When I do succeed in pleasing her, I sit beside her with a tense smile plastered to my face, trying not to do anything that might bring about a change of mood. I love Lucy too much-I can’t extricate my own mood from hers, and this offends my independent spirit. I can barely express how much I resent her when she puts the itchy hook of her discontent into my mind. That one tiny action is enough to shatter my good mood. I look at her face, contorted in dissatisfaction, and I think, I can’t separate myself from this person. I can’t forget about her. She’s got me, for ever. And then I think about how much she takes from me every day in terms of energy and effort and even my essence, even the bit of me that makes me who I am-she takes all that, without appreciating it, every minute of every day, and despite all this she chooses to make things even worse for me by whining when she’s got nothing to be unhappy about. That’s when I’m aware of the danger.
I’ve never really done anything. The only objectively bad thing I’ve done is drive away from Lucy once, when she was three. It was a Saturday morning and we’d been to the library. I didn’t particularly want to go. I’d have preferred to go for a sauna or a manicure-something for me. But Lucy was bored and needed an activity, so I silenced the voice in my mind that was shouting, ‘Somebody please shoot me in the head, I can’t bear any more of this tedium!’ and took my daughter to the library. We spent over an hour looking at children’s books, reading, choosing. Lucy had a brilliant time, and I even started to relax and enjoy it a bit (though I was constantly aware that people who didn’t have children were spending their Saturday mornings in ways that were far superior). The problem arose when I said it was time to go home. ‘Oh, Mummy, no!’ Lucy protested. ‘Can’t we stay for a bit longer? Please?’
At moments like this-and there are many when you’ve got children, at least one a day and usually more-I feel like a political leader wrestling with a terrible dilemma. Do I appease and hope to be treated leniently? That never works. Appease a despot and he will only oppress you even more, knowing he can get away with it. Do I steel myself for a fight, knowing that whether I win or lose there will be terrible devastation on all sides?
I knew Lucy would get hungry very soon so I stood firm and said, no, we needed to go home and have lunch. I promised to bring her to the library again the following weekend. She screamed as if I’d proposed to gouge out her eyeballs, and refused to get into the car. When I tried to pick her up, she fought me, kicking and punching with all her might. I stayed calm and told her that if she didn’t cooperate and get into the car, I would go home without her. She paid no attention. She shrieked, ‘I’m not happy about you, Mummy, you’re making me very cross!’ So I got into the car and drove away, alone.
I can’t describe how exciting it was. Inside my head I was cheering, ‘You did it! You did it! Hooray! You finally stood up to her!’ I drove slowly, so that I could see Lucy’s face in the rear-view mirror. Her angry screams stopped abruptly, and I watched the expression on her face turn from blank shock to panic. She didn’t move, didn’t run towards the car, but she threw her arms out in front of her, opening and closing the fingers of both hands, as if by doing that she could grasp me and pull me back. I could see her mouth moving, and lip-read the word ‘Mummy!’, repeated several times. Never in a million years would she have expected me to drive away without her.
I probably should have stopped the car at that point, while she could still see me, but I was full of exhilaration and, just for a few seconds, I wanted to believe that it could last for ever. So I drove quickly round the block. I pulled up outside the library again about half a minute later. Lucy was sitting cross-legged on the floor, howling. A woman was trying to comfort her and find out what had happened, where her mother was. I got out of the car, bundled Lucy up, saying ‘Thank you very much!’ to the puzzled woman, and we drove back home. ‘Lucy,’ I said calmly. ‘If you’re naughty and don’t do what Mummy says, and if you make life difficult for Mummy, that’s the kind of thing that will happen. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ she sobbed.
I hate the sound of her crying, so I said, ‘Lucy, stop crying right this minute, or I’ll stop the car and make you get out again, and next time I won’t come back for you.’
She stopped crying instantly.
‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘Now, if you’re good and make life easy for Mummy, then Mummy will be happy and we’ll all have a nice time. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Mummy,’ she said solemnly.
I felt a mixture of triumph and guilt. I knew I’d done something bad, but I also knew that I couldn’t help it. It’s hard enough behaving well when the people around you also are, when whoever you’re with is leading by example. Sometimes you think, I want to do a bad, selfish thing now, but I can’t because everyone else is being so infuriatingly decent. But when you’re trapped in an explosive situation with someone who is determined to break all records for appalling behaviour, how, dear Gart, do you maintain your composure and do the right thing?
It isn’t only Lucy who sets me off. I’ve often had to sit on my hands, so tempted have I been to whack a friend’s child round the head. Like Oonagh O’Hara, who only has to whinge or stamp her foot to set both her parents off with their, ‘Sweetie! Come for a cuddle!’ nonsense. Gart, how I would love to punch Oonagh in the face. If I could do it once, I think I’d be happy for ever.
6
8/7/07
DC Colin Sellers sniffed the arm of his jacket when he was sure no one was looking. Inconclusive. He sniffed again, but couldn’t tell if it was his clothes or his surroundings that stank. What was it about charity shops? He resolved never again to tell Stacey she ought to buy her clothes at Oxfam instead of Next. He hadn’t been inside a charity shop for years, hadn’t realised they all smelled like a stale stew of the past, layers of rancid odours piled one on top of the other like the decades of a life that has disappointed its owner.
Sellers wasn’t normally prone to maudlin reflections, but the shops were bringing it out in him. He’d done all the dry-cleaners first-and the chemical stench of those had been bad enough-but now he wished he’d done it the other way round, saved the best for last. Anything was better than the charity shops.
At the moment he was in the Hildred Street branch of Age Concern in Spilling, which was, thank God, the last of them. Tonight he’d make sure to tell Stace to wash his clothes at an extra high temperature. Or maybe he’d just throw them away. One thing he wouldn’t do: donate them to a manky shop for some other poor sod to buy. From now on, Sellers was against second-hand clothes. People ought to give money to these dogooder organisations, and that’s it, he thought. A nice, clean cheque that doesn’t smell of grease or death or failure.
It occurred to Sellers that he had never in his life given any money to charity. Because he couldn’t afford to, because he had Stacey and the kids to pay for as well as making sure Suki, his girlfriend, always had a good time and didn’t get bored of him. And then there were Stacey’s French lessons, which irked him more than he was able to express. S’il vous plaît. If he heard her say that one more time, he might actually ram her fag-packet-sized French dictionary down her throat.
Eventually, an old woman wearing a purple nylon polo-neck and a string of large, fake pearls emerged from behind the beaded curtain, holding the two colour print-outs Sellers had given her much younger and considerably more attractive assistant a few minutes earlier. One was of Geraldine Bretherick, the other of a brown Ozwald Boateng suit like the one Mark Bretherick had reported missing from his house.