Deconstruction of My Mother

She told him about the boy at the end of her street, the one with the overgrown garden permeated by the stench of cat piss.

'Did he touch you?' asked Patrick.
'Yes,' Wendy replied. 'He did.'
'Where?' he persisted. Later, looking back, Wendy would realize that she was his first psychiatric patient. His blank canvas. He transformed her. Wendy touched her breasts, and her vagina. 'It happened because my parents were never there, never home. The Rose and Crown - our local pub was my father's second home. The factory was his second. We came third.. His work kept him just this side of sanity. He worked in a factory. There was camaraderie on that assembly line, he used to say. There was camaraderie on the picket line too.

She was his chameleon; his Eliza Doolittle.. Under his tutilige she became glamorous, vivacious, intelligent, creative, charming. Or, at least, that's what Patrick told her. Before he asked her to marry him. She had got what she came for - the status and privileges that come with being a doctor's wife.

In the end Wendy became an unpaid actress. The whole world was her stage and their family and friends were the co-stars.


On the night before she died Cynthia's bedtime story had been The Water Babies.

They found her face down, floating in the lake.