Are You My Mother? (47 page)

‘
Thank God you weren’t there for the actual event. If anyone had filmed me going into labour, I’d have killed them,’ she said, before we all shushed her.

The penultimate scene had been shot in Mack’s flat, on the day the letter had arrived from the last Ann Paramor, in its thick cream envelope stamped with jolly Jersey stamps, and a postmark as wavy as my stomach at the thought of what it might contain.

Robert had been up in Manchester for a meeting that day, so I’d rushed straight over to Mack’s flat, where he and Katrina were having breakfast. He had instantly got his PD100 out of the case, and began to rig up some sort of complicated arrangement by which he strapped the camera to his skateboard, so he could pull it down the hall in what he told me was a ‘tracking shot’, to capture my expression as I came into the kitchen. Katrina started to set up the radio mikes, and I had waited at the kitchen table, glumly watching the activity around me as their half-finished cornflakes began to congeal around the sides of their bowls. Pat Sharp on Heart FM was playing songs from ‘this week in 1981’; Randy Crawford, ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’ and Smoky Robinson’s ‘Being With You.’ ‘What were you doing in that year?’ Pat asked, rhetorically, and I’d thought back: it was the year of Stella’s birth. That was the year when everything had changed, although not in the bad way I’d feared. I’d been dreading the prospect of no longer being number one; but what I actually became was a big sister. Number ones and number twos stopped existing as terms of competition, and merely became euphemisms for what Stella did in her nappy.

The shot in Mack’s flat seemed to take forever to set up, and I was ready to punch him for all that assing about with skateboards, pretending to be a creative wunderkind, when all I wanted to do was to rip open the envelope.

‘
Hurry up,’ I’d called out, snappily. ‘This is torture!’

But finally it was ready, and I had to admit, when I saw it on TV, it was very atmospheric. Mack had filmed me in slow motion as I walked down the hall, like a condemned prisoner on Death Row, reframing for a tight close-up of my white face when I sat at the kitchen table – the cereal bowls had been cleared away and the radio switched off - and began to tear open the envelope.

Then my voice, heavy with disappointment, reading out the letter from Jersey Ann, the perfectly nice, perfectly apologetic letter saying that there was absolutely no way that she could be my mother since she was eight in the year I was born, but that she did hope I found her and it all worked out for the best in the end.

‘
So that’s that,’ my disembodied voice said flatly, over the top of a close up of another wrong Ann Paramor’s handwriting. ‘That only leaves the Harlesden one, and I’m sure it’s not her. I just feel it. It feels right to stop here. To finish. I just want to move on with my life. We tried.’ My words oozed, dripping with a defeatism I hadn’t really even realised I felt until I heard them.

Back in our sitting room, Robert reached over and hugged me tightly. On TV, my voiceover faded out, replaced by the swelling introduction to ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM.

There was one final piece of footage, before Mack’s closing credits. Just as I was thinking to myself, well, hope springing eternal and all, maybe I was a bit hasty about Harlesden Ann; maybe I should go back, just to make sure. I’d always wonder, otherwise - Mack said to me, anxiously, from across the room,

‘
I hope you don’t mind that I did this, Emma.’

As Michael Stipe’s plaintive voice filled our ears, the shot changed to a street I recognised – back to Harlesden Ann’s street, as if Mack’s film had read my thoughts. My heart leaped into my mouth. He’s found her, I thought. A close up of the house, still deserted, ugly, unkempt.

Then, oh God, cutting to the exterior of a post office. Mack shooting hand-held as he walked slowly inside and through the roped-off queuing lines, towards the counters, a close up of a name badge reading ANN PARAMOR, then a slow pan upwards over an enormous chest, up three chins to a pasty, sullen face, zooming outwards to film sparse eyebrow hairs raised in enquiry, but not surprise at the sight of the camera and microphone – Mack had obviously gone in first and asked her if he could film – then another close up of her looking down at a photograph of me as a baby and then -

I held my breath, pressure building and building inside my head until I felt sure I’d start hissing like a pressure cooker and nobody in the room would be able to hear my voiceover on screen; at least not the ‘s’s anyhow -

- she was shaking her head, blankly. Shrugging her shoulders. Shaking her head again. Arranging her tight lips into a wavy rueful expression. Looking smug that she was going to be on television.

It wasn’t her.

‘
It wasn’t her,’ said Mack, looking at me worriedly as the screen went blank and words scrolled up, over the final verse and chorus of ‘Everybody Hurts’:

‘
None of the Ann Paramors on the list turned out to be Emma’s birthmother. She has decided not to take her search any further, although entertains a faint hope that if the right woman is out there, she might still come forward and contact the makers of this film.

The final words were mine, spoken over a photograph of Mum, Dad, Stella and I, taken on a beach in Devon, Stella and I squinting into the unknown, but never suspecting that the unknown would turn out to be a place without the two adults hugging us from behind. My words made me want to scream; brave, made-for-TV words forming trite, pat sentiments:

‘
I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones. I had wonderful adoptive parents for nineteen years. Of course I’ll always wonder, and I’ll always want answers about myself, but I can survive without them. I’ve survived for this long. As long as I can keep it all in perspective, and concentrate on the people I have in my life now who I love and who love me – well, that’s all that is important, at the end of the day.’

I got up and stormed out of the room, suddenly furious. There was a momentary silence behind me, and then I was aware of a buzz of concerned voices as Stella, Mack, Ruth, and Robert all got up and debated which of them should go after me.

Ruth, who was nearest the door, took an executive decision. ‘Give us a minute, will you?’ I heard her say, as she followed me out into my bedroom.

She found me leaning my forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching the roofs of cars passing below in a blur of metallic colours still just about discernible in the dusk.

‘
Are you all right?’

‘
No,’ I said, morosely.

‘
I don’t blame you.’ I heard a creak as Ruth sat down on my bed, and then a faint lip-smacking, snuffly sound which was Evie, heard through the baby monitor Ruth still held, stirring in her sleep. ‘It’s hard enough, what you’ve been through. It must be doubly hard, seeing Mack making such a big, suspenseful drama out of it.’

I gulped. ‘I thought…. I thought that the Ann in the post office must be her. I thought he’d found her and she didn’t want to know me. That’s why he didn’t tell me beforehand.’

‘
Mack would never do that to you. He’d never set you up like that.’

‘
But he did set me up! He used me. OK, it would have been worse if she
had
turned out to be my mother, but still, he manipulated me. I can’t believe he’d do that; I’m so angry with him, Ruth. And tired. This whole thing has been such a series of huge hopes and then even bigger anti-climaxes - my emotions are up and down like a…like a…
whore’s drawers
.’

‘
Perhaps that’s part of the reason you’re so angry with Mack now too; because he didn’t manage to help you find your mother?’

I turned slowly and went to sit on the bed next to Ruth. My hands were shaking. I flopped back, looking at the way my beaded lampshade sent globules of shadow dappling across the ceiling.

‘
Yeah. You’re right. It’s the scene which wasn’t there, in his film, that upsets me most,’ I said slowly. ‘I’ve tried and tried not to have any expectations, not to fantasise about it, but I just can’t help it. I so wanted there to be a scene, at the end, where I walk up a garden path somewhere, and there’s a small, dark-haired friendly woman who looks just like me, only twenty years older. She’s framed in the doorway. Her arms are open wide. We’re both crying, and we hug and laugh. Mack’s panning slowly around us…’ My voice was thick with tears, which started to drip self-pityingly out of the sides of my eyes and into my ears.

Ruth sighed sympathetically. ‘Poor you,’ she said, making me cry even harder.

‘
I didn’t want it to end with a picture of Mum and Dad. I didn’t want to be reminded of what I’ve already lost,’ I sobbed, flinging my arm across my face to hide my eyes. ‘I miss them so much.’

As if in sympathy, a tinny wail suddenly emanated from the baby listener. I sat up, sniffling, and we both watched the arc of tomato red lights flaring angrily into a howl of action.

‘
She’s so restless tonight,’ said Ruth, pulling a key out of her pocket. ‘Must be the heat. Will you go? I guarantee that a cuddle of a sleepy baby will make you feel better. Go on. I promise I’ll turn off the listener, so if you want to talk to her, or have more of a cry, you can. She’ll probably go straight back to sleep, and if she doesn’t, just bring her up here.’

I took the key - it did seem like a nice idea. ‘OK then, just for a bit. Will you tell Mack I think his documentary was brilliant, even if the ending did upset me. And tell Robert I’ll be back soon?’

Ruth nodded, putting her arm around my shoulders and squeezing.

‘
Thanks, pal,’ I said, leaning my head against hers.

I wanted to go in and see Robert, but I couldn’t face everyone else’s sympathetic noises, so instead I sneaked straight past the now muted party in the living room and down to Ruth’s flat.

Evie’s door was ajar, and I could see wavery pink shadows being thrown around the room from the magic lantern on the bookcase; little cartoonish angels with triangles for bodies blowing heavenly trumpets and playing celestial tambourines, dancing round in an eternal circle of soft red light.

Evie, however, was not impressed. She was kneeling up, clad in a baggy nappy and nothing else, rattling the bars of her cot like a wrongfully arrested political prisoner. Her tear-stained face was puce with heat and fury, and as she reached out her arms to be lifted up, she gave me a look which very obviously said ‘what the hell kept you?’.

I scooped her out over the side of the cot and held her close. She instantly stopped crying and, sticking her forefinger into her mouth, nuzzled her head into the space between my neck and my shoulder. Her earlobe against my cheek felt strangely cool in contrast to her hot face.

I eased myself as carefully as possible down in the deep white rocking chair by the window, and we sat and rocked, in silence apart from the sound of a small finger being sucked. I thought how, only a few months ago, Percy had lived here. This probably hadn’t been where he slept, being the smallest of the three potential bedrooms, but I had no doubts that it had been as brown and dingy as the rest of the flat.

It was so strange, how quickly everything could change. Percy was gone, but Ruth and Evie were here. Mack may have laid me bare for the nation’s entertainment, but look what else had come out of it. Maybe not a new mother, but a lover, and several new friends.

Evie muttered and briefly complained, so, fervently hoping that Ruth had stuck to her promise of switching off the monitor, I began to sing to her. But I couldn’t find the right song. ‘Hotel California’ - which for some reason sprung to mind first - turned out to be very tricky, a cappella, and I couldn’t remember the words to ‘One Man Went To Mow’, when I tried to start that one. I seemed to have forgotten all the lullabies I used to know. I wished I’d had the foresight to bring my recorder down - it was funny how playing it was so much easier than singing, a more tuneful conduit for the notes in my brain.

Then suddenly it came to me; the song that Mum used to sing Stella as a baby: ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.‘ Not particularly soothing, or somnolent – especially when sung flat by me – but it flooded out of me, even though I hadn’t heard it for years; all the words of the chorus and most of the verse, too. I closed my eyes and saw my mother, my
real
mother, rocking Stella and singing, smiling at me over Stella’s baby shoulder when I appeared in another doorway, in another age. It was Mum and Dad I missed, I thought, as the tears began to drop again into Evie’s fine hair. Not the stranger who’d given birth to me. I was wrong to even try and replace them – for that was what I had hoped, even if I wouldn’t admit to anybody.

Evie gradually fell quiet, and the room seemed full of the energies of innocence and safety, a place of transformation; a room where needs were always met and loved ones always close. I felt sad that it hadn’t been that way for Percy – at least, not towards the end of his life. Who knew what had gone before that. Maybe he too had once sat and rocked a child in this room. The magic lantern continued to throw coloured angels around the walls, and golden-pink spirals spinning onto the ceiling, illuminating the shelf full of stuffed animals, the white fluffy rug on the floor, and the clumsily-done painting of Humpty Dumpty.

Humpty was still perched on his wall, but he had a lopsided look about him which suggested that all the kings’ men - four of them, rosy-cheeked and musketed - may have already had an unsuccessful stab at putting him back together again after some previous unrecorded tumble. Ruth later told me that her mother had painted it.