by Louise Voss
Zubin was a lanky, laid back Zoroastrian Indian, who had the sweetest nature imaginable, and even let Stella dress him up like an oversized dolly in her outlandish designs. He was sitting there now, completely complacently, in a ludicrous orange frilly shirt done up to top button on a hot August night, and I felt a pang of affection for him. I half-waited for Stella to berate him for producing the huge moons of sweat which blossomed out from his armpits, but she didn’t comment; just sat on his knee and snuggled up to his neck. She was so much more mellow that she glowed - even her freckles appeared to radiate a kind of milkmaid contentment. I wondered if Zubin would ever be my brother-in-law. It was a nice thought, and not beyond the realms of possibility. Since Stella and he had met at the clothes’ shop he managed in Putney, they’d been as inseparable as Robert and I.
We hadn’t seen hair nor hide of Charlie since Stella agreed to drop the charges on condition that he stayed away. Rumour at Stella’s college had it that he was living in Spain, very disgruntled, teaching English to Spanish students, God help them. I had a horrible image of a roomful of innocent teenage Spaniards learning to say in perfect Sloaney brays, ‘you fucking pricktease.’
As for Gavin, there hadn’t been a peep out of him, either. I suspected he had absconded to somewhere remote enough to escape the long arm of Customs and Excise – or else he was in jail - and while I was concerned for him, I wasn’t losing any sleep over it. Robert was the only one who could make me lose sleep these days. Most nights I begged him to.
The other invited guest was Ruth, who sat on the floor with a cordless baby listener beside her, at which she looked anxiously every ten seconds, checking that the single red light didn’t suddenly multiply into a semi-circular howl. But Evie appeared to be sleeping peacefully in her cot downstairs.
They had moved into Percy’s old flat the previous month after a builder had bought it, done it up, and screwed a FOR RENT board into the wall, directly below my bedroom window. It was fantastic, having them there. Evie had grown into a cherubic baby with huge wide-apart blue eyes, rubber-band wrists, podgy thighs, and a constantly surprised expression. But most notable of all, she had a great soft swathe of thin blonde hair on her head which made her look exactly like Mack.
‘Are you sure there isn’t something you want to tell me about Evie’s father?’ I teased Ruth, privately, the first time we’d seen Mack and Evie together. ‘Well, it’s not Mack, if that’s what you’re getting at, because Mack’s a good bloke and not an asshole. Oops, don’t listen, Eves.’ She had covered Evie’s tiny ears with her hands, to which Evie responded by releasing a volley of farts into her nappy like ack-ack fire, which made us laugh even more.
I worshipped Evie; taught Ruth to massage her, collected her from the childminder’s, babysat her, and read my brand new copy of Are You My Mother? to her. And the best thing of all was that she wasn’t even remotely my responsibility. I wished that I could have materialised my baby bird for her entertainment, to see her wave her fists and crow with delight; but he hadn’t been around, not since Robert came on the scene.
We’d decided to make a bit of a party for the occasion of Mack’s full length directorial debut. I’d declined the invitation to go to a preliminary screening of it, for that reason - I wanted to have my friends and family with me when I watched it. Besides, Stella and I had never, in almost eleven years of living together, had a party before. I’d never known enough people that I liked enough to provide hospitality for.
‘I don’t know why Suzanne’s wishing you luck,’ Stella said to Mack. ‘It’s going ahead regardless, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve got your slot.’
Mack looked a little sick. ‘But what if the critics slate it? Then I’m finished. And you haven’t seen it yet either, Emma. I wish you’d come to that screening...’
‘What, and spoil the surprise?’ I tried to make my tone flippant, but it was a struggle. Mack’s nerves were rubbing off on me. ‘I told you, I didn’t want to see it in advance. I’d have been too tempted to try and make you edit out any unflattering shots of me, and then you’d have been left with no documentary at all.’
Robert pointed at me. ‘You – don’t be so self-deprecating.’ Then he pointed at Mack. ‘And you – stop being so pessimistic! They won’t hate it – it’s not a controversial enough subject. And even if they did hate it, of course you wouldn’t be finished.’
‘Oh – maybe they’ll hate it for not being controversial – oh God, maybe I should’ve gone with the idea about rat catchers on heroin in the sewers of San Paulo…..’
‘Shut up, Mack,’ Robert, Stella, and I chorused.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I added. ‘I’m sure I’ll like it, honestly. Even if I do cringe a bit at the sight of myself on TV… Here, let’s have a toast. To Mack, and his wonderful documentary.’
Katrina nudged Mack. ‘Wasn’t there something you wanted to say too – before you’re swallowed up by your own nervous gloom?’
‘Oh yeah. I wanted to thank Emma – and Stella, for this little party – but more importantly, Emma, thanks for letting me film you. I know how hard it was for you to talk about yourself, and your feelings, but I’m so glad you stuck with it. Despite my whinging, I do actually think we’ve got a great film, thanks to you. I just hope the critics feel the same. And that you’ve got something out of it too.’
He leaned over and kissed my cheek, and Robert squeezed my arm.
‘Don’t thank me,’ I said, ‘You should thank that homeless man I met on the tube. He’s the one who really began all this.’
Watching Mack’s documentary for the first time was the strangest experience of my life. I’d thought it would be a straightforward story about the search for Ann Paramor, but Mack had gone much deeper. He had me pinned out like a butterfly; my powdery emotions on display, my history raw. Everything I’d said over the months he interviewed me was somehow in there, condensed, distilled into a need so naked that at times it made me squirm. It wasn’t at all comfortable to watch, but even I could see that it made compulsive television.
We sat perfectly still throughout, apart from Stella giving the odd yelp when she saw herself in the Holistic Festival scene, or me burying my head in Robert’s lap with embarrassment at some of the inane things I came out with on film. It was all there, though; the list, the telephone calls, the inconclusive visit to Harlesden and the little girl with pyjamas on her head, the more conclusive trips to the Holistic Fayre and Nottingham. When I talked about things which Mack hadn’t actually filmed, such as the man on the tube, and the scene in the swimming pool in Nottingham, he used voiceovers; him, asking gentle questions, my replies, hesitant at first and then more confident, over a collage of images: homeless people, shots of such desolate loneliness and abandonment that we were all silent and choked. The isolation of crowded tube trains. Zoos, orang-utans, coach-loads of wriggling schoolchildren. He’d even gone and found another, local, antenatal aqua exercise class and filmed that, which made Ruth bark with laughter into her margarita.
‘Thank God you weren’t there for the actual event. If anyone had filmed me going into labour, I’d have killed them,’ she said, before we all shushed her.
The penultimate scene had been shot in Mack’s flat, on the day the letter had arrived from the last Ann Paramor, in its thick cream envelope stamped with jolly Jersey stamps, and a postmark as wavy as my stomach at the thought of what it might contain.
Robert had been up in Manchester for a meeting that day, so I’d rushed straight over to Mack’s flat, where he and Katrina were having breakfast. He had instantly got his PD100 out of the case, and began to rig up some sort of complicated arrangement by which he strapped the camera to his skateboard, so he could pull it down the hall in what he told me was a ‘tracking shot’, to capture my expression as I came into the kitchen. Katrina started to set up the radio mikes, and I had waited at the kitchen table, glumly watching the activity around me as their half-finished cornflakes began to congeal around the sides of their bowls. Pa
t Sharp on Heart FM was playing songs from ‘this week in 1981’; Randy Crawford, ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’ and Smoky Robinson’s ‘Being With You.’ ‘What were you doing in that year?’ Pat asked, rhetorically, and I’d thought back: it was the year of Stella’s birth. That was the year when everything had changed, although not in the bad way I’d feared. I’d been dreading the prospect of no longer being number one; but what I actually became was a big sister. Number ones and number twos stopped existing as terms of competition, and merely became euphemisms for what Stella did in her nappy.
The shot in Mack’s flat seemed to take forever to set up, and I was ready to punch him for all that assing about with skateboards, pretending to be a creative wunderkind, when all I wanted to do was to rip open the envelope.
‘Hurry up,’ I’d called out, snappily. ‘This is torture!’
But finally it was ready, and I had to admit, when I saw it on TV, it was very atmospheric. Mack had filmed me in slow motion as I walked down the hall, like a condemned prisoner on Death Row, reframing for a tight close-up of my white face when I sat at the kitchen table – the cereal bowls had been cleared away and the radio switched off - and began to tear open the envelope.
Then my voice, heavy with disappointment, reading out the letter from Jersey Ann, the perfectly nice, perfectly apologetic letter saying that there was absolutely no way that she could be my mother since she was eight in the year I was born, but that she did hope I found her and it all worked out for the best in the end.
‘So that’s that,’ my disembodied voice said flatly, over the top of a close up of another wrong Ann Paramor’s handwriting. ‘That only leaves the Harlesden one, and I’m sure it’s not her. I just feel it. It feels right to stop here. To finish. I just want to move on with my life. We tried.’ My words oozed, dripping with a defeatism I hadn’t really even realised I felt until I heard them.
Back in our sitting room, Robert reached over and hugged me tightly. On TV, my voiceover faded out, replaced by the swelling introduction to ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM.
There was one final piece of footage, before Mack’s closing credits. Just as I was thinking to myself, well, hope springing eternal and all, maybe I was a bit hasty about Harlesden Ann; maybe I should go back, just to make sure. I’d always wonder, otherwise - Mack said to me, anxiously, from across the room,
‘I hope you don’t mind that I did this, Emma.’
As Michael Stipe’s plaintive voice filled our ears, the shot changed to a street I recognised – back to Harlesden Ann’s street, as if Mack’s film had read my thoughts. My heart leaped into my mouth. He’s found her, I thought. A close up of the house, still deserted, ugly, unkempt.
Then, oh God, cutting to the exterior of a post office. Mack shooting hand-held as he walked slowly inside and through the roped-off queuing lines, towards the counters, a close up of a name badge reading ANN PARAMOR, then a slow pan upwards over an enormous chest, up three chins to a pasty, sullen face, zooming outwards to film sparse eyebrow hairs raised in enquiry, but not surprise at the sight of the camera and microphone – Mack had obviously gone in first and asked her if he could film – then another close up of her looking down at a photograph of me as a baby and then -
I held my breath, pressure building and building inside my head until I felt sure I’d start hissing like a pressure cooker and nobody in the room would be able to hear my voiceover on screen; at least not the ‘s’s anyhow -
- she was shaking her head, blankly. Shrugging her shoulders. Shaking her head again. Arranging her tight lips into a wavy rueful expression. Looking smug that she was going to be on television.
It wasn’t her.
‘It wasn’t her,’ said Mack, looking at me worriedly as the screen went blank and words scrolled up, over the final verse and chorus of ‘Everybody Hurts’:
‘None of the Ann Paramors on the list turned out to be Emma’s birthmother. She has decided not to take her search any further, although entertains a faint hope that if the right woman is out there, she might still come forward and contact the makers of this film.
The final words were mine, spoken over a photograph of Mum, Dad, Stella and I, taken on a beach in Devon, Stella and I squinting into the unknown, but never suspecting that the unknown would turn out to be a place without the two adults hugging us from behind. My words made me want to scream; brave, made-for-TV words forming trite, pat sentiments:
‘I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones. I had wonderful adoptive parents for nineteen years. Of course I’ll always wonder, and I’ll always want answers about myself, but I can survive without them. I’ve survived for this long. As long as I can keep it all in perspective, and concentrate on the people I have in my life now who I love and who love me – well, that’s all that is important, at the end of the day.’
I got up and stormed out of the room, suddenly furious. There was a momentary silence behind me, and then I was aware of a buzz of concerned voices as Stella, Mack, Ruth, and Robert all got up and debated which of them should go after me.
Ruth, who was nearest the door, took an executive decision. ‘Give us a minute, will you?’ I heard her say, as she followed me out into my bedroom.
She found me leaning my forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching the roofs of cars passing below in a blur of metallic colours still just about discernible in the dusk.
‘Are you all right?’
‘No,’ I said, morosely.
‘I don’t blame you.’ I heard a creak as Ruth sat down on my bed, and then a faint lip-smacking, snuffly sound which was Evie, heard through the baby monitor Ruth still held, stirring in her sleep. ‘It’s hard enough, what you’ve been through. It must be doubly hard, seeing Mack making such a big, suspenseful drama out of it.’
I gulped. ‘I thought…. I thought that the Ann in the post office must be her. I thought he’d found her and she didn’t want to know me. That’s why he didn’t tell me beforehand.’
‘Mack would never do that to you. He’d never set you up like that.’
‘But he did set me up! He used me. OK, it would have been worse if she had turned out to be my mother, but still, he manipulated me. I can’t believe he’d do that; I’m so angry with him, Ruth. And tired. This whole thing has been such a series of huge hopes and then even bigger anti-climaxes - my emotions are up and down like a…like a… whore’s drawers.’
‘Perhaps that’s part of the reason you’re so angry with Mack now too; because he didn’t manage to help you find your mother?’
I turned slowly and went to sit on the bed next to Ruth. My hands were shaking. I flopped back, looking at the way my beaded lampshade sent globules of shadow dappling across the ceiling.
‘Yeah. You’re right. It’s the scene which wasn’t there, in his film, that upsets me most,’ I said slowly. ‘I’ve tried and tried not to have any expectations, not to fantasise about it, but I just can’t help it. I so wanted there to be a scene, at the end, where I walk up a garden path somewhere, and there’s a small, dark-haired friendly woman who looks just like me, only twenty years older. She’s framed in the doorway. Her arms are open wide. We’re both crying, and we hug and laugh. Mack’s panning slowly around us…’ My voice was thick with tears, which started to drip self-pityingly out of the sides of my eyes and into my ears.
Ruth sighed sympathetically. ‘Poor you,’ she said, making me cry even harder.
‘I didn’t want it to end with a picture of Mum and Dad. I didn’t want to be reminded of what I’ve already lost,’ I sobbed, flinging my arm across my face to hide my eyes. ‘I miss them so much.’
As if in sympathy, a tinny wail suddenly emanated from the baby listener. I sat up, sniffling, and we both watched the arc of tomato red lights flaring angrily into a howl of action.
‘She’s so restless tonight,’ said Ruth, pulling a key out of her pocket. ‘Must be the heat. Will you go? I guarantee that a cuddle of a sleepy baby will make you feel better. Go on. I promise I’ll turn
off the listener, so if you want to talk to her, or have more of a cry, you can. She’ll probably go straight back to sleep, and if she doesn’t, just bring her up here.’
I took the key - it did seem like a nice idea. ‘OK then, just for a bit. Will you tell Mack I think his documentary was brilliant, even if the ending did upset me. And tell Robert I’ll be back soon?’
Ruth nodded, putting her arm around my shoulders and squeezing.
‘Thanks, pal,’ I said, leaning my head against hers.
I wanted to go in and see Robert, but I couldn’t face everyone else’s sympathetic noises, so instead I sneaked straight past the now muted party in the living room and down to Ruth’s flat.
Evie’s door was ajar, and I could see wavery pink shadows being thrown around the room from the magic lantern on the bookcase; little cartoonish angels with triangles for bodies blowing heavenly trumpets and playing celestial tambourines, dancing round in an eternal circle of soft red light.
Evie, however, was not impressed. She was kneeling up, clad in a baggy nappy and nothing else, rattling the bars of her cot like a wrongfully arrested political prisoner. Her tear-stained face was puce with heat and fury, and as she reached out her arms to be lifted up, she gave me a look which very obviously said ‘what the hell kept you?’.
I scooped her out over the side of the cot and held her close. She instantly stopped crying and, sticking her forefinger into her mouth, nuzzled her head into the space between my neck and my shoulder. Her earlobe against my cheek felt strangely cool in contrast to her hot face.
I eased myself as carefully as possible down in the deep white rocking chair by the window, and we sat and rocked, in silence apart from the sound of a small finger being sucked. I thought how, only a few months ago, Percy had lived here. This probably hadn’t been where he slept, being the smallest of the three potential bedrooms, but I had no doubts that it had been as brown and dingy as the rest of the flat.
