Читать книгу A Friend Like Ben: The true story of the little black and white cat that saved my son - Julia Romp - Страница 10

Now I wish this was one of those really happy stories where I became a taxi driver, gave a lift to a movie star and ran away with him into the sunset. But real life’s not usually like that, is it? At least mine’s not, and what actually happened two months after passing the Knowledge was that my life changed in a way that made me think I’d never be happy again.

George was the only thing that got me out of bed when Dad died, because losing him felt like the end of the world. We gave Dad the send-off he deserved – his coffin lying in a glass-sided carriage drawn by a horse wearing black feather plumes and led by a man wearing a top hat and tails, with friends and family following behind in a long line of taxis – but it felt unreal. How do you say goodbye to the person who ties you to the earth and stops you flying away with his jokes, kind words and quiet love? It wasn’t just me who was lost – Mum and Dad had been together since they were teenagers. We all dealt with his death the best way we knew how: by staying close as we started learning how to cope without him.

Dad was buried in the local cemetery and I hated leaving him there, cold in the ground, so I visited him as often as I could and would sit with him as George and Lewis ran around together.

‘Can we fill in the hole, Ju?’ Lewis asked me one day when they found a fresh pile of dirt beside a newly dug grave that was waiting to be filled.

‘Just a bit,’ I said.

A few handfuls of earth wouldn’t matter, I thought to myself as I watched Lewis laughing while he played. He wheezed at the same time because laughing took all his breath and sounded like an 80-year-old man who’d smoked a pack a day all his life. George silently watched Lewis as he roared, as if he was trying to work out what the strange sound was. Then when Lewis started coughing with the effort of laughing, George bent him over before patting him on the back until he got his breath back. Sometime later I knew George would suddenly stop playing, stand to attention in the silence like a rabbit hearing a fox and listen to the sound of a train that no one else could yet hear until it rumbled past on the railway line running beside the cemetery. George was so sensitive to noise that when we were out for a walk he’d scream each time a car went by, as if a juggernaut was rushing by instead of a Ford Fiesta.

A few months passed like that – George and I going up to the cemetery, sometimes with Lewis, sometimes just the two of us, while I sat and wondered what the future held for us now my dream of being a taxi driver had come to nothing. After doing the Knowledge, I’d just needed to pass a driving test in central London to get my full licence, but I’d failed twice while Dad was still alive and I could not face taking it again after he died. He’d always encouraged me to keep going, but I could hear him laughing and see his face every time I got into a cab. It was too much, so I’d given up on all that hard work. I felt like a complete failure. I was no good as a mum and now I was a quitter too.

So time went on, as it does, the earth settled on Dad’s grave and when a huge dip appeared, I almost got arrested after deciding to lay some turf on it as the sun went down one day. Within a few minutes, a couple of coppers had arrived – black helmets on their heads and radios crackling – and it had taken some convincing to make them realise that I wasn’t up to no good. But apart being suspected of grave robbing, I liked going to the cemetery because it was somewhere peaceful to go and think.

However much I did, though, I still felt as though I was stuck in treacle. As George played, the thoughts would tumble through my head. The life I was giving George was a world away from the one that Dad and Mum had given Boy, Nob, Tor and me as children. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to find a way to make things better. I had been taught to earn my way in life and even had with my own small florist’s shop, where I’d worked seven days a week before George was born, but I’d given it up when I became a mum. Now the Knowledge had come to nothing, I didn’t know what to do. It all made me feel so useless and as the months passed without Dad, I’d sit and wonder whether I was ever going to be able to change things for George and me.

But the more I thought about it, the more I knew one thing: I couldn’t let my unhappiness get the better of me. It was time for a fresh start.

George was four when he began school in September 2000 and it was one of those days when I looked at him and wondered what I was making such a fuss about. With his big blue eyes and blond hair, he looked perfect as I dressed him in a bright red sweatshirt and black trousers. I felt sure that school was just what he needed now we’d moved on to a new estate, which seemed so much nicer than our last. It was a new beginning for both of us.

As I say, I’m a dreamer. It took only a few weeks for me to be called in to talk to the teachers.

‘We think George might have hearing problems,’ one said.

‘He doesn’t respond when we call his name,’ another told me.

‘He can’t seem to understand commands,’ someone else piped up. ‘If we tell the children we’re going to sit down in a few minutes George does it immediately, and when we get them into a circle for story time, he crawls backwards and lies under a bench with his hands over his ears.’

In a way I was almost relieved to hear what the teachers had to say, because they were the first professionals to spend any proper time with George and they could see there was a problem, which was what I’d been trying to tell people for years. But I also felt scared, because however much you can cope with things when they’re hidden at the back of the cupboard, they feel much bigger the moment they’re brought out into the light. As George was referred for sight and hearing tests at a local clinic, I told myself that I could not be fearful: I was 27 years old, a grown-up, and if he really did have problems, the sooner they were identified, the sooner they could be sorted out.

Meanwhile, I kept myself to myself on the new estate after all that had happened on the old one and the first thing that needed sorting out was our new home, because the old woman who’d had the flat before us had lived there with 13 cats and the place was crawling with fleas. While the council came in and sprayed the rooms, George and I had stayed with Mum, and then it was all hands on deck when we finally moved in. I might have thought I was Miss Independent but I still needed my family to help decorate.

I’d learned young, after all, that you have to make the most of your home. ‘Sides, top, then front,’ my nan Doris would tell me as she pointed at a wardrobe before handing me a massive bottle of polish and a duster when she got me over to her house every Saturday morning to help her clean. Usually I did a good job, but then came the day when I was about 10 and she suddenly hit me across the back of the head without a word of warning.

‘Stay still!’ Nan screamed as I saw stars. ‘Don’t move. I’m going to get your mother.’

She ran next door, came back with Mum and together they peered at my head.

‘Look at them,’ said Nan.

‘It’s those kids from down the road who gave them to her,’ said Mum.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘You’ve got headlice,’ Mum told me and I started to cry.

I was back to normal after a good shampoo with the nit lotion and Nan let me back in her house to help clean it again. But all those years of dusting had taught me the power of elbow grease, and that was what I used in our new flat. Soon the kitchen was painted terracotta, the hallway white, my bedroom pink and George’s room yellow. I didn’t just decorate the inside, though. Our third-floor flat had a balcony overlooking a field with a willow tree in it, so I made the most of the view by covering the balcony floor in rainbow stripes, painting the walls green and putting flowers in pots. Standing on the balcony blowing bubbles at George, because he could never get enough of them, I’d look at the shed roofs below and wonder if a bit of turf would make them look better. You can’t even grow grass on a roof, but I never know when to stop, do I?

Real life came back with a bang, though, whenever I left the flat with George, because some days getting him to school could take up to an hour. He’d bite me or cling on to railings as we walked, screech and shout, or stare at the soldiers standing at the gates of the local army barracks and refuse to be moved. It was such a battle that I often took him in a pushchair, and as I bumped it down the stairs, I began meeting the woman who lived in the flat below ours. I wasn’t quite sure what she made of me, because our walls were paper thin and George made a lot of noise, while the only thing I knew about her was that she loved vacuuming so much that she seemed to be at it all day, every day.

The woman looked about the same age as me and had two children: a little boy around four, like George, and a girl who was a bit older. Even though we smiled as we passed on the stairs and she looked normal enough, I didn’t stop to chat because I’d just moved from a place where a lot of people were either falling down drunk or stealing from washing lines, however innocent they looked.

But one day, the woman looked at me as I struggled up a step with George.

‘Disgusting, isn’t it?’ she said as she looked at the grey concrete walls of the stairway.

They were covered in graffiti and the smell of wee wafted up from the corridor below because people were always peeing in it.

‘Horrible,’ I said.

‘I’m Michelle,’ the woman replied with a smile.

‘I’m Julia.’

‘Good to meet you. Now, shall we get something done about these stairs?’

That was the start of our friendship. Michelle and I were united in stair rage as we got everyone together and went to see the housing manager.

‘People will only have pride in their homes if you give them a reason to by cleaning up the graffiti and getting rid of the dog mess,’ we told him.

The housing manager agreed that if Michelle and I jetwashed the stairs and corridors, the council would paint the walls, and we were asked to pick a colour. So what did we choose? Cream, maybe? White? Blue even? No: pink, pale, baby pink, because it looked lovely with the grey concrete floor, didn’t it? We got so stair proud in the end that we even stuck fake flowers on the walls and would stand on our balconies watching troublemakers walk into the building. ‘Hope you’re not going to let the dog pee in there,’ we’d shout to one man, who we knew let his pet loose in our corridor. He didn’t like that one bit, but Michelle and I did. We’d been bitten by the brightening-up bug and even ended up painting the doors of the storage lockers each flat had on the ground floor to make the place a bit more colourful.

But however much Michelle and I got on, I was still backwards in coming forwards about being proper friends. Once I might have longed for a friend of my age, someone to see a film with or do a bit of shopping with maybe. But I’d learned that I was the only person who could keep George calm and because of that it wasn’t fair on him or anyone else to leave him. His needs had to come first and I just didn’t want to go out without him.

So while there were bad days when I cried quietly after he’d finally gone to sleep, I soon picked myself back up again and got on with things. I was George’s mum and I’d got used to keeping both of us out of the way of most people. We saw family, of course, but I didn’t want George to be stared at by strangers when he lay on the floor stiff as he had a tantrum or hear a tut as he screamed the place down. I didn’t want to have to explain how I was getting called into school because he got into trouble with the other kids, hitting or biting them when they didn’t play how he wanted, or how I’d asked for his hearing and sight tests to be done again because although they’d come back normal, now George was at school I was more certain than ever that something was wrong. I might have got used to his ways when it was just the two of us, but I couldn’t ignore how different they were now, which is why I wanted the tests to be done again in case there had been a mistake.

How could I explain all that to Michelle, whose children, Ricky and Ashley, were perfect? Tell her that George had begun to blurt out things when we were out and just wouldn’t stop, no matter how many times I tried telling him?

‘Fat!’ he’d say as a larger woman walked past.

‘Hairy!’ he’d cry at another with a plait.

‘Moles!’ he’d shout at someone with freckles.

‘Smelly!’ he’d tell just about anyone if they got too close.

People looked at him strangely before carrying on their way, but however much I tried telling George not to do it, he couldn’t keep quiet. The school didn’t know what to make of him and had even started keeping a book in which they listed all his behaviours, like refusing to drink in front of people or disappearing for half an hour when he went to the loo because he took off all his clothes before going. There were so many little things that I did not know where to start, and that’s why I was scared of making a friend.

Luckily nothing seemed to worry Michelle as we started to spend more time together. Maybe it was because she was a trained child minder, or just that she was really patient, but Michelle took everything in her stride – even the day when we were out on the field and I looked across to see George had pinned Ricky to the ground and was hitting him.

‘Stop!’ I screamed as I ran towards them.

George didn’t turn around at the sound of my voice and when I finally reached him, he just looked at me blankly for a moment before hitting Ricky again.

‘George, no!’ I said as I pulled him off, thinking that this time he’d really done it and Michelle would never speak to me again.

But she was quietly fine about it. ‘These things happen with kids,’ she told me as I dragged George away.

It made me so sad to realise that he could not make friends. As I watched him with Ricky and Ashley, I could see that George didn’t understand how to be with other children. I still wasn’t brave enough to talk to Michelle about it all though, until she brought it up one evening as we sat on the stairs between our flats. We’d got into the habit of meeting there as time had gone on and I’d found myself looking forward to the moment when I heard Michelle’s knock. Leaving our front doors ajar so we were both near enough to hear if any of the kids woke up, we’d sit out together, and that’s where we were the night she turned to me.

‘Is there a problem with George?’ Michelle asked.

No one had ever said it straight out like that before.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But he’s had his hearing and sight tested and they say he’s fine. I’m at the end of my tether with it, though, because I’m sure there’s a problem and no one seems to want to listen.’

Michelle looked at me with her big eyes. ‘You know, you’ve got to stop apologising for him, Ju. George is who he is and people are going to have to accept that. You get into too much of a state about it all. You shouldn’t care so much about what other people think. I can see how much it bothers you, but it shouldn’t.’

‘What about when he hits Ricky, though, or tells Ashley that she smells?’ I asked. ‘What am I supposed to do then?’

‘You do as much as you can with him. I know that. But sometimes you have to let the kids sort it out themselves and know that people are going to have to accept George the way he is because he’s not going to change anytime soon.’

I’ve always thought we meet people for a reason and Michelle was my karma. As we got to know each other better, I’d talk to her about George: how I’d finally get him to sleep each night just hoping we’d get through a few hours without him getting up to wee up the wall or how I’d see other kids playing together and wish George could learn to join in.

‘Let him be, Ju,’ Michelle would tell me. ‘You can’t make George be what he isn’t, and anyone can see what a good mum you are. It’s other people who’ve got to change their attitude, not George. If they can’t accept him, then they’re not worth bothering about.’

Michelle was so understanding that I soon even felt comfortable enough to take George to her flat. It didn’t matter if he wiped cake up the wall there or bashed the head of Ashley’s doll against the wall, because Michelle didn’t flinch.

‘Are you knocking some sense into Barbie, then, George?’ she’d say with a laugh. ‘That’s good.’

And while George still found it hard to get on with Ricky and Ashley, even though they were both really good with him, I knew that he liked Michelle. He’d never hug her, of course, or smile – George wouldn’t even look at Michelle when he spoke to her most of the time or show that he noticed when she was there. But as the months passed, he started doing something that told me he did: he sniffed. Each day when we left the flat, George would take in a deep breath of fresh air and tell me that he could smell Michelle. Because even though her flat was one floor below us, he knew when she had a wash on and to George that smell meant Michelle. Somehow she had got through to him and George showed me in his own particular way that she had.