The Not So Perfect Mum: The feel-good novel you have to read this year!. Kerry Fisher
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‘Yes.’
I sighed. Colin never had to squeeze conversation out of Bronte. They would lie on the front room floor giggling for hours. She’d manage to persuade him to play Polly Pockets with her, his huge hands squishing tiny pink shoes onto webbed feet and lining up miniature cartons of milk in her grocer’s shop. I couldn’t even get her to tell me who’d shared her crisps.
We walked past a group of teenagers gathered on the wall outside the bakery, all sloppy T-shirts and arses hanging out of their jeans. They were taking it in turns to swing each other around in a Morrisons trolley. The trolley tipped down the high kerb, throwing a boy with a spider tattooed on his neck and ‘Shit Happens When You Party Naked’ written on his sweatshirt headfirst into the road. I winced at the sound of bones meeting tarmac, but where we lived, a lot depended on your ability to look the other way. Hoots and wolf-whistles filled the air. No one jumped down from the wall. I shooed the kids into the bakery where Harley ran to the chocolate doughnuts covered in multi-coloured sprinkles.
‘What do you fancy, Bronte?’ I asked, squinting out through the reflections on the window into the road. A blonde girl with a glittery thong several inches above her jeans was squatting over the boy.
‘I’m going to get a gingerbread man. Are you getting a vanilla slice for Dad?’
I nodded, though Colin didn’t need any more blubber stuck on his backside. I’d always loved his muscular build towering above my tiny little frame. But now he was more darts player than rugby player.
Harley had bright pink and yellow sprinkles dotted round his mouth before we’d got out of the shop. Bronte nibbled the gingerbread man limb by ordered limb. The gang had disappeared but the boy was still there, propped up by the kerb, half-sitting, half-lying among the cake wrappers, Coke cans and fag packets. The girl was trying to look at his head.
‘I’ll be all right in a minute. S’just a cut, innit?’ the boy said.
‘Are you okay?’ I said.
The girl swung round, black eyeliner and thick mascara out of place on her young face. She pulled her sleeves over her hands. ‘It’s Tarants. He says he’s good, but he’s bleeding from his head, like. I think he needs some stitches or something. The corner of the trolley slashed him.’
‘Can I look?’ I hoped that I wouldn’t get a brick through the window later on. I waved Harley and Bronte over to the bench.
The boy took his hand away from his head. His sweatshirt was sodden. I stopped short of hopping about, waving my arms and shouting, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, you’re bleeding to death,’ but I felt my stomach suck in like a snail into a shell. For the first time I understood what fainting might feel like. I squeezed my eyes tight and fumbled for my phone.
‘Sorry, but you really need to get this looked at. I’m calling an ambulance. All right?’
He was rocking gently and sort of singing one note, all that ‘hard boy, what you lookin’ at?’ gone out of him. He nodded at me, then started throwing up between his legs, splattering his trainers. I took a step back. Colin did blood and sick in our house. I did nits and threadworm. I held my breath, patted him on the back, and considered putting my coat round him. The blood would never come out of it, though. I shouted at Harley to go into the bakery and ask for a towel. I’d never called an ambulance before. I wasn’t sure how bad people had to be for an ambulance. What if I had to pay for it if he wasn’t injured enough? Tarants heaved again. I pushed 999.
Bronte slipped her hand into mine. It only needed someone to half-kill themselves for her to feel affectionate. ‘Is he going to die, Mum?’ she said.
‘No, no, of course not. A small cut can bleed quite a lot, so it’s probably not as bad as it seems,’ I said, not even daring to look at the trolley in case half of Tarants’ scalp, complete with black hedgehog spikes, was dangling there.
Harley spotted the paramedic before I did. I hadn’t been expecting a motorbike. The paramedic pulled off his helmet to reveal a lean capable face and dark hair going grey at the temples. With a brisk ‘I’m Simon,’ he got straight to work, snapping on gloves and shining a light in Tarants’ eyes and ears. I felt responsibility drop off me. Harley edged closer for a better look.
‘Mum, will the doctor take him to hospital? Will he have to stay there? Will he get in trouble for messing about with the trolley?’ As usual I was torn between pride at Harley’s enthusiasm and embarrassment at his appetite for blood and the fact that he couldn’t have a conversation that didn’t compete with passing jet planes.
Harley bellowing in Simon’s ear probably wasn’t helping him concentrate. I tried to pull him back, but Harley looked as though he was on for stitching the wound himself. With a little wink, Simon nodded his head to show where Harley could stand for a ringside view without being in the way.
‘What’s his name?’ Simon said.
‘Tarants,’ said the girl. ‘Short for Tarantula. His real name is Kyle, but no one ever calls him that.’
Simon nodded at her as though he came across a lot of people called Black Widow and Daddy Long Legs in his line of work. He examined the wound, his long fingers smoothing and tapping, like he was reading Braille, talking, talking all the time in a soothing voice. Harley had a definite swagger when Simon asked him to fetch a box of bandages from the back of the bike.
‘Has anyone phoned his parents?’ Simon asked over his shoulder, as he ripped open a dressing.
His shoulders sagged when he learned that Tarants lived with his sister. I looked away. We all knew that our SD1 postcode – stabbings, domestics, heroin overdoses – was the one that the emergency services tried to pass like a forfeit at a party. SD2, a weird oasis of grand Victorian houses bordering our area of flat-roofed sixties flats and terraced stone-clad boxes, was the black fruit gum that everyone wanted – stranded Persian cats, heart attacks, fingers lopped off by pruning secateurs.
When Simon had finished, he smiled round at me, too young for a man who had all of us staring as though he was about to walk on water. Harley didn’t seem to suffer from that best-pants-for-the-doctor deference, though. ‘Cor. How do you know what to do? Have you seen someone die? Will he die? I want to be a doctor like you.’
‘I have seen someone die. Sometimes it happens even when we try our very best. But Tarants is going to be okay. There’s nothing stopping you becoming a doctor. You just have to work hard at school – and have a stomach for blood, which you obviously have.’ He said it like he really believed Harley could do it. And that made me want to smother him with big fat grateful kisses.
Just as I was noticing that he did have quite nice lips, I heard, ‘Hey, Bronte. What you doing here? I thought you was late home from school. I came out to see where you’d got to.’ I turned to see Colin standing behind us, hands on hips. When he came out to see where his little princess was, he was just being a good dad. I, on the other hand, was ‘blinking neurotic’.
‘Bleeding hell, Maia, I thought you’d be home by four. I didn’t realise you was going to get the kids. You’re not going to have time to cook tea before you get off to work.’
I didn’t want to confirm Simon’s SD1 expectations by launching into a slanging match in the street. Colin glanced down at Tarants but apparently the thought of his own hand-to-metal contact with a tin opener was a far greater tragedy than leaving your brains splattered on the road.
I tried to pacify him. ‘I went out to put a notice up in the post office and as it was home time, I thought I’d meet the kids, and then—’
Simon looked up, right into Colin’s paint-spattered sweatshirt. ‘Your wife saw this young man had hurt himself, so she very kindly called the emergency services and was good enough to stay here to make sure he was okay. He should be fine but I’ve got an ambulance coming to take him to the hospital so he can be checked over,’ he said, as though Colin had been falling over himself to make Tarants’ welfare his top concern rather than his ever-rumbling belly.
‘Mai,