Are You My Mother?

by Louise Voss

  I glanced at my sister, sitting at the table rubbing her throat, with a spaced-out glassy wideness in her eyes. It hurt me to look at her, so I gazed around the room instead. Ruth’s kitchen was identical to ours, except that at that moment hers felt, in my feverish imagination, haunted. Haunted by the memories of plates and a troubled cat. I wondered what had happened to Percy’s cat. Had it run off, like Ffyfield? Unreliable beasts, I thought vaguely. Gavin was probably a cat in a former life. Then I remembered that the RSPCA had taken it away because we’d declined the offer to house it. It probably thought we were the unreliable beasts. I rested my forehead on the table, too weighed down to keep my head upright anymore.

  I wished that Robert and Zubin were there, and just about managed to summon up the energy to check my watch; but it was only nine thirty, and they weren’t expected back from Milton Keynes until late.

  ‘I want Robert,’ I said, pathetically, my voice muffled. My muscles were beginning to ache now too, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the tennis or the stress.

  Ruth took over. ‘Do you need any more details from us?’ she asked the PC, who had reappeared in the doorway. He hesitated, and then pulled a business card out of his breast pocket, which he handed to Stella. It seemed odd, to think of the police having business cards.

  ‘I’ve got all I need for now, I think,’ he said, consulting his scribbled notes. ‘Obviously, as soon your assailant is fit to talk, we’ll take a statement from him too. If you want to press further charges against him, then ring this number and we’ll take it from there. He was lucky to escape a charge last time. You might want to reconsider the matter in the light of a second assault.’

  Stella shook her head, miserably.

  Despite my exhaustion, I felt curious about Charlie’s apparent lack of any kind of common sense or self-preservation, under the circumstances of his last close shave: ‘Why would he risk it again? We think he’s been hanging around here on and off for months – surely he’d know it would make things worse for him if Stella changed her mind?’

  The PC dipped his head knowledgeably, exposing a prematurely-thinning patch of sandy hair on top of his head, which reminded me of Gavin. I hoped he’d got away all right.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, ‘how many of them take stupid risks. It’s arrogance, usually, or alcoholism, making them think they can do whatever they like without redress. We see it all the time. Out on bail, under court order, whatever – they keep coming back regardless. I maybe shouldn’t say it, but sometimes it takes a good kicking to get the message through in a language they understand. What I mean is,’ he added hastily, lest we were about to level charges of police brutality at him, ‘your have-a-go hero out there. We certainly don’t condone that sort of behaviour, but if I was Charlie Weatherby with my face all smashed in, I might think twice about coming back again.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ said Ruth. ‘Have you got all you need from us now?’

  The constable put away his notebook and replaced his peak cap, swivelling it briskly around to the correct position. ‘Well, yes. Unless‘ - he jerked his thumb back in the direction of the window to indicate where Charlie had fallen - ‘his story is significantly different to yours.’

  ‘Which it probably will be, since he’s a deranged liar and an alcoholic,’ said Stella quietly. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him to say that I did this to him.’

  ‘He can’t,’ I said, reaching down and squeezing her shoulder. ‘There’s a witness this time. It’s over, I’m sure of it.’

  After the policeman had left, we were all silent for a few minutes. Ruth put on the kettle, but then fetched a bottle of brandy from one of her kitchen cupboards, poured generous slugs into three glasses, and then carried them in the fingers of one hand across to where Stella and I sat at the rickety formica kitchen table. I envied Ruth her steady hands – mine were still shaking so much that it was beginning to get on my nerves. We were all so inured to the principle of grown men punching and kicking the crap out of one another, because we saw it on television pretty much everyday, but the reality of it - the bloody crunches and yelps of pain; the rage and the violence – that was an entirely different matter. I never wanted to witness anything like that, ever again.

  ‘Let’s get this down us,’ Ruth said eventually. We each tipped back our heads and drank, making versions of the same strange noise at the back of our throats as the brandy seared us.

  The baby monitor was on one steady red light – indicating Ruth’s extreme overprotectiveness, since Evie was only down the other end of the hall - and this somehow calmed me more than the comfort of the alcohol flowing down my gullet. I had an overpowering urge to creep into Evie’s room and watch her sleeping, but I felt too sullied by the night’s events. And surely, however bad I felt, Stella must have been feeling far worse.

  ‘Are you sure you aren’t injured, Stell? Did he hurt you?’ I asked.

  Stella put her hand to her throat again, exploring it, swallowing hard as if to see if she still could. There was a red mark against the white skin of her neck, but she shook her head. ‘I think I’m OK,’ she said croakily. ‘The bottle hurt, but he only pressed hard when Gavin appeared, and that was only for a second. It’s a bit painful to swallow, though.’ She paused, staring at me with huge eyes. ‘What’s going to happen now, Emma? Will I have to go to court this time?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. Probably not unless Charlie presses charges against Gavin, and then we’d have to be witnesses. But he can’t press charges against Gavin unless he knew who he was. And frankly he’d be insane to even think about it.’

  ‘Have they ever met before?’ asked Stella, drilling her fingers into her temples and wincing. I moved round the table behind her and began to massage her head, until she gradually began to yield up some of her tension into my hands. It helped calm me, too.

  I wracked my brains to try to remember if Gavin and Charlie’s paths had ever crossed. ‘Don’t think so. God, I hope not. Otherwise Gav’s really in trouble. But I don’t think Charlie started hanging around here until after Gav and I split up, so Gavin should be in the clear.’

  The kettle came to a noisy boil and Ruth stood up to make some tea.

  ‘But won’t you want to press charges this time, against whathisname – Charlie?’ she said, as she threw teabags into mugs and poured boiling water on them.

  ‘No. I couldn’t face it,’ Stella said, dully. ‘I just never want to see him again. I couldn’t stand going over and over it, and then it would all come out about that night at the party again - and he’ll probably end up suing me, like he said in that phone message…..‘

  Her voice began to tremble, and I hugged her. ‘You know, Stell, I really, really doubt that we will ever hear from him again, not after a hiding like that. Gavin was a totally unreliable boyfriend, but, like he boasted to me on many occasions, he was a good shit-kicker… And Charlie’s too much of a coward – for all he knew, Gavin could have been your new man.’

  Ruth interrupted. ‘Will someone please tell me where the infamous Gavin suddenly sprang from, like Superman, in your hour of need? I thought he was off the scene months ago?’

  ‘He was,’ I said, releasing Stella and pouring myself another small brandy. ‘He just pitched up tonight after ringing me when we were playing tennis. He wanted us to get back together.’ I laughed hollowly. ‘Still, I’m glad he was there and not Robert, or Zubin. I wouldn’t have wanted to risk either of them getting injured fighting that schmuck.’

  I pulled my phone out of my bag and dialled Robert’s mobile. It was on voicemail. ‘Robert, when you get this message, please can you and Zub come back? I’m really sorry to make you miss the rest of the gig – but something’s happened. I’m fine but Stella needs to see Zub, and I need to see you. Don’t worry, just please come back as soon as you can? Bye.’

  We fell silent again as Ruth handed us each a mug of tea. I took a sip and my glasses instantly steamed up. Drifting down through the ceiling abov
e came the faint sound of our telephone ringing, and then the click of our answering machine picking up.

  ‘Wonder who that was?’ I said, to no response from Stella.

  A couple of minutes later, Ruth’s door buzzer sounded. She picked up the entry phone in the hall and spoke into it, but it was dead. ‘Nothing,’ she said in disgust, shaking it. ‘It was fine earlier, and now it’s not working again – I can’t even hear the traffic.’

  The temperamental buzzer sounded again.

  ‘At least yours makes a noise,’ I said vacantly. ‘I’ve lost clients because ours sometimes doesn’t even buzz.’

  ‘I don’t want to let anyone in until I know who it is. It couldn’t be the boys back already, could it?’

  I shook my head. ‘Doubt it, not unless they left an hour ago. They’d call our mobiles if they couldn’t get in. And I didn’t hear our doorbell ringing upstairs.’

  Ruth tightened the belt of her dressing gown. There was a faint, rancid whiff coming from her right shoulder which marred her otherwise shining cleanliness: baby sick. ‘I’d better go down and open the door. It might be the police again. Will you come with me, Emma, just in case it’s – ‘

  I nodded, feeling nauseous at the thought of an even more vengeful Charlie somehow struggling out of Casualty, like a zombie crawling out of a tomb, and back for another go at Stella. No, that would be impossible. He was in no fit state to do anything except have his smashed nose X-rayed.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Ruth, over the noise of the buzzer being pressed a third time. ‘Stella, you stay here.’

  She nodded, looking catatonic again. ‘What a day,’ I heard her whisper as we left the room.

  Chapter 38

  I followed Ruth down the stairs, grateful for the solid smooth roundness of the banister, feeling so tired that I could have just lain down then and there on the stairs and gone to sleep. After two brandies, I was also feeling fuzzy-headed and swimmy. I fervently hoped it wasn’t the police again, come to arrest us for covering up for Gavin – I didn’t think I’d be capable of stringing together a convincing sentence.

  Ruth bent down, prising open the letterbox with her thumbnail, and calling through it. ‘Who’s there?’

  A man’s voice answered, startlingly familiar yet oddly unplaceable. ‘I’m looking for Emma Victor. Does she still live in this building? I rang but nobody’s in, and as your light was on, I thought I’d ask if you knew her.’

  Where did I recognise that voice from? My first thought was perhaps an old boyfriend of Stella’s, or maybe someone like Greg Hiscock, someone that I didn’t see a lot of but knew quite well. It was a comforting voice, and it gave me a warm feeling; welcome after the harsh events of the night.

  Curious, I gently pushed Ruth aside and peered through the letterbox myself, shuddering at the recent memory of Gavin’s fight-widened eyes framed in the same rectangular space. I was at waist level with a pair of jeans; clean, but respectably faded around the knees and pockets. At the bottom of my peripheral vision I could still see a dark bloodstain on the path.

  ‘Who is it?’ I called. There was the sound of leather shoes creaking, and the person crouched down.

  I saw two brown eyes regarding mine through the letterbox; calm eyes, in tanned, slightly wrinkled skin..A beard, once dark brown, now salt-and-pepper, decorating the edges of a broad, square-jawed face that I knew or, at least, used to know….

  I looked slowly up again, back into the eyes, and saw they were full of tears. We were both silent.

  With a colossal emotional whump in my solar plexus I thought how I knew this person, and wondered how I could ever have doubted that he was still alive; why on earth I hadn’t kept the faith in those long, dark nights after the funeral, when I dreamed that it was all a mistake, and it would all be OK, it was all just a great big administrative blunder which, given time, would get sorted out.

  I was torn, for a second, between running straight upstairs to grab Stella and bring her down, or flinging open the front door and jumping into his arms like I used to do when I was a kid, arms around his neck, legs around his waist, the blissful smell of him: pipe tobacco and wool, aftershave and mint….

  It was the moment I’d longed for, dreamed of, fantasised about, for a decade. But I did neither, because at that same moment the hall walls began to close in on me, squeezing the breath from me, and the tiled floor started to rock and undulate, spinning me around like a top until I felt too dizzy to do anything but blink and blink to try and refocus my blurred world….

  ‘Daddy?’ I whispered through the letterbox, right before it all went dark and I crashed backwards into oblivion.

  When I came round on the cool tiles of the hall floor, he and Ruth were kneeling over me. My glasses had fallen off and my vision was blurred, but I could see that he was crying. Ruth’s face had folded into creases of confusion, concern, anxiety.

  I wanted to hear him laugh, not see him cry. That was how I remembered him; laughing. But then, with a pain in my heart more vicious than anything I’d experienced before, I realised that it wasn’t Dad at all.

  Just somebody who looked astonishingly like him.

  Ruth handed me my glasses, and I began to struggle up to sitting, feeling utterly defeated, and more than a little embarrassed. Fainting – for God’s sake. Such a ludicrous, hysterical, Victorian thing to do.

  ‘Emma,’ the man said. ‘I’m so sorry. I would never have sprung this on you. I didn’t think you were in, which is why I rang your neighbour’s doorbell; to check you really lived here. I looked you up in the phonebook – you said you lived in Acton in that documentary. I’m his brother. I’m Tony. I’m Ted’s brother.’

  I took a deep, painful breath, unable to speak at all for a couple of minutes. ‘Ruth,’ I croaked eventually. ‘Please can you go upstairs and warn Stella, if she’s up to it, so that she doesn’t get the same shock as I’ve just had. He looks just like our dad….’

  ‘I’ll get you a glass of water,’ she said, standing up.

  ‘No, don’t, I’m fine.’ I reached out for her hand. ‘Don’t tell Stella I passed out. In fact, don’t tell Stella anything unless you think she can handle it. She’s too freaked out already as it is. We’ll come up in a few minutes.’

  Ruth bent down again and hugged me, both her knees clicking like the snap of dead branches, and then she retreated down the hall and up the stairs to her flat.

  Uncle Tony and I sat there in the hall, in silence. I couldn’t bear to look at him; it hurt too much. The weight of disappointment pressed me to the floor and prevented me from moving at all. Plus, I had absolutely no idea what to say to him. I’d never even met him before.

  ‘Did you know they were dead?’ I asked, eventually, still not meeting his eyes.

  ‘No. I couldn’t believe it. When? How?’

  ‘Ten years ago. A car crash. In Wiltshire.’

  Uncle Tony raked his top teeth over the beard beneath his lower lip, and dropped his head into his folded arms. ‘What a mess,’ he said, his voice muffled in the sleeve of his sweater. ‘Oh Jesus, what a mess.’ He sounded almost as if he was crying again.

  I huffed through my nose. A mess it most certainly had been. ‘I tried to get in touch with you, to let you know so you could come to the funeral, but nobody seemed to know where you were.’

  ‘That was because I didn’t want anybody to know.’

  Finally, I lifted my chin and gazed at him. Now that the shock was receding, the experience was bittersweet. Close up, I could tell he wasn’t Dad, for they weren’t by any means identical. There was an unmistakeable similarity, though, as if Dad had dressed up as a hippy for a fancy-dress party, and never quite relinquished the feel of the costume. Once I started to look at him, I couldn’t stop; he was a better reminder than a photograph ever could be. And even better, he was family. Stella and I had family again.

  ‘You’re so like him.’

  ‘I know. At least, we always were as kids. I wonder what he’d look like now.’
>
  You, I thought. He’d still look like you.

  ‘I haven’t – hadn’t – seen him for thirty years. Twenty years before he died.’

  ‘He never talked about you.’ I traced a pattern around the diamonds of glazed putty on the floor, holding the tiles in place. I felt I needed some putty to hold myself together after the shocks of the evening.

  ‘We fell out.’

  ‘What could be so bad that you don’t speak for twenty years? Dad wasn’t the sort to fall out with people. He hated arguments.’

  Uncle Tony winced and looked away. Then he moved around so that he was sitting next to me, our backs against the wall, our shoulders almost touching.

  ‘It’s a long story. Can I tell you another time?’

  I leaned away from him, feeling that I couldn’t handle this unexpected proximity. Thirty years of nothing, and now here he was wanting to rub shoulders with me? Where had he been when we needed him?

  He sensed that I was rolling myself up into a ball and, to his credit, he edged slightly away from me, too.

  ‘I didn’t even know Stella existed until I saw her in the programme with you,’ he said, fiddling with something in his jacket pocket which sounded like keys – a muffled heavy jingling. My uncle’s fingers, fiddling with his car keys. It was amazing. We had a real uncle.

  ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’ he continued. He had a faint Scottish accent, and it sounded like a successful version of one of the impressions Dad used to try to do for us. Donald where’s your trooosers? ‘You both are. But she looks so like Barbara. I couldn’t believe it, that they ended up having a child of their own – another child, I mean….’ He tailed off, embarrassed.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I know what you mean. Yes, it was a complete surprise to them. I was ten when Stella was born.’

  My bottom was beginning to get numb on the hard tiled floor, and I shifted uncomfortably, relaxing enough to begin to slowly uncurl. I stretched my legs out in front of me, and then noticed how stubbly, bordering on hairy, they were. I hadn’t cared if Gavin saw them, but now I felt self-conscious. Was it appropriate to mind if one’s uncle observed one’s hairy legs, or not? Was it normal? I had no idea if uncles and nieces even hugged and kissed hello and goodbye, or if they shook hands. Still, I could ask Stella to ask Suzanne later. Or Mack might know.