‘Skinny mocha,’ Zara says as she hands me my favourite drink.
‘Thanks,’ I say, desperate to take a gulp of it to revitalise my dehydrated body but aware that the liquid in this cup is piping hot and will only burn me if I try too quickly.
‘How are you feeling?’ Zara asks, eyeing me with a little concern. ‘You look pale.’
‘I’ve felt better,’ I confess, pleased that all the extra foundation I put on my face before I left home has done its job. I am trying to look like a person who spent a large part of the weekend puking up, after all.
‘So, what happened then?’
We start walking as I run my best friend through the tale of what happened to me after the house party, or at least the fictional version that Mum concocted for me. How I was on my way to the park to meet everybody but was sick on the way. How I felt embarrassed about getting it on my dress. How I phoned Mum to come and get me instead.
Just like on Saturday night, Zara believes me, although there is one slight difference when I tell it this time. She is laughing at me now.
‘You’re such a lightweight,’ she teases me before fixing me with a serious stare that has me slightly worried for a second. ‘Oh my god, that beautiful dress. Is it ruined?’
I relax when I realise that her serious expression has nothing to do with the fact that she might not believe me.
‘Yeah, pretty much,’ I reply, pulling my face. ‘Unless Mum can perform a miracle on it.’
‘Well, if anyone can do it, your Mum can,’ Zara says, and I nod my head in agreement.
That is certainly true.
If anyone can do anything, Mum can.
15
HEATHER
I’d only been an hour into my shift at the station when I was told I was needed elsewhere.
Usually, I would jump at the chance of getting out from behind the desk and hitting the streets. I enjoy being out in the fresh air, and it’s certainly a more effective way of doing some police work than sitting over a pile of paperwork. But I was hoping for a quiet day today, for obvious reasons. Instead, I’m now climbing into the back of a minivan alongside several of my colleagues, although I’m not sure where we are going yet. It turns out I’m not the only one, and as we are driven out of the car park and onto the main road through the town centre, I wonder if this might be some training exercise that has been set up for us, hence the unexpected nature of it.
While that wouldn’t be ideal, I suppose it will get me out of my own head a little, thinking less about what I did over the weekend and more on the task at hand, whatever that might be. That’s one good thing about this type of work, I suppose.
Every day is different.
There are many pros and cons to being a police officer, and I weighed every one of them up before taking the plunge and deciding that it was the career for me. I knew that while the starting salary wasn’t particularly high, there would be plenty of opportunities for progression in the force, as well as the fact that the retirement plans were very generous. I also knew that I would get to spend a lot of time outdoors, which suits me perfectly because I’ve felt as if I’m the kind of person who can go stir crazy if I spend too long in the same environment day after day. On the downside, irregular hours are a staple of this job and shift work is the norm. I knew my time with Chloe would be affected, as well as my social life, and that was something I had to consider.
But perhaps the toughest thing to reconcile when I was considering this line of work was knowing that I would be exposed to some shocking and upsetting things. Terrible acts of violence committed against poor victims by heinous criminals. There would be no way of avoiding it.
Did I really want to go into a job that would show me the darker side of society?
I was unsure at the time, mainly because, as the mother to a young daughter, I was already conscious of just how many things there were to worry about when it came to keeping her safe. It probably wasn’t a good idea to start adding a whole new bunch of things to that list after what I would undoubtedly witness as a police officer. But in the end, after careful thought and deliberation, I decided to go for it.
I was going to become a policewoman.
The deciding factor in my decision was that I knew it was a stable career and one which would mean I could provide for my child, both at the time and many years into the future. There weren’t many start-up costs involved to get into it, unlike many other professions that would have required me to study for expensive qualifications that only loans could have paid for. The shift work would mean I would have to rely on babysitters more often than I would have liked, and I was going to see some things at crime scenes that I would probably never be able to forget, but as a mother, I had a job to do, and that job was to provide a good living for my daughter.
And so it has proved.
It hasn’t been easy being a single mother all these years while balancing changing rotas and irregular sleep patterns. Still, I have managed it and, most importantly, been able to bring Chloe up without leaving her wanting for much other than more time with me. She’s been on holidays in nice hotels with big pools,
