The World's Worst Mothers

About the author

Sabine Ludwig was born in Berlin in 1954. After graduating, she worked as a radio editor. She is now one of Germany's most successful writers for children, and she also translates the books of authors such as Eva Ibbotson and Kate DiCamillo from English into German. She lives in Berlin with her husband and daughter.

About the translator

Siobhán Parkinson was born in Dublin in 1954. After graduating, she worked as a book editor. She is now one of Ireland's most successful writers for children and is Ireland's first Children's Laureate. She has translated books by Renate Ahrens and Burkhard Spinnen from German into English. She lives in Dublin with her husband.

Translated by
Siobhán Parkinson

T
HE
W
ORLD'S
W
ORST
M
OTHERS

Published 2012

by Little Island

7 Kenilworth Park

Dublin 6W

Ireland

www.littleisland.ie

First published as
Die schrecklichsten Mütter der Welt
by Cecilie Dressler Verlag in Hamburg in 2009

Copyright © Cecilie Dressler Verlag 2009
Translation copyright © Siobhán Parkinson 2012

The author has asserted her moral rights.

ISBN 978-1-908195-19-7

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design by Chris Judge
Inside design by
www.sinedesign.net

Printed in Poland by Drukarnia Skleniarz.

Little Island received financial assistance from
The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of Ireland Literature Exchange (translation fund), Dublin, Ireland.

www.irelandliterature.com

[email protected]

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Bruno lifted up the bag. It was dead heavy, but still way too light for training.

His boxing gloves were lying on the lawn beside the path that led from the patio into the garden. Bruno's father had had it re-sanded the week before. He would put on the gloves in a minute, but first he had to fill this stupid bag.

Bruno was holding the bag open with one hand, and with the other he was trying to stuff it with a shovelful of sand. It was not easy. It had rained yesterday, and the sand was way too wet. And now he'd got it all over his shoes.

You could always buy a punchbag, of course. They didn't cost much. But it wasn't a question of money. It was a question of his mother.

He had been allowed to keep the boxing gloves that his father gave him for Christmas, ‘but only for show', he'd had to promise.

‘They look class on my wall.'

‘I don't think they really fit in,' his mother had replied.

And Bruno had to admit she was right. His boxing gloves didn't look quite right under the poster of Mozart as a child in a blue satin suit with a lacy flounce at the throat.

‘You're not planning to use them, I take it?' His mother had sounded anxious.

His father rolled his eyes and said, ‘Well, since you have refused to let him have a punchbag, what could he possibly
use
them for?'

‘Think of his fingers!'

Bruno thought about his fingers, which, at the moment, looked like battered sausages. His precious fingers, which nothing could be allowed to harm, because that would be the end of his piano playing, the end of his career as a pianist.

He was getting there. One more shovelful and he would be able to tie the bag at the top and hang it from a branch of the oak tree.

‘Bruno!' The sound echoed through the garden.

The shovel slipped, and a load of wet sand landed in Bruno's sleeve.

‘It's time to go to piano! Get a move on!'

Bruno shook out his sleeve and looked at his watch. Five past four. He'd forgotten all about his piano lesson. He'd been forgetting about it more and more often lately, even though it was a date written in stone. For the past year, he'd had to turn up every Thursday at a quarter past four at Frau Leberknecht's in Leonore Street.

He brushed his hands down quickly on his trousers. What about the bag? Where should he hide it? He stuck it behind the box hedge, a place his mother would never dream of looking.

Bruno lurched through the patio door into the house, grabbed his music, which was lying on the piano, and stuffed it into his shoulder bag. Only seven minutes left. He'd just make it, if he really put the boot down. Frau Leberknecht hated it when people were late.

‘Are your hands clean?' Bruno's mother's head appeared around the kitchen door.

‘Yeah, sure,' he lied. He didn't have time for hand-washing.

Bruno threw his bag over his shoulder, leapt onto his bike and sped off. Too late, he remembered that he'd left his boxing gloves lying in the garden.
Please, don't let it rain!

It was exactly eighteen minutes past four when he rang Frau Leberknecht's doorbell. He wiped his hands once more on his trousers.

Frau Leberknecht opened the door, said, ‘Good afternoon, Bruno,' and went ahead of him into the room with the grand piano. The first time Bruno's mother had seen that grand piano, she was bowled over. It was enormous and its black lacquered wood was always gleaming as if it had just been polished. It seemed to say to Bruno, ‘You're not good enough for me. You will never be good enough for me.'

Bruno feared nothing the way he feared this monster.

Frau Leberknecht opened the lid and Bruno pulled the music out of his bag and put it on the stand.

‘We'll start with the Chopin,' said Frau Leberknecht. ‘You were having a few problems with that the last time, weren't you?'

He always had problems with the Chopin. Four sharps and then that impossible stretch with the left hand.

‘Begin.'

The fingers of his right hand, which should have been gliding smoothly over the keys, felt as if they had got themselves into a knot. His left hand was hanging uselessly in the air. From low G to high C – how could he do that?

‘What key are we in here?' asked Frau Leberknecht as if she couldn't care less, but Bruno could see that deep down she was peppering. Every mistake you made, she took it personally. Even the piano let out an uncooperative groan, as Bruno pressed the pedal.

‘E major,' whispered Bruno.

‘Well then, please play it in E major,' said Frau Leberknecht.

Bruno began to sweat. His fingers were slippery. And what was all this? Why had the white keys suddenly turned brown? It took him a moment to work out that it was his own sweat mixed with sand from the punchbag. Hastily he tried to wipe the dirt off the keys with his fingers, which led to a horrible noise.

‘Please go and wash your hands,' said Frau Leberknecht as his index finger slithered off a streaky C key.

Cheeks flaming, Bruno stood up and went to the door. Then he hesitated. He didn't know where the toilet was. The only bit of Frau Leberknecht's flat that he knew was this room – that and the hallway.

‘On the right by the front door,' said the teacher.

He could see his blazing face in the mirror. A little brown trickle ran down his forehead to his nose, heading for his mouth. He licked it away. It tasted of salt and sand.

‘Look, Sofa, look what I've made!' Nicholas came stumbling into Sophie's room. He was carrying a semi-collapsed mini-sandcastle in both hands.

‘Don't!' shouted Sophie. But it was too late. Nicholas dropped the heap of sand on her desk. She just managed to get her laptop closed before a shower of sand landed on it.

‘Are you crazy?' she yelled.

Sophie sighed when her mother appeared a moment later.

‘Really, Sophie! Why do you always have to shout at Nicholas like that?'

Sophie pointed at the heap of sand on her desk.

‘Oh, for goodness' sake, a little bit of sand is easily got rid of.'

‘Have you any idea what would have happened if it had got into my computer?' Sophie couldn't help the way her voice was getting shriller and shriller. ‘That would have been the end of it, and you'd have had to buy me a new one.'

‘Might be just as well if the wretched thing finally gave up the ghost. Then you might do something other than hunching over it day and night.'

‘Oh, yeah? And what would you suggest?'

‘You could start by combing your hair, for example. You look like a scarecrow.'

Sophie's mother's haircut was short and precise. Not a hair out of place.

‘And another thing you could do for a change would be to play with your little brother instead of nagging him all the time.'

‘Maybe if he could learn my name …' Sophie turned away. She didn't want her mother to see that the tears were starting in her eyes.

‘Oh, don't be so sensitive. Everyone else thinks it's cute. But you have to make such a fuss about it.'

Her mother left the room, shaking her head. She came back with a dustpan and brush.

‘I'll do it,' said Sophie quickly.

Nicholas had poured the sand right onto her maths test, and she didn't want her mother to see that it was not great. She'd much rather get George to sign it. He wasn't really supposed to, as he wasn't her guardian, just her mother's husband, but the maths teacher didn't know that, did he?

Sophie opened the window to throw the sand out into the yard. Nicholas was down there, hunkering happily in the sandpit, filling bucket after bucket with sand. She dropped the sand right onto his head and then quickly closed the window so that she wouldn't have to listen to the racket he made.

Then she opened her laptop and cleaned a few grains of sand off the keys. She logged into Allfriends. It worked. She breathed a sigh of relief. And there was a new post. Someone called Leonie asked if she was the Chiara who'd been in fifth class with her. She couldn't be sure from the photo.

Of course she couldn't. Nobody could recognise Sophie from that photo. She had combed her long hair in front of her face and taken her own picture with her mobile phone.

And anyway she wasn't called Chiara and she hadn't ever been in fifth class in Lilienthal Grammar. Only really good students attended Lilienthal Grammar. Sophie was not a good student. Nor was she fifteen. She was thirteen. But every time she went online as pretty, sporty Chiara, whose hobbies were playing tennis and the saxophone, she forgot all about the real Sophie, the chubby girl with pimples on her forehead and chewed nails who had never as much as held a tennis racquet in her hand, never mind a saxophone. Of course Chiara had no brothers or sisters, and definitely no half-brother with blond curls and sky-blue eyes that everyone thought was a little angel.

A soft mewing could be heard.

‘Come here, Lulu, come on.'

The cat turned onto its back in front of Sophie and let her give her a thoroughly good scratching. Lulu was the only one in the whole family who was not taken in by Nicholas. She'd actually bitten him once, when he was trying to pull her out from under a cupboard by the tail.

‘We're two poor little sausages, aren't we?' said Sophie.

Lulu meowed something that sounded to Sophie like, ‘Yes, that's right.'

‘Emily, have you seen the car keys?'

Emily looked up from her English book. She only had ten minutes left and she had to learn two pages of vocabulary. She'd never make it.

‘Are they not in the box?' she asked.

‘No, or I wouldn't have asked, would I?'

Half hysterical, one arm stuck into her coat sleeve, Emily's mother was barging through the kitchen. She yanked out the cutlery drawer, snatched a newspaper off the table.

‘I was sure I'd left them here on the table!'

Emily shut her book.

‘Why do you put the keys in a different place every time, Mum?'

‘Because … because the phone was ringing as I came in yesterday …'

Emily got up and went to the little cupboard in the hallway on which the phone sat. There were the car keys, under the telephone book. She swung them triumphantly from her fingers.

‘Here they are, Mum.'

‘Thanks, Emmykins! What would I do without you?'

Emily wondered the same thing. Every day. Actually, she thought she'd already solved the problem of the keys. She'd given her mother a present of an electronic key fob that beeped if you whistled for it. Or so the leaflet said. The thing was, though, that her mother couldn't whistle. But that didn't stop the wretched thing from beeping incessantly.

It started up once when her mother was doing a job interview. She'd rooted about frantically in her handbag without finding the keys, but the contents of her bag tumbled out onto the floor. Including Porky, a lucky piggy that Emily had made for her in first class. It only had one ear and didn't look too appetising. Of course she didn't get the job. Who would employ a book-keeper who wasn't able to keep her own handbag under control?

‘Do you want a lift? It's raining. You'll have to sit in the back,' her mother said as they reached the little yellow Fiat dotted with rusty flecks, for all the world like freckles. ‘The passenger door is stuck.'

‘It's been stuck for months,' said Emily. ‘Why don't you get it fixed?'

Her mother laughed and said, ‘I will if I get this job today. I have a really good feeling about this one.'

She had a really good feeling about them all. But she never got the job. She was too old, or the boss didn't like her being a single mother who didn't want to do overtime. Once, she'd even turned a job down because the woman she would have to share an office with used a perfume that was too overpowering. ‘I couldn't put up with that stink for two minutes,' she'd said.

‘Oh my God!' Emily's mother was tapping on the petrol gauge. ‘Either this is wonky again or we're in trouble.'