took off Dad’s stripy apron. “Did my wild Australian boy leave this?” she said, dangling it. “I bet that’s all he did leave! I never saw the domestic side of him, I must say! When did he nick off, the little mongrel?”
I was shocked rigid. She was his mum, after all. Mums are supposed to be on their kids’ side. “Two years ago,” I mumbled.
That shook her.
“Two years… And I never knew! Any excuses?”
“No. Him and Mum had a last row. He slammed out and that was it.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“Yeah, we do. Living with his girlfriend in Greville Drive.”
“Where’s Greville Drive?”
“Ten minutes’ bus ride from here.”
“So how come he sent me a postcard from Thailand?”
I nearly dropped a mug. Thailand? My mouth went all dry.
Grandma went on, “It just about made me throw up from shame.”
I said, “Please – uh – Grandma – Glendine, don’t tell Mum. Greville Drive was bad enough.”
“I bet!” she said. “When I saw that postcard I thought, sounds like he’s living it up. That’s when I decided to pack up and come over and see how you fellas were getting on.” Well, we’re not, I thought. We’re in the crap. We’ve got no money, Mum’s working her socks off at the checkout and everything’s horrible. What can you do about it?
Then I remembered those ten-quid tips. And the posh luggage. And the way she dressed. I couldn’t help it – I thought, She’s really rich. I wondered why Dad never mentioned that. He never had any readies. Whenever he had a job, we didn’t see much money from it. Most of it went on booze. And dope, if you ask me. We didn’t know that for sure, and he always flat denied it, but there’s a difference between the way people get when they’re pissed and when they’re stoned.
“How do you think he managed to go to Thailand?” Grandma was asking.
After a bit, I said, “I think his girlfriend had some money.”
My mum had called her a little slapper, among other things I won’t repeat. But Greville Drive is quite posh. Compared to our road, anyway. It was houses, not flats. She most likely put up the cash. She was probably in Phoo-kuk or whatever the place is called with him right this minute, lying on a beach wearing three triangles of lace tied on with string, under a bunch of palm trees. Thinking of this made me want to throw up. Not from shame, though. From rage. Whatever problems I have with my mum, she doesn’t deserve to be treated like that.
Grandma Glendine settled in with us.
I hated her being there, but not because of her so much. It was because I had to share Mum’s room. And Mum not only smokes – she snores.
“Mum! Roll over!” I’d shout when her snores were driving me wild. The most infuriating thing was that Mum simply refused to believe that she snored.
“It’s lies, I don’t! Dad would’ve told me.”
“Probably too stoned to notice.” I shouldn’t have said that. She just turned her back and her shoulders started to shake. I knew she was still crazy for him.
Somehow Gran – I’d decided to call her just Gran – arranged her things in my room. She used all that luggage as extra furniture. The trunk turned into a table. Gran wrote loads of postcards on it, all touristy pictures of London, beefeaters at the Tower, guards at Buckingham Palace, that kind of thing. Even some of Princess Diana. She said a funny thing about her, that I should have taken more notice of at the time, but I didn’t.
“I remember exactly where I was when I heard she’d died. I was skinning a kangaroo.”
I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on that. I just thought it was a joke or something. I sometimes think I’m not very bright.
The other suitcases were piled up and she stood things on them. She’d brought lots of interesting things with her.
There were postcards of pictures all painted in dots. I couldn’t make them out until she explained them. They were painted by Australian natives and were all in code. A fire was a bunch of red dots, for instance, and white dotted lines were trips their ancestors made in something called the Dreamtime, across the outback. That’s the middle of Australia where it’s all desert. And there were special kinds of dots for animals or their footprints, or curvy coloured lines for snake tracks. The animals were wonderful weird kinds. I loved those postcards and Gran gave me some to stick up on my side of Mum’s dressing-table mirror.
Then there were some wooden animals with burn marks on them. Big lizardy things called goannas, and snakes (I wouldn’t even touch those. God how I hated snakes, not that I’d ever seen a live one). She had miniature wooden things like long bowls and something called a throwing stick, for spears, she said. She gave me a boomerang, only where would I have space to try throwing it? She showed me a picture of a didgeridoo, a musical instrument, which is a long, thick pipe. It gets hollowed out by termites, and it’s so heavy you have to rest the far end, the end away from your mouth, on the ground. She told me women aren’t allowed to play it because it’s symbolic, you can guess what of!
She showed off her clothes. They were sort of naff in a way, but rich-naff, not like Mum’s shell suit that I told her not to buy at the Oxfam shop (but of course she did). It’s a sort of metal-pink. I die every time she goes out in it.
Gran took us out. Not on week nights, she was very hot on me getting to bed early so I wouldn’t be tired at school, but on Fridays and Saturdays. She took us for meals out, and not at the local dumps, either, except once we took her to one of the African cafés for the experience. I took her around the market a couple of times, she said she loved it, which was quite something, because it can be fun in the summer, but it’s pretty dismal in the rain. Mainly though, she wanted to treat us. Once we went to a Holiday Inn right up West and had a really swish meal with proper waiters. That was the night she took us to see the show at the Hippodrome. It was amazing. I’d never seen a live act before. She took us to loads of good movies too. We took taxis and minicabs everywhere, she wouldn’t ride the buses or trains.
She talked. How she talked! And she wanted me to talk, too. When I came home from school she asked me to tell her my whole day. I was used to slumping in front of the telly after school to chill out. Now I had to articulate. She soon spotted I hated school. She never mentioned the truant-cop, but I think she’d heard, or maybe Mum had ratted on me.
“It’s really bad not to like school, sweetie,” she said. (By now I’d lost count of all her pet names for me.) “You have to get your priorities right. School’s a top priority at your age.”
“It’s so boring.”
“It’s up to teachers to make learning fun.”
