Are You My Mother? (28 page)

There had been a mouse in the health centre’s waiting room once; it ate through a stack of envelopes and some herbal cough sweets in Joanne‘s desk drawer, and left little black turds all over the headed paper. My eyes suddenly filled with tears at the thought that Charlie had hurt Stella, and all I was worrying about was a stupid
mouse
. But then I heard it again, a shuffley, quiet noise, not, in fact, like the sound that any type of small vermin would make.

I gulped, and wondered if I should phone Mack, or the police; but the thought of a policeman turning up to rescue us from what was potentially a mouse was too humiliating. Still, maybe if a policeman were actually there I could persuade Stella to file a complaint against Charlie. I crept down the hall. Again I thought that there was something odd about the silence in the flat. Something seemed to be missing.

Still with my rubber gloves on, and armed with a bottle of antibacterial spray which I held out in front of me like a weapon, I tiptoed cautiously into my room. It was empty, and momentarily silent until suddenly, from my walk-in wardrobe, came the unmistakable sound of floodgate-opening, gasping sobs. For a second I didn’t even think it
was
Stella, because Stella hardly ever cried. Even under the current circumstances, it was more likely that a stranger had broken into the flat for the sole purpose of having a good cry in my bedroom, than Stella. I put it down to the amount of tears she’d shed when our parents died – it was as if she’d approached adulthood like something desiccated and hollow, a plant needing hydration. I hadn’t seen her cry, properly, since 1998 when she fell down the escalator in Shepherd’s Bush Station, hungover, and tore a ligament in her ankle so badly that it took a chunk of bone with it.

I ran over to the cupboard and wrenched open the door. That cupboard always used to be our repository of junk, until I decided that I’d really like a place of my own to meditate in. I’d commandeered the vegetable rack from the kitchen, and installed a small brass Buddha on one of its onion-flaky shelves. The cupboard was huge, and so with an old rug on the floor, and candles and incense perched on either side of the Buddha, it made a great meditation space – although I had to confess, I’d only actually meditated in there twice. Stella used it more often, with ‘meditation’ being a euphemism for the smoking of a surreptitious joint. She thought I didn’t know.

Gradually, due to a general lack of storage space, the erstwhile occupants of the wardrobe - namely the ironing board, iron, a suitcase full of winter clothes, and some tacky framed posters left by the flat’s previous owner - had crept back in again, one by one, jostling for space with the spiritual paraphernalia. Contemplative it wasn’t.

Stella was crouched on the rug, squeezed in between the vegetable rack and the suitcase, howling like a baby. I dropped the cleaning stuff, yanked off my gloves with a rubbery plop, and pulled her out, sending the ironing board crashing down on both of us. I threw it aside as though it was made of balsa wood in my haste to get to her.

‘
Oh Stell, my baby. Tell me what he did to you... I’m calling the police. We should’ve gone to the police last night - oh my God…’

Stella crawled into my arms and bawled without restraint, eyes and nose running, leaving a wet stigmata of grief on my shoulder. I was speechless with horror at the daytime sight of her face and arms, now that the cuts and scratches had swollen and the bruises purpled. She looked far worse than she had the night before.

‘
Emma, it really hurts,’ she sobbed. ‘My face is throbbing. I’ve got such a headache.’

I swallowed, wondering what else hurt her. ‘Stell, you have to tell me. Did he – ‘

She looked away, but answered. ‘No. He didn’t…quite…rape me.’

I exhaled with both relief and renewed terror at what that might mean.

‘
OK. You don’t have to tell me anything else yet, if you don’t want to. Come on, I’ll run you a bath, make you a cup of tea and get you some Neurofen. I think I should call the doctor.’

‘
No! It’s just a headache. Please, don’t, Emma. Just get me some painkillers.’

I led her by the hand, compliant as a child, into the bathroom where she stood vacantly on the bathmat, waiting as I ran her a huge bubbly bath. She looked so forlorn and small, still in the old t-shirt of Dad’s which she wore in bed, her shoulders shaking with sobs.

‘
Hop in, and I’ll get the tea.’

‘
And the Neurofen,’ she said, weakly stripping off the t-shirt and climbing into the bath.

I ran into the kitchen, put on the kettle, and ransacked the drawer where we usually kept the painkillers. But there was nothing in there except the usual miscellany which ended up in kitchen drawers: books of matches, odd clothes pegs, plastic ice-lolly moulds, guarantees from various kitchen appliances. No Neurofen; not even an aspirin. I raced back to the bathroom.

‘
We’re out of Neuros. Shall I nip down to the shop for you?’

Stella nodded once, her chin dipping in and out of the deep water as she lay motionless. I retreated, grabbed my bag and keys, flicked the kettle on, and left the flat.

It was on the stairs that I realised what was different about the silence that morning. It wasn’t only a manifestation of the dark moods and pain inside the flat – something was actually, physically missing: the persistent warble of Percy’s television.

Percy
always
had his TV on. He was an early bird, and he switched it on as soon as he woke up, usually at six or seven in the morning, and always at window-rattling volume. At first Stella and I used to complain, shoving large-lettered but polite notes underneath his door, but after a while we just got used to Richard and Judy bellowing at one another as our morning wake-up calls. Percy did turn the sound down a bit when he received the notes, but after a few minutes he’d forget, and crank it back up again.

I stood outside his door, concerned and dithering. This was serious enough to warrant further investigation; but Stella was up there, in pain, in the bath. I decided not to do anything until I’d been to the shop for the painkillers – after all, I might spot Percy on the way out, in his habitual position, scratching and mumbling on the doorstep downstairs, or on his daily ramble along the terrace and back again. Although, that said, he usually left his door open when he went out, and it was firmly closed.

I went down to the main front door and checked around, but there was no sign of him, and his two milk bottles were sitting unclaimed on the doorstep. Now I was seriously worried.

‘
Bugger you, Percy,’ I muttered. ‘Don’t do this to me, not today.’

He definitely wasn’t away or anything – as if he ever went on holiday! - because I’d been aware of him the previous night, thumping around, slamming doors. When I’d gone to the loo after putting Stella to bed and seeing Suzanne off, I ‘d heard a muffled chuntering through the floorboards as Percy went into his own bathroom, directly underneath. Straining my ears to hear better, I’d identified the clunk of a heavy cistern lid being lifted and propped against the wall. An echoey old voice had floated up, and I’d overheard the words, ‘Ello, ballcock! How’re you doing then?’ The lid crashed back down and Percy had stomped out of the bathroom, evidently satisfied by his small talk with the plumbing. Even in the midst of the horror of that night, it had almost made me smile.

I dashed to the Narayan Grocery, purchased a packet of Neurofen and some fresh orange juice, and hurried back to the house. On the way up, I listened again at Percy’s door, and again there was nothing but hollow silence. I knocked, loudly and fruitlessly, for a long time, bearing in mind Percy’s deafness. Still nothing. We had a key to his flat, which his Age Concern lady asked if we could keep for when Percy locked himself out or lost his own key – a regular occurrence – and so, with a sinking heart, I realised I was going to have to go in.

I traipsed back up to our own flat, made Stella a cup of tea, and took it into her with the pills and a glass of water. She was lying completely still in the bath, her eyes shut, furrows of pain corrugating her usually-smooth forehead. Her hair snaked across the surface of the water, and she looked like the Lady of the Lake - if said Lady had been in a nasty scrap.

‘
Take these,’ I said, popping three Neurofens out for her and laying them on the end of the bath next to the glass of water. ‘Your tea’s down here on the floor. Will you be all right for five minutes? Percy’s TV isn’t on and he didn’t answer the door. I’m worried about him.’

Stella dipped her chin in the water again, in a martyred sort of way, which I took as an affirmation.

‘
Sorry, Stell. I won’t be long.’

But just as I was about to go out of the door, she said, in the faintest of ghost voices, ‘Wait, please. Just a minute. I want to tell you what happened first.’

I sat down on the floor, pressing my palm against the unfeeling smooth white pedestal of the basin for support while Stella began to speak, the low flat monotone of her voice rendered even more eerie by the bathroom’s acoustics. I hoped Percy was OK, that he could hang on, but I couldn’t walk out on Stella until she was finished.

She told me how Charlie had kissed her and touched her and it was lovely.

How they’d walked out to his car and got in the back and kissed more; and then he had put his hand up her dress and pulled her knickers across to one side so he could touch her with his fingers.

I twitched my own fingers involuntarily against the white porcelain, forcing them to mime the notes for ‘Creep’ by Radiohead, hearing it in my head as a tinny descant, wishing that I could make it drown out what Stella was saying.

She told me that they’d got close to having sex, but that neither of them had any condoms, and that it didn’t bother Charlie at all, but then she’d said that she couldn’t, unprotected. She wasn’t on the pill, and besides, in this day and age....

She told me how he hadn’t listened; just yanked the thin waistband of her lacy pants so it snapped clean through, and how the last barrier was gone, and she had felt the first sublime sensation of heat and solidity as he began to enter her. How at that point it had felt too good to protest.

And then how it had all gone really wrong, when, three seconds later, she’d come to her senses and sat up in the car – quite happily – and said, ‘Oh well, next time, eh?’, and tried to pull her dress down again.

‘
He called me a fucking pricktease. He grabbed my arms and tried to force it back inside me. I wriggled away, but I couldn’t get to the door. He got hold of my hair and pulled my head down and stuck his dick in my mouth....’

I couldn’t bear to listen to it. I jumped up and ran over to the bath, I supposed, to give Stella a hug. But she was under the water, hiding beneath its inviolable smooth surface, and I couldn’t reach her. So I sat down again, drawing my knees up to my chin, feeling utterly helpless.

‘
I bit it.’

‘
You did
what
?’

‘
I bit his dick. Really hard. I think I drew blood.’

I sighed, a very distant long-lost cousin of a laugh. ‘Oh Stella. Then what?’

She trembled and the water rippled slightly, tiny vibrations of pain.

‘
He kneed me in the face, and hit me a few times, really punched me. I don’t think it sunk in at first, what I’d done to him, until it started to hurt, because he suddenly grabbed his dick and screamed, and that’s when I got out the car and ran off. I hid until I heard him drive away, and then I went and waited by your car. I couldn’t go back into the party. I couldn’t bear all your “I told you so” faces.’

She sloshed back in the bathwater, out of sight.

‘
As if we’d ever say I told you so’.

We were silent for a few more long minutes, and then I remembered Percy. I reached across and turned on the hot tap. ‘I’d better go, Stell. I won’t be long, I promise.’

Feeling sick to my stomach at what I’d just heard, and at the thought of what I might find, I tentatively let myself into Percy’s flat. The usual sour smell engulfed me, and I had to put my sleeve over my nose before stepping into the hallway, still calling Percy’s name over and over: ‘Mr. Weston? Are you there? Are you OK? Mr. Weston?’

Percy’s cat, a starved-looking tabby with a perpetual expression of desperation on its face, shot down the hall and began hurling itself at my legs, mewing tonelessly. ‘Go away, cat,’ I whispered, trying to walk further into the flat but hindered by the weaving feline. I imagined I could actually see the fleas leaping out of its fur and onto my ankles, making new homes in the turn-ups of my jeans. ‘Where’s Percy then, eh?’

Then I saw him – his feet, at least, sticking out of the living room and into the hall. As I ran up to where he lay, I became aware of a dark puddle surrounding him, and couldn’t prevent myself screaming: an inadvertent but ineffectual girly sort of yelp, which I felt briefly glad that nobody but the cat had heard. When I realised that the liquid wasn’t blood, but stout – a can of it had fallen with Percy to the floor and saturated his limp body – I had to lean against the dank, dark walls of the hallway, hyperventilating with relief and panic in tandem. He seemed to have tripped over the lead to his television, as there was a socket in the hall nearby, and a plug tangled loosely around his ankles. It looks as if someone has unplugged Percy.