A year later, in court, my Mum was battling my Dad for custody of us, and I told them that I wouldn’t go with her because she didn’t want us. I repeated her words: ‘She doesn’t want her husband, she doesn’t want her kids, she just wants her freedom.’
We stayed with my Dad.
Years later still, when my Mum was having one of her trademark freak-outs and said how much she loved my brother and I, I told her what I’d heard that night while I was hiding in the kitchen. She stopped crying and shouting and looked at me for a long time.
‘You misheard,’ she told me seriously.
‘I did not,’ I said back, just as seriously.
She looked at me for a long time and then laughed. ‘Oh, well, you know it all don’t you? Get the fuck out of my house.’
And so I went.
It wasn’t the first time I left her house, and it wasn’t the last time I let her fuck my head up. It’s just another chapter in the ‘why my Mum is a fucking cunt’ saga.
Grimms’ Fairytales
My Mum used to work nights. In the evenings before she left she would tuck my brother and me up in our beds in our shared bedroom and put on a storybook cassette for us to listen to before we went to sleep. The content that she supplied was sometimes questionable: where we could easily drift off to sleep listening to some old dear tell us fairy tales written by Enid Blyton, it was much more difficult when she put in the cassette of some mad bastard reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
When it was a Grimms’ night, as soon as she’d left the room my brother and I would leap out of bed and play, because we were fucking terrified of the dark stories pumping out of the little speaker on top of the chest of drawers.
One night we were particularly restless, so while we played quietly with the stories still on in the background, I decided that I would do a magic trick that would knock his fucking socks off.
Earlier in the day, Mum had given us both a shiny new ten pence piece each. We’d never seen one before, but the old ones were big and fat and dull, and these were all beautiful and sparkly and new. I told my brother that that with the new ten pence piece you could do magic far more easily, because they had loads more magic in them.
He didn’t believe me, so I had to prove it.
I popped the ten pence piece into my mouth and told him that when I opened my mouth it would have disappeared. I closed my mouth and moved my tongue to try and push the coin to the floor of my mouth to conceal it, apart from I fucked it up and accidentally swallowed the coin.
I started crying.
‘Has it gone?’ my brother asked innocently.
I ran out of the bedroom and into the living room where Dad was sat with a fag on watching Red Dwarf.
‘DADISWALLOWEDTENPEE!’ I cryscreamed at him.
He asked me why and after a lengthy discussion he realised that I was an idiot and chucked both my brother and I into the car for a trip to accident and emergency.
‘DADAMIGOINGTODIE?’ I cryscreamed at him all the way there.
He told me of course I wasn’t going to die.
We got to accident and emergency and the doctor told me off for trying to be magic and I was x-rayed and stuck in a bed to be monitored.
Now, I don’t know the technical medical term for it, but this fucking coin was hovering somewhere in my throat. The doctor was worried that it would go into my lung and if the shiny little shit didn’t move the right way (into my tummy) then there would be problems.
I stayed in hospital for fucking ages waiting for it to move.
It did move, eventually, and it moved the right way. Down into my tummy. I got sent home and my Mum was given loads of those cardboard sick/shit holders and some lollypop sticks. I had to shit in a cardboard pot for the next three days until one day my poo had a shiny bit in it and I was free.
Needless to say when I got back to school I was a fucking legend. I was the girl who shat out the new ten pence piece.
The Silver Brumby
If I told you where I was brought up you’d laugh your fucking heads off. The village has such a fucking twee name that as soon as I tell anyone they dissolve into crazy laughter.
The place was full of people who were middle class. We were never middle class. My Mum and my Dad both worked hard at vocational jobs though, so we did have enough money for me to fulfil my Mum’s childhood dream of having a pony.
We kept my pony at an old farm. The farmer who owned the farm was the father of the man who my Mum would eventually leave me, my Dad and my brother and our home for. But not yet.
Mum was, and maybe still is, a care worker. That’s one of those people who go round to old people’s houses and tuck them in at night and chat to them a bit and wipe them down when they shit themselves. One of the people that she cared for was the old farmer that owned the farm that we kept the pony at.
I didn’t like the old farmer. After school and on weekends when I was down at the stables I could see him sitting in his chair by the window in his front room looking out at me and my Mum. I’d always ignore him, but Mum would wave, and sometimes, before we’d go home, she’d make us both go in to his house to ‘check he was doing okay.’
When I wasn’t reading Enid Blyton, I was reading stories about ponies. Silver Brumby was one that I read over and over and I’d keep in the car as an excuse not to go into that old bastard’s house. Sometimes I’d sit in the car for an hour after I’d finished riding, reading Silver Brumby and waiting for Mum to come out of the house.
One day, after we’d finished cleaning up the horse’s shit and piss and fed her and tucked her in for the night, Mum told me that she was going to check on the Old Man. I went to the car and tried the door but it was locked. Mum told me that I had to go with her this time, he’d been asking why I hadn’t been in to see him in so long.
She took the spare key from under the pot in the back porch and we let ourselves in. His house always smelt the same: of tobacco and fried eggs and dust. We walked through to the kitchen, across the hallway and into the living room, where he was sat on his big leather armchair in front of the window, as usual.
He drank a lot. Sometimes my Mum would have to dash to the shop for him to buy him more booze when he ran out. It was always Bell’s whisky, about a bottle each day. By his chair there was a bottle with a couple of inches left in it, and in his hand was a glass. He turned to greet us and put his glass down on the table at his side.
‘You haven’t been to see me for quite some time, young lady,’ he said to me.
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.
The room was fucking filthy. Fag ends and empty bottles everywhere and mud ground into the carpet. There was a single bed in his living room because
