Dad smashed his ship-in-a-bottle.

‘What you crying about?’ Mum asked, her head cocked to one side, as if genuinely baffled by his reaction.

‘We won’t be able to go over Nanny’s any more,’ he said, and I saw Dad bristle slightly.

‘But we’ll be a proper family,’ Mum said gaily. ‘Won’t that be nice?’

They had a bring-a-bottle party to celebrate and invited everyone in Dad’s large extended family, including his brother Keith, his sister Lesley and various other relatives we’d never met, as well as his numerous drinking buddies. It was as if Dad had invited everyone he’d ever met but Mum, on the other hand, invited nobody. It went without saying that she hadn’t invited Nanny and her many brothers and sisters because she hadn’t spoken to any of them since meeting Dad, and she didn’t have any friends of her own because she wasn’t allowed out without Dad. But it was quite a shock when Mum told us that none of us children could attend.

‘I’m not having you winding him up, not tonight,’ she said. ‘I can just fucking see it now, shown up in front of all his family. Not on your fucking nelly.’

By this time Diane had moved back out again, so Cheryl went to stay with her. That left me and Davie.

‘Can we go over Nanny’s?’ I asked.

‘No, you fucking can’t,’ Mum snapped. ‘I’m sick of them knowing all my fucking business.’

Davie and I were locked in a bedroom. Mum gave us a bottle of coke, some crisps and a packet of peanuts and instructed us to stay put until everybody had gone. She even left a bucket in case we needed the loo. The music was blaring into the early hours and our flat sounded like the pub on the corner did on special nights like New Year’s Eve. We could hear other children playing with our toys out in the passageway, but it seemed that Mum was ashamed of us because we weren’t allowed to join in.

Mum and Dad got married at a registry office one day when I was at school and, as with their ‘engagement party’, none of us was invited. I had always wanted a proper family with a mum and a dad, and I would have loved to go to their wedding and maybe even be a flower girl, but it was made very clear to me that as far as I was concerned nothing had changed.

Life continued pretty much as it always had, except that over the weeks and months I noticed Mum’s belly was getting bigger. At first I thought she must have been eating too much, but then I worked out that she was having a baby and I waited for the day when she would tell me. I would have asked her
myself but I was shy. Talking about babies would mean talking about sex in a roundabout way and I was far too embarrassed to do that. Even though I had grown up hearing every grunt and groan Mum and Dad made in their bedroom and seeing Dad’s pornographic magazines lying around, I was still embarrassed about such things. My face reddened as I imagined the moment Mum would sit me down and tell me I was going to have a little brother or sister. But in the end, I was saved the embarrassment because it was Cheryl who finally said the words, straight after Mum had been carted off in an ambulance, screaming and clutching her huge distended belly.

‘Lisa, do you know Mum’s having a baby?’

Of course I knew! I had turned nine years old two months before.

The baby was a little girl and they named her Katrina. I thought she looked like a perfect little doll. She was so tiny her veins showed through her paper-thin skin and I remember staring at her for ages in her little Perspex cot, which was parked at the side of Mum’s bed. I adored her straight away and couldn’t wait for Mum to bring her home, but the hospital insisted on keeping them both in for a while. At the age of forty-three, Mum was classed as an older mother, so the hospital wanted to take special care of her for a few days, and she had smoked through the pregnancy so Katrina was born on the small side.

While they were away, Dad wasn’t at home much because he was either out celebrating in the pub or else up at the hospital breathing gin fumes all over little Katrina’s sleepy head. With him out of the way, Cheryl felt safe enough to bring
Jenny over to the flat. It was her first visit since Dad had moved in with us five years before, and I remember her walking around from room to room, her mouth slack with horror as she saw how we were living. As usual the flat was a mess, but Jenny seemed particularly upset to see the various dents and holes in walls and windows.

‘What on earth’s been going on over here?’ she kept asking.

I tried not to think about how angry Dad would be if he came back and found her there. I was terrified, jumping at every sound, but filled with excitement too as I dragged Jenny around showing her things like my special cupboard where I kept some brightly coloured plastic carrier bags stuffed with everything from elastic bands to felt-tip pens.

‘Come and look at my collections, Jenny,’ I cried and she duly admired them, telling me that everything looked very useful and I was clever to have collected them.

She must have been sick with worry when she went back across the road to report to Nanny what she had seen but they were powerless, especially now that Mum was married to Dad. There was nothing they could do.

For the first few weeks after Mum brought Katrina home from the hospital, the atmosphere in the flat was calmer. Dad seemed to curb his drinking and gambling, and the fits and rages that I had grown so used to became less frequent. However, the violence was replaced with psychological cruelty. He would use Katrina as a weapon. Sometimes Cheryl and I would be allowed to hold her, and at other times he yelled at us to ‘Fuck off away from her.’ It was sad to see
Katrina’s gummy smiles turn into startled cries as we hastily pulled our fingers from her tiny grasp.

When Mum and Dad wanted to go to bed in the afternoon, Katrina would be left with whoever was around and more often than not it was me. I’d sit on the floor beside her in front of the television, constantly bouncing the baby chair to stop her from crying. Occasionally Cheryl and I were allowed to take her out in the pram, but more often than not there would be a massive row when we got back as Dad accused us of having taken the baby ‘over the road to them cunts’. He was determined that none of Mum’s family would ever meet her fifth child. But Nanny and Jenny were desperate to see the baby, so one day when we were sure Dad had gone out and wouldn’t be back for a while, we sneaked Katrina over the road so they could give her a cuddle.

My heart was drumming because I imagined Dad would find out and break the door down any minute.

‘Oh, look at her,’ cooed Nanny tearfully. ‘What an absolute angel.’

That was the only time Nanny saw her because we didn’t dare risk it again.

By the time Kat, as everyone called her, was a few months old, Mum and Dad had secured the cleaning contracts for various media companies in the West End. Mum was out at all hours and run off her feet as she tried to juggle all the different jobs. She worked in the evenings, the early hours of the morning, and sometimes during the day as well when she had a special job in a private house. Dad brought in his older sister, Lesley, and a couple of other people he had rounded up
from the pub to help out in return for a bit of cash in hand. Sometimes he would come along to check they were doing a good job, but mostly he stayed at home to watch the horse-racing on the telly and look after the baby.

Whenever Dad had a win on the horses, he’d usually do two things: number one, he’d take care of his first priority which was to stock up on gin, brandy and Special Brew; then, after studying the form for at least an hour, he’d put the rest of his winnings straight back onto a ‘dead cert’ at the bookies.

His wins were rare enough, and two in a row were unheard of. Everyone seemed to know this but Dad. So when the horse he’d picked so carefully fell at the first fence, or limped in last with the stragglers, he would be apoplectic with rage. For the next few hours he would storm about the flat fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol, trying to find people and things to blame for his bad luck. I’d try my best to hide with the dog.

His violence had almost become a way of life, but the thing that frightened me the most was how crude and lewd he would become after he’d exhausted himself smashing the place up. It was always the same pattern–violence first, crudity second. Maybe it was the drink, but he didn’t seem to care I was in the room, and neither did Mum.

‘Do you fancy it up the arse tonight, Donna?’ he’d ask with a leer, as casually as if he were asking if she wanted a cup of tea.

Mum would laugh. I wasn’t sure whether this was because she found it funny, or simply because she was relieved he had
stopped his violent rampage. But sometimes he did things so repugnant that she seemed just as shocked as me.