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Authors: Margaret Leroy
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always shot through with fear —
that one day she’d go and leave me and somehow forget to return. Or maybe the fear of abandonment is something I’ve added
since, thinking back, laying my knowledge of what happened later over my memory of those moments, as frost lies over leaves.
There was one man called Marco, whom she met through a lonely hearts column in the local paper. He was, or claimed to be,
Italian. She always said she liked a man with an accent. He moved in with us. He was smooth, flash, with lots of chest hair
and gold jewelry. The flat was clean and tidy while Marco was with us; sometimes I heard my mother singing as she worked.
When he left, taking all her savings and even the money from the gas meter, and she realized she’d been conned, that all his
protestations of love had been just an elaborate charade, something seemed to die in her. That was when she started buying
sherry instead of wine. She lost her job. Sometimes she’d be virtually insensible when I came in from school, and I’d have
to take off her outer clothes and tuck her up in bed. One day I came home all excited, bursting to tell her I’d won the second-year
art prize. It was one of those moments when life feels full of promise and shiny, like a present just ready and waiting for
you to unwrap. But my mother was snoring on the sofa, the front of her blouse hanging open, and there was no one to tell.
Sometimes she’d be coherent but maudlin, full of platitudes, weeping and saying again and again how she’d tried to give me
a good life but it had all gone wrong, and eating Hellmann’s mayonnaise from the jar with a tablespoon. I started taking money
from her purse, to buy food. I spilled nail varnish on her skirt and she hit me with a clothes hanger. When I got into a fight
at school because someone had called me a lesbian — the usual schoolgirl term of abuse, I shouldn’t have got so upset — she
turned up drunk and belligerent in the school office, demanding to see the headmistress, and had to be seen off the premises
by the caretaker.
That was when the social worker started visiting. The third time she came, she told me to pack and took me out to her car.
The Poplars. It’s the smell I remember: disinfectant, cabbage, adolescent sweat. And the texture of it: everything rough,
worn, frayed. Lino, and thin blankets, and flabby white bread and corned beef, and having to ask for every sanitary towel.
The sofas had springs sticking through, and when Darren Reames in one of his moods ripped off some of the wallpaper, it stayed
like that for months, with a great gaping tear. There weren’t enough electric points: You had to unplug the fridge to watch
the television, so the milk was usually sour. There was never enough to eat. Once I said I was hungry and Brian Meredith told
me not to talk because talking wasted energy.
Brian Meredith ran the place; he’d been in the SAS. He was short, dapper, smart in his red or blue blazers; he was pleasant
to visiting social workers, who liked his ready handshake and his poster that said “I’m the Boss” with a picture of a gorilla,
and his friendly yellow Labrador stretched out on the floor by his desk. He looked like everyone’s favorite uncle — and he
knew how to hit without leaving a mark on you. Looking back, I can see why he got away with it: He took the really difficult
kids that nobody else would touch. Girls with shiny, sequiny names — Kylie, Demi, Sigourney — and wrecked lives. Boys who
set fires, who used knives. All of them lashing out at the people who tried to help them with what I see now was the terrible
rage of those who have nothing to lose: children who couldn’t be consoled. Like Darren, who’d set fire to his school and then
to his house with his grandfather in it. Or Jason Oakley, who said his dad had interfered with him, who kicked a pregnant
care worker in the stomach, so she miscarried; though in the
that one day she’d go and leave me and somehow forget to return. Or maybe the fear of abandonment is something I’ve added
since, thinking back, laying my knowledge of what happened later over my memory of those moments, as frost lies over leaves.
There was one man called Marco, whom she met through a lonely hearts column in the local paper. He was, or claimed to be,
Italian. She always said she liked a man with an accent. He moved in with us. He was smooth, flash, with lots of chest hair
and gold jewelry. The flat was clean and tidy while Marco was with us; sometimes I heard my mother singing as she worked.
When he left, taking all her savings and even the money from the gas meter, and she realized she’d been conned, that all his
protestations of love had been just an elaborate charade, something seemed to die in her. That was when she started buying
sherry instead of wine. She lost her job. Sometimes she’d be virtually insensible when I came in from school, and I’d have
to take off her outer clothes and tuck her up in bed. One day I came home all excited, bursting to tell her I’d won the second-year
art prize. It was one of those moments when life feels full of promise and shiny, like a present just ready and waiting for
you to unwrap. But my mother was snoring on the sofa, the front of her blouse hanging open, and there was no one to tell.
Sometimes she’d be coherent but maudlin, full of platitudes, weeping and saying again and again how she’d tried to give me
a good life but it had all gone wrong, and eating Hellmann’s mayonnaise from the jar with a tablespoon. I started taking money
from her purse, to buy food. I spilled nail varnish on her skirt and she hit me with a clothes hanger. When I got into a fight
at school because someone had called me a lesbian — the usual schoolgirl term of abuse, I shouldn’t have got so upset — she
turned up drunk and belligerent in the school office, demanding to see the headmistress, and had to be seen off the premises
by the caretaker.
That was when the social worker started visiting. The third time she came, she told me to pack and took me out to her car.
The Poplars. It’s the smell I remember: disinfectant, cabbage, adolescent sweat. And the texture of it: everything rough,
worn, frayed. Lino, and thin blankets, and flabby white bread and corned beef, and having to ask for every sanitary towel.
The sofas had springs sticking through, and when Darren Reames in one of his moods ripped off some of the wallpaper, it stayed
like that for months, with a great gaping tear. There weren’t enough electric points: You had to unplug the fridge to watch
the television, so the milk was usually sour. There was never enough to eat. Once I said I was hungry and Brian Meredith told
me not to talk because talking wasted energy.
Brian Meredith ran the place; he’d been in the SAS. He was short, dapper, smart in his red or blue blazers; he was pleasant
to visiting social workers, who liked his ready handshake and his poster that said “I’m the Boss” with a picture of a gorilla,
and his friendly yellow Labrador stretched out on the floor by his desk. He looked like everyone’s favorite uncle — and he
knew how to hit without leaving a mark on you. Looking back, I can see why he got away with it: He took the really difficult
kids that nobody else would touch. Girls with shiny, sequiny names — Kylie, Demi, Sigourney — and wrecked lives. Boys who
set fires, who used knives. All of them lashing out at the people who tried to help them with what I see now was the terrible
rage of those who have nothing to lose: children who couldn’t be consoled. Like Darren, who’d set fire to his school and then
to his house with his grandfather in it. Or Jason Oakley, who said his dad had interfered with him, who kicked a pregnant
care worker in the stomach, so she miscarried; though in the
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