by Louise Voss
But Mack had handed me four ten pound notes. One was crisp and fresh, but the others were old and softly wrinkled, reminding me of the scene in Starbucks, with the tramp’s horny fingernails under the ten pounds I gave him. It seemed like years ago, although it was only a few months. I wondered how he was doing, and if the money had gone on alcohol and fags, or sustenance and shelter. I felt newly grateful to him for spurring me into changing my life.
I handed over the forty pounds and the wide-eyed cashier let us all through the turnstile.
‘BBC film crew,’ said Stella smugly.
It was incredible and frankly, ridiculous, how many people gawped at Stella and I, just because we were being followed by a camera and a boom mike. The crowds parted to let us through at every turn – which was, admittedly, quite handy in the hippy crush.
Stella was basking in the attention, hamming it up to the maximum and swanning about like a true luvvie. I was glad she was there, since it meant that less of the attention was consequently focused on me, although I was attracting a lot of stares too, in the outrageous electric-blue fake-fur jacket she’d designed. I felt like a Furby. Stella herself was resplendent in a very Eighties tartan blouson affair - so, on reflection, perhaps the reason people were staring at us wasn’t so much to do with the film crew at all…
A barrage of sound and activity greeted us when we entered the hall, a sort of spiritual indoor marketplace. There was something almost biblical about the hubbub and strange smells in the air, perhaps due to the baggy hessian shirts many of the men were wearing, and the sound of a whiny snake-charming instrument floating above the heads of the nirvana-seeking punters. A middle-aged half-naked belly-dancer wobbled her way past us through the crowds, accompanied by a dark skinny man who was the source of the whinging trumpet.
The belly-dancer’s stomach fat jiggled and undulated, swirling softly like kneaded pizza-dough. The bottoms of her heavy breasts were escaping from underneath her spangly bra-top, and a couple of wiry pubic hairs were clearly visible above the silk loon pants which cinched her hips, cutting hard into the fleshy love-handles.
Stella stared, blinking with horror. ‘That’, she said, too loudly, to camera, ‘is unacceptable.’
I had a sudden irrational flash of panic that this woman, cavorting in pyjama bottoms with her tummy doing impressions of jelly on a trampoline, might be Ann Paramor. Shaking my head to dispel the notion, I consulted the floor plan and exhibitors’ guide to try and figure out where Ann might be. But the stands were listed by company only, and I couldn’t see any mention of her name.
‘Come on,’ I said to Mack, a lot more bravely than I felt. ‘We’re just going to have to take it stand by stand.’ My knees were shaking.
We plunged into the melee and began walking up and down each aisle, staring at and then dismissing the occupants of each stand, despite their breezy sales pitch and welcoming New Age smiles. None of them resembled me in any way.
After forty minutes, my head was reeling with new and strange words, and images of bizarre holistic gadgets and therapies that no well-informed 21st century-dweller should live without. We could, had we so wished, have had a Mineral Analysis of our hands, our toes read, our auras photographed, our Third Eyes opened, our irises diagnosed, or our PMT Ayurvedically cured.
‘I’m knackered,’ whined Stella. ‘Look, there’s a Yogurt Shoppe, can we go and sit down please?’
We adjourned to a plastic table and chairs in the Holistic Vegetarian Food court, and Stella and I slumped down over some reassuringly normal frozen yogurt, while Mack continued to film. I was beginning to have a niggling sensation in my chest that perhaps Ann Paramor wasn’t exhibiting after all, but I wasn’t sure if this possibility made me feel worse or better.
‘Stella, I’m sorry, but I have to take off this jacket,’ I said, sliding out of it. ‘I’m absolutely boiling. Do you think there’s a cloakroom here?’ I hung it on the back of my chair and fanned my hot face with a paper napkin.
‘Well, all right then; if you must’ she said reluctantly. ‘Hey, what’s Hawaiian Tuna Massage, do you suppose?’ She squinted at a sign above a nearby stand. ‘Apparently it creates profound states of transformation and self-love.’
Mack panned the camera across to the sign, and back to us again.
‘What do you reckon, Em? Maybe women in grass skirts rub you down with tuna steaks while chanting Om. God, we’ve only been here an hour, and I’m already fed up with all these extravagant claims to the path of True Consciousness or Knowledge or Enlightenment, or whatever. You’re an aromatherapist, you know all about all this hippy shit, but it doesn’t do anything for me.’
I looked more closely at the sign. ‘It’s not tuna, it’s huna. That curly writing is confusing. And anyway, even I think half this stuff is rubbish. Don’t diss it all, though, Stella. A lot of these therapies have been around for thousands of years… Look, can we get on with the business in hand, please? The suspense is killing me. I don’t think she’s here – surely we’d have seen her by now.’
‘OK. Don’t worry, we’ll find her. We haven’t looked at all the stands yet. And even if her name’s not on her stand, there’s bound to be someone we can ask.’
I managed a smile at Stella’s laboured sympathy, and we set off again, me with an armful of synthetic blue fur jacket, Mack and Katrina following silently along behind. I noticed that Mack seemed to be filming rather more shots of Stella’s bottom than I felt was strictly relevant to the project, but I was at least grateful that he’d stopped banging on about how gorgeous she was, and if she might possibly be interested in him.
We trawled down two more aisles, and Stella had to be restrained from buying - with my money - a pair of ‘Chi-Pants’ solely because of their advertising pitch: ‘Chi-Pants replace the cross-seam crotch with a gusset. They give room to move and room to...be’. I, in the meantime, was seriously tempted to sign up for a UFO Abductee Probability Measurement Test - a confidential 388 question test revealing High or Low Probability with personal recovery package. I thought that it might explain a lot.
Eventually we had zigzagged up and down all the aisles except the final one, nearest the big stage at the end of the room.
‘She’s got to be down here somewhere. I’ll meet you back at her stand if you find her, or by the stage if you don’t, OK? I’m dying for the loo. Don’t want to be meeting your Mum with a full bladder, now do I?’ Stella disappeared towards a sign saying ‘Toilets’.
Typical, I thought. Deserting me when I need her most. I took a deep breath and headed down the final aisle.
Halfway along on the left, I spotted the name Ann Paramor on a banner above a stall. A plump red-haired woman stood with her back to me. Unable to continue, I paused by a stand displaying Real Mirrors. ‘See yourself as others see you!’ said the blurb on the banner above the table. ‘Our mirrors don’t reverse your image, so you see your true reflection.’ I looked first at the three mirrors hanging in front of me, before peering at myself in them. They acted as a useful screen between me and Holistic Mother. I generally disliked my reflection, and had a sudden stab of hope that a Real Mirror would show me that, in fact, I was a lot more beautiful than all the other normal mirrors in the world had always led me to believe.
I slowly raised my eyes to meet myself as I really was. But hope faded, to be replaced by a sludgy disappointment - if anything, I thought I looked far less attractive than I’d always assumed myself to be. How could I ever have thought I was pretty? Lank dark hair, pale skin, too many wrinkles... I stared again, this time trying to look less critically at myself, focussing on my nice curvy lips and large brown eyes behind my oblong glasses. Better. Not great, but better.
I took off my glasses and moved my face right up close to the mirror, trying to re-create the feeling I once had when stoned, at a party Gavin took me to. I’d gone into the loo, had a pee, and was about to leave when my reflection had caught my attention in an entirely new way. It was as if I’d inhaled a whole new and
gorgeous me along with the puff of the joint; or as if a supermodel had switched places with me. I literally took my own breath away. Fascinated, I’d gaped at this beautiful creature with her neat nose, perfect eyebrows and chocolatey eyes. My chin was pointy and my cheekbones even pointier, and when I smiled – wow! I was magnificent. It was one of the best five minutes of my entire life. I still didn’t know whether that was how I really looked when I was twenty five, or whether my smoke-wreathed brain had created the image; a sort of reverse Frankenstein’s monster.
Sadly, the girl who now gazed back at me in the ‘real’ mirror seemed to have been weighed down by the frown marks between her eyes; her peachy skin a little dulled and coarsened by the intervening years and cumulative burdens of responsibility. Even my best assets, the eyelashes, just stuck straight ahead, stubbornly uncurled. If this Ann was my birthmother, I wished she could have seen me the way I looked in that old mirror at the party, and not how I looked in this one.
‘You look gorgeous, me darlin,’ said Mack, in an appalling Irish accent. I was mortified. I’d got so used to him following me around with a camera that I had actually forgotten he was there.
‘Oh, shut up,’ I said, blushing puce. ‘You won’t put that in the film, will you?’
He laughed and shook his head. ‘Do you think it’s her?’ he whispered, pointing at Ann.
‘Don’t know. Haven’t managed to see her properly yet.’
Taking a deep breath, I peeped around the mirror’s frame to see what Ann – assuming that it was indeed her - was doing. She was deep in conversation with a man with a ridiculous beard, plaited into a skinny grey braid secured at the end by a bead. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Mack and I watched as Ann placed a small cardboard pyramid, painted purple, on the customer’s outstretched palm. A look of wonder spread over the man’s face as Ann gestured to him to pass his free hand over the top of the model and back.
All over the stand were stacks of other pyramids, in different colours and sizes, most of them just flimsy-looking frames. Only one was completely three-dimensional, the largest of them all. This took pride of place on the table, and was a multi-tiered green affair, about two feet in diameter, faintly Mayan in appearance. On each of its corners and tiers sat crystals, different colours for each layer. The whole thing appealed to my innate sense of order.
More crystals were spread out over all the remaining available space, scattered loose or sitting colour-coded in trays. The banner over the top of the table read Love Lines Inc. (Ann Paramor; specialist in Pyramid Energy and Crystal Layouts).
How on earth did I feel about having a birthmother who made pyramids? I gazed spellbound at Holistic Mother’s back. At least we had alternative pursuits in common, after a fashion. That might explain how I’d ended up as an aromatherapist. It would be cool, actually, to have a mother who was, roughly, in the same sort of professional field. Perhaps we could even go into business together.
The implausibly-bearded man fished in his jeans’ pocket and handed Ann a crumpled note in exchange for the purple pyramid, which he placed gingerly in his rucksack as though it were a basket of eggs, and wandered off with a big smile. Ann began to tidy up the stack of pyramids she had disturbed to show the man, and I seized my opportunity.
Sidling round to the front of the stand, I picked up a blue pyramid frame, examining it with trembling hands as Mack lurked behind, surreptitiously filming through the gap between two of the ‘real’ mirrors.
As I slowly looked up, the woman turned and smiled at me. She looked nothing like me at all, although she was the right sort of age: late forties, early fifties. She had pale blue eyes, fleshy foundation-covered cheeks, and her nose was dotted with a smattering of splodgy freckles. Her lips, coated with a generously sticky layer of orangey lipstick, were thin, and her long auburn hair needed a good brushing.
‘Hello there. Can I help you with anything?’ I immediately recognised her deep voice and thick Yorkshire accent from her answer phone message.
Yes, I thought. Are you my mother? ‘Um,’ I said instead, tearing my gaze back to the pyramid. ‘Could you tell me what pyramid energy is, please?’
Ann’s face lit up and she launched into her set piece, a condensed lecture on ‘pyramid power for beginners’. As she had with the last customer, she selected a pyramid and rested it gently on my palm. I tried to stop my hands from shaking.
‘Now,’ she said, somewhat smugly, ‘Wave your other hand slowly across the top, palm down. What do you feel?’
I rotated my free hand in the air above the pyramid, feeling like a mystic about to peer into a crystal ball. I felt nothing, but was finding it very hard to concentrate.
‘Take your time,’ Ann said.
Suddenly I felt a warmth in the hand holding the pyramid. As I tried to concentrate on the sensation to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, a light upwards breeze tickled my other palm.
‘Wow!’ It was a relief to have something else to focus on. ‘I can feel cool air on my hand!’ It was a disconcerting feeling, and I couldn’t help shoving the pyramid back onto the table as if it were red hot. ‘How come? It’s made of cardboard.’
Ann looked at me indulgently, like a physics teacher who shows her class how to make iron filings dance to a magnet’s tune.
‘Polyboard, actually. But that’s what I’m saying: pyramid energy. The basic structure of the pyramid changes positive ions into negative - it’s the shape that matters, not what it’s constructed from. Some people feel it as heat given off, others feel a rush of air.’
‘Yeah, I felt heat in my other hand. So what can you do with them?’
‘What can’t you do with them, love, is more the question. In the kitchen, keep your fruit under a pyramid and it will stay fresh for twice as long. Milk will keep, without needing refrigeration. Cut flowers don’t wither nearly as quickly. I had a mouse in my flat; I put one of these outside his mouse hole, and he grew to twice his size in a few weeks! Sleep under a big pyramid and your health will improve dramatically.’
‘Wow,’ I said again, my armpits prickling with nervous sweat. I made a private note never to sleep under a pyramid, in case it made me grow to twice my size in a few weeks.
The more I scrutinised her, the more convinced I was that she was the wrong Ann Paramor. Even if I took after my natural father, surely there would be a slight resemblance? Still, this time I really would have to find out for sure.
‘The Egyptians really knew what they were doing. Haven’t you ever seen pictures of the mummies? Preserved far better than would ever be expected from bodies five thousand years old - it’s not the embalming, it’s because they were buried in a pyramid. If you’re dead it keeps you fresh, if you’re alive it keeps you young and healthy. In an ideal world we’d all live in pyramid-shaped houses, and hospitals and government buildings would be pyramids too.’ Ann had a dreamy distant look in her eyes, as she rambled on. ‘Of course, what I really want to do is....’
At that point a group of Hari Krishnas took the stage and a loud chanting and tinny clashing of tiny cymbals commenced, drowning out her next words. I hadn’t been paying all that much attention, but I just caught the words, ‘...build a giant Kermit at Saopaul.’
I stared at Ann, confused and embarrassed. This was getting more surreal by the minute. Why on earth did she want to build a giant Kermit? Perhaps she was quite simply off her rocker.
‘Oh really?’ I shouted gamely back over the noise, trying to sound interested. ‘Where is Saopaul, exactly?’
Ann looked at me. ‘Surely you know where Saopaul is!’ she yelled back.
Never heard of it, I thought, not wanting to admit ignorance. ‘Southall?’ I hazarded, wishing Stella would come back and help me out. I wondered if Mack was getting all this on film. Southall wouldn’t, I’d have thought, be an obvious choice of location for a fifty foot Muppet, unless maybe it was an ironic post-modern statement, or had some cultural significance of which I wasn’t aware.
‘No �
� Saopaul.’ A hint of irritation had crept into Ann’s voice. By now I was really hoping that I hadn’t reached the end of my search.
‘I’m sorry, but my geography isn’t great,’ I said, my cheeks hot enough to defrost frozen peas. ‘I’ve never heard of Saopaul.’
A sound engineer must have returned to the stage and lowered the volume on the speakers, because the Hari Krishnas suddenly became much more muted.
‘You must have heard of it, love. You know, North Pole and Saopaul. I want to build a giant pyramid at t’ South Pole.”
The South Pole! A giant pyramid! I stifled a laugh. Lucky I hadn’t started asking what Ann Paramor was going to make the Kermit out of, or if she needed permission from Jim Hensen. I didn’t dare look around to see what Mack and Katrina were making of this exchange.
‘Oh, of course. I’m so sorry, it was the noise from the stage, it drowned you out.’
With relief, I saw Stella sauntering towards us, weaving elegantly around a small ashy bearded man carrying a didgeridoo, white lines and dots painted all over his face and torso. ‘Excuse me, I’ll be back in a minute,’ I said to Ann, and rushed off to intercept Stella, followed discreetly by Mack and Katrina.
‘I’m sure it’s not her. She doesn’t look anything like me.’
Stella glanced over. ‘No, you’re right, she doesn’t. But I don’t look much like Mum, either, though, do I? You’ve got to be sure.’
‘What do you mean? You’re the spitting image of Mum. Oh, but I hope it’s not her. You know, I actually thought she said she wanted to build a giant Kermit in Southall.’
They all stared at me, their eyes popping. Emma’s finally flipped, their expressions said.
‘I just misheard, all right?’ I wish I hadn’t mentioned it now. It’s just that there’s no – you know - connection there.’
‘Don’t be silly, why would there be?’ Stella was brisk and matter-of-fact.
‘So how do we find out then? I can’t just go up and ask her, can I?’
