We had yet another new dog, Sissy, a small crossbreed terrier that Barbara was training up. She heard me creeping down the stairs and yapped at the kitchen door, signalling to Barbara and Julie that I was around. Barbara whipped open the door, stony-faced. I looked past her to Julie, who was sitting at the table dabbing her eyes with tissues. The two children were out in the garden, playing with a ball. Barbara controlled herself in front of Julie. I could see it was an effort and she hissed through tight lips, ‘Yes?’
I just stood gawping at Julie. Why was she here? Barbara answered my unspoken question: ‘Julie will be staying. You will have to sleep in our room on the spare bed and Kevin will sleep on the sofa. You can go and change the sheets.’
I dutifully trotted off to do my household chores. Julie hadn’t noticed me, or even looked up or smiled; apparently she was too deep in her grief. I had no idea what had happened, but I knew better than to question Barbara and make a scene in front of Julie.
Since the day we’d gatecrashed what had been Julie’s husband’s birthday party, I had heard nothing from her. I had written her letters – without Barbara knowing (she would have killed me) – begging her to come and get me. Although I didn’t know Julie, her husband had actually been kind to me that day (even though he had later rejected me through social services). Their house looked nice, with pretty clothes and toys, and there was food – lots of it! The children also had looked clean and happy. But I had had no answer, and as the days and weeks developed into months I assumed I would never hear from her again. Now, a year later, as I ripped off the old sheets from Kevin’s horrible stained bed and put on clean ones with crisp hospital corners, I was struck how strange it was that I was in the house with my two mothers. Two mothers! One, my adopted, grizzled grey witch of a mother who didn’t love me (actively hated me, rather) and punished me at every turn; the other, a pink, fluffy floozy of a mother who didn’t know me, had given me away, and didn’t seem that interested in me at all – yet. What a situation! How was I to deal with this while going to a school I hated and being kept home to do housework most of the time?
After a day or two, I found out that Julie had left her husband. This was her second marriage, she said. She cried and cried, dabbed at her eyes with Kleenex and drank gallons of tea.
‘Why are men so mean to me?’ she sobbed. ‘What have I ever done to deserve this?’
The two children, Diana, who was eight, and John, six, were complete strangers to me. We were all shy and awkward with each other. Nevertheless, I showed them the chickens, telling them they were all named after the Osmonds, my favourite group from my younger childhood. They liked playing with Sissy, who was still a pup. Then I took them to the orchard and they were fascinated by the caravans. We waved to Sean and the Polish people, who waved back. They thought it was really strange to have these people living there.
Meanwhile, I had to sleep in the main bedroom with Ian and Barbara, which made me feel so scared that I hardly slept at all. The single bed in their room had all Barbara’s dolls on it. The day Julie arrived I had to go and get permission from Barbara to move them so I could make up the bed. Julie was so distressed she didn’t notice this.
Barbara snapped, ‘Don’t break anything,’ so I was ultra-careful transferring them one by one to the top of a chest of drawers in their bedroom. There were two teddy bears, Edward and Duncan; a blonde doll with a china face in a lacy christening dress, and loads of others, plastic and rubber ones, with dark hair, orange curls, blonde plaits, knitted clothes and fancy outfits. Barbara adored her dolls and I sometimes peeped through the door and saw her playing with them on the spare bed. She would talk to them and then rock one in her arms like a baby, whispering that she loved them. I saw her singing lullabies to them and calling them ‘mummy’s little angels’. It made me shiver to think about it, especially as she was so nasty to me. One time she caught me spying on her and shouted: ‘What are you looking at, you nosy little bitch?’
Julie stayed for quite a while. At first I thought, Yippee, I can get to know my real mum. But I soon found this was a very difficult task. She talked about herself all the time, but it was a strange kind of talk. She constantly looked in the mirror, or put on lipstick, fluffed her hair or changed her clothes. She would go out to the shops and come back with loads of bags of new stuff, then put it on and twirl around the hall and living room, doing a fashion show, giggling in her high-pitched, breathy voice. Short mini-skirts, way too short for her; frilly blouses, very low cut. She would get her hair bleached and permed and come back with lots of new shoes and jewellery. I watched all this, amazed.
I had imagined we would sit down and talk about things. She might ask me about school or be interested in who I was. Not at all. I wanted to show her my favourite drawings, but didn’t know how. I wanted to ask her questions – especially about my father – but never found the words. Barbara was being less aggressive with me, and even Kevin was behaving himself a bit more. Having Julie there, in the daytime at least, meant they were not so openly bullying towards me.
After a while, Julie started going out every night. She was supposed to be looking for somewhere to move to. She’d also have to find some kind of job (the mention of which made her cry). Apparently she and Brian had fallen out over how much money she spent and she said, ‘This time it’s really over,’ hinting they’d fallen out before. This was her second marriage (did that include my dad? I wondered). She’d come to us, she said, as she had nowhere else to go.
When she sat and talked about this, she would sometimes look at me and say, ‘Of course, you can come and stay with us when things are sorted.’ My heart would leap. But
then she would go back to talking about her problems and nothing more would be said about it. I wanted to ask her when but I didn’t know how. She never mentioned it again, either. Her children seemed quite sweet, but they were close to each other, and only really spoke to one another. I was a stranger, although I was a half-sibling, and, I guess, I looked dirty and not very nice, so they kept their distance from me.
I snuck out whenever I could to talk to Sean about it, and he would feed me milk and biscuits and shake his head. Then he’d put on some Irish music and we’d have a little sing together, or we’d put some seeds in his tiny garden round the caravan and water them with a silver watering can. Or I’d draw something with him while he drank a mug of tea. Then I’d come back to the house with my two strange mothers, but feeling quite a bit better.
Then the rows began. Julie was going out every night now, and coming back very late. She was visiting a local pub and had hooked up with someone – a taxi driver called Vernon. I saw her dress up and go out every night in a different outfit, and then I would hear the commotion when she came back and stomped up the stairs.
Barbara would leap out of bed and shout, ‘What time of night do you call this? This isn’t a hotel, you know!’ Barbara would slam back into the bedroom, fizzing like a firework.
I was also more and more spooked by sleeping in the same room as Ian and Barbara. She refused to have the curtains closed, as she liked the light. This meant it was hard to sleep. They slept far apart in bed, one on either side, facing away from each other. They never touched. It was such an odd atmosphere. I would lie there in the gloomy room, hearing him snore, and watch the dolls sitting on the cupboard with their waxy faces and shiny, spooky eyes staring right back at me. I lay there at night thinking about the fact that I had two mothers in the house, but neither wanted to know me. Neither seemed to love me. I hadn’t found out anything about my father, as Julie would never sit down and talk to me properly. She didn’t seem interested in getting to know me, and avoided me most of the time. She was only affectionate with Diana and John. They seemed not to want to get to know me, either, which was sad. I was desperate to know more about where I had come from, why I had been sent away – especially to someone like Barbara – but there never seemed to be a time or a place to ask.
Occasionally Julie would say things about me going on holiday with them or visiting their house, but it was so vague. I would latch on to it, and then it was never mentioned again. I hoped she might mean it, but something inside me made me not really trust her.
Things finally came to a head when Barbara lost her temper in her usual volcanic way, becoming utterly furious with Julie. The row blew up one evening when she was putting on her lipstick in the hall mirror.
‘You’re not going out again!’ spat Barbara, standing behind her. ‘That’s every night this week!’ It sounded like she was talking to me, rather than Julie.
Julie stopped, mid-pout, and looked back at Barbara in the mirror. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Where the bloody hell are you going every night?’ snapped Barbara. ‘You’re using me like a babysitting service! This isn’t a sodding hotel!’ I watched this from a safe distance, behind the upstairs banisters.
‘You’re not my bloody mother,’ said Julie, affronted. ‘I can go out if I want.’
At this, Barbara went red and exploded. ‘Right, that’s it! You’re out, all of you.’
Julie nearly dropped her pink lipstick. Her mouth opened like a goldfish (I could see it in the mirror). ‘What, now?’
‘Yes, now. Out!’
I could see the blind fury on Barbara’s scarlet face and I scuttled back into the toilet and peeked out. Barbara was suddenly stomping up the stairs to my room, where Julie had been sleeping, and started throwing things into her bags. Julie hobbled up the stairs behind her in her stilettos and I could hear the two women shouting, and then fighting, in my old bedroom.
‘Leave that alone!’ I could hear Julie shrieking.
‘Get out!’ shouted Barbara. ‘Now!’