The woman laughed, and lit another cigarette from the stub of the old one. She looked comfortable, sitting by the kitchen table in her bare feet after shucking off her high heels. Marian wasn’t comfortable at all. The situation spooked her.
“Look, no disrespect,” said Marian, “but you’re not my mother and I don’t know what else to call you. It’s freaking me out. Who are you? Why are you here? Have you come for one of my kidneys, or what?”
“If it helps, call me Della. Think of me as your mother’s long-lost twin sister.”
“Auntie Della? It sounds like an Internet advice column: Ask Auntie Della about all your embarrassing personal problems. Where’s that name come from?”
“Oh, one of my boyfriends called me it. When we were introduced, he didn’t catch my name properly, and he called me Della until we sorted it out. Later, it became his pet name for me. It’s nice to have little shared jokes with people you’re close to. I liked him a lot, and sometimes I thought of Della as my better self, the person I’d be if I had a normal life and settled down with a husband and kids and cats. . . .” She stared into the distance. “But it didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry,” Marian said again, wondering how much bitterness she would find herself listening to. “Can I have a ciggy?”
Della smiled. “Oooh, my first parenting dilemma!”
“Don’t say that. You’re not my mother.”
“I’m more than half of your mother—we had the same life for nineteen years, before we diverged.”
“Maybe so, but you’re still not my mother.”
“I’m the closest you’re going to get.”
Tension filled Marian’s body, the muscles clenching in her thighs and shoulders. “If you diverged before I was born, there must be alternates of Mom who diverged a lot more recently. Say . . . a version of her who didn’t die in the accident, who didn’t get in the car that day.”
“Yeah,” said Della. She flicked ash off her cigarette so forcefully that it missed the ashtray and landed on the table. “But all those other versions—where are they? I came to see you. I’m here for you. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“I guess.” Marian suddenly felt guilty for being resentful and ungrateful. It was like all the times as a child when she’d found her mother embarrassing or overbearing, and she’d wanted her to disappear. Then Mom had died. She would have given anything to revoke those wishes, to see her mother come back. Now her mother was here—or the nearest approximation. Near enough to spit on, as her grandparents would say. They’d never liked Mom: they blamed her for leading their son into drugs and crime and prison.
“So, you’re here for me,” Marian said. “Thanks for coming. What now? What do you want to do?”
Della smiled, as if a light had been switched on inside her. She was like the Lester Todd song, “The Girl With A Neon Heart.” “I’ll do whatever I can. I’ll help you with your homework, talk to you about boys, teach you how to wear make-up. I want to be your mother! I’ll give you treats, buy you toys and dolls. We’ll go on holiday together, visit museums and all that kind of stuff. We’ll take photos and have a family album. I want you to be happy—I want to make you happy.”
The words tumbled forth in an outpouring of need. Marian felt embarrassed at the naked emotion in Della’s face, the sense of pent-up longings finally bursting out. It was all too much. Within her, a deep childish part of herself responded, wanting the long-lost mother who would play at dolls and bake cupcakes. But it was too late for that.
“I’m fifteen,” she said. “I don’t need toys and dolls. If that’s the kind of thing you want, why didn’t you hop to a different universe, one where your alternate died leaving a child three years old, or seven years old? Why here? Why me?”
Della slumped forward onto the table, her head in her arms. When she raised her face to look at Marian, her eyes were wet with tears.
“I didn’t want to tell you this,” she said. “But you’re right—there is a reason I’m here. It’s you I want, not some other child. . . .” She paused for a long moment. “God, this is hard. I need a drink! Is there anything in the house?”
This was all too familiar. Mom had been fond of drinking, and now Della looked to be the same. It made Della feel more like her real mother, and Marian suffered a pang at the sight of the tearful woman across the table, falling to pieces like a repackaged version of the same defective toy.
“No, there’s nothing to drink,” she lied. She touched Della’s hand. “Come on, you can do this. Out with it.”
Della drew in a rasping breath. “Well, it’s simple really. Your mother was nineteen years old when she became pregnant with you. And so was I.” She stopped, as if that were the whole story.
“But you said you never had any children.” Marian frowned, trying to work it out.
“That’s because I had an abortion.”
“You . . . had an abortion?” The word felt strange in Marian’s mouth. It was something from films and soaps and gossip mags, not a word to say over the kitchen table with a cup of tea. That’s me she’s talking about. She was pregnant with me, and she aborted me. “You’ve got a lot of cheek! Come back to finish the job, have you?”
“No! It’s not like that. I wish it had never happened. I want to take it all back and start again.” Della wiped her eyes. “God, I’m such a mess. I wanted to make a good impression on you, and here I am falling apart already. There’s no hiding it, I suppose. I’m a wreck, a shriveled-up burnt-out wreck.”
Marian sat still, waiting for the rest of it to come out. From her schoolbag, she heard the beep of her cell phone as messages arrived. Her friends would be asking about the party—when they should come, what they should wear, who they should bring. That was her life, not this universe-hopping intruder now drama-queening in her kitchen. Marian had only just met Della, and already she despised her. She was weak, even weaker than Mom. She could want whatever she liked, but she wouldn’t get it.
Della was talking, between hiccups and sobs. “I was a student, I had no money, I had nothing. . . . And he was useless; I knew even then he was no good, even before he went down. Pathetic jailbird prick! How could I have his baby, when we’d already broken up? Besides, I was only nineteen, I had plenty of time. I’d get a degree and a career and a husband and cats . . . oh, it was all in front of me!
“But none of it happened. I didn’t finish college, or get a proper job. I lived for the moment. I was the party girl with the good-time pills, the tabs to take you up and the weed to bring you down. Yeah, I sold the lubrication of festivation . . . only the class B’s, nothing injectable. Nothing I wouldn’t take myself.
“Well, the years drifted by. And when is the right time to have a kid? When you meet the right guy. I already told you about Narinder. He called me Della and I called him Mr. Happily-Ever-After.
“Except I’d picked up a dose in the party years. Chlamydia. You heard of that?”
Marian nodded warily.
“Good—watch out for it. You need to look after yourself better than I did. I never knew I had it, and by the time I found out, it was too late. It got into my womb, and I was infertile. I can’t ever have kids.
“We thought about everything: surrogacy, IVF, adoption.” Della put on a posh voice and continued, “Did you know, my dear, that Social Services don’t take kindly to ex-addicts wanting to adopt? Seems they think we might relapse. Gosh, what a slander!”
Back in her normal down-market dialect, Della concluded, “So, no kids—and pretty soon, no Narinder.” She shrugged. “The only time I’d ever been pregnant, I blew it. How could I know it would never happen again? I kept thinking about it, wondering if I’d done the wrong thing. Hindsight is what keeps you awake at night. Then I heard about the hopper, the parallel worlds, and . . . well, you know the rest.”
Marian wanted to slap Della’s face. The nerve of the woman! She was as selfish as those customers who came into the Cauldron wanting “love summonings,” regardle
ss of how their victims might feel about it.
“I’m amazed you’ve got the brass neck to turn up with a story like that,” Marian said. “Never mind the neck—you must have a brass chest, a brass stomach, and a brass arse!”
“What do you mean?” said Della. “That’s my life in black and white. It’s no fun being childless, you know.”
“Sounds like you had a lot of fun anyway, Miss Party Girl. And now you come along and tell me that you aborted me, which is bad enough, but I thought maybe you regretted it. I could understand that. But you don’t really regret it, do you? You only wish it hadn’t happened because of what followed. If you hadn’t caught a dose and become infertile, you would never have regretted that abortion. You’d never have thought of it again. You certainly wouldn’t have come barging into my house wanting to play at mommies and daughters.” Marian unexpectedly felt a catch in her throat, and hated it for ruining the delivery of a perfectly good rant. “If you’d had kids of your own, you wouldn’t be here now. So you don’t really care about me at all.”
Marian felt tears rising, and tried to choke them back. It was like losing her mother all over again. To see Della across the table, to hear her sounding like Mom and offering to give advice and buy treats and do all those parenty things . . . it had got her hopes up. Subconsciously, she’d thought her mother was back. But no, it was only some selfish bitch trying to use Marian as a bandage for her own emotional wounds. “You don’t care about me, so you can get lost.” She leapt out of the chair, sending it clattering backward, and flung open the kitchen door. “Go on, get out!”
“Ah, the teenage tantrum,” said Della. “I’ve only been here half an hour, and already we’re having a row. How quickly the glamour of parenthood fades. But I shall be strong!” She got up and closed the door, then began looking inside all the kitchen cupboards.
“I know it’s a shock,” Della went on. “And yes, you’re right—I wouldn’t be here if my life had turned out differently. But then, neither would you. You wouldn’t be here if your mother hadn’t died. We are where we are, and we have to make the best of it. After all, when I found out I was infertile, I could have sat at home feeling sorry for myself. Well, I did! For months and months. But then I got up off my backside and I decided to look for someone who needed me. I want to make a difference. Won’t you at least give me a chance?”
“You say you want to make a difference, but it looks like you really want to make a drink,” said Marian sourly. “Sit down and stop rifling the kitchen! I told you there isn’t any alcohol. If you want me to give you a chance, you need to look a bit more like a mother, and a bit less like a bag lady who’s just wandered in off the street.”
“Now then,” Della said, “less of your sass. I’m not hunting for booze like some damn alkie whore. I’m looking for—ah-ha!” She grabbed a set of scales from a cupboard full of rolling pins and scone-molds and other baking paraphernalia. Then she took a Tupperware container out of her handbag. Inside the Tupperware lay a large plastic bag full of gray powder. She weighed the bag and scribbled the result on a scrap of paper.
“What’s that?” asked Marian. She’d been to parties where older kids giggled and tried to look cool as they brought out their stashes of weed or coke or speed, but this looked nothing like any of them.
“This is a perfectly legal substance,” said Della. “It’s a precursor chemical to another substance that is also perfectly legal . . . in this world, anyway. In other universes, maybe the end product isn’t quite so legal, although this little bag would still be perfectly legitimate—just very difficult to get hold of. But here, where certain drugs are less fashionable and the government hasn’t needed to clamp down, it’s just a matter of finding someone who’ll do you a favor.” She sighed. “It makes me feel old, knowing that guys I dated when we were students are now biochemistry professors with their own labs.”
“And the specialness never ends,” said Marian tartly. “I thought you came here to reunite with your long-lost aborted fetus, and it turns out I’m merely the afterthought to a drug deal.” Again, she felt let down, though she knew she shouldn’t. The words echoed in her head: the world doesn’t revolve around you.
“Well, since you made such a point of telling me you were fifteen and too old for toys and dolls, I thought I’d treat you like a grown-up and tell you the score. How do you think I can afford to hop across universes? It isn’t the million-quid-a-time celebrity hobby it started as, but it still ain’t cheap.”
“Fair enough, I suppose.” Marian found that her feelings had executed a swift one-eighty—rather than being offended that Della had extra items on her To Do list alongside Long-Lost Baby, she felt somewhat relieved. It put less pressure on Marian, if Della had other concerns. Already Marian was wary of Della’s neediness, her quasi-parental desire to hang out and spend Quality Time together. “So, what does the stuff do?”
“This doesn’t do very much. Like I said, it’s just a precursor. When it’s baked, it’s a cognitive remixer—it gives you synaesthesia, among other things. Creative types use it to taste their paintings, smell their tunes, and so on.” Della shook her head and laughed. “There’s a whole subculture called the Symmetric Aesthetic, with ‘sense-balanced’ art and edible equations and stuff you have to be totally off your head to appreciate. I dabbled in it myself when I was going out with one of the theorists. . . .
“But that was a long time ago. The remixer isn’t important. It pays my ticket, but I wouldn’t have got it if you hadn’t been here. You’re far more important to me than—” Della made a dismissive gesture toward the bag of powder.
“So what do you want to do?” asked Marian again.
“I want to get to know you,” Della said. “I realize I can’t just walk into your life and expect you to have a Della-shaped hole ready and waiting. But I want to make the effort. I want to be here when you need someone you can talk to.”
It sounded reasonable. She should give Della a chance, at least. “All right, but I have a busy life. There’s a party tonight, I’m working in the shop tomorrow—”
“Then Sunday, maybe we could do something together. Suppose your mother hadn’t died, what would you be doing?”
Marian gritted her teeth. “You’re not Mom, damn it! Don’t try to replace her.”
“All right then, let’s do something she never did. Something you’d like to do, but you never did with her.”
“Give me some time to think about it,” Marian said. “This is all a bit too much at once.”
“Yes, I know. I remember the first time I met myself . . . well, that’s another story. Look, how about I come back on Sunday afternoon? I’ll think of something we can do, and you can suggest something, and between us we’ll work something out.”
“Or nothing,” said Marian. “Don’t take anything for granted.”
“Hah! You’ll do well. I hope you keep that same attitude with the boys. Make them work for it.”
Della got up, packed away the Tupperware with its gray powder, and sauntered out of the door into the sunshine, leaving behind a pall of cigarette smoke and a suddenly silent kitchen.
Marian rinsed out the ashtray and put the mugs in the washbowl. Now the house felt small and empty. When her grandparents had left for the weekend, she’d looked forward to having the place to herself. But with Della gone, she felt alone. She should have asked Della to stay and cook dinner; that would have been something. It took all her self-control to refrain from running out into the street and demanding that Della come back to make beans on toast.
No, don’t sound desperate. Make her work for it, like she said. Anyway, it was ridiculous to feel lonely when she had messages waiting, and friends ready to come over.
Ah, the friends. Trouble was, the more people you invited, the less they were your friends. Marian had a couple of confidants with whom she felt genuinely close. Beyond that, there were only brittle bonds of acquaintance based on superficial gossip. The others would come round for the
party, not for her. They’d go to any empty house with a loud stereo system—anywhere that wasn’t hanging around on street corners, sneering at the tourists. Any party where drinks or drugs might appear. . . .
No alcohol, Marian resolved. But some of them would probably bring it themselves. She couldn’t stand at the door all night, warding off booze.
Well, maybe not a “party” party. Just a select gathering. Maybe just a girls’ night. But half of the girls wouldn’t come if there were no boys, so it wouldn’t be much more than Marian’s best buddies and no special occasion at all, hardly any point in even having the old folks out of the way.
It was like a syllogism. No booze—no boys. No boys—no girls. No girls—no party. Nothing.
Shit!
But why not just chill with her friends? They could still have fun and shake the place up a bit. And it would be good to talk to the girls, tell them about Della’s visit, get their thoughts on what to do and what to say.
Marian opened a can of low-calorie soup and ate it with an unbuttered slice of toast, adding some sliced cucumber as a token fresh vegetable. Then she texted her closest friends and invited them round for a “girls nite.”
Annabel was the first to arrive, dressed in black with a holographic T-shirt of Lester Todd’s new band. Marian didn’t want to explain the whole Della situation several times over, so she’d planned to wait until everyone arrived before starting on it. But the subject was on her mind and wouldn’t be suppressed. Soon it burst out.
“Do you spend much time with your mom?” Marian asked.
Annabel frowned. “She has this big thing about us all eating together. You know, sometimes you just want to snack on something while you’re watching TV, but she won’t have it. No, the entire family has to sit down at the table and be interrogated. My brothers joke about it: they say it’s like those old films where the prisoners of war have to go to . . . the mess, is it? Where they eat, anyway, and the Nazis take the roll call, and in the film there’s always one Nazi who talks to the prisoners and tries to catch them out, discover their escape plan. So we turn up to the dinner table and it’s like a roll call—you need a doctor’s note if you’re missing. Then when we’ve all sat down, the cuffs spring out of the armrests to shackle us to the chairs, and the interrogation starts. ‘How was your day at school?’ ‘How’s your friend Marian doing?’ ‘Where’s the escape tunnel?’ Meanwhile Dad just sits there shoveling peas into his gut, and us kids are all kicking each other under the table to make each other laugh. . . . Is that what you meant?” Annabel looked at Marian with a concerned expression.
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