Mummyfesto, The

by Green, Linda

  ‘I really snapped at her, didn’t I? I feel terrible. I just …’

  ‘I know. Look, she’s getting signatures, isn’t she? She can’t have been that put out.’

  ‘No,’ said Jackie, visibly brightening. ‘I guess you’re right.’

  ‘Mrs Carter said I didn’t smell of dog poo at all,’ chipped in Oscar.

  Jackie looked at me quizzically.

  ‘It was one of those mornings,’ I explained.

  ‘Fill me in later,’ she said. It was my turn to look at her with a frown. ‘First Monday of the month,’ she went on. ‘Don’t tell me you’d forgotten.’

  I mouthed a four-letter word at her to signify that I had. It had been a combined New Year’s resolution, this night-out-once-a-month thing. January’s had been good fun, but now it seemed I was in danger of failing spectacularly to make it to February.

  ‘I’ll ask Rob,’ I said. ‘It might still be OK.’

  ‘Well, if it’s not, let us know. We could always make it another night instead.’ I nodded, although I could tell by her voice that she’d been looking forward to this. And I also knew that the logistics involved in getting three mums of six children out of their respective houses by eight o’clock on a particular night were immense.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Shall I check that Anna’s remembered?’

  Jackie gave me a suitable look. In a competition between an electronic organiser and Anna, it would be foolish in the extreme to back the electronic organiser.

  ‘Come on, Mummy,’ said Zach, tugging at my hand. ‘We’re going to be late.’

  ‘I’ll see you there,’ said Jackie. ‘And don’t worry about any wine, it’s my turn.’

  I nodded, hoping that were true and she wasn’t just saying it because she knew how skint we were.

  Mondays was physio. Other children had an action-packed after-school programme of football, street dance and Beavers. Oscar had physio, occupational therapy and swimming in a special hydrotherapy pool. Not that he complained about it. And Zach never complained about being dragged along to watch either. We did at least manage to leave an afternoon a week free for going to the Woodcraft Folk meetings (which Rob described as Boy Scouts for Guardian readers), but I felt bad about it all the same. It wasn’t what you planned for your children.

  I helped Katie lift Oscar into the standing support sling. I hadn’t planned this either, of course. That the only way I would see my youngest son stand was with the help of what looked like an outsize baby bouncer. And the worst of it was that every time I saw him in it, his legs dangling to the floor, I was reminded of when he was little and I’d put him in a real baby bouncer, encouraging him to try to use his legs to help him bounce, blissfully unaware that my efforts would be in vain because Oscar’s leg muscles would never be strong enough to support him. Because those were the days before he was diagnosed. Before our world was blown apart.

  ‘That’s great, Oscar,’ said Katie. ‘Fantastic movement there.’

  She was lovely, Katie. Full of enthusiasm and praise. It must be hard for her because unlike some of the other children she saw, there was no chance of Oscar making any real improvement. This was simply about holding off the deterioration as long as possible. She never let on about that to Oscar though. Always made him come away feeling he had done something new.

  ‘I want to be the birdman of Bognor,’ said Oscar. Katie laughed and turned to me.

  ‘I showed it to them on YouTube,’ I explained. ‘Zach was doing something at school about how things fly.’

  ‘Humans can’t fly really,’ said Zach, ‘it’s just a silly game they play.’

  ‘I’m going to fly,’ said Oscar. ‘I’m going to be the first person to fly to the moon.’

  Katie smiled at him. We all did. Because that was the effect he had on you.

  As we turned off the towpath into Fountain Street, a familiar tall figure wearing painting overalls and sporting sticky-up hair with tell-tale flecks of green paint, turned in from the other direction.

  ‘Look!’ Oscar laughed, pointing at him. ‘It’s Spencer.’

  Most fine art graduates would probably baulk at being compared to a painter and decorator from Balamory. Rob, fortunately, was not one of them.

  ‘Thank you, cheeky,’ he said with a grin. ‘So, what’s the story in Hebden Bridge today, or wouldn’t I like to know?’

  ‘I’ve been practising flapping my arms and taking my feet off the ground,’ said Oscar.

  ‘Have you now?’ Rob said, stooping to give both him and Zach a hug. ‘Well, at this rate I’ll have to build a nest for you.’

  Oscar started giggling. He had a brilliant giggle. Entirely infectious.

  ‘Orang-utans build nests in trees,’ said Zach. ‘And they’re one of our closest relatives.’

  ‘So they are,’ said Rob. ‘In fact, I do believe that’s where Mummy got her red hair from.’

  Oscar and Zach collapsed in a fit of giggles. I raised my eyebrows at Rob but couldn’t stop myself smiling.

  ‘And welcome home to you too,’ I said. Oscar started singing ‘I Wanna Be Like You’ from Jungle Book. Rob joined in, doing some kind of ape dance. If any of our neighbours had not already come to the conclusion that our whole family was nuts (and that was probably unlikely), then they certainly would now.

  ‘Come on, mancubs,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Time to get you some tea.’

  I turned to go inside. The usual assortment of ponddipping nets, Zach’s scooter and various bats and balls was strewn across the front yard. To be fair to the boys, most of the bats and balls weren’t even ours. While it was lovely that the children in our little street were permanently in and out of each others’ front yards, it had somehow resulted in ours becoming the communal toy-dumping ground.

  I opened the front door, Fleabag, our cat (that is what happens when you let your children name a pet, although I’ve always suspected that Rob put them up to it) offered a plaintive miaow and ran out. I shrugged and shook my head; you could lead a cat to the cat flap a hundred times, but getting it to use it when you were out was clearly another matter.

  Oscar followed me in, commentating on his progress up the ramp as if he were Evil Knievel about to jump over thirty-two London buses.

  ‘Can we have spaghetti?’ he asked, once he had safely ‘landed’.

  ‘Yep,’ I said, smiling down at him. ‘And the good news for you,’ I added, turning to Zach, ‘is that it’s carrot sticks for starters.’

  Zach grinned. Everything he ate had to involve carrots. This was, as Anna had pointed out to me, not exactly a bad thing when compared to the children she saw who would only eat chocolate-spread sandwiches or chip butties. But I guess if your children do anything to excess you tend to worry. Even carrots.

  ‘Right, you boys go and wash your hands,’ I said. ‘I’ll get the table laid.’

  ‘Everything OK?’ asked Rob as they left the room.

  ‘Yeah. Oscar did really well. Katie said his scoliosis hasn’t got any worse.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Oh and Zach’s still got his homework to do after tea. We didn’t get a chance while we were there. It’s something you need a mirror for.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Nice colour,’ I said, gesturing towards his hair as I reached past him to the cutlery drawer.

  ‘Fern-green. Always a good one for bathrooms.’

  I was quite sure he had meant for it to come out in a light-hearted, jovial way. And maybe it would have sounded like that to the untrained ear. Maybe it was only me who picked up that hint of something else buried several layers beneath. Something which made what I was about to ask even harder.

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry but I completely forgot that it’s supposed to be our girls’-night-out thing this evening. I know you were planning to go to the studio and I really don’t mind not going if you want to go tonight.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, you go.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

&nb
sp; ‘No, so don’t ask me again in case I change my mind.’

  He said it with a smile on his face. And followed it up by putting his arms around my waist and pulling me closer.

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied, kissing him on the lips. He’d made a lot of sacrifices for our family. I knew that. But sometimes I wondered it he knew how much I appreciated it.

  ‘We’re only going to the Olive Branch and we won’t do starters and Jackie’s insisted on taking the wine even though she won’t be drinking.’

  ‘Stop apologising,’ said Rob. ‘It’s not as if you’re out gadding about every night. And don’t you dare go for the cheapest thing on the menu.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I might even get some olives as a side.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Rob. ‘Who said anything about olives?’

  I smiled at him as Oscar hurtled back into the kitchen.

  ‘Zach wouldn’t let me squirt the soap by myself,’ complained Oscar.

  ‘Well, that’s probably because the last time you did it you decided to squirt a picture all over the tiles.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Oscar. To be fair, he always acknowledged when he’d done something wrong, never tried to squirm his way out of it. I smiled at Zach as he quietly took his seat at the table. Just occasionally I wished he would do something naughty too. Anything which would make him seem more like a normal seven-year-old boy.

  Rob had spaghetti with the boys, which made me feel even worse about going out. I sat down with them as they ate, Rob and I taking it in turns to remind Oscar not to speak with his mouth full.

  ‘Do you remember that time,’ said Zach, ‘when you said “don’t eat with your mouth full” by mistake.’ Oscar giggled and immediately snapped his mouth shut, doing a hamster impression with his cheeks.

  ‘Thank you, Oscar,’ said Rob. ‘But you may carry on eating.’

  Oscar groaned and went back to sucking up the spaghetti from his bowl. It was the strange thing about mealtimes. Sometimes I could kid myself that we were a normal family, sitting around our kitchen table like this. Mucking about, reminding our children of their table manners. It was only the head support of Oscar’s powerchair which gave the game away.

  It was stupid really. I hated the word ‘normal’. Had fought against it all my life. Always wanting to be different, never wanting to conform. And it annoyed the hell out of me that of all the things I found myself craving now, it should be normality.

  I sat with Oscar later, the Cough Assist machine mask pressed over his mouth and nose, trying not to flinch each time he did. There were some things you never got used to. This was one of them. It was also the reason Zach went to bed before his brother. He couldn’t bear watching it, even though he knew that it was helping Oscar. Keeping his chest and airways clear to try to prevent him getting an infection, ending up in hospital, all the things we dreaded.

  At last, when the machine was finished, I took the mask off and suctioned around Oscar’s mouth, removing the last of the mucous.

  ‘There,’ I said. ‘All done.’

  He snuggled into me, the way he always did afterwards, feeling small and vulnerable in my arms.

  ‘Love you loads,’ I said, rocking him to and fro, delaying the moment I had to put his night-time ventilator mask on as long as possible. The house was still around us. Zach asleep – or, more likely, reading one of his astronomy books with a torch under the covers. Rob downstairs, doing the washing-up, no doubt wondering when he’d next get the chance to go back to his painting at the studio instead of painting bathrooms. And me, holding my little boy close to me.

  Normal. Our kind of normal, at least.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, hurrying into the Olive Branch at quarter past eight and plonking myself down in the seat next to Jackie.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Anna. ‘We’re just glad you made it. We were beginning to think it might be the two of us.’

  ‘No, Oscar was a bit clingy, that’s all. Or maybe I was a bit clingy actually. We’ve got a little girl in at the hospice at the moment, who has only got a day or so left.’

  Jackie nodded and poured me a glass of wine.

  ‘I still don’t know how you do it,’ she said. ‘I’d be in bits every time.’

  ‘It does get to me sometimes, especially when I go straight to school to pick up the boys after something’s happened. But most of the time I’m squirrelled away in the office writing press releases or whatever. It’s far harder for the nurses and the family support workers. I think if I was involved with the children as much as them I’d probably be a jibbering wreck by now.’

  ‘Well, you’re still a braver woman than me,’ said Jackie.

  ‘Says she who has to keep order in a class of thirty teenagers every day,’ chipped in Anna.

  ‘Oh God, that’s nothing. At least I’m not teaching them maths, or owt important. If they get a bit rowdy I can always get them to pretend to be having a riot or summat.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that,’ I said. ‘I always hated that improvisation stuff in drama. I’d be frozen to the spot in terror.’

  ‘You were never shy at school, surely?’ said Anna.

  ‘I was. Painfully so.’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Jackie.

  ‘Started going to protest meetings and marches with my mum when I was a teenager. Realised that you didn’t get anywhere in life by keeping your mouth shut. That you had to shout loud enough to make yourself heard.’

  ‘What about you?’ asked Anna, turning to Jackie.

  ‘Oh, I’ve always been gobby. Runs in the family. Maybe that’s why I’m good at getting kids to shout up. But there again I couldn’t sit and listen to some teenager who’s taking drugs or cutting themselves and not tell a soul about it.’

  Anna looked down at the table and fiddled with the napkin which was already on her lap.

  ‘I didn’t mean it as a criticism,’ said Jackie, quickly. ‘I know you have to do that. I just don’t know how you manage it, that’s all.’

  Anna smiled and shrugged. ‘They need to be able to confide in someone. It’s an honour, really, that they trust me enough to do it.’

  ‘So basically,’ I said, ‘we’re all bloody brilliant at our jobs but none of us likes to shout about it. And that’s exactly why men get away with screwing up the country.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s a difference between being good at what we do and being able to run the country,’ said Anna.

  ‘Is there? Look at the qualities we’ve got between us: compassion, empathy, an ability to communicate our ideas and inspire people. Don’t tell me the country couldn’t do with some of that.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s that old power corrupts thing, in’t it?’ said Jackie. ‘Put us in Downing Street and within a few months I’d be cutting education funding and saying drama were a waste of resources, Anna would be withdrawing counselling services and telling kids to pull themselves together and you’d be talking about closing hospices and introducing a pay-as-you-die policy.’

  Anna smiled.

  ‘We wouldn’t though, would we?’ I said. ‘Women don’t do things like that.’

  ‘Was Thatcher not a woman then?’ asked Jackie.

  ‘Course she wasn’t,’ I replied. ‘Don’t you remember the Spitting Image puppet of her in a pin-stripe suit?’

  ‘Well what about rest of them?’ asked Jackie. ‘Blair’s babes and all that.’

  ‘It was window-dressing, wasn’t it? How many of them had any real power to change things? Country was still being run by Blair and all his cronies.’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Anna, ‘but are we actually going to eat tonight or just put the world to rights and go home hungry?’

  ‘Hey, aren’t you forgetting my resolution to make a difference this year?’

  ‘Hard luck,’ said Jackie. ‘You’ll just have to wait until next time. Given the choice between plotting a revolution and having time for dessert, the tiramisu wins every time.’

  ‘OK,’ I said with a smile. ‘I’ll
go with the majority and we’ll order. But some day they’ll write about this meal, it’ll be up there with Blair and Brown’s meal at the Granita. Only in our case it will be the political coup that was thwarted by the lure of tiramisu.’

  ‘Are you wanting cream or ice cream with that?’ asked Jackie.

  ‘Soya cream actually,’ I replied with a grin. ‘Because in Hebden Bridge there’s always a third way, you see.’

  2

  JACKIE

  When I got there, she was still on the pavement outside her house, brandishing the secateurs.

  ‘Hello, Mum. It’s me, Jackie.’

  ‘I’m doing roses.’

  ‘You don’t have any roses out here, Mum. They’re all in back garden.’

  ‘Well I can’t see them.’

  ‘That’s because you’re out front, Mum. Anyway, love, you’ve done them already. Quite a few times in fact.’

  I took Mum by the arm and guided her steadily towards the front door, waving an acknowledgement to Pauline across the road as I did so. The phone calls were becoming more frequent. At least six since Mum had come out of hospital a month ago. I was lucky this time that it was a Sunday, that Pauline could get hold of me and I could come straight away. Christ knows what I was going to do if it happened in the middle of a lesson. It wasn’t fair to expect Pauline to intervene. She was getting on a bit herself. The last thing she wanted to be doing was trying to wrestle a pair of secateurs from my mother. A tough old bird, that’s what Mum had always called herself. Which had been great when I was growing up, but it didn’t make things so easy now.

  We went through into the front room. It was like a museum exhibit labelled ‘my childhood’. Nothing appeared to have been touched or moved and yet it had been lived in all that time. I swore even the carpet was the same one I remembered from my teens. Waste not, want not. Another one of her mantras. A rug covered the bare patch near the fireplace, while a smaller one concealed the area in front of the other armchair which my father’s feet had worn away over the years. The armrest covers remained on his chair too – although he was no longer around to make anything dirty. And the bureau in the corner was still covered with school photographs: Deborah and I smiling out from under a selection of wonky fringes. And later ones of me sporting a flick the like of which Halifax, mercifully, will never see again.