The Not So Perfect Mum: The feel-good novel you have to read this year!

Harley spotted the paramedic before I did. I hadn’t been expecting a motorbike. The paramedic pulled off his helmet to reveal a lean capable face and dark hair going grey at the temples. With a brisk ‘I’m Simon,’ he got straight to work, snapping on gloves and shining a light in Tarants’ eyes and ears. I felt responsibility drop off me. Harley edged closer for a better look.

‘Mum, will the doctor take him to hospital? Will he have to stay there? Will he get in trouble for messing about with the trolley?’ As usual I was torn between pride at Harley’s enthusiasm and embarrassment at his appetite for blood and the fact that he couldn’t have a conversation that didn’t compete with passing jet planes.

Harley bellowing in Simon’s ear probably wasn’t helping him concentrate. I tried to pull him back, but Harley looked as though he was on for stitching the wound himself. With a little wink, Simon nodded his head to show where Harley could stand for a ringside view without being in the way.

‘What’s his name?’ Simon said.

‘Tarants,’ said the girl. ‘Short for Tarantula. His real name is Kyle, but no one ever calls him that.’

Simon nodded at her as though he came across a lot of people called Black Widow and Daddy Long Legs in his line of work. He examined the wound, his long fingers smoothing and tapping, like he was reading Braille, talking, talking all the time in a soothing voice. Harley had a definite swagger when Simon asked him to fetch a box of bandages from the back of the bike.

‘Has anyone phoned his parents?’ Simon asked over his shoulder, as he ripped open a dressing.

His shoulders sagged when he learned that Tarants lived with his sister. I looked away. We all knew that our SD1 postcode – stabbings, domestics, heroin overdoses – was the one that the emergency services tried to pass like a forfeit at a party. SD2, a weird oasis of grand Victorian houses bordering our area of flat-roofed sixties flats and terraced stone-clad boxes, was the black fruit gum that everyone wanted – stranded Persian cats, heart attacks, fingers lopped off by pruning secateurs.

When Simon had finished, he smiled round at me, too young for a man who had all of us staring as though he was about to walk on water. Harley didn’t seem to suffer from that best-pants-for-the-doctor deference, though. ‘Cor. How do you know what to do? Have you seen someone die? Will he die? I want to be a doctor like you.’

‘I have seen someone die. Sometimes it happens even when we try our very best. But Tarants is going to be okay. There’s nothing stopping you becoming a doctor. You just have to work hard at school – and have a stomach for blood, which you obviously have.’ He said it like he really believed Harley could do it. And that made me want to smother him with big fat grateful kisses.

Just as I was noticing that he did have quite nice lips, I heard, ‘Hey, Bronte. What you doing here? I thought you was late home from school. I came out to see where you’d got to.’ I turned to see Colin standing behind us, hands on hips. When he came out to see where his little princess was, he was just being a good dad. I, on the other hand, was ‘blinking neurotic’.

‘Bleeding hell, Maia, I thought you’d be home by four. I didn’t realise you was going to get the kids. You’re not going to have time to cook tea before you get off to work.’

I didn’t want to confirm Simon’s SD1 expectations by launching into a slanging match in the street. Colin glanced down at Tarants but apparently the thought of his own hand-to-metal contact with a tin opener was a far greater tragedy than leaving your brains splattered on the road.

I tried to pacify him. ‘I went out to put a notice up in the post office and as it was home time, I thought I’d meet the kids, and then—’

Simon looked up, right into Colin’s paint-spattered sweatshirt. ‘Your wife saw this young man had hurt himself, so she very kindly called the emergency services and was good enough to stay here to make sure he was okay. He should be fine but I’ve got an ambulance coming to take him to the hospital so he can be checked over,’ he said, as though Colin had been falling over himself to make Tarants’ welfare his top concern rather than his ever-rumbling belly.

‘Mai, you’ve done your Good Samaritan bit, so stop bloody standing there and get your arse into gear.’ Colin ignored Simon as though he was just supermarket music.

Simon was obviously a stranger to SD1 customs. He looked over to me and nodded towards Colin. ‘Don’t you mind him talking to you like that?’

For a paramedic with all those qualifications, he wasn’t very bright. I shrugged, knowing that getting my arse into gear had rocketed up from an order to an urgent necessity. I started grabbing the school bags, hustling Harley and Bronte on their way as the first darts of panic shot through me.

Colin stood there, arms folded, jaw bull-dogging like a bouncer from a two-bit nightclub.

‘Come on, let’s go.’ I grabbed hold of Colin’s sleeve.

‘Hang on a minute. You got something to say, mate? Maia here’s got work to do. She needs to be at home sorting out her own family, not sticking her beak into other people’s business and looking for trouble when we got enough of our own. Why don’t you get on with saving the world and leave how I talk to the missus to me?’

I wasn’t so much grabbing as hanging on now.

‘Sorry,’ Simon said. ‘I wasn’t having a go. I think your wife did a kind thing for Tarants here and it seems disrespectful to speak to her like that. You should be proud of her. You’re a lucky man.’

I tried to make out the look on Simon’s face. Not confrontational, just matter-of-fact. Politely surprised even that Colin had spoken to me like that rather than licking the ground clean in front of me. I willed him to shut up before he became his own customer.

‘Since when have you been the expert on me missus?’ But I felt the tension in his forearm sag. Colin always loved having something someone else admired: the red Kawasaki when I first knew him; Bronte as a toddler, with her brown ringlets and eyes like little walnuts; that bloody phone that had nearly landed him in prison for handling stolen goods. Simon didn’t respond, just carried on packing up, arranging rolls of gauze in his bag and checking the bandage around Tarants’ head. Colin was used to men who either quaked in their boots or charged in, arms and legs flying like a Tom and Jerry scuffle. Indifference seemed to floor him.

I called Bronte over. ‘Start walking with Dad, I won’t be a minute.’

Bronte put her hand into Colin’s. ‘Fuckwit,’ Colin said over his shoulder, and walked off, all big man swagger. I breathed out.

Harley hung back with me. I said a quiet goodbye to Tarants but he didn’t answer. The girl mumbled, ‘Cheers’, and gave me a wave, which round here was almost a handwritten thank you note. There was no shock, no soft sympathy in her face. I braced myself for the pity on Simon’s, but instead he thanked me and turned his attention to the ambulance that had just raced round the corner.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Twenty-four thousand pounds a year, until the children are eighteen?’ I said. Twenty-four thousand pounds was so many hours of cleaning that I thought I might start laughing and never stop.

The professor’s solicitor, Mr Harrison, nodded and shuffled his papers. ‘Yes, she left enough money so that both children can stay at Stirling Hall School until they finish their A-levels, should they wish to do so.’

‘Why would she do that?’ I asked. ‘I was thinking that she might’ve left me something little, y’know, like her reading lamp or some of her books. I mean, not that I would rather have had that, I’m really grateful, but I was just the cleaner.’ I fidgeted on his very upright chair. I wasn’t used to wearing a skirt and I felt as though I had been rootling through my mum’s dressing up box. Trousers hadn’t seemed right though, and I didn’t want this guy in his pinstriped waistcoat to think I wasn’t paying proper respect to the prof.

Mr Harrison put the lid on his pen. He had that look about him. Teachers have it on parents’ evening, that blank face that doesn’t give anything away. ‘She’s written you a letter. Would you like to go into the waiting room to read it? I’ve got some phone calls to make, so don’t rush.’

I went and sat in a bright little room next to piles of Country Life magazines. My eyes pricked when I saw Professor Stainton’s careful writing. She’d addressed the letter to Amaia Etxeleku, which almost made me smile. No one called me Amaia, but Professor Stainton thought nicknames were laziness, ‘especially if one has a name to reflect one’s heritage’. The fact that my mother came from a little village in the Basque country fascinated the professor. I hadn’t been there since I was a teenager. Mum and I had always planned to go back together but she’d died before there’d ever been enough cash for jaunts abroad. The Basque thing probably wouldn’t have meant anything to me at all except it was obvious I wasn’t English. I often got mistaken for an Italian with my long dark hair and big cow eyes, just nowhere near as stylish.

I almost didn’t want to open the letter. I knew it could change my life, and all change, even change for the good, made me nervous.

Gatsby,

Stamford Avenue,

Sandbury,

Surrey,

SD2 7DJ

23 November 2013

Dear Amaia,

This may come as a surprise to you as I know you never wanted anything from me. I always felt that you were a very intelligent young woman whose life would have been vastly different had you been afforded a better education. I do not consider it to be too late for you. I know we spoke of you taking an OU degree and I do believe that you will.

However, at my age, I have to make decisions about the future, which is becoming shorter and shorter for me. Since my son died, I have been forced to consider how to make the best use of the little that remains dear to me and consider the legacy I would like to leave to mark my time on this earth. For me, education is the most valuable thing one can have after health, of course, and successful relationships. Therefore it would give me great pleasure to offer your lovely children a good start in life. The time that I have spent with them leads me to believe that they both show intelligence and enthusiasm for learning and I would certainly consider it a wise use of money. Purely because of your domestic circumstances and my fear that my money might find its way onto the horses at Newmarket, I have left my will so that the money can only be used for education at Stirling Hall School. I know from my time as a governor there that it will provide excellent and rounded instruction for your children and open doors for them, which might otherwise remain closed. I hope you will seize the opportunity to help them and keep in mind George Peabody’s wise words: ‘Education: a debt due from present to future generations’.

Finally, Amaia, I wish good things for you and your family. I am so grateful to you for making my last few years as comfortable as possible, with your kindness and attention to detail going beyond the call of duty. I urge you to consider my proposal very seriously.

With my very good wishes,

Rose Stainton

Who the hell was George Peabody? Was he famous? The professor couldn’t resist leaving me one last little puzzle to expand my mind. I started raking through my hair, pulling out all the loose strands. It was a wonder I wasn’t bald.

I screwed up my eyes, trying to find one thought that didn’t pull in a knotty old tangle of other problems with it. Sweat started to gather under my armpits, turning my silk blouse from pale blue to navy and reminding me why I kept it for special occasions. By now, I should have learnt that Etxeleku sweat glands and silk didn’t mix. I was just considering a damage limitation exercise with the kitchen roll by the water cooler, when Mr Harrison called me back. He looked relieved, as though he had been expecting to hand over his handkerchief for a huge nose blow. He settled back into his big boss’s chair and cracked his knuckles. ‘I assume you are going to take the opportunity to send the children to Stirling Hall?’

Assume. How wonderful to be in a life where you could assume anything. Assume that your husband would take care of you. Assume that your kids would be at a school where their days were about education and not survival. Assume that twenty-four thousand pounds a year was fantastic news, not some Australia-sized crow bar to wrench the lid off Pandora’s box.

I remembered my armpits and folded my hands in my lap. ‘I need to think about it, I mean, I’m grateful, of course, the professor has been very generous, but I need to discuss it with the children’s father, like,’ I said, immediately hearing the professor’s voice in my head. ‘Amaia, “like” is for people we are friends with.’

‘May I be so bold as to enquire what the obstacles are?’ said Mr Harrison.

I ignored the ‘being so bold’. He could, of course, just ask, though he was trying to be kind. ‘God, this is so embarrassing. I’m sorry to be so stupid, but how much are the fees at Stirling Hall? You said she was leaving me twenty-four thousand pounds a year. That can’t just be school fees.’

‘I’m afraid it is. Four thousand pounds a term for each child.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I said, then squirmed. ‘Sorry, I mean, that’s a heck of a lot of money. Sorry to sound ungrateful. So all that money would just go on the school fees. Wow. That’s the only option?’

‘I’m afraid the professor has been quite clear. She’s tied the money up so that it can only be spent on Stirling Hall. It will be transferred directly to the school at the start of every term. If you don’t take up her offer, she has left instructions for the money to go to the cancer hospice in town.’

The hair stood up on my arms. Mum had died there three years earlier. I forced away the memory of her little room with the flowery border and the horrible hours I’d spent there, watching her poor, knackered body rise and fall. I needed to think about the next generation, not the last.

‘I don’t want to sound graspy, but has she left any money for uniforms and that sort of stuff?’ I’d seen the piles of hockey sticks, rugby gear and coats for every occasion in the children’s bedrooms where I cleaned. I wouldn’t be able to get away with any old anorak and a West Ham football kit.

‘No, but I believe most of these private schools have good second-hand sales.’

My mind was scrambling to see how I could possibly afford it, even second-hand. Harley wouldn’t give a stuff about worn elbows or knees. But Bronte would make a right ling-along-a-dance. Even at Morlands, she could make me late for work fussing about matching hair bands and the tiniest ant-sized hole in her tights. It would be like pushing a lamb up the slope to slaughter if I tried to fob her off with something that wasn’t brand new.

Unlike Morlands, where a school trip meant walking down to the local museum with its two Roman coins and a few manky old fossils, Stirling Hall was the kingpin of school trips. I’d seen pictures of Stirling Hall’s cricket team on tour in Barbados in the Surrey Mirror. The bloody Caribbean as a school trip. Just off to the West Indies to whack a few balls. That wasn’t going to be a pound in your pocket, a jam sandwich and a packet of Wotsits kind of deal. I’d never be able to afford that for Harley. Still, he’d never played cricket in his life, so hopefully he wouldn’t make the team.

I picked at my raggedy nails. An image of Bronte begging me not to come to any school plays, sports days or carol concerts floated into my mind. She hated people knowing I was a cleaner. She kept trying to get me to apply for the X Factor so I could become a pop star instead, even though I sounded like a Hoover that had sucked up a sock.

Maybe I was going to need Mr Harrison’s handkerchief after all.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Well then?’ Colin said, through a fistful of crisps. ‘Did the old girl come good?’

‘Depends what you mean,’ I said. I opened the window to let out the smell of Colin’s first, though probably not last, joint of the day. I picked up the pages of the Racing Post strewn all round the settee.

‘Don’t play games,’ Colin said, licking his finger to dab up the crumbs on his T-shirt. ‘How much did we get? Don’t tell me she left you one of her crappy old tea services.’

‘No, she left us enough money to send the kids to Stirling Hall School.’

‘You what? I ain’t sending my kids to no nobby school. How much did she leave us?’

‘Twenty-four thousand pounds a year until they finish their A-levels, but—’

‘Twenty-four grand a year? Way to bloody go!’ Colin leapt up off the settee and started limbo dancing. ‘Whe-hey! Fan-bloody-tastic. Let’s go on holiday somewhere. D’you fancy Benidorm? Or Corfu?’

‘She didn’t leave me the money so we could go off sunning ourselves. She left it so we could send the kids to a decent school, get them a good education.’

‘It’s our money. We can spend it on what we like.’

‘No, we can’t. That’s the point. You’re not listening – unless we send the kids to Stirling Hall, we can’t even get the cash in the first place. It’ll all go to the cancer hospice.’

A great cloud of a scowl rolled across Colin’s face. ‘Let me get this right. That old biddy has left us twenty-four grand a year and we’ve got to spend it on some fancy pants school or we get absolutely zilcho?’

I moved in front of my favourite red vase. I didn’t say anything, just stood absolutely still. The remote control went zinging past my ear, clattering into the front window, taking a bite out of the frame but missing the glass. The batteries pinged out and rolled under the chair.

‘Christ Almighty.’ Colin kicked at the settee. ‘Snotty-nosed bitch. I bet you put her up to this. Didn’t you? Bloody banging on about education, filling the kids’ heads with crap about going to university. Sitting there with your nose in a book, bloody Withering Heights and David Crapperfield. You and your big ideas. Can you imagine Harley in a little green cap and tie? He’d be a laughing stock round here. Get his head kicked in before he got to the end of the road.’

‘It wasn’t anything to do with me. I didn’t even know she’d left me anything. For God’s sake, it’s better than nothing. I think it would be great for Bronte. She’s quite bright. She could really go places with the right education.’ My throat was tight with the effort of not shouting.

‘What places is she going to go? She’ll probably be up the duff by the time she’s sixteen. She needs to start, I dunno, learning to type or something, not having her head filled with a load of old bollocks she’ll never use.’

‘Bronte won’t be stupid enough to get pregnant with some no-hoper sponger from round here,’ I said, looking at Colin’s belly hanging out of his T-shirt. Blue fluff nestled in his belly button. I couldn’t let Bronte end up with a bloke who thought showers made you shrink.

Colin snatched the paper from me, then blubbered down onto the settee, rattling the sports pages into a position that meant I couldn’t see his face. I knew I’d got to him from the way his foot was twitching.

‘Don’t you want the kids to live better than us? Is your greatest ambition for Harley that he learns the difference between off-white and magnolia? Do you want Bronte to end up scrubbing skid marks out of the toilets of the women whose dads didn’t think spelling tests were a waste of time? Or are you just pinning your hopes on Bronte marrying a striker from flaming West Ham?’

He didn’t answer. Usually I knew better than to ‘keep going on’ but people like us didn’t get a lot of chances. I sat on the end of the settee and put his foot on my lap. ‘Can you put the paper down, just for a sec?’

He looked sullenly over the top. His eyes were still beautiful.

I persevered. ‘I think this is a really big chance for them. I never got any qualifications and neither did you, so we’re stuck here. Morlands is such a rubbish school that if they stay there, they’ll end up like us. We’re never going to have enough money to move into a different catchment area. But with a good education at Stirling Hall, the kids could become engineers, architects, doctors, anything. I don’t think it’s fair to stand in their way.’

‘Yeah, but what about when they want to bring their mates home? No one is going to come round here in their Beamer in case it ends up on bricks. You ain’t thinking it through. Let’s say they do go there. We can pay for the school, but what about all the things that go with it? The parents ain’t going to want their toffee-nosed little darlings hanging about with Bronts and Harley, are they? Case they catch something awful off of them. They’re all going to be living in great big houses – I don’t want some kid called Verity or Jasper coming round here to get a look at how poor people live, how Harley pisses against the back fence when I’m on the khazi or how we have to stand on a chair with a match to get the boiler to light every time we want a bloody shower.’

I’d worked in houses where guitar lessons, French club and netball matches were the norm, as run-of-the-mill as living in a home where the children had a playroom and the adults had a study. Of course, there’d been some arrogant little shits along the way like the boy who said, ‘You can’t be a mummy. You’re a cleaner.’ But there’d also been some sweet kids, who’d brought out their old dolls, tea sets and jigsaws so I could give them to Bronte.

The one thing they all had in common was this idea, a confidence that when they spoke, they had a right to be listened to. I was thirty-six and still had to work up the courage to say what I thought when they held meetings at school to improve discipline. I’d think, right, I’m going to put my hand up next. No, next. Then someone would drop in a ‘statistically speaking’ or an ‘economically viable’ and I’d decide that my point was probably a bit obvious anyway and some bloke with a clipboard would thank everyone for their useful input and Colin would be moaning about getting down the pub before closing time and that would be that. If money could buy confidence, I had a chance to do one clever thing in my stupid life.

‘Talk about glass half bleeding empty,’ I said. ‘Yeah, we might get some kids come here who think we’re common as pig shit. On the other hand, Harley and Bronte might even make some nice friends, normal kids who don’t think that a good Saturday night out is kicking in the car wing mirrors on the estate.’

‘You just don’t get it, do you? They’re going to be the council house kids among a bunch of nobs. They ain’t ever going to fit in.’

‘We’ve got to give them a chance. They might see that there’s more to life than a quick shag against the fence in the back alley or getting pissed in the bus shelter on Special Brew.’ I started combing through all the possible tactics I could use to get Colin to agree. I’d only got as far as two – begging or a blow job – when Colin shrugged.

‘I don’t fucking know. I think you’re wrong. How we going to pay for all the kit and crap that they’re gonna need? You’re just sticking your head into a bag of trouble,’ he said.

Colin was voicing my worries. Somehow that made me angrier. ‘That’s typical you. Just sit there and be defeatist. You were just the same when I wanted to go to appeal to get them into a better primary school. Give up before we start instead of using a bit of brain power to see how we could make it work. I’ll have to take on more shifts. Maybe things’ll pick up and you’ll be able to get some work. It’s a real opportunity.’

‘Don’t think you can rely on me getting work anytime soon. It’s not looking good out there.’

I tried to remember that to win this one I needed him on my side. I bit back my ‘change the record’.