Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [25]
‘Is that your mum?’
I nodded.
‘Would you wake her up for me, please?’
That was easier said than done, but a few minutes later a bleary-eyed Mum was upright – and ready for an argument.
‘We have reason to believe you have stolen a flower pot from a house near here.’
‘No I bloody haven’t!’ Mum said, as indignantly as she could muster. ‘How dare you come round here suggesting that.’
The policeman was not fazed by Mum’s fury. All the while she was speaking, he was staring at the flowerpot by the fire.
‘Can you explain where you got that from?’ he asked.
‘I bought it.’
‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘Be like that if you want.’
Great, I thought. He’s giving up.
‘But,’ he continued, ‘can you explain where this has come from?’
My heart sank when I saw where he was pointing. Just by his feet, at the front door, was a little pile of mud. On closer inspection, it went across the hall and out the door of the building as well.
‘In fact, we followed the trail all the way from the house you stole it from,’ the policeman said. ‘So you may as well admit it.’
It’s laughable really, isn’t it? We were so incompetent we’d left a muddy line all the way to our front door. Mum didn’t have a leg to stand on, but she was still denying it when the policeman picked up the pot and, chortling to himself, took it back outside. When he closed the door she was still swearing about the liberty he had taken accusing her of stealing.
‘But we did steal it,’ I said, confused.
‘Oh yes,’ Mum said, ‘we did, didn’t we?’ and broke out into a huge laugh. I had to join in; it was contagious. ‘Did you see the look on his face?’ she squealed. ‘Why didn’t you spot that mud?’ But she wasn’t angry. She was relieved, I think, that they hadn’t put us in the patrol car again.
‘What are we like, eh?’ she said, and I shrugged.
We were what we were. A team. Which is exactly how I wanted it to stay.
Even though Mum wasn’t arrested this time, there was another consequence. If I’d thought about it long enough, I would have remembered that it was the same consequence that had happened after the panda episode. By being naughty, by getting herself noticed by the police, Mum had flagged us up to all the authorities. Sure enough, a few days later, there was yet another knock at the door. Once more I was met by the familiar smartly dressed couple from social services.
‘Would you like to come in?’ I asked, out of habit.
‘That would be lovely,’ the woman said. ‘Now, is your mother here?’
Then they saw her, waking up from her afternoon nap.
‘Mrs Wilson?’ the man said firmly.
Mum squinted at the guests.
‘Oh, it’s you. What do you want?’
‘We’re from social services,’ the man said. ‘We have a warrant from the courts . . .’ He paused and looked at his colleague.
‘And we have come to take Cathy into care.’
FIVE
When Can I Go Home?
It had come out of nowhere.
What had we done wrong? We’d given the plant back. We were so happy, ask anyone. All these thoughts, and more, rushed through my head. But it didn’t matter. No one was listening.
The adults started talking. I couldn’t follow everything, just a few phrases. They said Mum hadn’t replied to letters. They said she had failed to turn up to meetings. They even accused her of not caring enough about keeping her daughter by refusing to talk to them.
That made her angry. I hadn’t heard her swear much before, but I did then. It sounded like she’d picked up a few phrases from Mark and his pals.
The upshot was that Mum told them to go to hell and they said that, in fact, she was the one lucky not to be going anywhere because of the way she’d been bringing me up. She was offended, but I was just confused. ‘Neglect’, ‘unruly behaviour’, ‘a disorderly house’, ‘enabling truancy’. There were too many words I couldn’t comprehend, but the overall meaning was clear: they weren’t happy. And, whether I liked it or not, I needed to get ready to leave.
More than thirty years later, I can’t believe the actual process of getting me out of the house wasn’t more protracted than