66 ELLE AUSTRALIA
MOTHER,
Stand-up comedian and actress
Sara Pascoe onthe woman
who helped her survive,
T in more ways than onehere is a young woman
opposite me on the train.
She is drunkenly lolling,
skirt riding up, head
leaning on the glass behind
her. Her wedges are rain-splashed,
on her leg a streak of crusted mud. She’s got green in
her hair, braces on her top teeth. She might be 14, she
ŘŖǯ Ȃ ę ǰ
being nearly as drunk as she is, and I stay on past my
stop to guard her like an egg. I didn’t sit on her – I’m not
a weirdo. I’m just a normal 35-year-old woman staring
creepily at a sleeping stranger, ready to snarl if any
predators move too close. But the egg hatched without
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in the wrong direction, wondering if she lived near the
station and hoping she got home okay.
How am I me and not her anymore? When I was 14,
15, 16, I lived for clubbing. I grew up in East London,
a 20-minute ramble from Hollywood nightclub
(famous because Martine McCutcheon might have
been in there once), Pulse (where the bouncers had
no lower age limits – seriously, a teenager could
bring her baby), and Time and Envy (two clubs for
the price of one, with a staircase that everyone fell
down on the way out). I never had any money but
I knew how to get drinks (ask men in suits), how to
hitch a lift (ask men in cars), and I took shortcuts
through parks (how was I not murdered?). And before
you assume my rancid social life was the result of lax
parenting or neglect, I didn’t have permission to go.My mum fought hard to keep me
in: she hid clothes and double
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shoes and dinner money. But she
had to sleep sometimes and, when
she did, out I’d run. Climbing down
drain pipes and squeezing through windows, retrieving
copied keys and wearing my sister’s too-small
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stealing my own freedom.
Through screaming rows, as my mum begged, cried
and despaired of me, I fought back as though she were
my kidnapper or some hyper-emotional prison warden.
I thought she hated me and was jealous. Why else
would she want to stop my fun? “Just you wait,” she
yelled once as I fell noisily into the bathroom at 4am,
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“until you have kids.”
It’s the sort of thing all parents say totheir thoughtless
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that be true? She was so old now) and “Don’t treat this
place like a hotel” (I’d never been to a hotel but I knew
they didn’t lock you in and hide your shoes). “When
I have kids, I’ll go out clubbing with them,” I protested
stroppily. “And I’ll buy them drinks and dresses
because I’ll never forget how it feels to be a teenager.
But I’ll never even have kids because it clearly makes
people so uptight and miserable!” Sorry, Mum.
I’m now the same age she was then, and I appreciate
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than as a caregiver alone. A woman who gossips aboutdearest