‘Um, well, no I don’t really,’ I said. ‘I mean, I know she wasn’t sure who your father was, but—’ The shock thought that I wasexactlylike my awful grandmother popped up, shaking me to the core.
‘And that kind of tells you everything you need to know about her, don’t you think?’ Mum said.
‘I suppose,’ I said. ‘If you say so.’ Then, as the implication of what she was saying hit me, ‘Actually, no. What does it mean? Because I’m in the exact same situation.’
‘Oh God, honey. I didn’t mean…’ Mum said, reaching out and gripping my arm. ‘I didn’t mean nothing by it. It’s just, well, Mum used to bring men home all the time. I suspect some of them even paid her. They certainly used to give her “money for bills”.’ Mum made air quotes with her fingers.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Wow.’
‘Wewerevery broke,’ Mum said. She suddenly looked like she might cry. She had always been edgy when talking about her childhood and I worried I’d spoiled the moment by forcing the subject on her now.
‘Did she really kick you out?’ I asked, trying to move the conversation back to safer ground.
‘She did. But, well… She was religious. Or at least, she liked to say she was.Pretendshe was. I was never that convinced myself, what with all the men and everything. I think she went to church about twice. But she was religious when it came to other people, put it that way. She could get very judgey very quickly. I think it was a way of avoiding thinking about herself really. Anyway, all you need to know is thatno,she wasn’t cool. She was an absolute bloody nightmare.’
I nodded as I thought about this. So my mum was cool not because her parents had been brilliant, but because they’d been bloody awful. That somehow seemed to make her an even better person. ‘Where did you go? When she threw you out?’
‘Oh, I… sort of moved around a bit,’ Mum said, looking uncomfortable again. ‘I stayed on a friend’s sofa for a while. I even spent some time in a shelter. Then… a guy I met… put me up for a while. It was messy.’
‘God,’ I said. ‘Poor you.’
‘It was OK,’ Mum said. ‘I was young and full of beans. But anyway, come downstairs and we’ll make some lunch and work out what we’re going to do with you.’
‘WhatI’mgoing to do with me,’ I said, reaching out for the bannister and pulling myself upright.
‘No, what we’re going to do,’ Mum said. ‘You’re not alone with this one, Dawney. Not for this one and not for nothing else, neither.’
‘Anything else, either,’ I corrected her. Correcting each other was a sort of running joke in our family.
Mum laughed. ‘Ooh, speaking proper now so the little one doesn’t pick up bad habits, are we?’
Downstairs in the kitchen, she lit another cigarette while I opened the fridge in search of sandwich ingredients.
‘So wh’happen with you and Billy?’ she asked. ‘Cos I have noticed he hasn’t been around, but I didn’t like to ask.’
‘He said hedoesn’t feel the same about me anymore,’ I said, using a silly, middle-class voice to mock him. ‘He sayssomething’s been broken.’
‘Because?’
I shrugged.
‘Oh come on, Dawn,’ Mum said. ‘You were all loved up and then suddenly you wasn’t no more. Something must’ve happened.’
‘Rob,’ I said, so quietly, I wasn’t sure she’d heard. ‘Rob happened.’
‘You told him?’ Mum said, so shocked that she actually put her cigarette down so that she could put her hands together in prayer. ‘Youtoldyour Billy about Rob?’
I paused buttering the bread just long enough to look up at her and nod sheepishly.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why the hell would you do that, Dawn?’
‘Well, he was shagging Siobhan, wasn’t he?’ I explained. ‘He said he wanted us to have a free and easy relationship.’
‘Free and easy,’ Mum repeated. ‘Of course. It was him who said he doesn’t believe in monogamy, right?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Not for him, he doesn’t, at any rate.’
‘Meaning?’
