by Jane Rogers
He booked a hotel in the Cotswolds. I began to pray that they would be ill, so I couldn’t leave them. Vi was just weaned, she must have been nine months. I lay awake at night agonizing about it. I had never left them, not for so much as an afternoon – except for leaving Ruth while I gave birth to Viola – and she was excited enough about the idea of the new baby not to be too upset by that. The contortion in my brain, of course, was that it was entirely ludicrous not to want to go; that I was pathetic, laughable. Where was my healthy selfishness?
It was in loving my children. Selfishly, I wanted to be with them. If Gareth had offered to go away on his own I would have been thoroughly relieved. I was ashamed. I talked enthusiastically about all the things we would do during our great escape; about the luxury of not being woken at 4 a.m., about the joys of an uninterrupted dinner. And in Gareth’s every word of eager anticipation I saw betrayal of the children, how little he cared for them.
During the week before, I shopped as if preparing for a siege: bought stocks of disposable nappies and baby bubble bath, then new pins and plastic pants in case Mum couldn’t do disposables, jars of juice and first-stage baby goo for Vi, sweets and treats and special colouring books to keep Ruth happy. I washed and ironed every article of clothing they possessed, while they ran about in old and outgrown garments; I bought a set of new bottles for Vi so that I could leave enough sterilized for the whole weekend. I agonized over which toys to pack, I planned and foresaw needs and dangers until my head ached with the pressure.
They were both healthy. My mother was looking forward to having them. On Friday morning there was no escape. I knew from the terror in my mind and the looseness in my bowels that if I left them they would almost certainly die. And yet I was going to leave them. Because I was too ashamed of myself to stand up to Gareth and tell him I didn’t want to go. By my own actions I was bringing catastrophe on myself.
At lunchtime I bundled a packet of nappies and a change of clothes each into a plastic bag, put it and the children in the car, took them round and unceremoniously dumped them on Mum. I left without kissing them goodbye. I ran back to the car and went to collect Gareth from work, so we could set off early on our wonderful second honeymoon weekend. Since leaving them was tantamount to condemning them to death, what hypocrisy to pretend concern, and ease my conscience with provision of bubble bath, favourite toys, and puréed beef broth.
That was the first, and the worst. But I never learnt to leave them graciously. I could never bear it. I always had to dump them and run.
What sort of a mother?
* * *
Sun. 23
And more recently, Marion? On the more recent occasion of you leaving your children, your younger children, your baby twins – did you make any provision for their welfare in your absence?
It was not the same. And I did make provision. Sensible Sarah was in the bath, the twins sleeping in their cots. After her bath she would come down to watch News at Ten with me, and find my note and the money on the kitchen table. She came from Edinburgh to help me with the twins; she had come to shoulder the very responsibility I left her with. The babies are not abandoned, they are left with a responsible aunt, better able to care for them and look after them than I.
I try to imagine them and I can’t. I try to imagine them crying, but I can’t see their faces – or decide which one I’d be looking at. I try to confront the damage I may have done to them; the gaping insecurity opened up under their scarcely balancing baby feet. I consider how I may have scarred the new lives entrusted to me.
But I hardly can. They are shadowy. I have never been able to see them. And by leaving them, I relinquished control.
With Ruth and Vi I couldn’t bear to. It was like handing over control of my own body, letting someone else eat and sleep and breathe for me. I knew how to do every little thing for them, down to the smallest detail; how they should be got up and washed in the morning, how potted and dressed, how breakfasted and groomed. Each detail of their daily routine was as clear in my head as my own, and the notion of someone else doing it – of any of it being done differently – appalled me. I remember Sunday mornings when Gareth offered me a lie-in, and I lay fretfully in bed listening to him forgetting to clean their teeth and not knowing which drawer the clean socks were in, until I came to dread Sunday more than any other day of the week. Once or twice I stupidly got up and barged in to help. He was furious.
I controlled them. I owned them. Their attention was mine to dispose. How I showed them – everything. Look at the doggy / horse / pretty flower / trees in the wind / sun on the sea / boy in the book / girl on the bicycle. Listen to the fire engine, burglar-alarm, ice-cream van. Smell the roses, shoe polish, niffy cheese. Look listen learn say; they were mine to give the world to and the world was mine to give them.
When Ruth was three I took her to a mothers and toddlers group. Vi was asleep in her pram. It was raining, and the church annexe we were in echoed with the pattering of rain on roof and windows; was full of the smells of floor polish and damp hair and old wood. For the first ten minutes Ruth clung to my knees, then gradually she became interested in the toys in the hall. There were small bikes and dolls’ prams, a wooden climbing frame and slide. I watched her investigate the climbing frame; standing staring at the children on it, then plucking up courage to test it with an arm and a foot. I was bursting with pride – she looked so compact and perfect, held her back so beautifully straight, and gazed with such absorbed interest at the world around her – I couldn’t help thinking she must be a magnet for all attention in the room. As I watched her wander from toy to toy – always slightly wary of the other children, slightly reserved, exploring – the pride and pleasure I took in her swelled to bursting point and I could hardly stop myself from crying. She was on her own there. Following her own interests, having her attention caught by varying objects and incidents, undirected by me. That sense of her as separate – and yet as connected to me as my own limbs – was unbearably poignant. Like being in love, yes, piercing like being in love, and seeing the other person so magical so beautiful so perfectly close to your heart’s desire – and so separate. So able to walk away, at any time.
Because I was in love with Gareth and had that heart-rending sense of his separateness from me, I married him. It’s why grandparents have their dressers clogged with photographs of babies and weddings. Real children grow up, real marriages crumble.
A story.
What Sort of a Mother
He’s sleeping. His quick shallow breaths fill the air like fluttering insects above the bed. She always leaves the lamp on till she comes to bed, because he’s scared of the dark. Standing by the bed she looks down at him. His face is tilted up on the pillow, his lips parted to suck in the air. His big face is like a baby’s.
The fat woman undresses methodically, padding quietly about the room. She pulls on a long flannel nightdress. She likes getting in bed with him. He’s hot. Not sweaty: hot and dry as an oven-baked potato, with smooth skin. He sleeps deep; doesn’t even stir when she crawls in beside him. His quick breaths just raise his ribs beneath her arm. As she settles and quietens, she falls into the old pattern, one breath to two of his, one breath to two of his. To the rhythmic pull of their joint breaths she launches out into his sea of sleep.
She’s never slept so well as with him. The others came in bed when they were little, but they tossed and turned, or pulled her hair. When they were babies she’d fall asleep slumped over Donna or Wayne or Tracey on her tit and force herself awake in a panic, scared to death she’d smothered them: find them curled like fat little leeches further down the bed, and her half-full tit still dripping for them.
And men – none of them was so good, for sleeping. Men were noisy and smelt bad; snoring and farting, turning their bulks in stiff heavy movements that jarred her sleep, knocking against her – foreign bodies. Their breath stank. Gary turned and flowed with her like he was still part of her own body – abandoned and floppy in his sleep as
a little child. The sun-heat of him pervaded her aching, work-horse body.
The woman in the dock was short and puffy with ill-health. She also smelt badly – mixed body and vegetable odours – sweat, stale urine, cooking fat, and a sourish tang familiar to the escorting warders: fear.
Leonie Doyle. Forty-one. Mother of six. From flat 213, Christie’s Tower, Blackhill Estate. Charged with the murder of her youngest son. She watched the court with a stupid, vacant expression, and had to be asked several questions twice. The medical report stated that she was of average intelligence, but suffering from severe depression. It was at this early stage in the trial that the murder charge was dropped, and replaced with a charge of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. In court she never spoke more than five words together; in the safety of a cell, she talked freely to her social worker, whom she had known for fourteen years.
Leonie Doyle had lived on Blackhill Estate since it was built in 1961. She had been seven months gone with Donna, when they offered her and Des a twelfth-floor flat. Ten years later she was living in a bigger, fifth-floor flat, with her six kids and no Des. Good riddance, as far as Leonie was concerned. He was rough when he’d been drinking, and one time he broke her arm. That was when she was expecting Gary, the youngest. A few months after the kid was born he left. The Social traced him to Blackpool, trying to get maintenance out of him, but then even they lost track of him. He never had any money anyway. He drank it all. She was better off without him.
Her babies were all born perfect. Not even a birthmark on them, she was proud of that. Gary didn’t get ill till he was nearly one.
Something’s wrong. It’s light. It shouldn’t be light. He’s never slept through – till eight o’clock? No. They’re yelling and screaming next door, enough to wake the dead. That’s how it starts, I remember. He’s lying in the bottom of his cot, lips blue, back arched. It’s that what woke me, not the screaming, the light. And that little gasp of his. His eyes’re rolled up till the pupils’re nearly out of sight. I’m fumbling, letting the cotside down, quick, reaching for him – he moves. He’s curling. Crisping. Like a strip of bacon under the grill. I’ll never not see that again. Crisping. When I wake nights I see it. I see it when I look in his face sometimes. His little body crisping with pain. Don’t talk to me about God.
Unlike many babies, Gary did not die from the acute meningitis he suffered at the age of eleven months. The infection responded to treatment, and after three weeks Leonie was told she could fetch him home. She had to take Darren and Tracey (the others were at school) and they ran around the consultant’s room screaming, while he explained to Leonie that Gary had suffered a certain amount of irreversible brain damage, due to lack of oxygen during the convulsions.
He’s a little baby again now. His mouth’s gone slack, he’s dribbling again. He’s no more better than I am, he’s going backwards. He was crawling three months ago. Look at him now. As if I haven’t got enough to do. And he feels different. Heavier; he’s not helping himself. Poor little sod. It’d be better if he’d’ve died.
Gradually she stopped noticing the difference. He was just the youngest – always, by a long way, the youngest. When they started taking him to that special school by taxi it was all right; for the first time, they were all off her hands during the day. There was time to sweep the floor, wash up, stuff a couple of bin liners with dirty washing and set off for the launderette where there were other women to talk to, and no sense of guilt in taking the weight off her feet for an hour while the wet clothes slopped round and round in a grey froth on the other side of the thick glass.
Days and nights and days and nights of them getting older, getting out from underfoot. Fewer of them in her bed at night, though no extra sleep because they still fought morning, noon and night, scrapping and yelling and breaking the furniture, shrieking and giggling in their bedrooms till the small hours – or out with the other kids, running up and down the walkways and dropping things off, trapping each other in the lifts, getting stoned on glue and cider, fighting. They ran wild. She didn’t want them to, didn’t intend it – but there were too many of them, and as each one grew older she stopped being the person that mattered and became simply the drudge – the one that brought food into the flat that could be taken from the cupboard, fridge or table, the one that locked the door at night and paid the telly man and the club for clothes. She simply was the flat – a place to hide or sleep. And she was money, either by asking or by theft.
Gary was the only one who didn’t get older. Didn’t stop needing her. Didn’t stop smiling at her and hugging her and creeping into her bed at night. When it got to the stage of them all being out with the gangs of other kids on the estate, she and Gary had the flat to themselves. She’d cook a tea for him and herself – the others came and went as they pleased, grabbing food when they fancied it or begging money for pies and chips.
She and Gary would eat sausage butties in front of the telly; he would help her to dry up, carrying cups one at a time from the table to the cupboard, performing each task with the careful interest of a child. He would talk about his day at school, the teachers and the story he’d been read; bring home misshapen drawings of people with huge heads and stick bodies, as the others had done when they were little, before school became a dirty word.
He’s a good boy. He loves his Mum. I tell him he can make us a cup of tea. He fills the kettle, with the tap running slowly, watching it, careful. Turns the tap off before he moves the kettle out from under it. No splashing. Checks the switch is off; plugs it in. It always takes a bit longer than you think, it’s like he’s the other side of glass – or water. I think sometimes, he’s just putting his hand through, he’s just putting his eyes through. When it’s plugged in he switches it on. Waits, till he can hear the noise of the element heating. Then he gives us a smile. He’s got a lovely smile. He’s so busy smiling he’s forgot what’s next so I point to the mugs. He puts them there side by side. Pushes them carefully a couple more inches back from the edge, like he’s arranging them for a bleeding display. Every little thing matters to him. I like watching him, when I’m not in a hurry. It’s soothing, like watching them fish at the dentist’s.
Only he’s not like the fish cos I know what he’s doing, I know why. He pushed the mugs in from the edge so’s they won’t fall off; he puts a tea bag in each cup, and when he’s put them in he has another look to make sure they’re in. When the kettle boils he watches it till it switches itself off – I’ve told him not to touch it, it’ll boil for a good minute before it goes off though. Then he pulls out the plug, holding the handle of the kettle as if it’ll bite him, turns it round awkwardly so’s he can grasp it with his right, lifts it slowly and pours into each cup. He never spills a drop. When he puts it down he gives me a look again, checking I’m watching. Then he squashes the bags with a spoon, he likes that bit, sometimes he starts to hum to himself. He does what I’ve told him – pulls a saucer by the cup, fishes the bag out, drops it on the saucer. Then the other cup. Then he’s getting the milk out the fridge – carrying it carefully, with both hands, taking the top off careful, careful, with his big clumsy fingers.
It can take him fifteen minutes to mash a cup of tea, I’m not kidding. But he’ll do it. And be pleased as punch, when at last he’s coming towards me carrying the mug high, not a drop spilt – grinning from ear to ear.
I know every movement. Every move he does, I know. Like I made him. I tell him how to do it. And when they learn him something new at school he comes home and shows me; he can write his name. When he does something wrong, I tell him. He doesn’t get let off. He learns from it.
She tried to keep up with the others. Scolded Tracey and locked her in after the first time she stayed out all night. Went down the school to see the teacher when she got a letter about Wayne truanting. Had long talks with Donna and took her to the doctor’s herself to get her put on the Pill, when she started going with that Damon. But if she locked them in they simply went sullen
and silent, pretending to ignore it when she unlocked the door again, then walked out past her as if she was nothing – dirt. It was all battle, with all of them; a losing battle, as she well knew. When she controlled one side of her family it went tearing and roaring away like a forest fire in every other direction.
All except for Gary. He loved her. He wanted her. He was hers to control. If she was cross with him, he cried. When the others were in she had her work cut out protecting him, and he clung to her side. If they teased or hurt him it could rouse her to slapping them still, big as they were. When the girls suddenly took a new interest in him and invited him into their room for a lot of whispering and giggling she knew damn well what was going on, and called him out. She slapped him and shut him in her bedroom, then went to deal with a sniggering Donna and Lynda, and a quiet sulky-looking Tracey.
‘You leave him alone. You hear me? He’s a little kid. I know he’s big – but in his mind he’s no more than a little boy just starting infants’. Just keep your nasty ideas to yourself and don’t go mucking about with him. You hear me?’ She slammed the door on them and after a couple of minutes they trooped out sheepishly and went off outside.
She listened to him crying and throwing himself against the bedroom door. He’d be all right. No one was going to get away with hurting him.
After the initial terror and howling, he slumped against the bedroom door, sobbing heartbrokenly. She lit a cigarette and sat at the kitchen table listening as his cries tailed off then restarted with a second wind. He was crying mechanically, perhaps having forgotten why he’d started.
‘Shut it, you thick pillock!’ she shouted. ‘You retard!’ She would look after him. If she had ever heard of him being upset at school she’d have been down there within the hour, ready to do battle. But if she made him cry – as long as she was listening to him – he was all right. She knew she meant him to be all right. It didn’t count.