by Louise Voss
‘I don’t know. Not at the moment, probably. Too much – you know – on my plate.’
With that, I left the room, climbing gingerly over the ‘To File’ piles of documents on the carpet where Dad’s slippers used to be, Janice’s post-it notes stuck pink and bossy on top of each stack.
I ran into my own bedroom and shut the door behind me, ignoring Janice’s gentle tap and call of ‘I’m just out here if you need me.’ Smoothing out Ann’s note with the flat of my palm, I placed it carefully between the pages and the hardback cover of my old Brothers Grimm Fairytale book, and slipped it under the bed, the words already etched on my brain.
I tried to process what information I could from the few words Ann had written. She referred to herself in the singular, not the plural: I might be leaving here soon. Surely, if she was half of a couple, she’d say ‘we’? She could be single, widowed, or divorced. I was torn between hoping, selfishly, that she hadn’t had any more children, so that if we ever met I’d be even more of a prize to her; and wishing that she’d gone on to have a big family so that I’d have a whole slew of new relatives to get to know.
Other than her address - Rose Cottage, Teffont, near Salisbury, Wiltshire - the fact that she said her prayers, and that sad little line I haven’t been well again, the letter volunteered little personal information about my birthmother. Even her writing style gave nothing away. It was a neat, small, almost childish hand, but the spelling and grammar were faultless. From these scant facts, I constructed an awful vision of her as a kind of grotesque Baby Jane figure, kneeling at the foot of her bed in a short babydoll nightie, hair in rollers, big eyes cast heavenwards, praying for me. On the bedside table, in my fevered imagination, were clusters of pill bottles of different shapes and sizes. I couldn’t visualise her face, but it was pale and wan with regret and ill health. I hoped she wasn’t seriously ill – what if she had cancer or something? By the time I found her, it might be too late.
Later, after Janice had tramped off home in her Doc Martens, I searched every other place in the house where more letters might have been hidden. There was definitely nothing else in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, since Janice and I would have found it, so I resorted to leafing through the pages of all the books on the bookshelf, and in the shoe boxes at the bottom of the wardrobe in the spare room. But I found no more correspondence from Ann.
I couldn’t stay angry at Mum and Dad for not letting me in on the secret of Ann’s identity – I was sure that if I’d asked, they’d have told me. Instead I channelled my rage towards Ann herself, feeling quite scornful of her naked need. Serves you bloody well right, I thought. You gave me away. You gave up your rights to me. Why should my Mum tell you anything about me?
Nonetheless, a few days later, I sat down and wrote to her. Just a little note, telling her about Mum and Dad’s deaths, and the address of the flat we were about to move into. No pressure, playing it cool, my pen shaking with the effort of not betraying the emotion I felt at writing a real letter to my real mother.
A couple of weeks after we moved into our new flat, the letter, opened and resealed with Sellotape, was returned to me. Ann’s puny, inadequate, three lettered little name was crossed out, and our address written carefully on the front, next to a message reading: ‘Return to sender. No forwarding address.‘
I was so furious that I kicked a chunk out of the bathroom door, splintering the wood, leaving little glossy chips of frustration on the hall carpet, and a lot of fabricated explaining to do to Stella about how the hole got there.
But I couldn’t afford to do anything further about it at that point. I had been granted status of official foster carer to Stella, and felt that I now had to maintain at least the appearance of being a responsible, mature adult. Not a kid who went around kicking in doors.
The circus of social workers, probate solicitors and estate agents finally packed up and left town, and Stella and I, in our new flat with big windows, a small kitchen, and a damaged bathroom door, had no choice but to try and pick up the pieces of our freshly orphaned lives.
Chapter 9
In the first year the two of us were alone together, the feeling of dreadful responsibility for Stella nearly suffocated me. She cried constantly, and I envied her for the ability to do so - I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing. I was just nineteen years old, and suddenly I had a double funeral to organise, a big house to sell, a small grief-stricken sister to look after, and a future in tatters - I had to turn down my place at Exeter University and find a job instead. Not to mention the shock of finding the correspondence from my birthmother, and the rejection I felt when my letter to her was returned - although, really, that was the least of my problems.
I handled the first few months OK, I believed – although I didn’t remember much of it. I knew Mum and Dad’s friends and neighbours had rallied round, and Janice the social worker was fantastic, but the burdens were still on my shoulders. It was me who lay awake every night obsessing about selling the house and buying a new place; about whether a flat in a mansion block or a conversion would be better, or whether a garden was preferable over a parking space; if I would ever pass my driving test, having failed twice already.
The list of things to worry about was endless, a Yellow Brick Road of problems twisting out of my sleep-deprived mind and off into the horizon. I developed spots and psoriasis, migraines and stomach complaints, bit my nails to the quick and pulled my hair out in clumps.
I could have dealt with all that, though, as long as I was looking after Stella properly. But gradually, Stella’s welfare began to just be another yellow brick. I loved her fiercely and protectively, as ever – but felt I couldn’t cope with the pressure of her constant tantrums and often downright nastiness to me. I knew, of course, her behaviour was borne out of grief, but I began to lose sight of her as a real person. She became just another trial sent to wear me down.
The turning point came when we moved house; it was bound to be an emotional time, leaving the home in which we had both grown up. I’d already given ten bin bags full of Mum and Dad’s clothes to charity, sold two sofas and a wardrobe, and flogged all Dad’s cameras to the camera shop in Acton. I was feeling utterly drained, and Stella had barely spoken at all for a week. A callous SOLD board stuck wonkily in the privet hedge outside was a brusque reminder of the collapse of our happiness. Stella kept the living room curtains closed all day so she didn’t have to look at it.
The day before the move, we had said our individual goodbyes to the secret freckles of the place: for me, my refuges in times of crisis; the larder, and the cupboard under the stairs which tapered to a warm dark hidey hole at the end. Stella, I knew, had cried in the attic where she and Mum used to do most of their sewing, and in the utility room, where Ffyfield’s bowls and litter tray still stood - Ffyfield had run away shortly after the night of the accident, and never been seen again.
Finally, by some unspoken agreement, we convened in Mum and Dad’s bedroom and climbed together into the cold bed, still made up with the same sheets and duvet cover I remembered Mum changing on the morning before her death. I’d found the old ones in the linen basket after the funeral, and I couldn’t bring myself to wash them for weeks.
We lay there in silence for some time, both of us trying desperately hard to smell the musky scent of our parents’ sleep from the bed. As we clutched our hands together, united in our grief, I had felt an overpowering wash of love for Stella.
On either side of the bedroom window stood two large antique Chinese vases, facing each other stolidly, a pair which Dad had inherited from his grandmother. They had been there all my life, but because Stella and I were banned from going near them in case of accidental breakage, I didn’t remember ever really studying them that closely before – we both just took them for granted, the way you do with familiarised beauty, whether in objects or loved ones.
Lying in the chilly bed holding hands with Stella, when I should really have been packing up my wardrobe, I stared at the vases.
They were really old, and, I noticed with wonder, really, really beautiful. The glaze was cross-hatched with delicate brown hairline cracks, the white background faded to an eggshell grey. And the figures. They were painted in the traditional blue associated with Chinese designs, but these were not the bland poker-faced stick figures found on willow-patterned plates or tea-sets. These were people, a whole village-worth of characters: victorious warriors on horseback, plump peasants with sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks; sexy matrons greeting their loved ones home from wars; friends; children; generals; workmen. These people had stories to tell, they had a past as fascinating and mysterious as that of the vases themselves. I had never realised they had personalities like that.
I kept staring from one vase to the other. It was completely quiet in the bedroom, the evening sun casting a mellow dappled glow around the room as it filtered in through the leaves of the trees outside.
‘Look at the vases, Stell. They’re so beautiful,’ I whispered. Stella peered over the edge of the duvet and followed my gaze.
‘It looks like they’re moving round and round,’ she said slowly, as transfixed as I was. ‘Like on a merry-go-round.’
She was right. I don’t think either of us would have been surprised if the figures had become animated for our entertainment, moving in a graceful circle around their vases like carved horses on candy-striped poles, slowly congregating in different groups, chatting, blushing, asserting, moving on.
‘You know, like in Mary Poppins,’ Stella added, and I did know, exactly, what she meant; when the merry-go-round horses detach from their circular base and sail off across the fields. We lay and imagined what it would look like, if the figures on one vase suddenly floated across to visit their kin on the neighbouring vase - a translucent rainbow’s arc of the moving figures peeling themselves off and travelling over, in a magical hologram of sparkling horses’ hooves and tiny bound feet in slippers.
The energy fields between the two would carry the townsfolk there and back, an animated and invisible highway whose traffic left behind an empty ceramic landscape.
‘The vases wouldn’t look the same, though, without the people on them,’ I started to say, but suddenly I was too choked to speak. When I looked around, I saw that Stella had fallen asleep, curled up in the centre of the bed in the way she used to as a special treat, when she was a toddler.
By the time I eventually got out of the bed, leaving Stella to doze, it was dark outside. Feeling a leaden depression, in tandem with a faint foolishness at the flight of fantasy, I turned on a bedside lamp and brought one of the vases into the cone of yellow light to inspect it more closely, tipping it carefully upside-down to examine the base. A deep carved Chinese signature decorated the bottom, which I traced like Braille with my fingertip. I felt as though I could rub the sweat of the artist who had just completed this tableau; a more alive thing than my parents. The lettering looked triumphant; bold and deep and almost clumsy in comparison to the intricate decoration around the sides
As Stella slept on, I finished the rest of the packing, leaving the bedclothes on our parents’ bed until last.
The next morning, an hour late, two removal men came and took the vases away in their white van, together with the few essential pieces of furniture we’d be able to fit in our new flat.
In my complete inexperience of moving house, however, I had been less than discerning in my choice of movers. They had advertised themselves on a card in the window of the newsagents – not Bodgit and Scarper exactly, but similar. I’d hired them because they were far cheaper than any of the other quotes I received. On of them kept staring at me and scratching his head, as if he were asking, ‘Do your parents know that you’re moving all their furniture out of here?’ Whenever I caught him doing this, I glared at him through narrowed eyes, daring him to try it.
When the vases and I were reunited at the new place, however, I found out exactly why the movers had been so cheap. I heard the Chinese villagers before I saw them – a flimsy crushed cardboard box being loaded off the van, its contents clunking and rattling together. I couldn’t bring myself to believe the worst until I opened the box, in which both vases had been lain together, no bubblewrap or protective polystyrene, just a few of sheets of thin white paper serving no useful shield at all. I cursed myself for not supervising better – I had just assumed that the men couldn’t be so stupid as to pack them that badly – and then I cursed the men.
Scenes of carnage met me when I lifted the flaps of the box; felled generals, weeping widows, headless horses and screaming children. Blue chips of blood everywhere, no survivors. For a fleeting moment I wished I could have helped them escape, that through the power of my imagination they could have been evacuated to safety as the cattle trucks pulled out; trailing despondently away to an unknown future, clutching all their belongings in wrapped shawls tied to the end of long sticks over their shoulders; leaving just creamy shards of what had been their home for hundreds of years. But it was too late.
‘Sorry, miss,’ the boss said half-heartedly as I yelled and ranted and almost kicked him. ‘You should’ve said if you wanted proper packing; it’s extra, see.’
But, as terrible as that day had been, the loss of the vases came to crystallise the realisation over which I had been burying my head in the sand for so long: my responsibilities weren’t just abstract yellow bricks of things to worry about at night, but real life-and-death ones. I alone could be the one to alter the course of Stella’s life throughout her rocky climb to adulthood, and I alone could make her path harder or smoother.
Fortunate, then, that it was only the two vases which got shattered. It made me see that it could as easily be Stella – if something happened to her, it would be my fault; if I didn’t make sure that she was properly cherished. The realisation was both appalling and strangely energising. I’d already been fortunate to have been considered mature enough to get custody of her; and now I had to make sure that she grew up to be someone Dad and Mum would have remained proud of.
Chapter 10
Against my better judgement, I did go to the pub with Stella that night. Obediently, I washed my hair first, standing in the shower miserably singing ‘I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair,’ without meaning a word of it, just letting the water sluice off my body, and wondering what Gavin was doing at that precise moment. I wanted to keep him in my hair; to keep the memory of his touch on my scalp.
Our local pub had just been refurbished, with much subtle arty lighting, huge abstract canvases on the walls and leviathan sofas. Stella thought it was fantastic to have such a trendy bar so nearby, but I missed its previous incarnation as a dingy public house with dark walls, scuffed wooden tables, and warped dartboard.
When we sat down with our drinks I wondered out loud what had happened to the pub's previous clientele, to the old men in shabby clothes with perhaps a silent dog under their chairs, or the odd brash divorcee who didn't set her sights too high.
'They probably put them all in the skip with that foul sticky carpet,’ Stella replied. She never had been known for her sentimentality.
Stella's mates turned up soon after, and I began to wish I’d stayed in bed. There was Suzanne, whom I knew very well - she and Stella had been best friends for five or six years, through school and on into their fashion design course at Ealing. She was fine; sweet, with her big eyes and small dreadlocks. She reminded me of Annabella Lwin from Bow Wow Wow, but whenever I said that, she and Stella always looked blankly at me. ‘Before your time,’ I’d mutter, feeling old, even though it was really before my time, too.
But Dan and Lawrence were so young that Dan still had stickers of dance acts peppering his backpack and a chain looping from the pocket to the belt buckle on his oversized jeans; and Lawrence was officially and very self-consciously a Fashion Victim: Hilfiger, Firetrap, Paul Smith and Diesel all fought for supremacy about his undernourished-looking person. He had the kind of strut only ever seen on a teenager with a £70 haircut.
&n
bsp; I wonder if Stella had slept with either of them. She slept with far too many men. It made me feel queasy and worried, although what could I say? I was convinced she wouldn’t be like that if Mum and Dad were still alive. But she wouldn’t listen to me; the boring older sister. I just hoped I’d drummed the safe sex message into her head enough.
There was an older guy there too, Charlie, whom I suspected had been invited as a kind of consolation prize for me - although he only seemed to have eyes for Stella. He was a graduate student with a rugby player’s physique and a braying Sloaney voice; and I took an instant dislike to him. What on earth was he doing hanging about with these immature nineteen year olds, I wondered; and then realised that he was probably thinking the same about me. His eyes were mean, and he was drinking too much.
‘What course are you on then, Em?’ Charlie asked me, immediately looking away as if he couldn’t even be bothered to hear the answer. He didn’t speak to me again after that.
I loathed being called Em by anyone other than Stella. ‘I’m not a student. I’m Stella’s sister. I’m an aromatherapist, and a massage teacher,’ I said haughtily, to the back of Charlie’s fat head.
Lawrence overheard. He swooned with mock lust, and nudged Dan. ‘Cool – she does massage.’ They winked at each other in a Benny Hill-ish fashion, and I had to pretend to laugh, although this was the tediously predictable male reaction which often greeted the announcement of my profession. I sometimes thought that I might as well have business cards which featured me topless, brandishing a whip.
After ten minutes I was bored rigid. I wish I could have joined in the conversation, but it was too difficult. Half the time I didn’t even understand what they were talking about - and when I did, every time I opened my mouth to talk, someone else had already launched in, and before I knew it, the topic of conversation had evolved into something else.
