by Lia Louis
I look up at him and laugh. And it feels nice to smile; really smile. “Thank you, Fox. That helps. It really does.”
“I’m glad,” he says.
“And you’re right,” I tell him, my voice rising to be heard over the loud clatter of plates being removed from the dishwasher on the other side of the kitchen. “It’s just that it feels… wrong. Like, this isn’t how it was meant to be. That something somewhere missed the boat. Forgot.”
“What, like fate? The universe?”
Heat creeps up my neck at those words, but still I shrug, give a weak nod. “I guess. I don’t know. Because at the same time, I feel like I’ve been delusional. Stupid. For even thinking for a moment that he could see me like that.” I stop. A lump has gathered in my throat. I can’t bring myself to voice another word. I don’t want to cry at work. The last time someone did, it was gossiped about so much that it may as well have been added to the staff newsletter, along with the bulletin about the misuse of sanitary waste bins and Chef Sam’s Custard Bathtub Charity Fund-Raiser.
“Look,” says Fox simply, his hands stopping to rest on the counter. “You both met in such a grandiose, serendipitous way. You let go of a balloon and he found it, an ocean away. It’s exceptional. And I defy anyone to meet someone in that way and not attach meaning to it.”
I nod, eyes on the counter.
“So do not feel stupid for a second.” There’s a pause as Fox pushes the lid on the giant pot of margarine. “Emmie? Are you okay?”
I look up to meet his eyes. Soft, the color of chestnuts. “Not really,” I tell him. “But I will be. Plus,” I say, “Rosie feels sorry for me, which means I’ll probably get cake from her mum for at least a week. There’s always a silver lining.”
Fox gives a chuckle, stands tall. “One day I’ll get honey cake.”
I smile at him. “You know she loves you.”
“Yes,” says Fox, folding his arms across his chest. “In a way you love that grumpy grandfather you only wish would ask you to euthanize him.”
“Oh, Fox, don’t be daft,” I say. “An uncle. I see you as more of an uncle.”
The last time I went inside Mum’s camper van was over fourteen years ago. It was the September after the Summer Ball, and the day after it broke out that it was me—that I was the girl that got Mr. Morgan suspended. Mum was due to leave for Edinburgh for a festival, then to Skye to meet a friend, and after school I’d walked in on her packing in the tiny lounge of our flat, and collapsed in the doorway, hysterically whimpering and shuddering in a heap, too far gone for a single tear to come. She hadn’t moved, told me coldly to pack a bag, and the next day I’d gone to Edinburgh with her, in her van, where I spent the whole time feeling like an inconvenience—like an old relative who had nowhere else to go. Three weeks later, Lucas’s first email finally found me, like a searchlight in a storm. I found your balloon on a beach near Boulogne-sur-Mer yesterday, it said. It made it one ocean and over 100 miles!
Tonight, I find the van parked up at the far end of the Maypole Folk Festival, beside a small white gazebo, shrouded in the thick, warm smell of hot dogs and incense. There is rust around the wheel arches now, and the seal around the window dangles loosely, unstuck with age, but like seventies wedding presents, like elderly neighbors, the van is one of those things that just keeps going. I’m not sure Mum would ever get rid of it unless it conked out altogether. She’s like that. Not so much a hoarder, but someone who frowns upon buying new things where it isn’t warranted (cigarettes being an exception, of course). Even the ex-pub chalkboard is the same one she has always had, cloudy with how many times it’s been written on and erased. Today there are fresh looping letters scrawled upon it in yellow chalk: Katherine Blue at the The Maypole Festival. Tarot Card Reading: £15.00.
“Mum?” I tap on the van’s window. A strip of yellow light seeps through a tiny crack in the drawn curtains—beige, covered in painted pink roses.
I knock again, twice, when the rusty door clicks and slides across. Mum sits there, tea in her lap, book over her knee, marking her place, and her arm stretched across the seat, fingers on the door handle. “Oh,” she says, the smile on her pale lips there, but only just. “Emmeline.”
“Hi,” I say. She is the only person who calls me Emmeline now, but it no longer makes me wince. “Taking a tea break?”
She looks down at the china cup in her hand. “Yes, I suppose. It’s been a long day. Thought I’d recharge.”
“Good timing by me, then,” I say, and like a reluctant, awkward stranger making space on a park bench, she moves over.
The van is stuffy and smells sweet, like warm fruit, and I’m glad when she doesn’t ask me to pull the door to, to shut out the fresh sea air. It reminds me of that trip to Edinburgh, that smell. The way I’d told her, in the silence of the tiny van, parked in a pitch-black campsite, that I hadn’t slept for weeks. That every time I closed my eyes, my dreams would take me to that classroom at Fortescue Lane, with him, and it would be so vivid, so real, that I swore I could smell his aftershave on my neck, like I still could that night when I got home. She sipped. That’s all she did. I wanted her to hold me, to cradle me, to tell me she wouldn’t let him hurt me again. But instead she’d said, “You know dreams aren’t real at your age, Emmeline,” as if a bad dream is all it ever was, and once again, brought the cup to her lips.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asks now.
“I was actually thinking maybe we could have dinner or something.” I hate the way my skin prickles with embarrassment at such a simple, normal suggestion. “I thought you might be working, but if you’re taking a break—”
“I actually have plans shortly.”
“Oh. Do you?” What I want to say is, why would you email me, then? Why would you send me a message, telling me you’re here, at this festival, in the next town, if you didn’t want to spend time with me? “It’s just, well, it’s been a few months and I thought we could spend some time together. Have a drink? Take a walk? Have an ice cream to celebrate?”
“Celebrate?” Mum stops, tea at her lips. “What is there to celebrate?”
My heart sinks, as if it is a rock dropped into a tank of water. “My birthday, Mum. My thirtieth.” And I know. I know from the way her hazel eyes glint, the way they widen, just a little, that she had forgotten. That her emailing me a couple of weeks ago, to “check in,” to tell me she’d be here, saying she’d “hoped” to see me when I said I was working but would ask for time off, was just a coincidence.
“Oh, Emmeline, stop it,” she says, clattering down the cup and saucer on the wooden counter behind her. “Don’t insult me.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I know it was your birthday. I didn’t forget. How could I?”
I nod. “Well. That’s what I meant by celebrate. Thirty. It’s kind of a big deal.”
“Is it?” she asks. “It is but a number, sweetheart, you know that. People place too much meaning on age.”
“Maybe,” I say, and then I change the subject, because I can feel her gearing up for a debate, about age, about people, as if she isn’t one of us. “So, how is everything? Have you been traveling a lot?” Most might ask about business, but I know better. I’ll be accused of caring too much about money if I do that.
She settles in the seat beside me, leg inches from mine, but never touching, and begins to list the places she and Jim have been since January. I have never heard of Jim before, but she talks as if I have known him all my life. Mum has always done this with boyfriends. One minute she doesn’t know them, the next minute they’re talked about as if they have been part of the furniture since day one. When I was seven, it felt like Den had been in my life all along because of this—because of Mum and her routine of jumping feetfirst, introducing me to them quickly, bypassing “dating” and going straight to meals at home and eating in front of the telly together, them helping me with my homework, putting me to bed. Mum and Den, someone I called my stepdad, were actually onl
y together for three years, yet I don’t remember a time before him. He and Mum got together when I was five, and he’d left when I was eight, almost nine. It went from him hiding sweets in his jacket for me to find, picking me up from school, and reading bedtime stories, to waiting for his key in the door and to looking for him in every red car that drove by, for however long it took me to realize he wasn’t coming back.
“We went to Cornwall last weekend, for a festival in Bude,” Mum says, brightening.
I nod enthusiastically.
“And before that, we actually went to Guernsey, which was glorious. There’s something special about it. The air…” Mum pauses and looks skyward, as if she can see the sort of air she’s referring to, around us. “It feels clean. Welcoming. A little bubble all its own, you know?”
“Like Skye,” I say, and she nods, eyes lighting up as if something has ignited.
“Yes, Emmeline,” she says, “exactly like Skye,” and I curse myself that my stomach sparks with something. Validation. For pleasing my mum, for getting something right for her, as if I am three, and a “good girl,” and not a grown thirty-year-old woman.
“And what about you?” she asks, smiling thinly. “I said to Jim just a few nights ago, that for all I know, you could be on the other side of the world. That’s why I emailed. What have you been doing with yourself?”
It’s times like these that I wish I had the relationship with my mum that my school friends had—that Rosie has with hers. I’d love to confide in her about Lucas. About the wedding, about Fishers Way and my roasting-hot room, and how much I worry sometimes, that I’m so off track, so “off plan” from where I thought I would be at this time of my life that it fills me with panic. That I’m scared of the loneliness that swamps me sometimes, so much I feel like I can’t breathe. That despite it being fourteen years ago, while I no longer dream of Mr. Morgan, his hot, wet voice in my ear, his hand bruising my thigh, I often feel guilt, of all things, about him, about telling someone what he did to me that night. Because he was suspended while it was “looked into.” He moved away alone, for a while, away from his wife and children—one of whom was my best school friend, Georgia. So many people hurt—so many people I cared about, and because of me. “Because of him, Emmie. Not you. It was all him,” Lucas would say, like he has so many times before, if he were here now. But I don’t tell Mum this stuff. It has never been that way for us.
“I haven’t been up to much,” I say to Mum, pausing to look around the tiny, musty space. I can hear a band—electric guitars, a fast, jolly violin—just beyond the van and its little cubbyhole on the field. “I’m still renting the place on Fishers Way.”
“Not the flat?”
“No,” I say. “I told you, I rent a room now. I left the flat eighteen months ago. I just couldn’t afford it anymore.”
“Well, I told you that a long time ago, Emmeline, but you refused to listen to me. You should have never tried to keep it on once, you know, erm, the police officer up and left you.”
“Adam,” I say, and I ignore the little jab in my stomach at the “up and left” part of her sentence. As if it was nothing. It was a long time ago now, yes—four years—but Adam, my first serious boyfriend, leaving the flat we’d moved into together, planned futures in, picked out furniture for, certainly didn’t feel like nothing back then. But then, Mum had “up and left” me all over the place when I was just fourteen, and she’s had more boyfriends and breakups than I could ever count. “We are meant to be babied only when we are babies,” she used to say, when I’d show heartache, show fear, or simply ask her to come with me to the dentist, or to miss a trip to help me study, like Georgia’s mum did, with flash cards and timers and plates of cookies. Of course it is nothing to her.
“How’s the photo studio?” she asks.
“I lost that job, remember?” I tell her now. “Laid off. I did tell you.”
“I don’t think you did.”
“I did,” I jump in, despite my best efforts to stay calm, stay neutral. This is all it ever is. A cold questionnaire of recycled questions she feels obliged to ask. “I’ve been at the hotel for two years now.”
“Hm.” Mum nods, eyes sliding to the side as if she’s considering whether I’ve told her the truth or not. “Well, forgive me, Emmeline, but it’s a blessing, if you ask me.”
I say nothing and avert my eyes to the torn, shabby linoleum at my feet.
“I mean it. The way they preyed on parents. I don’t know how you did it.”
“Preyed?” I say, my face crumpling. “It was a photo studio, Mum. For families. For children.”
“But the prices.” She shakes her head. “All those photos they’d take, knowing no parent would ever in their right mind turn any of them down.” Parent. She says that like she isn’t one herself too. “What?” she presses. “What is it?”
I pause, consider saying nothing at all. “I just… I was made redundant, Mum. I enjoyed it, I worked with families, with kids, and I miss it. You could be a bit more sympathetic.”
“Well, I won’t apologize, Emmeline,” says Mum curtly. “I am not ashamed that I am pleased you’re out of a job for an organization in a line of work I don’t agree with.”
From beside me, Mum huffs, then sips her tea, which is the color of ripe raspberries, and I hear Lucas chime in, in my mind, a smirk in his voice: “So, hang on, your mum doesn’t agree with meat, religion, and… photography? Nice one, Kath.”
* * *
Nobody speaks for a while, and chin resting in my hand, I watch the night outside closing in on me and Mum, a dimming bulb. I wonder what we look like up here, on the hill. A tiny, cozy orange light in the distance, by the sea. Two silhouettes squashed together, catching up on forgotten news, reminiscing about old times. Nothing, I suppose, that is close to what it really is: a stifling tin can with an atmosphere so thick inside, it feels as though I’m inhaling smoke.
“I saw Lucas last weekend,” I say finally. “We talked about going to Brittany again for a few nights.” I almost do it deliberately, mention it to see her jaw tighten, as it usually does, but instead she just nods. “I was talking to Lucas and—was it in Saint-Malo you said my dad—” I stop. “Peter lived.”
Mum looks up at me, eyes narrowing, shoulders stiffening now she knows where this is going. “Sorry?” I find it hard to believe sometimes that Mum was ever that carefree, free spirit she painted herself as. That twenty-two-year-old with the world at her feet, and a passport to anywhere she wanted. Before she had me, and I ruined it.
“You always said Peter lived somewhere by the beach, and that he worked in Saint-Malo in between touring with his band. And I was talking to Luke about it and he said he would take me there if I found out exactly—”
“For goodness’ sake, Emmeline, why would you want to go there?”
I swallow. “To see—”
“Don’t waste your time,” she says dismissively, words clipped. “It’s a seaside town, like here, like Ramsgate, like bloody Southend. Except full of the French.”
“I just wondered if you could tell me where. I’d like to see. Get some sort of idea where I’m from—”
Mum huffs, bored with my insistence, as if the years of my pushing for information is wearing her down. “I don’t know how many times I have had to say this, but you are from me, Emmeline, and all the places we have lived,” she says shortly. “You really must stop dragging up dead bodies.”
“I want to know who he is.”
“Am I not enough?” she snaps, and my stomach turns at the sharp spite in the words. “I brought you up, Emmeline. I looked after you and he was nowhere to be seen. You wanting to find him tells me you’re not content with the parent you do have. How do you think that makes me feel?”
I don’t respond. Her. Everything is about her. Everything I say, or do, every decision I have ever made is how it makes Katherine feel, what people must think about her. And no. The truth is, as much as it hurts to admit it, she isn’t enough. Nowhere nea
r. She never has been.
Mum clears her throat, sniffs deeply, straightens, stroking a hand down her cardigan as if composing herself.
“It’s unnecessary,” she says. “You have other more important things to focus on than that. People get so hung up on genes. It makes me laugh.” People, again. People like me, like everyone else out there. Not her. Not whoever she calls her boyfriend at the moment, I bet. They are better than us. Us clueless sheep.
There is more silence, and Mum finishes her tea. I want to run back to Fishers Way, climb into bed, and pull my duvet over my head until the sun comes back up. I want to call Lucas. I want him to make me laugh through the tears, say, “So you’ve had the Wrath of Kath, have you, Emmie Blue?” He understands Mum. He knows how exhausting, how much like hard work she is, how I spent my whole childhood on eggshells.
“I’m not trying to upset anyone,” I say eventually into the silence. Mum stares straight ahead, her nostrils flaring. “I would just like to know who my dad is.”
I wait for her to say what she normally does: “Well, I don’t know anything more than what I’ve told you, Emmeline.” But she doesn’t. Instead, she looks down at her hands. “I couldn’t see you,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“If you and he… started to have a relationship.” A muscle in her jaw pulses. “I couldn’t bear to see you.”
I open my mouth to speak, but I can find no words. It’s an ultimatum. It’s a toxic, controlling ultimatum, hanging in the air between us. Find your dad, and our relationship is over. My stomach bubbles. Rage. Utter, plummeting sadness and rage, but… hope. The tiniest speck, glittering among the black. She always said she never knew where he was. I’m not sure I ever believed her, but now she speaks like she might. That a relationship between us both could be possible.
