Are You My Mother?

by Louise Voss

  ‘Dad. Did the baby really come out of Mum’s bottom?’ I remembered whispering, whipping my hand away from Stella’s head with the sudden realisation of where it might have been. It occurred to me that all the facts of life I’d been given must just have been elaborate wind-ups; Stella’s head was far too big to come out of any hole that I’d ever been aware of. Perhaps pregnant ladies developed trap doors that swung down when the time came, like the one we had in our loft.

  ‘No. Well, yes. She came out of her….hmm….vagina. Mum’s told you about vaginas, hasn’t she?’ For the first time since arriving at the hospital, Dad sat up and gave me his full attention. ‘Hey, weren’t you supposed to stay at Mrs. P’s until the baby came?’

  I looked pityingly at him. ‘Well, yes, but the baby’s already come, hasn’t she? And I was with you, not Mrs. P. So do boys have vaginas underneath their willies then, or what?’

  I had only recently become even vaguely au fait with the workings of the human reproductive system. When I was about five I’d asked my friend Esther’s mother where babies came from, and with considerable embarrassment she had pointed south and said, ‘From a little hole at the top of ladies’ legs’, and so for years I used to look at my inner thigh and wonder exactly whereabouts this magic hole would open to let the baby out, and how. Daft, really – it never even occurred to me to get Mum to elaborate on this information, until she was about eight months pregnant, and I asked her one day how the baby would manage to swim down the inside of her leg without getting stuck.

  The ward doors opened, and we both looked up to see Mum being pushed through in a wheelchair. Her face was ashen white, her hair was a flattened, matted mess, and worst of all, she was crying hysterically. Dad practically flung Stella on to my lap, and ran over to her.

  ‘Darling, oh, my darling, what’s the matter?’

  Mum couldn’t speak. Tears just flooded down her face, and she shook her head. Fear sat like a brick in my gut – something must have gone terribly, terribly wrong. Perhaps Stella wasn’t ours at all. Or perhaps Mum had needed an emergency stomach removal.

  The nurse who was wheeling Mum up to her bed beckoned to a passing orderly, gesturing to him to close the curtains around us. He complied, averting his eyes away from Mum’s grief, and with a practised flick of the wrist, wrapped our family up around the bed like an overwrought but well-intentioned birthday present for Stella. The nurse and Dad together levered Mum out of her wheelchair and steered her on to the bed, gently lifting her legs for her and swinging them under the blanket.

  Dad just held her, rocking her back and forwards, the same as he did to me when I had a nightmare, and she was still crying. I could only watch in mute panic. Was Mum going to die? He looked over the top of her mussed-up head at me, and made ‘clear off for a minute’ faces. I hesitated, torn between a wish to stay and help calm her down, and a strong desire to go away until Mum came back to normal again.

  As I reluctantly handed Stella over to our parents, I whispered in her minuscule ear, ‘Mum’s not usually in a state, you know, but she had an accident and needed stitches. Don’t worry. I’ll pass you over to her for now, but I’ll be back in a minute.’

  ‘Good girl.’ Dad fished 50p out of his pocket. ‘Go and see if you can find a vending machine to get yourself something nice, and pop back in ten minutes, OK?’

  After some considerable flailing along the nylon walls around the bed, I eventually found the opening in the curtains and slipped through, pretending to walk out of the ward. As soon as I was out of their line of vision through the chink I’d left in the curtains, I doubled back again and round the other side of the cubicle. The lady in the next bed was asleep, her mouth wide open and her breath stertorous, so I was able to eavesdrop undetected.

  Mum was still crying, but talking low-voiced at the same time, her words all tumbling over each other as if she wanted them out of her body as fast as possible: ‘Oh my God, Ted, it was unbelievable, as if the delivery wasn’t bad enough, which it was, it was horrible; they had to give me a drip because I kept throwing up so I had all this fluid inside me, and when she was born I ripped’- I felt, rather than heard, Dad wince – ‘but they said I didn’t need stitches which was a relief only then I was dying to pee but every time I tried there was just all this blood, so eventually they tried to put a catheter in me and they kept jabbing it in, but there was so much blood they couldn’t see what they were doing, and it was agony and I was screaming and you weren’t there, and eventually they said they’d have to stitch it up so they could get the catheter in, and they took me to theatre and gave me two injections, one on each side, and that hurt even more but it still didn’t stop me feeling the needle and thread going in and out and it was sooooo painful, worse than the delivery, and I thought my bladder was going to burst too, and then they put the catheter in and apparently I weed out eight pints of liquid and it took fifteen minutes….’

  Eventually Mum’s crying subsided and then petered out, but I was still frozen with horror on the other side of the curtain. I couldn’t comprehend the details of what she’d been through, and I didn’t know what a catheter was, but it was plain that she had been suffering unspeakable agonies. She had told me, beforehand, that having a baby hurt quite a lot, but I had never imagined that it could cause her this much grief.

  I didn’t really understand why she seemed so upset about the stitches, either. My stitches had hardly hurt at all, and I’d had seven. Injections: fair enough, those were agony. But, in a way, I thought she appeared to be overreacting somewhat, which was most unlike her.

  Then she said something else, which made me forget about stitches.

  ‘Imagine going through all that agony and then just giving the baby away afterwards? I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know how she did it. I mean, that’s the only thing that makes it worthwhile, isn’t it, the end product?’

  Mum was talking about my birthmother. I couldn’t believe it at first, and then when I took in the enormity of what she was saying, I interpreted it in my own, nine-year old and less than rational, way: That my birthmother hated me so much that she was prepared to go through agonies like that, and then still didn’t want me.

  My heart pounding, I slunk out of the ward, loitered for a couple of minutes outside, and marched back in again, empty-handed. To my relief, the atmosphere was more normal when I stuck my head back through the curtain. Dad had taken his camera out of the bag and was checking light levels and arranging a red-eyed Mum and the sleeping Stella into a Madonna and Child-type pose.

  ‘Sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to scare you’, she said thickly to me. ‘I’m fine now, honestly. It all got a bit much, and the wretched stitches really hurt. So what do you think of your sister?’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ I replied wistfully. ‘So where are your stitches, Mum? I can’t see any.’

  Dad and Mum exchanged looks and smiled, Mum blushing.

  ‘I’m sitting on them, sweetheart. Pass me my handbag, would you? If Dad’s going to take our pictures, I at least want to have some lipstick on and my hair combed. Then come and sit up here and be in the picture.’

  As I’d squeezed on to the pillow next to my mother and new sister, twining my arm around Mum’s neck and donating my cheesiest smile, my earlier anxieties faded away. Even if my birthmother hadn’t wanted me, maybe it had still worked out for the best. At least the most amount of pain I had ever caused Mum was when I ran over her bare foot on my tricycle, and broke one of her toes.

  ‘All my girls together,’ Dad had said, squinting through the viewfinder at us, zooming us in and out for our place in the photo album. ‘Smile!’

  Chapter 7

  After Gavin dumped me, I didn’t leave go out for four days. Everything made me cry. The film of dirt on the roof of my car. My inability to erect the rotary washing line in our tiny shared back garden. The pathos of the boy selling dusters at the front door, and my meanness for not purchasing one. It would have been easier to list the things which did
n’t make me cry. In between the storms of tears I played my recorder constantly, for hours on end, lying on my back trilling mindlessly away with the radio tuned to Virgin. It didn’t matter what the song was, I had a stab at them all: “French Kissing in the USA”, “Jackie Wilson Said”, “Papa’s Got a Brand-New Pigbag”. I played and played until my lips began to tremble so much that I couldn’t purse them enough to blow, and tears rolled down the brown plastic and into the finger holes. Poor Stella, it almost drove her mad.

  I made Stella phone the individual Human Resources directors of the four different companies where I did my on-sites, and tell them all I was ill.

  ‘This is weird,’ she said, replacing the telephone. ‘Me calling in sick for you. Do you want me to write you a note excusing you from games, too? You used to write me fantastic notes to get me off PE, do you remember? “Stella has a doctor’s appointment. We think she has Dutch Elm Disease.” Or, “Stella is unable to play lacrosse today - she gets too upset when her legs go purple and blotchy in the cold weather”.’

  I didn’t crack a smile. ‘I never wrote anything that irresponsible.’ I picked up my recorder. “Brass In Pocket” had just come on the radio, and that was a great tune to play along to.

  ‘Oh, please, not again,’ Stella begged, sitting down on the side of my bed, and then crawling in next to me, like she used to when she was much younger. ‘At least wait until I’ve gone out.’ She wrinkled her nose at the inexorable web of rejection and stale despair I had weaved for myself in my pit. ‘It’s a bit smelly in here,’ she added.

  ‘Get out, then. No-one asked you to climb into my bed.’

  Stella rolled over and propped herself up on one elbow. ‘I’m so worried about you, Em. I’ve never seen you like this before. Please get up. You’re scaring me.’

  I stared resolutely at the ceiling. To be honest, I was slightly scaring myself; although there was a secretive and subtly liberating element to this excessive wallowing. All our tragedies prior to this had been shared, and I’d always had to put Stella first, to hold it all together for her sake; but the grief of losing Gavin was all mine.

  Eventually I turned to face Stella. In marked contrast to my unkempt and - doubtless - grey self, she looked fresh and dewy, dressed and ready to go to college, her hair in two blond plaits under a checked bandanna. She looked like an advertisement for milk.

  ‘Has he rung?’ I hated myself for asking.

  Stella tutted, rolling her tongue stud. ‘What, do you think I wouldn’t tell you if he had?’

  ‘I don’t know. You might not, if you thought it would upset me even more.’

  ‘Would it?’

  ‘Oh shut up, Stella. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.’

  Stella nudged me affectionately. ‘Come to the pub tonight.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Come on. It’ll do you good to get up and out. It’s only me and Suzanne and a couple of mates from college. I’ll ring Mack and invite him too, if you like.’

  ‘No! I don’t want to see Mack.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he never liked Gavin and he’ll be all smug and I told you so about it.’

  ‘No, he won’t. He’s your friend – he’ll cheer you up.’

  ‘I don’t want to see Mack yet. There’s nothing he could say to make me feel better. And if you see him, don’t tell him, OK?’

  Stella sensed me weakening. ‘OK. But you’ll come to the pub with us? I promise you, Emma, I’m going to keep bugging you until you give in.’

  I surveyed the scene around me with weary disgust; the frowsy sheets, the inevitable balled-up tissues, the sections of last weekend’s papers strewn across the bed – papers I hadn’t had the chance to read at the time, since I’d been too busy having a relationship with my boyfriend. Now time stretched endlessly ahead of me, winding off into misty grey void whenever I closed my eyes. I supposed that I should try to fill up at least a couple of hours of that infinity with something. I couldn’t stay in bed for ever - I had a worrying suspicion that I might be getting a bedsore. Either that, or it was just an enormous spot growing on my bottom. Knowing my luck, it would turn into a boil and I’d have to go to hospital to get it lanced, which was what happened to one of my aromatherapy patients. She said it was hideously embarrassing, because suddenly a whole roomful of medical students appeared and crowded round to watch the ignominious event….

  ‘Oh, all right then. I suppose so – just for an hour or so.’

  Stella kissed me, relief lighting up her face and making her skin even more peachy. ‘Good! Right, better go, otherwise I’ll be late for my life class, and Yehudi always moans at us if we’re late. Will you be OK?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said haughtily, rolling my eyes at my bunny slippers, which were peeping out from beneath the bed looking, I imagined, relieved that they might get a night’s respite from being the footwear of choice.

  ‘See you this evening, then. I’ll bring us back a Chinese first, if you don’t feel like cooking. Oh, and Emma?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You will wash your hair before we go out, won’t you? You look like Neil from The Young Ones.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch,’ I said morosely, rolling back into my stale pillows and pulling the duvet over my head.

  Two minutes later I was fast asleep again. I seemed to be able to do nothing else but sleep, cry, and play recorder. I dreamed that my birthmother bustled into my bedroom, clucking and matronly – so matronly, in fact, that she wore an old-fashioned nurses’ uniform, with the funny starched white tricorn hat, and the red cross on her apron distorted by the contours of her huge, Carry-On-esque breasts and, worryingly, she looked exactly like Frankie Howerd. She tidied away all the detritus of my misery, the sweet wrappers and sodden tissues, and managed to change the sheets to crisp fresh ones, executing brisk hospital corners, with me still in the bed.

  Then she sat down and stroked my forehead, whispering words of encouragement in my ears – proper, heartening advice and not merely placatory cliches like ‘there’s plenty more fish in the sea.’ I felt the heavy weight of her bowing the mattress next to me and, gratefully, I reached out to her. But when I opened my eyes, there was nobody there. All was silent, except for traffic noises from outside the window and the sound of a pigeon tap dancing on my windowsill in the watery mid-morning sun.

  I wanted to do it. I wanted to start searching for her – far more thoroughly this time than my last attempt, eight years previously. It wasn’t that anybody could ever replace Mum and Dad, because they couldn’t; but just to have someone, something of my own, some answers about my past. To stretch the iridescent walls of the bubble of my life to accommodate more than just me and Stella.

  I got out of bed, my warm feet silent across the wooden floor, and gingerly opened the curtains. The pigeon jumped, and eyed me balefully for a second, before sailing off, affronted.

  ‘You’ve got a nerve, to be annoyed with me,’ I said, as it swooped across the road to perch in the gutter opposite. ‘Crapping all over my windowsill.’

  Vapour trails criss-crossed the wide pale sky like scars, and I wished that I could fly away somewhere too. I turned back into my bedroom and gazed miserably at myself in the full length mirror. Even without my glasses on, the blurry reflection showed me what a state I looked. Stella was right – I did currently resemble Neil from The Young Ones; lank, Nana Mouskouri hair, droopy lips and shoulders, pasty complexion.

  It was funny to think that Stella was a baby when The Young Ones was first shown on TV. She seemed to like it even then, undulating gently in her bouncy chair as she stared with startled blue eyes at the television screen. Years later, she and her friends almost wore out the video of it, laughing hysterically, but with a certain cultivated post-modern irony to their amusement.

  The hardest thing about searching for my birthmother would be telling Stella. I had never even admitted to her that I knew my birthmother’s name; had found it in a letter, shortly aft
er Mum and Dad were killed.

  I was nineteen - Stella’s current age, although she was nine at the time – when they died. With a single knock on the bathroom door, everything changed.

  I was in the bath, getting ready for a night out, and it was Annette, a friend of my mother’s, who had knocked tremulously on the door. She’d been babysitting Stella that night, because Mum and Dad had gone to a wedding in Wiltshire. I was surprised and a little irritated to see her face wavering psychotically at me through the swirly frosted glass – babysitter turf was strictly downstairs on the sofa, in front of the television. She sounded odd, too, almost as if she was crying, but since I’d just lathered my hair into a wig of suds and couldn’t hear her all that clearly, I decided that she probably just had a bad cold.

  ‘Emma, there’s – someone here to see you.’

  ‘I’m in the bath. Tell him I’m not ready yet.’ I’d told Simon, my newish boyfriend, to come round for me at eight, and it was only twenty-five to.

  There was a pause. ‘It’s not your boyfriend. You’d better get out. Please.’

  Irritated, I dunked my head under the water, rubbed off the shampoo, then sat up, causing a small soapy tidal wave to whoosh up to the end of the bath.

  I was running late, but I’d wanted to wash my hair anyway. Simon was taking me to a disco, his best friend’s eighteenth birthday party, at the function room of an Ealing hotel. We’d only been going out for a month, but I’d already brought him home to meet Mum and Dad, so I knew I was keen. I had endured that ordeal the previous week, and Dad had been his usual embarrassing self; the conversation going something along the following lines:

  Dad (in mock-pompous voice): ‘Now tell me, young man, are your intentions towards my daughter entirely honourable?’

  Simon (blushing to the roots of his hair and studying his Doc Martens with great interest): ‘Um….’