Wake Up, Mummy (11 page)

I was still standing in the hallway, trying to decide what to do, when Chris pushed past me, opened the front door and, without looking at me, said, ‘I’m going to Joe’s. I’ll have my meal there.’

I walked into the kitchen, stood by the sink and stared out into the back garden, wondering angrily why I’d ever thought the day would turn out differently. My mother always let me down; she couldn’t really help it. So why had I allowed myself to believe that this time would be any different?

I was five months pregnant and completely alone. I put a hand on my swelling stomach and felt a familiar wave of panic wash over me. How was I going to manage when my baby was born? What was I doing even thinking of bringing into the world a child that was going to be
dependent on
me
– someone who couldn’t make a good decision to save her life?

I didn’t normally wallow in self-pity, but I began to cry as I thought of all the other pregnant women in the country who were spending Christmas Day with their partners and families. Why couldn’t I be one of them? Why did I only ever get tied up with losers and criminals? Why was my life such a mess?

I walked slowly up the stairs to my bedroom, sat on my bed and tried to count my blessings and think about all the people in the world who were far worse off than I was. Suddenly, an image of Carl came into my head. I could almost smell the stench of stale tobacco and alcohol that was always on his breath, and I could see clearly the nasty, leering expression he used to have on his face when he came into my bedroom at night. I hadn’t thought about him at all in months. Wondering why I’d done so now, I lay down on my bed and began to sob silently into my pillow.

In the evening, after spending the day alone in my bedroom, I checked on my mother, covered her with a blanket where she lay, dead to the world, on the living-room floor, and then went to my friend’s house. And that’s where I was when my mother turned up a couple of hours later, still drunk.

‘I’d been drinking shots,’ she told me, laughing like a
naughty child about what had happened earlier in the day. Then her tone became wheedling as she added, ‘I’m okay now, though, and I don’t want to be all alone on Christmas Day. Come home, Anna. I need someone to keep me company. Pleeeeease.’

It was as though someone had flicked a switch and turned my brain off, and as I lunged at my mother and started punching her, all I could think was how hurt and resentful I felt.

‘You selfish fucking bitch!’ I screamed at her. ‘What about us? You promised we were going to have a day together, like a normal family. But you don’t care about us enough to be able to keep off the booze for even just a few hours.’

I’d rarely hit my mother, even on the many occasions when she’d attacked me without warning. This time, though, I completely lost it, and my friend and her father had to intervene and pull us off each other.

AS MY PREGNANCY
progressed, I became increasingly frightened by the prospect of having to look after a baby on my own. What seemed even more terrifying, though, was imagining that baby growing into a child and going to school, and it was that thought that led to my becoming obsessed by the idea that I couldn’t bring a child up on the estate we lived on. We’d been on the
housing list for ten years, but it doesn’t help your chances of being rehoused if your current neighbours are constantly making complaints about you because of all the trouble you cause, and if the police are regularly called to your house to break up fights, or worse. Even in the rough neighbourhood we lived in, we stood out as being the neighbours from hell. So I realised that the council was hardly likely to move us to somewhere we’d be even more of a socially unacceptable nuisance.

In the early spring, I went into labour and was admitted to hospital. During the birth, my son became distressed while he was still in the womb and he stopped breathing. For weeks I’d felt scared and alone, and in many ways I’d been dreading the thought of becoming a mother. But, suddenly, when there seemed to be a very real possibility that my son wouldn’t live to see the light of day, I desperately wanted him to survive.

As the delivery room began to fill with doctors, I tried to follow their instructions to ‘Breathe, breathe’, and then to ‘Push, keep pushing’. And eventually my son was born.

Immediately, the doctors rushed him to the other side of the room. They all seemed to be talking at the same time, their voices blocking out the sound of my son’s first cry. And then I realised that he wasn’t crying; he wasn’t making any sound at all. I think I shouted out, although it may just have been in my head, but I definitely reached
out my hand and clutched at the wrist of one of the nurses as I asked her, the panic clear in my voice, ‘Is he breathing? Is he alive?’

‘The doctors are giving him an injection to try to make him breathe.’ The nurse patted my arm and I was frightened by the sympathy and sadness I could see in her eyes.

Tears trickled down the side of my face and mingled with the sweat that had already dampened the pillow under my head. And, just like my grandmother had done all those years ago, I began to whisper, ‘Please God. Please God. Please God.’

This time, though, it seemed that God was listening, because after a few seconds I heard a tiny, feeble sound like a kitten mewling. Then someone held my son in front of me just long enough for me to touch his blue, wrinkled little face before they put him in an incubator and wheeled him quickly from the room.

Later, when I’d been taken to the hospital ward, they brought the incubator and placed it beside my bed, and I lay on my side looking at my beautiful son and remembering, from the days when I lived with my grandparents, what it felt like to really love someone. Ironically, though, it was my mother who had to show me how to pick my baby up and cuddle him. I’d spent so many years of my life perfecting the art of hiding my feelings that I even felt embarrassed to hold my own son.

I looked around me at all the other women in all the other beds on the ward, and at all their husbands and partners, and I wondered what the hell I was supposed to do now. I had, literally, nothing to give my son except a second-hand Moses basket, and I was afraid that, emotionally at least, I might need him far more than he needed me.

A COUPLE OF
days after I took my baby home from the hospital, Keith came to see him.

‘He looks just like me,’ he told me, looking into the Moses basket and touching the tiny hand. ‘I don’t need a paternity test to know I’m his father.’

The next day, I was in the living room when there was a knock on the front door and, a few seconds later, Tyrone walked in.

‘I’ve come to see my son,’ he said, tossing a wad of money on to the sofa.

‘I’ve told Keith he’s his,’ I answered, standing beside Tyrone as he looked down at the peacefully sleeping baby.

Without a word, he scooped up the wad of notes and walked out, leaving his son in the care of a penniless, clueless teenager and her alcoholic mother.

When my aunts came to see the baby, it was clear that they were disgusted with me. One of them told me that my grandmother would be turning in her grave if she
knew what was going on, and another wanted to take my son and bring him up herself, so that he’d have a better life than the one he was clearly going to have with me. I could see the sense in what she was saying, but I told her I’d be able to manage, because my mother had promised to help me.

‘Your mother couldn’t even be bothered to look after her
own
children,’ she sneered. ‘What makes you think she’s going to bother looking after someone else’s?’

It was a fair question, and I couldn’t blame my aunt for thinking I wouldn’t be a good mother. It seemed to be an opinion shared by everyone who knew me – and, in fact, one that I held myself. I had no money, no parents who were realistically going to be able to help and guide me, and nothing to give my baby, not even a cot or a pram to put him in.

A few days later, I ‘borrowed’ a stolen credit card from one of our lodgers while he was out and bought my son a cot, bedding and all the other bits and pieces I couldn’t afford. Then I slipped the credit card back where I’d found it amongst the lodger’s belongings.

It was the norm where we lived to see people arriving home late at night with things they’d burgled, or with tyres they’d stolen from cars, which they’d left standing on bricks, and stealing credit cards wasn’t really even considered a crime, because lots of people did it. For example, I
went into a shoe shop in town one day and came face to face with a family I knew, who lived near us on the estate. The mum was standing at the till, and when I said ‘Hello’, she just nodded curtly and then turned her back on me. I was a bit surprised, but I turned away too and I’d started looking at the shoes when the dad wandered over, stood beside me and whispered not to mention their surname, because his wife was buying shoes for the whole family with a stolen credit card.

As children grow up, they accept and absorb the morality of the adults who have the greatest influence on them – normally their parents – and most of the people on that estate had a completely distorted understanding of what was right and acceptable. I can remember a boy a bit younger than me boasting to me one Christmas that he and his mates had robbed a family of all their Christmas presents except the kid’s bike. He almost puffed out his chest with pride at the thought of his superior sensitivity, and I wasn’t even shocked, because it was just the way of life.

After my son was born, however, I became even more obsessed by the thought of moving to a better neighbourhood. We’d made numerous applications to the council asking to be moved, but each time an inspector had come to the house and given us a list of the things we’d have to do before they’d even consider our request.
The list included totally refurbishing the house and garden – which, the inspector told us, looked like the back end of the Somme – and, realistically, there was almost nothing on it that was going to get done. So we kept getting knocked back, until it became clear that they had no intention of rehousing us at all.

I knew that there was an empty council house on a much nicer estate not far away from where we were living, and one day I asked if we could have the key, just to have a look. When my mother and I arrived, I opened the front door, walked into the empty living room and almost cried. The house was everything I wanted. It had clean, airy rooms without a trace of mildew or any water running down the walls, and it was in a nice area where you wouldn’t be ashamed to live and bring up a child. I knew that if only we could move to somewhere like that and start again, I could keep it clean and make it into a real home for my son.

As I stood there, looking out of the living-room window at the little back garden, I felt a rush of resolve, and suddenly I knew what I had to do. I was determined that my child wasn’t going to live in our house; he was going to have a home just like this. In fact, he was going to have
this
home.

Later that day, we returned to the empty house with our tatty bits of furniture and moved in.

When the council realised what we’d done, a council officer came to see us. We pretended we’d misunderstood and that we thought we’d been given permission, and, at last, my mother’s ability to lie convincingly was put to good use.

‘But they gave us the key,’ she told the irritated council officer, with an expression on her face of such credible innocence that I had to turn away to hide my smile. ‘They said we could come and see if we liked it. And we did. They wouldn’t have told us to do that if we couldn’t have it, would they?’ She laughed at the very thought of such a ridiculous idea.

‘You knew perfectly well that you were not being given permission to move into this house,’ the man snapped at my mother. ‘You’re going to have to pack up your stuff’ – he looked round the room at our shabby, broken furniture with an expression of thinly veiled disgust – ‘and go back from whence you came.’

There were a few people on the estate who already knew us, and a few more who knew our reputation, and when they heard we’d moved in, they got up a petition to try to have us evicted. They claimed, reasonably enough, that we’d have parties and fights and there’d be criminals and troublemakers at the house. In the end, though, the council let us stay, probably because no one there could face the idea of the battle that lay ahead if they tried to get us out.

The new estate was completely different from where we used to live. Quite a few people had bought their council houses, and all the houses and gardens were nice and well maintained. What struck me particularly, though, was that people didn’t know everyone else’s business; they just went to work – a novelty in itself after living on an estate where only the minority of adults had jobs – and then they came home and got on with their own lives.

But ultimately the residents’ petition proved unnecessary, as, once we’d moved in, my mother’s parties stopped. She’d always been afraid of being left on her own, and often when she was drunk, she’d cry and threaten to kill herself if I left her – and she knew I wouldn’t live in the new house with my son if the parties continued. Another reason they stopped was because we’d been careful not to let my mother’s friends know where we were going. Some of them tried to track us down, though, and one night a group of them turned up at the house of a friend of mine, asking where we were, and then beat up her father when he lied and said they didn’t know.

The club was still within walking distance and my mum still drank there, or got the bus into town and went to a pub, and she’d still occasionally bring a man home with her. But it was nothing compared to what she used to be like.

Not long after we’d moved into our new home, I met Ken – another recently released prisoner whose idea of ‘taking me out’ was to turn up at the house after the pubs had closed. I was 19 when I fell pregnant with his child. As soon as I told him, he left me and started seeing someone else. And by the time I was four months pregnant, I was seeing Dee.