cool, mum

Little Mlle Baroque is so fiendishly impressed that I am reading in the same line-up as Michael Rosen on Tuesday (Oxfam Bookshop, Marylebone High Street, 7.30pm, see previous post in Shameless Puffs section in sidebar) that she's told her friends, and they're impressed too. In fact, they're more than impressed. They're in awe.

We had a little melodrama earlier in the year. One of her friends (call her Miss P) announced (secretly, of course, to one girl who had to promise not to tell) that she was cutting herself. A few days later she announced (also secretly and to a different friend) that she was vomiting several times a day. One evening in my kitchen one of the girls (not mine) came in, shut the door, and said she had to talk to me. She was followed by another: "me too." And then by Mss B: "Me too!" The phone wires buzzed with mums weighing up thises and thats, and next day the girls took Little Miss P to their very kind and sympathetic Head of Year, who referred her to a school counsellor.

The situation seemed to be in hand until the day she handed yet another friend a pile of letters, each addressed to a different member of their little set, and said: "Don't give these out until I tell you to." That friend turned to Mlle B for support and the two of them took the letters to the park and read them. I heard all about it at dinnertime. Of course - you know, you've guessed it - they were long, carefully-written, individual, deeply imagined and categorical suicide notes.

It's a week later - the evening before the meeting that's been set up between Miss P's mum and the Head of Year. I had, in my role as Mother Hen N16, rung Little Miss P the weekend before, told her I expected her to ring my daughter and her friend every couple of hours to assure them she was still all right, given her a few home truths ("nothing goes on forever - nothing, do you hear me, and especially not the way you feel right now"), made her promise not to do anything rash, and said I fully expected to see her in Baroque Mansions within the following week.

It's fortuitous timing. She is literally shaking with the fear of telling her mother. I sit her down on the pink velvet couch (I found it on the pavement one time in E8), and the other girls sit on the floor around us with their arms around their knees, and we all have a chat about feelings, and mothers and schools and statutory duty of care, and how to solve problems that seem insoluble. In the end, with all the girls either crying or nearly crying (in their 12-year-old way), I say to Miss P - "well, honey, it's like the book said. You can't go over it. You can't go under it..."

At which the other two chime in unison: "Oh, NO!"

"That's right," I say. "You've got to go THROUGH it."

Miss P jumps a little with recognition, looks at me alertly, goes: "wha- what?"

In the end, all four of us were dancing around the living room, laughing, reciting the entire text of Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen at the tops of our voices; then the girls had something to eat, and Miss P went home.

The meeting went well. Of course her mum didn't kill her, and she is a much happier girl now. Next weekend they're all going shopping for party dresses.

Little Mlle B says her friends think I'm really cool. And they all want to know if I'm actually going to get to talk to him.