Scarlett - Cathy Cassidy [5]
I kick over the coffee table, still littered with this morning’s cereal bowls and empty glasses. A pool of juice slides out from the tipped-up carton and stains the cream-coloured carpet. Mum doesn’t even blink.
I pick up my school bag and hurl it against the wall with a satisfying thud. A framed school photo of me aged five, all gap-toothed grins and neatly pressed uniform, clatters to the floor. The girl in that photo is happy, hopeful, without a care in the world. I can’t even remember what it was like to be her. I stamp on the picture with my red wedge sandals until the glass shatters, and then I rip the photo into little pieces.
Someone knocks loudly on the door, and Mum snaps to attention and goes to answer it. She doesn’t have a problem hearing other people, only me.
‘Is everything all right?’ asks the man from downstairs. ‘I could hear lots of shouting and crashing about. Is something wrong?’
‘We’re fine,’ says Mum smoothly. ‘Just a little disagreement.’
‘Well,’ says the man, frowning, ‘OK. But keep it down, could you?’
He turns away, and I fling a sheepskin cushion at the back of his head. Mum grabs it before it hits home and calmly puts it back on the sofa, then moves on to pick up the coffee table, and carries the dirty dishes out to the kitchen. She mops up the orange-juice stain, and wraps the shards of shattered glass and tattered bits of photograph in newspaper to put in the bin.
She is very efficient, my mother. She covers my tracks, hides the evidence, tidies up the mess. It’s like I never got mad in the first place.
Pretty soon, there’ll be no trace of me left here at all.
Everyone has choices, according to Mum. Life chucks a bunch of stuff at us, stuff we have no control over, but we can decide how to handle it all. We shape our lives with the choices we make.
What a load of rubbish. Life isn’t fair – you think it’s going to be one way, and then it tips in the other direction and everything’s upside down. How do you make choices when everything’s turned to dust in your hands? It’s impossible.
It’s Tuesday night. Five days have gone by and we’ve had all the talks, the rows, the tantrums. We’ve been round and round in circles till there’s nowhere left to go.
‘This is the best option,’ Mum says gently, helping me to pack my suitcase. It’s the same case I took to Nan’s, the same one I took to Uncle Jon’s, and just looking at it gives me an ache in the pit of my stomach.
‘Best for you or me?’ I ask, but I already know the answer. Best for her. She’s the one with the choices, she’s the one calling the shots. I just get pushed around from place to place, like a bit of unwanted luggage.
‘Scarlett, please,’ says Mum. ‘We have to be positive about this.’
‘I am,’ I tell her. ‘Positive I’ll never forgive you.’
She folds up my red Chinese dress, and a pair of black parachute trousers. ‘It’s all about attitude,’ she tells me. ‘Lose that chip on your shoulder, stop feeling sorry for yourself. None of that helps, Scarlett. You act like the whole world’s against you.’
‘Not the whole world, just you,’ I snap, stuffing rolled-up tights and neon plastic bracelets into the case.
‘You made your choices,’ she repeats. ‘You knew the score. D’you think I’ll just stand by and let you mess up your entire education? Greenhall was your last chance, Scarlett, you knew that. Don’t blame me for the fact that you blew it.’
‘How come you’re so hard?’ I ask her.
‘Maybe I learnt it from you,’ she says. ‘Too bad. I’ve done my best, and maybe it wasn’t good enough, but I’m not going to stand by and watch you throw your life away.’
‘No, you’re packing me off to the middle of nowhere so you won’t have to. You won’t even have to hear my screams,’ I point out. ‘It was bad enough being parcelled off to Milton Keynes to stay with Nan, and then to Uncle Jon’s, but this time we won’t even be in the same country. You can’t make me go