Don't You Love Your Daddy? (5 page)

‘Sally, you shouldn’t be in here. Go back to bed,’ my grandmother said, but no one moved to take me out of the room. ‘Your mummy’s not very well,’ she continued. ‘The doctor’s on his way.’

‘Mummy,’ I wailed, wishing she would open her eyes and scold me for being out of bed, then take me back to my room – but she didn’t move.

I looked around at the grim adult faces for reassurance and saw that my father’s face was pale while Pete’s was stained with a flush that crept from his neck and all over his face. His fists clenched and unclenched and his breathing came in short shallow gasps. His distress communicated itself to me.

Before I had time to take in any more, I heard a siren and blue lights showed through our curtains. There was a flurry of activity as my father rushed to the door and let in two men in uniform, who came into the room.

One bent over my mother, lifted her eyelids and placed two fingers on her neck and wrist. The other picked up the empty pill bottle on the table and asked questions I didn’t understand. I heard my father telling them about the empty brown bottles and that she’d been depressed.

‘Have to get her to the hospital now, so she can have her stomach pumped,’ the one who was bending over my mother said tersely. I watched with alarm as my mother was placed on a stretcher. A blanket was tucked around her, and then they carried her out. I rushed to the front door and watched as they put her in the ambulance, and my father climbed in beside her. Then the doors were shut, the siren sounded and, with blue lights flashing, the vehicle sped off. Despite the lateness of the hour the street was full of curious neighbours, who looked at Pete and me with pity as they speculated in whispers on what had happened.

As the ambulance disappeared from view I threw myself on to the pavement and screamed. I felt my nana’s arms going round me and trying to lift me but it was Pete who carried me inside and placed me on the settee where my mother had lain. They both leaned over me, making soothing sounds, and my nana told me that my mother was going to be all right. But no amount of reassurance could stop my howls of fear.

It was not until I was too exhausted to cry any more that, with my grandmother’s arms around me, I finally fell asleep and was carried back to my bed.

My father returned in the morning, grim-faced, pale and tired.

‘Your mother’s going to be all right,’ he said, to Pete and me.

‘Where is she?’ I asked, and was told that she had to stay in hospital for a few days until she was better.

I didn’t believe him. People who were taken away in ambulances didn’t come back. I knew that because I had seen one of our neighbours, an old man, carried out of his house on a stretcher and he had never returned. Instead, a few days later, I had seen his wife, dressed in black and leaning on the arm of one of her sons, getting into a large car. Later, other cars had arrived filled with black-clad people. I was told the old woman had ‘lost her husband’ and had been at something called a ‘funeral’.

My nana stayed at our house that day, and after he’d had some sleep and a meal, my father returned to the hospital.

After my father had left I started to bombard my brother with questions. But Pete just told me I was too young to understand and refused to say anything more on the matter.

It was not until I was two years older that he told me more about what had happened on that night. That evening I had been in the lounge and witnessed yet another of the frequent rows between my parents. My father had returned home from work to find my mother smelling of drink and with no dinner ready for him. Not only were the breakfast dishes still in the sink but Billy, in a dirty nappy, had been left to cry in his cot. ‘What have you been doing all day, Laura?’ he yelled. ‘Look at this house! It’s a slum! I work and work and work, and then I come home to find you just lying there and nothing to eat.’

Lost in a fog of drink and depression, she gazed blankly at him and said the day had slipped away without her noticing.

The row between them developed from there with each having a different agenda. He wanted her to see how furious he was at her neglect, and she was trying to divert his attention from the fact that she had been drinking.

‘You spend money like water,’ he shouted. ‘Do you think it grows on trees? You just spend, spend, spend!’

‘Things are expensive, these days, David,’ she said.

‘Drink is, you mean! Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing with your housekeeping money?’

She tried to deny it but we all struggled to understand what she said because her speech was so slurred.

His anger became directed at Pete then, not just at her. ‘Could you not have tidied up?’ he yelled, when he saw that the sink was a swamp of dirty dishes left soaking in scummy water, and that on every surface ashtrays brimmed with cigarette stubs. ‘And what about your baby brother and Sally? Could you not have looked after them either?’

‘Not my job, and I’ve got my homework to do,’ was Pete’s defiant answer.

More shouting followed, and I stared at my feet, just waiting for it to finish. Eventually, once his rage was spent, my father stomped out of the house saying he was going to spend his hard-earned cash at the fish-and-chip shop. When he returned, the three of us ate in the kitchen while my mother lay silently on the settee with her face to the wall.

Pete and I, knowing that the truce would only last until the food had been consumed, disappeared to our rooms as soon as we had eaten. Neither parent came to see if I was all right and I put myself to bed without bothering to wash or clean my teeth. Once under the bedclothes I fell into a troubled sleep until my mother’s screams woke me.

It was some time after that when Pete, unable to sleep and feeling guilty at having slunk off to his room, had gone to see if she was all right. Expecting a tear-sodden mother he had instead found an unconscious one. Seeing that my father didn’t appear to know what to do, he had phoned my grandmother, and on her instructions, he had called the ambulance while my father had just stood helplessly by.

After her first admission to hospital, my father and his family were forced to acknowledge that my mother’s behaviour was not all her fault. The doctor had told my father that she was clinically depressed and that the drinking aggravated it. Depression was an illness, he had explained, which could be controlled by medication once they found out the best type for her. He went on to say that she was in a place where she would receive the right help, so there was no reason why she should not make a full recovery.

During that time it was decided that Billy would stay at my nana’s house where she and my aunt could look after him. Pete and I would remain in our home, but every morning on the way to work my father would take me to Nana’s house.

My mother was kept in that special hospital for six weeks. To me, a few months short of my fifth birthday, it seemed like a lifetime and, convinced that my mother was never coming home, I was inconsolable. When she saw my gloomy little face my grandmother would try to cheer me up. ‘Your mother will be home soon,’ she told me reassuringly, several times a day. ‘She has to rest before she’ll be ready for visitors,’ she would say, when I pleaded to be taken to visit her. I knew that my grandmother and my father had visited so why could I not go as well?

Eventually when my grandmother realized that until I saw my mother I was not going to believe that she was getting better, she agreed to take me to see her. She bought a posy of flowers for me to take, and put me in the blue dress my mother had given me on my birthday, with the silver bracelet I had insisted on wearing. I sat anxiously next to her on the bus. I clutched the posy so tightly that the green liquid from the stems splashed on to my dress as I stared out of the window, willing the journey to go faster.

‘You have to remember that your mummy is very tired, Sally,’ Nana kept telling me, but I was too excited at the thought of seeing her to pay much attention to that.

As soon as we entered the hospital my nostrils were filled with the smell that pervaded every corner: a mixture of disinfectant, cabbage, body odour and flowers; a smell that, ever since, I have associated with illness. I wanted to run and find my mother but the yards of shiny corridors and the sheer size of the building were intimidating. Instead I took my grandmother’s hand and held it very tightly.

‘Here we are! This is your mother’s section,’ she said, when we had walked to the far end of the corridor. A nurse unlocked the metal door and we entered a different area. Still holding my hand tightly, Nana led me into another corridor where we passed rooms furnished with rows of white-covered beds and an office in which several nurses were sitting. Passing them, we entered a large sitting room, painted a dull putty colour.

I saw my mother straight away: her hair was tied neatly back from her face and she was wearing one of my favourite outfits: a long denim skirt with a cream lacy jumper. She was sitting in an armchair by the window. I wanted to run to her but suddenly I felt shy.

‘Come now, child,’ said my grandmother, giving my hand a gentle squeeze. ‘Give your mummy the flowers.’

Suddenly tongue-tied, I held them out and my mother smiled. ‘Sally!’ she said, as she took them from me.

I searched her face for the mother I loved. I wanted her arms to go round me and for her to hug and kiss me. I wanted to hear her tell me how much she had missed me and how she was looking forward to coming home. But instead she just took the flowers and placed them on the small table beside the chair. This woman, who looked at me with a faintly puzzled expression, was not the mother who smiled and laughed, or the one who turned from me with tears running down her cheeks. It was as though a stranger had invaded her body, leaving a woman who sat hunched in her chair just staring vacantly at us. She started a sentence but let the words tail off and looked around in a bewildered way, as if she was wondering who had uttered them.

My grandmother did something that surprised me. She took my mother’s hand and spoke to her almost as though she was a child. She told her how much I had wanted to see her and how I had wanted to look pretty and bring flowers. My grandmother chattered on about the baby, how he was growing and how he had cut his first tooth.

A pretty young nurse, seeing my grandmother and me, came over, her starched uniform crackling as she walked. ‘So is this your little girl, Laura?’ she asked my vacant mother brightly. ‘She looks just like you.’ For a few seconds, there was some animation in my mother’s face as she told the nurse my name and how old I was. But I noticed that her hands twisted and pulled continuously at her skirt and that her legs and fingers were trembling.

The nurse took the flowers, arranged them in a vase and put them on a table near us. ‘They’re pretty,’ my mother said, and gave another distant smile.

After an hour a bell rang and my grandmother decided it was time to leave. ‘Laura,’ she said gently, ‘we have to go now. Give Sally a hug.’ My mother’s arms dutifully went round me.

I was almost relieved when we left. On the way home I felt such overwhelming misery for what had become of the mother I loved – I wanted her back.

The following Sunday, before the church service began, my grandmother took me to Sunday school. ‘There will be plenty of other children there for you,’ she said, as she pushed me through the door of the church hall.

The short curvaceous teacher smiled at me as she showed me where to sit and explained that she was going to read a Bible story to the class.

Over the next few Sundays I heard how Jesus had walked on water, fed a multitude of people with one loaf and a few fishes, made sick people well and saved a fallen woman. The word ‘miracle’ was repeated; a word that I tucked firmly into my mind.

Prayer, we were told, could help make miracles happen. When I asked my grandmother what that meant, she told me Jesus listened to every child’s prayers so if we really wanted something good to happen we could ask Him at night when we prayed.

What I wished for more than anything else was my mother, the one I loved who smiled at me, to return home and my skin to be unblemished. So at night I asked Jesus to listen to my prayers. ‘Everything you say in prayer travels straight up to heaven,’ my grandmother had assured me. But when, the next morning, my livid patches were still there and there was no news of my mother’s return, I wondered if He had heard me or, even worse, had decided to ignore my pleas.

As the days passed, nightmares invaded my sleep and my eczema spread. The weeks that my mother was away seemed endless. Our home was so quiet without her and Billy. Pete was different too: he had ceased to do his homework on the kitchen table; instead he went to a friend’s house after school and returned home long after supper time.

My grandmother tried to keep my mind off my mother’s absence and read me stories, but she couldn’t do what my mother had done, making them up and putting me in the centre of the story. When she took me to the park she tired quickly when I wanted to be pushed on the swing, and at her house, she didn’t watch the television programmes that my mother and I had enjoyed together.

‘Sally, shall we bake gingerbread men?’ she would say, in an effort to put a smile on my face, but the tears would seep down my cheeks. The smell when she took them out of the oven reminded me of my mother.