Are You My Mother? (17 page)

‘
Come on, chicken. Let’s go and have a cup of tea. You know what, I think Mum might just have one Easter egg left over – shall we go and have a look?’

I never saw Pat Short again.

‘
Well, I don’t know why you’re looking so sad. It sounds like you had a lucky escape.’

‘
I was just thinking about Dad. He was always so good like that; you know, looking after us. We were his little girls.’

‘
Do you still miss him?’

‘
Massively.’

I stared out of the un-curtained window into the smoggy brown city night, trying to picture Dad’s face, but I couldn’t remember it, not as the face I’d known. I could only picture him from the photograph on the mantelpiece: big sideburns, hamming it up for the camera, frozen in a youth that had bypassed him two decades before. Those same twenty years in between were the years I’d been his daughter; seen him every day, bounced on his lap and cried on his shoulder, but now it was as if he hadn’t even existed. Tears filled my eyes and I turned my head away so Mack couldn’t see.

Now
, I thought.
Tell him now.
Tell Mack you’re adopted, and you need his help to look up your birthmother on the internet. For Christ’s sake, just do something to stop this hideous wallowing.

I wanted to tell Mack everything: from how much I loved it when people used to comment that I looked just like my father; right up to meeting the homeless man on the tube, and the feeling that I had to let go of Stella, and do something for myself. Tell him about all the confusion that was tangled up in my head, tormenting me.

But when it came to the crunch, I just couldn’t. The clarity and purpose from finding Lori Singer that morning had trickled away, and I just felt too tired to explain the whole messy story. So yet again I copped out.

‘
Stella was thirteen when she went on her first date, too. Needless to say, hers was a completely different kettle of fish.’ Furious with myself, I tried to inject a note of levity into my voice.

‘
How come?’

I wasn’t sure whether Mack was being sensitive in playing along with my forced story, or whether he really hadn’t noticed that I was upset. The latter, probably, I thought.

‘
He was five foot eleven, fifteen years old, already shaving. Richard Something, his name was. He picked her up in a cab, took her to a film, then to Pizza Express for dinner.’

I could still remember Richard standing there in the hall, gravely helping Stella into her coat and shaking hands with me, as I’d scrutinised him with extreme suspicion.

‘
Don’t worry, um - Miss Victor. I’ll look after her,’ he’d said, and I had fought back the urge to grab him by his Stussy lapels and yell, ‘You’d better, you jumped-up adolescent oik, or I’ll remove your grillocks with a steak knife’.

Instead I’d just said, ‘I’ll pick you up from the restaurant at ten o’clock, Stella, OK? Have fun’; and then spent the next four hours anxiously pacing the hall and wondering if I could get away with disguising myself and sitting at an adjacent table in the restaurant, to make sure he was behaving himself with my sister. Even back then I knew that it probably wasn’t necessary to be so excessively over-protective, but I couldn’t help it. It was as if I had to take on the combined protectiveness of Mum and Dad, plus an extra couple of ladlefuls to compensate for my own lack of experience in those situations. Was ten o’clock the right time? Should it be earlier? Later? Should I have offered to collect her or not? I remembered wishing there was an Adolescent Dating Manual to which I could refer.

And here I was, six years later, still worrying about Stella.

‘
Come on then,’ I said abruptly, hauling myself out of the sofa. ‘I’ll get us some more beers. The film’s about to start.’

‘
Emma?’

‘
Yeah?’ I held my breath, waiting for Mack to ask me what was really wrong; to offer me a shoulder to cry on, to tell me everything would be OK, and he’d help me trace my birthmother.

‘
What
is
frottage, anyway?’

I’d just have to ask Mack to help me with that internet thing another time, I thought, as I lay in bed later. When I’d had a bit more time to think about what I might be getting into. When I’d got a bit more energy.

To try and get myself to sleep, I was softly playing my recorder along to “In The Army Now” by Status Quo, which I’d found on Radio Two. Not out of choice – I’d had a little browse through the radio stations, but most of them were broadcasting hard house, which was nigh on impossible to play along with.

I began to fall asleep still propped up on my pillows, loosely attached to my recorder; wondering vaguely what a psychiatrist would make of me, in bed alone with my lips around a long brown tubular instrument.

Chapter 16

The next day, after Stella had gone to Portobello Road to look for bargains, I got dressed, conducted a perfunctory hoover of the flat, and sat waiting in the spare room for my twelve o’clock appointment to arrive.

A stick of incense burned a trembling finger in the corner, and the crisp sheeted surface of the massage table was covered with a fresh strip of white paper from a large roll, similar to the sort found in doctors’ surgeries. I hoped the effect was less clinical, however, thanks to the stack of fluffy lavender towels on top of the paper, the gentle ambient music floating over small wall-mounted speakers, and a bronze statue of Buddha in the fireplace. I was proud of this room. It was the only room in the flat that ever got hoovered right up to the skirting board.

The twelve o’clock client was late, but I hadn’t really noticed how late. I’d been fetching a new bottle of sweet almond oil from the cupboard in the corner when I suddenly had to stop and sit down, as if my head could no longer support the weight of my thoughts.

Of course I’d always been curious about my birthmother, but only in an idle, abstract kind of way; I had always found it hard to believe that I could have been any happier with my real parents than I was with Mum and Dad. They were loving, and mostly attentive and, besides, I didn’t have anyone to compare them to. But, even as I thought this, I began to remember all the niggly little things I’d whitewashed over, in the redecoration of my memories after their deaths.

The great prickly lump, like a conker shell, permanently in my throat at the thought that they couldn’t possibly have loved me as much as they loved Stella. The way that Mum carried photographs of us both in her wallet, but mine was a fuzzy snapshot of me in a snowsuit, from a distance; and Stella’s was a crystal clear close up, showing off each individual eyelash. The way that they gave Stella her own cat, when I’d always wanted one.

Hang on, though. Did I ever actually
tell
them that I was desperate for a cat? Surely I must have done – what child holds back from nagging their parents for their hearts’ desires? But on the other hand, perhaps my memory was a little wobbly. Perhaps I hadn’t actually
realised
how much I wanted one, until Ffyfield strolled into Stella’s chubby arms, rasping a reluctant kiss on to her irresistible cheek. After having an orang-utan in one’s life, a pet cat might have seemed a little lame; so it was hard to be sure.

I lay down on the carpet and put my feet up against the wall, like an inverted bracket, to give my body a few minutes’ extra relaxation before I had to massage. I’d found Lori Singer, just like that. Of course, Lori Singer was famous, and therefore much more likely to be on the Internet, but if Mack could find two bona-fide mentions for Stella, who wasn’t at all well-known – much to her chagrin - then there must be a little bit of hope for me, too.

They were bound to have….what were they called? Plots? Pages? No, sites, that was it… sites
for adopted people looking for real parents. Mack kept saying how you could find out anything on-line. It was the Information Superhighway. I heard on Radio Four that you could adopt a vegetable patch on the Internet, for God’s sake. I stared at the ceiling, noticing how yellowish the paintwork looked in contrast with the pristine white walls. It upset me, the thought that clients might be lying there while I worked on their feet, thinking how badly the ceiling let the room down.

But I wouldn’t have time to do anything about it in the near future, not with the other, much more pressing, issue at hand. I needed to phone Mack, immediately, and ask for his help. The only problem was, I couldn’t remember where I’d put the piece of paper with his new mobile number on it, and hadn’t got around to programming it into my own phone. He’d said something about helping a colleague in an edit suite all that week, so I knew he wouldn’t be at home.

I crept into Stella’s bedroom, on secretive tiptoe even though she was out, and began to rummage for her Filofax, in the vain hope that she might just have written the number down when he gave it to us. He was the only person who possessed a spare sets of keys to our flat, and Stella locked herself out so regularly that she needed all his contact details.

The Filofax could have been anywhere. There was so much stuff packed into the bedroom that it was hard enough to see the floor, let alone one small fur-covered address book. I gazed around despairingly, resisting the temptation to sweep all Stella’s junk into several bin-bags and take it down to the two old ladies at the blind shop. They’d be in for a surprise if I did. Stella’s outlandish clothes were all over the place, draped over a tailors’ dummy by the window, or untidily shoved onto hangers on wheely rails down the side of the room. Feather boas, skimpy little vest tops, studded belts and sequinned long skirts jostled with hooded sweatshirts and a variety of decrepit leather and suede jackets bought at Portobello market.

Her designs lay around everywhere, in varying stages of completion from paper to uncut fabric to the finished article. The bed in the middle was covered with bits of sari material and several yards of gingham. Her bedroom looked more like a theatre dressing room or a photographer’s studio, or an indoor version of the market stalls she frequented every Sunday morning as religiously as church.

It was Mum who’d first taught Stella to sew. By the time she was nine, Stella’s success in the craft was on full view in the Victor household: in the neatly stitched embroidery on all our pillowcases; the casual jersey dresses she could almost make by herself; the jumpers she knitted for Ffyfield. It was the one thing in which Stella really excelled – her teachers were gratifyingly amazed when she would appear in school, yet again, with a homemade zip-up jacket or pearl-buttoned shirt or halter-necked top.

‘
I made this,’ was practically her catchphrase. She courted the compliments with the subtle fervour of a medieval lady being wooed by her knight.

Ten years earlier, Mum had tried to teach me the same skills. We begun, in the same way, with knitting. Unfortunately, Mum hadn’t realised that the fact that I was left-handed would be such an obstacle, and within two abortive lessons had concluded that it was impossible to teach someone in a mirror image of how one learnt it oneself. I could knit one row of stitches perfectly, if in slow motion: poke the wool over the end of the needle, wrap it around, stick the other needle through – but after that I was lost.

‘
Sewing’, Mum had said. ‘That’ll be easier – it doesn’t matter which hand you use. Come on, Emma, let’s make a skirt for you!’

And I was thrilled, caught up in the excitement of going to the department store and choosing a pattern from the Little Miss Vogue collection; watching some beautiful cotton material being unwound in lush folds to be cut into skirt lengths on the counter, with the peculiarly satisfying dark metal sound of the scissors shearing through it; then buying all the matching accoutrements; zips, buttons, thread.

Disillusion crept in at the pattern-cutting stage. Even with Mum showing me where to cut, all the black lines and arrows and triangles on the horrible flimsy paper confused me , and I got it hideously wrong. The pattern ripped, or crumpled, or I found I’d cut it out a size too small… and that was the
easy
part.

‘
Relax, Emma darling. Your shoulders are up round your ears.’

‘
I can’t
do
it!’

‘
You can. I promise, you can. Look, just tack these two bits together – no, these two, and then sew the waistband on. It’s easy.’

‘
Mum! It’s
not
easy…. Why is the waistband all thick in the middle?’

‘
Ah. Good question. How did that happen? Here – give it to me and I’ll re-do it. You carry on tacking that seam.’

By the time the fabric was eventually, with many pricked fingers and tearful expostulations, cut out, pinned together, and sewn up, my disillusion had turned into extreme frustration. This escalated to utter loathing of the finished product, with its wonky, gappy seams, ill-fitting zip, and too-tight waistband, despite Mum’s best attempts to put it right. What was intended to be a simple A-line skirt looked more like a tea cosy. The skirt would never be worn, and I felt like a failure every time I noticed it, scrunched up at the back of my wardrobe.

So of course Stella would be brilliant at it, a natural. I would come home from school to find her and Mum at the kitchen table, their heads together, silent in amicable concentration, embroidering intricate flowers along the bottom hem of a perfect little maroon taffeta skirt, and it would give me a feeling like pinking shears trimming around the lining of my stomach. Without even speaking to them I’d stomp up the stairs to my bedroom, listen to my Cure records at full volume, and contemplate dying my fringe pink.