‘Hello, my darling,’ he said.
‘Hello, ___,’ said my Mum. ‘She wanted to stay in the car and read again, she’s always reading, but it’s about time she came to say hello, isn’t it?’
She turned round and smiled at me. Told me to sit down. Where? I wondered. Everything was covered in shit. I remained standing.
‘Come here, ___’ the Old Man said to my Mum.
She walked over and sat on his lap.
‘Did you know that your Mum is my girlfriend?’ he asked me. ‘The other girls from Social Services won’t come and see me but I can always rely on my ___.’
Mum was giggling like a schoolgirl. His hand reached up and started to fondle her breasts.
‘You’re a good girl, ___,’ he said. ‘You always look after old ___.’
Mum sat, still giggling on his lap. Letting him touch her, letting this vile old cunt touch her fucking tits. I felt sick.
After what felt like forever of standing and watching, Mum got up.
‘Go and give ___ a kiss,’ she said.
No. I didn’t move.
‘___, go and give him a kiss.’
I looked at my Mum. She was smiling at me.
‘She’s shy,’ she said to the Old Man. He smiled.
‘Come here, ___, come and say hello to me.’
I walked over to him, slowly. As soon as I was in arms’ reach he grabbed me and plonked me on his knee.
‘See? It’s not so bad, is it?’ he said.
I sat very still. I was fucking rigid. I hated this old man. I hated him so much.
His hands that had been clasped around me, resting on my lap, released and he put one hand on my thigh and squeezed, as the other hand moved up and began to stroke my stomach.
I jumped up and ran as fast as I could out of the house and back to the car. The fucking door was fucking locked. I ran to the barn where we kept the straw for the stables and hid.
I don’t know how long passed, but eventually my Mum came looking for me. As soon as she opened the door to the barn she saw me and called my name. I can’t have been hiding as well as I thought I was.
‘Is he with you?’ I asked, not moving.
‘Of course not, silly. Why would he come out here? He’s gone to bed. Come on, time to go home.’
I came out. We got in the car. I was shaking and frightened.
Mum said ‘He’s a very lonely old man, ___, it’s very sad to be out here in the countryside with no one to talk to, and my friends at work, they won’t come out to him. It’s not very nice, is it?’
I shook my head.
‘So that’s why we have to go and see him sometimes. You know, cheer him up. He’s a sweet man, really.’
I didn’t say anything. Mum drove us home and when I got home I went straight to bed and never told anyone about what had happened.
About five years later, when my Mum had left me and my brother and Dad for the farmer, she rang me to tell me that the Old Man had died. I said I was glad, and she called me an evil bitch and hung up. Another couple of years after that, at my Mum’s house, the farmer started talking about his Dad. I told him that his Dad was an evil cunt, and I got thrown out of the house. The farmer doesn’t speak to me any more. Neither does my Mum.
You’re not allowed to speak ill of the dead, you see.
The Diary of Adrian Mole
I was about 12 or 13 when Mum decided that she was taking my brother and me on holiday to Gibraltar. She chucked some Goosebumps books at my brother and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole at me to shut us up. About her reading selection for me, she said, ‘You probably won’t understand most of it, but it’s funny.’ I read some of it on the plane over, and it was funny, but rather than making me want to read more Sue Townsend, it just made me keep an incredibly cynical diary for the next two years.
Mum had made all these plans for stuff to do in Gibraltar. Gibraltar is not that big at all, so once we’d gone up the rock and looked at the monkey things (scary, grabby, I didn’t like them) she decided that we were going to get on a ferry the next day and have a trip over to Tangier in North Africa. A very common thing to do after you’ve spent a day in Gibraltar, apparently.
Gibraltar, if you’ve never been, is very, very English. Tangier is not very, very English. It was very foreign and exciting and frightening. I’d never been abroad before and nipping over the water to North Africa was my first experience of being completely surrounded by a difference culture and way of life.
I loved it. We wandered around the markets, and ate some weird food, and watched a bloke with a snake do some weird shit, and stroked a camel. It was brilliant. Then we went into an indoor market thing, where Mum and my brother went off to look at rugs, and I was left wandering around some pots.
A man approached me and asked me where I was from. I told him that I was from England. He nodded and looked very thoughtful. He asked my age and where my Mum was. I told him and pointed to the room with all the carpets in.
He said, ‘Come with me.’
I walked with him up to my Mum. He introduced himself to her as a very rich man and then pointed to me.
‘I like your daughter. She is very beautiful. How much for your daughter?’
My Mum laughed. ‘She’s not for sale.’
He looked puzzled.
‘I want to marry your daughter when she is sixteen. I take her now and pay you. How much?’
Mum laughed a little less easily this time and told him again, no.
He looked thoughtful.
‘I give you thirty camels for your daughter.’
My Mum’s eyes bulged. She turned to me.
‘Thirty camels! Thirty fucking camels!’
‘Mum, what the fuck are you going to do with thirty camels?’
She looked back at the man and said again, no.
He upped his offer. Forty camels.
‘FORTY CAMELS! Forty FUCKING camels!’ she said to me, a kind of weird pleading look on her face.
‘Mum,’ I said, ‘you are not selling me for forty camels to this man. You don’t need any camels. Where would you keep forty camels?’
‘I
