Normally I would never say no to Ria if she wants sex – which, let’s face it, is hardly ever these days – but I’ve never seen her like this before and she’s scaring me. I gently put my hand over hers and push it away.
‘Ria. Don’t be silly. Of course I’m not going to leave you. But you seem a bit … manic. Why don’t you have a sleep and we’ll talk again later?’
She flops back on the bed, seemingly calmer now. ‘OK. Let’s do that.’ She turns her head towards me. ‘Tell me what’s happening downstairs. Is there any more news about the body they found?’
Ah. Perhaps this is why she’s behaving so strangely. Perhaps she’s more sensitive than I give her credit for.
‘They think it’s a man who died a long time ago. His brother’s coming out to identify the body, apparently.’
She nods, her eyes filling with tears again. ‘Right. What a horrible thing to have to do.’
I take her hand. ‘Horrible. But perhaps he will be able to take comfort after all these years in having some kind of closure.’
She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. ‘I guess so. Maybe. But I sometimes think it’s better that what’s in the past stays in the past. Don’t you?’
I imagine she’s talking about our row over the pills. Wanting to put it in the past. So I squeeze her hand and say, ‘Mostly yes. But that’s for him to worry about, not you. You should rest. And maybe,’ I stroke her breast gently, ‘we’ll have a go at making babies later. But only if you want to.’
She nods and smiles weakly. ‘Yeah. Let’s do that.’
36
BEFORE
To start with, it was all OK. Mama had made me a nice room in the new flat – not quite as nice as my room at Rhonda’s, but way nicer than the room we’d shared in the old flat which I still remembered a bit. It was tidy at home; there weren’t dirty dishes in the sink the whole time and there was always milk in the fridge. Mama wasn’t as good at cooking as Rhonda, but she told me she had had some cooking and ‘parenting’ lessons when she had been in the hospital where I used to visit her and now she was better at cooking than she used to be and she said she was also a lot better at parenting. I didn’t understand that – surely you either were a parent or you weren’t, but that’s what Mama said. Things had changed – I still had Weetabix every morning for breakfast, because I liked it and Mama said it was good for me, but sometimes she would also cut up a banana for me to have with it, and I never had Weetabix for other meals any more. My clothes smelt cleaner and they weren’t too small. Mama always got up in the morning and she always slept in her bed. The milk in the fridge smelt like it should do and the yoghurts didn’t go fizzy.
The biggest difference was Mama now had a job, so she couldn’t stay in bed all day because she was too tired or too sad to get up. She also told me that she was taking special pills the doctor had given her so she could be less sad, and more ‘stable’, which I didn’t understand as it wasn’t as if she ever fell over, but they definitely seemed to make her happier. And I was at school every day, so we weren’t in the house all day long like before. We had a new alarm clock to wake us up and Mama had to get up to take me to school and she always did and I was almost always on time. I had lots of friends at school and the teachers said I was a good worker. I brought home pictures and other things I’d made at school and Mama would stick them on the fridge with letter magnets, like in houses on the TV. Sometimes I had a friend home to play after school and some days Mama would even make cakes for us, with icing. She was just like the mamas I saw on TV.
Anna came to see me a lot at first, but after a while she came less and less, though she always said that I could call her whenever I liked and made sure that her number was stuck on the fridge. That was the other thing that was different, now that Mama had a job, she had enough money for us to have our own phone in the flat and I didn’t need to be scared of getting stuck inside with no food again even if Mama did go somewhere. But mainly I didn’t have to be scared because Mama didn’t leave me on my own anyway.
Then Mama got a boyfriend. His name was Dave. He would bring me sweets and chocolate bars when he came over but even so, I didn’t like him very much. I was used to it being just me and Mama at home but when Dave came over he’d give me 50p to go to my room and even though I liked having the 50p and the sweets I didn’t like having to go to my room, but I didn’t want to say that I didn’t want to go in case it made her cry. I wondered if I should tell Anna about Dave and about having to go to my room, but I didn’t want to get Mama into trouble or be sad so I didn’t say anything.
And then one day I came home from school, Dave had gone and Mama was on the kitchen floor crying. Then the next morning she wasn’t there. I rang Anna.
Over the next few years, that was the pattern. Everything would be OK for a while, Mama acted like a mother should and held down part-time jobs cleaning or in local cafés and the like – something that fitted in with when I started and finished school. Then she’d meet a man – some of whom were better than others – and she’d become less interested in me. After a few weeks or months the man would leave, she’d break down entirely, and I’d be sent back to Rhonda’s until Mama was strong enough to have me back.
Sometimes there would be a few weeks between the start of a breakdown and the time when I (or sometimes Anna) decided it was time for me to move out again, and that’s when I started to find out little bits about my dad and what had happened before I was born.
I’d always asked about Dad. When I was little, Mama would tell me he lived on a mountain far, far away. I pictured him in a stone hut, young and good looking, maybe with a small beard, doing stuff like rounding up sheep with a dog who was also his best friend, driving a tractor around fields and perhaps even washing in a stream instead of in a bath or shower. When I asked why he never visited or why he couldn’t live with us she just said that he lived too far away. Sometimes she’d play me what she called ‘their’ song. It had a nice tune, but the words always sounded sad, with the man singing about how everybody hurts. I wondered why they didn’t choose a happier song, I think I would have done, but I didn’t say that to Mama in case it made her cry.
By the time I was about eight or so, I started to believe that Mama didn’t know who my dad was, like some of my friends at school, or that she’d split up with him when I was a baby and didn’t want to tell me. I thought perhaps she’d made up the story about the man who lived on the mountain and about the song they listened to together just to make me feel like I had a nice dad somewhere who would like if he met me and who would want to get to know me if only he didn’t live so far away.
It never occurred to me that he was dead, until her most recent breakdown.
By then I was fifteen, and things hadn’t improved. That week Mama had still been in bed every day when I got home from school, either crying or asleep. I could tell she must have got up at some point during the day to eat by the mess she left in the kitchen, which I tidied away every night when I got home so that it didn’t smell too much and to try to give Mama one less thing to be upset about. But it didn’t work, of course – she was still always crying.