Are You My Mother?

by Louise Voss

  I stayed with them for a while, gradually lulled by the room’s tranquil haze, even relenting enough to accept several tokes of the next joint being passed around. It was ages since I last smoked – with Gavin, of course. We used to like to smoke before having sex. Mmmn, I thought longingly, wishing that he wasn’t so on my mind.

  Charlie’s gentle chords played over a myriad of muttered secrets and one or two lies. The accumulation of cigarette ends and flimsy smoked joints floating in the dregs of beer cups were the only indications of the hours passing. I put my elbows on the table and eavesdropped shamelessly on all the stoner conversations.

  Charlie told Stella that his sister Lucy was a lesbian, and that ‘Mummy was furious’ when she found out. So that was her name. Good for Lucy, I thought, feeling faintly affronted that she hadn’t tried to chat me up.

  Suzanne told Stella that she had gone off men and was thinking about becoming a lesbian – Dan hadn’t rung her in five days.

  Stella told Charlie that our parents had both been killed in a car crash ten years ago, which made me wince. But Charlie didn’t even look over at me. I felt invisible; that encroaching older-woman invisibility which descended like a fog on all but the most stunning 30-somethings. Heads no longer turned, builders no longer whistled, eyes were no longer opened wide with startled pleasure at your approach. I didn’t count Hugo.

  Kevin told Elias that he wanted to marry him when they graduated; then Elias told Kevin that he wanted to marry him too. I could tell he was lying.

  Stella told Suzanne that I had led a raving flasher off the tube train, but Suzanne didn’t seem very interested. She replied by telling Stella that her mother worked on the Graham Norton show, and I wondered if this was a complete non sequitur, or if there was some connection of which I wasn’t aware.

  Then Charlie asked Stella if she’d like to come on a date with him. Dinner or something. Stella instantly forgot about Suzanne’s mum and Graham Norton, and said she would. Charlie celebrated by putting down the guitar and stroking Stella’s breast, and I felt like picking up Suzanne’s lighter and setting fire to the hairs in his nose.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I heard him whisper in her ear. Stella’s face lit up, in the guilty, furtive way it always did when she was plotting something evil. Again, I feared for her. As they stood, unsteadily, I pulled her aside.

  ‘Please be careful, Stell,’ I said in a low voice, willing her to take in what I was saying. Talk to the hand cos the face ain’t listening was a college catchphrase of hers and Suzanne’s; the traffic policeman’s palm pushed out in a stop sign, the head flashily turned away. As I spoke to her, I caught both her hands in my own so that her face had to listen to me. ‘It’s important, Stella. Please. Don’t be long. I’m going to have a coffee then I think we should go home, OK?’

  Stella rolled her eyes at me. ‘I’ll be fine. Chill out. We’re just going for a walk, that’s all.’

  I looked to Suzanne for support, but she had fallen asleep, her breath misting up the mahogany table surface, making its shiny depths shallow again. When I turned back, Stella and Charlie had gone.

  I drank three cups of black coffee and succeeded in chasing almost all the webby remnants of the smoke from my head; out from behind my eyes, out of my fillings, sluiced from underneath my tongue, even the wisps which had stuck in the crevices of my brain were dislodged. With each fresh cup I looked at my watch. Eventually my head was clear, but fifty-five minutes had passed and there was still no sign of Stella or Charlie.

  Suzanne was still asleep. Elias and Kevin were kissing in a corner of the room, perched uncomfortably on one of Yehudi’s nasty dining chairs; black polished wood so shiny it appeared plastic, and a faux-tapestry seat. I identified Kevin’s shoulder from the melee of tangled limbs, and tapped him on it.

  ‘Whose car did you come in?’ I demanded.

  Kevin raised his head about an inch, a delicate strand of spit running from his mouth to Elias’s.

  ‘Charlie’s.’ The strand popped and vanished, and he looked away from me.

  I tapped him again, more of a poke this time. ‘It’s important. Stella’s not back. What does the car look like, and where did you park?’

  ‘It’s a red GTi. End of the road. Want us to come and help you find her?’

  ‘No, don’t worry. I’ll just go and have a wander. They’re probably snogging on the back seat. Thanks.’

  I came down the front steps into the cold November night, flattened party sounds rising above the roof behind me. It felt good to be out in the crisp frosty air after the cloying warmth of the smoky dining room. Yehudi’s house was in the middle of the street, but I couldn’t see a red GTi in either direction. Tutting, I strolled down to one end of the road, then back to the other. No red cars at all, no Stella. I decided that Charlie must have taken her off for a drive, and hoped fervently he hadn’t taken her home without telling anyone. I was by now really ready to leave, and didn’t want to be stuck at Yehudi’s after everyone else had gone, waiting for Stella to potentially not reappear at all.

  As I turned back towards the party, I made out a dark amorphous shape by the rear wheel of my own car. It moved, and I stopped, uncertainly. I squinted through the darkness, trying to work out what it was - a large dog, perhaps. Then it moved again, and I heard a muffled moan. I ran forward as Stella lifted her head very slowly and painfully from between her knees, a vast heavy bowling-ball head, swaying and out of proportion with her body like a baby who couldn’t yet sit up. There was blood coming out of her mouth, and one eye was beginning to squeeze shut, blackening in its socket, like the ghost Stella and I had both suspected she already was.

  Chapter 23

  I woke early the next morning, with an awful pressing feeling of doom hanging over me as soon as I struggled into consciousness; the sort of feeling when you knew something horrible had happened, but couldn’t immediately think what.

  Then I remembered Stella, and the way her swollen eyes had looked as blank as a switched-off television when I ‘d helped her into bed the previous night. She hadn’t spoken a word all the way home, to me or to Suzanne; just mutely and stubbornly shaking her head whenever I said she should go to the police. I still didn’t know exactly what Charlie had done to her.

  Suzanne had stayed for a drink with me, crying, saying how she never had trusted him, he had a really bad reputation, he’d been in trouble with college before; until eventually I had to bundle her home in a minicab, her eyes as raccoon-black as Stella’s but with smudged mascara, not violence. It was all I could do to prevent myself shouting at her, ‘How could you let her go off with him if you knew that?’

  Going back to sleep was out of the question, even at seven a.m. on a Sunday. I got up, dressed, and pottered around the flat, which was bowing with a leaden, uncomfortable silence, not the usual easy peace of early morning. I dismissed it as my own stress from the trauma of Stella’s injuries, and started to make myself some toast, deciding not to try and wake her. But then I began to worry that she wasn’t asleep at all, but lying in a coma with head injuries, or worse. I should’ve insisted on taking her to Casualty last night, I fretted.

  I peered around her bedroom door, squinting through the gloom at the faint bump in the bedclothes. Her breathing, thankfully, was regular, but even with her hair covering her face, I could see that her cheek wasn’t the shape it was supposed to be. It was too dark to make out the bruises.

  ‘Stell?’ I whispered tentatively, kneeling down beside her. ‘Are you OK?’

  She groaned and shrugged my hand off her shoulder. ‘Leave me alone,’ she muttered thickly.

  ‘It’s OK. It’s early. Go back to sleep. I just wanted to check on you.’

  Stella made another sound, an exasperated sort of sigh, and pulled the bedclothes over her head.

  The hours until she woke again seemed to last forever. I couldn’t even face playing the recorder – in fact, I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I closed the kitchen door behind me and bega
n to clean: surfaces, floor, hob, extractor, even the oven. I put yellow rubber gloves on my hands and Lou Reed’s Transformer on the boombox, and got down to work. But I had to skip over track three, ‘Perfect Day’, because it was so far from being a perfect day that bile rose in my throat and tears to my eyes as I scrubbed and squirted and wiped and polished. I knew I’d never again be able to think of the song’s simple piano introduction without feeling the same frustrated pain, and the harsh scent of cleaning fluid; not just in my nostrils and my throat but also, synaesthesically, yellow and abrasive under my skin, like hate. Like fury.

  I emerged from a gleaming kitchen two hours later, panting and exhausted, my lower back aching, but intending to start on the living room next. Stella’s door was still closed, and I was just tiptoeing past when I heard a small sound from my own bedroom. It sounded suspiciously like a mouse, and I was terrified of mice. Perhaps it would leave quietly and a confrontation would never be necessary.

  There had been a mouse in the health centre’s waiting room once; it ate through a stack of envelopes and some herbal cough sweets in Joanne‘s desk drawer, and left little black turds all over the headed paper. My eyes suddenly filled with tears at the thought that Charlie had hurt Stella, and all I was worrying about was a stupid mouse. But then I heard it again, a shuffley, quiet noise, not, in fact, like the sound that any type of small vermin would make.

  I gulped, and wondered if I should phone Mack, or the police; but the thought of a policeman turning up to rescue us from what was potentially a mouse was too humiliating. Still, maybe if a policeman were actually there I could persuade Stella to file a complaint against Charlie. I crept down the hall. Again I thought that there was something odd about the silence in the flat. Something seemed to be missing.

  Still with my rubber gloves on, and armed with a bottle of antibacterial spray which I held out in front of me like a weapon, I tiptoed cautiously into my room. It was empty, and momentarily silent until suddenly, from my walk-in wardrobe, came the unmistakable sound of floodgate-opening, gasping sobs. For a second I didn’t even think it was Stella, because Stella hardly ever cried. Even under the current circumstances, it was more likely that a stranger had broken into the flat for the sole purpose of having a good cry in my bedroom, than Stella. I put it down to the amount of tears she’d shed when our parents died – it was as if she’d approached adulthood like something desiccated and hollow, a plant needing hydration. I hadn’t seen her cry, properly, since 1998 when she fell down the escalator in Shepherd’s Bush Station, hungover, and tore a ligament in her ankle so badly that it took a chunk of bone with it.

  I ran over to the cupboard and wrenched open the door. That cupboard always used to be our repository of junk, until I decided that I’d really like a place of my own to meditate in. I’d commandeered the vegetable rack from the kitchen, and installed a small brass Buddha on one of its onion-flaky shelves. The cupboard was huge, and so with an old rug on the floor, and candles and incense perched on either side of the Buddha, it made a great meditation space – although I had to confess, I’d only actually meditated in there twice. Stella used it more often, with ‘meditation’ being a euphemism for the smoking of a surreptitious joint. She thought I didn’t know.

  Gradually, due to a general lack of storage space, the erstwhile occupants of the wardrobe - namely the ironing board, iron, a suitcase full of winter clothes, and some tacky framed posters left by the flat’s previous owner - had crept back in again, one by one, jostling for space with the spiritual paraphernalia. Contemplative it wasn’t.

  Stella was crouched on the rug, squeezed in between the vegetable rack and the suitcase, howling like a baby. I dropped the cleaning stuff, yanked off my gloves with a rubbery plop, and pulled her out, sending the ironing board crashing down on both of us. I threw it aside as though it was made of balsa wood in my haste to get to her.

  ‘Oh Stell, my baby. Tell me what he did to you... I’m calling the police. We should’ve gone to the police last night - oh my God…’

  Stella crawled into my arms and bawled without restraint, eyes and nose running, leaving a wet stigmata of grief on my shoulder. I was speechless with horror at the daytime sight of her face and arms, now that the cuts and scratches had swollen and the bruises purpled. She looked far worse than she had the night before.

  ‘Emma, it really hurts,’ she sobbed. ‘My face is throbbing. I’ve got such a headache.’

  I swallowed, wondering what else hurt her. ‘Stell, you have to tell me. Did he – ‘

  She looked away, but answered. ‘No. He didn’t…quite…rape me.’

  I exhaled with both relief and renewed terror at what that might mean.

  ‘OK. You don’t have to tell me anything else yet, if you don’t want to. Come on, I’ll run you a bath, make you a cup of tea and get you some Neurofen. I think I should call the doctor.’

  ‘No! It’s just a headache. Please, don’t, Emma. Just get me some painkillers.’

  I led her by the hand, compliant as a child, into the bathroom where she stood vacantly on the bathmat, waiting as I ran her a huge bubbly bath. She looked so forlorn and small, still in the old t-shirt of Dad’s which she wore in bed, her shoulders shaking with sobs.

  ‘Hop in, and I’ll get the tea.’

  ‘And the Neurofen,’ she said, weakly stripping off the t-shirt and climbing into the bath.

  I ran into the kitchen, put on the kettle, and ransacked the drawer where we usually kept the painkillers. But there was nothing in there except the usual miscellany which ended up in kitchen drawers: books of matches, odd clothes pegs, plastic ice-lolly moulds, guarantees from various kitchen appliances. No Neurofen; not even an aspirin. I raced back to the bathroom.

  ‘We’re out of Neuros. Shall I nip down to the shop for you?’

  Stella nodded once, her chin dipping in and out of the deep water as she lay motionless. I retreated, grabbed my bag and keys, flicked the kettle on, and left the flat.

  It was on the stairs that I realised what was different about the silence that morning. It wasn’t only a manifestation of the dark moods and pain inside the flat – something was actually, physically missing: the persistent warble of Percy’s television.

  Percy always had his TV on. He was an early bird, and he switched it on as soon as he woke up, usually at six or seven in the morning, and always at window-rattling volume. At first Stella and I used to complain, shoving large-lettered but polite notes underneath his door, but after a while we just got used to Richard and Judy bellowing at one another as our morning wake-up calls. Percy did turn the sound down a bit when he received the notes, but after a few minutes he’d forget, and crank it back up again.

  I stood outside his door, concerned and dithering. This was serious enough to warrant further investigation; but Stella was up there, in pain, in the bath. I decided not to do anything until I’d been to the shop for the painkillers – after all, I might spot Percy on the way out, in his habitual position, scratching and mumbling on the doorstep downstairs, or on his daily ramble along the terrace and back again. Although, that said, he usually left his door open when he went out, and it was firmly closed.

  I went down to the main front door and checked around, but there was no sign of him, and his two milk bottles were sitting unclaimed on the doorstep. Now I was seriously worried.

  ‘Bugger you, Percy,’ I muttered. ‘Don’t do this to me, not today.’

  He definitely wasn’t away or anything – as if he ever went on holiday! - because I’d been aware of him the previous night, thumping around, slamming doors. When I’d gone to the loo after putting Stella to bed and seeing Suzanne off, I ‘d heard a muffled chuntering through the floorboards as Percy went into his own bathroom, directly underneath. Straining my ears to hear better, I’d identified the clunk of a heavy cistern lid being lifted and propped against the wall. An echoey old voice had floated up, and I’d overheard the words, ‘Ello, ballcock! How’re you doing then?’ The lid crashed back down
and Percy had stomped out of the bathroom, evidently satisfied by his small talk with the plumbing. Even in the midst of the horror of that night, it had almost made me smile.

  I dashed to the Narayan Grocery, purchased a packet of Neurofen and some fresh orange juice, and hurried back to the house. On the way up, I listened again at Percy’s door, and again there was nothing but hollow silence. I knocked, loudly and fruitlessly, for a long time, bearing in mind Percy’s deafness. Still nothing. We had a key to his flat, which his Age Concern lady asked if we could keep for when Percy locked himself out or lost his own key – a regular occurrence – and so, with a sinking heart, I realised I was going to have to go in.

  I traipsed back up to our own flat, made Stella a cup of tea, and took it into her with the pills and a glass of water. She was lying completely still in the bath, her eyes shut, furrows of pain corrugating her usually-smooth forehead. Her hair snaked across the surface of the water, and she looked like the Lady of the Lake - if said Lady had been in a nasty scrap.

  ‘Take these,’ I said, popping three Neurofens out for her and laying them on the end of the bath next to the glass of water. ‘Your tea’s down here on the floor. Will you be all right for five minutes? Percy’s TV isn’t on and he didn’t answer the door. I’m worried about him.’

  Stella dipped her chin in the water again, in a martyred sort of way, which I took as an affirmation.

  ‘Sorry, Stell. I won’t be long.’

  But just as I was about to go out of the door, she said, in the faintest of ghost voices, ‘Wait, please. Just a minute. I want to tell you what happened first.’

  I sat down on the floor, pressing my palm against the unfeeling smooth white pedestal of the basin for support while Stella began to speak, the low flat monotone of her voice rendered even more eerie by the bathroom’s acoustics. I hoped Percy was OK, that he could hang on, but I couldn’t walk out on Stella until she was finished.