by Louise Voss
I wondered in which era I might have been most fashionable – with what length hair, what style glasses? I honestly didn’t know whether my sort of person was perennially fairly stylish, or whether I’d just never quite made it at all. I did buy nice clothes, if that counted for anything, and get decent haircuts, although I had the sort of hair which always looked scruffy, no matter what I did to it. It wasn’t wavy enough to be curly, but too kinky to be entirely straight. I got the odd blond highlight, but nobody ever seemed to notice, even in my dark hair.
I was a little envious of Stella’s mad hairstyle, even though it would be a bit too high maintenance for me. She had to groom and style and pamper it, constantly putting gunk in it to keep the waves in place. I didn’t think I could be bothered with all that, however much she said it was worth it to get men raving about it the way they did. Anyway, she thought I was lucky – my hair might not be all that special, but my eyes were lovely. Gavin liked them, too, especially the long, thick eyelashes which scraped against the lenses of my glasses, and which I could flutter against his skin in luxury butterfly kisses.
I knew I ought to have shown off my eyes a bit more. They were my best feature, and I looked better when I wore my contact lenses; but they were so scratchy in my eyes. People always assumed that I hid behind my glasses, although only Stella understood that I actually wore my glasses when I felt more confident, not less.
I often wondered if I’d be more confident if I had blood relatives around to compare myself against: a genetic map rolled out in front of me, charting my future. So I could know whether I’d still be good-looking at fifty, or whether the crumbling would accelerate out of control. Whether I’d get leaner with age, or whether at forty my bum would drop. And, much more seriously, whether there were any nasty hidden surprises lolling around in the undergrowth of my future, like a hand-grenade with its pin pulled out: breast cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes. I didn’t like surprises.
For a second the man on the tube came back to me, his eyes green and sparkling, the only clean part of him. I wonder how he came to be so alone, where his family were?
I still hadn’t done anything concrete to begin my own search. Although my resolve was still strong, it seemed like such a momentous task. Come on, I told myself. Think. Be logical – you’ve always been a logical kind of person. It was on all your school reports: Emma has a very logical mind and methodical approach. Supertramp’s Breakfast in America was the one of the first albums I ever bought, because it had “The Logical Song” on it.
Much to my irritation, however, every time I tried to think how to go about finding my mother, the face of the winsome Julie from Fame loomed repeatedly into my consciousness instead; her dreamy eyes, the elegantly skinny knees sticking out from the long, Broiderie Anglaise-festooned skirt on either side of the big shiny cello, the upward tilt of her chin as she sawed resolutely away. But try as I might, I just couldn’t remember the actress's name. It was on the tip of my tongue for days.
The next time I went in to do the baby massage, I asked Joanne the health visitor, who was about my age, but she didn't know either.
‘Oh yes, Julie - long blond hair. She used to play in the lift, didn’t she? No, I don't know what her real name is, but she was in that film with that tasty one.… Bacon... Kevin Bacon -Footloose.’
‘Really? I was supposed to see Footloose on my first ever date. Pat Short, his name was. We were thirteen.’
‘Supposed to see it? That sounds like you either had a very good time, or a terrible time.’
‘The latter, sadly. We made it to the cinema but – oh, it’s a long story.’
‘Why do you want to know, anyway, about Julie from Fame? Oh, bugger this bloody clementine!’
Joanne was unsuccessfully trying to peel a recalcitrant citrus fruit, one of the really annoying varieties whose skin clings on for dear life, and instead of shucking it off with one satisfying dig of the thumb, you had to rip tiny little shreds away from the flesh. Her hands were dripping with juice and the fruit was only half exposed. She grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her desk, and wiped up the mess, before lobbing the clementine uneaten in the bin. The scent of it lingered sweetly in the air.
‘No special reason. You know how something bugs you when you can't remember it.’
And there wasn't any special reason; although over the next week it still eluded me, and I was still bugged. Funnily enough, however, it turned out to be my inability to remember the real name of Julie from Fame which gave me the first breakthrough in my search.
The doorbell rang just as Stella was getting out of the shower the following Saturday morning. I wasn’t yet awake, but the sound penetrated my dream, and before I was even aware of moving, I found that I’d hauled myself out of bed and was standing squinting blearily out of the window. Even without my glasses on, I recognised the thinning halo of hair and the toes of the red All-Stars which was all I could see of our visitor.
‘It’s Mack,’ I called, groggily, rubbing my eyes.
‘Oh crikey. Shall we pretend we’re out?’ replied Stella, tying her towel more firmly around her breasts as she came into my room.
‘No. Don’t be cruel to him. Anyway, I haven’t seen him for ages,’ I mumbled.
Besides being a mate of mine, Mack was also the self-appointed handyman of the Victor household. He lived four doors down from us, and Stella had instantly sussed him as a potential free Mr. Fixit when she spotted him screwing up a security light outside his front door. One quick burst of the Stella charm was all that was required, with the odd top-up when she felt particularly sorry for him; and Mack was now at our beck and call – replacing washers, mending hairdryers and, once, escorting off the premises a particularly mammoth spider which even I couldn’t face. But the best corollary of all this free DIY was that he and I had become good friends.
I was very fond of Mack. At first, I’d wished Stella that found him fanciable, since he was so clearly taken with her, and occasionally entertained the faint hope that they would get it together. Not married or anything, but I did think it would be good for her to have a long-term relationship, to stop all this...gadding about, as Mum might have said.
But despite my encouragement, Stella remained adamant that he was too old, his hair was too weird, and he was too much of a nerd. She wasn’t even impressed by his very credible job as a freelance television producer – mostly because we’d never seen any evidence of him actually doing any work, and were both beginning to wonder if he was making it up. Eventually I realised that Stella was right. Mack was lovely, but just wasn’t attractive, not in that kind of way.
‘All right then – but will you answer the door while I get dressed?’
‘But I’m not dressed, either.’
‘I know but, with all due respect, it’s not your legs he’s going to be looking at, is it?’
‘God, you’re so vain. Well, I suppose it’s time I got up. I’ve got a massage at twelve-thirty.’
Stella disappeared into her bedroom, dropping her towel en route to reveal the tiny owl tattoo on her pert fashion-student's bottom, as I came grumpily out of my own room, pulling on a thick jumper over my short pyjamas.
‘Mum would have a fit if I could see you now, with your tongue and that....thing on your bum. She'd say I wasn't looking after you properly.’ I felt cross, although now that I thought about it, Mum had been pretty laid-back. I seemed to be trying to squeeze triangle-shaped memories into round holes of truth – how odd.
Stella confirmed what I’d been thinking. ‘She wouldn’t have had a fit. I bet she’d have been totally cool about it. Plus I bet she’d think you’d done a great job taking care of me.’
Her voice was muffled as I watched her struggle into a very tight silky polo-neck, then jeans, a glittery belt, and thick red hiking socks. Unexpected tears stung the backs of my eyes as I plodded, touched by Stella’s remark, down to the front door.
‘Hi, Mack, sorry I took so long. The intercom’s broken again.�
�
‘Hi, Emma. Well, I’ll have a look at it for you if you like, but I don’t know much about them. Guess what, I brought something for you.’
‘Really? What? Come in.’
Mack’s pale hair bounced around his head as he walked up the stairs. If it had been longer, he would have looked like one of those fibre-optic lamps, so that if you switched him on he’d light up purple and crimson and turquoise.
He thrust an HMV bag into my hands. ‘You said you’d never got around to buying it on CD.’
I opened the bag and extracted a copy of The Head On The Door by The Cure. ‘Oh wow, fantastic. This’ll bring back memories. Thank you so much, Mack, you really shouldn’t have done. Make yourself at home, and I’ll put some coffee on.’
Mack looked pleased. ‘It was nothing, really. It was on sale in HMV and I just remembered our conversation, that’s all.’
Stella came into the room at the tail end of the conversation, clutching her make-up bag, and clocked that gifts were being distributed.
‘Hi, Mack,’ she said, expectantly. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed at the CD I had left on the kitchen counter.
‘Hello, Stella; you look great. Oh, that’s just a little present for Emma.’
‘Right.’ Stella was very put out. I knew just from the tone of her voice that she was thinking, ‘well, where’s mine then?’ She could be so spoilt sometimes, I thought. As if I’d expect any friend of hers to bring me a gift.
‘Mack,’ I said, ‘did you ever watch Fame?’
‘Oh, you're not still on about that, are you?’ Stella turned her back on Mack and went over to the microwave to apply lipstick, using its shiny reflective door as a mirror.
‘I think it was before my time,’ said Mack, obligingly racking his brains. ‘Why?’
‘I'm trying to remember the name of the actress who played the cellist. I think she was in Footloose too. It's bugging me.’
‘Er, sorry, I don't have a clue.’ Mack was momentarily crestfallen, then suddenly brightened. ‘Look it up on the Net. I'll find it for you, if you like.’
His face lit up at the brilliance of the idea, and he cantered down the hall to our second-hand computer in the living room, which he had recently sourced, delivered, set up and installed software on.
Stella spat on her mascara wand, ramming it viciously in and out of the little Maybelline tube, and then applying it to cosmetically-surprised eyelashes.
‘Great, thanks, Mack,’ I called, following him in with two of the three coffees I’d made, wondering why I’d chosen to carry them both in the same hand when my knuckles, jammed in the two mug handles, were getting scalded
Beyond a knowledge of basic word-processing –i.e.that clicking on the little square at the edge of a document made it bigger - and Solitaire (6 games won, 251 lost), our new computer was a bit of a mystery to me. I could just about write up invoices and do correspondence for my aromatherapy practice, but, shamefully, I was probably the only person left in the developed world who hadn’t yet got to grips with the internet. I hadn’t had the time or the inclination and frankly, I found it all somewhat sinister.
‘OK, now, here we go. Let's do a search on Fame and maybe, let's see, the Eighties.’
Mack was all businesslike and nerdy, an overgrown lead character in some Hollywood teen movie about the boy-whizzkid who taps into the Pentagon's computer and disarms a few nuclear warheads, in between rounds of Tomb Raider and saving his parents' marriage. I still marvelled that he did anything as glamorous as make television programmes.
The search proved not to be very helpful, mostly mentioning Irene Cara's hit of the theme tune rather than the TV series itself. We switched to a different tack, tracking down the film of the series instead, but it turned out that the skinny cellist wasn't even in the movie version. Eventually we got a result by searching for Footloose.
‘Here it is!’ I shrieked, peering through Mack’s hair at the screen, and accidentally inhaling a few fine strands. ‘Look; cast list! Um....Kevin Bacon, blah blah blah....LORI SINGER! How could I forget that name? Lori Singer, Lori Singer – great. That's such a load off my mind.’
‘Any more for any more, before I log off?’ Mack asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you need anything else finding out while we're on-line? The World Wide Web is your lobster – and I know what a technophobe you are.’
‘Oyster,’ said Stella. She had finished her make-up and joined us, out of joint curiosity and boredom.
‘I knew that, too,’ said Mack haughtily. Hey, let’s look you up.’ He tapped in Stella’s name. After a brief pause the results came up: Your search has found 12 mentions including "Stella Victor".
‘Fab,’ she cried. ‘Is that really me?’
Mack scrolled down. ‘Haven't you ever looked yourself up before? I thought that's what everyone did as soon as they got an Internet connection.’
‘Nah. I was waiting until I’m famous. More gratifying then. Still – twelve mentions? That’s not a bad start.’
Stella wasn’t joking. She dreamed of seeing her face on posters in the Underground; perhaps publicising her flagship store, or promoting her new autobiography. The line, ‘A Little Orphan With Big Talent’, would probably feature. She once admitted to me that she got prematurely annoyed and offended at the mere thought of some lout sticking a blob of chewing gum on the part of the poster corresponding to the end of her nose, or a drawn-on moustache – or worse, a speech bubble containing the words, ‘I suck cock’. Stella was already worrying about how she’d look in her publicity shots. She sulked for days when Stella McCartney got the job as designer for Chloe – she’d wanted to be the first famous fashion designer called Stella.
Mack laughed. ‘I have to warn you, though, most of these mentions will probably be duplicates or sites with people called Stella and Victor in them.’
Stella's name came up, legitimately, in two documents: one mentioning her runners-up status in a group project she'd done at college last term, and the other as an alumnus of her old school.
‘Wow. I'm on the Web, therefore I am. Well, it’s a start, I suppose. Your turn, Em. Go on, Mack.’
‘No - don't bother, Mack, please. Why don't we try Mum and Dad? I bet Mum’s got loads of mentions for her dissertations, and there might be something about Dad’s cameras. Barbara and Ted Victor.’
I suddenly wanted to see their names on the wavy screen, to feel that they still existed, even if only in cyberspace. They did both come up on the search, several times, but the contexts and references were so tedious that after trawling through a couple of sites which had published their research papers on, respectively, “The Endangered Habitat of Pongo pygmaeus abelli (the Sumatran Orang-utan)”, and “Design and Construction of the Victatilt Mk II” – reproduced without permission, I noted, on an amateur photographer’s website - the novelty soon wore thin, and Stella told Mack to log off.
I, however, remained staring at the blank screen, struck with a gigantic realisation. I absolutely could not believe that I had never thought of it before. It was so incredibly, glaringly obvious… I’d have to ask Mack to help me, though. I wasn’t sure which of those search engine thingies to use, and I couldn’t ask Stella. Not yet. But at least it would be a start; the start I’d been putting off making for two weeks.
Thanks, Lori Singer, I told her, and imagined her like an angel, smiling soporifically at me and playing me a special little aria on the cello, glad that she could have been of assistance. Because, the thing was, I already knew my birthmother’s surname.
After finding that letter with her Christian name and address on it, ten years ago, I’d phoned up the reference library in Salisbury, where a lovely old librarian with a tweedy-sounding voice had gone and looked her up for me on the local Electoral Register. I later found out exactly the same information by the more straightforward method of sending off for my birth certificate, but at the time I hadn’t realised you could do that, and I’d been utterly el
ated at my discovery. I had sent my own letter again, bursting with renewed hope and unbearable anticipation, this time with her full name on the front – Ann Paramor – and PLEASE FORWARD; but once again it had been returned to me, either stubbornly or blithely unopened, and all my earlier resolve had crumbled away, defeated.
I turned to Mack. ‘Are you busy tonight? Do you fancy coming round to watch Men In Black on TV with me? There’s beer in the fridge, and Stella’s going out, so I could do with the company.’ I could ask him then, I thought. When Stella’s out.
‘Aren’t you seeing Gavin tonight?’
I narrowed my eyes at Stella when Mack wasn’t looking, willing her not to say anything, but she was engrossed in a copy of last month’s Company magazine, and didn’t seem to have heard.
‘No. So, are you up for it, or what?’
‘Sure. I’ll come round at about eight then, shall I?’
Chapter 15
Stella was leaving to meet Suzanne at the pub, just as Mack came back that evening. She was dressed in one of her own designs; a PVC and cotton miniskirt with trapped rose petals, and her legs flowed out like solidified golden syrup from underneath it.
‘Inspired by natural forms,’ she remarked smugly, as she noticed Mack’s pale-fringed eyes tracking over her cinematically.
‘So I see,’ he replied, not meaning the skirt at all. I gave him a look, which was lost on him until Stella had left the flat in a cloud of CK One, banging the front door behind her; my exhortations to be careful hanging in the air, mingling with the perfume.
‘She’s very easy on the eye, your sis,’ he said wistfully. ‘It’s such a pity she’s so young.’
