“Yes, I suppose it was.” Mia laughs sadly. “She woke up and they told her that her fiancé had brought her in, and my mum just played along and then told my dad, ‘Well I suppose we’d better just get married then’. They moved in together and then they got married as soon as she turned 18.” She traces her fingers along the edge of her cup, and frowns. “It could have all been so nice.”
I lift my hand to run it along her calf and decide at the last second that would probably be extremely creepy, and detour to picking up my tea instead.
“When did you come along?” I ask.
Mia sighs. “A year after they got married. They both tried really hard, I mean really hard to get sober when they found out.”
“Had your dad gotten into meth as well?”
“He hadn’t really, I think he tried it a few times, but he preferred the drink.” She gives me a wan smile. “He felt it wasn’t as harmful as the drugs.”
“Right.”
“They did pretty well until I was born, but then it was the stress of having a baby and not having much money, my dad was working two jobs to try and make ends meet, and it was… hard.”Mia winces, as though remembering a very painful memory. “My mum, I mean, when I look back on how she was, and the problems she had, and I mean I know now, but she had bipolar disorder. My dad, he sort of clocked it when I was little. He said some days he’d come home and my mum and me would be in the kitchen, dancing along to the radio and baking biscuits. Then other days he’d come home and I’d be alone in the lounge room with a bowl of stale crackers and an empty glass of water with the telly on. My mum would have days where she couldn’t get out of bed, and couldn’t move.”
“Did she ever try to get help?”
Mia rolls her eyes with a heavy sigh. “Yeah, but they just scared her off. Told her that she’d likely have child services on her doorstep if she sought treatment, told her how high the statistics were for children being removed from mentally ill parents.”
I huff out an angry breath. “Bloody hell.”
“And my dad, he was just helpless in the face of it all. He had his own demons to deal with, and he just weren’t equipped to deal with a mentally ill partner and a little kid.” Mia’s face crumples, and she draws in a deep breath through her nose. “My mum, she’d… sometimes she’d just disappear, for days. One time, I was four years old, and I fell asleep on the couch watching the telly. When I woke up, it was dark, the telly was off, no lights were on. I called out for my mum, but no one came. And I needed a wee so badly, but I was too scared to move.” She looks up at me, her lip trembling. “So I just peed on the couch. I lay in the dark for what felt like hours, just crying for my mum. I remember being so cold, and so scared I’d be in trouble for ruining their sofa.”
“Oh, Mia.” I want to take her in my arms, or do something, anything, just hold her and comfort her. “Bloody hell. I’m so sorry.”
Mia puts her cup down with shaking hands and wraps her arms around herself. “My dad, he came stumbling home late, barely able to walk properly because he’d been up the pub after work.” Mia laughs bitterly, dashing away the only tear I’ve seen fall from her eyes all night. “He cleaned me up, and he was singing and talking funny the whole time. I was a little kid, so it made me laugh, but I know now it’s because he was blind drunk. I remember sitting there in my warm pyjamas, eating his kebab he’d picked up on his way home, and it felt like some sort of adventure. Like everything was fine now.” She covers her face with her hands, half laughing, half sobbing. “Sorry, I…”
“Don’t apologise, please. I-I don’t even know what to say. Sorry feels… grossly insufficient.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine.” Her hands drop from her face, and she sniffles. “There’s no point in being sorry, it happened, didn’t it?”
“So, that all went on for another 9 years?” I ask, and Mia shrugs.
“More or less. There were better times, like when my dad got a promotion at work and he only had to work one job. He was home for dinner every day, he had weekends off, it felt like a whole new world.” Mia’s face darkens. “But then he started drinking again, too much, and he was late for work too many times, so they fired him.”
I sigh and shake my head. “Fucking hell.”
“People have asked me many times what the turning point was, when did it get really bad.” Mia shifts in her seat and huffs out a breath. “But it’s not that simple. It’s not like that at all. It’s this long, slow descent into having one bad day, then a bad week, and suddenly it’s been a month of bad days, and you start to stop seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.” She rubs her fingertips over her lips, and her gaze becomes distant, fixed on nothing in particular, as she gets lost in the past. “I was in Year 7, and I’d started spending a lot of time at my friends’ places. It was warmthere, and there was food, and family. I think all the parents knew something were wrong with me, things weren’t right at home, but no one said anything. They just fed me and let me stay as long as I needed to. Like that would solve my problems.” Her head bobs in a gentle nod. “People like to feel they’re doing something good while not doing much at all. So many times I’d get home, and no one would open the door. My mum was too strung out, or she wasn’t there at all, or she and my dad would be passed out together. I don’t know. But it’s only so long before the neighbours notice what’s going on, and call the police.”
“Did they help you?”
Mia shakes her head in that same slow fashion, still lost in memory. “At first I ran away from them, I thought they were arresting me even though I’d not done anything. Then one day, it was a nice woman officer, and she cornered me in the playground down between the blocks of flats, and told me I didn’t need to be scared. She asked where my parents were, and I told her they weren’t opening the door.” Mia blinks rapidly, and shakes her head. “They, uh, they came up with me, banging and ringing the bell. No one answered, so they called a locksmith to come open it.” She frowns and bites her lip. “When they got inside, my mum was passed out on the couch, and my dad was nowhere to be seen. The police tried to wake my mum, but they couldn’t. They called an ambulance, and my mum was taken off to hospital.” She breathes out a bitter laugh. “And then it was all out in the open. They tracked my dad down at the pub, and hauled him off to the station where they’d taken me, and asked him to explain why I was being left alone so much.”
“That’s when they took you away?”
She nods, her eyes seeming to come back into focus. “It all happened really quickly after that. My parents were ordered to do parenting classes, and I was placed with a foster family. It was all a mess. My mum needed help, she needed rehab, and my dadwas still working two jobs, doing the classes and trying to get to mandated AA meetings, but no one wanted to helpthem. They just set down demands and then left it.” She lets out a frustrated sigh, running her hands over her face and into her hair. “It was never going to work. I was moved to a long-term foster family after a few months, because the first placement was meant to be short-term only. I saw my parents once a month at scheduled visits, with a social worker present. They both came for the first six months. Then my mum stopped coming. My dad missed a visit, then made the next one, and was apologising. But I could smell the beer on him.” Her face crumples into that expression of complete pain, her lower lip trembling. “He never came again after that.”
I run a hand over my mouth. “Fucking hell. I’m so sorry. I know I keep saying that, but I am. I just can’t imagine…” I don’t want to say that I can’t imagine abandoning a kid like that. I know I made mistakes with Archie, that I wasn’t around enough when he was really little. That I told myself I’d be more involved when he was older. I wasn’t a perfect parent. And I’ve never lived the life these two people did, went through the struggles they did. It’s unfair to judge them like that. “I can’t imagine how painful that must have been for you.”
“Oh, I completely lost it.” Mia lets out a pained laugh. “I was a horrid kid. I was with a good family, the mum was really nice and she really cared, but I was scared, and angry, fuck I was so angry, Dom. I wanted to destroy everything, I wanted everything around me broken because I was just so hurt.” She breathes out heavily and scrubs her fingers along her thighs. “One day I smashed a window, we were having a row over homework or something stupid. And Jackie, that was my foster mum, she said, ‘I can’t do this anymore’, and she rang my social worker, and off I went.”
Her face goes painfully blank for a moment, and her throat bobs as she swallows hard.
“My next placement, it were with a really experienced family, that’s what they told me. I was fifteen at this point. I’d been placed for adoption, because my parents had lost their rights, but no one wanted an angry, traumatised teenager. So I was placed with this family, this very good family.” Her eyes meet mine, and the pain and anger in them chill me to my core. “I’ll never forget the way he looked at me, the dad. I know now what that look means, when a man looks at you that way. But I were just a kid, I didn’t know then.”
My hand curls into a fist on my thigh, and rage tugs at my belly. “He-”
“Yeah.” Mia interjects quickly. “For two years.” She holds up a hand. “I don’t want to say it. I can’t. I’m alright, I’m in therapy for it, and I’m alright. But I can’t say it. Not yet. That hurts too much.” She gives me a crooked smile. “And he’s dead now, so that’s some comfort at least.”
