by Fiona Gibson
Where the hell has she gone?
I try, as I hurry through faint drizzle in my unsuitable sandals, to thrust myself into Mum’s muddled world. Before Mimosa House, she’d lived in Hackney, which could be Jupiter for all she knows now. No point in trying to be logical. Mum doesn’t know one day from the next, and the seasons are indistinguishable; she once raged that no one had given her any Christmas presents in August. There are no friends I can think of, or people she might be trying to find. Petty arguments killed any friendships years before she moved into the home. Last Christmas, she received only three cards: one from me and the kids, one from Helena and a whopping padded satin thing from Adam that came in a flat white box. You could smell the guilt emanating from it. As far as I know, there’s no one else in her life, unless you count the ever-patient GPs, hairdressers and chiropodists who frequent the home and tend to various parts of her. I must tell the kids that should I show any signs of becoming like Granny, they must set me up in a tiny cottage by the sea with limitless alcohol and strong fags, as I fully intend to take up smoking again. Martin is fervently anti-smoking – the reason I gave up, in fact. I shall save all my fag ends and dispatch them to him in a Jiffy bag.
Mimosa House is in sight. My head swims with a terrible image of crushed Fox’s Glacier Mints glinting in the road, or her old brown cardigan flattened by a tyre, with a pigeon pecking at it. Helena is hovering anxiously in the foyer and buzzes me in. She is trying to emanate calmness, but I can see fear in her eyes. ‘I’ve been racking my brains,’ she says, ‘and there’s only one place your mum ever talks about.’
‘Glasgow? She wouldn’t have gone to King’s Cross, would she, and caught a train?’
Helena smiles kindly. ‘I think that’s unlikely.’
‘And the police have been out looking for her?’
‘Yes. We’ve still got staff out looking too. She can’t have gone far, Caitlin.’
I nod, feeling helpless and sick. Mum could have been mugged – although she has nothing to be mugged for, apart from her mints – or knocked down by a car. Her road sense is worse than Travis’s. I picture her in some alley or shadowy corner of the park, alone and scared. No longer vexed Jeannie ticking me off for letting myself go.
‘Caitlin,’ Helena says gently, ‘please don’t cry. We’ll find your mum. Let’s go.’
As we set out, I’m thinking, Glasgow. It’s where she belongs, even now; she has only ever tolerated London. Dad, a Londoner himself, had promised that they’d have a better life here. As if in defiance, she’d talked about home constantly, which had tipped into the shipyard fantasies. Jeannie the shipbuilder, slamming in rivets with her bare fists.
‘Helena,’ I say suddenly, ‘I have an idea.’ Ships, rivers, water.
‘What is it?’
‘The canal. I just have a feeling …’
‘It’s worth a try,’ she says, and we hurry along dank side streets, calling her name.
‘I’m Jeannie!’ cries a drunk man, tumbling out of a ratty-looking pub. He sings after us, ‘I dream of Jeannie with the light-brown hair.’
We reach the bridge that spans the canal. There’s a flight of steps on each side leading down to the towpath. While Helena hurries down one, I take the other. There are moored narrow-boats, some with yellowy glows at their windows. Now my hunch seems ridiculous, that Mum might have mistaken a murky East London canal for the Clyde.
Folk music drifts lazily from one of the boats. There’s a sweet, woody smell of dope. I clack along the towpath in my spindly sandals. One of the heels feels unstable and I pray that it won’t snap off. Boots would have been better after all.
Although I’m almost too scared to look, my eyes skim the water. Silvery reflections shiver on its surface. There are a few floating cans and a plastic milk carton. What if Mum hasn’t floated, but is lying at the bottom with the rusting shopping trolleys and God knows what else?
How the hell will I tell Adam about this?
He was right. Mimosa House isn’t the right place for her. Not safe enough. It’s the twenty-first century, for God’s sake; aren’t they able to instal a security system that’s capable of foiling an old lady with dementia? It’s not as if she hasn’t tried this before. She has crept into the kitchen and towards the open back door while the chef was having a ciggy. She’s lurked by the front door, hoping to attach herself to someone else’s family as they leave. Helena has found her rattling the bar on the fire-escape door in a bid for freedom. Imprisoned – that’s how Mum feels. Incarcerated with lots of old people talking nonsense and a blaring TV that seems permanently tuned to The Flintstones. Tears drip down my cheeks, and a sob escapes. If I’d done what Martin had suggested and moved her in with us, she’d be alive now.
‘Scuse me? Are you all right?’
The voice gives me a start. A head has popped up from the folk-music boat. A stocky, bearded man emerges.
‘I’m just looking for someone,’ I say quickly.
He grins and a gold tooth glints. ‘Feisty lady, Scottish, worked in shipyards all her life?’
Relief swells over me like a wave and I hurry towards him. ‘Yes, have you seen her? Is she OK?’
The man beckons me closer. ‘Jeannie’s in here. She’s good company, your mum. A lovely old bird.’ He takes my hand and helps me over the railings.
I step on to the deck, which wobbles uncertainly, and follow him down a short flight of creaking steps. There’s a thick smell of woodsmoke. Low benches run along each side, on which several young men and women sit, tightly packed as if on a train, plus Jeannie with her tweed coat buttoned up to her neck.
‘Mum!’ I exclaim, peering into the gloom. ‘What are you doing here?’
She jabs a finger at the table. They are playing cards. A couple of cigarettes and a joint emit smoke from a scallop-shell ashtray. ‘Playing poker,’ she retorts. ‘What does it look like?’
‘Everyone’s been worried sick! I’ve been charging about all over the place looking for you—’
‘She’s a ferocious player,’ the bearded man cuts in. ‘You’ve been having a nice time with us, Jeannie, haven’t you?’ He winks at me.
‘Nice to find young people with manners,’ Mum mutters. ‘You’re looking awfully done up, aren’t you? Are you going somewhere?’
‘No, Mum.’ I don’t have it in me to be angry.
‘Those trousers do nothing for your hips.’
A girl with a pale, luminous face giggles into her hand. She’s probably the age of my babysitter.
‘Come on, Mum,’ I say gently. ‘Let’s go.’
‘You’re a spoilsport, you are. Always ruining my fun.’ Her eyes gleam in the tea lights’ glow.
I squeeze past the tight row of knees to take Mum by the hand. ‘Thanks for looking after her,’ I say. ‘Come on, Jeannie, I’m taking you home.’
‘Back to those bloody old people,’ she growls as we leave.
It’s 3.20 a.m. With creeping horror, it dawns on me that I am having my Bambino photo taken in seven hours’ time. Millie insisted that I have a professional photo taken for the page. Imagine fretting over such a trivial matter when your own mother could have fallen into the canal or been taken hostage by boat-dwellers.
Naturally, all of this is completely my fault. This is what happens when you go out with a strange man, drink alcohol and start thinking that perhaps sex isn’t such an appalling concept after all.
11
‘Heavy night last night?’ Carmen scans my face as if it’s a substandard garment on a sale rail.
‘Just a few drinks with friends,’ I reply.
‘Hmmm, I’ll need to cover up here, here and here.’ Her French-manicured nail flicks my chin, the sides of my nose and under-eye zones. ‘And here and here,’ she adds, indicating my hairline and jaw.
I glimpse my reflection in the studio’s dressing-room mirror. To Carmen, who’s accustomed to making up professional models, I must look like a corpse.
‘What sort of make-up d’you usually wear?’ she
asks.
‘Um, Rimmel, bit of Maybelline …’
She winces. ‘I mean colours. Which spectrum d’you feel comfortable with?’
What does she mean? I don’t have a spectrum. ‘I don’t wear much make-up,’ I say, ‘unless I’m going out, then it’s just a bit of eyeshadow and lip gloss.’
She emits a gravelly laugh. ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor.’
Despite my horror at having my photo taken by a proper photographer – in a proper studio with blazing lights – I have begun to feel less anxious about the whole deal. Carmen appears to be wearing no make-up apart from a slick of brownish gloss on her full lips. A natural beauty, smelling fresh and lemony. I feel reasonably safe in her dainty hands.
‘All I’ll do,’ she continues, ‘is bring out your eyes and lips, sticking to the pinky-brown palette. Flattering shades to bring out your natural glow.’
Natural glow! I like the sound of that. Haven’t had one for at least a decade.
‘You’ll still be you,’ Carmen adds, ‘but more so.’ She smiles reassuringly and I smile back. I’m not sure what the pinky-brown palette is exactly, but it sounds unthreatening.
Travis, I am relieved to note, is chatting happily to Adrian, the photographer, in the main studio. ‘I like Captain Hook,’ he announces. ‘Captain Hook cool.’
‘I like him too,’ Adrian enthuses. ‘D’you have one of those plastic hooks that you wear instead of a hand?’
‘Yeah! Daddy bought it. An’ I got jacket and trousers.’
I’d tried to persuade Millie that I would be available only on Travis’s nursery days, but now it seems I needn’t have worried.
‘We’re lucky to be able to book Adrian,’ she’d told me. ‘We have to work around his availability.’
Carmen selects products from three enormous make-up boxes and sets them out on the dressing table. For a natural look, she seems to have chosen a heck of a lot. There are eye shadows in dozens of shades ranging from shimmery beige to black. Black eye shadow? I hope she’s not intending to use it. I feel far too ragged to pull off the smoky-eyed temptress look, and I’m not sure I’d be convincing as a goth. She opens a palette of lip colours and removes the lids from four bottles of foundation.
‘You’re a tricky colour,’ she murmurs, ‘so I’ll have to blend.’
‘Right.’ No one has said this before. I wonder if it indicates an underlying medical problem.
Clearly, Carmen is leaving nothing to chance. Armed with brushes, applicators, eyelash-curlers and flat circular sponges that look like breast pads, she sets to work. As in the hairdresser’s, I avoid my reflection, focusing on an oily smear on the wall just beneath the mirror.
‘Your little boy’s a real sweetie,’ Carmen remarks, soothing my nerves with strokes of her blusher brush.
‘Thanks. He has his moments, but he’s a pretty good boy.’
‘He’s so cute! Nothing like you, is he? Does he look like his dad?’
My molars clamp together. ‘Yes, he’s his image, actually.’
Carmen chuckles. ‘He must be a honey. Your man, I mean. Lucky you.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I hate it when this happens. My kids are, admittedly, head-turningly cute, and that’s not just me being boastful. Strangers ooh and ahh in the park, even with Jake, who you’d assume would be too old to be cooed over. Rather fortuitously, my offspring have inherited Martin’s dark-eyed intensity, rather than my insipid blue-grey eyes and light-brown hair. In fact, they bear no resemblance to me whatsoever, which is galling when you’re the one who lugged them around for nine months and lay screaming and sucking on gas-and-air, feeling as if your entire lower half was about to burst open. Martin’s handsomeness has been distilled into our children, the smug arse.
‘Nananananananana, Batmaaan!’ blasts Travis.
‘All done,’ Carmen says with a grin. ‘What do you think?’
I look up. Slowly, the image comes into focus.
And it’s truly terrible.
I mumble something unintelligible. In fact, I am incapable of speech. No words could convey the true horror of what I see before me. Carmen lied. I am not myself only more so. She has transformed me from being reasonably presentable with a faint air of knackeredness into what I can only describe as … a man.
A man in drag. The kind of unconvincing trannie you feel desperately sorry for, with his over-done face and bouffant hair and massive farmer’s hands. The sort you want to take aside and say, ‘Look, love, cut the flouncy blouse and false eyelashes and all that slathery lipstick. It’s too much. Women don’t do their make-up that way – at least, they haven’t since 1975. Come home with me and we’ll have a cup of tea and try something more feminine.’
Seemingly unconcerned with my reaction, Carmen is packing away her things. I keep staring. It’s beyond awful. I will appear in a national magazine looking like a Bert or a Norman. My man-face face gawps at me as Carmen cleans her lip palette with baby wipes. In some other universe, Travis continues to trill the Batman tune.
‘I … um …’ I stutter, fearing that if I stare long enough, I will detect an Adam’s apple and a hint of beard growth.
Carmen is humming now, seemingly having forgotten that I exist. She certainly doesn’t care what I think of her handiwork. How dare she lull me into a false sense of security? Natural glow indeed! I’d be no less pissed off if I’d asked a painter to redecorate my living room – not that I can afford to employ tradespeople – and instead of the creamy white I’d asked for, he’d painted the goddamn room purple.
‘Mummy!’ Travis cries. ‘Where’s Mummy?’
‘Just coming, darling,’ I manage, as Carmen gives my hair a cursory backcomb and liberal dose of foul-smelling spray. Fantastic. Now I am sporting an unyielding dome. Who backcombs their hair in this day and age?
By now, I am beyond caring. I’ll just have to go with it. At least I’ll give Millie a laugh when she sees the pictures. Then I can throw myself off London Bridge and be done with it.
‘She’s ready,’ Carmen sing-songs.
I am no longer Caitlin, but ‘she’. And I smell weird, as if my entire body has been dunked in melted-down old-lady make-up. I smell like Mimosa House, minus the faint whiff of wee and meaty dinners.
I stride purposefully from the dressing room to the main studio, where Adrian has positioned a soft leather seat for me to park myself on. Travis is sprawled belly-down on the floor, where he’s playing with a pile of multicoloured cables. I hope they’re not live electrical cables. Surely Adrian or his whey-faced assistant would have stopped him if they were …
‘Right. Lovely.’ Adrian appraises my appearance, his mouth twitching with unease. ‘On the chair, please, Karen.’
‘It’s Cait—’ I start, just as Travis looks up, his face crumpling in horror as he sees not his loving, pancake-making mother, but some bloke called Bert who’s stolen my clothes.
‘Mummy!’ he screams, sending the cables flying.
‘It’s OK, darling, it’s me,’ I protest as he spins away, colliding with a light stand and sending it crashing to the floor. There’s a metallic clang and a tinkle of breaking glass.
‘Christ, my light!’ Adrian barks.
I spring out of the seat and try to gather up Travis from his huddled position in the corner. He writhes out of my grasp, still wailing as if I’m some dastardly child-thief. ‘Want Mummy!’
‘Travis, darling, I am Mummy.’
‘Don’t like Mummy face!’ he shrieks.
Carmen regards the scene with amusement, one hand plonked on her skinny hip.
‘It’s just make-up,’ I soothe. ‘I’ll take it all off.’
‘Horrid Mummy! Bad Mummy!’
‘Shhh, sweetheart …’
‘WANT DADDY!’
‘I try to grasp his hand, but he flails wildly, punching my thigh and kicking furiously. Finally, as his fury morphs into sobs, I manage to coax him towards the leather seat.
‘Sorry about your light,’ I murmur.
�
��These things happen.’ Adrian rolls his eyes towards his assistant – a sharply angled boy who has so far failed to acknowledge me and is already setting up a replacement light. ‘They could have warned me,’ he adds, ‘that there’d be a child here today. It’s not really appropriate.’
Oh, isn’t it? Maybe I should have employed the stuffing-him-in-a-cupboard trick. Bet Harriet Pike didn’t cause any bother when she was having her photo done.
Travis is so distraught we end up doing the pictures with him plonked on my lap, whimpering like an injured pup. No matter how I try to radiate empathy, I am conscious of my jaw being unnaturally clenched.
‘Smile, Travis,’ I murmur.
‘Oh, don’t worry about him,’ Adrian mutters. ‘I’m cropping out the kid.’
Now Travis, like me, is nameless.
Carmen swoops over my face with her powder brush. ‘You have a terribly oily T-zone,’ she reprimands. ‘You’re breaking through.’
No bloody wonder. Travis is still gulping silently. As we leave the studio, I glimpse the three of them – Adrian, his assistant and Carmen the Witch – swiping beers from a battered fridge and flipping them open with a desperate air.
‘Nasty Mummy face,’ Travis whimpers in the stairwell.
Hell, I’ve forgotten to scrape off the damn make-up. ‘It’s just like dressing up,’ I assure him. ‘You know, like when you play Captain Hook.’
He remains unconvinced. How long before we’re home and I can hose down my face? Half an hour at least. Half an hour in public with my Bert face on.
In the studio’s cobbled courtyard, I scrabble in my bag for my purse. Thirteen quid and a few coppers. Not nearly enough for a cab. I grasp Travis’s hand, intending to find a café with an abundant supply of loo roll with which to wipe my face. We march through a series of junk-cluttered alleys, eventually finding ourselves at a bustling roundabout. Nothing looks as it did when we came here. There are gloomy warehouses and factories with crudely painted signs, but no café with limitless loo paper, and therefore no chance of making myself look normal.
We march on, bracing ourselves against the cold March winds, both too gloomy to speak, until the Underground sign comes into view. Thankfully, the Tube carriage isn’t crowded. Perhaps we’ll manage to get home without my having to make eye contact with anyone. Each time I blink I’m conscious of something like eighteen layers of lash-lengthening mascara. I feel like my eyelashes have been dunked in tar.
