Cat Step, page 21
He did something strange then. He lunged towards June and put his arms around her neck.
‘Forgive me, Mum,’ he said. ‘Forgive me. I did a terrible thing. I should never have hurt you. I can’t get it out of my head. I’ll go to my grave regretting what I did to you. I’ve had the counselling. I’m saying sorry. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
‘It’s all right, Son,’ she said and held him close.
He turned his head from her bosom and looked at me. ‘I’m telling you, from the moment he came to work for me, that boy was slippery. And you can stay away from my mother.’
June sat there with her boy in her arms, patting him lightly, her face stiff yet jubilant. There was nothing else to say. Fuck them. I left them to their embrace and walked out of the cafe and across the road, back to the bus station, back to Lennoxtown.
I think cars are dangerous things that break down and cost too much money to run but when I closed the door and sat inside my own, parked up outside the sheltered housing, I was glad of it to cry in. I felt relieved to be away from that pair, cuddling in the cafe like nothing had ever happened, and I was happy to put my weight onto the steering wheel and feel myself get cold in that cold car. I should have known that June, for all her tough talk, felt the lack of her son like I felt the lack of Robbie. She would want him near her, to feel the heat off his skin: her own boy. She would welcome her body’s sudden exhale, its release of stress and hate and its surge of stupid gulping tenderness.
If Robbie was with me in my car, wouldn’t I question him about what Michael had said, wouldn’t I demand he prove to me his actions were those of a senseless, grieving, gullible, foolish boy and only that, nothing worse, nothing pathological, nothing criminal? And when he told me what I wanted to hear wouldn’t I believe him?
But he wasn’t there and he couldn’t tell me anything and in that cold car it cracked – the accumulation of his stories and my stories and our brief life. Fêlure. To crack. You don’t crack in ballet like you jump or stretch or leap. There is no such thing, no such term.
I was driving to the nursery to pick up Emily and do God knows what when my phone rang. I pulled over. It was Sara. She wanted to meet with Emily and me that afternoon.
‘Will you be home? Do you have a next of kin who could be there too?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘This is all so unnecessary.’
‘We’ll do what we did before,’ she said.
‘Waste our time,’ I said. ‘In that case we might be home, we might not be.’
‘It’s a bit more serious now,’ she said. ‘I would advise you to be home.’
Of course. I was accused of something dangerous. It was an issue of child protection. An accusation made by a woman I’d met once on a street whose ex I’d quite enjoyed shagging.
I knew where she lived. I remember Paul telling me how easy it was to see his daughter even though he’d moved back to his mum’s. He could see her jumping on her trampoline from his old bedroom window, the houses were that close. I told myself I would drive by to see if she was home. I wondered if his car was parked outside the house, if he was building that wall she wanted. Maybe I’d put my head at her window and stare inside to give her a fright. I’d tell her she was a cliché. The jealous, jilted ex. The stupid girl. The stupid pair.
That’s when I turned off Main Street before I should have and went up a narrow road with cars parked on either side and found the house that was similar to Robbie’s gran’s except it was a whole house not a flat. I saw that it had a tidy lawn with a gravel border and a half-built wall and Paul’s car was indeed parked outside.
My first thought was to shove my hand on my car horn, so I did that. I was going on instinct and impulse now like they trained us to do at dance college: go with your instincts, let one action move into another, keep the flow, retain the energy. The horn made a satisfying sound and I hit it again, holding my hand down. I saw Georgia’s face at the side of a blind. I saw Paul’s face at the upstairs window. I turned off the engine and got out of the car and stood at their gate.
‘Paul!’
Nothing.
‘I want to talk to you.’
Nothing. They were inside and gutless, away from their windows, in the sanctity of their sanctimonious house. People from other houses were at their windows now and I shouted again for Paul, for Georgia, for one of them to talk to me.
‘It’s a fucking lie, you know,’ I yelled. ‘Paul, do you even know what you’ve done?’
I picked up a piece of gravel and threw it at their front door.
‘Paul!’
He appeared again at the upstairs window, opened it wide and stuck his head out.
‘What are you playing at?’
‘I’ve lost my job.’
‘What?’
‘Do you know what she’s done?’
‘Who?’
‘Her.’
‘Georgia?’
‘She called social services on me.’
He seemed as if he genuinely didn’t know what I was talking about. I saw the downstairs blinds twitch and it was all the encouragement I needed. I ran up their garden path and got my fist and thumped it against the window and then I stepped back to shout up to Paul.
‘Calm down, Liz.’ He leaned out of the window.
‘I can’t. She’s accused me. And you told her. I did nothing wrong, Paul. I’ve lost my job.’
‘I didn’t know, honestly.’
‘But you told her. Who do you think I am?’
‘It’ll blow over.’
‘It won’t blow over. It’s social services.’
‘Wait a minute, I’m coming out.’ He closed the window but I heard shouting. I heard Georgia saying, No, you won’t go out, and then there was nothing and I was standing waiting, with my heart thudding and my head roaring. I didn’t know what to do next but then Georgia was standing at the downstairs window again, pulling up the blind and opening the window. She stuck her arm out of the window and pointed at me and said, ‘I was right to call social services.’
‘No you weren’t.’
‘You left your daughter on her own in a car park where you couldn’t see her.’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘That’s child cruelty.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘You’re a lazy mother.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Too lazy to take care of your own child.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Too lazy to get a boyfriend of your own.’
‘He came to me.’
‘You took him because he was there and you couldn’t be arsed to look for your own man.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘He’s my daughter’s dad.’
‘You kicked him out, love. You’re the lazy one, the stupid one, acting like you’ve got all the time in the world with your on-off, on-off carry-on. You stupid, jealous, ignorant little girl.’
Oh God, and to think I was a feminist. To think I danced side by side with other girls who knew that if we were all good we all became brilliant. We shone and we tapped and we kicked in sync and stood in a line with our arms crossed around each other’s waists and we turned slowly, kicking high like the Lido girl I could have been, dancing on a stage in Paris, and we did this night after night and here I was throwing insults with a girl I didn’t care about over a man who’d let me down.
‘You’re not welcome here, and neither was your scumbag bastard boyfriend,’ Georgia said and closed the window.
Despair made me pick up a stone and hurl it at their windows. It bounced off the glass, ineffectual, like everything I had tried to do in Lennoxtown. Useless. Bouncing off hardness. So I picked up more stones and threw harder. Fucking double-triple-glazing, hardened glass. Paul would have got a deal from one of his mates to put in the quality stuff.
From behind the window Georgia pointed a finger at me. I couldn’t make out what she was saying so I picked up a brick and hurled it at the window but it was so bloody heavy it didn’t even reach. It scared her though. She stepped away. Good. I found another brick and at last I smashed a window. It made a pleasing sound and the shattered glass had a satisfying look about it. I tried again with another brick but missed. Again and again and again I tried to smash the windows. I kicked over a pot of spring flowers and one of those miniature fir trees and only stopped when Paul came charging out of the front door and grabbed my whole body from behind and pinned my arms with his arms to my sides. It was a pose that without the force and the anger and viewed from a distance might be perceived as loving. That pas de deux again.
‘Enough,’ he said in my ear.
‘You’ve wrecked me,’ I said. ‘I know I’m mad but I’m not bad like that.’
‘I didn’t know she was going to phone social services.’
‘I think you did.’
A police car without its siren but with its blue lights flashing parked outside the house. Paul let go of his grip on me and I see this now as some sort of idiocy or cry for help or plain self destruction but I picked up another brick and held it high above my head. I could have crashed it down anywhere. I could have hurled it against the window, I could have hurled it at Paul, I could have smashed it onto my head, and that’s what I wanted to do right then, I wanted to smash it down onto my own skull and be done with it.
‘Put the brick down,’ the policewoman said.
‘Liz, put it down,’ Paul said.
I could eat the fucking brick. I could swallow the brick and make it tear my insides so I bled and the new pain would take the place of the old pain that was inside me, every hour, every minute, every second of every day. I squeezed the brick hard, wanting to make my hand bleed. And then I threw it at the windows. Fucking smashed one again!
There was a terrible scream from inside the house and then cries – two cries – Georgia calling Paul’s name over and over and a smaller cry, a wailing cry. Georgia came out of the house carrying Holly, their child, and Holly’s face had blood on it, her head was cut, her mouth was wide with wailing pain. Oh my God, I wanted to run to that child and tell her I was sorry sorry sorry. But there was hysteria. There were bats in the air. Paul raced to Holly and took her from Georgia. Georgia flailed her arms and screamed at me, a horrible keening that she had no control over, I know she had no control over. The policeman ran to her side and made a call on his radio. Paul checked Holly’s head. A neighbour jumped over the half-made wall and held out a tea towel which they used to wipe the blood from Holly’s face.
I stood still, my hands at my sides, my fists no longer clenched.
‘I presume you want to press charges?’ the policewoman said.
‘Yes we do,’ said Georgia.
Paul said nothing.
‘We’ll need you to come with us,’ the policewoman said. ‘We are arresting you—’
It was then I realised. ‘What time is it?’
Nobody moved.
‘What time is it?’
Paul checked his watch. The police kept their eyes on me.
‘It’s five to twelve,’ he said.
‘I have to pick up my daughter from nursery.’
‘We need to take you to the station first.’
‘No. I have to pick her up.’
‘We’re not communicating very well, are we?’ the policewoman said. ‘You’ll be coming with us.’
I turned to Paul. ‘Please,’ I begged him. ‘Please can you get her?’
Georgia cut in. ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’
‘Could your mum…?’
‘It would be the least I could do,’ he said to Georgia.
‘No. It’s the worst you could do.’ She held her crying daughter close.
Resisting arrest. It was futile but I tried it. I ran away from them all, in the direction I was sure would lead me to the nursery, and I ran without looking back until I heard the policeman’s heavy steps and felt his hands on me and after that I was as vicious as I could be. I kicked and screamed and punched and threw my body onto the ground, refusing to cooperate when he tried to stand me up. I hurt myself. I have strong legs so I expect I hurt the policeman too. In the end he restrained me and I let him lead me to the police car. We passed my car with its driver’s door wide open, parked far from the kerb where I’d dumped it a few minutes earlier.
They drove me through Lennoxtown to the police station, away from Emily who had been on her visit to the primary school and would soon be waiting for me and wanting to tell me all about it. I was beyond myself. I pictured her standing with her coat and her outdoor shoes on, the name of her buddy held like a jewel on her tongue, the first thing she would tell me. The second thing she would tell me was that I was the last mummy again, always the last mummy.
I don’t like to think about what happened next. Emily tells me the same small details each time I ask. She tells me that she waited until all the mummies and daddies had picked up all the boys and girls and when I didn’t come they let her stay for lunch and when I still didn’t come she stayed in the nursery for the afternoon and after that a lady came to pick her up. The lady had a playhouse in her garden and Emily played in that. I know very little else.
‘What did she give you for tea?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘What was the lady like?’
‘I can’t remember. I missed you. Where were you? Why didn’t you come for me?’
I asked her the same questions and she replied with the same questions of her own.
14.
At the police station they took my name and address and told me to empty my pockets. I gave them a twenty pence piece, my door keys and two hair slides that I’d clipped together after Emily had tugged them from her hair. Some hair was caught in the ends and I wanted to pull it from the slides and keep it. The policewoman took the slides from me. Maybe she thought I’d use them to dig bluntly at my veins or something.
I had no phone to give them because I’d left it in my car and I wondered if Paul would keep it safe for me. It was unlikely; he would be tending to Holly’s cut face and placating her mother. I saw the futility and badness in what I’d done. I saw too the irony in leaving my phone in the car a second time.
‘What about my daughter?’ I asked.
‘We’ve contacted social services and they’ve contacted the nursery,’ one of the police told me.
‘Who is going to pick her up?’
‘Don’t you have a relative who can get her?’
‘Can you call Ruth from my work?’ I asked. I even gave them June’s name. They said they would pass the numbers on to my lawyer. I was to get a lawyer. I had a right to a lawyer.
‘Is the little girl okay? The girl that got hurt?’
Oh, the contempt he showed me. ‘The girl you hurled a brick at? She’ll be in A&E just now.’
They charged me with assault, damage to property and resisting arrest, gave me a blue mat to lie on and took me to a cell.
I sat in the tiled room, a stink of urine coming from the toilet, and listened to voices from other cells. Through a high window I saw a rectangle of white sky. I had time to question Robbie. I wondered if he had known what Michael McDermott was doing. Had he received a tenner here and there for taking the old folks’ prescriptions to the chemist and for keeping quiet while Michael snipped a line of tablets off a blister pack? Maybe Robbie and his friends were taking pills themselves so selling them was an easy next step. I remembered Robbie’s refusal to speak about Lennoxtown and his reluctance to return. Perhaps you never really know a person. Perhaps I’d fallen for a man with a kink in his integrity, a penchant for stealing, concealing the truth and hoodwinking his lovers. Who knew I would throw bricks with intent to break glass, with intent to damage? Who knew I would hurt a small child in the process, causing her pain and making her bleed? Yet it was in me all the time. Those thoughts disturbed me. I thought I knew Robbie and he me. I thought I knew myself.
At one-thirty a policeman took me to an interview room. He told me I would be formally charged. First there were people who wanted to talk with me.
‘What people?’
‘You have a social worker.’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s here.’
I was ashamed, but there she was, pulling back the chair and taking the lid off her cup of tea.
‘I got one for you,’ Sara said, ‘but I couldn’t remember how you took it.’
‘Just milk.’
‘I guessed right.’
The tea was too hot to drink. I watched the steam rise.
‘There’s a lot to unpick,’ Sara said and she talked about the situation I found myself in because of the arrest and what had come before. ‘These are two separate issues but they are connected obviously. And my job first and foremost is to safeguard Emily, to make sure she can be safely fed, clothed and nurtured.’
I listened as best as I could but the slowness of her note-taking was unbearable so I stood up and said, ‘I need to get my daughter.’
Sara put her pen down.
‘I’ve recommended that Emily be looked after for the time being. That certainly means tonight. And until I’ve spoken with other professionals—’
‘What?’
‘We need to assess your case and I can’t do that until at least tomorrow.’
‘No, what do you mean looked after?’
‘We’ll place her in emergency foster care.’
‘No you won’t.’
‘Liz, we don’t have much choice. You’ve been arrested and you’re in custody. You have no next of kin.’
‘She doesn’t need foster care. She’s not been abused.’
‘Abuse comes in many forms.’
‘How fucking dare you!’ I was throwing stones. I was picking up bricks and hurling them.
‘Cut out the swearing please. I will arrange a meeting to go over it all.’
