But the thought was quickly dismissed. She and her mother were not alike at all. Romany was a tiny baby and whilst Angie looked as if she had barely survived Armageddon, her daughter was totally loved and nurtured. Her mother had let her down consistently, from the moment she was born. Even though Angie hadn’t seen her since her teens, she was constantly reminded of how her woeful legacy still left its mark on her life, like the shadow of an ink stain that would never quite wash out.
No, there were no points of comparison between her and her mother, Angie told herself sternly and often. What she was going through was just the baby blues, according to the visiting midwife. All perfectly normal apparently, and in no way suggesting that she was, or would become, an unfit parent. The midwife had helped her tidy up and suggested that she might want to be a little more diligent with the washing up, and Angie had joked about how the flat had looked before the addition of a newborn baby and promised to make a bigger effort. But no sooner had the midwife left than things seemed to slip out of her control again. Where did anyone find time to do anything when they had a baby to care for?
Despite what the midwife had said, Angie certainly didn’t feel like a fit mother just then. She smelled, for a start – a musty, earthy tang that came from too long spent in the same clothes. She lifted an arm, took a tentative stiff at her armpit and recoiled. That was definitely more than just a musty smell. That was some serious body odour. Her dreadlocks smelled, too – she knew it even before she grabbed a handful of matted hair and thrust it under her nose.
There had been children who smelled in the children’s homes. Despite the attempts of staff to comply with basic hygiene standards, there were always some kids who slipped the net and escaped the shower. It hadn’t been so bad when she had first arrived, prepubescent and with no body hair to speak of. But as they all grew and their hormones began to kick in, the ones who had been a little ripe as pre-teens began to positively hum.
There was no smell that Angie associated with her dysfunctional childhood as much as human body odour. Even now, the merest whiff of an unwashed body was enough to send her back into the darkness of those times. If a client arrived at Live Well who even looked as if they might not have had a recent encounter with soap and hot water, Angie would find herself feigning a full appointments diary. She would rather turn people away than have to take that smell back into her nostrils. And yet here she was, smelling just like they did.
She needed to snap out of it.
She would start today.
Right now.
She unlatched Romany from her breast, where she had been comforting herself rather than feeding, and laid her down gently in the carrycot. Then she went into the kitchen to find the scissors. Obviously, they weren’t where they should have been, and it took her a while to locate them under a bag of defrosted peas that she had taken out of the freezer, slit open and then failed to replace.
With scissors in hand, she went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror and took a long look at herself. Her face was sallow, plum-coloured circles rimming her hollow eyes. She even looked like her mother, she thought, although her current poor complexion was a result of a lack of fresh air and exercise rather than addiction. She gave herself a tentative smile and was pleased to see how much difference it made. That was more like it. Angie Osborne had re-entered the building.
She lifted the scissors and let them hover by her ear for a moment and then, in one decisive snip, she cut through a dreadlock. It fell into the basin and lay there looking for all the world like a dead rodent. Without giving herself a chance to stop, she snipped at the others and they fell one by one, limp and lifeless, into the porcelain until there were none left. Then she stopped and stared. Her hair was now a couple of inches long and sticking up from her head like a hedgehog, but freed from the dreadlocks, she could see the auburn colour once more and what was left felt silky between her fingers. She was transformed. Gone was the Angie of the last decade and here was someone new. A new Angie to begin this new part of her life.
27
Angie was astonished at how sore her scalp still was days after the dreadlocks had gone. She had washed her hair over and over until all the loose hairs had disappeared down the plughole, but what was left insisted on standing up on end and any attempt to flatten it made her sore scalp cry out in protest. It would just take time, she decided.
The rest of the transformation was easier to achieve. She had thrown every item of clothing into the washing machine whether she had worn it recently or not. She had taken three black bags of rubbish out to the bins and removed anything that was beyond its sell-by date from the fridge. From now on, she decided, she was going to be far more careful about what she put inside her body. Not only did she owe it to Romany to stay as healthy as she could, but also a more natural approach to life felt right. For years, she had been talking about healthy diets and lifestyles to her clients without entirely practising what she preached, but the time had come to make a change. She would miss cheese, and the rare bacon sandwiches that she sometimes made for herself when she was drunk, and beer – she would really miss beer – but it felt right, like this was something that she should have done a long time ago.