Читать книгу Envy - Amanda Robson, Amanda Robson - Страница 31

‘What’s the matter?’ Mouse asks, as I sit at his breakfast bar sipping a cappuccino. ‘Your lips are curling downwards. Are you in a mood again?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise, just tell me what’s wrong. That’s what’s supposed to happen, isn’t it? You worry. Then you tell me about it because I am your friend.’

‘It’s just that life’s so unfair,’ I say with a shrug of my shoulders.

He laughs, his strange laugh, like a braying donkey. ‘There’s nothing new about that.’

‘Is that supposed to make it any easier?’ I ask.

He puts his arm cautiously around my shoulders, as if he wants to be friendly but is not quite sure how to be.

‘Please try and explain.’

‘It’s the children. Faye’s children. How come she’s been able to have them when she can’t even look after them properly?’

He looks at me intently and his eyes widen. ‘Is that what’s happening?’ he asks.

Yes, I think, but don’t reply. It is too painful to speak about. A tear begins to trickle down my face. Yes. These children, who’ve had such a good start in life, will not get the backing they need because Faye has become distracted.

Look at what happened to me. Did my life start to go wrong, the minute I was born to a mother who couldn’t look after me? Or was it always a disaster from the start?

No. My mother loved me. She looked after me as well as she could, for as long as she could. As a young child I remember her sweet scent as she held me. Sitting, snuggled up on the sofa together, watching Disney films.

‘Erica,’ she would say, ‘always remember, there is nothing as strong as a mother’s love.’ Then she would pause, and hold me against her more tightly. ‘I want to wrap you in cotton wool and protect you for ever.’

If only she had.

Once upon a time, my mother cooked a mean spaghetti bolognaise and knew how to dip strawberries in melted chocolate. I never had a dad. Mum just had lots of boyfriends who came and went. Mike, Steve, Francis, Robert, Sam, Jake and Rod. Rod was my favourite – funnier and kinder than the rest. He built a Morgan car with a kit, and sometimes took me for a ‘spin’ around the block in it.

I was happy back then. But happiness is a funny word. What does it mean? Is it an idea? A feeling? Is it real? Was it the warm contentment that began in my stomach and radiated through my body, because I had my mother and I knew she loved me? She was the pivot of my life. Maybe she still is, even though she is only a memory now.

The first day my life began to fragment I was walking home from school with my friend Geoffrey. He lived near me and every afternoon when school had finished we ambled along the road together on our way home until we parted at the third corner. Memory plays tricks. I remember sunny afternoons; frost, wind, and rain, all dissolve into oblivion.

On one such sun-dappled afternoon, we heard shouting behind us and turned around to see two boys from the year above marching quickly towards us, shouting, ‘Slag. Slag. Slag.’

Tommy Hall and John Allan. Tommy was large for his age with a broad slack face, always redder than it should have been. Always looking as if he had been running and was out of breath. John was wiry. Petite and mean. Boys to keep away from if you could.

‘Slag. Slag. Slag.’

Getting nearer. Grinning and pointing. Pointing at me. We turned away from them and continued to walk. But they stepped in front of us and blocked our path. Eyeball to eyeball. Eyes scalding ours.

‘Erica Sullivan, your mother’s a slag,’ Tommy said.

‘Like mother, like daughter – slag, slag, slag,’ John continued.

Geoffrey puffed out his pigeon chest and stepped towards them, chin up defiantly. ‘Shut up, you two. I hear you’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Leave Erica alone. She’s worth ten of you.’

Tommy clenched his fist, pulled his arm back and rammed his hand, like a hammer, into Geoffrey’s stomach. Geoffrey bent double. They ran away laughing, and shouting, ‘Slag, slag, pussy, pussy.’

I put my arm around Geoffrey’s bent shoulders. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Just about, I think.’ There was a pause. ‘What a pair of knobs.’

‘Thank you so much for defending me.’

We began to walk slowly along the road, but Geoffrey was struggling, holding on to my arm. ‘Why do you think they said that?’ I asked.

He turned his head and pressed his eyes into mine.

‘Don’t take any notice of them – there’s always a few knobs about in life.’

We staggered to our parting corner.

‘Thank you again,’ I said. ‘I hope you feel better by tomorrow.’

He laughed. ‘I hope I feel better long before that.’

I watched him walk away, still holding his stomach. Then I turned and ran home to my mother.

My mother and I lived in a block of flats on the council estate, on the edge of the leafy part of town where Geoffrey lived. The same estate as Tommy Hall and John Allan. I ran through the under passage that crossed the A road, trying to ignore the rancid smell of stale human urine. Into our homeland of 1960s concrete. Solid and grey and ugly. Up the concrete staircase (the lift never worked), along the balcony to number 64, Bluebell Rise, our small, square, characterless flat. At least we had a bedroom each. Mum said we were very lucky to have been allocated that.

She was in the kitchen in her fishnet nightie dancing with Rod, the radio on full blast – a half-empty bottle of gin on the kitchen table.

So you see, Faye, life isn’t always easy when your mum is a slag.