Stealing Stacey

“I – I’m afraid I said you wouldn’t mind moving in with me.”

I couldn’t speak for a moment. For horror.

“But I’ll have to sleep in your bed!” I wailed.

“Shhh! We must be nice to her.”

I didn’t feel like shushing. “Why?”

“I don’t know really,” said Mum. “I just know we must.”

That was so like Mum. You probably think she was thinking that this person was rich and we ought to suck up to her, maybe, but that wasn’t it. Mum doesn’t know why anything. She just does things. It’s like she acts on instinct. I bet if someone had asked her why she was marrying my dad, she’d have said, in that same helpless voice, “I don’t know exactly. I just know I must.”

Come to that, I bet Nan did ask her. Nan stayed married to my grandad for forty-two years and she’d be married to him still if he hadn’t gone and died. She’d never have married a no-hoper like Dad. Fancy watching your kid do something that stupid and not be able to talk her out of it. That’s why I’d decided I was never going to get married. Even if I’d liked boys, which naturally, considering what a bunch of duck-brained wussy creeps they are, I did not, I wouldn’t let myself get tied up to someone who might run out on me and leave me penniless and probably up the duff. (Of course Mum’s too old to be up the duff. Which is one good thing at least.)

Anyhow, there it was. I kicked up a terrible fuss (but quietly – even I didn’t want the vision to hear) but in the end I had to move out of my room. I was so upset I was crying. We carried my clothes and the rest of my clobber into Mum’s room. She’s got the double bed from when Dad was around. At least she had a washbasin in the room. I thought, Good, cos I bet when “Glen-deen” – of all the stupidnames – gets in the bathroom, she puts down roots. This was going to be a nightmare.

I started to sink down on the bed. Mum pulled me up before I touched. “No, you don’t. Back you go and talk to her. I’ll arrange your stuff.”

“Mum! I won’t know where anything is!”

“I’m going to give you half of all my space. Even my dressing-table top.”

“Big deal!”

“Yes, it is. Now go and talk to your grandmother.”

“What am I supposed to call her? I’m not calling her Nan, I’ve got a nan already!”

“Call her Grandma then.”

I went slowly back into the kitchen. Grandma (ugh! Who says “Grandma”?) was washing the tea things at the sink. I took over – she was a guest after all.

She took off Dad’s stripy apron. “Did my wild Australian boy leave this?” she said, dangling it. “I bet that’s all he did leave! I never saw the domestic side of him, I must say! When did he nick off, the little mongrel?”

I was shocked rigid. She was his mum, after all. Mums are supposed to be on their kids’ side. “Two years ago,” I mumbled.

That shook her.

“Two years… And I never knew! Any excuses?”

“No. Him and Mum had a last row. He slammed out and that was it.”

“You don’t know where he is?”

“Yeah, we do. Living with his girlfriend in Greville Drive.”

“Where’s Greville Drive?”

“Ten minutes’ bus ride from here.”

“So how come he sent me a postcard from Thailand?”

I nearly dropped a mug. Thailand? My mouth went all dry.

Grandma went on, “It just about made me throw up from shame.”

I said, “Please – uh – Grandma – Glendine, don’t tell Mum. Greville Drive was bad enough.”

“I bet!” she said. “When I saw that postcard I thought, sounds like he’s living it up. That’s when I decided to pack up and come over and see how you fellas were getting on.” Well, we’re not, I thought. We’re in the crap. We’ve got nomoney, Mum’s working her socks off at the checkout andeverything’s horrible. What can you do about it?

Then I remembered those ten-quid tips. And the posh luggage. And the way she dressed. I couldn’t help it – I thought, She’s really rich. I wondered why Dad never mentioned that. He never had any readies. Whenever he had a job, we didn’t see much money from it. Most of it went on booze. And dope, if you ask me. We didn’t know that for sure, and he always flat denied it, but there’s a difference between the way people get when they’re pissed and when they’re stoned.

“How do you think he managed to go to Thailand?” Grandma was asking.

After a bit, I said, “I think his girlfriend had some money.”

My mum had called her a little slapper, among other things I won’t repeat. But Greville Drive is quite posh. Compared to our road, anyway. It was houses, not flats. She most likely put up the cash. She was probably in Phoo-kuk or whatever the place is called with him right this minute, lying on a beach wearing three triangles of lace tied on with string, under a bunch of palm trees. Thinking of this made me want to throw up. Not from shame, though. From rage. Whatever problems I have with my mum, she doesn’t deserve to be treated like that.

Chapter Two (#ulink_e11fae60-40da-53ad-8fad-6895ce1cbd36)

Grandma Glendine settled in with us.

I hated her being there, but not because of her so much. It was because I had to share Mum’s room. And Mum not only smokes – she snores.

“Mum! Roll over!” I’d shout when her snores were driving me wild. The most infuriating thing was that Mum simply refused to believe that she snored.

“It’s lies, I don’t! Dad would’ve told me.”

“Probably too stoned to notice.” I shouldn’t have said that. She just turned her back and her shoulders started to shake. I knew she was still crazy for him.

Somehow Gran – I’d decided to call her just Gran – arranged her things in my room. She used all that luggage as extra furniture. The trunk turned into a table. Gran wrote loads of postcards on it, all touristy pictures of London, beefeaters at the Tower, guards at Buckingham Palace, that kind of thing. Even some of Princess Diana. She said a funny thing about her, that I should have taken more notice of at the time, but I didn’t.

“I remember exactly where I was when I heard she’d died. I was skinning a kangaroo.”

I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on that. I just thought it was a joke or something. I sometimes think I’m not very bright.

The other suitcases were piled up and she stood things on them. She’d brought lots of interesting things with her.

There were postcards of pictures all painted in dots. I couldn’t make them out until she explained them. They were painted by Australian natives and were all in code. A fire was a bunch of red dots, for instance, and white dotted lines were trips their ancestors made in something called the Dreamtime, across the outback. That’s the middle of Australia where it’s all desert. And there were special kinds of dots for animals or their footprints, or curvy coloured lines for snake tracks. The animals were wonderful weird kinds. I loved those postcards and Gran gave me some to stick up on my side of Mum’s dressing-table mirror.

Then there were some wooden animals with burn marks on them. Big lizardy things called goannas, and snakes (I wouldn’t even touch those. God how I hated snakes, not that I’d ever seen a live one). She had miniature wooden things like long bowls and something called a throwing stick, for spears, she said. She gave me a boomerang, only where would I have space to try throwing it? She showed me a picture of a didgeridoo, a musical instrument, which is a long, thick pipe. It gets hollowed out by termites, and it’s so heavy you have to rest the far end, the end away from your mouth, on the ground. She told me women aren’t allowed to play it because it’s symbolic, you can guess what of!

She showed off her clothes. They were sort of naff in a way, but rich-naff, not like Mum’s shell suit that I told her not to buy at the Oxfam shop (but of course she did). It’s a sort of metal-pink. I die every time she goes out in it.

Gran took us out. Not on week nights, she was very hot on me getting to bed early so I wouldn’t be tired at school, but on Fridays and Saturdays. She took us for meals out, and not at the local dumps, either, except once we took her to one of the African cafés for the experience. I took her around the market a couple of times, she said she loved it, which was quite something, because it can be fun in the summer, but it’s pretty dismal in the rain. Mainly though, she wanted to treat us. Once we went to a Holiday Inn right up West and had a really swish meal with proper waiters. That was the night she took us to see the show at the Hippodrome. It was amazing. I’d never seen a live act before. She took us to loads of good movies too. We took taxis and minicabs everywhere, she wouldn’t ride the buses or trains.

She talked. How she talked! And she wanted me to talk, too. When I came home from school she asked me to tell her my whole day. I was used to slumping in front of the telly after school to chill out. Now I had to articulate. She soon spotted I hated school. She never mentioned the truant-cop, but I think she’d heard, or maybe Mum had ratted on me.