Free The Perfect Mother by Margaret Leroy Page A

drove away in their cars. Some of them just couldn’t get anything better. Most of them wanted to help, really. They wore denim and had piercings and said howmuch they liked the music we listened to and tried to get us to talk about our feelings. You could see when they talked to you, trying to get near you, how they yearned for some kind of revelation—that you would give them the gift of some confidence, a disclosure or confession about your family and what had been done to you, they were longing for your trust, though not knowing what the hell to do with it if you gave it. They were OK, most of them. Only Brian Meredith hit us. But they all used Pindown.
    Lesley was the nicest. She arrived soon after me. She was perhaps ten years older than me, twenty-three to my thirteen. Lesley became my key worker. She was different from the others, rather awkward and clumsy, with feet too big for her body, but her eyes were quiet when they rested on you.
    Lesley was very conscientious. She took me off for individual sessions. We sat on the square of carpet in the staffroom—the only bit of carpet in the place—and did exercises from a ringbound manual she had, called Building Self-Esteem. She drew a self-esteem tree on a big piece of paper with felt tips; there were fruit on the branches, and you had to write something about yourself that you liked in each of the fruit. I remember the dirty cups on the coffee table, and the smell of Jeyes from the corridor where someone had been sick. I couldn’t think of much to write in the fruit. She turned a page of her book. ‘If I could wave a magic wand, what would you wish for?’ she said. ‘When you’re grown-up and all thisis behind you, what would you want to have?’ I sat there in the smell of cabbage and disinfectant. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. I closed my eyes, and saw it all, clear, vivid. Perhaps it was the tree she’d drawn, triggering something in me. I saw lots of trees, a garden; I saw a house and children and a husband, all these images welling up in me, precise as though I’d drawn them. ‘I’d like to have children,’ I said. ‘I’d like to have a family of my own. And a place to live, just us and nobody else.’ I saw, heard it all in my head: a lawn, a lily pool, the splashing of a fountain in the pool, the laughter of children. In a moment of hope that warmed me through, there on the thin frayed carpet: I will have them, I thought, these things.
    My mother visited, occasionally, erratically, dressed up, but not for me. Always in a hurry, as though there was somewhere else she needed to be. Like someone at a party, looking over your shoulder for the person they want to talk to, and shifty, as though she was implicated in some guilt by merely being there. Sometimes she brought presents: exuberant cuddly toys, large fluffy rabbits with satin hearts on their chests. I put the toys on the window sill of the room I shared with Aimee. Sometimes my mother was drunk when she came, sentimental, and full of self-pity; saying over and over how she’d done her best for me, done everything she could.
    ‘When can I come home?’
    ‘Soon. Very soon, Trina.’ Smoking her Marlboros,fiddling with her rings. ‘I just need to get myself together. You’re OK in here, then, are you?’
    ‘I hate it.’
    ‘Oh,’ she’d say. ‘They seem nice enough.’
    Afterwards Lesley would sit on my bed and talk to me.
    ‘How do you feel about your mum, my love? How does it all make you feel?’
    I never knew how to answer these questions.
    During the week we were meant to go to school. The others mostly didn’t; they’d go off to the towpath, where they’d sit on rubber tyres and inhale lighter fuel and throw stones into the water; or to the Glendale Centre, where when they got bored they’d steal things from the shops. I was the only one who went on going to school.
    It was a sprawling comprehensive, full of children I envied, with homes to go to and trainers that were