Free Mummy Knew by Lisa James Page A

cursing him every day. Now that Dad wasn’t around to torment him, he was like he was a different dog, almost reverting to a playful puppy again.
    Mum remained in her room. I often heard her crying and muttering things into her pillow. When Diane and I took her in a cup of tea and some jam sandwiches, she was lying on her bed, a roll of loo paper resting on her tummy, and a cigarette burning between her fingers with an inch-high tower of ash. She lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling with puffy, red-rimmed eyes.
    ‘Here, Mum,’ said Diane, making a space on the bedside table. ‘You’ve got to eat.’
    ‘I don’t want anything,’ said Mum, pulling herself up to stub out her cigarette. ‘Just leave me alone.’
    ‘Come on, it’s not the end of the world,’ said Diane.
    ‘It might not be for you,’ said Mum angrily. ‘But I love him, Di, and I deserve a bit of happiness.’ Her eyes welled up, and she pulled off a length of loo roll to blot away her tears.
    ‘What about us?’ asked Diane, a slight edge creeping into her voice. ‘Don’t you love us?’
    Mum ignored her question and lit another cigarette. After she had blown out a long stream of smoke she said, ‘I’m over fucking forty. This is my last chance, and none of you wants me to be happy–not you lot, not me mum, no one. I’m gonna end up on me own forever.’
    ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Diane.
    ‘I bet they’re having a right laugh over the road, aren’t they?’ said Mum, referring to Nanny and Jenny.
    ‘They’re just worried, that’s all,’ said Diane. ‘They can’t work out why you haven’t spoken to them for the past four years.’
    ‘I bet she’s going, “Oh, that Donna, she’s always picking the wrong men,”’ Mum said, imitating Nanny’s Geordie accent.
    Even though I was only eight, I knew that Mum had definitely picked the wrong man in Dad, and I vowed to be a lot more careful when I grew up. I remember wondering why she couldn’t just find someone else, someone nicer who wasn’t rude all the time. Why wasn’t she happy that Dad had gone? He hit her and yelled at her even more than he did to the rest of us. What did she love about him? But instead she moped around, gazing out of the window as if waiting for him to return and smoking endless cigarettes.
    Our happiness and Mum’s misery were short-lived. I got home from school a couple of days later to see the familiar leather coat on the kitchen door and heard grunting noises from the bedroom and I stopped dead, feeling as if there was a lead weight in my chest. He was back.
    Mum and Dad spent the first few days in bed together, then Mum gathered us all into the front room. She said they had an announcement to make, that they were getting married. Cheryl and Davie both cried. Cheryl’s tears slid down slowly, but Davie let out huge wracking sobs and cried in a way I’d never seen him cry before, even worse than when Dad smashed his ship-in-a-bottle.
    ‘What you crying about?’ Mum asked, her head cocked to one side, as if genuinely baffled by his reaction.
    ‘We won’t be able to go over Nanny’s any more,’ he said, and I saw Dad bristle slightly.
    ‘But we’ll be a proper family,’ Mum said gaily. ‘Won’t that be nice?’
    They had a bring-a-bottle party to celebrate and invited everyone in Dad’s large extended family, including his brother Keith, his sister Lesley and various other relatives we’d never met, as well as his numerous drinking buddies. It was as if Dad had invited everyone he’d ever met but Mum, on the other hand, invited nobody. It went without saying that she hadn’t invited Nanny and her many brothers and sisters because she hadn’t spoken to any of them since meeting Dad, and she didn’t have any friends of her own because she wasn’t allowed out without Dad. But it was quite a shock when Mum told us that none of us children could attend.
    ‘I’m not having you winding him up, not tonight,’ she said. ‘I can just