There was something churning round in my stomach. It wasn’t my period. That heavy, pushing ache you get was gone. This was more like a cement mixer, turning over and over. When I lay down, I got the taste of stale bread in my mouth. When I sat up, I tasted my own sick. Then my mouth suddenly filled up with saliva and I spat down the sink. I felt hot and then cold. I felt weak and dizzy. I was ill, there was no doubt. And I needed to take something. Pills, medicine—something to get this stuff out of my stomach, this stuff that was churning around.
Suddenly I felt drowsy. I could still feel the sun on my face. I had a dull ache at the back of my head, and closed my eyes. I remembered to lie on my right side. Best for dreaming. I willed myself to remember my dream. Daytime sleeping was the best. I could sleep right through till morning—but I had an alarm clock, my mother. My mother would wake me up and tell me to pack my school bag. And eat a sandwich.
As it happened I dreamt the same dream I had dreamt before. The one where I’m trying to get through a house and out the other side. This time I arrive at the house on a bicycle and tie it up to a post like it’s a dog or something. There’s someone there to help me. The person is telling me which way to go but I don’t want to listen. I tell the person to take my bicycle and go back home. Now I can go down into the cellar on my own. Then I realise that I have no bicycle and I know that I have to get another. I feel frustrated that I don’t know where I’m going to get one from. Just as I think I’ve worked it out, I hear my name. I open my eyes and see Mum.
‘Looks like you’ve got sunstroke,’ she said.
Was she sympathetic? Accusing? Then she laughed. ‘Your face is like a raspberry!’
Did she really have to laugh?
‘It’s all right,’ she reassured me. ‘It isn’t really burnt. Only a little bit red. Do you feel all right?’
‘Sick. Dizzy. Tired.’ I was monosyllabic with sleep.
‘Too much sun,’ declared Mum. ‘I’ll get you some water.’
I wanted to ask for orange juice but she was gone.
Time took a leap. In a matter of seconds she was back with a jug of iced water. And a sandwich.
‘I won’t be well enough for school tomorrow,’ I declared.
‘Yes, you will. Then we’ll go to the doctor, just for a checkup. A three-thousand-mile service,’ she said with a laugh.
Mum put her hand on my hot forehead. For a moment she looked at me so kindly, like she was an angel or something. She poured out a glass of water and placed it in my hand. Then she turned briskly and walked out of the door to the sound of Eliza’s call. Like a matron going off duty. End of shift.
I looked at the sandwich. I would weigh myself first, I thought. And afterwards, perhaps.
Green paint, sandwiches, school, doctors, a new dress for a wedding, an appointment on the calendar, Dad’s girlfriend, spaghetti Bolognese, shopping. I had got myself another list. But it wasn’t complete.
I remember knowing the French word for town hall but in my exam I couldn’t reach it. Knowing something and not knowing something. It happens more than you think. Some people call it denial.
Mum came back in. She sat down on the side of my bed. She looked down at me serenely, rearranged my pillow gently. Like a proper mother.
‘We’ll sort it out,’ she said.
But I felt like I had stepped onto the bottom of a long escalator. I was being carried along whether I liked it or not. It was almost impossible to turn round and run back down again. Almost.
SOMEWHERE inside I knew the truth about what was wrong with Jo but I also knew it was impossible because it was what happened to other families. Families where the mother eats suppers consisting of a slimming drink and chips, families where the mother tries to push her acne-ridden, lanky daughter into modelling, families where the mother makes comments about the neighbour: ‘She’d look better in something loose’; ‘Oh, no, not the leggings’; ‘At least she’s got nice hair’.
I wasn’t as bad as that, surely. But had I made my daughter lick the platter clean? Had she seen me reminisce about how I looked when I could fit into my size ten wedding dress? Was I, in fact, only one Ryvita away from the Hollywood-diet, celebrity-worshipping mother? Perhaps, in fact, it was all my fault…
The guilt that was sucking the sense out of me was magnified by the commercials on television. Cleaning fluids, gravy, the right medicine administered with loving care all shine the light on what it is to be the perfect mother. I didn’t look like the advert mother and my house didn’t look like the advert house. I was struggling to get Jo to the doctor, let alone tuck her up in bed and caringly spoon some wonder medicine into her, as seen on TV.
It was about that time, just before I eventually persuaded Jo to see the doctor, that I picked up the newspaper and read about the teenager who had literally cleaned herself to death. The girl was called Lisa and it seemed such a pretty, happy name, yet she scrubbed her hands with every cleaning fluid she could find in her mother’s over-stocked cupboard. Still not satisfied, she would apparently bathe in bleach and wash her hair in a thick gluey substance normally used for unblocking sinks. She frequently ended up in Casualty on account of all the toxic fumes she was inhaling and the burnt areas on her skin. Her mother knew about it, but apparently did nothing.
Eventually Lisa swallowed some of the cleaning fluids, large quantities of the stuff, in fact, in an attempt to clean out her insides. Her mother, it transpired, was a stickler for cleanliness in the home and ‘a friend’ informed the paper that she would slap Lisa for coming home from school with the merest speck of school gravy on her blouse. ‘What sort of mother…?’ I found myself saying, but quickly suppressed the question in case I discovered that the answer was, ‘A mother like you.’
For some reason, I cut out the article so I could read it again and again. Perhaps it comforted me in some strange way to find a mother worse than I could ever be, one who would have guilt stamped on her soul for the rest of her life. But it unsettled me, too, for I knew deep down that Jo had a problem and I knew that if I ignored it I would be like Lisa’s mother, the one I was judging and condemning so easily. The story brought tears to my eyes and one day I sobbed over it as if I were reading an obituary of a loved one. I felt I knew Lisa and wished I could have done something to prevent her tragic story, and all the time Jo’s tragic story seemed to be unfolding before my eyes. I knew my daughter needed help, more help than I could give her, and yet I had a responsibility. I was the one who needed to take control but was failing to do so.
In the end, I managed to get Jo to the doctor. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do but there seemed to be no other options. I had not yet taken Eliza’s advice and used my imagination. That would come later. That would come with Lily Finnegan’s strange approach.
‘I don’t need to go to the doctor’s, I’m not ill,’ Jo said when I suggested it.
‘But your stomach…’
‘I’m better. I’m OK.’
‘You haven’t been going to school, you’ve been—’
‘I know, I know. Please, Mum, don’t pressurise me. I’ll be all right, I promise.’
Her eyes pleaded with me, she looked so sad, even desperate, and I couldn’t reach her. I wanted to hug her, to tell her I loved her, that I missed the old Jo, that everything would be all right. But it was as if she had put a barbed-wire fence around herself to keep people out. To keep me out. Still, I tried to get through. I was not going to give up on my own daughter as, it seemed, Lisa’s mother had.
‘You are