Black Dogs and Clouds

Sandra was only borrowing the child. It caught her eye as she was going home via a different route from the Supermarket. I mean that loser with the misspelled tattoos and children with four different fathers, didn’t deserve them. It wasn’t Sandra’s fault she had the darkness, the clouds that encapsulated her since the Social Services came for her Mary. Well in truth they said the clouds were the reason they had to mind Mary until Sandra overcame her latest ‘episode’.

Her new child’s name was Polly. Wasn’t that so fortuitous? Sandra had her own Pollyanna now! Who had her own room with a warm bed (no sharing like in no3) and indeed her own toilet too. Just in case Polly got lost in her new house it was better to have a lovely white chain on her ankle just to keep her safe. With the big torch she played hide and seek.

It was paradise for Sandra and Polly back then in those halcyon days. No more clouds or black dog (as her father used to call it). They both loved the tins of Ambrosia rice and Birds Eye fish fingers that they ate every day until Polly had to go and ruin it for everyone by standing on her lovely little toilet bucket waving to the nosy octogenarian neighbour who phoned the PSNI.

But Sandra isn’t a bad mother despite what the tabloids printed. The doctors’ observe a huge improvement as her pregnant daughter Mary visits her every week in the building with the white walls and a hundred windows. There are no dark clouds or black dogs when Mary feeds her Ambrosia rice or the doctor from Nigeria gives her the wee yellow tablet. ‘It’s a girl mammy, and we are going to call her Polly’.