by Rachel Marks
The lyrics flash up on the screen and I begin. This bit’s not too bad. It’s that sort of breathless talk-singing people do when feeling deep emotion. I can just about manage that. Then I’m supposed to sing something about me looking like I’m a queen (an apt lyric at this particular moment if ever there was one) and I want to shrink into myself.
I can feel the music building towards the bridge and my throat feels dry, my heart pounding in my chest. Here we go. Here comes the real singing.
And then the cheers from the crowd and the alcohol take over, and I’m back in my living room with the boys performing in front of the television and I start belting it out. I even sweep my hand across my body and perform a dramatic air grab.
When the chorus finally arrives, the whole crowd sways their arms in the air and sing along, and then suddenly Mimi appears, taking the extra mic off the compere and joining in.
At the sound of Mimi’s voice, the crowd stops singing, stops swaying, and just stares at her, dumbfounded.
It’s all right for her. I did all the hard work. It’s easy to jump in, give it the old Whitney Houston and get all the glory.
For a little while, I continue to sing along with her, a mismatched duet, but like Batman and Robin, it’s clear who the star is here, and after a lot of irritated glares from the audience, I take a step back and hand my mic to the compere.
When Mimi’s finished singing, the crowd erupts in whoops and cheers and Mimi gives a shy bow, her face flushing pink as she does. And I’m glad I brought her. It’s very rare I do anything that makes me feel good about myself these days, but right now I don’t feel half-bad.
*
When we reach the taxi rank, Mimi leans up and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Thank you for tonight. Despite my initial reservations, I had a great time. I hope I didn’t embarrass you too much with my singing.’
‘Well, you did kind of rain on my parade a little bit, but I’m glad you enjoyed it.’
Mimi smiles. ‘I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it. Thank you. Seriously. I never would’ve done it without you forcing me to.’
‘You’re very welcome. It was the least I could do after all your help with the flat. You were right. It does feel much better getting it sorted.’
‘Good. Now, just make sure you invite Kate to pick up the boys from yours next weekend so that she can see it.’
*
In the morning, I paint a second coat on all the walls and then grab a black bin liner and have a huge clear-out. Old clothes I never wear any more, receipts, bank statements, empty bottles of shampoo and shower gel that were lining the bottom of the shower, magazines I’m never going to look at … I take all the recycling to the tip – it’s got to the point where it needs its own room because I never remember to put it out on recycling day. On the way home, I pick up some polish and a duster from the shop and, when I get back, I polish all the surfaces (who knew the TV picture was that clear?) and run the Hoover round. I tidy the boys’ room, putting their toys away in the cupboard and Blu-Tacking some of their pictures to the wall. And when I’m finished, I sit down with a microwave curry, a beer and an episode of American Horror Story feeling decidedly cleansed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘Right, good morning, everyone. Tommy, can you please stop sticking your carrot up your nose and, Jasmine, I don’t think James wants you licking his cheek, although I’m sure you’re only being friendly. Now, this morning we’ve got a special treat because Ethan has decided to bring in his new puppy.’
A cacophony of excitement ensues and I’m just trying to settle the class down when I notice Harley skulking in with his hood up.
‘Morning, Harley. Can you take your hoody off, please?’
Harley crosses his arms and shakes his head.
‘Well, Ethan is bringing his puppy in to meet us all in a minute. If you want to join us on the carpet, then you’re going to have to take your hoody off.’
I’m not sure why. Because it’s an arbitrary school law that children all look like clones of each other, perhaps?
Harley shakes his head again, remaining standing.
‘Right, Mrs Watson, if you could get the class in a circle and calm for the imminent arrival of Ethan’s delightful puppy, I’m just going to have a quick chat to Harley.’
Mrs Watson scowls at me, deservedly so on this occasion. The children seem to have no concept of a circle, however many times I ask them to sit in one, and trying to get them calm, with the prospect of a small, supposedly cute and cuddly animal joining them in the classroom is a seriously tricky task. Which is why I’m avoiding it, using Harley as my excuse.
‘Thanks,’ she says, with a bitter twitch of the lips.
‘No, thank you,’ I say, mirroring her gesture.
Then she enters the lion’s den and I steer Harley out into the corridor and sit down with him on the mini chairs that cause my knees to stick up in the air.
‘So, what’s up? I thought you’d be jumping up and down at the news a puppy was going to be coming into class.’
Harley looks at his feet and pulls his hood down further over his face. Sitting close to him, I can see his cheeks are blotchy like he’s been crying a lot. I reach over and gently push his hoody off his head. He screws up his face and gives me a death-stare. Then I see it, the angry bruise covering the side of his face next to his eye.
‘What happened to your eye, buddy?’ As I ask the question, I pray there’s a simple and innocent explanation, that Harley’s behaviour this morning is not linked to the cause of the bruise, but my instincts tell me that the bruise has everything to do with why Harley is acting out.
Harley doesn’t speak, just pulls his hoody back down over his face. Then a flustered-looking Mrs Watson puts her head around the door. ‘The puppy is here. I’ve asked Ethan’s mum to wait by the back door just a sec, but the kids are going crazy.’
I can see that Harley isn’t in the mood to tell me about what happened, and I don’t want him to miss out, so I stand up and hold out my hand. ‘Come on, Harley. Let’s go and meet this puppy. We’ll talk about this later.’
Reluctantly, Harley takes my hand and I lead him past the circle, well, gaggle, of very squealy, wriggly children to the back door where Ethan and his mum are waiting with a ridiculously over-excited puppy on a lead beside them. When I open the door, the little mutt jumps up at me, his muddy paws marking my trousers.
‘Sit,’ Ethan’s mum says, but the puppy ignores her entirely, so she yanks on the lead and pulls him away, nearly dislodging his head.
I’m sure what I’m feeling is something akin to a panic attack, but I smile as sincerely as I can manage.
‘OK, give me two seconds to calm the class a little bit. They are understandably very excited. And then you can bring him in. Does he have a name?’
‘She’s called Misty.’
‘Oh right, sorry,’ I say, apologizing for my misogynistic error, instilled in me from a childhood of books where the dogs were always male, like the doctors and the firemen.
I take an unusually subdued Harley with me back to the carpet and then attempt to calm the manic class. I did suggest to the head that perhaps the combination of a class of reception children and a sprightly puppy wasn’t the most sensible idea, but she assured me it would be fine and said it was good to show the children that we valued the things that are important to them outside of school. I don’t see why we couldn’t do that with a photograph of Misty, but it’s easy to sit in your ivory tower and inflict pain on other people, I suppose.
‘OK, we must be silent, everyone, or we will scare little Misty,’ I whisper. ‘Let’s see if we can be so quiet that she doesn’t even notice we’re here when she comes in.’
As if by magic, it works. The class are silent. Well, until the bloody puppy comes in, jumping up at them, licking their faces, swatting them with her wagging tail. It’s like trying to control the riot when a group of young girls spot their adored boy band. All the shushing and holding my arms
out as a barrier is never going to have the desired effect, so I sink back into my chair and pray none of the children tell their parents they spent the morning being mauled by an untrained animal.
Just as I’m looking on, as if the class belong to someone else, my eyes fall on Harley, now happily joining in with the class to smother the poor puppy, the bruise on his face shouting at me like a flashing light, and I know I’ve got no choice but to raise the alarm, even though I worry that if I do, I’m only going to make things worse for him, let alone the effect it will have on Emma.
*
‘We’re going to have to make a call to social services, Noah. There are too many red flags.’
‘But Mum seems like a good person. I really think there’ll be an innocent explanation.’
‘It’s often the quiet ones.’
‘Let me do a home visit. If her explanation doesn’t wash or if I feel there needs to be some kind of intervention, we’ll make the call.’
Mrs Jackson takes a deep breath. ‘I want a thorough check and a thorough report.’
‘Of course. Absolutely. Thank you. I’ll call her now and tell her I’m going over after school.’
‘And try to get out of Harley what happened. Then you can see if their stories match.’
‘Will do.’
*
All day, Harley refuses to tell me what happened, which makes me even more concerned about what I’m going to find when I get to the house. Following the satnav, I pull up outside. It’s a terraced house at the far end of a large estate.
When I knock on the door, no one answers for a while, but I can hear Harley yelling about something on the other side. There’s some banging and then Harley opens it.
‘Hi, Mr Carlton. How come you’re here?’
‘I came to have a quick chat with Mummy. I just wanted to …’
‘I’ll be there in a sec,’ Emma calls down and then she appears at the top of the stairs. She’s wearing joggers and a cropped sports top, and her hair is pushed off her face with a hairband. She’s so skinny I can see the bones and the sinew beneath her skin. She pulls on a loose-fitting T-shirt and heads downstairs.
‘Do you want to come and see my bedroom?’ Harley says, looking up at me expectantly.
I place my hand on his head. ‘Not just now, little man. I need to talk to Mummy for a bit. Perhaps you could go and make something, then you could show me it?’
When Emma reaches the bottom of the stairs, she shoos Harley up and guides me through to the lounge, where I sit down on the worn-out leather sofa.
‘Can I get you a drink? A coffee? Squash?’
I shake my head. ‘I’m fine. Come and sit down a minute.’
‘It’s about his eye, isn’t it?’ Emma looks at the floor and I notice that her eyes look black too, except not with bruises, just exhaustion.
‘Sort of. The school just wanted me to come and check everything is OK.’
I don’t want to go in all guns blazing. Partly because she’s more likely to cover up the truth if I do that, but also there could still be a perfectly innocent explanation.
Emma shakes her head and I think she’s preparing for battle, but then I notice her eyes are filled with tears. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him, I swear.’
As she says it, there’s a sinking feeling in my stomach, because I’d so hoped she wasn’t going to have been the perpetrator. I’d so hoped there was going to be some other explanation.
‘He was just going on and on at me and I told him to stop, that Mummy needed him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He just kept shouting at me and I pushed him to get him away from me, but I pushed him too hard and he hit his face on the TV unit.’ She points at the MDF cabinet supporting the ridiculously large flat-screen TV. ‘It was an accident. You believe me that I’d never hurt him on purpose, don’t you?’
I nod because I can tell that Emma’s not a bad person and we’ve all been pushed to our limits before. Sometimes you grab your kids a bit too hard, push them into their car seat a little over-zealously, but at the same time, there’s something about Emma that makes me worried for Harley.
‘Please don’t tell the school,’ Emma continues. ‘I just have bad days sometimes. But I’m trying my best. I know I’m not a great mum but I do love him. I love him with all my heart.’
‘I can see that. I just wonder if it would help having someone to talk to. What about Mimi? Could she help you out sometimes when you’re having a bad day?’
‘Oh, God, no. Please don’t tell Mimi what happened. She thinks little enough of me as it is.’
‘She really doesn’t. That’s in your head, you know.’
‘Trust me, she despairs of me most of the time. If you tell her this, she’ll take Harley off me and I’d die if that happened. He’s all I’ve got.’
‘I would never tell her. It’s confidential. But of course she wouldn’t take him off you. She knows you’re a good mum.’
Emma shakes her head. ‘You don’t know her like I do. When it comes to stuff like this, she’s very black and white. You mess up, you don’t get any more chances.’ She looks so drained I can’t help but feel sorry for her. ‘After a while, it takes its toll, you know, always being the black sheep, the lesser daughter, the failure. This would just be more fuel to the fire. I don’t want her to know I’m still struggling. She thinks I’m doing better. And I am. Most days.’
The thing is, I know exactly how she feels. The desire to hide your perpetual mistakes from a sibling that never makes any.
‘I just think …’
Then there’s the sound of the door crashing open and Harley appears in the lounge. ‘I’ve made a rocket to show you. Will you come up?’
He looks so desperate to show me his creation, I can’t turn him down. ‘Is that OK?’ I ask Emma.
‘Of course. Just ignore the mess. I’m going to have a big tidy-up tonight.’
‘Don’t worry, my flat is always a mess. It’s no problem.’
Harley leads me up to his room and I search it for signs of neglect, but other than the fact I can’t see any books, it’s a perfectly adequate kid’s room. There’s a bed, a few toys, a large photograph of him and Emma on a canvas on the wall. And then, touchingly, I notice he’s Sellotaped his drawings of Finn and Gabe to his wardrobe door.
‘You put your pictures up?’
Harley looks at them and nods. ‘They’re my friends. And it was one of my favourite days.’
I feel a lump forming in my throat, then Harley pulls me on to the floor to show me the rocket he’s made out of Lego. Like most of Finn’s creations, it is basically just a base plate with four walls built up on it (it’s amazing what that basic construction can masquerade as), but he flies it into the air and makes whooshing sounds to show it really is a rocket.
‘Awesome rocket. Well done, you. And thanks for giving me some time to talk to Mummy.’
‘What were you talking about?’ Harley asks, swirling his rocket around in a loop-the-loop.
‘Just checking you and Mummy are OK, and talking to Mummy about that baddy on your face.’
Harley drops his rocket and his eyes to the floor.
‘You know, you can always talk to me about anything, Harley.’
Harley keeps his eyes fixed on the carpet. I notice it could do with a good hoover, but it’s not exactly a child protection issue. If it were, I’d have been hauled straight in to the boys’ school for a telling-off.
‘Mummy told me what happened.’ I put my hand on Harley’s shoulder.
He looks up at me briefly then looks away again. ‘I didn’t mean to make her so cross. I just really wanted to try out my new scooter.’
I hear it in his voice – the fear, the shame – and it suddenly dawns on me that Harley hasn’t been protecting his mum as I’d first thought – he’s been protecting himself.
I can still remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. It wasn’t the first time Mum hit me, but it’s the time that hurt the most, emotionally anyway. I was ni
ne. It was a Sunday. I’d spent the day alone in my room. Ben had been at a friend’s, Mum had been in her shed ‘studio’ and God knows where Dad was. Running away somewhere as usual, probably. Anyway, I’d spent all day on this painting of Mum – it was supposed to be a surprise for her. I’d copied the photograph of her on the windowsill, sitting in a field of bluebells, her long dark hair blowing in the wind.
When I was finally happy with it, after two or three attempts, I took it down with me and went to knock on the shed door. Mum hadn’t answered at first and I’d wondered if she was asleep, but I was desperate for her to see my painting so I kept knocking. After what seemed like a really long time, she opened the door and before I even had a chance to speak, she slapped me right around the face.
‘If I don’t answer, it’s because I’m working,’ she said, her eyes full of rage, spittle erupting from her mouth and landing on her lips.
Then she slammed the door in my face and I ran back up to my room, ripped up the painting, buried my head in my pillow and wept. I was so ashamed I never told anyone what happened, not even Ben.
It’s so clear to me now that Harley is feeling exactly what I felt. And it makes me surprisingly furious.
‘You didn’t do anything wrong, OK, buddy?’
Harley doesn’t look convinced and it suddenly feels exceptionally important that I make him realize this is not his fault.
‘You were not being a naughty boy. You have to understand that. It’s OK to be really excited about something and find it hard to wait. It’s OK to be …’ I want to say ‘a kid’ but I know that wouldn’t make any sense to him.
‘I haven’t been on it yet. It’s really cool. It’s blue. My favourite colour.’
‘Do you want to go and try out your new scooter now?’