Read Online The Perfect Mother by Margaret Leroy - Free Book Online Page B

who smoked a lot of dope. Her family had rejected her totally—wouldn’t see her again. In the Vondel Parkin Amsterdam, the man had drifted off. She’d wandered back to London, existed for a while on the edge of some rather bohemian group, people who squatted, who liked to call themselves anarchists, who had artistic pretensions. She wore cheesecloth blouses, worked as a waitress. It was the pinnacle of her life, the time to which she always yearned to return. She was still only nineteen when she met my father. She fell pregnant almost immediately. He went off with somebody else when I was six months old; my mother was just twenty. She never talked about him, except to say that she wasn’t going to talk about that bastard. I only knew he’d been part of that arty group, and that his name was Christopher.
    It was OK when I was younger. She had standards then, she was quite particular: she talked a lot about manners; she always laid the table properly for tea. We were happy, I think, happy enough, though there was never much money, and often she left me alone in the evenings, even when I was young. I remember how as a little girl I’d sit on the bed and watch her getting ready, perhaps for her evening shift behind the bar, or maybe for a night out on the town with one of her long succession of temporary men. She’d be all sheeny and glossy, with high heels, and a gold chain round her ankle, her skin a sun-kissed brown from her weekly session at the Fake It tanning studio, with the smell that was then so comforting, so familiar, of Marlboros and Avon Lily of the Valley. I’d sit on the bed amid the heaps of her clothes and accessories, her belts and bangles and gloves and floatyscarves. She had a particular passion for gloves, in pastel cotton or silk, with little pearl buttons or ruched wrists. It was eccentric, perhaps, giving her an air of spurious formality, but she liked to hide her hands, which were always rough and reddened from the work she did, all the washing of glasses in the sink at the bar. I’d watch how she’d choose from her glittery sticks of cosmetics, how she’d do her mouth, first drawing the outline with lippencil, making her narrow lips a little more generous, then the lipstick, coral bright, eased on straight from the stick. She’d press her lips together to spread the colour out. I thought she was so beautiful. Yet my pleasure in these moments was 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 jewellery. 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 realised she’d been conned, that all his protestations of love were just an elaborate charade, something seemed to die in her. That was whenshe 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