Earth to Daniel

by Gwyneth Rees

  I stumbled out into the corridor again. The cat lady had gone, thank goodness. At the far end of the corridor Mum and Dr White were coming out of his office. Dr White was a tall thin man with curly hair. He looked about the same age as my dad. Mum was clutching a piece of paper which even from this distance I recognised as a prescription.

  ‘Daniel, what are you doing down there?’ Mum called out.

  ‘Nothing,’ I mumbled, hurrying to join them.

  Dr White looked concerned. ‘Are you all right, Daniel?’

  I gulped. ‘Yeah.’

  He put his hand on my shoulder. He reminded me a bit of Dad when he did that. ‘Some of the patients here are very sick and they might behave a bit strangely. Did one of them give you a fright?’

  ‘No,’ I tried to look chilled, adding, ‘There was a lady going on about killing cats.’

  ‘Oh, that’ll be Elspeth. Don’t worry. She hasn’t really killed any cats.’

  ‘It wasn’t her she said was killing them. It was the people in her loft.’

  Dr White nodded like he wasn’t hearing anything new or anything particularly concerning. ‘Well I’ve had a look at your mum, Daniel. That rash is nothing to worry about and I’ve given her something to stop the itch.’ He smiled at her. ‘OK, Isobel?’

  Mum nodded. ‘Thanks again.’ She turned to me. ‘Come on, Daniel. We’ll go to the chemist and then we’d better both be getting to school.’

  We said goodbye and left.

  I should have asked what he’d told her to do about the lithium, but I forgot. I was too busy trying to make sense of what I’d just seen. Was that how Mum had been when I was little? Had she been like those people in there?

  ‘Mum, I don’t like this hospital much,’ I told her as we passed through the reception area where the receptionist was talking to a man who was responding very loudly, with his nose pressed right up against the glass partition. ‘Even if it does help people get better.’

  ‘I don’t like it either. And if I ever had to be admitted here …’ She actually shuddered.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I wouldn’t let anyone put you in here, no matter how sick you got,’ I promised.

  ‘If I was very sick you might not have a choice,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes I would.’ I put my arm round her protectively. ‘I wouldn’t let anyone do that, no matter what. Not even Dad.’ I don’t know why I added that.

  ‘Oh, Daniel!’ Mum had tears in her eyes. She grabbed hold of my hand suddenly. ‘Come on. Let’s run.’

  And the two of us ran back to the car together, laughing, because she was escaping with me and not staying behind inside that horrible, scary building.

  CHAPTER 6

  The next two weeks were weird. I couldn’t get used to Dad not being there in the evenings and I knew Mum was really missing him too. I knew because she sent him emails and texts every day and ran to the phone every time it rang in case it was him – even when the time difference meant it wasn’t likely to be. She was always hanging out on the computer in case Dad came online, even though he rarely Skyped. Before he left, Dad had said he’d ring us as often as he could to see how we were getting on and in those first two weeks he was ringing us almost every day. He sounded really close on the phone, not like he was across the other side of the world. He told us a little bit about what was going on at his end – Grandma was very poorly now – but mostly he just wanted to hear about us.

  Mum had started bringing lots of paperwork home with her and was doing it after Martha and I were in bed. That wasn’t new. Dad was always having to tell her off for working too hard. But now Mum seemed to be staying up half the night judging by the times I’d woken up and seen the downstairs light still on. Often it was three or four in the morning.

  On Sunday night, after I woke up to use the bathroom, I went downstairs to see what Mum was doing. I found her sitting at the dining table with a mug of coffee, surrounded by bits of paper. She was in her pyjamas and dressing-gown, so she’d obviously intended to go to bed at some point. Her hair was all messy as if she’d been running her hands through it.

  ‘Are you OK, Mum?’ I asked her.

  Mum looked up, starting slightly at the sight of me standing there. ‘God, Daniel, don’t creep up on me like that!’

  ‘I wasn’t creeping.’

  ‘Well, you gave me a fright!’ She sounded wide awake.

  ‘Sorry. Mum, why aren’t you in bed?’

  ‘I can’t sleep so I’m making a list of ideas to raise funds for the school. You know they’ve got this annual book sale that your Mrs Lyle keeps going on about … well, I think we should vamp it up a bit.’

  I wasn’t sure exactly what ‘vamp’ meant.

  ‘Look it up in the dictionary, Daniel,’ Mum said when I asked her.

  As I moved towards our laptop she shook her head and pointed to the actual dictionary in book form that just happened to be sitting on the table. (Even at four in the morning she can’t stop being a teacher.)

  ‘Vamp … “to improvise inartistically or crudely”,’ I read out after looking it up. I frowned. ‘Don’t you think Mrs Lyle might be a bit offended if you just take over like that?’

  ‘Mrs Lyle is a very competent teacher, but she’s very dull, Daniel. She has dull ideas. So do a lot of the other staff. They mean well enough, but they’re so boring. If you ask me, the whole school needs livening up a bit.’

  I couldn’t believe she was criticising my teachers. Normally she’s always saying that teachers do a really tough job and they don’t get the respect for it – or the salary – that they deserve.

  ‘Back to bed, Daniel,’ she said. ‘Go on. You’ve got school tomorrow. I don’t want you nodding off in class. I used to hate that when I taught English. I never knew if the kids who fell asleep were just sleep deprived or if I was boring them unconscious.’ She started to laugh.

  I could still hear her laughing as I climbed the stairs. It sounded a bit weird in the middle of the night.

  I was seething as I walked home the following day. I had stayed in the school library doing my homework until five o’clock because I didn’t feel like going back to an empty house. But I hadn’t planned on Mum coming to find me when she was ready to leave, and calling out in this really mumsy voice, ‘Sweetheart, do you want a lift home?’

  She said afterwards that she hadn’t realised anyone else was in the library at the time because the older boy who’d been studying there had just gone to put a book back so she hadn’t seen him. I felt really angry with her. What if that boy repeated what he’d heard? Everyone in my class might find out and start making fun of me. Calum might find out.

  I had stubbornly refused a lift, so she had gone off on her own to fetch Martha from her after-school club.

  I was dawdling because I was still in no hurry to get home, when I spotted Abby waiting at the bus stop up ahead. The two girls who’d been yelling at her on our first day were sitting on the wall next to the stop. Their school blazers were tossed on the ground on top of their school bags and their ties were hanging loose round their necks. Abby was standing with her back to them looking awkward. They were goading her about her mum again.

  ‘So how much does she drink then? Two bottles a night …? Three …? Does she know her liver’s gonna pack up if she doesn’t stop?’

  I could have walked straight past. After all, Abby hadn’t been all that friendly to me so far. But I knew I couldn’t just leave her there.

  ‘Hi, Abby.’ It was all I could think of to say at such short notice.

  She looked at me as if she didn’t know if I was her saviour or someone who was about to start having a go at her too. I pretended I couldn’t hear the comments the other girls were making. (‘Oh, look. She’s got a boyfriend. Isn’t that sweet?’)

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked her.

  ‘My friend’s,’ she grunted.

  ‘What time’s the bus?’ I glanced down at my watch. It was half past five.

  ‘Dunno.
I think I must have just missed one.’

  ‘Right.’ We both stood looking in the direction the bus was meant to come from. ‘If you like you can come round to mine instead,’ I offered in a rush. ‘Mum won’t mind. She’s probably not even back yet.’

  Abby bit her lip, glancing over at the girls, who weren’t showing any signs of leaving. She looked down the street again, but there was still no bus. ‘No thanks,’ she said quickly, ‘but I’ll walk with you.’ I guessed she’d been dying to leave for ages but hadn’t wanted them to think they’d scared her away.

  We walked side by side away from the bus stop while the girls giggled. ‘Who are those two?’ I asked when we’d turned the corner.

  ‘We went to the same school last year. They know about my mum.’ She flushed.

  Her embarrassment made me feel embarrassed too and, before I knew it, I had blurted out, ‘You mean about her drinking?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone else,’ I mumbled quickly.

  ‘Everyone else knows anyway,’ she said. ‘I wanted to start at a new secondary school this year, where the other kids didn’t know about Mum. I thought this one would be OK. It’s where my big sister went. But it turns out a girl who was in my class last year is Calum’s cousin, so he found out everything really quickly.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I didn’t know what else to say. ‘You can still come round to my place if you want,’ I added awkwardly.

  ‘It’s OK. My sister should be back from work soon so I may as well go home.’ She paused. ‘Thanks for … you know …’

  ‘Sure.’ I hadn’t really expected her to come over to mine, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed just the same. It would have been nice to start making a friend here. I stood watching her leave, thinking that from the back she reminded me a bit of my friend Kirsty from my old school. Kirsty had walked home with Mark and me sometimes. Abby paused to kick an empty can out of the gutter and started to dribble it along the pavement. That part wasn’t like Kirsty. Kirsty used to hate it when Mark and I went on about football all the time.

  When I got in, Mum was crossing the hall, her arms piled high with books and sheets of paper. ‘Those other teachers are getting to be a real pain,’ she grumbled as I followed her into the kitchen. ‘One useless opinion after another! I’m telling you, if I have to listen one more time to Margaret Lyle’s pathetic plan for her dreary book sale –’

  ‘Mum, maybe you shouldn’t be saying this to me?’ I interrupted, feeling uncomfortable.

  ‘Who else am I going to say it to?’ Mum snapped, pushing her hair out of her face and plonking all her stuff down on the kitchen table without even checking to see if we’d wiped it clean from breakfast this morning. Mum was getting much snappier since Dad had left, I’d noticed. She had also started to talk quite a lot about the other teachers at home in a way she never did normally. Like about how the deputy head had bad breath when you got up close to him, and how the head of science, Mr Gregory, kept looking at her legs. I hated it when she said stuff like that. I mean, they were my teachers, for goodness sake!

  I decided to try a different tack. ‘If you’d let me go to a different school, you could’ve moaned about the other teachers as much as you liked. It wouldn’t have mattered then, because I wouldn’t know them. And what happened just now in the library wouldn’t have happened either.’ My campaign to get her to let me change schools wasn’t completely dead and buried. Last week I’d tried to recruit Martha on to my side by pointing out that in a few years’ time, she’d have to go to the same school as Mum as well, but she just got all excited and wanted to know if she’d be allowed to eat her school dinner with Mum.

  Mum just grinned. ‘Still finding me an awful embarrassment, are you?’ She opened the door of the fridge and discovered that we had nothing left in it except cheese. She opened the freezer instead. ‘Chicken nuggets!’ she announced triumphantly. She bounded over to the vegetable rack and pulled out a bag of potatoes. ‘How about helping me peel these?’

  ‘Mum, are you stressed?’ I asked her. She seemed really tense and sort of hyper-alert or something.

  ‘Quite the opposite!’ Mum said. ‘I feel full of energy! Ever since I stopped those stupid tablets as a matter of fact. Now, don’t use that knife. Use the potato peeler. I’ve told you before, I don’t want chopped fingers in my dinner.’

  I stared at her. ‘What? The lithium tablets?’

  ‘Of course! I wasn’t on any others last time I looked.’

  ‘But you’re not meant to stop them!’ I protested. ‘Dad said. He said you got really ill last time you stopped.’ That had been when Mum had come off the tablets so that she could get pregnant with Martha. Dad had explained to me (on one of the rare occasions he’d actually spoken about Mum’s illness) that Mum had really wanted to have another baby, so she’d decided to stop taking the lithium. Apparently it’s risky taking lithium when you’re pregnant because there’s a chance that it might harm the unborn child.

  ‘Your dad isn’t always right, Daniel. It’s time you learned that,’ Mum said brusquely.

  ‘Well, what about Dr White?’ I asked, starting to peel a potato. ‘What did he say? Did he say you should keep taking them?’

  ‘Of course he did! You’d think he had shares in the company that makes lithium, the way he was going on about it. Sometimes I think that’s how all these doctors earn their living – by being in a conspiracy with the drug companies. I’ve been telling your father for years that these lithium tablets do more than just make me put on weight, but he won’t listen! They slow my mind up too. I know they do. And they must have caused that rash, because as soon as I stopped taking them, it disappeared.’

  ‘But you used that cream on it,’ I pointed out. ‘The stuff you got from the chemist.’

  ‘Well, I had to keep him happy, didn’t I?’ Mum said. ‘Dr White, I mean. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the years it’s that you need to keep your doctor happy.’

  ‘But Mum –’

  ‘And I don’t want you telling tales to your father next time he phones. He’ll only freak out and insist on coming home and missing his mother on her deathbed and we don’t want that.’

  I swallowed, feeling even more confused. It was important that Dad got to spend this time with his mother. Dad had told me that himself. But if Mum had stopped her medication …

  ‘Daniel, did you know that your father’s mother – and the rest of his family – tried to get him to dump me when we were engaged?’ Mum suddenly said. ‘It was when they found out I’d been in a psychiatric hospital. Your grandmother nearly had a fit when she heard her precious son was going to marry a mental case. She called me that once, you know – said it to your dad when she thought I wasn’t listening. And when he did marry me, she had to get as far away from me as possible, so she emigrated to New Zealand. I mean, how pathetic is that?’

  ‘Mum …’ I suddenly felt really uncomfortable. It just wasn’t like Mum to tell me all this. And anyway, I was almost sure that it wasn’t true. ‘I’ve still got homework to do, OK?’

  I left off peeling the potatoes and went upstairs. Martha’s door was open and I could see her sitting on the floor in her bedroom, playing with her toy fire engine.

  ‘Look, Daniel!’ she shouted, pointing at her dolls’ house. ‘That house is on fire and there are ten children inside it. It’s a case for …’ She grinned at me, pointing up at the ceiling as if she could see him coming.

  ‘Superman!’ I finished, flinging out my arms and swooping wildly round her bedroom, because pretending to be Superman suddenly seemed a whole lot easier than just being me.

  CHAPTER 7

  Mum was right. She didn’t get really ill like Dad had said she would if she stopped her lithium tablets. At least, she didn’t seem ill to me.

  But certain things about her behaviour started to seem a bit odd. She often stayed up half the night now and yet she still seemed wide awake in the mornings. Over the next week she swi
tched from hardly going to the supermarket at all, to going there almost every evening and stocking up on masses of things. She also started buying lots of really expensive chocolates from a delicatessen she had discovered near the school, and was eating her way through at least two boxes a day. When I asked her if she was worried that the chocolates would make her put on weight, she just laughed and said, ‘No! Isn’t it wonderful?’ She seemed very happy about it. She was buying loads of other sweet stuff, too, which she normally avoided, and there was plenty of great food in the house for Martha and me – cakes and biscuits and loads of crisps.

  Mum’s dress sense seemed to have changed too.

  ‘Mum, you’re not wearing that to school, are you?’ I asked when she came down the stairs one morning wearing a bright yellow cardigan instead of the brown jacket that went with the brown skirt of her horrible frumpy suit.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re complaining about the way I’m dressed,’ Mum retorted. ‘I mean, look at what you’re wearing! Talk about dismal!’

  ‘Mum, this is my school uniform!’

  ‘Even your tie is grey. Purple and grey. You look like you’re going to a funeral.’

  ‘Yeah … well … school uniforms are meant to be dull, I guess.’

  ‘Hmm …’ She didn’t sound convinced.

  In assembly I thought she looked like a light bulb. I kept waiting for someone else in my class to point that out, but nobody did.

  ‘I have an announcement to make regarding this year’s book sale,’ Mum shouted out, and I couldn’t help glancing nervously at Mrs Lyle, who was standing at the back of all the Year Eights. ‘Instead of just books,’ Mum continued, ‘we’re going to sell plants and cakes as well. Because books and plants and cakes all go together.’