back to London, existed for a while on the edge of some rather bohemian group, people who squatted, who liked to call themselves anarchists, who had artistic pretensions. She wore cheesecloth blouses, worked as a waitress. It was the pinnacle of her life, the time to which she always yearned to return. She was still only nineteen when she met my father. She fell pregnant almost immediately. He went off with somebody else when I was six months old; my mother was just twenty. She never talked about him, except to say that she wasn’t going to talk about that bastard. I only knew he’d been part of that arty group, and that his name was Christopher.
It was OK when I was younger. She had standards then, she was quite particular: she talked a lot about manners; she always laid the table properly for tea. We were happy, I think, happy enough, though there was never much money, and often she left me alone in the evenings, even when I was young. I remember how as a little girl I’d sit on the bed and watch her getting ready, perhaps for her evening shift behind the bar, or maybe for a night out on the town with one of her long succession of temporary men. She’d be all sheeny and glossy, with high heels, and a gold chain round her ankle, her skin a sun-kissed brown from her weekly session at the Fake It tanning studio, with the smell that was then so comforting, so familiar, of Marlboros and Avon Lily of the Valley. I’d sit on the bed amid the heaps of her clothes and accessories, her belts and bangles and gloves and floaty scarves. She had a particular passion for gloves, in pastel cotton or silk, with little pearl buttons or ruched wrists. It was eccentric, perhaps, giving her an air of spurious formality, but she liked to hide her hands, which were always rough and reddened from the work she did, all the washing of glasses in the sink at the bar. I’d watch how she’d choose from her glittery sticks of cosmetics, how she’d do her mouth, first drawing the outline with lippencil, making her narrow lips a little more generous, then the lipstick, coral bright, eased on straight from the stick. She’d press her lips together to spread the colour out. I thought she was so beautiful. Yet my pleasure in these moments was always shot through with fear, that one day she’d go and leave me and somehow forget to return. Or maybe the fear of abandonment is something I’ve added since, thinking back, laying my knowledge of what happened later over my memory of those moments, as frost lies over leaves.
There was one man called Marco, whom she met through a Lonely Hearts column in the local paper. He was, or claimed to be, Italian. She always said she liked a man with an accent. He moved in with us; he was smooth, flash, with lots of chest hair and gold jewellery. The flat was clean and tidy while Marco was with us; sometimes I heard my mother singing as she worked. When he left, taking all her savings and even the money from the gas meter, and she realised she’d been conned, that all his protestations of love were just an elaborate charade, something seemed to die in her. That was when she started buying sherry instead of wine. She lost her job. Sometimes she’d be virtually insensible when I came in from school, and I’d have to take off her outer clothes and tuck her up in bed. One day I came home all excited, bursting to tell her I’d won the second-year Art prize: it was one of those moments when life feels full of promise and shiny, like a present just ready and waiting for you to unwrap. But my mother was snoring on the sofa, the front of her blouse hanging open, and there was no one to tell. Sometimes she’d be coherent but maudlin, full of platitudes, weeping and saying again and again how she’d tried to give me a good life but it had all gone wrong, and eating Hellmann’s Mayonnaise from the jar with a tablespoon. I started taking money from her purse, to buy food. I spilt nail varnish on her skirt and she hit me with a clothes-hanger. When I got into a stupid fight at school, she turned up drunk and belligerent in the school office, demanding to see the headmistress, and had to be seen off the premises by the caretaker.
That was when the social worker started visiting. The third time she came, she told me to pack and took me out to her car.
The Poplars. It’s the smell I remember: disinfectant, cabbage, adolescent sweat. And the texture of it, everything rough, worn, frayed. Lino, and thin blankets, and flabby white bread and corned beef, and having to ask for every sanitary towel. The sofas had the springs sticking through, and when Darren Reames in one of his moods ripped off some of the wallpaper, it stayed like that for months, with a great gaping tear. There weren’t enough electric points: you had to unplug the fridge to watch the television, so the milk was usually sour. There was never enough to eat. Once I said I was hungry and Brian Meredith told me not to talk because talking wasted energy.
Brian Meredith ran the place; he’d been in the SAS. He was short, dapper, smart in his red or blue blazers, and pleasant to visiting social workers, who liked his ready handshake and his friendly yellow Labrador stretched out on the floor by his desk. He looked like everyone’s favourite uncle—and he knew how to hit without leaving a mark on you. Looking back, I can see why he got away with it: he took the really difficult kids, that nobody else would touch. Girls with shiny, sequiny names—Kylie, Demi, Sigourney—and wrecked lives. Boys who set fires, who used knives. All of them lashing out at the people who tried to help them with what I see now was the terrible rage of those who have nothing to lose: children who couldn’t be consoled. Like Darren, who’d set fire to his school and then to his house with his grandfather in it. Or Jason Oakley, who said his dad had interfered with him, who kicked a care worker in the stomach when she was pregnant, so she miscarried: though in the end even Brian Meredith couldn’t cope with Jason, and he was sent to Avalon Close, an adolescent psychiatric unit with a grim reputation. Girls like Aimee Graves, whose father had held her head in the loo and flushed it, who came into Care and had seventeen foster placements, Aimee who was so misnamed, for no one loved her. Except me, for a while. Except me.
Brian Meredith solved some big problems for the council. He did what he liked, and his methods were all his own. Two rooms on the second floor. The secret of his success. Pindown. Each room with a bed, a table, a flimsy electric fire, and the glass-panelled door, the glass screened with brown paper. There were no locks, no keys, but saucepans were hung on the outside of the door handle, and someone was always there, the other side of the door. If you misbehaved or ran away, that’s where they put you. They took your clothes and shoes: you had to wear your pyjamas. If you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to knock on the door. They sat you at the table to write down the wrong things you’d done. The rules were stuck on the wall, a list with lots of ‘no’s: no smoking, TV, radio, books; and no communicating out of the window without permission—because you could see the woman who lived in the flat next door, her sitting room was level with your window, you could see right in. You’d watch her dusting, watching television, sitting on the arm of the sofa and having a quiet smoke, and you’d want to bang on your window, to see if she might wave to you. Sometimes you felt she was your only friend.
Most of the staff were young. Some were doing it for experience, they wanted to get on courses and become proper social workers, the kind who sat in offices and went to case conferences, and visited places like The Poplars then drove away in their cars. Some of them just couldn’t get anything better. Most of them wanted to help, really. They wore denim and had piercings and said how much they liked the music we listened to and tried to get us to talk about our feelings. You could see when they talked to you, trying to get near you, how they yearned for some kind of revelation—that you would give them the gift of some confidence, a disclosure or confession about your family and what had been done to you, they were longing for your trust, though not knowing what the hell to do with it if you gave it. They were OK, most of them. Only Brian Meredith hit us. But they all used Pindown.
Lesley was the nicest. She arrived soon after me. She was perhaps ten years older than me, twenty-three to my thirteen. Lesley became my key worker. She was different from the others, rather awkward and clumsy, with feet too big for her body, but her eyes were quiet when they rested on you.
Lesley was very conscientious. She took me off for individual sessions. We sat on the square of carpet in the staffroom—the only bit of carpet in the place—and did exercises from a ringbound manual she had, called Building Self-Esteem. She drew a self-esteem tree on a big piece of paper with felt tips; there were fruit on the branches, and you had to write something about yourself that you liked in each of the fruit. I remember the dirty cups on the coffee table, and the smell
