I GOT over it. Life was too good right now to be moping around for long. I had the radio up really loud in our yellow lean-to kitchen. I sang along with it enthusiastically. ‘Clap along if you feel that happiness is the truth!’ I sang and banged my soapy hands together enthusiastically in time to the music, splattering bubbles all over the grimy window.
‘Hey... HEY!’
My mother’s voice startled me. I turned around to see her leaning on the door jamb a little too heavily. Her cheeks were flushed. She’d been drinking. I mean, she always drank, she was drunk all the time, but she had really hit it this time.
I leaned across and switched off the radio.
‘What’s the matter Mum?’ I said warily, wiping my soapy hands on my school dress. I was momentarily confused. I was not really able to judge her mood. She was drunk yes, but she was generally pretty happy when she was really soaked. She didn’t look happy this time.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Hey? Gittin’ all that muck all over my windows...’ she grumbled, throwing her hand towards the window like she was fixing to wipe it off already.
I almost laughed. Almost. I looked back at the bubbles as they trailed down the window, cutting a shiny path through the smoky gloom.
‘Aww Mom, you can’t be serious?’ I said with a smile in my voice, hoping to jolly her out of it.
And that’s when she started. ‘Serious?? Am I bloody serious? Why yes, I am bloody serious! I am! I am bloody serious! Why doesn’t anyone ever take me bloody serious? ...’ she started ranting in an almost hypnotic way. Bloody serious, bloody serious, bloody serious, she kept yelling over and over and over in different ways, on a loop but not quite, with her voice gaining panic each time, visibly shaking with the intensity of it.
I eyed her with alarm. I recognized this. Sometimes she did this and it was horrible. It could last for days. That explained the extra drinking; she often drank more to try and self-medicate it away. If she followed her usual pattern, then she would rant herself into such a state, she would be physically sick, beating at herself and tearing at her skin. It was like she was possessed by some sort of monster, and she knew it, so she was trying to tear it out of her, vomit it up, rip it from her body, any way she could.
When she was like this, she couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t eat. After a while, the sleeplessness especially seemed to make her worse. The thoughts got louder in her mind as she struggled against them while her energy petered out. Eventually, after a week or so, her body would just break down because it had no energy left. Then she would go quiet.
That was always a relief but what took over then was almost as horrifying. She still wouldn’t sleep but she became this kind of zombie woman. Her eyes were completely dead. She didn’t drink while she was like that, but paradoxically, I wished she would. Drink might relax her enough to go to sleep.
She’d never been to a doctor about it and I’d never had the strength to make her. She was phobic about doctors at the best of times and would barely even take me even when I was really ill. The few times she had taken me, she’d refused to go in with me to the clinic and would spend the time pacing around the car park, sucking back cigarettes. Fortunately, I was pretty healthy, but not long ago I gave myself a hairline fracture coming off the trampoline the wrong way, and she wouldn’t even take me inside then, even though I couldn’t walk by myself.
Anyway. I didn’t mind, I really didn’t, we got by and I think she and I knew without saying anything, that if a doctor ever did get a chance to poke around her body, she’d be in the hospital and I would be in foster care before you could say ‘Department of Social Services’.
