by Louise Voss
ARE YOU MY MOTHER?
By Louise Voss
Copyright: Louise Voss 2011
PART ONE
Chapter 1
‘No, don’t look right at the camera. Look at me. Just imagine that it’s you and me, having a normal chat. It’s not an interview. I’m just asking you questions, like a mate would, over a drink. OK? Ready? Right: let’s start with you telling me why you’ve decided to look for your birthmother, after all these years.’
‘But you already know that. I told you last week.’
‘Emma. Pretend you haven’t told me anything yet.’
‘Um…., well, I suppose I – um, oh, damn it. Sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about the pauses, I can edit them out afterwards.’
‘…I’m sorry. I can’t get the words out. Didn’t I tell you that I’m really….what’s that word which means you can’t speak? Inarticulate. I’m really inarticulate under pressure.’
‘Emma, there’s no pressure. Ignore the camera.’
‘But I don’t want to be on TV! Turn it off. I’ve changed my mind. My rash is coming up. I’ll be all blotchy….’
‘Let’s try again in five minutes. I’ll make us some coffee.’
But would I ever be able to tell Mack about all the things that mattered, even if he didn’t have a digital video camera stuck in my face and a deadline for his commissioned documentary on adoption? The real reasons that, after thirty years and a couple of half-hearted earlier attempts, I’d decided to launch a proper search for the woman who gave birth to me? I wasn’t sure that I even knew myself. I supposed it was the sum of many small parts, some more dramatic than others.
I tried to see if I could list them. Something had happened between me and a homeless man on a tube train. Something even worse happened to my relationship with my boyfriend, Gavin. Something shifted, a subtle slide, between my sister Stella and me. My job was in danger of becoming stale. I was depressed; perhaps I had been for some time. Maybe it was like global warming; the signs had been there for years but we’d all been ignoring them. It was too big, too scary. Of course I’d always been curious about my natural parents - in my situation, who wouldn’t have been? But my yearning had been painted over, again and again, by the simple daily brush strokes of coping; working; bringing up Stella by myself. It was a rhythm which left no room for anything more than idle speculation – there may have been another ‘me’ underneath the layers, but I just didn’t have the time or the emotional resources to strip them off and see. Until now.
‘Ready to try again? Take a deep breath.’
‘OK. Well, see, there was this man on the tube a couple of weeks ago, and he reminded me of a book I used to read to Stella when she was little – oh, that doesn’t make much sense, does it? Oh hell, I’m even irritating myself here – sorry. Bet you wish you’d picked someone else for your documentary now.’
‘No, Emma, I want it to be you. I told you; you’re a survivor, it’s a great story. And what we uncover might be even more exciting. However much you waffle at the beginning, that’s what’ll come across. I know you. Trust me.’
On that day in October, when the man flung himself through the closing doors of my carriage of the tube, I’m sure mine wasn’t the only stomach to give a sudden, sick lurch. The faces of all the other passengers registered shadowy panic too, before they hastily dropped their eyes back to their books and newspapers. I delved into my bag for any reading material I could find, which turned out to be a leaflet on how to treat verrucas. I’d picked it up for Stella at the Health Centre last time I was there for the baby massage class.
As the Central Line train prepared to depart from Shepherd’s Bush station, the man started to rock, bouncing from side to side off the red bars that flanked the doors. We could all smell him now, as the nostril -flaring stink of unwashed body crept stealthily around the carriage, an accusatory weapon. I felt myself blush with embarrassment, as if the smell activated the blood rushing to my cheeks.
The man was staring at me, and I blushed even more deeply, feeling the old, hated rash of embarrassment sweep up over my chest and neck. I forced myself to think of something to distract me; to stop me feeling so flustered.
I thought about the twelve massages I’d done that day. I loved being an aromatherapist, but I hated the on-site part of it - it was such hard work. My forearms were getting so muscly that I was beginning to resemble Popeye.
I glanced up. He was still staring.
Don’t look, Emma. Think. Where was I? Oh yes, how nightmarish the on-site clients were. They were mostly surly advertising executives who treated me like something they’d scraped off the bottom of their shoe. I suppose because I found it quite hard to make smalltalk with strangers, and I didn’t naturally have what people called a ‘bubbly’ personality anyway, they just thought of me as a non-person. They never thanked me at the end of a session, and often carried on doing business while I worked knots out of their sweaty backs, barking dictation at hovering secretaries in muffled voices, their cheeks squashed into the black leatherette doughnut of the massage chair’s face rest.
Still, anyway, I was on my way to a big night out that night, so I told myself to forget about the narky execs. The Who in a special, one-off charity concert, at the Royal Albert Hall, with my beloved. And even better, I’d nipped home first to drop off my massage chair – nicknamed The Bastard - to ensure that Gavin and I wouldn’t have to participate in a threesome with its bulky black shoulders and spiky limbs. It was transported in a black vinyl holdall, the whole thing resembling an occupied body bag, which took up the space of another commuter, and invariably made me deeply unpopular during rush hour - plus, it weighed a ton. Going anywhere on the tube with it made me cringe; and it meant that Gavin couldn’t give me a lift home afterwards on his bike.
I decided that I shouldn’t moan about it so much. It made it sound as if I hated my job, and really, I didn’t. I loved massage. It was one of the few things I knew that I was naturally good at - aromatherapy, disco dancing, playing the recorder. Sex, too, according to Gavin. But massage was what I did best. And the aromatherapy I did from home was a completely different kettle of fish to the on-site.
The clients who came to the flat were mostly women, whom I sent away afterwards limp and grateful, heaven-scented with essential oils. After I’d done the initial consultation, where we sat at my desk and they told me about their aches and pains, I’d mix up the oils to best suit their moods and symptoms, and then after that, it was as if my hands took over. If the clients wanted to talk, I was happy to talk back to them; learning about their husbands, kids, cars, money worries, beauty treatments – and if they didn’t, that was fine too. In fact I preferred it, because then I could concentrate solely on getting the energy flowing between us, through me, into them, which was what made for the most effective massage. Long after they’d gone home again, their words of praise and relaxed delight lingered like the oils themselves around the rooms of the flat.
I wished I had some oils on me right then, in the train - lavender and rose would have been nice. The man’s smell was making me feel queasy, and I didn’t dare look to see if he was still staring at me, Then, suddenly, he gazed up towards the ceiling of the carriage and began to howl.
In such an enclosed space, the sudden and abrasive noise caused everyone’s heads to shoot sharply upwards to the source, eyes wide with surprise and embarrassment. It was a deeply emotional sound and, amidst the brittle veneer of commuter respectability unique to British public transport - where someone blowing their nose too obviously was cause for people to tut in disgust - it seemed alien and incongruous.
Or maybe vanilla, I thought; vanilla oil was so soothing. Apparently it was the scent most similar to the smell o
f breast milk. I very much doubted that I personally had ever been breast-fed, so maybe it wouldn’t have that much effect on me.
The man, still howling, was shaking his head as if a bee had flown into one of his ears. He’d stopped looking at me, thankfully, and I studied him surreptitiously. He was probably in his late twenties; wild hair, dirt-darkened skin. He was wearing a battered old leather jacket with a can of Tennants sticking out of the pocket; his eyes rolled around uncontrollably in different directions, like joke eyes. I thought it looked as if his face had been formed from the same leather as his jacket, they were the same shades of exhausted brown. Then I felt so sad for him, that someone so young had got himself into such a state.
The twelve people in my part of the carriage employed a variety of reasonably predictable reactions to the man’s behaviour. Most looked away hastily, staring fixedly at the floor or edging their bags and briefcases more firmly behind their calves. A very expensive-looking man opposite examined his immaculately manicured fingernails. The student next to me turned up the volume on his walkman as far as it went, making the tinny kerchink kerchink sounds even louder and tinnier. A woman with sticky-thick plum lipstick and big hair fiddled with her fringe and blushed and, next to her, a couple of Spanish teenagers held hands, whispering and giggling nervously. A doughy young tourist opposite stared impassive ahead of her, and I wondered idly what on earth would possess someone that plump to wear a garment emblazoned with the logo ‘Fat Face.’
The man finally stopped howling. I read my verruca leaflet with great interest as he approached, his stink hovering around him, almost visible in its pungency.
He jerked his arm up and pointed at Mr. Expensive with a trembling, dirty finger.
‘You - yes, you, Tony Blair, you make me sick, you smarmy git! Well at least this time you won’t wriggle out of it, you’re gonna to die down here with the rest of us, under the ground, forgotten, cattle, no-one will let us out of our cages, the ground is splitting, earth's pouring in, look, we'll be buried alive…aaargh! They play mind games with us, you know, the Government. That Tony Blair, he's an evil bastard. YES YOU – I’M TALKING ABOUT YOU. It's all part of the plan, to subdue us. He wants to privatise us all, for God's sake! You're all too stupid to realise it, but it's obvious - we can't get off, this cage is locked, they just say we can leave to screw with us! You know we'll all die down here, don't you?’
At that exact moment, with a sickening crunch, the train shuddered to an unscheduled stop in the middle of the tunnel. The lights flickered, then came back on again, but the engine died, and for a minute there was silence.
The man leaned forward and stuck his head in Mr.Expensive's face. ‘DON’T YOU.’ Mr. Expensive recoiled with disgust and fear.
Nightmare. I couldn’t wait to tell Gav about this, I thought. Nervously I checked that my Who tickets were still in my pocket; stiff, shiny, £60 per head, been-looking-forward-to-it-for-weeks tickets.
My reflection in the window opposite was distorted and long, and I appeared to have another, identical, upside-down head growing out of my own. With my hair tightly scraped back in a long ponytail and my glasses, I thought that I looked like some sort of weird and disapproving governess. At least the denim jacket and big hoop earrings made me appear a bit less of an old fogey. I had a horrible image of the man grabbing my earrings and pulling, and my hands instinctively rose to fiddle with them, leaving the verruca leaflet in my lap.
Unfortunately this seemed to draw the man’s attention to my reflection, and he suddenly wheeled around, snarling, and stood directly in front of me. Sweat beading my forehead, I quickly moved my gaze upwards until I met his eyes. They had stopped rolling and, as we stared at each other, the only conscious thought going through my head was how green they were.
It would have been an insult to him and to all homeless people, if I were to say that I knew how he felt, because of course I’d always had a nice place to live. But once, when Stella and I were first alone, I believed I had an idea of what it was like to feel that lost.
The tension grew and grew until finally the man looked down, darted forward, and with one swift movement grabbed the verruca leaflet from my hands and ripped it in half. I jumped out of my skin and, briefly, felt like crying; that breathless sweaty feeling behind the eyes and in the throat. Then he turned, grabbed a book – Terry Pratchett – from the hands of the student with the walkman, and threw it forcefully up and behind his head.
It hit the forehead of the woman with the plum lips with a smack, leaving a red graze. She started to whimper loudly, covering her face with her hands. Through the pounding of my heart, I still managed to be impressed at how exactly her nail polish managed to match her lipstick. The urge to cry left me, and I was strangely not at all scared; not then. I looked at my watch – it was only six o’clock. Masses of time. I’d been planning to do some shopping in Kensington High Street first, although now I had this idle thought that perhaps the man was right, perhaps we were all going to die down here? I thought that the synapses in my brain must not have been firing properly, for the very next second I found myself wondering if I could afford that lovely three-quarter length denim skirt I’d seen in French Connection the week before. Money, whilst not desperately tight, wasn’t exactly plentiful either, and the tickets had been my big indulgence for the month.
There was a stunned silence from everyone else. Then the Spanish girl began to cry for real, snuffling and burying her head in her boyfriend's shoulder, lost in his outsize designer jacket. The only part of her face visible was a thin plastered-down and lacquered sideburn which had been sculpted into a delicate serpent.
The man stared briefly at the outburst of emotion erupting behind him. Then, once more, he locked eyes with me. At that moment, it was as if I woke up. My trancelike musings on nail polish, foot complaints and denim skirts vanished, and I was hit with the sudden revelation that we were the same, me and this disturbed man. I felt an overwhelming wave of empathy for him. I saw myself sitting on benches at midnight, cold and miserable; and ten years on, I felt the same, only less cold. I had no more idea of my own place on this strange planet than he did - possibly less - and unless I took steps to find it, then I could see myself ending up in a similar state, standing on a tube train incandescent with rage, ranting at Tony Blair or London Transport – random victims, innocent or otherwise. New clothes and Who tickets – they were like trying to stick bandaids on a severed limb.
Perhaps this was an exaggeration – although I was only half sure – but the point was that, in that split second, I realised that for years I’d been drifting, sacrificing everything to make sure Stella was OK: that she was fed, watered, educated, loved. I had been subsuming my own needs to care for my little sister - and what about me? Who’d been looking after me? Not Gavin, not really. In fact, nobody. Not one single person. This was an alarm bell. This man was telling me that things had to change. That I really had to do something about it before it was too late and my life slipped by, measured only by a succession of nameless backs, burly or weedy, in marginally differing striped shirts.
Actually, that wasn’t true. I didn’t quite subsume all my needs to take care of Stella, not at first. There was this one lapse, after Mum and Dad were killed, ten years ago. I did something terrible; something which helped me identify with the man on the train. I’d never told a soul, but in those first few months of bewildering bereavement, I used to wait until Stella was asleep; eleven, twelve o’clock, and then I would let myself out of the house, leaving her alone in there. The thought of her slight figure motionless under a Barbie duvet, the only living thing in the house, made me nearly physically sick with guilt – but I had to do it.
It started with a craving for air, a longing to escape the stuffy confines of our recycled grief as we sat each night, wordless on the sofa, our eyes empty squares of flickering escapism. When Stella had finally, silently, trailed off to bed, I used to go and stand in the back garden, breathing in the dirty night air, listening for
town foxes and cats being penetrated, wishing I could scream like that too.
One night, before I knew what I was doing, I’d slunk like an intruder along the passage at the side of the house, unlocked the gate, and I was out. A rush of exhilarated freedom filled my lungs for a second, and I found myself walking away. It was eleven thirty, and most of the houses in our street were sealed for sleep, but a few had lights in bedroom windows. I stared at these, willing myself to be able to see in, to see parents getting ready for bed; to catch a glimpse of a mother stroking her daughter’s forehead, kissing her in her sleep. I could still feel the imprints of Mum’s kisses branding my own forehead; feel the memory of love, nurture not nature, but still as strong.
That first night, I was only out for a few minutes. By the time I reached the end of the street, I raced back again, my footsteps metallic on the empty pavements, hurling myself back through the gate and into the kitchen, assailed by the stillness of the dead house, but relieved that all was still quiet. For the rest of that night I stayed downstairs and played my recorder, sotto voce, immersing myself in its tinny breathless parp - my other prop in times of crisis. I never read music, just played along to songs on the radio, picking out melodies and bass lines, mindlessly creating muzak in my head. It went a small way towards drowning out some of the guilt and grief. Until the next time I sneaked out again.
I knew that if Social Services ever found out – found out about the wandering, I mean; my recorder playing wasn’t that bad - I risked losing Stella, and she would be taken into care. She was only ten years old. But as time went on, I reasoned with myself that if I didn’t get out on my own at night like that, I would explode, and possibly hurt Stella in some other way. I wrote a note for her which I left on the kitchen table at nights, just in case she woke up and couldn’t find me – although that never happened. Stella slept as if in a coma: ‘Stella – gone down to the 7-11, back in fifteen minutes, don’t worry xx’. During the day, I hid this note under the lining paper of the kitchen drawer.
