when Lewis started coughing with the effort of laughing, George bent him over before patting him on the back until he got his breath back. Sometime later I knew George would suddenly stop playing, stand to attention in the silence like a rabbit hearing a fox and listen to the sound of a train that no one else could yet hear until it rumbled past on the railway line running beside the cemetery. George was so sensitive to noise that when we were out for a walk he’d scream each time a car went by, as if a juggernaut was rushing by instead of a Ford Fiesta.
A few months passed like that – George and I going up to the cemetery, sometimes with Lewis, sometimes just the two of us, while I sat and wondered what the future held for us now my dream of being a taxi driver had come to nothing. After doing the Knowledge, I’d just needed to pass a driving test in central London to get my full licence, but I’d failed twice while Dad was still alive and I could not face taking it again after he died. He’d always encouraged me to keep going, but I could hear him laughing and see his face every time I got into a cab. It was too much, so I’d given up on all that hard work. I felt like a complete failure. I was no good as a mum and now I was a quitter too.
So time went on, as it does, the earth settled on Dad’s grave and when a huge dip appeared, I almost got arrested after deciding to lay some turf on it as the sun went down one day. Within a few minutes, a couple of coppers had arrived – black helmets on their heads and radios crackling – and it had taken some convincing to make them realise that I wasn’t up to no good. But apart being suspected of grave robbing, I liked going to the cemetery because it was somewhere peaceful to go and think.
However much I did, though, I still felt as though I was stuck in treacle. As George played, the thoughts would tumble through my head. The life I was giving George was a world away from the one that Dad and Mum had given Boy, Nob, Tor and me as children. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to find a way to make things better. I had been taught to earn my way in life and even had with my own small florist’s shop, where I’d worked seven days a week before George was born, but I’d given it up when I became a mum. Now the Knowledge had come to nothing, I didn’t know what to do. It all made me feel so useless and as the months passed without Dad, I’d sit and wonder whether I was ever going to be able to change things for George and me.
But the more I thought about it, the more I knew one thing: I couldn’t let my unhappiness get the better of me. It was time for a fresh start.
George was four when he began school in September 2000 and it was one of those days when I looked at him and wondered what I was making such a fuss about. With his big blue eyes and blond hair, he looked perfect as I dressed him in a bright red sweatshirt and black trousers. I felt sure that school was just what he needed now we’d moved on to a new estate, which seemed so much nicer than our last. It was a new beginning for both of us.
As I say, I’m a dreamer. It took only a few weeks for me to be called in to talk to the teachers.
‘We think George might have hearing problems,’ one said.
‘He doesn’t respond when we call his name,’ another told me.
‘He can’t seem to understand commands,’ someone else piped up. ‘If we tell the children we’re going to sit down in a few minutes George does it immediately, and when we get them into a circle for story time, he crawls backwards and lies under a bench with his hands over his ears.’
In a way I was almost relieved to hear what the teachers had to say, because they were the first professionals to spend any proper time with George and they could see there was a problem, which was what I’d been trying to tell people for years. But I also felt scared, because however much you can cope with things when they’re hidden at the back of the cupboard, they feel much bigger the moment they’re brought out into the light. As George was referred for sight and hearing tests at a local clinic, I told myself that I could not be fearful: I was 27 years old, a grown-up, and if he really did have problems, the sooner they were identified, the sooner they could be sorted out.
Meanwhile, I kept myself to myself on the new estate after all that had happened on the old one and the first thing that needed sorting out was our new home, because the old woman who’d had the flat before us had lived there with 13 cats and the place was crawling with fleas. While the council came in and sprayed the rooms, George and I had stayed with Mum, and then it was all hands on deck when we finally moved in. I might have thought I was Miss Independent but I still needed my family to help decorate.
I’d learned young, after all, that you have to make the most of your home. ‘Sides, top, then front,’ my nan Doris would tell me as she pointed at a wardrobe before handing me a massive bottle of polish and a duster when she got me over to her house every Saturday morning to help her clean. Usually I did a good job, but then came the day when I was about 10 and she suddenly hit me across the back of the head without a word of warning.
‘Stay still!’ Nan screamed as I saw stars. ‘Don’t move. I’m going to get your mother.’
She ran next door, came back with Mum and together they peered at my head.
‘Look at them,’ said Nan.
‘It’s those kids from down the road who gave them to her,’ said Mum.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘You’ve got headlice,’ Mum told me and I started to cry.
I was back to normal after a good shampoo with the nit lotion and Nan let me back in her house to help clean it again. But all those years of dusting had taught me the power of elbow grease, and that was what I used in our new flat. Soon the kitchen was painted terracotta, the hallway white, my bedroom pink and George’s room yellow. I didn’t just decorate the inside, though. Our third-floor flat had a balcony overlooking a field with a willow tree in it, so I made the most of the view by covering the balcony floor in rainbow stripes, painting the walls green and putting flowers in pots. Standing on the balcony blowing bubbles at George, because he could never get enough of them, I’d look at the shed roofs below and wonder if a bit of turf would make them look better. You can’t even grow grass on a roof, but I never know when to stop, do I?
Real life came back with a bang, though, whenever I left the flat with George, because some days getting him to school could take up to an hour. He’d bite me or cling on to railings as we walked, screech and shout, or stare at the soldiers standing at the gates of the local army barracks and refuse to be moved. It was such a battle that I often took him in a pushchair, and as I bumped it down the stairs, I began meeting the woman who lived in the flat below ours. I wasn’t quite sure what she made of me, because our walls were paper thin and George made a lot of noise, while the only thing I knew about her was that she loved vacuuming so much that she seemed to be at it all day, every day.
The woman looked about the same age as me and had two children: a little boy around four, like George, and a girl who was a bit older. Even though we smiled as we passed on the stairs and she looked normal enough, I didn’t stop to chat because I’d just moved from a place where a lot of people were either falling down drunk or stealing from washing lines, however innocent they looked.
But one day, the woman looked at me as I struggled up a step with George.
‘Disgusting, isn’t it?’ she said as she looked at the grey concrete walls of the stairway.
They were covered in graffiti and the smell of wee wafted up from the corridor below because people were always peeing in it.
‘Horrible,’ I said.
‘I’m Michelle,’ the woman replied with a smile.
‘I’m
