The Bad Mother's Handbook by Kate Long Read Free Book Online Page B

blinking at each other and
looking sheepish. It was then I realized how much older
he was.

    Outside in the quiet cold air his pants squeaked.
    ‘Can I see you again?’ he murmured over the creaking.
My ears were still ringing slightly and it took a moment
to register what he’d said.
    ‘How old are you?’ I found myself asking. Around us
crowds of people moved into knots and couples, shouting
or embracing, slapping passing cars on the roof. Someone
was throwing up in a shop doorway amid cheers.
    He held up his palms to me, head on one side. I was
sure I could see crow’s feet in the lamplight. ‘Hey. What’s
up? Does it matter?’
    Does it matter? That’s what Paul said when I asked
him if he’d done it before. And yeah, it bloody well did,
as it turned out. So not a great question, Rawhide.
    ‘I’ll take your number. I’ll give you a call.’
    He shrugged. Then, with difficulty, he extracted a pen
from his back pocket and wrote it on my hand, held onto
my fingers afterwards. He was staring into my eyes.
    ‘I’m twenty-eight, if you must know. God.’ He shook
his head. ‘Still don’t see what the deal is. Why, how old
are you?’
    ‘Like I said, I’ll give you a call.’ I loosed my hand from
his grip. ‘See you.’ And I joined Julia and Gilly on the taxi rank, feeling as if, somehow, I’d got one back. On somebody.
    See the doctor. I should bloody cocoa.

    *

    IT WERE summat an’ nowt, only a dance at the Mechanics’,
but I got in a row over it. It were a regular thing when I was
about sixteen. I’d throw my lace-up shoes and best frock out
of the window, then tell my mother I was off to Maggie
Fairbrother’s. Her mother used go out drinkin’ so we could do
as we liked. So then we’d walk it into Harrop and go dancin’.
The last time though it were t’ Carnival Dance and when I got
back home I had confetti all in my hair and cuffs. I kept brushin’
it out but it sort of clung. My mother spotted some of it on
the floor, and I got a good hiding and sent to bed. She was
allus angry, and tired to death, bent over her dolly tub or her
scrubbing board or her mangle. And shamed. You see she
could never hold a man, never had a home of her own. I think
she were terrified I might end up the same.

    *

    I HAD A TRIP into Wigan to find out what I already knew.
    There was a time, late sixties I suppose it’d be, when
approaching the town was like driving through a war
zone. Nan and I would get the bus in and I’d stare out of
the windows at rows and rows of shattered terraces, brick
shells, piles of rubble. Sometimes there’d be a square of
waste ground with just a line of doorsteps along the edge
of the pavement, or ragged garden flowers sprouting
through the masonry or a tiny patch of floor tiling in the
mud. On the horizon there would always be those huge swinging metal balls on cranes. It made me shudder to
think what they could do. That was the progressive period
when they were busy putting people into tower blocks (I
don’t know what they called the period when they moved
everybody back out again).
    The journey through all those ruins always unsettled
me. We’d have reached the Market Hall by the time I felt
right again. Nan would visit each stand, chatting and
joking with the stallholder over every purchase, and I’d
turn on my heel and gaze upwards at the steel rafters
where pigeons fluttered, and escaped balloons dawdled
tantalizingly. You could smell the sarsparilla from the
health-food booth, and ginger and hot Vimto. If I was good
I had a hair ribbon off the trimmings stall, and I got to
choose the colour.
    So now I drove through the outskirts of a reinvented
Wigan with grassed-over areas and new, prestige estates
with names like ‘Swansmede’ and ‘Pheasant Rise’.
Imaginative chaps, these developers. I got through Scholes
and onto the one-way system, over the River Douglas, past
the Rugby League ground, under Chapel Lane railway