Wake Up, Mummy (5 page)

I’d continue to play as if nothing had happened, avoiding looking at my friend so that I didn’t have to see the embarrassment on her face. And, after a while, the front door would be wrenched open and my mother
would march past us again, before setting off down the road towards the pub, while I blinked back my tears and pretended I didn’t care.

I did care, though – at least, to begin with – and one day I ran down the road after her, asking where she was going and begging her to take me with her. But she just kept on walking, waving her arm to brush me aside and hissing at me angrily, ‘Get back home to your grandmother.’ So I stood and watched her walk away, finally accepting the fact that the only thing that really mattered to her was drinking with her friends.

As well as being an alcoholic, my mother became addicted to laxatives and diet pills and developed bulimia, making herself sick every time she ate or drank anything. I grew used to the circus of emotions that accompanied her wherever she went. Nothing about her was ever calm or reasonable; every aspect of her life was steeped in the drama of confrontation and resentment. And then, when I was five years old, I came home from school one day and knew immediately that something more serious than usual was wrong.

My grandmother was waiting for me at the front door, her face red and blotchy. I felt my heart lurch with fear, because it seemed that in the space of just one day, since I’d left the house for school that morning, she’d suddenly become old. She bent down to hug me and then took my
hand and led me into the kitchen, where she pulled out two chairs from beside the kitchen table and said, ‘Sit down for a minute, Anna. There’s something I have to tell you.’

She turned to look out of the kitchen window and then dabbed impatiently at her eyes with the corner of her apron before turning back towards me again.

‘Your mummy isn’t very well,’ she told me. ‘She’s had to go to the hospital.’

She must have seen the alarmed expression on my face, and she took hold of my hand as she added hastily, ‘She’s going to be all right, though. She may have to stay in the hospital for a little while. But there’s nothing for you to worry about. Everything here will be just the way it always is. You and Chris will be fine.’

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure I believed what my grandmother was telling me. If there was nothing to worry about, why did she look so anxious and tired and as though she’d been crying?

‘Can we go and see her?’ I asked, half-dreading the answer.

‘No, not for a while at least,’ my grandmother replied. ‘Children aren’t allowed at this sort of hospital.’

She patted the back of my hand and then stood up abruptly, placing her chair back under the table and looking out of the window again with sad eyes.

The next morning, I was walking very slowly down the stairs, wondering why my grandmother hadn’t woken me up in time to have breakfast with her, as she always did, when I heard my grandfather’s voice. He was in the living room, talking to someone I couldn’t see through the partially open door, and my attention was caught by his hushed, almost whispered tone. As I stopped to listen, I heard him say, ‘It was a terrible thing to witness.’

For a moment, I thought he was crying, but I knew that wasn’t possible, because my grandfather never cried.

‘We called the ambulance, although we thought we were too late. I keep asking myself, why? Why would Judith try to commit suicide?’

It felt as though the hallway had started to spin around me and I gripped the banister tightly to stop myself tumbling down the stairs. I knew what suicide meant – it meant trying to kill yourself – and I knew it was a very bad thing to do, because only God could decide when you were born and when you died.

My mother was in hospital for several weeks, and my brother and I didn’t go to see her there at all – not on that occasion and not on any of the other occasions during the next two years when she was taken away in an ambulance.

By the time she came home after that first incident, I’d worked myself up into an almost hysterical state of
anxiety about what I overheard my grandfather say that day. It wasn’t until some time later, though, that I finally summoned the courage to ask my mother the question that had been tormenting me for so long: ‘Do people go to heaven if they commit suicide?’

My mother just shrugged and said, ‘No, apparently not.’

It was confirmation of exactly what I’d suspected. But, even so, it was a terrible shock. I simply couldn’t understand why my mother would try to do something that would make God angry. And I didn’t dare think about where she
would
go if she didn’t go to heaven. For years, I worried about what would happen to her if she ever succeeded in killing herself, or, if she didn’t, how God would view the fact that she’d tried.

After that first attempt, she spent a lot of time in hospital. I didn’t really understand why until much later, when I realised that it was usually because she’d tried to kill herself again or been sectioned under the Mental Health Act when her alcoholism or manic-depression tipped the precarious balance of her mind too far.

On one of the occasions when my mother was in hospital, one of my aunts started dating a new boyfriend, and my grandmother insisted she must take Chris and me with her on all their dates – including the very first one. Looking back on it now, it seems very unfair. But I don’t remember my aunt or her boyfriend ever complaining
about it, and the fact that he wasn’t put off altogether by our presence certainly says something about how keen he was on my aunt. He was a kind, generous man, and they were both very good to us, taking us with them on picnics in the woods and to the beach, and treating us as though we were their own children. In fact, I used to pretend they were my parents, and Chris and I couldn’t believe our luck when our aunt’s boyfriend later became our uncle. I’d dream about being adopted by them and living with them for ever, and it seems that at one point I might have come quite close to getting my wish.

Children know when the adults they live with are keeping secrets, and I became good at tuning in to the whispered conversations that stopped or changed abruptly to hearty cheerfulness as soon as someone noticed I was there. One day, when my mother had just been sectioned and was in hospital again, I heard one of my uncles talking to my aunt.

‘Whether it’s her
fault
or not that she’s ill is beside the point,’ my uncle said angrily. ‘The fact remains that she’s not a fit mother. Those kids deserve better, and Mum and Dad need to have the right to make decisions about their lives, because Judith sure as hell doesn’t want to be bothered.’

By piecing together the fragments of conversation I overheard, I learned that when my grandmother and
uncle had gone to see my mother at the hospital, they’d tried to get her to sign adoption papers for me and my brother. But the psychiatrist had discovered what they were doing and had almost literally thrown them out, furious with them for attempting to coerce his vulnerable patient into giving away her children. The psychiatrist was probably right to do what he did – from a legal point of view, at least – although perhaps he wouldn’t have felt quite so outraged if he’d known what it was like to live with my mother, or if he’d been able to see into our future.

Paradoxically, it seems that although we were nothing but a nuisance to my mother when we stood in the way of her going out and having a good time, she felt differently when she was in hospital. I’d like to think that somewhere deep down inside her she loved me, but I know she didn’t really want me. Although she continued to refuse to give us up, it was largely because she liked having the upper hand and took pleasure in
not
doing whatever people wanted her to do – particularly when those people were the members of her own family.

Another overheard conversation took place shortly after my mother had spent four months in a psychiatric hospital and was telling one of her friends how easy it had been to get hold of alcohol there.

‘God, you’d need a few drinks before you did the dirty
with
some
of the night staff,’ she said, and they both laughed. ‘There was this one male nurse…’

I crept away, unwilling to hear the details she was about to describe. I didn’t know whether what she was saying was true or whether she was just showing off to her friend. That was always a problem with my mother: her love of drama – and perhaps, also, her refusal to admit that anything about her life was dull and mundane – made her almost incapable of relating any story without gross exaggeration. What I wasn’t in any doubt about, however, was the fact that she’d have managed somehow to get hold of drink while she was in hospital, because there was nothing more important to her than a steady supply of alcohol and I knew she’d do whatever it took to get it. She’d been resolute in her refusal to give my brother and me up for adoption by her family; but I knew that if she had a choice between us and drink, she’d have abandoned us without a second thought.

During one period when she was sectioned, she made friends with an anorexic girl who had hair down to her waist and who later died in hospital. By the time my mother came home, she’d become fixated on the idea that I must grow my hair. However, in her usual spirit of always having to do everything to the nth degree, she announced that
my
hair must be allowed to grow not just to my waist, like her friend’s, but until it touched my feet,
and she would fly into a rage if anyone ever suggested I should have it cut.

I wasn’t consulted, of course, and I hated it. As my hair grew, it became more and more difficult to manage, and the daily ritual of tying it up and plaiting it – a process that tugged painfully at the skin on my scalp – seemed to take hours. Then, one day, I told my mother that my friends at school said they thought I should get it cut. I knew that the topic of my hair was dangerous ground on which to be treading, but the feeling that I looked ridiculous had finally given me the courage to say something.

I was always on the alert with my mother, because, however ‘normal’ she might appear when she was talking to you, her mood could change instantly, without any warning. Even so, I was taken by surprise by the violence of her response. She grabbed my shoulders, her fingertips digging into my flesh so painfully that the bruises they made were still clearly visible several days later. I turned my head away from her instinctively, thinking she was going to hit me. But instead she screamed hysterically, ‘What right have your fucking bitch friends to tell you to get your hair cut? What kind of stupid bitch are you to take any notice of them? Haven’t you got a fucking mind of your own?’

Through the shock and fear I felt a rush of indignant resentment. Growing my hair had been
her
idea, not mine. So, from her point of view, it was just as well if I
didn’t
have a mind of my own. However, I knew better than to argue; instead, I looked at my feet and waited for her tirade of furious abuse to stop. I didn’t understand why it mattered so much to her, but clearly it did, and I had no reason to doubt the fact that she would get her own way with regard to my hair, just as she did with almost everything else.

As my hair grew longer, my mother took every possible opportunity to parade me in front of her drunken friends, boasting about it as though it was some great achievement of her own and telling them that
her
daughter wasn’t going to be ‘like all the rest of the bitches with short hair’. In the pub, she’d sneer drunkenly at the mothers of other girls and say, ‘You needn’t bother bringing that bitch of a daughter of yours to the pub. No one’s going to notice her when my Anna’s here.’ Everyone was used to her volatile, aggressive moods and no one dared confront her. They’d simply nod their agreement – and then corner me or my brother later and tell us how crazy our mother was. As if we didn’t know!

In the past, I’d often wished my mother would pay some attention to me, instead of concentrating all her energies on getting drunk. But this wasn’t the sort of attention I’d wanted. She still didn’t notice
me
; I was just a vehicle for her new fixation, which had arisen because of a dead girl I’d never met. I hated having long hair, and
I hated being different from all my friends, but I knew it was pointless trying to reason with my self-absorbed, angry and unreasonable mother.

In fact, I spent very little time with my mother during the time we lived with my grandparents, except when they were away and she couldn’t find anyone else to palm us off on. On the rare occasions she had to look after us she’d be forced to take us with her to the pub, where her version of parental care involved making us sit outside on our own for virtually the whole weekend while she drank herself into a stupor inside. The pubs she went to didn’t have gardens or family areas; they were always in the middle of town, and we’d sit on their doorsteps, on the street, from opening time until they closed, or until someone realised where we were and came to take us away.

On the ‘good’ days, we’d go to a pub where my mother knew the landlord and where my brother and I would be allowed to sit in the back room. We knew that we mustn’t disturb her for any reason; if we did, she’d thrash us when we got home. So we just sat there, for hour after miserable hour, while she moaned to anyone in the bar who’d listen and told them about what a difficult life she had, wallowing in their sympathy and drinking the drinks of consolation they bought for her.

As usual, we were under very strict instructions not to
tell our grandparents – or anyone else – where we’d been all day. And we didn’t, because we knew there was always a high price to pay for disobeying our mother.

Fortunately, though, the days with our mother were outnumbered by the days we spent with my grandparents, aunts and uncles, who were very good to Chris and me. My mother’s sisters and brothers looked after us on the many, many occasions when my mother dumped us on them so that she could go off and drink and exert her ‘right’ to enjoy herself. Chris and I must have been a burden to them, but they never made us feel like one. They fed and clothed us and made us believe we were loved and wanted, and I’ll always be grateful to them for everything they did for me.