He had handed me the prescription without a moment’s hesitation, then turned back to his screen to prepare himself for his next patient. Moments later I stood in the car park of the pharmacy gazing at the label on the bottle in my hand. Gazing at the warnings it contained. Sleeping pills. Takers of life, in the wrong circumstances. When I held them, I felt a strange, hollow excitement. They would give me back my life.
When I began my life in Australia – my real life, rather than the period in which I had merely existed – Kathleen persuaded me to see her doctor and ask for something to help me sleep. I was still plagued with nightmares to the extent that sometimes I was afraid to lay my head on the pillow. In sleep I would see Letty’s terrified face, hear her screaming my name, and I prayed for oblivion. The first remedy the Australian doctor offered was those pills, albeit under a different name. When I registered what they were, on the prescription he offered me, I took a faltering step towards him and passed out cold.
I was told by people who knew no better that I came from a broken home, but it never felt broken to me. I never felt the lack of a father: my mother was enough parent for anyone, blessed with an indomitable spirit, fierce with maternal love and pride, determined that I should escape her own mistakes with a decent education. She shepherded and chivvied me, scolded and adored me, and even though we were patently neither a rich nor a conventional family I never felt the lack of anything. Even by childhood standards I sensed that my lot was a good one. My mother worked incessantly, low-paid part-time work that kept me close by her. Often she worked as I slept, and now I wonder how she managed to raise a smile – and a cooked meal – for me at breakfast.
We lived in a cottage in an area that was half suburban sprawl, half village a little way out of London, rented to Mum by a woman she had once worked for. I had twenty-odd friends within half a mile of my house and the freedom within that half-mile to do pretty well what I wanted. Twice, during my childhood, we flew to Australia, which made me an expert among my peers on global matters. One day, Mum promised me, we’d go and live there with Aunt Kathleen. But I don’t think she wanted to be close to my grandparents. She never had much good to say about them. And when my grandfather died she found other reasons – her latest job, my schooling, a man she had grown fond of – not to uproot and move to the other side of the world.
And then it was too late. My mum’s cancer was shockingly efficient. She had lost weight – a source of pride, then concern when she discovered it was not due solely to her careful monitoring of calories. The latest ‘nice man’ – a divorcé who lived an hour away by train – found excuses not to visit and then, as the treatment became messy and unpleasant, as her emotional demands grew greater – melted away. Perhaps stung by his disappearance, independent to the last, she did not tell Kathleen she was dying. I found out afterwards she had sent a letter that would arrive after her death. In it, she told Kathleen I was not to be pressured to go to Australia but asked her to be there for me wherever I wanted to be. It was the one badly judged decision of her maternal career.
There is never a good age at which to lose your mother, but my seventeen-year-old self was spectacularly ill prepared to face life alone. I watched my proud, glamorous mother shrink, then diminish. I saw her appetite for life disappear, buried in morphine and confusion. At first I did my best to care for her, and then, as the nurses took over and I understood what she had not been brave enough to tell me, I withdrew. I told myself it was not happening, and as my mother’s friends whispered behind their hands at how brave, how capable I was, I sat at home alone, stared at the pitiless bills, and wished I had a life that belonged to anyone but myself.
My mother died one dark, painful night in November. I was with her, and told her she should stop apologising, that I would be fine, that I knew I was loved. ‘There’s money in my blue bag,’ she told me hoarsely, in one of her last moments of lucidity. ‘Use it to go to Kathleen. She’ll look after you.’ But when I looked, there was less than a hundred pounds – not enough to get me to Scotland, let alone Australia. I suspect pride kept me from telling Kathleen of my plight. Perhaps predictably I went off the rails. I left school and got a job stacking shelves, then discovered that this would not keep me in my mother’s house. The rent arrears built up until my mother’s friend told me, apologetically, that she could not afford for me to stay. She offered me a position as a live-in nanny, and was relieved when I told her I was going to stay with a friend.
My life became chaotic. I sold bits of my mother’s jewellery, although what little she’d had was worth barely enough to keep me in food. I lived in a squat, discovered nightclubs and worked as a barmaid, trying to ensure that I was drunk enough when I left each night that I didn’t have to think about how lonely I was when I got home. For a while I was a Goth, and when I was twenty-one I got pregnant by one of the many men who passed through that squat in Victoria, a giant of a man whose last name I never knew but who made a great lentil stew, stroked my hair and called me ‘baby’ on one of the nights when I had enough money to get very, very drunk.
Once I realised I was pregnant, everything changed. I don’t know if it was hormones, or just the inheritance of my mother’s good sense, but a self-preservation instinct took over. I thought of what I had avoided thinking about for four years, and what my mother would have said if she could see where I was. I never considered getting rid of the baby. I was glad that I would have a family of my own once again, someone who was linked to me by blood.
So, I stripped my hair of its violent dyes, got a job working as a mother’s help, and when Hannah was born, I was employed by friends of that family in a picture-framing shop. They were happy for me to work until half past one when I had to pick up Hannah from nursery. I wrote to Kathleen occasionally, and sent her photographs, and she always wrote back promptly, enclosing a few pounds ‘to buy something for the baby’, telling me she was proud of me for the life I had created for myself. It was not an easy life, or a financially stable one, but it was fairly happy. I think, as Kathleen used to tell me, my mother would have been pleased to see it. Then one day Steven Villiers came in and asked for a moulded gilt frame with a dark green mount for a print he had bought. And my life, as I had created it, changed for ever.
I was lonely, you see. I was lucky, I knew, to have a family who were prepared to tolerate me and a baby, but I used to watch them around the kitchen table, joking with each other in front of the television, the children’s feet prodding their benign, grubby-jumpered father. I even envied their arguments. I would have loved someone to argue with.