Sophie Hannah: The Wrong Mother

And then it stops. I try to move, and am surprised to discover that I can. I crawl free and sit up, preparing myself for blood, bones poking through torn flesh. I feel all right, but I don’t trust the information my brain is receiving from my body. People often feel fine and then drop dead soon afterwards; Nick is for ever accosting me with gloomy anecdotes from the hospital to that effect.

My dress is shredded, covered in dust and dirt. My knees and arms are grazed, bleeding. All over me, patches of skin have started to sting. A man is swearing at me. At first it appears that he is wearing beige pyjamas with a funny badge on them; it is a few seconds before I realise he’s the bus driver, my almost killer. People are shouting at him, telling him to lay off me. I watch and listen, hardly feeling involved. There has already been shouting in the street today. This afternoon, screaming in public is normal. I try to smile at the two women who have nominated themselves as my main helpers. They want me to stand up, and have taken hold of my arms.

‘I’m all right, really,’ I say. ‘I think I’m fine.’

‘You can’t sit in the road, love,’ one of them says.

I’m not ready to move. I know I can’t sit in the road for ever-the team from the Consorzio are coming, and I have to cook supper for Nick and the kids-but my limbs feel as if they’ve been welded to the tarmac.

I start to giggle. I could so easily be dead now, and I’m not. ‘I’ve just been run over,’ I say. ‘I can sit still for a few seconds, surely.’

‘Someone should take her to a hospital,’ says the man who hit the side of the bus.

In the background, a voice I sort of recognise says, ‘Her husband works at Culver Valley General.’

I laugh again. These people think I have time to go to hospital. ‘I’m fine,’ I tell the concerned man.

‘What’s your name, love?’ asks the woman who is holding my right arm.

I don’t want to tell them, but it would sound churlish to say so. I could give a false name, I suppose. I know which name I would give: Geraldine Bretherick. I used it recently, when a taxi driver was showing too much interest in me, and enjoyed the feeling that I was taking a risk, tempting fate a little bit.

I am about to speak when I hear that familiar voice again. It says, ‘Sally. Her name’s Sally Thorning.’

It’s odd, but it’s only when I see Pam’s face that I remember the firm, flat object that rammed into my ribs. That’s why I fell into the road. Pam has a face like a bulldog: all the features squashed in the middle. Could the hard flat thing have been a hand?

‘Sally, I can’t believe it.’ Pam crouches down beside me. The skin around her cleavage wrinkles. It is dark and leathery, like a much older woman’s; Pam isn’t even forty. ‘Thank God you’re all right. You could have died!’ She turns away from me. ‘I’ll take her to hospital,’ she tells the people who are bending over me, their faces full of concern. ‘I know her.’

In the distance, I hear someone say, ‘That’s her friend,’ and something in my brain explodes. I stand up and stagger backwards, away from Pam. ‘You hypocrite! You’re not my friend. You’re an ugly, evil gremlin. Did you push me into the road deliberately? ’ Today it is normal to slander people in the street. But the onlookers who until now have been keen to help me don’t appear to know this. Their expressions change as it dawns on them that I must be mixed up in something bad. Innocent people do not fall in front of buses for no reason.

I pick up my handbag and limp towards the car park, leaving Pam’s astonished face behind me.

When I pull into Monk Barn Avenue with my cargo of children, an hour later than usual, I still have that lucky-to-be-alive feeling, an unreal glow that coats my skin, even the patches that are throbbing, where the blood is congealing into scabs. It’s similar to how I felt after I had Zoe, with diamorphine coursing through my veins: unable to believe what has just happened.

I am pleased to see my house for the first time since we bought it. Relieved. Given a choice between being dead and living here, I would choose the latter. I must remember to say this to Nick next time he accuses me of being too negative. I still think of it as our new house, although we’ve lived here for six months and it’s only a flat, part of what must once have been a spacious, elegant house that had some integrity. More recently, a team of architectural philistine vandals has divided it into three, badly. Nick and I bought a third. Before we moved here we lived in a three-hundred-year-old three-bedroom cottage in Silsford with a beautiful enclosed garden at the back that Zoe and Jake loved. That Nick and I loved.

I pull up beside the kerb, as close to our house-flat-as I can get, which today is reasonably close; it won’t be too much of a slog getting the children and their bags and toys and comfort blankets and empty bottles to the front door. Monk Barn Avenue is two neat rows of four-storey Victorian terraces with a narrow strip of road in the middle. It wouldn’t be so narrow if there were not cars parked bonnet to bumper along both sides, but there are no garages, so everybody parks on the street. This is one of my many gripes about the place. In Silsford we had a double garage with lovely blue doors…

I tell myself not to be absurdly sentimental-garage doors, for Christ’s sake-and turn off the ignition. The engine and radio fall silent and in the silence the thought rushes back: Pam Senior tried to kill me today. No. She can’t have. It makes no sense. It makes as little sense as her screaming at me in the street.

Zoe and Jake are both asleep. Jake’s mouth is open as he snores and grunts softly, his plump cheeks pink, sweaty brown curls stuck to his forehead. His orange T-shirt is covered in stain islands, remnants of the day’s meals. Zoe, as always, looks neater, with her head tilted and her hands clasped in her lap. Her curly blonde hair has expanded in the heat. I send her to nursery every day with a neat ponytail, but by the time I arrive to pick her up the bobble has vanished and her hair is a fluffy gold cloud around her face.

My children are breathtakingly beautiful, which is odd because Nick and I are not. I used to worry about their obvious perfection, in case it meant they were likely to be snatched by a ruthlessly competitive parent (of which there are many in Spilling), but Nick assured me that the blotchy-faced, snot-encrusted little characters at Kiddiwinks nursery look every bit as irresistible to their parents as Zoe and Jake do to us. I find this hard to believe.

I check my watch: seven fifteen. My brain is blank and I can’t decide what to do. If I wake the children, either they will be manic after their early evening recharge and up causing chaos until ten o’clock, or they’ll be groggy and whiny and have to be rushed straight to cot and bed, which will mean they will miss their supper. Which will mean they will wake up at five thirty and shout ‘Egg-IES!’-their pet name for scrambled eggs-over and over again until I haul my exhausted body out of bed and feed them.

I pull my mobile phone out of my handbag and dial our home number. Nick answers, but takes a while to say, ‘Yeah?’ His mind is on something else.

‘What’s up?’ I ask. ‘You sound distracted.’

‘I was just…’ Full marks to me. Nick is too distracted, apparently, even to finish his sentence. I hear the television in the background. I wait for him to ask me why I’m late, where I am, where the children are, but he does none of these things. Instead, he startles me by chuckling and saying, ‘That is such bollocks! As if anyone’s going to fall for that!’ I know from long years of experience that he is talking to the Channel 4 News, not to me. I wonder if Jon Snow finds him as irritating as I sometimes do.