Are You My Mother? (10 page)

She was right. I don’t think either of us would have been surprised if the figures had become animated for our entertainment, moving in a graceful circle around their vases like carved horses on candy-striped poles, slowly congregating in different groups, chatting, blushing, asserting, moving on.

‘
You know, like in Mary Poppins,’ Stella added, and I did know, exactly, what she meant; when the merry-go-round horses detach from their circular base and sail off across the fields. We lay and imagined what it would look like, if the figures on one vase suddenly floated across to visit their kin on the neighbouring vase - a translucent rainbow’s arc of the moving figures peeling themselves off and travelling over, in a magical hologram of sparkling horses’ hooves and tiny bound feet in slippers.

The energy fields between the two would carry the townsfolk there and back, an animated and invisible highway whose traffic left behind an empty ceramic landscape.

‘
The vases wouldn’t look the same, though, without the people on them,’ I started to say, but suddenly I was too choked to speak. When I looked around, I saw that Stella had fallen asleep, curled up in the centre of the bed in the way she used to as a special treat, when she was a toddler.

By the time I eventually got out of the bed, leaving Stella to doze, it was dark outside. Feeling a leaden depression, in tandem with a faint foolishness at the flight of fantasy, I turned on a bedside lamp and brought one of the vases into the cone of yellow light to inspect it more closely, tipping it carefully upside-down to examine the base. A deep carved Chinese signature decorated the bottom, which I traced like Braille with my fingertip. I felt as though I could rub the sweat of the artist who had just completed this tableau; a more alive thing than my parents. The lettering looked triumphant; bold and deep and almost clumsy in comparison to the intricate decoration around the sides

As Stella slept on, I finished the rest of the packing, leaving the bedclothes on our parents’ bed until last.

The next morning, an hour late, two removal men came and took the vases away in their white van, together with the few essential pieces of furniture we’d be able to fit in our new flat.

In my complete inexperience of moving house, however, I had been less than discerning in my choice of movers. They had advertised themselves on a card in the window of the newsagents – not Bodgit and Scarper exactly, but similar. I’d hired them because they were far cheaper than any of the other quotes I received. On of them kept staring at me and scratching his head, as if he were asking, ‘Do your parents
know
that you’re moving all their furniture out of here?’ Whenever I caught him doing this, I glared at him through narrowed eyes, daring him to try it.

When the vases and I were reunited at the new place, however, I found out exactly why the movers had been so cheap. I heard the Chinese villagers before I saw them – a flimsy crushed cardboard box being loaded off the van, its contents clunking and rattling together. I couldn’t bring myself to believe the worst until I opened the box, in which both vases had been lain together, no bubblewrap or protective polystyrene, just a few of sheets of thin white paper serving no useful shield at all. I cursed myself for not supervising better – I had just assumed that the men couldn’t be so stupid as to pack them that badly – and then I cursed the men.

Scenes of carnage met me when I lifted the flaps of the box; felled generals, weeping widows, headless horses and screaming children. Blue chips of blood everywhere, no survivors. For a fleeting moment I wished I could have helped them escape, that through the power of my imagination they could have been evacuated to safety as the cattle trucks pulled out; trailing despondently away to an unknown future, clutching all their belongings in wrapped shawls tied to the end of long sticks over their shoulders; leaving just creamy shards of what had been their home for hundreds of years. But it was too late.

‘
Sorry, miss,’ the boss said half-heartedly as I yelled and ranted and almost kicked him. ‘You should’ve said if you wanted proper packing; it’s extra, see.’

But, as terrible as that day had been, the loss of the vases came to crystallise the realisation over which I had been burying my head in the sand for so long: my responsibilities weren’t just abstract yellow bricks of things to worry about at night, but real life-and-death ones. I alone could be the one to alter the course of Stella’s life throughout her rocky climb to adulthood, and I alone could make her path harder or smoother.

Fortunate, then, that it was only the two vases which got shattered. It made me see that it could as easily be Stella – if something happened to her, it would be my fault; if I didn’t make sure that she was properly cherished. The realisation was both appalling and strangely energising. I’d already been fortunate to have been considered mature enough to get custody of her; and now I had to make sure that she grew up to be someone Dad and Mum would have remained proud of.

Chapter 10

Against my better judgement, I did go to the pub with Stella that night. Obediently, I washed my hair first, standing in the shower miserably singing ‘I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair,’ without meaning a word of it, just letting the water sluice off my body, and wondering what Gavin was doing at that precise moment. I wanted to keep him
in
my hair; to keep the memory of his touch on my scalp.

Our local pub had just been refurbished, with much subtle arty lighting, huge abstract canvases on the walls and leviathan sofas. Stella thought it was fantastic to have such a trendy bar so nearby, but I missed its previous incarnation as a dingy public house with dark walls, scuffed wooden tables, and warped dartboard.

When we sat down with our drinks I wondered out loud what had happened to the pub's previous clientele, to the old men in shabby clothes with perhaps a silent dog under their chairs, or the odd brash divorcee who didn't set her sights too high.

'They probably put them all in the skip with that foul sticky carpet,’ Stella replied. She never had been known for her sentimentality.

Stella's mates turned up soon after, and I began to wish I’d stayed in bed. There was Suzanne, whom I knew very well - she and Stella had been best friends for five or six years, through school and on into their fashion design course at Ealing. She was fine; sweet, with her big eyes and small dreadlocks. She reminded me of Annabella Lwin from
Bow Wow Wow
, but whenever I said that, she and Stella always looked blankly at me. ‘Before your time,’ I’d mutter, feeling old, even though it was really before my time, too.

But Dan and Lawrence were so young that Dan still had stickers of dance acts peppering his backpack and a chain looping from the pocket to the belt buckle on his oversized jeans; and Lawrence was officially and very self-consciously a Fashion Victim: Hilfiger, Firetrap, Paul Smith and Diesel all fought for supremacy about his undernourished-looking person. He had the kind of strut only ever seen on a teenager with a £70 haircut.

I wonder if Stella had slept with either of them. She slept with far too many men. It made me feel queasy and worried, although what could I say? I was convinced she wouldn’t be like that if Mum and Dad were still alive. But she wouldn’t listen to me; the boring older sister. I just hoped I’d drummed the safe sex message into her head enough.

There was an older guy there too, Charlie, whom I suspected had been invited as a kind of consolation prize for me - although he only seemed to have eyes for Stella. He was a graduate student with a rugby player’s physique and a braying Sloaney voice; and I took an instant dislike to him. What on earth was he doing hanging about with these immature nineteen year olds, I wondered; and then realised that he was probably thinking the same about me. His eyes were mean, and he was drinking too much.

‘
What course are you on then, Em?’ Charlie asked me, immediately looking away as if he couldn’t even be bothered to hear the answer. He didn’t speak to me again after that.

I loathed being called Em by anyone other than Stella. ‘I’m not a student. I’m Stella’s sister. I’m an aromatherapist, and a massage teacher,’ I said haughtily, to the back of Charlie’s fat head.

Lawrence overheard. He swooned with mock lust, and nudged Dan. ‘Cool – she does massage.’ They winked at each other in a Benny Hill-ish fashion, and I had to pretend to laugh, although this was the tediously predictable male reaction which often greeted the announcement of my profession. I sometimes thought that I might as well have business cards which featured me topless, brandishing a whip.

After ten minutes I was bored rigid. I wish I could have joined in the conversation, but it was too difficult. Half the time I didn’t even understand what they were talking about - and when I did, every time I opened my mouth to talk, someone else had already launched in, and before I knew it, the topic of conversation had evolved into something else.

I hadn’t always been quiet, though. In the right circumstances, particularly if alcohol was involved, I’d been described as ‘a right laugh’. It was like unbunging a drain. Once I started to flow, I flowed – only not just a few days after being dumped.

I gazed towards the door, tuning out their voices, willing Gavin to appear and take me away from all this, until the irritating tone of someone’s mobile phone interrupted my thoughts. It would have been so nice if my own mobile was programmed full of the numbers of friends whom I could just call up and invite to join me. I tried to picture it
. 'Come on down, if you're not doing anything. I'm just here with Stella and her mates, but they're, you know, so young. It would be great to see you - I could do with a decent chat about something other than Gilles Peterson; no, he's not a weatherman, he's a DJ.'
But my phone only had five numbers programmed into it: 'Home', 'Stella Mob,' ‘Gav’, 'Train Enqs' and 'Health Cent.’

It wasn’t that I had no friends. I did have quite a few once, but apart from Mack, whom I saw quite a bit of - partly because he was a neighbour, partly because he secretly fancied Stella, and mostly because we just kind of clicked - I’d seen them only intermittently over the past few years. Between work, Stella, and most of all, life on Planet Gavin, I just didn’t seem to have any spare time. Doing aromatherapy from home meant that most of my appointments were in the evenings, after the clients finished work, and so whenever I had a night off, I only wanted to see Gav.

Plus, he’d been very much a one-woman man; as in, one bird, but loads of mates to drink pints and smoke spliff with. His idea of purgatory would have been to sit around a dinner table with other couples, discussing how nice the hanging baskets outside The Royal George were; or bemoaning the trials of finding somewhere local to recycle plastic milk containers. Gavin was more of the ‘ducking and diving, dodging and weaving’ school of social behaviour, which I had found exhilarating to begin with, then occasionally exciting, and eventually completely frustrating and something he should have grown out of at twenty. Still, he loved me – or so he said. I could forgive him a lot for that.

I wondered, for the millionth time that week, why he’d stopped loving me. If he ever really had loved me. If I was even loveable.

The students were still talking about nightclubs and DJs, and I listened half-heartedly for a few minutes before tuning out again. They might as well have been talking in a different language. Stella went clubbing most weekends – she did all her dancing without me these days. Which was as it should be, since she was grown up now, and had her own friends. Besides, I felt too old to be out till four a.m., gurning manically and spinning on my head. I was much happier curled up on the sofa with Gavin, watching a video. Or at least, I had been.

‘
Do people still spin on their heads?’ The words in my brain were suddenly on the outside, without me realising I’d said them aloud, cutting right through an animated discussion about Fatboy Slim’s last album. Everybody stared at me.

‘
What?’ Stella wore an expression comprised of equal parts of indulgence and embarrassment, and I felt as if it was me who was the silly younger sister, out of her depths in this big grown-up conversation.

‘
Um – you know, I suppose it started with the breakdancers in, what, ’83, ’84, didn’t it? They literally used to spin on their heads, and then it came to be like an expression for what kids did in discos – ‘

Cringing, I heard the words ‘kids’ and ‘discos’ jarring discordantly around the table. I felt about eighty-five years old. I looked at Charlie, the other ‘older’ person present, for support, but he appeared to be intently counting the bubbles in his pint of poncey European lager.

‘
No,’ said Stella. ‘Nobody spins on their heads anymore.’

‘
I think I’ll just go to the loo,’ I said, standing up and cracking my knee against the edge of the coffee table. ‘Excuse me.’

More than anything, when I was fifteen, I wanted to be able to breakdance. I used to beg Mum to let me rip up the lino in the kitchen so I could carry it around with me in an unwieldy roll, ready to lay down on any sort of surface and do my stuff. I could do a passable back spin, but the first time I tried a swan-dive, where you dived on your front and then slid back up as if nothing had happened – it had been a disaster. The lino I was practising on was still attached to the kitchen floor, so there had not been a lot of available space. I’d banged my head so hard on the side of the fridge that I nearly knocked myself out.