The Bad Mother's Handbook (5 page)

‘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.

*

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

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 on 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 stare; 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.