‘She’s fifteen days late with this month’s rent. I can’t keep putting up with this, tell her. She needs to find a way to pay me.’
‘OK.’
He left. I went upstairs and spoke to my mother.
‘I can’t do anything about it now,’ she said.
I asked, ‘Is there any money?’
‘I don’t know. Go down to the community café if you’re hungry. They’ll feed you. They’re open in the mornings.’
I went back downstairs. We were poor again. That much, at least, was clear.
39
Hope
My mother was mostly out now, always working to buy the drugs she needed to get her through the job. She’d always said she didn’t mind the work. It was easy money, more than she could ever make doing anything else, and because Ace’s work – running a brothel – was illegal, she got cash in hand and didn’t have to pay any tax.
I used to believe her when she said she didn’t mind the work, that she actively liked it because of the money she made. ‘There’s this idea out there that women are only sex workers because they have no choice or they’re exploited, but I choose this work, Hope. It gives me independence and a good life. It’s not always easy, but no job is. Don’t let anyone tell you I’m a victim, or you’re a victim. This is good work, well paid.’
It made sense, but now, when I came home from my days out with Jade and found my mother on the sofa again, entirely absent from life, I could see this wasn’t good work at all. Or perhaps it just wasn’t good to have been doing it for as long as my mother had. Perhaps it was a career where people burned out after a few years and needed to move on. Besides, I was learning for myself now that, although the money was nice, the work itself was revolting. I carried on because I had to, but I was determined to find a way out, a way to avoid descending into my mother’s particular hell.
Mostly now, I wouldn’t let her go near the baby. I looked after her myself – bundled her up in the pushchair, took her out to the park, cafés, baby groups at the Sure Start Centre. The other women at these places were much older than I was. They didn’t speak to me. I could tell they thought Jade was my baby, and disapproved. They looked at me with pursed lips and shook their heads, as though they themselves were angels, or as though their versions of immorality – I knew one of these women was cheating on her husband – were less immoral than mine.
I didn’t go to school. Education and me had given up on each other years before. I kept getting kicked out for rudeness to staff, or for throwing stuff around, or for hitting the girls who wound me up. In the end, I wasn’t really welcome anywhere. Some bloke from educational welfare came round a few times, and my mother said I was being home schooled. She showed him a maths book and a few sheets of paper with some punctuation exercises on them, and he seemed satisfied.
We were happy together, Jade and me. Looking after her was easy. Maybe she was an easy baby, or maybe I’d found something I was good at for once. That was what the staff at Sure Start said to me. ‘You’re a natural, Hope,’ one of them remarked, when Jade was seven months old and I was helping her to crawl, moving her knees forwards for her so she got the hang of what she had to do. ‘You’ve got so much energy and patience.’
I liked Sure Start. Susan, who ran most of the stay-and-play sessions, taught me how to make baby food from scratch and freeze it in ice-cube containers so Jade would always be well fed. I made her loads of stuff: chicken and leeks; lentils and potatoes; tiny pasta in spinach sauce; carrots. I even made her liver. She liked it. She liked all of it. I loved feeding her, knowing that what I’d made was filling her up, doing her good.
I wanted to keep her. I wanted her to be my own.
‘Ace says you haven’t shown your face at work for weeks.’
‘I’ve been looking after Jade.’
‘We need money, Hope. We really need money.’ There was a panicked pitch to my mother’s voice.
I said, ‘Jade’s a baby. She needs looking after.’
‘Take her with you.’
I said nothing.
‘I said, take her with you.’
‘Ace’s house isn’t a place for a baby, Mum, and you know it.’
My mother shrugged. ‘It was fine for you when you were a baby.’
I looked her straight in the eye. ‘It wasn’t.’
‘And what do you remember about it? What harm did it do you?’
I struggled to give words to what I was feeling. I wanted to say it wasn’t that being there as a baby was harmful, but that being exposed to it all my life was … wrong. It was wrong to bring a child up to think this was normal, that this was what they should be aiming for. All I knew was that I never wanted Jade to go through the doors of that place. Not ever.
I said, ‘I’m not taking her. I’m not. If you stopped spending all your money on fucking drugs, you wouldn’t need me to work.’
The slap on the face came hard and fast.
And I struck back.
‘Your mum loves you, Hope,’ Ace said, leaning back in his chair in the front office and drawing on his e-cigarette. He exhaled. Raspberry-scented clouds filled the air and then faded above our heads.
‘You look like an idiot,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re a massive fucking pimp and you smell of raspberries.’
‘What should I smell of?’
‘I dunno. Tobacco and leather.’
‘But she does love you,’ he said again. ‘And little Jade.’ He was in his ‘I’m the closest thing you’ve got to a father’ mode and wasn’t going to let it go.
‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘Just not enough.’
Three days had passed since my fight with my mother. Neither of us had won. I had bruises on my legs where my mother had kicked me. She had a black eye where I’d delivered a punch. I had never been violent before, but I was sick of living with a woman who was such a waste of space. I wanted to get away from her, but had no idea how.
‘Why do you say that?’
I shrugged. I’d gone as far as I was prepared to go with this conversation. Ace would always stick up for my mother. Always. He’d lost interest in me, never came near me for sex anymore. He only bothered with my mother these days, although I wasn’t sure what else was going on between them. Ace had been around, shagging my mother, all my life, but I had no idea whether what they had was serious, or if Ace was just messing around like he’d obviously been doing with me, even though he’d said I was precious, even though he’d said he loved me, that he couldn’t get enough of me and carried photos of me in his wallet.
Sometimes – more often now than I used to – I would remember the girls I’d known at school. I’d think of their young faces, their plaited hair, their white ankle socks and school bags, and wonder what they were doing now they’d turned thirteen. Having their ears pierced maybe, getting into make-up, hanging around with boys and hoping for a snog. None of them, I was sure, would be longing to make a forty-year-old man come back to bed with them.
Ace said, ‘Have you got money?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’ll keep her quiet, then. That’ll please her.’
‘She’s not getting it.’
‘What?’
‘She’s not getting it. No way. She’ll blow the lot on drugs. I’m keeping it for Jade. She needs food, nappies, new clothes. Loads of stuff.’
Ace looked at me for a moment. ‘You’re a good sister to that baby.’
‘I’m pretty much her mother now. Mum does fuck all.’
‘She does her best.’
‘Her best is shit.’
‘She loves you, Hope.’
‘So you keep saying.’
‘I was there when you were a baby. The social workers wanted to take you away, but she fought and fought to keep you. She was never going to let you go. You kept her on the straight and narrow for a long time.’
‘Not long enough.’
Ace shrugged. ‘Don’t be too hard
on her. She hasn’t had it easy.’
‘Lots of people don’t have it easy and they still manage to show up for motherhood. She’s off her face all the time. She can’t look after Jade. I’ve had to get the neighbour to keep an eye on her while I work. It’s crap, Ace. Really crap.’
‘I know. I’m going to talk to her about getting treatment again. She knows she needs it.’
‘Does she?’
Ace nodded. ‘She really does. There’s a programme I’ve been looking into for her. I can pay for it. Therapy, methadone, that sort of thing.’
‘Can she start soon?’
‘If she agrees to it.’
‘She’d better. She’s going to lose us both if she doesn’t.’
Ace sighed. ‘You two need some space between you, that’s clear. You can’t keep hurting each other like this. But I promise you, Hope, your mum wants you to be a proper, loving family. She wants a good life for you and Jade. You’ve been doing a great job with her. She knows she owes you so much for that.’
I shrugged. ‘Jade’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t mind looking after her. I want to look after her. She can’t bloody do it, can she?’
‘She wants to.’
‘She’ll have to fight me.’
‘She’s Jade’s mother.’
‘Only by birth. Our social worker knows it’s me that does everything for her. They’ll let me have her, once I’m old enough, once I’ve got money and a house and everything.’
Ace looked at me seriously. ‘And how are you going to get those things, Hope? You’ve got no education.’
‘So?’
‘There’s not much you can do without one. No normal employer will have you.’
I knew what he was saying: Come back and work for me. Close your eyes and make a pretty fortune.
I fell silent.
Ace said, ‘Listen, your mum needs treatment, there’s no question of that. She’s upset at what happened between you, and I know she’ll agree to it. How about you and Jade come and live with me while she gets herself sorted? You can have the whole top floor, just the two of you, far away from the business side of things. I won’t expect you to work, and I’ll help you out with money when you need it. You can’t go on like this, beating up your mother.’
‘I didn’t beat her up. I punched her because she fucking well deserved it.’
‘Whatever,’ Ace said. ‘The two of you need to live separately for a while, and unless you want to go into foster care, I suggest you take me up on my offer.’ He reached into his wallet and handed me a wad of notes. ‘There’s two hundred pounds to start you off,’ he said. ‘I can knock off here around eight tonight when Max takes over. Why don’t I take you out? We can go to that Italian you like, the one where you get those massive sundaes.’
That was what he did now. Instead of taking me to posh restaurants and treating me like a woman, he took me out for pizza and ice cream, as if I were ten years old. It left me with a bruised feeling in my chest, made me think he’d only been pretending. Maybe he had. Maybe he’d never loved me, never thought I was beautiful.
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want your fucking ice cream.’
‘But I bet you want my flat,’ he said, then leaned back in his chair and smiled at me like a winner.
40
Annie
The bombshell came from nowhere. The two of us were hanging around the kitchen one morning, raiding the cupboards for snacks, when Helen walked in, just after 9.00. She always worked the day shift. She was the manager and not having to sleep here was a perk of her job. She looked at us and smiled, and said, in a serious voice I’d never heard her use before, ‘Sit down, girls.’
Lara wasn’t there. She was hiding somewhere, like she always was. So my first thought was that somehow Helen had found out Hope and I were sleeping together and she was going to tell us off for it.
‘What?’ Hope demanded, because she, too, had noticed Helen’s tone and knew it meant nothing good. ‘Are we in shit?’
Helen shook her head. ‘Not at all. Sit down, please.’
We both sat down.
‘Right,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll get straight to the point. We all know there is a lack of funding now for homes like this one. They’re expensive to run and the government wants to save money. I’m afraid we’re being shut down. Not immediately, but probably just after Christmas.’
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ Hope said. ‘So what’s going to happen to us?’
‘Your social workers will find new placements for you. They’ll be in nice homes, I’m sure. And you’ll both be sixteen soon. It won’t be for long.’
‘Will we be together?’ Hope asked.
Helen paused, then said, ‘Realistically, love, that’s unlikely. There aren’t many places, so we’ll have to take what we can get.’
Immediately, Hope threw back her chair and hurled the first few things she could find at the wall. Glass shattered on the floor. Water dripped down the paintwork. ‘Fuck you,’ she said. ‘Fuck you all.’
I walked over and slipped my arm around her waist. ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. We’ll be alright. They won’t … We won’t let them … They won’t…’
And just like that, Hope calmed down.
They’d have been fools to split us up. She was dangerous without me.
Upstairs, we spoke in low voices.
‘They won’t separate us. No way. We’ll run away first.’
‘We’ll die if we have to. We will. They won’t keep us apart.’
‘No. They won’t keep us apart.’
Our lips met and we kissed for a long time. When we pulled away, I opened my eyes and saw Lara standing ghost-like in the doorway, watching…
It had rained in the night, so in the afternoon we took ourselves off to the waterfall. We stripped naked and sank into the pool, reaching for each other beneath the water, arms and legs entwined, our mouths meeting over and over, the love between us as tangible as rock.
Afterwards, we sat on the grass at the water’s edge. She stared straight ahead at the summit of Crinkle Crags. ‘The new homes won’t be anything like this,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘They’ll be in some shithole town where everyone’s skint and on drugs, and there’s no light at the end of any of the tunnels.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘And they’ll separate us.’
‘Yes.’
The thought was unbearable.
We were silent for a while, then she said, ‘I’m glad I met you.’
‘I am, too.’
‘Will you marry me?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, and we both knew what that meant, without her ever having to mention it again.
Significant Moments in My Life with My Mother
By Annie Cox
Part Two
The community café was housed in a green Portacabin behind a church on the Oxford Road, and opened every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You had to get the food bank to refer you if you wanted to go. There was a whole entry system that went like this:
1 Get a referral to the food bank from a social worker, health visitor, doctor or someone from Citizens Advice.
2 Take your coupon to the food bank and collect a box with enough food to keep you for three days. In ours, we got a small box of cornflakes, two tins of economy beans, one tin of tomato soup, one bag of dried pasta, one jar of economy tomato sauce, one tinned treacle sponge.
3 Repeat the above, but only once more in the next twelve months. If you are still struggling, move to step four.
4 Get a referral by the volunteers at the food bank to the community café. They give you another coupon.
5 Take your coupon to the community café. There, you will be given a cup of tea, one hot meal and whatever Greggs has left over that’s past its sell-by date (usually donuts). They will also give you a bag of stuff to take home.
I didn’t have a coupon but wandered down there, anyway.
The wooden steps up to the door were wet and rotting, and I had to hold the railing to steady myself. Inside, there was a smell of powdered soup and old sweat.
A few sunken-eyed clients sat silently at the tables, their hands cupped around mugs of tea. A woman from Shelter moved among them, doling out free advice on how to avoid homelessness. There was a journalist as well, and two people from Reading University, carrying out research into food poverty. More people were watching the clients and making notes than there were actual clients in the room. On the walls were lots of large-print posters: ‘Struggling with irregular work?’ Or ‘Has illness affected your ability to pay?’ Or ‘Loan sharks: don’t be fooled.’
I went over to the hatch from where they served powdered soup and baked potatoes. The volunteer today was Valerie, who I knew.
‘Hello, Annie, love,’ she said, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘What brings you here? Have you got your coupon?’
I shook my head.
‘Come and sit down, lovie. Let me get you some soup.’
I took a seat at a table. In the middle was a plate of biscuits. I eyed them and felt my stomach clench.
Valerie brought me a small mug of leek soup and sat down opposite. ‘Have a biscuit,’ she said, pushing the plate towards her. ‘Have the Jammie Dodger. That’s what I’d have.’
I took the Jammie Dodger. It was soft, but I didn’t care.
‘Now,’ said Valerie. ‘What brings you here?’
‘Caitlin isn’t well,’ I told her. ‘She’s been in bed for weeks and won’t talk to me.’
We were distracted by a man at the table next to us, who suddenly started crying. A woman sat down with him and handed him tissues. He held out some papers to her. ‘The hospital says I can’t work,’ he managed, between sobs. ‘But they keep telling me I have to. I’ve been in the Royal Berks four times this year with slit wrists but they keep on saving me. I don’t want them to save me. And because I’ve been out of work more than three months, they say I have to spend thirty-five hours a week looking for a job, so I have to be logged into their website all that time. But I haven’t got a computer at home. I’ve got to go to the library down the street, but it’s only open in the mornings because they’re shutting it down, so they’ve cut my money again and I’ve got no food. I don’t want to be here. I just want to be dead.’
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