Read My Daughter, My Mother for Free Online

he’s like: he never really questioned after a certain time.’
    She stopped for a moment. Joanne sat quietly, praying that her dad and Karen wouldn’t come back – not just yet.
    ‘I feel I haven’t had a life. As if I’ve been living in a trance. I can’t explain really. It’s like living behind a sort of screen, where everyone else is getting on with life around you, but you’re not really there, even though you are. And it got to this week and I decided: I’m going to be fifty, and I’m not going to live the rest of my life like this. I just thought, if I stop – this was last weekend – I’ll be clear of them by my birthday. I never asked anyone, I just threw the bottle in the rubbish and that was that.’ She swallowed. ‘It was like jumping off a cliff or something.’
    ‘It was brave,’ Joanne ventured.
    ‘It was bloody stupid, as it turns out.’ The anger was returning. ‘They talk about drugs all the time on the news: heroin and all that. And here I am, a drug addict like all of them – a dirty drug addict.’ The tears started to flow again.
    Joanne gripped her hand, feeling tears rising in her own eyes. All these years her mom – her strange, kind at times, but predictably unpredictable mother – had been suffering all this.
    ‘So they’ve put me back on it again,’ Margaret said bitterly.
    ‘They can help you: you can come off it more slowly, like you would with any drug.’
    Margaret crumpled, sinking further down into the bed again. ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’
    ‘Course you can,’ Joanne was saying. She sensed movement behind her and turned to see her dad and Karen approaching.
    She watched her parents’ eyes meet.
    In a small defeated voice Margaret said, ‘Hello, Fred.’
    Fred looked down at her, his face lined with sorrow. ‘Hello, love.’
    He was about to sit down beside the bed, reaching out to take her hand, but Margaret turned her head away from him.
    ‘Oh, go away, Fred,’ she said. Her voice was full of weary contempt. ‘Just leave me.’

Six
    Joanne was perched uncomfortably on a miniature chair by the painting table, watching Amy, when she heard the soft voice again.
    ‘She’s really enjoying herself, isn’t she?’
    She’d been in such a daze that she hadn’t seen Sooky come in, and turned to see her, dressed this time in a sunflower-yellow salwar kameez suit and smiling as she bent to put an apron over Priya’s head.
    ‘I can’t seem to get her to do anything else,’ Joanne said. ‘She’d spend all day here, if I let her.’
    There wasn’t another chair, so Sooky knelt down.
    ‘How’re you?’ she asked. She had a nice way of speaking, looking into your eyes as if she really wanted to know.
    Joanne was relieved to see her, happy that someone – anyone – would come over specially to talk to her.
    ‘I’m all right,’ she said. She’d been miles away, her head full of all that was happening with Mom. ‘What about you?’
    ‘Oh,’ Sooky said lightly, ‘not too bad.’
    There was a silence. Priya, with vigorous enthusiasm, was getting stuck into a pot of sky-blue paint. Joanne desperately wanted to talk, just to have a normal everyday chat, but it was hard to know what to say. The silence grew so long that she suddenly demanded, ‘How old are you then?’
    ‘Me? I’m twenty.’
    ‘Oh, I thought you were younger.’
    Sooky laughed, a sound that again Joanne found very cheering. ‘Why – how old’re you?’
    ‘I’m twenty-two.’
    ‘I thought you were older.’
    ‘Thanks very much!’ Joanne said. ‘Mind you, I feel it some days.’
    They were off after that, nattering away, finding out about each other. Sooky said she had been to school in Handsworth Wood, had two brothers and a sister, and her elder brother was already married with two children and another on the way. Joanne told her about Karen, about growing up in Kings Heath, then found herself blurting out, ‘My mom’s been poorly, you see . . . I’ve been back and