Always a Part of Me

She wasn’t really a witch.

I mean she was, but she wasn’t. It was a nickname I used with Erin, my younger sister - and Mum never found out. Not once. Although maybe she knew, and just didn’t tell us.

Even as a kid I knew it was a harsh assessment. Generally speaking, she was a model mother: Not many people ate real Spaghetti Bolognaise in the Seventies, but even to this day I’ve never had it from a can. Not once. This was the pattern that our lives followed as we grew into healthy, well-covered young women – and Mum never stopped delivering. Cooking, cleaning, dispensing advice and helping with homework.

Yet I still, from an early age, harboured a hatred for her. Both of us kids were simply frightened of the woman. She knew stuff, and there was no telling exactly what she knew or how she knew it – or when she’d irrationally lose her temper with us. And somehow, without any evidence of any sort, I instinctively knew that her insane rages and the stuff she knew were in some way related.

It was a constant tightrope. My first serious experience was in October 1979. I’d just started senior school, and had been setting my stall out for an older boyfriend as soon as I got there. Makeup was not permitted but mostly tolerated, although Mum strictly forbade it – so I had to be careful, putting it on in the loo once I got to school, and staying late to go back in and get it off before going home.

My first kiss was a twenty-four-carat cliché: Steve Johnson approached me as I was walking back home one night. I was alone, most of the other kids being ahead of me thanks to my makeup removal routine. He’d been made to stay late for being flippant with a teacher, sidling up to me and gently touching my arm. ‘Hey, you got a minute?’

I gave him several minutes as it turned out, behind – would you believe it? – the bike sheds.

But I was unmarked. No love bites, no makeup to smudge. On top of the world, I went through the front door having committed – in my eyes – the perfect crime. Mum was, as always, in the kitchen. I tried to focus on the trigonometry homework I’d been given as a way of sucking the brightness from my eyes; doing my best to look jaded as I pushed the door open. She glanced up at me from a recipe book. ‘You’re late today.’

Rapid excuse needed, and I had a credible one: ‘Some of my English Lit class playing up. Mrs Young made us all stay behind.’

As I spoke, she looked directly at me for a couple of seconds, a faint smirk emerging before she licked her lips and went over to the hob.

OK, she could have been chancing her arm - but she’d somehow picked the right occasion. It was too much of a coincidence. She knew.

Trouble was, at that age you’ve no idea what kind of weird abilities your parents might possess. All parents, for that matter. Some days I’d kid myself that she’d probably just heard something on the grapevine, or – more likely – found the makeup, hidden under the loose bit of slightly rotted floorboarding in my room under the piece of carpet that I carefully lifted up to access it every day.

Either way I liked that she never brought it up directly with me. I was too young for a boyfriend and that was that - but she did have her way with me enough times over the years to convince me that yes, she really was a witch. I was completely sure I was always being punished in lieu of the stuff she knew about me, but didn’t want to discuss. Erin avoided most of it, but I was unfairly deemed to be responsible for all kinds of domestic crimes from early adolescence onwards: Messy bedrooms were the biggest problem. It was like living in an army officer training unit. Erin and I had come back from the park one summer’s evening ready for dinner, and she was stood at the bottom of the stairs with a face like thunder.

‘Come with me.’

We looked at each other, terrified. What had she found?

Mum frogmarched us into my bedroom first, and my stomach lurched. She peeled back my hastily made bed and glared at me.

‘What on earth is this?’

‘Er… sheets and blankets, just like any other bed.’

The yelling started before I’d even finished my sentence:

‘In what world do you think this is good enough young lady!!?’

But I was older by then. I’d visited enough of my friends’ houses to see how things worked in other, normal families. Their mothers didn’t explode over mixed up piles of shoes in the hallway, or the odd badly ironed garment. Nonetheless I spoke tentatively, as much to show respect as out of fear:

‘Mum, does it really matter that much?’

Despite my informed bravery, she would still have us well and truly under her thumb for a good few more years - and we all knew it. Her eyes froze onto my face, and the pre-speech inward breath was drawn to maximum effect. A total drama queen, yet still highly effective – especially as she slowed the words down to half speed, squeezing every last amp out of the charged air in the room:

‘You…have...no… IDEA. what I have to deal with.’

But I did. Shopping, looking after the house and cooking food. She wasn’t a bloody hedge fund manager, was she? Nightmare of a mother.

However, as I got slightly older, I started – inevitably – to understand the truth about womanhood. The school had told me what to expect, and Mum – dutiful as ever - played her part and dealt with it like a pro. Other realities – notably heartbreak - started to appear in my life, and we grew closer as I understood more. For a while, I put her worst behaviour down to the sheer grind of having to deal with cold, hard reality.

Until I didn’t. Until she started scaring the crap out of me all over again. I’d just turned fourteen, and Erin was ten. It was the summer holidays, and we were sat up at the kitchen breakfast bar reading our respective age-appropriate (or in my case age-inappropriate) magazines, whilst Mum was at the sink.

I looked over and sneered at Erin’s silly, immature nonsense. She’d outgrown princesses and ponies, but it had to be pretty lame, whatever she was into. My edition of Just Seventeen was where it was at, and I knew it. It wasn’t just her age, either. She was turning into a serious arse-kisser with Mum, always trying to please. In recent months, I’d felt like the pair of them had some kind of bond, and were always plotting behind my back to try and snoop into my life.

My dislike of Erin, however, was put to one side as - out of nowhere - Mum nearly jumped out of her skin. What the hell was wrong with her this time?

‘It’s a girl!’ She exclaimed.

‘What!?’ we said in unison.

She was looking around frantically for a pen, found one and then located a spare page at the back of the recipe book. After quickly glancing at the kitchen clock above the door, she carefully wrote it down. ‘Eleven fifty-six. Girl.’

I was getting a bit impatient by that point. ‘What girl?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘You tell me.’

But sure enough, about ten minutes later Charlie arrived at the door. He was Erin’s best friend, and his heavily pregnant mother was very friendly with ours.

‘Sarah! Auntie Julia! I’ve got a baby sister!’

‘I know!’ said Mum.

Charlie had looked understandably confused, and slightly deflated. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter.’ Mum just smiled at him. ‘You must be delighted!’

Charlie had nodded, whilst Erin and I just stood there, wondering what the hell had just happened. I said nothing to her at the time, and we hardly ever spoke of it again - but Mum had told a few people and word discreetly got round. I think she liked the attention; her acting ambitions having been put paid to once she’d met and married Dad.

Of course, that meant my life wouldn’t truly be my own anymore. Boyfriends; intimacy; bunking off school: God knows how much of it she’d ever really know. I could never be sure, but I one hundred percent wished I had another mother. Anyone.

And when I had my own kids, I’d never make them feel the same way. She may have been a witch whether she liked it or not, but that didn’t excuse the round-the-clock, spring-loaded tension we’d had to endure for our entire childhoods.

Thirty years later, stood in the crematorium lobby with Erin; Dad; our own husbands and kids; the rest of the family and various friends, I was still keen to be a different type of person to Mum.

As the first-born daughter I’d always known that, when the time came, I would have to do the speech. Obviously the terror she’d invoked in both of us wouldn’t be mentioned, but the weirdness had been raised with Erin. However, we’d agreed pretty quickly that it would have been wildly inappropriate. It may have been the most extraordinary thing about Mum and a fitting metaphor for her sheer intensity, but this wasn’t the time. Stories of that nature could be told at the wake, over alcoholic drinks and a buffet. Not in a crematorium chapel.

Besides, there was so much more to her than an upmarket party trick – albeit a mighty good one. To be honest, I was just grateful by that point. Grateful that she had had loved us in her own way; loved Dad and had - despite everything - never been a cookie cutter-type Mum like most of the others. As I’d aged, I’d realised that coming from slightly unusual parentage was far more interesting than not.

Nonetheless, as soon I got in the car with Pete and the kids I felt a burden lift - as you tend to after the funeral of someone close. The speech was behind me and I’d kept my emotions under control. It was a celebration of a life, and the wake was a genial event. Admittedly, I had to internally berate myself for looking, as I think most parents would, at my own two daughters and concluding that they were far better-adjusted human beings than Erin and myself. But I think most kids do that, no matter how accomplished their parents were.

It was only the following day that things got slightly odd.

We’d left the girls at home and gone shopping for some holiday outfits, though really I just wanted to get out of the house. Mum and Dad had visited so many times over the years that I couldn’t look at the reclining sofa in the living room without thinking about her, fond as she was of spreading herself out on it. The big mall out by the ring road was as good a diversion as any, and I was routing through various racks of summer dresses when an attractive couple in - I guessed - their early thirties, appeared in my peripheral vision.

I thought nothing of that, until I picked up a cream-coloured floral halter neck trouser suit that the woman had just been holding up against herself in a nearby mirror before her husband shook his head and she returned it. As I brushed my hand over the material to feel its quality, I stood up with a start. Pete was understandably concerned:

‘You OK Darling?’

I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, and shook my head with abandon to force myself back into reality. But the feeling wouldn’t go away, and rude as it felt I couldn’t help but look at the other couple. And I knew beyond any reasonable doubt that she was cheating on him.

But still, I tried to kid myself: Don’t be silly, Sarah. If you could do what Mum could do, you’d have been doing it years ago.

I looked at Pete and pretended everything was fine. ‘I, er, just got that feeling. Like when you realise you’ve gone out and left the gas on.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m an idiot, ignore me.’

He looked both confused and bemused, and I was keen to push on with the rest of the day. ‘Right,’ I said with purpose. ‘All things considered, I think I’ve got enough stuff to wear for this trip after all.’ I looked over to his favourite part of the store. ‘Come on.’

As ever, he needed no persuasion. We entered the chilled efficiency of the food hall, which was at capacity with Saturday shoppers. Thankfully a middle-aged couple were approaching us with laden bags on their way out, and they had a spare basket - which was handy as there were none left to take. The woman smiled at me, holding it up - and I nodded gratefully.

And then wished I’d never taken it, almost throwing it to the floor as the images flashed through my head. It was enough to make Pete stop dead in his tracks. ‘What’s the matter now?’

I shook my head and looked at him blankly, though not because my mind was actually blank; it was more out of complete bewilderment. The couple were now on their way out of the main door, but I knew. Knew that he’d raped his wife the previous evening, and not for the first time.

Silly me. I’d thought childbirth would be the most painful part of being a mother. Followed by toilet training; the Terrible Twos; puberty.

But I was wrong.

This crap, it appeared, would be with me everywhere I went from now onwards – and it wouldn’t be some kind of freaky, fun superpower that I could use to snoop on my kids. My job would be to restrain myself from telling them too much about the world around us all; the one I was already starting to know far too much about. Otherwise they’d never trust anyone, and I’d scare them for life. And their own lives? If they knew how much I’d know about them, I’d lose them.

I’d have to keep everything to myself until my dying day, and the pressure would inevitably blow the lid off me once in a while. And who would I be taking it out on?

I could try, but I knew then that Mum had tried. I’d do my best. It was all anyone could do. But would it be enough?

Meanwhile, I looked around at the cook-chill delicacies; the new doughnut-croissant creation being promoted at the pastry counter, and the ever-tempting bottles of white wine at the far end near the checkouts.

And I knew the answer was No.

I needed fresh vegetables, rice and home-cooked chicken. Orange juice. My job, in addition to spending my remaining years keeping my mouth shut and my emotions in check, was to live a long life. That way I’d spare my own eldest daughter for as long as I could.