Are You My Mother? (14 page)

‘
That’s Wayne over there,’ I said in a loud stage whisper to Esther, unable to control myself any longer. ‘He’s had the flu, but he’s better now. He’s Betsey’s dad.’

Mum half-smiled, half-frowned at me to be quiet. Then she gathered us all around her, and announced; ‘OK, children, we’re going inside now. There’s rather a lot of you, so please try and be quiet so you don’t overwhelm or frighten them.’

We filed inside the big stable-like building, thick glass separating us from the orang-utans. Wayne was still wandering around outside, but Pru and Maisie, Betsey’s sisters, were loping about, occasionally sitting down and tearing off a leaf to nibble, their long legs folding beneath them like collapsible pushchairs. There was no sign of Betsey.

I shot a look at Mum.
Where is she?
Mum pointed at the sleeping quarters and raised her eyebrows, but I shook my head back. I didn’t think Betsey could be in there; she rarely slept during the day. A faint uneasy feeling began to creep over me. Mr. Jenkins, the zookeeper, wouldn’t allow me inside their house unless it was just Betsey and I together - the other ones weren’t nearly so friendly with me.

Mr. Jenkins appeared in the doorway, his shiny pate and buck teeth gleaming under the spotlights of the enclosure. Like Mrs. Meades and her boots, he resembled some sort of composite from the natural world – half egg, half chipmunk. He smiled goofily at Mrs. Meades, perhaps recognising a kindred spirit, but she didn’t notice, as she had got a small faecal-stained piece of straw snarled up in the fur of one of her boots, and was clearly trying to work out how to extract it without touching it. Then Mr. Jenkins spotted me – largely because I was waving frantically at him – and beckoned me over. My chest puffed up with pride, and I pushed my way through the group and over to his side.

‘
Hello, young Emma,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry love, but Betsey’s a bit under the weather today. She’s coming down with that flu that’s going around.’

‘
Where is she?’ I was torn between concern for Betsey, a sense of crushing disappointment, and enjoyment of my classmates’ curious faces.

‘
She’s in bed, love. Best leave her alone – ‘

Just then, I saw Betsey’s skinny red arm stretch out from her straw boudoir, followed by a pair of bleary eyes as she cautiously began to emerge.

‘
There she is, Mr. Jenkins! Oh, please can I go and see her? Please, just for a minute?’ Hopping anxiously from foot to foot, I turned around to appeal to Mum. ‘Mummy, please?’

Mum made a ‘leave me out of it’ face. By now my class were riveted, and I was desperate. This would be my only opportunity. I rushed up to the glass and knocked on it, waving madly across at Betsey. It was true, she didn’t look well. Her eyes had a sorry, dead appearance, and her hair was lacklustre. She grinned faintly at me, but it was nothing that anyone else would’ve noticed. Then she sat down and listlessly picked a few fleas off her thigh.

Mr. Jenkins frowned sympathetically at me. ‘I’m sorry, Emma, but the answer’s no. She’s been in a very bad mood all morning, and I’m getting the vet over to take a look at her later. You don’t feel much like playing when you’re poorly now, do you? Same with Betsey. Pop back in again next week, and I expect she’ll be right as rain again.’

Next week! Next week was no good. Next week, my entire class wouldn’t be watching as I demonstrated my Dr. Doolittlesque empathy with our closest animal relatives. I burst into tears. My class began to titter awkwardly, and Darrell Hawkes chanted, sotto voce, ‘Em-ma Victor loves the monkeys, Em-ma Victor loves the monkeys...’. He started to lope in a circle around me, his bare goose-pimpled arms hanging down in bracket shapes in front of him, making chimpanzee noises and occasionally beating his puny chest. Mrs. Meades gave him a clip round the ear, but the damage was done. What I had most feared had come to pass: I was now an object of ridicule.

Mum led me outside by the elbow and told me to pull myself together, I was making a big fuss about nothing and embarrassing myself. She gave me a cuddle, though, and made me blow my nose, but it didn’t make any difference.

When we got on the coach to go home again, Esther went and sat near the back with Julia Pidgeon. Julia, unfortunately, lived up to her name, with a fat stomach, skinny legs, and the worst pigeon-toes I’d ever seen, and I knew that Esther didn’t even like her that much. They both played tenor recorder in our recorder group, and there was always a lot of argy-bargy going on around the trembling skeleton of their reluctantly-shared music stand.

Perilously close to tears again, I wandered further on down the aisle in search of a seat, but they were all taken except one empty one next to Rosemary Thatcher.

‘
Hello,’ I said nervously, thinking that at least now I’d be able to talk to her properly. I slid in next to her, still sniffing, but feeling a little bit better. Perhaps Rosemary Thatcher would be my new best friend – the tragedy and romance of her marred beauty and otherness had always been far more appealing to me than boring old Esther. The most exotic thing about Esther was her frilly ankle socks. ‘Can I sit here?’

Rosemary muttered something which I couldn’t hear, and looked away.

‘
They’re really brilliant, aren’t they, orang-utans? Did you know that they can swing distances of up to thirty feet? I wish I could do that, don’t you?’

Rosemary turned back to me, her disfigured face impassive, staring at me out of her slits of eyes. ‘Go away, Emma Victor,’ she said. ‘You’re weird.’

Getting up without a word, I fled down to the front of the coach again, curled up in a window seat in the five row oasis of emptiness between Mrs. Meades and the first lot of children, and wept hot, silent, bitter tears all the way back to Acton.

Betsey didn’t want me. Esther didn’t want me. Even Rosemary didn’t want me. All the magic was gone; forever, I thought. And when the baby arrived, I knew it would be much, much worse.

Chapter 14

But, of course, I was wrong. However strong my love for Betsey had been, it wasn’t a patch on how I felt for Stella, from the moment I first saw her.

Betsey had died a few weeks after that fateful zoo trip, carried off by the same flu her father had contracted. I’d been utterly grief-stricken for days and, despite completing a terrific project for Mrs. Meades - a sort of posthumous biography of Betsey - my classmates remained unimpressed. I’d thought my life was over - until the first time Mum picked me up from school accompanied by Stella in her pram. All the girls in my class coochy-cooed over her so rapturously that, by association, I began to feel special again. My next project was entitled ‘My Little Sister’, in which I showed everyone photographs of Stella in the bath; and even Rosemary Thatcher managed a smile at the sight of her.

And now here we were, nineteen years later, my little sister and I, on a wintry Sunday afternoon. It was the weekend after our row and, even though we’d made up, there was still a tension between us. The peace was a fragile gossamer one, flimsy with hidden truths and unspoken secrets.

I looked across at her as she talked without listening, kneeling on the floor, her hair snaking across her face and her long fingers flicking over the pages of a large illustrated book. I tried to remember the sight of her lying pinkly in that pram at the school gates, but found that I was having trouble imagining a time when Stella couldn’t talk. It was funny, I thought, how the people you loved could drive you so far around the bend.

The wind was howling with such volume around the window frames that Stella had to raise her voice to be heard above it, which irritated me even more, since I was trying to finish
Temples of Delight.
She was browsing through a book of 80's fashions for a project she was doing at college; wittering inanely and endlessly in the way she only ever did with me, and had been doing since she was two years old. It still wound me up – it was like being trapped underneath a waterfall.

‘
I sometimes think,’ she said dreamily, ‘of all the clothes I've ever made, in my whole life; from dolls’ clothes to those awful naff things I made in primary school; you know, poncey blouses and that time I tried to make jeans, and that weird holey jumper that actually looked really punk, do you remember the one? I just wonder if one day someone will try and track them all down for a complete retrospective of my career – wouldn’t that be hilarious?’

I tsked at her. ‘Dream on, Stella. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to exhibit the dresses that Vivienne Westwood made for her teddy when she was six, so I’d imagine you’ll be safe.’

Stella flicked through the pages until something caught her eye. ‘Ooh, look, it’s those belts. Suzanne and I were talking about them the other day - do you remember them, Em; sort of canvas webbing, they came in lots of different colours and the buckle end always dangled down, and on men they were supposed to be like penis extensions. Look.’

I ignored the stretched-out book being thrust under my nose. ‘Stella, I’m trying to read. Leave me alone.’

Stella was getting annoyed too. ‘I just wanted to know if you’d ever had one, that’s all.’

‘
No.’

‘
Did you have any legwarmers then?’

‘
Yes, I had legwarmers. Pink ones.’

‘
Suze and I were watching
Fame
re-runs on cable other night, it was so crap I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that they were actually supposed to be talented:
I
could play the viola better than that skinny bird; and they're all so ugly!’

‘
She played the cello, not the viola; get your facts right. I'm going to finish my book - in peace.’

I marched out of the room, picking
Temples of Delight
off the arm of the sofa on my way. I’d always secretly thought that the cellist from
Fame
, all eyes and cheekbones and long delicate fingers, was absolutely the most beautiful woman ever, and had yearned to look like her. But remembering back I supposed that her character, Julie, had been a bit wet really. Funny how people's ideas of beauty changed, I thought as I flopped down onto my bed. Stella was right, none of them would really be considered that gorgeous these days: not that dopey Bruno with his big soppy eyes, or cheesily hard Leroy and his shiny pecs, even that little black girl, the main one. Irene Cara. She was cute, but there’d been a whole gaggle of that type of girl on TV in the early ‘80s: the blind one in the Lionel Ritchie video, Jennifer Beals in
Flashdance
, the female cast of Cosbys. However much they said ‘80s fashions were back in again, you still didn't see that shaggy permed winsome look any more. Thankfully.

I wondered in which era I might have been most fashionable – with what length hair, what style glasses? I honestly didn’t know whether my sort of person was perennially fairly stylish, or whether I’d just never quite made it at all. I did buy nice clothes, if that counted for anything, and get decent haircuts, although I had the sort of hair which always looked scruffy, no matter what I did to it. It wasn’t wavy enough to be curly, but too kinky to be entirely straight. I got the odd blond highlight, but nobody ever seemed to notice, even in my dark hair.

I was a little envious of Stella’s mad hairstyle, even though it would be a bit too high maintenance for me. She had to groom and style and pamper it, constantly putting gunk in it to keep the waves in place. I didn’t think I could be bothered with all that, however much she said it was worth it to get men raving about it the way they did. Anyway, she thought
I
was lucky – my hair might not be all that special, but my eyes were lovely. Gavin liked them, too, especially the long, thick eyelashes which scraped against the lenses of my glasses, and which I could flutter against his skin in luxury butterfly kisses.

I knew I ought to have shown off my eyes a bit more. They were my best feature, and I looked better when I wore my contact lenses; but they were so scratchy in my eyes. People always assumed that I hid behind my glasses, although only Stella understood that I actually wore my glasses when I felt
more
confident, not less.

I often wondered if I’d be more confident if I had blood relatives around to compare myself against: a genetic map rolled out in front of me, charting my future. So I could know whether I’d still be good-looking at fifty, or whether the crumbling would accelerate out of control. Whether I’d get leaner with age, or whether at forty my bum would drop. And, much more seriously, whether there were any nasty hidden surprises lolling around in the undergrowth of my future, like a hand-grenade with its pin pulled out: breast cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes. I didn’t like surprises.

For a second the man on the tube came back to me, his eyes green and sparkling, the only clean part of him. I wonder how he came to be so alone, where
his
family were?

I still hadn’t done anything concrete to begin my own search. Although my resolve was still strong, it seemed like such a momentous task. Come on, I told myself. Think. Be logical – you’ve always been a logical kind of person. It was on all your school reports
: Emma has a very logical mind and methodical approach
. Supertramp’s
Breakfast in America
was the one of the first albums I ever bought, because it had “The Logical Song” on it.