‘Was that a bad thing?’ I ask.
‘No! It was – is – a wonderful thing, but I didn’t know how to handle it. You were so different from me … and you missed your dad so much, of course. I started to get promoted at work – I kept telling myself we needed the money – and, well, running a school seemed a whole lot simpler than being a mum, I suppose. I was trying to do the right thing, Phoenix, I promise!’
The right thing … that’s all any of us try to do, surely? And yet time after time our best efforts backfire and it turns out we did the wrong thing after all. I’m used to it by now, but I had no idea Mum might feel the same way.
‘What about Dad, though?’ I ask.
‘Your dad loves you, Phoenix,’ Mum is saying. ‘He’s just not good at standing up to Wanda.’
I nod. I think I’ve known this for a while.
And then Mum is dialling through to FaceTime Dad in Dubai, and after a few brisk words she hands her mobile to me. There’s Dad, thousands of miles away, wearing a Santa hat and wrapping presents for Drake and Dara. It’s four hours ahead there, almost midnight, but he takes his phone though to the boys’ room and I see my little half-brothers sleeping in the glow of the night light, their baby faces flushed with excitement, Christmas stockings hanging at the end of their beds. Wanda leans in towards the screen, waving, wishing me a Merry Christmas.
‘I was going to call you tomorrow, Phoenix,’ Dad says. ‘It’s been hectic here – work has been pretty full-on, and the kids keep me busy …’
‘I’m your kid too, Dad,’ I say. ‘Even though you’re miles and miles away, you’re my dad. I need you too!’
He looks startled, then sad. ‘I know you do, Phoenix,’ he says. ‘I’ll try to do better. We should set a regular time and day to FaceTime, and perhaps you could come over for a holiday?’
I’ve heard it all before. ‘You always say that,’ I challenge him. ‘You always promise and it never happens, Dad. How many times have I been to visit you in Dubai? Never. Not once in all the time you’ve been there. It’s never a good time for you, and it never happens. I’ve never even met my half-brothers. Do you know how that makes me feel, Dad? Do you?’
He opens his mouth to argue, then closes it again. I watch him take a tissue from his pocket and wipe tears from his cheeks, but I’m not sorry I said it. I wish I’d said it years ago.
‘Happy Christmas, Dad,’ I say, and cut the call.
In the end, it’s the best Christmas ever. The fairy lights glitter and Mum doesn’t take the home-made heart decorations off the tree, and, even though we decide to skip the mistletoe this year, Lee and I manage a kiss beneath the tinsel-draped chandelier instead.
He loves his feathered beret and gives me a book of photos of an Australian family who have a tame magpie. The pictures are beautiful, but the magpie eventually leaves them and returns to the wild, which makes me sad. ‘Pie won’t ever do that,’ I say. ‘He’s a hero, now. He saved Grandma Lou!’
‘He did, I know … but he will go back to the wild one day, Phoenix. He needs his freedom!’
That’s something I don’t want to think about – not yet.
My other presents include a new iPad from Dad, a pile of books and an emerald-green corduroy minidress from Mum, and a pair of green Doc Marten boots with ribbons instead of laces from Grandma Lou. Everyone comes in from the flats and the outbuildings, and Christmas unfolds around us like magic.
We feast and hug and laugh and play old-fashioned board games, and the adults drink mulled wine and hot port and Grandma Lou DJs, her tinselled wheelchair wedged in beside the record player. The dancing goes on late into the night.
Every day I expect to wake and find that Mum has gone back to Bellvale, but every day she stays. She cooks – no microwave ready-meals in sight – and though she burns the rice and the spaghetti turns to mush and the cheese sauce is more like lumpy mashed potato, she keeps trying. She cleans and lights the wood burner and drags us out for brisk, snowy walks around the park, pushing Grandma Lou in the wheelchair, tucked in under a crochet blanket.
In the evenings she reads us chapters from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol or asks random general knowledge questions, like a kind of human version of Trivial Pursuit. I see a glimpse of someone I vaguely remember from childhood, a mum who can turn her hand to anything (except cooking), and organize life so it runs like clockwork, making me feel safe. She wears the red silk scarf with the heart pattern every day, even though it clashes with her beige cashmere twinsets and olive-green tweedy coat. Sometimes she links my arm as we walk, and I find myself leaning in towards her.
‘Mum,’ I say, one day when Grandma Lou is in her studio painting and the two of us are stacking the dishwasher together. ‘Remember when you and Grandma Lou fell out, four years ago? We were here for Christmas and something happened and we packed up early and went home … well, what was it? What made you stay away for all that time?’
A flash of pain crosses her face and her fingers go to the phoenix necklace, tugging and twisting at it. ‘Phoenix, come on – that’s all in the past. Now isn’t really the time …’
‘When is the time, then?’ I ask. ‘Aren’t we trying to be open with each other? I know you’ve made your peace with Grandma Lou, but what could possibly have been so bad that the two of you didn’t speak for four whole years?’
To my surprise, Mum falls apart. My tough, sensible, no-nonsense mother sinks on to a kitchen chair, head in hands, her shoulders shaking, sobbing. I’m not sure I can handle two total breakdowns in the space of a week. I put the kettle on and find the box of tissues.
‘Don’t cry, Mum!’ I tell her. ‘It doesn’t matter!’
‘It does,’ she tells me. ‘It does, because when your whole life has been built on secrets and lies, sometimes you need to hear the truth. Four years ago, I asked your gran who my father was. It was a question I’d been asking her ever since I was a little girl, but she’d never tell me. And then, four years ago, she did …’
Mum takes a ragged breath in and tries to smile. ‘Turns out my father was a man I’d known all my life. When I was little, I thought he was wonderful – I idolized him, followed him about like a shadow … but he never belonged to me. He married three times, but never Grandma Lou. They were best friends …’
Unease stirs within me. Best friends? Mum was born in 1973, bringing Louisa’s ten-year career as a famous model to an end. In that time she hung out with the international jet set. She met Andy Warhol in New York (I wrote about him in art history at Bellvale) and even made the cover of Time magazine, photographed on the back of Bob Dylan’s motorbike. A famous Canadian songwriter immortalized her in a hit song and legend has it that David Bowie once hid away in the old railway carriage at Greystones, working on an album.
I’ve heard all the stories, soaked them up with a sense of awe as if listening to a fairy tale or a legend, but I’ve never heard Grandma Lou describe any of those people as her best friend.
‘He never knew, you see, Phoenix,’ Mum continues. ‘He never knew he was my dad, even though he spent so much time with us. And I didn’t know either, but I hoped, sometimes. By the time I reached my teens, he’d lost interest in me. I wasn’t this cute little kid who followed him around any more – I was a swotty, introvert, plain-Jane teen who suddenly found my mum’s arty, bohemian friends … well, silly and childish with their all-night parties and their wrecked careers and their endless stories of fame and fortune.
‘One day I was singing to myself, some stupid eighties pop song … here in the kitchen, working through a page of fractions homework. He walked in and heard me and laughed, and told me not to give up the day job, and I’ve never forgiven him for that …’
‘Who, though?’ I push, even though a part of me has already guessed. ‘Who told you that, Mum? It was probably just a joke, a throwaway comment. You shouldn’t have taken it to heart!’
Mum laughs, but it’s a cold, harsh sound. ‘Oh, he meant it,’ she says. ‘I have a terrible voic
e, I know that now, but when I was your age I hadn’t a clue. He knew, though. He would, wouldn’t he? He was a pop legend, even then.’
My heart is hammering.
‘Four years ago I plucked up the courage to ask Louisa again, because Lord knows I am a grown woman and surely I deserve to know who my own father is. And you know what? She told me. It was him, Phoenix … Ked Wilder. Ked Wilder is my father. Your grandfather.’
I open my mouth and close it again. ‘B-but … I d-don’t understand!’ I stammer. ‘Ked seems so nice! Why didn’t he say something? I met him at the gig at the start of December … Why didn’t he say anything to me?’
Mum gets up, takes two mugs from the cupboard and fishes teabags from the caddy. I can see her putting herself together again, gathering her defences. She pours on the freshly boiled water, squeezes the teabags, adds milk.
‘That’s just it,’ Mum tells me, plonking the mugs down with shaking hands and pushing the biscuit tin across. ‘Ked doesn’t know. Louisa never told him, and he never guessed. They dated for a while in the late sixties and decided they were better as friends, but when Louisa came back from America, they must have got together again, briefly. It didn’t last, and soon after Ked met his first wife – one of those whirlwind romances. They married in a registry office in Camden round about the time that Louisa realized she was pregnant. She kept quiet, let Ked think it was someone she’d met in America. She’s kept the pretence up ever since …’
‘Oh, Mum!’ I say.
‘That’s it, really,’ she says. ‘Louisa put Ked’s happiness ahead of her own, ahead of mine … ahead of yours. His marriage didn’t last, and he went on to marry twice more. They didn’t last, either. Who’s to say what would have happened if she’d told him? Didn’t he have a right to know? Perhaps I’d have had a father, and they might have found a way to make it work, to stay together. They really do care about each other, I know that …’
‘It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,’ I whisper.
Mum sighs. ‘I was angry with Lou for a long time,’ she admits. ‘I wanted a clean break … I passed on her cards and presents, but anything personal, any letters, went straight into the bin. You tried to write too, but … I didn’t send your letters. I had no right, but …’
‘You were hurting,’ I finish for her. Mum was out of order, but what’s the sense in blaming her now? It won’t change anything. We’re building bridges at last, and that’s what really matters.
‘Phoenix?’ Mum asks. ‘Have you seen Louisa’s painting?’
I frown. ‘No … you know what she’s like. She won’t show anyone until she’s finished.’
‘I know,’ Mum says. ‘But helping her these last few days, I couldn’t help but see. Come and look …’
She pads through the hallway and opens the studio door a fraction, stepping back to let me see.
Grandma Lou sits in front of a huge painting, her back to me, seemingly absorbed in the work of mixing paints on the palette table at her side. The record player spins a Beatles LP, but it’s the painting that takes my breath away. The canvas is huge and beautiful, a painting of me and Pie with a young man with blue eyes and a black fedora being towed through an azure sky by a flock of small red phoenix birds. In the distance a woman and child dressed in sari silk are playing with monkeys, laughing, holding hands.
Mum closes the door again, gently, silently.
‘What … what even is that?’ I whisper as she leads me back to the kitchen.
Mum takes a deep breath. ‘It’s a family portrait … the weirdest, most beautiful family portrait I’ve ever seen. How can I be angry with her, Phoenix? She’s lived all this time with the secret … and what a bittersweet secret it is!’
‘Poor Grandma Lou,’ I say. ‘Poor Ked!’
‘He has no idea that he told his own daughter she couldn’t sing, or that the new lead singer of the teen band he’s backing is his granddaughter …’
I take a deep breath in. ‘Mum … if you knew how much it hurt for someone to say that, then … well, why were you so cold about my singing? You never actually said it outright, but you made it clear you hated it. I grew up believing I had a terrible voice!’
I watch Mum battle with her emotions again. ‘I never meant you to feel that way!’ she argues. ‘I’m sorry if that’s how it seemed. I just wanted to protect you … I didn’t want you in that world, because I’d seen how vain and fickle it could be. And after I’d found out about Ked … well, I’m ashamed to admit it, but I hated that I didn’t have his talent too!’
‘Oh, Mum!’
She smiles sadly. ‘I may look like a stuffy old head teacher, Phoenix, but there’s still a part of me that never got past the hurt little-girl stage. I told myself I was protecting you from the music world, but perhaps my motives were more selfish than that. I’m sorry, I really am!’
I pull Mum in for a hug and she lets out a deep breath, like she’s finally letting go of the worries that she’s been holding close for years.
‘So … Ked and Louisa,’ I say, after we pull away from the hug. ‘What a mess. Why can’t things come out in the open now? Why does it have to stay secret?’
‘Lou said there was no way she could tell him … He’d be angry, upset, the papers would have a field day with it. She has a list of excuses as long as your arm to explain why he can never know. I don’t suppose I’m the type of daughter a sixties pop legend would want, anyhow – I’m too plain, too dull, too ordinary.’
‘You’re a million miles from ordinary,’ I protest. ‘You’re … I don’t know, you’re a force of nature! You’re smart and strong and slightly terrifying. You’re cleverer than anyone I know … you run a school, for goodness’ sake!’
Mum laughs. ‘Thank you. Only slightly terrifying?’
‘OK … completely terrifying. But I feel safer with you than anyone else in the world!’
‘That’s good to know. There’s nothing like a long midnight drive through a snowstorm to make you think about what matters in this life. I thought I was heading to a deathbed, and seriously, Phoenix, I don’t think I’d ever have got over that. I’ve been given another chance with Louisa – another chance with you too. I’m not going to waste those chances. I’m tired of secrets and lies, but I’m starting to understand why Louisa made the decisions she did. She was trying to do the right thing. We’re pretty slow learners in this family when it comes to looking after each other, but whatever else we do, we keep on trying. I think we’ll get there in the end.’
‘I wish I’d known all this,’ I say. ‘I thought … well, I thought you didn’t like me very much.’
The words hang in the air between us, heavy and sad, but they’re my truth. It feels good to say them out loud at last, like squeezing the poison out of a wound and cleaning it with something stingy to let it heal. I can see Mum fighting to keep back a second wave of tears.
‘I love you, Phoenix,’ she says quietly. ‘I’ve made so many mistakes, and I’ll go on making them, I suspect, but you … you are the one absolutely perfect thing in my life, and I am so very proud of you. I love you so much. I’m so sorry if you didn’t know that, and – well, I’m just so sorry for everything, really. I’m so proud of you … your courage, your spirit, your spark. You teach me more about life every day than books ever could!’
‘I love you too, Mum,’ I say.
She pulls me close and we cry on each other’s shoulders, the kind of messy crying that makes your eyes red and gritty and your nose run and your heart ache, and I wonder why it took so long to work out that no matter how complicated the problem, the answer is almost always ‘I love you’ and ‘I’m sorry’.
I lift up my mug of tea, but the milky liquid spills down my sweater as a piercing yell rings out from Grandma Lou’s studio.
‘Phoenix! Vivi!’ she shouts. ‘Come quickly! Ked’s on the line … you’ll never guess!’
21
London
I’m up at dawn, too excited to eat, taming m
y hair with anti-frizz serum and experimenting to see how many ‘dress all in black’ combos I can come up with. Sasha has been working on the feather design idea and reckons she has enough pieces for the show providing we all turn up in black to give her a blank canvas to work on.
I finally settle on black leggings, black miniskirt, black long-sleeved T-shirt and my new green Docs. We’re meeting here at three, a little convoy of cars and van to whisk us down to London, but there’s no way I’ll be able to settle to anything before that.
I warm up my voice by running through some of the set list as I tidy up the kitchen and wash the breakfast dishes. Mum is taking me and Lee down to the studio, plus Pie, of course … no way do I want him to miss out on this. A bunch of VIP tickets have been handed out, so that the families who are driving to London will have seats in the studio audience.
Those left behind will have to make do with the TV.
‘Laurel, Jack, Willow and Jake’s mum and sisters are going to come up and watch the Lola Rockett show with me,’ Grandma Lou says. ‘We’ll all be cheering you on! Oh, by the way, I meant to tell you … there’s a new family moving into Sadie’s old flat today – Sheddie’s helping with the move. A very nice young woman and her two girls. They’ve had a tough time of it, I think, but hopefully this will be a new start for them. She’s going to help me out with cleaning and lighting the wood burner and a little bit of cooking and so on while my leg’s healing. Perhaps after that too. I think my stepladder days are over! And hopefully I’ll be able to spend more time painting!’
Forever Phoenix Page 13
