Are You My Mother? (9 page)

All Mum’s research notes had to be dealt with too, reams and reams of them; and Dad’s business accounts, which were floating around, stuffed haphazardly into plastic bags or just loose in piles. I found about three thousand of the leaflets he’d had printed up, containing the instructions for construction of the Victortec and Victatilt (Mk II) cameras which he made in kit form; and I put them all out for recycling except a handful. Mum’s notes I parcelled up and posted to her university faculty - let someone else make a decision about something, I’d thought.

As I cleared and quietly cried, simultaneously filing and keening while Janice rabbited on relentlessly next to me, I supposed that at the back of my mind was a flicker of hope that I might suddenly stumble on a great cache of correspondence pertaining to my own heritage. Or at least my absentee birth certificate, which I’d never seen. But there was nothing, until I unearthed the letter; one limp, unprepossessing sheet of paper, so crumpled up already that I nearly threw it away without a second glance.

Luckily I did give it a second glance, and when I realised what it was, my heart beat so fast that I thought I was going to faint.

It was dated two months before the accident.

Rose Cottage

Teffont

Nr. Salisbury

Wilts.

Dear Barbara and Ted,

It’s been a while since I heard from you. I haven’t been well again. I do respect your wishes not to tell Emma that I’m asking after her, but I would so like to know how she is. Please send me a little note to let me know what she’s going to do now that she’s left school. She’s in my prayers every day.

Yours sincerely,

Ann

PS I might be leaving here soon.

Ann. A good name for a mother, was my first thought. Frustratingly, there was no surname, which meant that she and Mum must have been in correspondence prior to this. I’d felt a momentary flash of anger at Mum for excluding me from the woman who was at the core of my identity. Then I re-read the words, about ten times, while Janice was blithely launching into an anecdote about her band opening for Adam and the Ants in 1979. There was something a bit weird about the note, I thought. As if Ann was not saying everything she wanted to say – or maybe that was just how I wanted to see it. But it seemed a little abrupt, somehow.

At least she had included an address – I could write to her. Even if she had already moved, perhaps the current occupants of the house would forward my letter. Eventually Janice noticed the shock on my face, and the way my hand was shaking as I scrutinised the flimsy piece of writing paper, holding it up to the light in the vain hope that there might be another secret message to me contained within it; written perhaps in lemon juice or invisible ink, the way they used to do in Enid Blyton, the Secret Seven or the Famous Five. I had so badly wanted to be in the Secret Seven when I was nine.

‘
Are you all right? What have you found?’ Janice asked, sitting back on her heels and pushing her curly hair out of her eyes.

‘
It’s from my birthmother,’ I said, in a strangled-sounding voice.

Janice rushed over and gave me one of her carefully appropriate social-worker hugs. She smelled of womanly sweat and Body Shop White Musk, and her arms felt bony around my shoulders. Not motherly at all, but then that was probably intentional.

‘
Wow. How do you feel about that?’

She was always asking me how I felt. It bugged the hell out of me, because what could I say, during those terrible days, except what I always said: ‘Shit.’

‘
Shit,’ I said. ‘Her name’s Ann. I didn’t know that.’

‘
Are you going to contact her?’

‘
I don’t know. Not at the moment, probably. Too much – you know – on my plate.’

With that, I left the room, climbing gingerly over the ‘To File’ piles of documents on the carpet where Dad’s slippers used to be, Janice’s post-it notes stuck pink and bossy on top of each stack.

I ran into my own bedroom and shut the door behind me, ignoring Janice’s gentle tap and call of ‘I’m just out here if you need me.’ Smoothing out Ann’s note with the flat of my palm, I placed it carefully between the pages and the hardback cover of my old Brothers Grimm Fairytale book, and slipped it under the bed, the words already etched on my brain.

I tried to process what information I could from the few words Ann had written. She referred to herself in the singular, not the plural:
I might be leaving here soon.
Surely, if she was half of a couple, she’d say ‘we’? She could be single, widowed, or divorced. I was torn between hoping, selfishly, that she hadn’t had any more children, so that if we ever met I’d be even more of a prize to her; and wishing that she’d gone on to have a big family so that I’d have a whole slew of new relatives to get to know.

Other than her address - Rose Cottage, Teffont, near Salisbury, Wiltshire - the fact that she said her prayers, and that sad little line
I haven’t been well again
, the letter volunteered little personal information about my birthmother. Even her writing style gave nothing away. It was a neat, small, almost childish hand, but the spelling and grammar were faultless. From these scant facts, I constructed an awful vision of her as a kind of grotesque Baby Jane figure, kneeling at the foot of her bed in a short babydoll nightie, hair in rollers, big eyes cast heavenwards, praying for me. On the bedside table, in my fevered imagination, were clusters of pill bottles of different shapes and sizes. I couldn’t visualise her face, but it was pale and wan with regret and ill health. I hoped she wasn’t seriously ill – what if she had cancer or something? By the time I found her, it might be too late.

Later, after Janice had tramped off home in her Doc Martens, I searched every other place in the house where more letters might have been hidden. There was definitely nothing else in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, since Janice and I would have found it, so I resorted to leafing through the pages of all the books on the bookshelf, and in the shoe boxes at the bottom of the wardrobe in the spare room. But I found no more correspondence from Ann.

I couldn’t stay angry at Mum and Dad for not letting me in on the secret of Ann’s identity – I was sure that if I’d asked, they’d have told me. Instead I channelled my rage towards Ann herself, feeling quite scornful of her naked need. Serves you bloody well right, I thought.
You
gave
me
away. You gave up your rights to me. Why
should
my Mum tell you anything about me?

Nonetheless, a few days later, I sat down and wrote to her. Just a little note, telling her about Mum and Dad’s deaths, and the address of the flat we were about to move into. No pressure, playing it cool, my pen shaking with the effort of not betraying the emotion I felt at writing a real letter to my real mother.

A couple of weeks after we moved into our new flat, the letter, opened and resealed with Sellotape, was returned to me. Ann’s puny, inadequate, three lettered little name was crossed out, and our address written carefully on the front, next to a message reading:
‘Return to sender. No forwarding address.
‘

I was so furious that I kicked a chunk out of the bathroom door, splintering the wood, leaving little glossy chips of frustration on the hall carpet, and a lot of fabricated explaining to do to Stella about how the hole got there.

But I couldn’t afford to do anything further about it at that point. I had been granted status of official foster carer to Stella, and felt that I now had to maintain at least the appearance of being a responsible, mature adult. Not a kid who went around kicking in doors.

The circus of social workers, probate solicitors and estate agents finally packed up and left town, and Stella and I, in our new flat with big windows, a small kitchen, and a damaged bathroom door, had no choice but to try and pick up the pieces of our freshly orphaned lives.

Chapter 9

In the first year the two of us were alone together, the feeling of dreadful responsibility for Stella nearly suffocated me. She cried constantly, and I envied her for the ability to do so - I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing. I was just nineteen years old, and suddenly I had a double funeral to organise, a big house to sell, a small grief-stricken sister to look after, and a future in tatters - I had to turn down my place at Exeter University and find a job instead. Not to mention the shock of finding the correspondence from my birthmother, and the rejection I felt when my letter to her was returned - although, really, that was the least of my problems.

I handled the first few months OK, I believed – although I didn’t remember much of it. I knew Mum and Dad’s friends and neighbours had rallied round, and Janice the social worker was fantastic, but the burdens were still on my shoulders. It was me who lay awake every night obsessing about selling the house and buying a new place; about whether a flat in a mansion block or a conversion would be better, or whether a garden was preferable over a parking space; if I would ever pass my driving test, having failed twice already.

The list of things to worry about was endless, a Yellow Brick Road of problems twisting out of my sleep-deprived mind and off into the horizon. I developed spots and psoriasis, migraines and stomach complaints, bit my nails to the quick and pulled my hair out in clumps.

I could have dealt with all that, though, as long as I was looking after Stella properly. But gradually, Stella’s welfare began to just be another yellow brick. I loved her fiercely and protectively, as ever – but felt I couldn’t cope with the pressure of her constant tantrums and often downright nastiness to me. I knew, of course, her behaviour was borne out of grief, but I began to lose sight of her as a real person. She became just another trial sent to wear me down.

The turning point came when we moved house; it was bound to be an emotional time, leaving the home in which we had both grown up. I’d already given ten bin bags full of Mum and Dad’s clothes to charity, sold two sofas and a wardrobe, and flogged all Dad’s cameras to the camera shop in Acton. I was feeling utterly drained, and Stella had barely spoken at all for a week. A callous SOLD board stuck wonkily in the privet hedge outside was a brusque reminder of the collapse of our happiness. Stella kept the living room curtains closed all day so she didn’t have to look at it.

The day before the move, we had said our individual goodbyes to the secret freckles of the place: for me, my refuges in times of crisis; the larder, and the cupboard under the stairs which tapered to a warm dark hidey hole at the end. Stella, I knew, had cried in the attic where she and Mum used to do most of their sewing, and in the utility room, where Ffyfield’s bowls and litter tray still stood - Ffyfield had run away shortly after the night of the accident, and never been seen again.

Finally, by some unspoken agreement, we convened in Mum and Dad’s bedroom and climbed together into the cold bed, still made up with the same sheets and duvet cover I remembered Mum changing on the morning before her death. I’d found the old ones in the linen basket after the funeral, and I couldn’t bring myself to wash them for weeks.

We lay there in silence for some time, both of us trying desperately hard to smell the musky scent of our parents’ sleep from the bed. As we clutched our hands together, united in our grief, I had felt an overpowering wash of love for Stella.

On either side of the bedroom window stood two large antique Chinese vases, facing each other stolidly, a pair which Dad had inherited from his grandmother. They had been there all my life, but because Stella and I were banned from going near them in case of accidental breakage, I didn’t remember ever really studying them that closely before – we both just took them for granted, the way you do with familiarised beauty, whether in objects or loved ones.

Lying in the chilly bed holding hands with Stella, when I should really have been packing up my wardrobe, I stared at the vases. They were really old, and, I noticed with wonder, really, really beautiful. The glaze was cross-hatched with delicate brown hairline cracks, the white background faded to an eggshell grey. And the
figures
. They were painted in the traditional blue associated with Chinese designs, but these were not the bland poker-faced stick figures found on willow-patterned plates or tea-sets. These were people, a whole village-worth of characters: victorious warriors on horseback, plump peasants with sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks; sexy matrons greeting their loved ones home from wars; friends; children; generals; workmen. These people had stories to tell, they had a past as fascinating and mysterious as that of the vases themselves. I had never realised they had personalities like that.

I kept staring from one vase to the other. It was completely quiet in the bedroom, the evening sun casting a mellow dappled glow around the room as it filtered in through the leaves of the trees outside.

‘
Look at the vases, Stell. They’re so beautiful,’ I whispered. Stella peered over the edge of the duvet and followed my gaze.

‘
It looks like they’re moving round and round,’ she said slowly, as transfixed as I was. ‘Like on a merry-go-round.’