said. ‘When you’re grown-up and all this is behind you, what would you want to have?’ I sat there in the smell of cabbage and disinfectant. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. I closed my eyes, and saw it all, clear, vivid. Perhaps it was the tree she’d drawn, triggering something in me. I saw lots of trees, a garden; I saw a house and children and a husband, all these images welling up in me, precise as though I’d drawn them. ‘I’d like to have children,’ I said. ‘I’d like to have a family of my own. And a place to live, just us and nobody else.’ I saw, heard it all in my head: a lawn, a lily pool, the splashing of a fountain in the pool, the laughter of children. In a moment of hope that warmed me through, there on the thin frayed carpet: I will have them, I thought, these things.
My mother visited, occasionally, erratically, dressed up, but not for me. Always in a hurry, as though there was somewhere else she needed to be. Like someone at a party, looking over your shoulder for the person they want to talk to, and shifty, as though she was implicated in some guilt by merely being there. Sometimes she brought presents: exuberant cuddly toys, large fluffy rabbits with satin hearts on their chests. I put the toys on the window sill of the room I shared with Aimee. Sometimes my mother was drunk when she came, sentimental, and full of self-pity; saying over and over how she’d done her best for me, done everything she could.
‘When can I come home?’
‘Soon. Very soon, Trina.’ Smoking her Marlboros, fiddling with her rings. ‘I just need to get myself together. You’re OK in here, then, are you?’
‘I hate it.’
‘Oh,’ she’d say. ‘They seem nice enough.’
Afterwards Lesley would sit on my bed and talk to me.
‘How do you feel about your mum, my love? How does it all make you feel?’
I never knew how to answer these questions.
During the week we were meant to go to school. The others mostly didn’t; they’d go off to the towpath, where they’d sit on rubber tyres and inhale lighter fuel and throw stones into the water; or to the Glendale Centre, where when they got bored they’d steal things from the shops. I was the only one who went on going to school.
It was a sprawling comprehensive, full of children I envied, with homes to go to and trainers that were regularly replaced. I didn’t do well: I was always rather hungry and distracted. I went because of the art: because the art rooms were always open at lunchtime. You could mess about with pens and paints and do whatever you wanted and nobody bothered you. It was quiet, in a way that The Poplars never was—just Capital Radio playing, and a few other girls softly talking, and the drumming of the rain on the mezzanine roof: it always seemed to be raining, that’s how it is in my memory, the windows clouded with condensation so no one could see in. And there I discovered this sweet surprising thing—that with a pen or paintbrush in my hand, there was a flow to my life, and I could draw things that pleased me, and the other girls would stop and look as they passed. However tired I was, however hungry, this flow and freedom still happened, till The Poplars faded away, to a smoky blur on the edges of my mind, and I entered a different place, a place of shapes, of colours, viridian and cobalt and burnt sienna, where I felt for a while a secret guarded joy.
There was a teacher called Miss Jenkins who took an interest in me. She had an ex-hippy air—she wore hoops in her ears and liked embroidered cardigans. She never asked me how I felt or wanted to talk about me. She must have known where I came from, but it didn’t seem to matter. She showed me things—a book of Impressionist paintings; a postcard of a picture by Pisanello that I adored, of a velvety dark wood studded with birds like jewels; a book of botanical drawings she’d bought at Kew. She gave me pictures to copy, to explore; and suggested materials I could try—fine pens, oil paints, acrylics, and plaster to make a 3-D picture—which they only used in class at A-level. I was privileged, I knew, and at moments like these I felt rich. So I went on going to school, for the quiet hours in the art room and the complicated sweet scent of acrylic paint that I could still smell hours afterwards, and Miss Jenkins whose first name I never knew.
I never got to know the other girls. I kept myself a little apart, not wanting them to find out about me. I saw this as a temporary thing. When things are OK, when this bad bit is over, when I’m back with my mother, I thought—then I will talk to them, make friends, be one of them. Not till then. Aimee at The Poplars was my only friend.
She was wild, Aimee: a sharp, knowing face, hair like fire, tattoos all down her arm. She had a razor-blade sewn into the hem of her jeans. For emergencies, she said. She never went to school.
Aimee got picked on a lot by the staff at The Poplars. They told her she was trouble. She wasn’t like me, she wouldn’t just go along with things and bide her time. I’ve always been able to do this—blend into the background, not be conspicuous, not be seen—but Aimee couldn’t or wouldn’t: there was something in her, some flame that wouldn’t be quenched. Brian Meredith hit her more than the others—for nicking stuff and getting into fights and being lippy. She used to call him Megadeath. ‘He’s got it coming,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll do him over. Just you wait. One day.’ Once he kept her for three weeks in Pindown. When she came out she’d ripped all the skin from the sides of her fingernails and sometimes she’d shout in her sleep.
She ran away often. Sometimes she took me with her. She showed me how to do it, how to travel on a train without a ticket by hiding in the toilet, how to steal. We’d plan it all together in the room we shared, the street light leaking through the thin curtains onto the battered candlewick of our bedspreads. Each time it was like falling in love: each time we thought this was the day, the time, the Real Thing. Usually, we’d head for Brighton, where Aimee had heard you could live in a squat and find some people who’d help you. Brighton was our promised land. We knew how it would be. We’d sell jewellery, those little leather thongs with stones on, we’d live on chips, read fortunes: we’d be like the older girls you saw there on the seafront, with their impossible glamour, their ratty ribboned hair and Oxfam coats and thin thin bodies and wide, generous smiles.
We’d pack our bags with a change of clothes and Kit Kats we’d nicked from Woolworths or mini-packs of Frosties, and put on our trainers and go. And maybe we’d get there, and sleep on the beach by the pier, and the police would come and pick us up, and we’d be put in Pindown.
The third time, they let me out after a week of Pindown. I was quiet and sensible and sat at the table and wrote down the wrong things I’d done. But Aimee was kept there for fifteen days, and when she came out she had a chest infection. They’d taken the fuse out of the fire because she’d been stroppy, she said.
I woke that night to see her sitting up in bed, the bedspread pulled up to her chin, her fists all bone, clasping it so tightly. The orange light through the curtains made her skin look sickly.
‘I’m going to tell,’ she said, through her coughs. ‘What it’s like here. What he does, that motherfucking bastard.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t. You can’t.’
‘Just watch me,’ she said.
Her social worker from the Civic Centre, Jonny Leverett, was a pallid man who wore heavy-metal sweatshirts. The next time he came, he took her out in his Skoda, and they were gone for hours.
‘Well?’ I said, when she came back.
‘I told him,’ she said. Tearing at the skin at the sides of her fingernails. ‘They’ll have to do something now. They’ll have to come and get Megadeath. They’ll have to lock him up. Life would be too short for him.’
Two
