Free Wake Up, Mummy by Anna Lowe

partner and stepfather. But when the front door closed, he was something else entirely. The real Carl was a drunken, disgusting human being, devoid of any empathy or compassion, who made me fear him and then used my fear to enable him to abuse me, physically, emotionally and sexually. As long as my mother was able to drink, she was happy – and oblivious to what was going on around her. So all Carl had to do was make sure she was never without a constant supply of alcohol,and then he was free to indulge whatever sick fantasy came into his mind.
    Although my mother never mentioned my grandmother to us, other than to swear and complain about her, she must have made contact with her somehow. Because, after we’d been in the flat for a couple of days, she told us that in future she would take us to school on the train every morning and then my brother and I would walk to my grandparents’ house at teatime, and stay there until she and Carl came to collect us after they finished work.
    It had quickly become apparent that Carl didn’t like my brother or me, and it must have been equally clear to Carl that I detested him. But even living with him and my mother in his horrible little flat might be bearable if I could see my grandmother every day. I was so excited at the prospect that I had to stop myself jumping up and down, because I knew better than to let my mother know how happy I was. I’d long ago learned not to tell her if something was important to me, because if I did, it meant that whenever she was in one of her moods or feeling mean, she could hurt me by taking away the one thing that might give me some pleasure. So I tried to appear indifferent, as though I didn’t really care about seeing my grandparents, and I hoped my mother couldn’t tell that my heart was doing cartwheels in my chest.
    After lunch on the first day back at school, I hardly took my eyes off the large, oak-framed clock above the blackboard. The afternoon seemed to drag on for ever, but finally the last lesson of the day came to an end and I grabbed my little bag off the peg in the cloakroom and ran to the school gate. Then I stood there, kicking the wire netting that surrounded the playground, and waited impatiently until my brother almost flew out of the building, grasped my hand without a word and tried to keep up as I set off along the pavement as fast as my legs would carry me.
    Rounding the corner of the street where my grandparents lived, we could see my grandmother waiting for us at the open front door. It had only been a few days since we’d last seen her – since the night when our mother had snatched us from the house – but it seemed like a lifetime. As we ran up the garden path, she squatted down and opened her arms and we almost knocked her over in our eagerness to feel them close around us.
    Life soon settled into an uneasy but more or less regular pattern. I knew that, however miserable the days might be, for five out of seven of them every week I would spend at least a couple of hours with my grandparents, and sometimes with my aunts and uncles too. Saturdays and Sundays were the worst days. But we hadn’t been living with Carl for very long when my motherstarted having an affair with another man she’d met at a pub. Almost every weekend after that, while Carl was out drinking with his mates, we’d trail after her reluctantly to her weekend-boyfriend’s house, where we’d sit alone in the living room for hours on end, watching television, while they went upstairs and shut the bedroom door.
    Eventually, she’d come tearing down the stairs again, shouting at us, ‘Out! Out! Get moving for God’s sake,’ as though we had kept her waiting, rather than the other way round. Then she’d usher us out into the street, and we’d trot along behind her as she almost ran to my grandparents’ house, where Carl would soon be arriving to collect us. She swore us to secrecy, making us promise again and again that if Carl asked,