Are You My Mother?

by Louise Voss

  Robert burst through the door, stopping short when he saw me sitting in the kitchen, holding hands with a strange man and crying. Zub piled comically into the back of him, and then peered out over his shoulder.

  ‘What’s going on? What’s the matter?’ demanded Robert in a panicked voice, giving Tony an extremely dirty look.

  I wiped my eyes and smiled at him. ‘Hi darling. Zub, Stella’s gone to bed. She wants you to go and see her anyway, even if she’s asleep.’

  Zubin turned and vanished into Stella’s room, kicking off his trainers on the way and leaving them sprawled in the hall. Even in the emotionally heightened circumstances, I felt a faint stab of annoyance.

  ‘Well?’ said Robert.

  I stood up, my legs so shaky that I wondered where my kneecaps had got to, and walked over to him, sliding my arms around his waist and burying my face in his chest. When I looked around, I saw that Tony had got up too, and was holding out his hand towards Robert.

  ‘Robert,’ I said, my voice as wobbly as my legs. ‘I’d like you to meet my - father.’

  Chapter 40

  Tony and I saw each other every day over the next fortnight. He stayed in a local B&B for a couple of nights, and then in the spare room at Robert’s flat, spending every possible minute with me and Stella. Other people drifted in and out; extras to our talking heads, filling in details, providing colour: Stella, Robert, Ruth, Mack, and then Tony’s wife Melissa, who came down from Scotland to join him after a few days. She was gorgeous; calm, and beautiful, a mass of curly brown hair and appealingly crooked Dracula teeth, like David Bowie’s before he got them capped. She showed us how she could leave two puncture marks in an apple, and taught me and Stella some Qi Gong. She laughed an impulsive, delighted laugh whenever Stella insisted on calling her Auntie Melissa. She was my stepmother, kind of.

  Mostly, however, Tony and I just talked. Talked and cried and talked. After a few days, we tentatively hugged. And then we cried again. He’d been terrified, he said, that I would hate him for what he’d done.

  But how could I hate him? After everything that had happened over the past year, the one thing I’d learned was that we had to make the choices which felt right to us, and to live with the consequences, whatever they were. It was our responsibility, and no-one else’s. Poor Ann, I thought, young and ill and easily swayed. But it wasn’t Tony’s fault that she hadn’t been strong enough to do what she really wanted to do – keep me. And this, for me, made all the difference.

  He and I were out on our own for a walk one day, along the river just past Hammersmith Bridge, when Tony pointed at a nearby bench. He looked anxious and edgy, as if he’d been wrestling with some kind of knotty internal problem and then come to a decision.

  ‘Sit down for a minute, I want to show you something.’

  I sat, noticing the dull brass plaque screwed to the back of the bench: In memory of Elizabeth Hannon. She loved this place. Underneath, in green aerosol, someone had sprayed Shaz is a slut. I turned my back on it and watched the thick swirling water flow past.

  Tony reached for something in his trouser pocket, and pulled out a crumpled envelope. Sitting down next to me, he extracted an old photograph and handed it to me, and I felt a physical swooping in my belly.

  ‘Ann.’ We both said it at the same time.

  She was a small woman, except for her nose, which sat awkwardly on her face as if dropped on there from a great height. She looked dislocated, uncomfortable in her skin and whey-pale, with a large mole near her left eye. Her hair was the same colour as mine, but dull, with a stubborn sort of curl. She was leaning against a mantelpiece, raising a glass of red wine in a toast, but with an expression of abject misery on her face. She looked nothing like me.

  ‘She wasn’t very well then,’ said Tony. ‘She was so beautiful when I first met her; but it wasn’t because she had a stunning face or anything – she just had so much – energy. Vitality, I suppose. It’s so sad….’

  His voice trailed off once more, and he rubbed his beard. The small scratchy sound it made sent a funny electric sort of shock down my legs; not sexual, just the realisation that these two people, one real, one on photographic paper, had given birth to me. Their absence in my lives had made me into who I was.

  The next afternoon I had a couple of massages to do, so Tony and Melissa took Stella out for lunch. They discovered a mutual love of explosive curries, and were gone for hours, returning with scalded tongues and garlic breath, tipsy with Cobra beer; and Tony announced himself fully up to speed on everything in Stella’s life.

  They had also had a long chat about Charlie, in which Stella had finally made peace with her decision to drop the original charges, and not pursue this latest attack despite the obvious, and understandable, disapproval of the police. In her mind, Charlie had got what he deserved, without anybody else - ie. herself, me, Zub, Charlie’s family - having to suffer further.

  ‘Karma,’ Tony said, and Melissa agreed solemnly.

  Stella also told Tony that she and Zubin were going to get a flat together – which was news to me. I felt a momentary panic, until I remembered that I spent most days at Robert’s anyway, and really it was as if she and I had stopped living together months ago. I wouldn’t miss Zubin’s trainers in the hall, either.

  ‘I think we should sell the flat, then, and split the money,’ I said recklessly. Robert had been badgering me for weeks to move in with him permanently, but I’d been reluctant to abandon Stella, in case things didn’t work out between her and Zub. Old habits died hard….

  But, in the long term, Robert wanted to be closer to his daughter Grace. Every time we came back from Nottingham he marvelled about what she’d learned in his absence: colouring inside the lines; understanding and following the ‘dee-structions’ for a new board game; singing ‘Trinkle trinkle little star’ in a round. I could have listened to him talk about her all day, just for the expression on his face. And Grace was such a lovely, funny little girl, with a fearsome comedy frown and a brilliant smile.

  When we were with her, I surreptitiously studied the way she interacted with her mother and step-father and realised that she ebbed and flowed between all the adults in her life, effortlessly adapting to the different personalities around her. It made me think that perhaps the circumstances of my childhood, or even Stella’s, hadn’t been all that remarkable after all. Families came in all shapes and sizes.

  Mack begged me to let him make a follow-up documentary, a sort of ‘what happened next’, but I stood my ground and refused. I’d had enough of baring my soul on television. I wanted to put it all behind me and move on. Besides, the first documentary had been so well received that Mack had a constant stream of work offers.

  But I did think about how different a programme it would have made this time. I could see why Mack wanted to do it. I could see it when I looked in the mirror, when I opened my mouth to speak, when I lay down to sleep curled up close with Robert at night. Everything was different. I felt that instead of my cells renewing themselves gradually over a seven year period, it had all happened at once and I’d sloughed off my old body and suddenly become a new person. For the first time in my adult life, I felt the feathery wings of freedom take hold of me under my arms and lift me up, as if throwing me into the sky, confident in the knowledge that I’d fly. It was the most amazing feeling.

  Chapter 41

  Towards the end of summer, when the late sun was getting weaker and the shadows on the pavement skinnier, Tony came down to London again, alone this time, announcing that Melissa had just found out that she was six weeks pregnant.

  ‘My second child’s due in early June,’ he said when he arrived at the flat, a broad smile elongating the word ‘early’ even further than his acquired Scottish accent already had. He looked fantastic, I thought, much brighter-eyed, without the hovering anxiety of his last visit. Even his beard had been cropped into angular topiary on his chin – not quite George Michael, thankfully, but much smarter and far less hippyish.
When he rubbed it, it no longer made such a rustling sound; more of an brisk zipping.

  I had some news of my own, which I’d been saving for when I saw Tony face to face. When I waggled my finger to show off the small sparkly diamond engagement ring Robert had given me just the week before, Tony smiled an even wider beam of delight. And, unless I was very much mistaken, pride.

  ‘That’s fantastic news,’ he said joyfully. ‘I want to hear all about it over lunch. Are we meeting Stella there?’

  I hesitated. ‘Yes. But, um, before we go….I wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Would you….um, I mean, would it be OK if….do you think…’ I was beginning to hyperventilate, and I could feel my face getting damp and hot with fluster. I felt even more vulnerable than when I’d visited the Ann Paramors; and really began to understand why Robert had been so nervous when he’d proposed to me.

  We had gone for what I thought was a normal day out to London Zoo, and I couldn’t figure out why Robert was so jumpy and distracted, until we got to the orang-utan enclosure. There, with an audience more than likely comprised of Betsey’s nieces and nephews, clustered on the bank on their side of the fence, all collapsed down into seated positions like a display of fold-up pushchairs in a baby shop, Robert got down on one knee and handed me the tiny ring box. The orang-utans looked solemnly across at us, as if appreciating the momentous occasion - apart from one baby one, who was loping cautiously around on the grass, showing off his smooth hairless inner arms as he swung tentatively around a tree-trunk, like Gene Kelly in ‘Singing in the Rain’.

  ‘Oh, yes please, definitely,’ I’d said, as I jumped tearfully into Robert’s arms, half expecting a haphazard smattering of leathery applause to drift across to us.

  Tony was looking at me, with the same loving expression I’d seen in my other dad’s eyes, long ago, when I’d been crying in the larder with prepubescent outrage and heartache.

  ‘Come on then, spit it out,’ he said, as I dithered and bumbled and couldn’t meet his gaze.

  ‘I – er – wondered if you might consider…. giving me away at my wedding,’ I finally blurted out, the blood roaring in my ears.

  My father held out his arms to me. ‘I’d be honoured,’ he said.

  I burst into tears.

  Stella met us at the Yellow River Café – she’d come straight from her and Zub’s new flat in Putney - and when she heard Tony’s news, she poked me in the ribs.

  ‘There you go, Em, another little brother or sister for you to fuss over,’ she said, and I gave her a hard stare.

  ‘I’m so happy for you,’ I told him. ‘Specially because I won’t have to take care of this one. It can come and stay with its big sister and her husband – and then we’ll put it on the train back home to Scotland again afterwards.’

  ‘Now you’re getting married, do you and Robert think you’ll start a family soon?’ Tony asked, as we settled ourselves around a table and perused menus.

  Stella laughed a loud barking laugh. ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ she hooted. ‘Of course Emma’s going to have children. It’s obvious that Emma is going to have children. You’re gagging to have children, aren’t you, Em?’

  As it happened I had, by then, well and truly got over my earlier fear that I’d never be willing to put myself through the fearful protectiveness of parenthood. I’d watched Robert with Grace, and Ruth with Evie, and realised that the measure of instinctive adoration a parent felt for a child far outweighed the terror of that child being harmed in any way.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, lowering my menu and withering Stella with a glance before turning to my father. ‘Yes, I do, and I hope we will – but not for a few years yet. Robert and I see Grace every other weekend, who’s nearly five, and that’s lovely; but to be honest I’m sort of tired of looking after everybody else.’

  I saw Stella’s stunned face. Her tongue stud appeared slowly from between her lips before sinking back out of sight again, as she took this in.

  ‘I don’t mean just you, Stell. I mean, generally, I want to stop care taking. Looking for my birthmother was the start of it, but now I want to let go of everything else I’ve been clinging on to: even the baby massage and the aromatherapy business. I want to do something for myself. I want to travel.’

  ‘Travel?‘ Stella was obviously remembering how I got galloping nervous diarrhoea just organising the two of us on a charter flight, for a week at a hotel in Portugal on our last holiday, four years earlier.

  ‘Yes, travel. I told Robert, and he’s said he’s always wanted to do it too, so we’re going to take an extended honeymoon; at least six months. It’s going to be hard for him to be away from Grace for that long, but when we come back, we’ll buy a house closer to where she lives. Listening to all Tony’s stories of his travels made me realise how much I want to see some of the world, before I think about having a family. There are so many things I know nothing about. I want to go and eat real Chinese food in China. I want to climb up mountains in Nepal, and do a Vipassana course in India and – and – oh, everything. Once we sell the flat, I’ll be able to use my half of the money from that.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Stella.

  ‘That’s fantastic,’ said Tony.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, beaming at them both.

  Two elderly ladies on the next table were peering at a large portrait on the restaurant wall. ‘Don’t you think it’s a little blatantly political that a Chinese restaurant would have a portrait of Chairman Mao on the walls?’ we all overheard one of the women say to her friend, in hushed tones.

  ‘Yes, my goodness, and look, they even have him on the menus,’ her friend replied nervously, peering over half-moon glasses at the line drawings of a jovial bald Chinese man, and clearly wondering if they’d stumbled into a hotbed of anti-capitalism. Not at these prices, I thought, feeling wild with exhilaration.

  Stella rolled her eyes, and I leaned in towards the centre of the table, beckoning them to join me so that our heads were almost touching. ‘That,’ I said solemnly, ‘is why I want to go travelling. So I don’t end up thinking that Ken Hom is a Chinese leader and not a celebrity chef.’

  We all laughed conspiratorially, and I felt comfortable, happy. Like people did, with their families.

  When we came out of the restaurant again two hours later, we set off for the flat in the dusty summer heat, walking around the corner past Stamford Brook tube station. There was a Big Issue seller there, partially blocking our path, deep in conversation with the corpulent, red-faced owner of the flower stall outside the station, leaning on the handle of an old tartan shopping trolley containing all his copies of the magazine.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Tony politely, waiting for him to move aside.

  The man turned and thrust a magazine, its pages flapping, towards us.

  ‘Bi-iiig Issue?’ It sounded like a sneeze.

  We all stopped, awkwardly, and performed a small pocket-searching dance for change. I was the first to find a pound, and began to reach my hand out towards the seller’s, a young man with tanned, weatherbeaten skin and bright, bright green eyes. I froze, the coin in my fist suspended in mid air.

  It was him; the man from the tube. The man I’d led up the escalator. Something was sticking out of the front pocket of his jeans; the neck of a small brown pill bottle. Half the label was showing, and I tried unsuccessfully to see if I could make out his name from the writing on it. He must be on medication, I thought, feeling relieved and somewhat proprietorial. But I’d have known that, even if I hadn’t seen the bottle. For a start, he could never have been doing that job if he was in the same state he’d been in last year; and besides, I could tell from his eyes. They were still striking and compelling, but the terrible wildness had gone from them. His jeans were clean, and he didn’t smell bad.

  I stared at the hand he had stretched towards me. No more thick yellow claws; just slightly ragged, shortish, grimy-ish fingernails. I had a moment’s doubt – his old fingernails h
ad been so much a part of him that I couldn’t believe he no longer had them. Maybe it wasn’t him….. Then I looked at his eyes again. It definitely was.

  ‘Are you all right, Em?’ Stella slid her arm protectively around my waist, and stood closely behind me. I nodded, without taking my gaze off the Big Issue seller.

  The man looked at me blankly. ‘That’s a pound, please,’ he said, nodding towards my clenched fist. Sunlight flashed and glinted off the diamond in my engagement ring, dappling his face with tiny dancing dots.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I blurted back towards the man, as if I’d taken the baton of Stella’s enquiry and was passing it on. I was suddenly dying to know if meeting me had changed his life, in the same way he’d triggered the changes in my own.

  He made a face at me. ‘I’m all right. Are you all right?’ He turned to Tony. ‘What about you, mate – are you all right?’ He was mocking me.

  Tony laughed uneasily. ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Good,’ said the man decisively. ‘We’re all just bloody peachy then, ain’t we? That’s a pound, please.’

  My hand finally unclamped enough to allow me to drop the pound into his own and, as if in a trance, I took the copy of the magazine. Its paper cover felt warm from where he’d been holding it.

  I opened my mouth to say, ‘I’ve seen you before,’ when he beat me to it.

  ‘Oi, I recognise you.’

  I waited for him to mention that day on the tube, the hand-holding on the escalator, but he didn’t. ‘Yeah. Saw you on the telly. You was in that documentary, weren’t you?’

  Stella hugged me tighter. ‘She certainly was.’ Then she added, with considerable smugness, ‘So was I, actually.’