by Louise Voss
Mum (slapping Dad on the arm): Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ted, leave the poor man alone. Take no notice of him, Simon, he’s pulling your leg.’
Simon had been mortified, but touchingly awestruck that Mum had called him a man. He went on and on about what a cool mother I had, until I wanted to suggest he took her out for a date instead.
Grinning at the memory of Simon’s discomfort, I’d wrapped a towel around my slick wet body, and opened the bathroom door. Annette stood there, with an expression on her face unlike anything I’d ever seen before, and the smirk dropped away from my lips. She appeared waxy, greenish, terrified. I thought for a fleeting second that she’d looked more normal when viewed through the frosted glass.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Oh Emma. I just got here and then…please come downstairs, straight away.’ She grasped my bath-warm arm with her fingers, cold and red from the walk from her house to ours. She was still wearing her overcoat. It was March, but cold, cold weather.
Alarmed gooseflesh broke out all over my body, a chilly sort of fear.
‘What is it? Is it Stella?’
She shook her head, tightened her grasp on my arm and frogmarched me, dripping, along the landing to the top of the stairs. I looked down the staircase and saw through the banisters the top of a policemen’s hat. When I turned back to Annette she was crying, silently but indisputably.
I ran down the stairs two by two, clutching the towel to my breasts, almost tripping at the bottom and half-skidding on the wooden hall floor, until coming to a halt at the policeman’s feet. If I hadn’t been so frightened it might have been funny. The policeman took off his hat and held it awkwardly by his side, twitching it slightly as if it was a Salvation Army tambourine. He looked at about retirement age: craggy, with bloodshot, basset-hound eyes and a bald spot, old and tired after too long being the bearer of bad news.
‘What’s happened?’ I croaked. ‘Where’s Stella?’
Swiping a hand across her face, Annette pointed to the closed door of the sitting room. ‘She’s in there, watching a video. She’s fine. She let me in but didn’t see…him arrive, PC…. what’s your name?’
Now she sounded almost cross, as if he was a troublesome schoolboy.
‘PC Fletcher,’ he supplied deferentially.
‘Yes. Well. Why don’t we all go in the kitchen and sit down? I’ll make some tea.’
I resisted the urge to shout at her: ‘Stop behaving like you own the place. You’re just the babysitter! Whatever this is, it’s nothing to do with you.’
Nonetheless, the policeman and I sat down, awkwardly, across from each other at the kitchen table. Annette had taken off her coat and filled the kettle but now continued to stand at the sink, motionless. She was quite plump, and from behind she resembled a joint of meat tied up with string: bulges popped out on either side of her bra strap, her waist, and the place where her knickers cut into the sides of her hips.
‘Look, whatever it is, please can we get on with it? I’m going out in twenty minutes’ time and I’m not even dressed yet.’
The policeman cleared his throat, but when he spoke, it was to Annette’s back.
‘Could you fetch Miss Victor – Emma - a dressing gown or something? She looks cold.’
Annette turned then. ‘Where is it?’
‘On the back of my bedroom door,’ I replied automatically. When she’d left the room, the kettle still not switched on, the policeman looked me in the eyes. I felt dizzy. It was all I could do not to put my fingers in my ears and start singing la la la to drown out what was coming.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he began, as I knew he would. I stared mutely at him, elbows on the table, fist holding up the towel, my whole body now shaking.
‘Can you confirm that Ted and Barbara Victor are your parents’ names?’
I nodded, feeling sick.
‘I’m so sorry…. They’ve been involved in a car accident on the M3.’
I nodded again.
Annette returned with a dressing gown, but in her panic she had gone into my parents’ room and unhooked Dad’s bathrobe, a navy towelling one with a fraying cord and pockets stuffed with tissues. She draped it over my bare shoulders and the smell of him filled my nostrils.
‘Are they dead?’
PC Fletcher reached across the table and patted my hand. ‘I’m afraid they are, yes.’
‘Do I have to identify their bodies?’ It was all I could think of to say. I had an unbearable mental image of me in a cold stainless steel room, with someone pulling separate drawers out of the wall containing Mum and Dad’s broken remains, toes tagged.
I felt a tickle on my shin, and looked down to see a cluster of bubbles sliding down over my ankle and onto the floor. I watched them trace their slow path, spotlit into a shifting beautiful iridescence, more tenacious than life. Just hours earlier, Dad had changed the bulb which now illuminated them.
The policeman cleared his throat again. He spoke as quietly as if he was trying to hypnotise me. ‘That won’t be necessary. All we’ll need you to do is to confirm that these items belonged to them.’
He pulled a clear plastic ziplock bag from his pocket and put it on the table. It contained two sooty-looking objects, which on closer inspection turned out to be Dad’s wristwatch and Mum’s moonstone necklace.
‘Why are they all black?’ As soon as I’d said it, I realised why, and spots danced white before my eyes. It was all I could do not to throw up or pass out. I was aware of my senses distilling down into one pure sensation; not grief or anger or any emotion, just the feeling of my hand still clinging to the towel. My parents were dead but I must not let this policeman see my boobs.
The PC beckoned to Annette. ‘I think you’d better call a doctor,’ he said. ‘Get her something for the shock. And if you could make that tea, that would probably be a good idea too.’
Mum’s make-up bag was still sitting on the end of the kitchen counter, from where she had transferred a few key items into her sparkly clutch bag before she left; lipstick, comb, powder. When dizziness made my head droop onto my chest, I got another waft of the post-shower aftershave and soap smell off Dad’s bathrobe, so I jerked upright again. I didn’t realise I was crying until the tears ran warm down the chilled damp skin of my cheeks.
‘Who can I contact for you?’ PC Fletcher had flipped out a small notebook and had his pen poised, desperate for something to do.
One small part of my brain tried to consider this, but I couldn’t think of anyone at all. Who was it appropriate to call in these situations – my ex-headmistress? The milkman? Ghostbusters? Where were all our fucking relatives? The cousins we could move in with; the apple-cheeked grandparents; the sympathetic uncles and aunts. But there was nobody. Mum was an only child. Dad had one brother, but he’d last been heard of living in a commune in the Hebrides and hadn’t been in touch for years - I couldn’t remember ever meeting him, and Dad never spoke about him. It seemed that they’d had some sort of terminal falling out. None of Mum or Dad’s parents were still alive. Stella’s godmother Maggie, the one who’d given her Are You My Mother?, had married an Australian and emigrated to New South Wales six years earlier. I didn’t even have a godmother, and had always envied Stella hers, even if she did live on the other side of the world.
Stella. Someone had to tell Stella. I so didn’t want it to be me.
Even though I hadn’t given my birthmother a thought for months, I suddenly longed for her to appear, like a substitute or an understudy, to fold me up in her arms and tell me she’d take care of me from now on. But unlike my own parents, I didn’t even know if she were dead or alive. And Stella still had to be told.
‘Stella,’ I whispered. Annette came over then and put her arm around me, but I shook it off.
Telling Stella was twenty times worse than I could have anticipated. I’d gone into the sitting room, alone, and over to where she was curled up on the sofa, half watching Sleeping Beauty - or, as she called it when she was a toddler, �
�Sweep n’Booty’ - on video whilst simultaneously sewing another hexagon on to the patchwork quilt she and Mum had been working on for months. Her cat, Ffyfield, was draped across her lap, almost covered by the quilt, one paw stretched luxuriantly out like the arm of a sleeping child.
I picked up the remote and clicked off the video, expecting sudden black silence – the soundbed to the words with which I was about to ruin her life – but instead, the TV came back on, a close-up of Robert Smith from The Cure, my favourite band, performing their new single on some chat show. Under normal circumstances this would have had me riveted, and although I did think, oh, look, it’s The Cure, I then immediately thought, so what, I have to tell Stella our parents are dead.
‘Annette’s here. I let her in just now.’ Stella glanced up at the television. ‘And by the way, I was watching that video, if you don’t mind.’
I turned off the TV properly this time, and sat down next to her, unable to believe what I had to say. ‘Stell, something terrible’s happened.’
She looked at me then, and I broke down, keeling over on the sofa, pressing my face into the edge of the colourful quilt on her lap, causing Ffyfield to jump up in panic and bolt across the room. I shouldn’t be doing it like this, I thought. I ought to be strong for her. It all seemed totally unreal; preposterous. I wanted to be excited about the prospect of going to a party with Simon, or of seeing Robert Smith on telly, red-lipped and bashful. Not this.
‘What?’ Stella tugged at my hair in panic. ‘What?’
I managed to sit up again, reaching out for her, hugging her narrow shoulders towards me and pushing her head into my chest so that I didn’t have to look in her eyes.
When I told her, I felt her whole body go rigid. Then she elbowed her way free of my embrace and stared at me, her small white face twisted with horror.
‘No!’ She screamed and hit me, hard, catching my ear and the side of my head. Before I could grab her, she leaped up and began clawing at her own face, clawing and ripping at her skin, and then at the quilt she’d spent so many countless hours on. I just about managed to grab the scissors from her sewing basket and kick them out of the way under the sofa before she lunged for them. She was howling like a banshee, screaming gibberish. PC Fletcher and Annette rushed in just as Ffyfield shot out of the door, his tail upright and bushy, like an oversized squirrel’s.
By the time we managed to calm Stella enough to stop her screaming, we were all sobbing and shaking, apart from the PC, who was red-faced and a little breathless. Pieces of torn-up patchwork carnage lay everywhere, like twisted metal and broken glass on a blood-stained motorway verge. For the first of many times to come, I regretted passionately that Stella and I hadn’t been in that car too.
Chapter 8
The letter from my birthmother just turned up in my hand, during the uniquely painful exercise of clearing out my parents’ things; all those years of household paperwork, crammed into dozens of shoeboxes all over their bedroom: under the bed, in the wardrobe, on top of the wardrobe. The social worker who’d handled Stella’s case, Janice, more or less insisted on coming round to help me, since left to my own devices, I’d never have done it. I would have just shut the door behind me and let it all stay in there, gathering dust.
Janice and I waited until Stella had gone back to school to start the sorting, and it had taken ages; several days of squatting on Dad and Mum’s crushed-strawberry pink bedroom carpet, surrounded by a printed inventory of the Victor family, with Janice valiantly trying to cheer me up with stories of her days in a punk band and her pink-haired struggles with the Establishment. I barely even answered her, just noticing that the more animated she became, the more her meagre breasts bobbed around underneath her threadbare CND t-shirt.
It was a teeth-grittingly gruelling thing to have to do, but eventually we were nearly finished. Under Janice’s expert guidance, everything that needed to be kept was sitting in piles on the floor, waiting to be filed, and everything else thrown away. I had to be ruthless because we were moving to a flat in Shepherd’s Bush – I already had an offer in on the house. My parents had taken out life insurance, but I wanted to be extra certain that there would be enough money in the bank to pay for the rest of Stella’s education. Plus Janice had, gently, suggested that a fresh start might be the best way forward. We would only rattle around in that great big house by ourselves.
It did mean, though, that however much I instinctively wanted to keep them, there would not be room for all the accumulated years of paid electricity bills or my blotchy kindergarten paintings. I kept just a few mementoes; photographs, obviously, and Stella’s swimming certificates. Birthday cards from Mum and Dad to us, often funny cartoony caricatures of us all, drawn by Dad himself. And one poignant little note which Dad had scribbled to Mum, on the back of an old Christmas card. The black ink of the biro showed up only intermittently on the shiny card, so that in places you had to look at the indentations made by the pen in order to read the words. He must have written it when I was in the room, not wanting to risk my overhearing him if he’d whispered it. It said, What do you think of H’s new boyf? I think he looks like Betsey – is that why she fancies him? Underneath, in Mum’s neat writing, it said: Shut up - I think he’s cute.
Dad had replied, Shd I be jealous? I know how much u like hairy red-heads w/ long arms…
The two subjects of this written conversation were Simon Cartwright, the boy who was meant to be taking me to an 18th birthday party on the night of their accident; and Betsey, an orang-utan who was the main focus of Mum’s PhD. Dad was right, too: I never noticed how much Simon actually had resembled Betsey.
Simon had only been to the house once, the previous week, so this note had added poignancy for me because it was written just days before Mum and Dad died. I dimly remembered that Simon never made it through the front door on his second visit - he had apparently turned up in the middle of the chaos that night, just after I’d broken the news of the accident to Stella. I didn’t know who he spoke to or what they told him, but I never heard from him again, nor did I try to contact him. It was as if he’d never existed - which I think was another reason I kept the note.
All Mum’s research notes had to be dealt with too, reams and reams of them; and Dad’s business accounts, which were floating around, stuffed haphazardly into plastic bags or just loose in piles. I found about three thousand of the leaflets he’d had printed up, containing the instructions for construction of the Victortec and Victatilt (Mk II) cameras which he made in kit form; and I put them all out for recycling except a handful. Mum’s notes I parcelled up and posted to her university faculty - let someone else make a decision about something, I’d thought.
As I cleared and quietly cried, simultaneously filing and keening while Janice rabbited on relentlessly next to me, I supposed that at the back of my mind was a flicker of hope that I might suddenly stumble on a great cache of correspondence pertaining to my own heritage. Or at least my absentee birth certificate, which I’d never seen. But there was nothing, until I unearthed the letter; one limp, unprepossessing sheet of paper, so crumpled up already that I nearly threw it away without a second glance.
Luckily I did give it a second glance, and when I realised what it was, my heart beat so fast that I thought I was going to faint.
It was dated two months before the accident.
Rose Cottage
Teffont
Nr. Salisbury
Wilts.
Dear Barbara and Ted,
It’s been a while since I heard from you. I haven’t been well again. I do respect your wishes not to tell Emma that I’m asking after her, but I would so like to know how she is. Please send me a little note to let me know what she’s going to do now that she’s left school. She’s in my prayers every day.
Yours sincerely,
Ann
PS I might be leaving here soon.
Ann. A good name for a mother, was my first thought. Frustratingly, there was no surname, which meant tha
t she and Mum must have been in correspondence prior to this. I’d felt a momentary flash of anger at Mum for excluding me from the woman who was at the core of my identity. Then I re-read the words, about ten times, while Janice was blithely launching into an anecdote about her band opening for Adam and the Ants in 1979. There was something a bit weird about the note, I thought. As if Ann was not saying everything she wanted to say – or maybe that was just how I wanted to see it. But it seemed a little abrupt, somehow.
At least she had included an address – I could write to her. Even if she had already moved, perhaps the current occupants of the house would forward my letter. Eventually Janice noticed the shock on my face, and the way my hand was shaking as I scrutinised the flimsy piece of writing paper, holding it up to the light in the vain hope that there might be another secret message to me contained within it; written perhaps in lemon juice or invisible ink, the way they used to do in Enid Blyton, the Secret Seven or the Famous Five. I had so badly wanted to be in the Secret Seven when I was nine.
‘Are you all right? What have you found?’ Janice asked, sitting back on her heels and pushing her curly hair out of her eyes.
‘It’s from my birthmother,’ I said, in a strangled-sounding voice.
Janice rushed over and gave me one of her carefully appropriate social-worker hugs. She smelled of womanly sweat and Body Shop White Musk, and her arms felt bony around my shoulders. Not motherly at all, but then that was probably intentional.
‘Wow. How do you feel about that?’
She was always asking me how I felt. It bugged the hell out of me, because what could I say, during those terrible days, except what I always said: ‘Shit.’
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Her name’s Ann. I didn’t know that.’
‘Are you going to contact her?’
