Free The Bad Mother's Handbook by Kate Long Page A

the back kitchen windowsill, behind the terracotta garlic jar, but I didn’t throw it out, that would have been
ungrateful.
    The bell was about to go for break so Sylv tottered off
to the ladies’ to re-do her lipstick and rearrange her underskirt,
and I gathered up my daffodils and set off for the
classroom. As I got to the corner some of them began to
escape and flutter to the floor. Any minute now and they’d
be stampeded by a bunch of ten-year-olds, so I put the rest
of the pile on the Nature Table and got down on my hands
and knees and began swishing up the little paper shapes
with my hands.
    ‘Let me help.’ Mr F, with his clipboard and stock cupboard
invoices under one arm, was stooping to pick at a
lone petal which had welded itself to the grey vinyl floor
tiles. ‘Tricky customers, aren’t they? Look, I’m sorry about
earlier.’
    I must have looked blank.
    ‘In the office. Sylv.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Sometimes
her enthusiasm to, ahm, help gets the better of her.’
    ‘It’s not your fault, you’ve nothing to apologize for.’
    ‘Well. Rest assured, it won’t go any further.’ He handed
me my daffodil. ‘And if you’d like someone to talk it
through with sometime, someone objective . . . I can see
it must be a difficult situation, with your mother being
as she is . . . Anyway, I’m usually in the Feathers of a
Sunday lunchtime, the Fourgates Ramblers meet there.
It’s quite a nice atmosphere, I don’t know if you’ve ever
been in. No jukebox, which is a rarity these days.’
    Before I had time to do anything other than smile
vaguely we heard the click of heels behind us. Sylv’s face,
newly drawn on, was eager with news. ‘You might like to know we’re running short of paper towel in the ladies’,’
she said as she drew level. Mr F gave a small salute and
walked off towards his room. ‘He’s very much on the short
side for a headmaster, isn’t he?’

    *

    My dad always says, ‘As one door shuts, another one
slams in your face.’ Mind you, he’s not nearly as bitter as
my mum, because according to her, he didn’t have anything
like as much to lose. He was an apprentice with
British Aerospace when she got caught, and he just carried
on, finished his training and got a full-time job there.
He’s still on the machines, despite waves of redundancies
and his appallingly casual attitude. ‘He thinks it’s beneath
him,’ my mum often says, and we know who to blame for
that idea. A blue-collar worker? Nah. She wanted to land
a professional, a doctor or a lawyer, that sort of league.
    Anyway, he’s wrong. About the doors. I was asked out
by someone else the very next week.
    I was in the senior library, because I often am. I love
it in there. It smells of furniture polish, and the wicker-bottom
chairs creak under you as you lean back against
the radiator to chew your pen and think. On sunny days
the light makes beams of sparkly dust that drifts like
random thoughts. The calm is intoxicating. It’s about as
unlike our house as you can get.
    The one thing my mum can’t get at me for is, I do
work. I’m after four As, mainly to get me away from her.
Don’t know if I’ll get the grades, but it won’t be for want
of trying. There was another module coming up and an
essay to get out of the way (what I want to know is, why can’t teachers communicate with each other so you don’t
get about twenty deadlines at once?).
    So I had my Keats out and my Brodie’s Notes and my
Oxford pad and I was just getting into my spider diagram
when someone put an illegal cup of hot chocolate down
on the desk next to me.
    ‘Absolutely NO food and drink to be consumed in the
library,’ said Daniel Gale brightly. ‘It’s OK, the librarian’s
outside arguing with Mr Stevens over the budget. She’ll be
there for the duration. Cheers.’ He produced a KitKat and
snapped it in half. ‘There you go. Eat up.’
    Out of the corner of my eye I saw two