The House of Hidden Mothers (3 page)

‘No,' said Tara. ‘I knew it wasn't a game. I remember thinking, that's hurting Mummy but I can't stop. It's too much fun. That's the really disturbing bit, wouldn't you say?'

Tara then tossed her hair, or rather her hair plus the extensions she'd insisted on adding to the defiant bird's nest perched on her head. Shyama had made the mistake once of telling Tara her theory that an Indian woman's virtue was measured by her hair. Respectable women – in the movies and paintings, on the street – always had long straight tresses untouched by perm or primping, tamed into matriarchal buns or thick tight plaits hanging heavy like stunned black snakes. Only wild ‘junglee' women or women in mourning uncoiled the serpents and set them free. The shorter and wilder the haircut, the looser the morals, wasn't that the inference? It was only a theory, but within days Tara's hair seemed to have grown up and out by several inches. Shyama's, meanwhile, was getting longer, as if she was trying to blow-dry her way back into respectability. Well, too late for that now. Divorced, toy boy in tow and a stranger for a daughter. Who would have seen that coming?

An ice-cream van pulled up at the park entrance and chimed out ‘The Teddy Bears' Picnic', the dissonant notes dancing into the park and sprinkling on the shifting wind. It worked. Every child suddenly stopped mid-activity, ears pricked, sniffing the air expectantly. They are like little animals, Shyama thought as several of them started galloping towards the siren call, pulling adults with them. Others less fortunate were told Not Before Tea and the coordinated wailing began. The fury of injustice made them cry louder, but No Means No and Life Isn't Fair – best you learn that one early. Shyama's mother had told her that when that jingle sounded it meant that the ice-cream man had just run out of ice cream and was on his way home. For years, Shyama wondered why he always seemed to finish his supplies just as he reached her house. When the truth finally dawned, she couldn't decide if she was horrified by her mother's cruel lie or impressed by it. How odd it was that children believe anything we tell them for years, and then one day mistrust every word that comes out of our mouths. Why did she want to do this again?

A faint beep sounded from the depths of Shyama's overstuffed handbag. She rummaged amongst her usual debris of tissues and vitamin-pill bottles and a half-read newspaper until she found her mobile. A text from Toby. ‘All OK?' She hesitated. She didn't want to talk to him yet. She wasn't quite sure what she was going to say or even how she felt … Doomed and defiant in alternating waves. Of course, she could call him back and quote him any number of women who had defied the odds and given birth way past their medical sell-by date: that woman who was a judge on some dancing talent show, she was forty-nine when she popped one out, wasn't she? With a grown-up daughter, like Shyama herself. Probably all those years of pliés kept her fit and flexible. What was her name? Then, of course, there were all those OAPs who Zimmer-framed their way to that notorious Italian doctor who got them pregnant, though she recalled that one of them had died before her daughter's fourth birthday. She had been a single parent, too. What had happened to that child, she wondered? Who would explain to her that Mummy had spent her savings having her in her sixties, had brought her into this world only to depart it soon after from cancer, rumoured to have been triggered by the amount of drugs and hormones she'd imbibed in order to create and sustain a life she would not see into double figures. Shyama's finger hovered over Toby's number. Why did she want to carry on with this?

And then, on cue, because the universe sometimes works that way (or at least we like to think it does, so we create patterns from random collisions and see omens and signs in every coincidence, otherwise what's the alternative? Accepting that we are merely random specks flicked around by the gnarly finger of indifference?), the apple-cheeked toddler returned. She was still in her buggy, but now holding an ice-cream cone triumphantly between her fat fists. It was already beginning to melt; vanilla tears were making their way down the rippled orange cone on to the little girl's fingers. As her mother braved an approach with a wet wipe, the child looked up and smiled the way only children can – in the moment and with unadorned purity. Shyama's guts clenched, holding on to nothing, muscles contracting around an empty space waiting to be filled. In a year's time, she would look back at this moment and tell herself, there, that was the brief window when you could have recognized this yearning for what it really was, the ten seconds when you could have made a different choice and walked into a different future. But instead, she picked up her bag and wandered over to the playground, her phone to her ear, waiting for Toby to answer her call.

‘Ew, sir! Sir! That pig's dead, innit?'

Toby looked up from the sty to face a row of schoolkids with their faces pressed against the iron railings, wild delight in their eyes at the prospect of seeing a real-live dead thing.

‘There! In the corner! Can we touch it?'

Toby whirled round, dry-mouthed. Christ, maybe he'd inadvertently stepped on one of the piglets – he had been so distracted since Shyama's call. A quick glance at Priscilla confirmed she was still sprawled on her side, eyes shut, whilst her recent litter fought their squealing, desperate battle to find and hold on to a teat. It was an undignified scramble with piglets kicking each other's snouts and climbing over each other's heads to get to the milk. It reminded him of the buffet queue at a Punjabi wedding that Shyama had dragged him to, not long after they had first met.

‘This,' she had told him, ‘is what's known as a trial by fire. Not unlike the one that Sita had to walk through in order to prove her purity to Ram. Don't ask now, we're doing Hinduism on Wednesday. Today is Meet the Family day – all of them in one place, plus all their friends, acquaintances, hangers-on, people we don't like but have to invite because we went to their kids' weddings, and anyone else who will want to gossip about us, which is everyone. This is what's known as the one-rip-and-it's-off approach.'

‘You're not going to make me take my trousers off and pretend it's some ancient Indian custom, are you?' Toby was only half joking.

‘No, though that's tempting. When you have to take off a plaster, there are two ways, aren't there? You can pick up a teeny corner and try to peel it off really slowly, wincing and hurting all the way. Or—'

‘One rip and it's off?'

‘Exactly. Me and you becoming an item is possibly the biggest scandal on the Birmingham kitty-party circuit since Uncle Baseen's son announced he was gay two days into his honeymoon and ran off with the cocktail waiter.'

‘I'm not sure we could top that.'

‘Well, you're the wrong colour, you live in a bedsit, and wait till they find out how old you are.'

‘You don't have to tell them, do you?'

‘No, I don't have to. I just want to. Ready?'

They were standing at the rear of a purpose-built banqueting suite, a low-roofed concrete building that from the back could have been a factory or a modest shopping mall, except for the garlands of fairy lights festooned over every available inch of outside wall. ‘The only man-made structure in the West Midlands visible from space,' Shyama told him as they pulled into the car park, her ancient hatchback out of place amongst the Mercedes and Lexuses with their personalized number plates. Now they were standing outside the car, trying to ignore the slight drizzle that had just started, and Shyama was waiting for Toby to say yes. Or go home. Those were his choices. Toby had never liked an ultimatum; he reached decisions slowly, almost unconsciously, letting the seeds of the pros and cons settle into the primal mulch in his back brain whilst he got on with something physical like chopping logs or mucking out a sty. Then hours later, when he was thinking of nothing in particular, the answer would bud and unfold, and it was always the right one because it came to him. He didn't chase it. He wasn't prepared to chase this woman he had only known for six months either.

Their meeting had been like one of those moments you read about or see in cheesy films but never think is actually going to happen to you. Not to someone like him, at least, who didn't even like surprises. It had been six years ago, not long after his twenty-eighth birthday. He had been clearing out one of the stables. Then he had heard this voice, this guffaw, deep and full-throated enough to make him turn. She had been laughing at the rabbits, a child at either side of her. Not hers but Priya's, he found out in due course. An hour later, she'd asked for his number and in a daze he'd given it. Dates followed swiftly, increasingly; she always suggested the venue or event: restaurants he had never heard of, bars he would never have gone into without her, films he would not have chosen but usually loved. She took the lead, but subtly, without ever making him feel he didn't have a choice. And he kept choosing to say yes.

And now here they were, in a car park in Birmingham, on the verge of their first and maybe last row. She stood, hands on hips, only a couple of inches shorter than him, but in this mood seeming feet taller. Her normally unruly hair was a straight sheet of dark brown with red streaks. (‘I nearly did the full Sharon Osborne after the divorce,' she told him. ‘Short and traffic-light scarlet. But I haven't got the guts. Or the cheekbones.') She was wearing a sari, red and black shot through with gold thread, very dressy. He was used to seeing her in work clothes: casual suits, mannish jackets. It sounded stupid, but he hadn't thought of her as Indian until now. The sari – what was it, just a long piece of material? – clung to her generous bust and revealed a waist and hips he knew by touch rather than sight; the jewels at her neck and on her wrists imitated the raindrops caught like tiny prisms in her hair. She looked so … foreign, like one of the busty beauties pouting out of the painted mural in his local Indian restaurant. What used to be his local – in fact, the only one within a twenty-mile radius of the Suffolk village he used to call home. Eating an occasional chicken tikka masala was the nearest he had ever come to Indian culture. And now her. Doe-eyed, firm-jawed, angle-browed, soft-curved, older than him, dark to his blond, pugilist to his pacifist – too many contradictions to work. Then he caught a glimmer of something in her eyes. Those eyes; he wasn't a poetic man but they made him think of chocolate, fresh earth and twisted sheets. Beyond the brown was something he recognized from years of tending to unwanted animals, a kind of fear or maybe a resigned acceptance that however much you barked and spat, in the end someone was going to kick you where it hurt. He realized she didn't want to fight. She wanted to get in first before he disappointed her. I never want to disappoint you, was his first thought, and his second caught him by surprise. That he loved her already.

‘Shall we?' He smiled, offering her his arm with a self-consciously gallant swoop.

She raised one eyebrow, Bollywood style. ‘Don't say I didn't warn you, sweetie.'

‘There! In the corner! Nah, behind you! Behind you!'

Feeling like an unwelcome pantomime dame, Toby peered into the far corner, where sunlight couldn't penetrate the overhanging tin canopy, and saw the outline of a motionless prone piglet. He scooped it up in one fluid movement, shielding it from the little darlings now baying for blood.

‘Is it dead then? Can we see?'

The piglet was barely breathing; each tiny inhalation seemed a mighty effort.

‘Fighting for life' made sense to anyone who had held the runt of any litter, battling its early and inevitable demise. He'd seen so many of them and still didn't understand why Nature bothered creating them in the first place. What was the point, throwing together a weaker, smaller version of a species just so its mother could reject it, its siblings bully it and some other passing predator get a free and easy meal? Maybe it was the Darwinian equivalent of the naughty step, a way of warning your kids to behave, of reminding them how hard life could be and how lucky they were. Maybe Priscilla had lined up all her piggy kids this morning before opening hours and pointed a quivering trotter at their unfortunate brother, coughing in the corner.

‘If you don't listen to Mummy and eat all your swill, that's where you'll end up. All eighteen of you. Take a good look. That could have been you.'

The piglet gave a little quiver as if he was reading Toby's thoughts. He wouldn't last the night, not unless they chucked money, time and resources they didn't have at him. In any case, not intervening was policy at Broadside City Farm.

‘We want the children to have as authentic an experience as we can give them,' Jenny Palmer, the farm manager, had told him on his first day. Jenny was an earnest, friendly sort and had tried very hard to look as if she lived on the premises and was up at sparrow's fart to milk the herd. But Toby had already clocked the designer wellies and the line where the fake tan ended and her neck began. What did he care? He was grateful to have a job, even a temporary one such as this.

‘You have to remember,' Jenny continued, ‘that many of these children have never even seen a real cow or a pig or a horse. They have no idea that vegetables come from the ground. Many of them don't even have gardens …' She shook her head sadly.

Toby tutted in what he hoped was a sympathetic manner.

‘So that's why we have to let them just come here and be. Explore. Breathe. But this is a working farm. We sell our milk and eggs and meat, as you know, and we don't want to shield the children from that either. They need to know how we make our food – that all those cute little piggies will end up as bacon. And if an animal is sick or dies, well, we let them see that too. I mean, if it happens during opening hours, obviously. Otherwise we put it on the website. The most important thing is, we let Nature take its course as far as possible and we don't interfere.'