Are You My Mother? (27 page)

Yeah, right, I thought. How stupid was that; telling workmen to keep away from a roomful of naked women? By now my heart was pounding, and I remained rigid with tension throughout Nigel’s massage, feeling as if a million ball bearings were rolling around underneath my skin, wondering if Nigel, or worse, the workmen, could see my breasts sticking out on either side of my body. It was unlikely, given their resemblance to two fried eggs, but nonetheless I worried about it. Nigel’s hands were cold, and I could smell last night’s garlic on his breath, even though I was lying face down.

‘
Relax,’ said Nigel, leaning his face down close to mine, bathing me in a hot garlic wind.

I closed my eyes and pretended that Nigel’s long fingers belonged to Betsey instead, and that helped a little; but I couldn’t fully relax until it was my turn to do the massage again. Only then did I feel as if the ball bearings had dissolved, taking my bones with them. My body ceased to be flesh and blood and became pure distilled movement, a spiritual connection. It was the first time I’d felt anything spiritual for a long time; certainly the first time since Mum and Dad were killed. I breathed a sigh of relief - I had finally found something I was good at.

Back in the kitchen at the party I saw, through a very unfashionable hatch in the wall, that Suzanne and her two gay friends had adjourned to the dining room. Trails of watery-nosed, wrapped-up people kept coming in and out of the house, ignoring the tangerine soda and the toilet paper, but calling out things like, ‘Nippy out there now,’ or ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ or ‘Any more beer in that fridge?’ so I supposed that the students had eventually got tired of the interruptions and moved en masse next door in search of some uninterrupted smoking time. As if I was watching her on television, Suzanne waved at me through the hatch, beckoning me in. ‘In a minute’, I mouthed, as I stood at the kitchen sink, running my cold purple hands under the hot tap until they began to thaw out and redden even more. They reminded me of Nigel’s hands, on that first massage day.

Just as I was drying them on a damp tea-towel, Stella and Charlie came bumping back into the house, still giggling, and headed straight for the dining room, so I changed my mind and went back outside again. I’d rather take my chances with Hugo and Yehudi than sit and watch those two pawing all over one another, I thought crossly. It was only eleven o’clock, too early to insist on going home.

In the garden, Yehudi had worked up to his grand finale: the fireworks display. He tried to set them off, but only a couple exploded; the rest writhing weakly on the grass out of boredom before fizzling out in disgust. The party outside talked loudly to cover Yehudi’s embarrassment, and someone turned the music up. The blue-haired hippy chivvied everyone into dancing around the bonfire, and I lurked out of sight in case Hugo tried to chat me up again.

I noticed that Charlie’s sister had found a hippy she seemed to really like, and was admiring her alpaca poncho. Everyone except the little boys had got bored of the liquor luge by now, which was indeed beginning to melt from the heat of the bonfire. The children were whizzing all kinds of objects down the chute: matchbox cars, sticks, bonfire-baked potatoes. It was dripping so much that it was more like white-water rafting than a bob-sleigh course.

I found the food, and ate as much of a baked potato as I could manage before its tough hide defeated the flimsy plastic fork with which I was attempting to tackle it. I threw the skin underneath a handy hydrangea bush, and entered into a bit of desultory chit-chat about holistic practices with a couple of the hippies, which ended up being pretty interesting. It passed another hour, anyway, and I managed to avoid Hugo’s lovestruck glances from across the bonfire.

When I next went in to see what Stella was doing, she and the others were still sitting solemnly around the huge polished mahogany dining table, as if they were at a funeral and not a party. Charlie had brought in a guitar, which he had apparently found in Yehudi’s bedroom on his way back from the toilet, and which he was playing exquisitely, further enthralling Stella. His big sausagey fingers formed complicated bar chords, sending them skittering so effortlessly up and down the frets that the strings squeaked like a kitten with each change of key. The untrimmed ends of the strings waved around the guitar’s neck like whiskers.

I stayed with them for a while, gradually lulled by the room’s tranquil haze, even relenting enough to accept several tokes of the next joint being passed around. It was ages since I last smoked – with Gavin, of course. We used to like to smoke before having sex. Mmmn, I thought longingly, wishing that he wasn’t so on my mind.

Charlie’s gentle chords played over a myriad of muttered secrets and one or two lies. The accumulation of cigarette ends and flimsy smoked joints floating in the dregs of beer cups were the only indications of the hours passing. I put my elbows on the table and eavesdropped shamelessly on all the stoner conversations.

Charlie told Stella that his sister Lucy was a lesbian, and that ‘Mummy was furious’ when she found out. So that was her name. Good for Lucy, I thought, feeling faintly affronted that she hadn’t tried to chat me up.

Suzanne told Stella that she had gone off men and was thinking about becoming a lesbian – Dan hadn’t rung her in five days.

Stella told Charlie that our parents had both been killed in a car crash ten years ago, which made me wince. But Charlie didn’t even look over at me. I felt invisible; that encroaching older-woman invisibility which descended like a fog on all but the most stunning 30-somethings. Heads no longer turned, builders no longer whistled, eyes were no longer opened wide with startled pleasure at your approach. I didn’t count Hugo.

Kevin told Elias that he wanted to marry him when they graduated; then Elias told Kevin that he wanted to marry him too. I could tell he was lying.

Stella told Suzanne that I had led a raving flasher off the tube train, but Suzanne didn’t seem very interested. She replied by telling Stella that her mother worked on the Graham Norton show, and I wondered if this was a complete non sequitur, or if there was some connection of which I wasn’t aware.

Then Charlie asked Stella if she’d like to come on a date with him. Dinner or something. Stella instantly forgot about Suzanne’s mum and Graham Norton, and said she would. Charlie celebrated by putting down the guitar and stroking Stella’s breast, and I felt like picking up Suzanne’s lighter and setting fire to the hairs in his nose.

‘
Let’s go for a walk,’ I heard him whisper in her ear. Stella’s face lit up, in the guilty, furtive way it always did when she was plotting something evil. Again, I feared for her. As they stood, unsteadily, I pulled her aside.

‘
Please be careful, Stell,’ I said in a low voice, willing her to take in what I was saying.
Talk to the hand cos the face ain’t listening
was a college catchphrase of hers and Suzanne’s; the traffic policeman’s palm pushed out in a stop sign, the head flashily turned away. As I spoke to her, I caught both her hands in my own so that her face
had
to listen to me. ‘It’s important, Stella. Please. Don’t be long. I’m going to have a coffee then I think we should go home, OK?’

Stella rolled her eyes at me. ‘I’ll be fine. Chill out. We’re just going for a walk, that’s all.’

I looked to Suzanne for support, but she had fallen asleep, her breath misting up the mahogany table surface, making its shiny depths shallow again. When I turned back, Stella and Charlie had gone.

I drank three cups of black coffee and succeeded in chasing almost all the webby remnants of the smoke from my head; out from behind my eyes, out of my fillings, sluiced from underneath my tongue, even the wisps which had stuck in the crevices of my brain were dislodged. With each fresh cup I looked at my watch. Eventually my head was clear, but fifty-five minutes had passed and there was still no sign of Stella or Charlie.

Suzanne was still asleep. Elias and Kevin were kissing in a corner of the room, perched uncomfortably on one of Yehudi’s nasty dining chairs; black polished wood so shiny it appeared plastic, and a faux-tapestry seat. I identified Kevin’s shoulder from the melee of tangled limbs, and tapped him on it.

‘
Whose car did you come in?’ I demanded.

Kevin raised his head about an inch, a delicate strand of spit running from his mouth to Elias’s.

‘
Charlie’s.’ The strand popped and vanished, and he looked away from me.

I tapped him again, more of a poke this time. ‘It’s important. Stella’s not back. What does the car look like, and where did you park?’

‘
It’s a red GTi. End of the road. Want us to come and help you find her?’

‘
No, don’t worry. I’ll just go and have a wander. They’re probably snogging on the back seat. Thanks.’

I came down the front steps into the cold November night, flattened party sounds rising above the roof behind me. It felt good to be out in the crisp frosty air after the cloying warmth of the smoky dining room. Yehudi’s house was in the middle of the street, but I couldn’t see a red GTi in either direction. Tutting, I strolled down to one end of the road, then back to the other. No red cars at all, no Stella. I decided that Charlie must have taken her off for a drive, and hoped fervently he hadn’t taken her home without telling anyone. I was by now really ready to leave, and didn’t want to be stuck at Yehudi’s after everyone else had gone, waiting for Stella to potentially not reappear at all.

As I turned back towards the party, I made out a dark amorphous shape by the rear wheel of my own car. It moved, and I stopped, uncertainly. I squinted through the darkness, trying to work out what it was - a large dog, perhaps. Then it moved again, and I heard a muffled moan. I ran forward as Stella lifted her head very slowly and painfully from between her knees, a vast heavy bowling-ball head, swaying and out of proportion with her body like a baby who couldn’t yet sit up. There was blood coming out of her mouth, and one eye was beginning to squeeze shut, blackening in its socket, like the ghost Stella and I had both suspected she already was.

Chapter 23

I woke early the next morning, with an awful pressing feeling of doom hanging over me as soon as I struggled into consciousness; the sort of feeling when you knew something horrible had happened, but couldn’t immediately think what.

Then I remembered Stella, and the way her swollen eyes had looked as blank as a switched-off television when I ‘d helped her into bed the previous night. She hadn’t spoken a word all the way home, to me or to Suzanne; just mutely and stubbornly shaking her head whenever I said she should go to the police. I still didn’t know exactly what Charlie had done to her.

Suzanne had stayed for a drink with me, crying, saying how she never had trusted him, he had a really bad reputation, he’d been in trouble with college before; until eventually I had to bundle her home in a minicab, her eyes as raccoon-black as Stella’s but with smudged mascara, not violence. It was all I could do to prevent myself shouting at her, ‘How could you let her go off with him if you knew that?’

Going back to sleep was out of the question, even at seven a.m. on a Sunday. I got up, dressed, and pottered around the flat, which was bowing with a leaden, uncomfortable silence, not the usual easy peace of early morning. I dismissed it as my own stress from the trauma of Stella’s injuries, and started to make myself some toast, deciding not to try and wake her. But then I began to worry that she wasn’t asleep at all, but lying in a coma with head injuries, or worse. I should’ve insisted on taking her to Casualty last night, I fretted.

I peered around her bedroom door, squinting through the gloom at the faint bump in the bedclothes. Her breathing, thankfully, was regular, but even with her hair covering her face, I could see that her cheek wasn’t the shape it was supposed to be. It was too dark to make out the bruises.

‘
Stell?’ I whispered tentatively, kneeling down beside her. ‘Are you OK?’

She groaned and shrugged my hand off her shoulder. ‘Leave me alone,’ she muttered thickly.

‘
It’s OK. It’s early. Go back to sleep. I just wanted to check on you.’

Stella made another sound, an exasperated sort of sigh, and pulled the bedclothes over her head.

The hours until she woke again seemed to last forever. I couldn’t even face playing the recorder – in fact, I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I closed the kitchen door behind me and began to clean: surfaces, floor, hob, extractor, even the oven. I put yellow rubber gloves on my hands and Lou Reed’s
Transformer
on the boombox, and got down to work. But I had to skip over track three, ‘Perfect Day’, because it was so far from being a perfect day that bile rose in my throat and tears to my eyes as I scrubbed and squirted and wiped and polished. I knew I’d never again be able to think of the song’s simple piano introduction without feeling the same frustrated pain, and the harsh scent of cleaning fluid; not just in my nostrils and my throat but also, synaesthesically, yellow and abrasive under my skin, like hate. Like fury.

I emerged from a gleaming kitchen two hours later, panting and exhausted, my lower back aching, but intending to start on the living room next. Stella’s door was still closed, and I was just tiptoeing past when I heard a small sound from my own bedroom. It sounded suspiciously like a mouse, and I was terrified of mice. Perhaps it would leave quietly and a confrontation would never be necessary.