Call Me Star Girl

by Louise Beech

  The door buzzer sounds and I scream.

  I daren’t approach the little screen that shows who’s on the other side.

  My mum? Surely. She’s on her way, after all.

  Or what if The Man Who Knows is here early?

  What if he heard me announce that several songs were coming up and thinks it’s so he has a chance to speak at length with me. On cue, electric blue flashes at the end of the corridor. I’m torn between getting the phone and answering the door. The buzzer sounds again, urgent.

  I run back, pick up the phone, and say, ‘Stella McKeever, one moment please,’ and then head for the door. It’s my mum on the screen.

  Thank God.

  She looks small. I remember how she filled a room when she was dressed up to go out. How, as a small child, I felt warm in her dazzling light, even when she shone it in another direction.

  I open the door. The light from the foyer momentarily makes her look young again. Like we are the same age.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she says, as she always does, eternally apologising for being here after so long away.

  ‘Not at all.’ I close the door after her.

  ‘Are you okay?’ She studies me, concerned.

  I must look a state. ‘It’s just … been a hell of a night. One of the presenters hasn’t turned up and we’re worried sick. Then I heard something outside and was a bit spooked.’

  ‘Oh, that was me, sorry. There are no lights on out there and I fell over the bin.’

  ‘Yeah, they’ve gone out in the corridor too.’

  She has a carrier bag in her hand. When she sees me looking at it she says, ‘It’s for you. But not yet.’

  As in my game with Tom, I ask nothing. ‘Come in.’

  I go into the studio. She follows. She may not have been to my home, but she’s been here. This has been my second home for five years, really, seven if you include my training, so she has seen where I mostly exist.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’ I ask.

  ‘No, I’m okay.’

  I see the phone’s receiver off the hook and remember there’s a caller waiting. ‘Just need to get this,’ I tell her, and then say ‘hello’ into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Stella,’ he says. The Man Who Knows.

  ‘I can’t talk now,’ I whisper.

  ‘Do you have someone there?’

  I frown. Has he been watching the building? Is he already here?

  ‘You do,’ he says. ‘Are you sure someone should be there when I bring my photographs?’

  ‘No,’ I hiss, turning away from my mum. ‘It’ll just be me. Don’t ring again. I’ll see you when we agreed.’

  I hang up and try and compose myself.

  ‘Who was that?’ asks my mum. ‘Are you okay, Stella?’

  I nod. Lie. I realise that, even though I’ve lined up seven songs – something Stephen will not be happy about when he finds out – we still only have about twenty-five minutes. It isn’t long; a pathetic amount of time for a life-changing discussion. I decide that, since she doesn’t want a drink, I’ll get straight to it.

  ‘I can’t believe you were Victoria Valbon’s doula,’ I say.

  ‘It’s true,’ she admits.

  ‘It’s just … why didn’t you tell me when she died? I even mentioned it to you, the day after, when it hit the news. When they announced her name, you said nothing about knowing her!’

  My mum perches on the edge of the desk, still clutching the carrier bag, as though, if she puts it down for a moment, I’ll snatch it and pull out the contents.

  ‘Before she died she was…’ she begins ‘…just another client. Just another girl. No, that’s not fair. She was more than that. We got … close. And then when … when it happened … well, I was in shock. I just couldn’t … I didn’t know what you’d think. What anyone would think. But then … now…’

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m telling you in case you find out.’

  ‘Find out what?’

  ‘What I wanted to tell you earlier on the phone.’ She pauses. ‘You deal with the news here so you’re bound to hear it. I know they haven’t said who it is yet. But they might.’

  ‘Said who what is?’

  ‘I’m being interviewed by the police. About Vicky’s murder.’

  ‘You?’

  She nods. ‘It’s because I knew her.’

  ‘Yes, but … it’s you? The new suspect?’

  I wonder if she knows that Tom was questioned, too. Did Victoria tell her who the father of her baby was? She must have done. This all races through my head, but I don’t want to ask any of it. Don’t want her to know Tom was questioned. Surely if she knew, she would say so? But she didn’t tell me she’d known Victoria. I glance quickly at my window to find calm; it doesn’t work.

  ‘I’m not a suspect,’ she says. ‘That’s something more official. Even if they say that on the news, I’m not. I’m just helping them with their enquiries. It’s all voluntary. Lots of people who knew her have done that. I was at the station yesterday.’

  ‘What did they want to know?’

  ‘Just about my time with her,’ my mum admits. ‘You know, our relationship.’

  ‘You told me earlier that you fell out.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says softly. ‘We did. But I won’t tell them that. It doesn’t make me look very good, does it? And it has nothing to do with her death.’

  ‘You’re going to lie?’

  ‘It isn’t lying if you don’t mention something, is it?’

  What can I say to that? Is she right? And aren’t we all liars, then?

  ‘I have to go again in a few days,’ she says; ‘and I think that should be it.’

  ‘Should?’

  ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’

  Except she has. She has hidden my father from me all of my life. Hidden herself from me for most of it too. She seems to realise the weight of her words.

  ‘With regards to Vicky,’ she adds.

  I sigh heavily. ‘What if her family knows you fell out? She must have told them? What if they tell the police, and you don’t? How will that look?’ I pause. ‘How did you fall out?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘Don’t we have more important things to talk about?’

  ‘We do.’ I glance at the monitor; we have nineteen minutes now. ‘But I’m still curious.’

  ‘Let me tell you another day,’ she says. ‘When we have more time. If we get into that, we won’t have time for…’

  My father, I think.

  ‘Tell me about the star perfume.’ The words leave my mouth before I know I’ve put them together.

  My mum closes her eyes and inhales as though smelling it again. The gift I once had for knowing how she felt – for feeling it myself – floods through my system. Carrie Martin’s “Maria in the Moon” plays; my favourite song this month. The haunting words narrate my emotions. You left your story up in space. It’s coming down now. My mum is bringing it down. I feel childlike joy rise up through her. Thinking about him makes her feel this way. It’s familiar to me. Tom makes me feel the same.

  ‘It was the only thing he ever gave me,’ she says. ‘That’s why I cherished it so much. Why I only wore the perfume when it was just me and you.’

  ‘I’m sorry it’s gone,’ I say.

  ‘Where did you lose it?’

  ‘If I knew that…’

  She nods. ‘I know you looked but you won’t find it online. It was a one-off. He had the scent specially made. He chose all the ingredients. Said it was perfectly me. The bottle belonged to his grandmother and was made of the finest glass. When he was little she used to say that the crystal stopper had actual stars trapped in it. He got it when she died because he was the only grandchild. He told me he kept it for the day when he found a woman who deserved it.’ She strokes the carrier bag. ‘He gave it to me just a month after we met. Stella, there’s no explaining the love between us. I couldn’t fight it. And I couldn’t share it.’ She looks at me. �
��With you.’

  ‘You kept him from me because you didn’t want him to love me?’

  ‘I thought it would dilute how he felt about me.’

  The song ends. Another starts.

  ‘He’d gone anyway,’ she adds. ‘He had to leave just when I found out I was pregnant.’

  ‘Where did he go?’ I ask.

  Ignoring my question, she says, ‘So I decided to let him. I thought I could live with the memory of what we’d had. Thought that would sustain me. I dated so many men when you were small, I know that. I think I was looking for something – anything half as powerful as what we’d had would have been good. But I never found it.’ She pauses. ‘Until he wrote and asked me to go back to him when you were…’

  ‘Twelve,’ I finish. ‘I carried that perfume everywhere.’

  ‘I know.’

  Finally, I say what I’ve always wanted to. I speak softly, my pain quiet. ‘You left me. It was the cruellest thing anyone has ever done to me. Not a word for fourteen years and then you come back. No warning. And I let you in. I let you back into my life. I asked for nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Are you though?’

  She doesn’t answer. ‘I am sorry that I’ve hurt you so much,’ she eventually says.

  ‘You went back to be with him. He wrote to you and you dropped everything. Your life. Me.’ I glare at her. ‘Did you ever think of me? Feel bad that you’d left me with our neighbour while you fell into the arms of your great love?’

  ‘I did,’ she insists.

  ‘Was he worth it?’

  She doesn’t answer; her silence says it all. There’s a break in the music – a caesura. Time seems to stop. In the space, something occurs to me.

  ‘Now I know – it was because he died, wasn’t it? You were alone, so you came back. If he was alive you’d still be with him and I’d still be more or less an orphan.’

  She doesn’t deny it.

  ‘And you have the nerve to ask why you’ve not been to my home.’ I turn my back on her and go to my window. Clouds have suffocated all the light. ‘Do you really want to know why I never asked you over?’ I pause; she doesn’t speak. I’m thawing, the hurt is thawing, and I don’t know what to do with it. ‘I didn’t know why at first, but I do now. I didn’t want to give you the opportunity to come to the place I called home and leave me all over again.’

  ‘That’s fair enough,’ she says sadly. ‘I deserve that.’ After a moment, she adds, ‘Did you ever look for me when you’d grown up?’

  ‘Not once.’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’

  I think of the speech I prepared long, long ago. The words I planned to say to her if she returned.

  Mum, I’m happy you’re back. I’ve wished for this. Every day. But you don’t need to stay. I talk to you at night. See you in the stars. And that’s enough. You’re better up there where the light never goes. If I let you back into my daytime world you might leave again.

  But I don’t say them.

  ‘Who is he then?’ I turn to face her again. ‘My father.’

  My mum pales. If she has prepared for this moment, she’s not ready enough. ‘I gave you clues,’ she says.

  ‘Clues? That’s not fair. This isn’t a game.’

  I want desperately to cry.

  She comes over to me. She takes my hands when she speaks. They are cold. Mine warm them. She looks me in the eyes for the first time. Her irises flash blue, like the phone, like they did when she was young and full of life. It occurs to me that they flash when she thinks of him.

  She tells me about the biggest clue.

  And I know who he is. She doesn’t need to say his name.

  I know.

  I let go of her and run to the toilets and I’m violently sick.

  29

  STELLA

  THEN

  I used to pretend my father was Buck Rogers.

  When I was little, and my mum was still around, I’d sit and watch an old video of the TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, while she was out partying. Sandra-next-door lent it to me. In the end, I wore the tape out and as his image faded in my head too, I pretended my dad was someone else. Sometimes a pop star; sometimes a film star.

  Once at school, I was dumb enough to say that my real father was on the telly. I endured weeks of ribbing. Weeks of finding posters of random celebrities stuck to my cloakroom peg with the word DAD scrawled over them. Children are so clever; they can spot the vulnerable kids. It all died down after a while, when they found someone new to mock, but I kept quiet about my father’s identity for the rest of my school days.

  Until Sandra.

  Once I had lived with her for a few years and I loved her the way you love people who have accepted you with utter kindness, I told her about my fantasy fathers. Neither of us had mentioned my mum for a long time. A social worker visited a few times in the months after Sandra had to declare I now lived with her, but she must have found the home – and Sandra – perfectly adequate for an abandoned child, because she left us to it.

  Sandra and I were sitting at her kitchen table one afternoon, a place we often drank our coffee or ate sausage sandwiches and caught up on the day’s activities. I must have been about sixteen because I was in the midst of my exams. I hated revision, mainly because there were no subjects I enjoyed, and I had no idea what I wanted to do or be.

  ‘It’ll all soon be over,’ said Sandra, stirring sugar into her coffee.

  I drank mine strong, unsweetened. She always joked about me being sweet enough already, to which I’d raise my eyebrows, because we both knew it was the last word anyone would choose to describe me.

  ‘What are you going to do, Stella?’ she sighed.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I could be sulky with Sandra and she never rose to it. Never lost her temper, as though she felt I’d been through enough already.

  ‘Are you going into sixth form? You’ll have to decide, you know. Or do you think an apprenticeship might be the way for you? Learn a job while you’re doing it?’

  I shrugged. I just didn’t care.

  ‘What are your friends doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Clare’s staying on in sixth form. Shauna’s going to work at her dad’s double-glazing company.’

  ‘Shame you don’t have—’ Sandra stopped mid-sentence and shook her head.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I didn’t think,’ she said.

  ‘What? Tell me.’

  She looked sad. Eventually said, ‘I was going to say that it’s a shame you don’t have a father with a thriving company and the chance of a job there.’

  I laughed. Couldn’t help it. All I could see was Buck Rogers. A job with him would mean futuristic space adventures in a skin-tight white suit, with a squeaky-voiced robot as our sidekick. I laughed some more.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Remember years ago, when you gave me that old video cassette with episodes of Buck Rogers on?’

  ‘Oh, that. I always wondered where it had gone.’

  ‘I kept it. Watched it over and over. I used to…’

  ‘What?’ Sandra asked softly.

  ‘Pretend he was my dad,’ I admitted. ‘Daft, I know. I suppose I thought it would be cool to have a dad like that, who was famous. A hero, I guess.’

  Sandra reached out as though to touch my hand and seemed to think better of it. She knew me well. Knew that I often rejected physical comfort, simply because I didn’t know how to respond to it.

  ‘Did your mum never even hint who he was?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I asked her a couple of times, when I was little. She told me he was the kind of father who was better off out of my life.’ I paused. ‘Who was she to make that decision?’

  ‘Maybe it was a genuine choice,’ suggested Sandra. ‘Maybe he hurt her, and she was protecting you?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s it. She talked about him like he was someone … godly almost. I never got the feeling he’
d done anything like that.’

  ‘Do you wish you knew him?’

  I wasn’t sure. That my mother had seen fit to keep him a mystery, that she had clearly idolised him, meant he remained an enigma. The reality might be dull. Ordinary.

  And I didn’t want that.

  ‘Do you know which saying I hate more than anything,’ I said, suddenly angry and not sure why. ‘It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Our teacher quoted it in English. Some knob called Tennyson wrote it. No thanks. I’d rather not bother. Then no one can hurt you.’

  ‘You might change your mind one day,’ said Sandra, softly.

  ‘I won’t,’ I insisted. I hated it when adults told me what I might or might not do. How the hell could they presume to know me that well?

  ‘Shall I put some chips on?’ Sandra always offered me food when she didn’t know what else to say to me.

  ‘Not hungry,’ I snapped, and pushed my chair under the table.

  Sandra stood too. Looked at me. I knew the look. It was the one that meant she wished she could change things. I wish I could get your mum back. I wish I could make it all good for you.

  But I didn’t want her to.

  I went to my room. Opened the window. It was the end of May so not cold enough to freeze my feelings. I preferred to see my mother as part of the sky; I saw my father there too; and myself. I was some fascinating, distant star that lit up the sky but would disintegrate if it ever fell to earth.

  30

  ELIZABETH

  THEN

  We were on our West Park bench when she finally told me about her baby’s father. Vicky and me. Doula and client. The sun was hot and high. The August roses were vivid in the glare. So many colours – pink and red and yellow. She was as swollen as a balloon by then. I had watched her blossom over the last five months. Watched the small, curving tummy grow into a fully fledged pregnancy.

  When I first arrived that day, Vicky seemed somehow different. I think it was a Sunday, because when I play it over in my head now, I remember she said she wasn’t bothered about missing her mum’s Sunday lunch on such a hot day. She said she was sick of seeing happy family life and feeling separate from it. Sick of being alone. A single mum. There are new things I recall each time I think of that day again. New details, like a child running past us and falling over and crying for her mum as her grandad cradled her.