You Might Need Somebody

“Sorry, Lil… I don’t think I’ve ever asked you. How did she die?”

“Who die?”

“Your, erm… God, sorry. It’s just you don’t speak about her.”

“Who?”

“Your mum… Fuck, sorry- you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

It was most definitely day time, sitting at a mate’s kitchen table with the usual suspects; an overflowing ashtray, a plate of dwindling supplies, some sort of odd liqueur as we were out of beer. I don’t think I’d told my Charles and Eddie story at that point, but then I probably had. My mum isn’t dead. She’s at work as I type this. There is however, a 15 year gap in my life where I didn’t really have a mum. She didn’t have a daughter either.

I grew up in a small flat (“Well, it’s actually a maisonette really” said Mum) in South Norwood in South London. I lived there until I was 10 and I only have fond memories of that time. I exclusively remember it in the summer. Of course I remember Christmases but generally whenever I ever think of it I can still recall distinct smells of ice cream vans’ exhausts in parks, the rented video cases from the corner shop, the pet shop on Portland Road and this teacher called Mrs Sharpe who smelt of dried pasta and PVA glue. My earliest memories are of nursery school, but in fact, of racing home to catch Sesame Street on Channel 4 in the afternoon and drinking cup-a-soups with my mum. Always in the sun.

My dad worked in town so we’d see him properly when the weekend came around. He’d be in late most evenings but my brother Jack and I would manage to entertain ourselves with the Yes and No game until the front door went and we’d race out of our bedroom to meet him. We’d climb on dad as he ate his dinner standing up, he has always, until recently, had too much nervous energy to sit down. My mum would be rightly irked as getting us to calm down again would take some time.

Four became five with the arrival of my brother Ben who Jack and I suspected might be a grub-like alien but we soon became okay with having him around. Dad remained the superstar. He bought ice lollies, played football, watched Saturday morning cartoons, built complicated train sets that would entertain us for only minutes, flicked Subbuteo players, went blackberry picking, ran races, took us to Wendy’s, sometimes to his office near London Bridge which felt incredibly glamorous because it had a water cooler and chairs that span. He would buy us trending plastic crap in the Whitgift Centre he couldn’t actually afford and purposely catch buses with longer routes while Mum stayed home with Ben and rested after an exhausting week with three very exhaustive children. I remember sometimes thinking she was boring or worse, that she didn’t want to play with us. The six-week summer holiday was particularly stressful. Mum had endless tears, WWE-inspired bedroom tournaments, the ensuing injuries, demands, fibs, supermarket floor tantrums, irritating neighbours and infinite boredom to either diffuse or remedy, all on her own and with very little money. Just the other day she laughed and said that she wouldn’t have been able to cope if lockdown had happened at that point with us. I really only remember laughter though, we always had that. Hours whiled away belly laughing making up songs about local characters (particularly memorable was the one about Mavis the childminder who wore canary yellow shorts and walked her ferrets on leads) or people on TV we thought were annoying. Mum and I would escape to Penge and blast a ‘Huge Hits 90-something’ cassette in our shit car that I was embarrassed of. That car had a weird smell too because Ben in his suspicious alien grub years had been car sick after eating too many Petit Filous, something I held against him for some years. We would sit in boiling hot traffic, Mum and me, after hitting up Sainsbury’s and Iceland, and sing ‘You Might Need Somebody’ by Shola Ama at the top of our lungs. Maybe we just did this once but I remember it like it was a weekly ritual of ours, just us, away from the boys.

When we moved to St Leonard’s in 2001 I stopped laughing as much. We’d had to move because there were now five of us in that same tiny flat (maisonette, whatever it was) and we were all growing in size and attitude - we needed more space. I didn’t settle in. I cried every night and dramatically told my parents of how I wanted to die and hated everyone, including them, in my new town. I became even more emotional and even more difficult to parent. I started secondary school. I never had any problem making friends really but the resentment I felt for my parents was suffocating at times because I felt so entitled to living a different life, my old simple life with all those smells and that laughter. At that age you don’t often think of the wonderful things you do have, like food, clothes, a family, and a home with your parents still very much in love with each other. I now feel a great amount of shame about how I made them feel at that time but then I have to remind myself that I was just a child and children have the ability to be real dickheads sometimes.

It was around this time that my relationship with my mum began to break down. I spoke to her with such disdain, and she would snap straight back in the exact same manner so I would disappear. Christmas Days were, for years, approached with great caution as my brothers and my dad would await the ticking time bomb of my mother and I to inevitably go off. I found solace in my friends’ mothers- something that only hurt and pushed my mum away even further. My friendship circle became my family, as it would continue to be for a further decade. Alcohol, immature, abusive boys and drugs I soon also sought comfort in. Famously though, they don’t heal gaping wounds, only deepen them. I stopped going to school. I got an STD that meant I had to tell the school (despite never being there) what I was up to on the weekends. When I was home I slept all day. One day I was woken up to the local Truancy Officer in my bedroom offering to drive me to school. Arranged by my mum because she didn’t have a clue what else to do. I pushed my mum, ran out the door and didn’t come home for a week. I missed lessons, mock exams and a chance at reaching my potential. I pretended to think it funny or ‘unconventional’ until very recently. Now I just feel really sad for that little girl thinking she was bigger and better than something she deemed so basic and boring as getting an education. When I collected my GCSE results and read I’d only passed three I sobbed in the assembly hall. A teacher comforted me and asked “Lillie, what did you think would happen?”. I didn’t have the answer.

My brothers would cry too and beg me to ‘just make up’ with her. My dad was a fast-weathering rope in the tiresome tug-of-love that was mine and mum’s broken relationship. We would meet up without Mum, sometimes it would have to be in secret so it wouldn’t cause yet more arguments. I felt like she had always been quite jealous of the relationship I had with my dad. I remembered her telling me in Norwood to not fuss over him so much in the playground because ‘some dads aren’t very nice and some people might get the wrong idea’. I didn’t understand that as a child but I do now. My dad is categorically the polar opposite of the abusive, evil character my mum was scared people might think of him. Her and I are similar in that way- we are obsessed with what others might think, however untrue and farfetched the thing we manifest might be.

As I had done previously in my teens with friends’ mums, I later would seek that parental figure in partners. I needed to be looked after, yet I still dressed up (mentally and physically) as an adult and refused help. When people asked about my mum I would regale in telling them of what a terrible person she was. “She’s like an evil step-mother who hates me- except she gave birth to me” I’d repeat to various, faceless people I sat round kitchen tables with at 5am. They would pretend to laugh and so would I.

Things didn’t really improve. I partied and slept all the way through the depression of my teens and twenties; tunnel-visioned and driven by what I thought was ‘cool’. My romantic relationships inevitably broke down. I was sexually assaulted. I relied more heavily than ever on alcohol and substances and the rubbish boys of my teenage years had now turned into abusive older men. I felt more abandoned than I ever had. I really needed my mum- the one thing I was depriving myself of.

A few years later, in 2018, I had a breakdown. I was living in Peckham, climbing the walls in my head but physically sleeping for days. I had lost jobs and partners and friends and the normally reliable drugs/alcohol/pretending I thought everything was ‘just hilarious’ weren’t silencing the deafening screaming in my head like they had done in the past. I was having hallucinations and coming round to having smashed things in episodes in the flat I shared with a very patient housemate I’d only met on Gumtree only a few months earlier. My phone would ring with concerned friends on the other end but I couldn’t talk. My brother would come and stay in silence just to be there but I wouldn’t remember him arriving or leaving. It felt like my different parts of my brain were shutting down daily. Towards the end of that summer I took an overdose of every pill I could find in the house. My housemate, unaware of what was going on, slept in the next room as I eventually, fortunately, came around, and was taken to Kings. My dad came to collect me and I moved back to Hastings that weekend. When I saw my mum she cried and I stood and cried a bit too I think, but I can’t really remember much from that day. I do remember her asking if I wanted to go and see a kitten and I said yes, so we went and saw a kitten at her friend’s and that was nice. In no way did I or will I ever blame a particular person or event for what happened that summer but only wish I had looked after myself better and sought professional help when I needed it. I wish I’d stopped pretending terrible things were funny so long before it came to that.

The crappiest year to date wasn’t done with our family yet.Just three months after that happened, my beloved, zippy, nervous, superstar dad suffered a stroke. If we weren’t feeling completely helpless and heartbroken before that then we certainly were now! (Note my still-trying-to-make-it-palatable-for-everyone-else-ever-so-slightly-comic tone. Old habits die hard.)

Mum leapt into action, barely allowing herself any time to be upset, she was the most ‘mum-like’ I had ever known her to be since I was ten. She stroked my hair as I cried myself to sleep. In the times we weren’t visiting him in hospital she made food she knew would comfort us. Acted like she couldn’t remember names of those characters from before to get us all laughing again and distracted. She downloaded films we watched as children to make us feel like we were okay and back belly laughing in South Norwood. She told us how special we all were and that it would be okay. It is okay. It’s shit and it’s different, but it’s okay.

Mum and I now, we are really good. It’s so bizarre, how I spent such a large part of my life pitching, only to myself, how different she and I are. We are in fact, of course, pretty much the same person. We spend all day laughing, gossiping, cooking and reminiscing about those hilarious old characters from before. She came home from work last week and announced she wants to make up a dance routine with me. She makes me die laughing. Before lockdown she’d make me do AquaFit with her and we’d have to not make eye contact with one another because the playlist of re-recordings of 80’s hits was too funny to bear. We shout ‘love you’ as we say goodnight. We don’t talk about the 15 year gap because, as I keep hearing on the sodding news, ‘WE ARE WHERE WE ARE’ and we are. I didn’t expect to be here, in my life, at 28 living with my parents during a global pandemic but I am grateful I have this time with them, just the three of us, as I feel like I wasted so many years not being mates with them. I beam with joy at how far we have all come, and I’m nervous and excited for everything else to come but I have them. They are my best friends, my family- however different everything is now to the technicolour dream-like, 12 month long summers we used to have. We all still have each other and we are so lucky; I feel very, very lucky.

Mum and I still share a love of supermarkets. I don’t cry on the floor of them anymore (just) but we do still listen to bangers in the car. Just us.