Are You My Mother?

by Louise Voss

  ‘Yeah.’ I flipped the top off a beer and handed it to Mack. ‘I really worry about her,’ I said abruptly.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t,’ he replied, taking a long swig, and putting his palm over his mouth to suppress a little burp. ‘Stella’s old enough and – ‘

  He evidently realised that by no stretch of the imagination could the expression ‘old enough and ugly enough’ ever be applied to Stella, so he stopped. ‘Old enough to enough to look after herself’, he concluded. ‘I mean it, Emma. She’ll do whatever she’s going to do, and she’ll be fine – she’s not stupid. In fact, Stella is one of the most self-possessed women I’ve met, even at her age. She knows what she wants.’

  ‘She’s had enough practice where men are concerned, I suppose,’ I said, changing my mind about the cup of tea I was making, and helping myself to a beer as well. I suddenly had a craving for its sharp fizzy clarity, and not the brown workaday dreariness of tea. Perhaps if I drank less tea, I too would be going out on dates as often as Stella.

  The stupidity of the thought made me laugh – Stella had men of all ages falling at her platform soles, and it had everything to do with her blonde hair, porcelain skin and Kate Moss body, and bugger all to do with how much tea she did or didn’t drink.

  ‘She’s ten years younger than me but she’s still probably been out with more than twice the blokes that I have. And she and her mates are so experienced. They talk about all this stuff that I hardly even know about - God, for all I know, she might even be doing it!’

  Stell and Suzanne behaved like men, as far as I could see; strutting about, proud of their sexuality and the discerning manner in which they erroneously believed they distributed it. The picture I had of them, flitting around from one preternaturally hormonal boy to another like two bumblebees bouncing around inside different flowers, nothing in it for them except the thrill of fresh pollen dusting their noses, could have scared me witless, if I let it.

  ‘Doing what? Having sex?’

  ‘No – although I know she is. I meant, doing all the stuff that they giggle about. Frottage. Water sports….’ I couldn’t think of anything else.

  Mack laughed. ‘I’d say it’s extremely unlikely. Since when have teenagers ever done more than about five percent of the things they discuss? Give yourself a break, why don’t you? She’s an adult. What she gets up to in the privacy of her own room is really none of your business.’ His face assumed a wistful expression, and it was not difficult to imagine what he was thinking.

  We adjourned to the living room. ‘Have a seat. The film doesn’t start till nine,’ I said, waving an arm towards our plum sofa, where we sat in silence for a few minutes, drinking our beers and listening to the traffic noises outside the window. The sound of cars passing reminded me of the suck and crash of waves on a shore.

  ‘Haven’t you had many boyfriends then?’

  ‘No. A few flings here or there before Gavin, but he’s been the only serious one…’ I tailed off. I still didn’t know why I hadn’t told Mack about Gavin finishing with me. I supposed I felt it was too humiliating to admit. If Mack had been a girl, I’d have told him like a shot, but ours wasn’t really that sort of friendship. I had a sudden craving for a close girlfriend or two; that mutual combination of secret vocabulary, fan club, personal shopper, shrink and punchbag, the way that Stella and Suzanne were with each other.

  ‘Stella must have started young, to have been out with twice as many boys as you.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, pulling a scratchy little feather out of the sofa cushion, ‘we started at the same age – thirteen. The difference was that I didn’t get another date for about four years after my first one, and she’s had a different boyfriend approximately every month since then.’

  ‘Well, at least with all that experience you can be sure she won’t let anyone try it on with her. Innocence is probably the biggest danger, especially combined with drop-dead beauty like Stella’s.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said, morosely.

  Mack glanced at me, and realised that perhaps he’d been extolling Stella’s physical virtues a little excessively. ‘So, tell me about your first ever date,’ he said, nudging me into a smile.

  ‘Funny you should ask, actually. I was only thinking about him the other day. He was called Pat Short, which was a bit unfortunate because he was this teeny little second year from the boys’ grammar. He looked like he ought to have a catapult and a copy of the Beano sticking out of his back pocket.’

  Mack laughed, stretching back on the sofa and sticking his red All-Stars out in front of him. God, I hated those All-Stars. No wonder he couldn’t pull, I thought bitchily.

  ‘Where did you meet?’

  ‘In the children’s library. I was getting some more Dr. Seuss books out for Stella. I don’t know what Pat’s excuse for being in there was - he probably thought that all those miniature tables and chairs might make him seem bigger. He slipped me a note.’

  ‘How romantic.’

  ‘Wait – you haven’t heard the best bit. It said something like “do you want to go out with me?” and it was signed Hawkwind.’

  Mack spluttered into his beer. ‘Hawkwind? As in, the band? I thought you said his name was Pat?’

  ‘It was. He just liked Hawkwind, that’s all. Of course, I’d never heard of them, and so I thought some tall, gorgeous, nut-brown Cherokee was writing me notes, but when I looked around, all I saw was this undersized schoolboy with National Health glasses like mine on. He was sort of gurning at me and staring at my boobs like he had X ray vision, so then I realised it must be him.’

  ‘Did you have boobs at thirteen?’

  ‘Yes, actually. The trouble is, they stopped growing when I was fourteen.’ I cupped my hands over my chest protectively, trying to imagine that they were Gavin’s hands on my bare breasts, like that Janet Jackson album cover. I felt my nipples harden at the thought – it was an odd sensation, to be simultaneously aroused and depressed. I wondered, yet again, what Gavin was up to that evening.

  ‘So then what?’

  ‘Oh, well, to cut a long story short, we went to see Footloose together, but I left before the film had even begun.’

  The date had been a disaster from the start. It was just after Easter, and, to save having to buy overpriced jellybabies in the cinema, I’d brought with me the large box of Maltesers I’d been given as an Easter gift: Mum and Dad had laid on an Easter egg hunt in the garden for Stella, and the Maltesers were a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that I was too old to hunt under bushes for my chocolate.

  Once we had paid – individually – for our tickets, Pat had led me, with an authority belying his size, straight to the back row. We sat down, with him on my left, and I crinkled the cellophane off my Maltesers. As I offered the box to him, two things happened.

  Firstly, he immediately slid his right arm around my shoulders, before the previews had even started. He was clearly aiming for my right breast, but unless his arm were suddenly to grow about eight inches, he didn’t stand a chance. But he kept trying, valiantly pressing himself closer and closer to me until he was practically squashing me into my seat. I could smell the Brylcreem in his thick blond hair, and the warm teenage funk of Right Guard unsuccessfully disguising armpit sweat.

  The second thing that happened was that his left hand began robotically stuffing Maltesers – my Maltesers - into his mouth. He reminded me of a game Stella had at home, called Hungry Hippos, where you had to make four primary-coloured hippos leap up and swallow as many yellow balls as you could, as fast as you could.

  I had recoiled in horror from this dual onslaught. Every time I tried to move either myself or my box of Maltesers, his relentless hands would follow, squeezing and cramming. It felt as if those hands had some kind of inbuilt homing instinct, since he never once looked at me or spoke to me. His eyes remained fixed on the screen. I closed the lid of the box, but his fingers slid beneath it. Then I placed the box on the floor by my feet, but he reached down and pulled it
across to beneath his own feet. Before Footloose had even begun, I’d had enough. Ripping his arm away from where it was draped, tentacle-like, across my back, I stood up.

  ‘If you want them all that much, why don’t you just finish them!’

  I had dumped the box and the remaining six Maltesers over his head, where one stuck, unnoticed, in the Brylcreemed thatch; and pushed my way past the rest of the snogging couples in the back row, stepping on toes and kicking over buckets of popcorn. Pat Short gazed after me, open-mouthed, but made no attempt to follow.

  When I got home I shut myself in the larder, sitting down on the hard concrete floor next to a sack of King Edwards, and sobbed without restraint. Dad heard me, opened the door, and squeezed in next to me.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at the pictures?’

  He hugged me to his chest, and I thought how different it felt to Pat’s skinny insistent grip. I pushed my face into the warm cotton of his shirt.

  ‘He….he….put his arm around me.’

  Dad stroked my hair. ‘Don’t worry, chicken, I’m sure you told him what’s what. But, on the other hand, who wouldn’t want to put their arm around a gorgeous girl like you? Is that why you’re back so early?’

  Agonised, I lifted up my head so I could look him in the eyes. My glasses were partially steamed up with tears, making him seem edgeless, less substantial. ‘No, Dad, I left because he….he….he –‘

  ‘What?’ Now Dad was beginning to get worried. I could tell he was ready to go round to Pat Short’s house and give him a good kicking, and I’d felt delighted. ‘What, darling, tell Daddy. It’s OK. Shhh, tell Daddy.’

  Taking a deep breath, I stammered, ‘Daddy, he ate all my Easter Maltesers’, before collapsing into a fresh storm of sobs. When I surfaced again, Dad’s mouth was twitching. He bit the inside of his lip, and swiped a hand roughly across his face, as if trying to wipe away his grin. Then he tousled my hair, gave me another hug, and stood up, his hand resting on the shelf between a tin of peaches and a box of Quaker Oats.

  ‘Come on, chicken. Let’s go and have a cup of tea. You know what, I think Mum might just have one Easter egg left over – shall we go and have a look?’

  I never saw Pat Short again.

  ‘Well, I don’t know why you’re looking so sad. It sounds like you had a lucky escape.’

  ‘I was just thinking about Dad. He was always so good like that; you know, looking after us. We were his little girls.’

  ‘Do you still miss him?’

  ‘Massively.’

  I stared out of the un-curtained window into the smoggy brown city night, trying to picture Dad’s face, but I couldn’t remember it, not as the face I’d known. I could only picture him from the photograph on the mantelpiece: big sideburns, hamming it up for the camera, frozen in a youth that had bypassed him two decades before. Those same twenty years in between were the years I’d been his daughter; seen him every day, bounced on his lap and cried on his shoulder, but now it was as if he hadn’t even existed. Tears filled my eyes and I turned my head away so Mack couldn’t see.

  Now, I thought. Tell him now. Tell Mack you’re adopted, and you need his help to look up your birthmother on the internet. For Christ’s sake, just do something to stop this hideous wallowing.

  I wanted to tell Mack everything: from how much I loved it when people used to comment that I looked just like my father; right up to meeting the homeless man on the tube, and the feeling that I had to let go of Stella, and do something for myself. Tell him about all the confusion that was tangled up in my head, tormenting me.

  But when it came to the crunch, I just couldn’t. The clarity and purpose from finding Lori Singer that morning had trickled away, and I just felt too tired to explain the whole messy story. So yet again I copped out.

  ‘Stella was thirteen when she went on her first date, too. Needless to say, hers was a completely different kettle of fish.’ Furious with myself, I tried to inject a note of levity into my voice.

  ‘How come?’

  I wasn’t sure whether Mack was being sensitive in playing along with my forced story, or whether he really hadn’t noticed that I was upset. The latter, probably, I thought.

  ‘He was five foot eleven, fifteen years old, already shaving. Richard Something, his name was. He picked her up in a cab, took her to a film, then to Pizza Express for dinner.’

  I could still remember Richard standing there in the hall, gravely helping Stella into her coat and shaking hands with me, as I’d scrutinised him with extreme suspicion.

  ‘Don’t worry, um - Miss Victor. I’ll look after her,’ he’d said, and I had fought back the urge to grab him by his Stussy lapels and yell, ‘You’d better, you jumped-up adolescent oik, or I’ll remove your grillocks with a steak knife’.

  Instead I’d just said, ‘I’ll pick you up from the restaurant at ten o’clock, Stella, OK? Have fun’; and then spent the next four hours anxiously pacing the hall and wondering if I could get away with disguising myself and sitting at an adjacent table in the restaurant, to make sure he was behaving himself with my sister. Even back then I knew that it probably wasn’t necessary to be so excessively over-protective, but I couldn’t help it. It was as if I had to take on the combined protectiveness of Mum and Dad, plus an extra couple of ladlefuls to compensate for my own lack of experience in those situations. Was ten o’clock the right time? Should it be earlier? Later? Should I have offered to collect her or not? I remembered wishing there was an Adolescent Dating Manual to which I could refer.

  And here I was, six years later, still worrying about Stella.

  ‘Come on then,’ I said abruptly, hauling myself out of the sofa. ‘I’ll get us some more beers. The film’s about to start.’

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘Yeah?’ I held my breath, waiting for Mack to ask me what was really wrong; to offer me a shoulder to cry on, to tell me everything would be OK, and he’d help me trace my birthmother.

  ‘What is frottage, anyway?’

  I’d just have to ask Mack to help me with that internet thing another time, I thought, as I lay in bed later. When I’d had a bit more time to think about what I might be getting into. When I’d got a bit more energy.

  To try and get myself to sleep, I was softly playing my recorder along to “In The Army Now” by Status Quo, which I’d found on Radio Two. Not out of choice – I’d had a little browse through the radio stations, but most of them were broadcasting hard house, which was nigh on impossible to play along with.

  I began to fall asleep still propped up on my pillows, loosely attached to my recorder; wondering vaguely what a psychiatrist would make of me, in bed alone with my lips around a long brown tubular instrument.

  Chapter 16

  The next day, after Stella had gone to Portobello Road to look for bargains, I got dressed, conducted a perfunctory hoover of the flat, and sat waiting in the spare room for my twelve o’clock appointment to arrive.

  A stick of incense burned a trembling finger in the corner, and the crisp sheeted surface of the massage table was covered with a fresh strip of white paper from a large roll, similar to the sort found in doctors’ surgeries. I hoped the effect was less clinical, however, thanks to the stack of fluffy lavender towels on top of the paper, the gentle ambient music floating over small wall-mounted speakers, and a bronze statue of Buddha in the fireplace. I was proud of this room. It was the only room in the flat that ever got hoovered right up to the skirting board.

  The twelve o’clock client was late, but I hadn’t really noticed how late. I’d been fetching a new bottle of sweet almond oil from the cupboard in the corner when I suddenly had to stop and sit down, as if my head could no longer support the weight of my thoughts.

  Of course I’d always been curious about my birthmother, but only in an idle, abstract kind of way; I had always found it hard to believe that I could have been any happier with my real parents than I was with Mum and Dad. They were loving, and mostly attentive and, besides, I didn’t ha
ve anyone to compare them to. But, even as I thought this, I began to remember all the niggly little things I’d whitewashed over, in the redecoration of my memories after their deaths.

  The great prickly lump, like a conker shell, permanently in my throat at the thought that they couldn’t possibly have loved me as much as they loved Stella. The way that Mum carried photographs of us both in her wallet, but mine was a fuzzy snapshot of me in a snowsuit, from a distance; and Stella’s was a crystal clear close up, showing off each individual eyelash. The way that they gave Stella her own cat, when I’d always wanted one.

  Hang on, though. Did I ever actually tell them that I was desperate for a cat? Surely I must have done – what child holds back from nagging their parents for their hearts’ desires? But on the other hand, perhaps my memory was a little wobbly. Perhaps I hadn’t actually realised how much I wanted one, until Ffyfield strolled into Stella’s chubby arms, rasping a reluctant kiss on to her irresistible cheek. After having an orang-utan in one’s life, a pet cat might have seemed a little lame; so it was hard to be sure.

  I lay down on the carpet and put my feet up against the wall, like an inverted bracket, to give my body a few minutes’ extra relaxation before I had to massage. I’d found Lori Singer, just like that. Of course, Lori Singer was famous, and therefore much more likely to be on the Internet, but if Mack could find two bona-fide mentions for Stella, who wasn’t at all well-known – much to her chagrin - then there must be a little bit of hope for me, too.

  They were bound to have….what were they called? Plots? Pages? No, sites, that was it… sites for adopted people looking for real parents. Mack kept saying how you could find out anything on-line. It was the Information Superhighway. I heard on Radio Four that you could adopt a vegetable patch on the Internet, for God’s sake. I stared at the ceiling, noticing how yellowish the paintwork looked in contrast with the pristine white walls. It upset me, the thought that clients might be lying there while I worked on their feet, thinking how badly the ceiling let the room down.