The Perfect Mother by Margaret Leroy Page A

like a man with a nice accent. Karl’s an entrepreneur.’ She pronounced this carefully. ‘We’ve got a new flat in Haringey.’
    ‘I can come and live with you, then,’ I said.
    ‘Just give me a bit of time,’ she said. ‘Karl and me have got to get ourselves sorted. We’re just getting the flat together.’
    Afterwards Lesley sat on my bed, asked how I was feeling. Really, I thought, she doesn’t need to bother any more, I won’t be here much longer.
    ‘My mum’s all right now,’ I said. ‘She’s got this flat with Karl. I’m going to go and live with them. Any day now.’
    Lesley put her arm round me. Her voice was gentle, hesitant.
    ‘Catriona, my love, that’s not what she’s saying to us.’
    My mother never came again.
    They tried to get me foster parents. They were going to advertise in the Evening Standard, they said.
    Lesley took the photograph with her smart new Polaroid.
    ‘Smile!’ she said. ‘Give me a lovely big smile. That’s wonderful—you look like Meg Ryan.’
    I stood there, smiling my most important smile ever. I tried to make my whole self smiley, the corners of my mouth ached with smiliness.
    Lesley showed me the ad. It said, ‘Catriona is a bright, pretty teenager with a real artistic talent. Her record of school attendance is excellent. Because of her troubled past, Catriona can be rather demanding at times. Catriona needs firm and consistent parenting.’
    I thought about this, lying in bed at night in the orange light of the streetlamps, chilly under the candlewick, missing Aimee. I let myself think, just for a moment, about my foster family, what they might be like: nice food and lots of it, gentleness, and a soft bed with a duvet that tucked in at the back of your neck. And I wondered what it meant to be demanding.
    No one was interested; no one even enquired about me. No one wants to adopt a fourteen-year-old girl who can be rather demanding, however bravely she smiles. I toldmyself I’d never thought it would happen, really, but there was a messy secret shame in admitting that I’d hoped.
    I left the day I was sixteen. Two months before my birthday, Kevin from the Leaving Care team came to see me. My mother had been asking about me, he said. She’d moved abroad but she wanted to make contact, and did I want to see her. I said I didn’t, really. It was my decision, he said. He sorted out my benefit, found me a flat above a chip shop in Garratt Lane, and a furniture grant from a charity.
    My birthday was Lesley’s day off, but she came to say goodbye. She held me close for a moment, a quick, hard, awkward hug. It embarrassed me; I wanted her to let go of me. But then, when she’d let go of me, I wished that she’d hold me again.
    ‘I hope you get them,’ she said. ‘Your wishes, the things you wanted. I’m wishing them for you, too.’
    That evening, in my flat in Garratt Lane, I sat at my flimsy new table and such loneliness washed through me, and I briefly longed to be back at The Poplars, just to have people there.
    But slowly I put some kind of a life together. I did some temping—I’d learnt to type at school. There were always boyfriends. I guess I was attractive enough: I wore my skirts short and my blonde hair long and did whatever they wanted. I used to worry that my clothes, my skin even, stank of the chip shop, but the men didn’t seem to care. I was, I suppose, promiscuous: I needed company in the evenings; I could only sleep through the night withsomebody beside me. And if some of them were married—well, I reckoned, that was their responsibility. I never told them about myself and if they asked I made up something, recasting my life as unexceptional. After a month or two they usually drifted off, sensing I guess something in me that would for ever elude them. But from time to time there’d be one who said he loved me, and then I’d stop returning his calls, or say I was washing my hair, and after a while, he’d drift away, however keen