Kerry Fisher - The Not So Perfect Mum - The feel-good novel you have to read this year!

‘Mum! What are you doing here?’ she said in a tone that could offend a thin-skinned person.

‘I had to go to the post office, so I thought I’d walk home with you. I had some bad news today so I felt like getting some fresh air.’

Bronte eyed me warily. I could see her closing down, ready to reject any neediness on my part. ‘What?’

‘You remember Rose Stainton, the professor of English, at the big white house? She died last week.’

Bronte looked down at the ground. ‘I liked her. She was nice.’ I waited for her to ask me something, anything. I suppose I’d thought she might cry. But she’d folded in on herself, shutting me out.

I broke the silence. ‘Do you want a hand with your bag?’ I ached to pull her into a big hug but resisted. No one did ironing board as well as Bronte.

‘Okay,’ she said, with a small shrug of one shoulder. She swung her bag towards me. ‘Are we waiting for Harley?’

She’d barely finished the question when he came bowling out of school, parka tucked under his arm, white polo shirt nearly as grey as his trousers. With a ten-year-old’s lack of understanding of weight, speed and energy, he charged into me. I staggered backwards into the straggle-haired woman next to me whose ‘Watch where yer going’ did nothing to put him off. He threw himself round me, unselfconscious, grey eyes shining up at me. I allowed my face to fall down onto his head, breathing him in and threading my freezing fingers into that warm space where his hair curled down over his collar. His shoulders went up as he registered the cold but he didn’t push me off. Harley never hid his feelings; they walked two-by-two across his face, sat in the angles of his body, burst out in his words.

‘What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were coming today. Brill. Can we go down the bakery and get cakes?’

I needed to say no. Chocolate éclairs weren’t going to help the pile of red bills. I could feel some pound coins, fat and solid, in my pocket. Bronte walked next to me, while Harley squashed his nose against car windows, looking at steering wheels, shouting about hubcaps and guff about engine sizes that I’d stopped pretending to understand. I waited until he’d finished peering through the blacked-out windows of a BMW before telling him the news about the prof.

‘She was all right, wasn’t she? Are you sad?’ Harley stopped and gave me a hug. ‘What did she die of?’

That question was the start of a whole discussion about what’s left of a body after twenty years, if worms eat eyeballs, if teeth disintegrate in a cremation, if people are buried naked and whether I knew anyone who’d been put in a coffin alive. I almost preferred Bronte’s indifference. I managed to distract Harley by pointing out a Mercedes SLK, no doubt belonging to a local drug dealer.

I turned my attention back to Bronte. ‘So, who did you play with today?’

‘No one.’

‘You must have played with someone.’

‘Well, I didn’t,’ Bronte said.

‘So did you sit on your own all playtime?’

‘Yes.’

I sighed. Colin never had to squeeze conversation out of Bronte. They would lie on the front room floor giggling for hours. She’d manage to persuade him to play Polly Pockets with her, his huge hands squishing tiny pink shoes onto webbed feet and lining up miniature cartons of milk in her grocer’s shop. I couldn’t even get her to tell me who’d shared her crisps.

We walked past a group of teenagers gathered on the wall outside the bakery, all sloppy T-shirts and arses hanging out of their jeans. They were taking it in turns to swing each other around in a Morrisons trolley. The trolley tipped down the high kerb, throwing a boy with a spider tattooed on his neck and ‘Shit Happens When You Party Naked’ written on his sweatshirt headfirst into the road. I winced at the sound of bones meeting tarmac, but where we lived, a lot depended on your ability to look the other way. Hoots and wolf-whistles filled the air. No one jumped down from the wall. I shooed the kids into the bakery where Harley ran to the chocolate doughnuts covered in multi-coloured sprinkles.

‘What do you fancy, Bronte?’ I asked, squinting out through the reflections on the window into the road. A blonde girl with a glittery thong several inches above her jeans was squatting over the boy.

‘I’m going to get a gingerbread man. Are you getting a vanilla slice for Dad?’

I nodded, though Colin didn’t need any more blubber stuck on his backside. I’d always loved his muscular build towering above my tiny little frame. But now he was more darts player than rugby player.

Harley had bright pink and yellow sprinkles dotted round his mouth before we’d got out of the shop. Bronte nibbled the gingerbread man limb by ordered limb. The gang had disappeared but the boy was still there, propped up by the kerb, half-sitting, half-lying among the cake wrappers, Coke cans and fag packets. The girl was trying to look at his head.

‘I’ll be all right in a minute. S’just a cut, innit?’ the boy said.

‘Are you okay?’ I said.

The girl swung round, black eyeliner and thick mascara out of place on her young face. She pulled her sleeves over her hands. ‘It’s Tarants. He says he’s good, but he’s bleeding from his head, like. I think he needs some stitches or something. The corner of the trolley slashed him.’

‘Can I look?’ I hoped that I wouldn’t get a brick through the window later on. I waved Harley and Bronte over to the bench.

The boy took his hand away from his head. His sweatshirt was sodden. I stopped short of hopping about, waving my arms and shouting, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, you’re bleeding to death,’ but I felt my stomach suck in like a snail into a shell. For the first time I understood what fainting might feel like. I squeezed my eyes tight and fumbled for my phone.

‘Sorry, but you really need to get this looked at. I’m calling an ambulance. All right?’

He was rocking gently and sort of singing one note, all that ‘hard boy, what you lookin’ at?’ gone out of him. He nodded at me, then started throwing up between his legs, splattering his trainers. I took a step back. Colin did blood and sick in our house. I did nits and threadworm. I held my breath, patted him on the back, and considered putting my coat round him. The blood would never come out of it, though. I shouted at Harley to go into the bakery and ask for a towel. I’d never called an ambulance before. I wasn’t sure how bad people had to be for an ambulance. What if I had to pay for it if he wasn’t injured enough? Tarants heaved again. I pushed 999.

Bronte slipped her hand into mine. It only needed someone to half-kill themselves for her to feel affectionate. ‘Is he going to die, Mum?’ she said.

‘No, no, of course not. A small cut can bleed quite a lot, so it’s probably not as bad as it seems,’ I said, not even daring to look at the trolley in case half of Tarants’ scalp, complete with black hedgehog spikes, was dangling there.

Harley spotted the paramedic before I did. I hadn’t been expecting a motorbike. The paramedic pulled off his helmet to reveal a lean capable face and dark hair going grey at the temples. With a brisk ‘I’m Simon,’ he got straight to work, snapping on gloves and shining a light in Tarants’ eyes and ears. I felt responsibility drop off me. Harley edged closer for a better look.

‘Mum, will the doctor take him to hospital? Will he have to stay there? Will he get in trouble for messing about with the trolley?’ As usual I was torn between pride at Harley’s enthusiasm and embarrassment at his appetite for blood and the fact that he couldn’t have a conversation that didn’t compete with passing jet planes.

Harley bellowing in Simon’s ear probably wasn’t helping him concentrate. I tried to pull him back, but Harley looked as though he was on for stitching the wound himself. With a little wink, Simon nodded his head to show where Harley could stand for a ringside view without being in the way.