Dustbin Baby Read Online Free PDF

Hannah. Well, I was sad for her – but I was also so jealous it’s a wonder I didn’t gleam emerald green all over. I wasn’t jealous of Hannah because of Grant Lacey. I was jealous of Hannah because she had a lovely mum.
    I’m even jealous of Cathy and
her
mum, though she’s a terrible worryguts who’s on the phone flapping if Cathy is five minutes late home from school and she calls her seriously embarrassing baby nicknames like Cuddlepie and Chubbychops. Cathy squirms when she does it in front of us. I shake my head sympathetically but I have to blink hard to stop tears spilling down my cheeks.
    I want a mum to cuddle and kiss me. I want a mum to worry about me. I want a mum to baby me.
    I don’t say a word about it to Cathy and Hannah of course. They think I’ve
got
a mum. They’ve only met Marion a couple of times. Maybe they were surprised that she’s much older than their mums but they didn’t say anything. They seemed to think it cool that I call her by her first name.
    â€˜Did you call Marion “Mum” when you were little?’ Cathy asked.
    I fudged things by saying I’d always called her Marion.
    I can’t start calling Marion ‘Mum’ now.
    I’ve called lots of women ‘Mum’. I don’t even remember what the first one looked like. Patricia Williams. That’s the name in my file. It’s a huge great box file packed with all kinds of clippings and letters and reports. It’s got my name on it but I wasn’t even allowed to have one quick peep inside – not until I went to live with Marion. She insisted. She said she didn’t care what the rules were, it was my basic moral right to learn about my past. Marion’s great at getting her own way, even with senior social workers. She doesn’t shout. She doesn’t even argue. She just states things quietly but firmly. So they gave in and presented me with my brimming box file.
Dustbin Baby, This Is Your Life
.
    I knew lots of it already, of course. I’d made a scrapbook of my life when I was little. They don’t like you using the word ‘scrapbook’ because they don’t want you to feel you’re like little throw-away scrappy bits of paper. Though that’s the way I
do
feel. You know those linked dolls you can make if you fold a piece of paper and cut out a girl shape? They all look identical but you can colour them all in differently and put glasses on one and bright lipstick on another and choose varying patterns for their dresses. I’m like all those paper dolls. I’ve stayed the same shape girl all my life but each time I’ve gone to a new home someone’s coloured me in differently.
    Patricia Williams was my first mum, though she wasn’t permanent. She took in foster kids. She’d been doing it for years, babies a speciality, so they took me out of hospital when I was a few days old and she looked after me until I was nearly one.
    I wonder if she remembers me? If only I could remember her! I have these dreams where someone’s lifting me up and holding me close and kissing me. Cathy’s got a dream journal and writes all her dreams down. We were all discussing our dreams one day, cosily squashed up together in a corner of the playground, and just this once I forgot to be cautious and started telling them about my recurring dream. Luckily they started hooting with laughter long before I was finished, totally misinterpreting everything, thinking I was dreaming about a romantic encounter with some boy. I let them carry on thinking that because it was less embarrassing than the truth. Normal people don’t dream about being babies. I don’t know who the dream arms belonged to. Not my mother. She didn’t hold me close and kiss me. She probably seized me by the ankles and shoved me straight in the dustbin.
    So have I been dreaming about this first foster mother, Mrs Williams? I’ve got an idea