by Louise Voss
I made a decision.
‘No,’ I said, folding my sheet of Paramors into a fan as wobbly as my lower lip. ‘I’m not going to the Post Office.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m a snob and a terrible person; but I don’t want it to be her because of where she lives,’ I said, and burst into tears.
Mack turned off the camera at once. He hugged me awkwardly, leaning across the handbrake. ‘You’re not a snob or a terrible person. I’m sorry, Emma. God knows I should have been more sensitive, after my own experiences. I just got carried away with finally getting somewhere.’
‘I know. But I keep thinking about you and your birthmother. What if Ann’s like that?’
‘Emma, I keep telling you: what if she isn’t? Of course it’s natural to be apprehensive, but you’ve got to be prepared for anything. She might be an alcoholic, or a criminal, or mentally ill – you just have no way of knowing until you find her. At least this Ann is responsible enough to hold down a job at the Post Office, so she can’t be a complete loser.’
‘You’re right. Maybe if I draw a blank with all the others, I’ll come back here and try again another time,’ I sniffed, taking off my glasses and drying my eyes.
‘Well, up to you, of course. Although I do think that it would be best to rule her out altogether, otherwise you’ll always be wondering.’
‘I know. Just… not today, OK? I feel like such a failure, running away like this when we’re potentially so close, but I can’t face it.’
‘Emma, you aren’t a failure. Don’t be daft. It’s a very traumatic thing you’re doing – take all the time you need. We’ll try the others first, and then take a view on coming back here later, OK?’
I nodded miserably. As I pulled away, I looked back at number seven in my rearview mirror , hoping against hope that I’d never have to see it again. A small canary-coloured fledgling was standing disconsolately in the road, gazing after my retreating car.
‘Damn,’ said Mack. ‘I should’ve filmed all that.’
‘Too late,’ I replied. Too late.
Chapter 21
I felt depressed after the abortive trip to Harlesden. Despite Mack’s reassurances that my concerns were completely natural, I couldn’t stop feeling ashamed of my negative feelings about the house and its putative occupant. Every time I tried to think positively, I saw the muscular weeds forcing their way up between the paving stones on Ann Paramor’s front path, and the scabrous moulting once-white pebbledash on the house’s exterior, grey and baggy like elderly underwear, and it made me feel sick. Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps it was better never to know. There would be no shame in giving up. I could stop the filming, and Stella would never find out.
I was missing Gavin even more than ever, too. I felt a teenager’s irrational compulsion to hear the ring of the phone in his flat; to know that something of my own volition, even as trivial a thing as a telephone’s ring, was once more impacting on his life.
Stella wasn’t helping, tripping around the flat in huge clunky wedges and a skintight dress, preparing for another Saturday night out. She was sitting at the kitchen table, peering into a compact, applying make-up with the painstaking application of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel.
‘Are you OK, Em?’ she said, plucking a rogue hair out of her eyebrow. ‘You’re biting your fingers.’
I looked down at my hands. I was literally tearing at the skin around my cuticles, shredding it with my teeth even as I was aware of the white pain which would follow later, after the blood had stopped flowing.
‘No. I’m fed up. I want to see Gav.’
I wondered what Gavin was doing tonight. It would probably be one of four options: beer n’takeaway in front of the telly; night out with the lads; or unidentified dodgy dealings with unnamed contacts in out-of-the-way places, probably underneath railway arches or round the back of empty shopping precincts. Or there was a worse possibility: out with new girlfriend. I didn’t even want to think about that one.
It occurred to me that none of the first three options made him sound like a particularly good catch, and then found myself leaping to his defence. Ridiculous – defending him against my own charges…
‘So do you?’
I hadn’t even noticed that Stella was talking to me. ‘Do I what?’
‘Want to come to this party with me and Suzanne?’
Here we go again, I thought. Younger sister takes pity on sad, Bridget-Jonesesque spinster. I couldn’t think why she was asking me, after our last fiasco at the pub.
‘I don’t think so, thanks. I fancy a night in watching TV.’
Stella cackled like Cruella de Vil. ‘What, another one? There’s nothing worth watching tonight.’
‘Yes there is, actually. There’s a really interesting documentary on about the rise of Nazism.’
Stella laughed again, thinking I was being sarcastic. I was annoyed.
‘I’m serious, Stella. I’m sick of watching these stupid vacuous reality TV things, or unfunny sitcoms. We should both watch more educational television. I mean, what do we ever talk about, except blokes, pop music, last night’s crap TV, or what shopping we need to get?’
Stella rolled her sparkly eyes at me. ‘Emma, I’m nineteen. I don’t care about politics or history. I just want to have a good time.’
‘Well, I’m thirty, and I do care,’ I said, picking a vase of dead freesias off the window sill and dumping them in the kitchen bin. They’d been there so long that the water had evaporated and the petals turned crispy and fragile, empty like discarded snakeskin.
‘I want to be someone who has opinions. I want to be able to make informed decisions about things other than how many boob jobs Posh Spice has had.’
‘OK then, you should definitely come to this party. It’s at Yehudi’s house, you know, my art tutor, so there’ll be lots of mature people there. Probably masses of single, intelligent men who you can talk about Nazism to until you’re blue in the face.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, relenting slightly. It did sound better than the usual brain-dead student gatherings Stella attended. I washed out the vase and left it upside down on the draining board.
‘It’s entirely up to you, Em. I’m not going to beg.’
‘Where is it, and how are you getting there?’
‘Barnes. We were going to cab it; but if you’re coming, then it would make sense for you to drive, wouldn’t it?’
‘What if I want to drink?’
‘Oh go on, Emma, please? It’ll cost us a fortune in cab fares otherwise.’
‘I thought you said you weren’t going to beg.’
I took them to the party. I suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of staying in, yet again waiting for the phone not to ring. And to be honest, I hadn’t really fancied the documentary. Plus, I had a new dress that I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to wear, and my cosmetics were in danger of drying up and fossilising if I didn’t give them an outing soon. Even putting on lipstick and lip-liner felt like an adventure.
After some very militant navigation from Stella in the passenger seat, I found a parking place at the end of the road and briefly scrutinised my appearance in the rear-view mirror. Next to Suzanne, with her beautiful glossy brown skin and doe eyes, and Stella’s gorgeous face and cool hair, I felt distinctly old-haggish, despite them both sitting up and whistling when I emerged from my bedroom in my new Jigsaw dress. It was the element of surprise to the whistle which I didn’t like; sort of, wow, for an ancient person, you scrub up quite well…. But I supposed that Suzanne had deigned to ask me where I got my eyeshadow from, and had looked impressed when I told her it was Urban Decay. So maybe I was overblowing this OAP trip. In fairness, I was only thirty, for God’s sake, not fifty.
They were both still grumbling in anticipation, with the blithe confidence of teenagers: ‘And it’s creepy old Yankee Yehudi, too - not even someone sexy like Collin or Scott. Oh well, let’s make the most of it. Free booze and maybe some spliff,
and he might even give us a better mark in our life class.’
‘Yeah – but we’ll probably have to listen to him banging on about California all night. If he loves it so much, why doesn’t he just go home? It’s not like he needs the money, teaching life drawing. He’s loaded already.’
‘Come on, let’s get it over with.’
The three of us marched into the house through the open front door, me trailing marginally behind, and out the other side on to a large patio in the garden, where the party was in full swing.
‘Oh my God,’ whispered Stella in my ear, ‘it’s even worse than I knew it would be.’
‘What do you mean? You just spent half an hour convincing me it was going to be a fantastic party!’
‘Well, you wouldn’t have come otherwise, would you? Look, he’s got a vodka luge, and people are queuing up for it – in this weather! They’ll freeze.’
She pointed towards the far corner of the garden, where a specially built wooden frame supported an enormous block of ice. Behind the frame was a step-ladder, on which Yehudi was perilously perched, pouring something, presumably vodka, down a chute carved in the ice. At the end stood a woman, scantily-dressed in a worn t-shirt and a hippy skirt with bells hanging off it, straggly blue streaks in her hair, her head tilted back and her mouth wide open to receive the flow of interestingly-chilled alcohol.
Three or four small children stood around, fascinated at the proceedings. One little boy was clutching a toy car, his fingers almost visibly itching to put it at the top of the luge and let it go skidding down his very own mini bob-sleigh run.
‘Blimey, it must have cost him a fortune to get that ice delivered. What a poser. It might be quite a cool thing to have – if the temperature was 80 degrees. That woman’ll catch her death.’ Suzanne disgustedly helped herself to a cup of wine from a bottle open on the table, and poured one for Stella and me too.
Stella tittered. ‘Yehudi’s got confused, he thinks he’s in Venice Beach, not Barnes. Is this really what Americans do at Thanksgiving parties?’
The woman who had just drank from the luge went around to the stepladder, patted Yehudi’s bottom, and called out something to her friends, an assortment of female hippies. They all laughed as they whirled and shook their hair to a James Brown CD which blared from a boombox on the patio. I was immoderately relieved to see that there were indeed plenty of people there older than me.
‘Do you think that’s Yehudi’s girlfriend?’ Stella asked Suzanne.
‘I doubt it – I thought he liked his women young and fresh, not old and wrinkly like that one. Look at her, she’s got to be the wrong side of forty.’
They shuddered with horror at the mere idea of someone that old having a sex life. Then Yehudi spotted us from his vantage point atop the stepladder and, gesturing to someone else to take his place, he jumped down and rushed across to greet us.
‘Suzanne! Stella! Great to see you girls, so glad you could make it!’ He turned to me. ‘And you must be? Hmm? Oh, right, Emma. Lovely to meet you,’ and leaned over and kissed my hand ostentatiously. I had a simultaneous urge to slap away his shiny bald head, and to wipe my hand on my dress, but I managed instead to smile, gamely.
‘Not many of you young folk here, but hey, early days yet. We got turkey burgers and corn on the barbecue over there, and pecan pie for dessert, so go help yourselves. I see you found the wine - sodas in the kitchen if you want them. What do you think of the luge – isn’t it just the coolest thing you ever saw? I want you kids to see that us Americans really know how to throw a party!’
Oh well, I thought. At least someone believed I still fell into the category of ‘kid’.
He hared off again to put a new tape in the ghetto blaster, and presently the intro to Parliament’s Up for the Down Stroke rang out around the yard. Suzanne and Stella looked at one another and made faces.
‘Did you see what he was wearing? That hideous tanktop, and light tan Timberlands - so ‘95, darling… For someone who teaches on a fashion course, you’d think he’d have better taste. Not to mention his hippy friends.’
They spent a happy ten minutes doing such a good impersonation of the Fashion Police that I could practically see the blue lights flashing around them, and the riot gear and truncheons replacing their party dresses. I identified more with the way that Yehudi and the hippies were dressed than with Stella and Suzanne’s outrageous garb, so kept quiet. Thankfully, they were eventually interrupted by a knock on the kitchen window.
‘Oh look, there’s Kevin and Elias. Thank God, someone else made it. Come on, Emma, we’ll introduce you.’We traipsed into the kitchen, where huge bottles of generic-brand supermarket pop in lurid fizzy hues jostled for every available inch of counter space, with 40-packs of cheap toilet paper, its dull scratchy off-whiteness providing a welcome break from the hectic sodas. Kevin and Elias, a very obviously gay couple, were standing staring out the window in abject queeny horror at the proceedings. A man and a woman sat at the kitchen table, both rolling joints, and with a sinking heart I recognised the man as Charlie the Creep.
‘Hi! What a relief to see you. Happy Thanksgiving - as if we care. And what the hell is going on in the garden- why is Yehudi up a ladder? Is he making an ice sculpture?’
Stella and Suzanne kissed their classmates. ‘Vodka luge, dude,’ said Suzanne. ‘You mean you’ve never seen one before? Rumour has it that they were all the rage in ‘93 on the Beach. We’re supposed to be witnessing how the Californians throw a party.’ She made a pouting face, and swigged the rest of her plastic cup of wine.
I cleared my throat conspicuously, making a face at Stella. Normally I’d have lurked shyly until introduced, but with this teenage rabble I was more or less beyond caring.
‘Oh, sorry, Em. Everyone, this is my sister Emma.’
Elias and Kevin rushed over and shook hands with me. ‘Oh my God, Kev,’ said Elias. ‘Just look at those eyelashes!’
‘Aren’t they to die for?’ Kevin agreed, and I annoyed myself by blushing.
Charlie raised his head and nodded at me. ‘We met before, didn’t we,’ he said, a comment, not a question, looking as uninterested as he had on the first occasion.‘So where’s Lawrence and Dan tonight? Are they coming?’ Stella peered out of the window, trying to spot them in the garden, and I could see Suzanne holding her breath in anticipation at the mention of Dan’s name.
‘No, I heard they were going to see Limp Bizkit in concert, ’ said Elias.
Suzanne looked bereft, and helped herself to another drink. ‘I love Limp Bizkit,’ she said, sadly.
I leaned my back against the kitchen counter and watched Charlie at work on his joint. He was enormous, bigger than I remembered, perched gingerly on the small kitchen chair as though it were made of matchsticks. He had very short cropped black hair and a charcoal five o’clock shadow. When he opened his mouth to speak, his voice was so low that it almost made the floorboards vibrate. I supposed he was actually pretty handsome, if you liked that kind of thing. But he gave me the creeps, without a doubt. There was something shifty about his eyes.
Charlie twisted the end of the joint, lit it, and inhaled with a brief fierce crackle of flame and paper. He took a couple more drags then passed it to the dark-haired girl next to him, who so far had not spoken.
I sat down at the table next to her. ‘Hi, I’m Emma. Are you Charlie’s girlfriend?’
Shaking her head and laughing, the girl took several hefty sucks of the joint, having to choke back a coughing fit of undignified yelping little tremours which made her shoulders quake. When she could breathe once more, she said, ‘Ugh, no! He’s my brother.’
I wasn’t surprised that she wasn’t his girlfriend; not with the way he stared at Stella. The girl didn’t volunteer her own name, nor pass me the joint. Instead I saw it head around in Stella’s direction. Stella took a couple of surreptitious drags, peering at me from beneath her sparkly eyelids. Of course I knew she partook, but I didn’t particularly like to witness it.<
br />
‘What’s Yehudi doing with all these bottles of fizzy drink?’asked Suzanne. ‘Grape, lemon-lime, cherry - who drinks this stuff?’
Charlie looked behind him at the regimented stacks of white toilet paper.
‘I shouldn’t think we’ll get through that lot, either - not unless the turkey burgers are off.’
His pronunciation of ‘off’ sounded like ‘orf’. Prat, I thought. But Stella was laughing like he’d said something incredibly funny. She already looked stoned.
I decided I’d better leave them alone, before I said something I regretted. It was Stella’s life. She was on her own path, I reminded myself. It was nothing to do with me.
Chapter 22
I stepped back out into the garden and headed straight for the bonfire, to keep the cold November chill out of my bones. It felt strange, to have a hot front and cold back, but I was enjoying the feeling of my cheeks reddening and my outspread hands toasting in the heat.
Charlie’s sister had also come into the garden, where I spotted her in earnest conversation with the women hippies, looking like an anthropologist trying to communicate with a hitherto-undiscovered tribe. Shifting from foot to foot, I surreptitiously checked out the talent.
There was none. Apart from the students in the kitchen, all the men were like Yehudi - over forty-five and ‘loosely woven’, as Mum would have said. They all seemed to have too much facial hair, smoked roll-ups, and were indeed talking about earnest subjects: devolution, solar energy, Wittgenstein. Despite what I’d said to Stella earlier, I felt an overwhelming desire to instigate a conversation about whether Tom Cruise was gay or not. Perhaps I just didn’t have it in me to become an intellectual.
I felt another pang for Gavin, who had two modes of conversation: vacuous ramblings on topics about which he actually knew very little, or lengthy diatribes about people who’d ripped him off. Both modes were at least always entertaining, even if often extremely light on fact.
