For Paul Hunt
Contents
HOLLY
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
DARREN
HOLLY
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
DARREN
HOLLY
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
HOLLY
PROLOGUE
1990
This was going to be my Best. Day. Ever. Mummy had brought me to London and we were going to see a matinee performance of Miss Saigon at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. I loved saying, ‘The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane,’ and thought that every building or house should be described like this. So, I was in year four at Mattocks Park, but if anyone ever asked me which school I went to, I’d reply, ‘Mattocks Park, Alderman Road.’ I thought it made me sound like a movie star. And there was usually nothing movie star about my life, living as I did in a boring semi, in a boring cul-de-sac, with boring parents, in a boring market town. I lived in Tring. Tring didn’t even sound like a proper place; it sounded like the noise the bell on my bicycle made. Sometimes I pronounced it with a mock French accent to make it sound more exotic. Tringue. Or sometimes Trinje. Some thought that was pretentious for an eight-year-old, but as Mummy said to the neighbours on more than one occasion, ‘She’s not exactly a conventional child.’
I knew it wasn’t very nice to describe your parents as ‘boring’, especially when your mum brought you on exciting trips like this one, but this really was the most interesting thing she had ever done in her life. And I’m not exaggerating. She used to say I exaggerated all the time. Like the time I told her I’d seen a masked gunman coming into school when actually it was Mr Roberts (the Welsh one, not the Scottish one) in his costume for the Dick Turpin assembly. Or the time I told her Mrs Tipping had given birth to a pussycat called Brandy when actually all she had done was bring her cat into class because she was on her way to the vet’s and it was sat in her lap and then it jumped off. Mum just used to reply with a reminder that one of the Ten Commandments was ‘Thou shalt not exaggerate.’ It was right up there between bearing false witness and coveting your neighbour’s ox. But really, Mummy and Daddy were really, really boring. And what’s more, they were really, really old. When I was born, Mummy was forty-two. Forty-two. That was old enough to be a granny. I’m surprised the doctors and nurses didn’t go, ‘My God, woman, what are you doing here? You should be, like, dead.’ My parents were always the oldest of all the kids’ parents at school. So if they came to sports day, or a concert, everyone assumed they were my grandparents. It was really, really embarrassing. Everyone else’s mum and dad wore jeans and puffa jackets. Mine wore sensible shoes and grey hair. Yuck.
The other really embarrassing thing was that Mummy was the local church organist. In the week she was a secretary at the nearby college of further education, but come Sunday, she was sat at the Gray & Davison three-keyboard ‘monster’ (her words, not mine. An organ was an organ was an organ as far as I was concerned) in her red cassock and Persil-white surplice, hands flying. ‘Mrs Mills with pipes’ my daddy used to call her, though I had no idea what this meant.
And she wasn’t just the organist, oh no! She was also the ‘musical director’. She had invented this term herself, she claimed, because usually a man being in charge of a choir was called a ‘choir master’, but the female equivalent would have been ‘choir mistress’, and – although she wouldn’t elaborate on why – she didn’t feel that was a very good idea. She was out every Thursday and Friday evening at choir practice, and if there was a wedding on Saturday, she would be out for the afternoon then too. You might think this would have given me a break from her musical-directory ways, but no. And why? Because I was in her blessed blooming choir. I know. Mortifying. I hated it. I had to wear the smelly cassock thing too and it itched my neck. And she made me wear pigtails because she felt that was the best look with a cassock. My life was intertwined with hers in a constant round of singing, processioning, cassocking and more singing.
With Thursday to Sunday taken up with churchy things, you might think we got some respite at home Monday to Wednesday. No such luck! Monday and Tuesday were fine, but Wednesday she always had the radio on for a teatime programme called Choral Evensong. And she would sit in the living room beating time with a knitting needle, singing along with the hymns. And she expected me to do the same. The noise of the organ blasting out of the radio, the only time she would have it on full blast, was like the sound of a thousand people being murdered. And that was no exaggeration.
Monday night was Tring Penguins night, my weekly swimming club, and even there I couldn’t escape Mum’s churchy ways. When I emerged from the changing rooms to go poolside and join my fellow Penguins, Mummy would shout from the spectators’ gallery, ‘What locker, Holly?’
And I wasn’t allowed to reply with the number of the locker in which I had left my clothes; I had to reply with the equivalent hymn for the number, taken from Hymns Ancient and Modern. So if I’d left my stuff in locker number 15, I would have to shout back, ‘“Before the Ending of the Day”!’ Or had I used number 197, it would be, ‘“The King of Love My Shepherd Is”!’ Honestly, the looks I got from the other children when I did this.
And my enforced musical education didn’t end there. I had to have piano and cello lessons, and Mrs Baxter who taught me cello smelt of cheese. And I loathed cheese.
So you can understand why I officially hated my life.
Sometimes I would look at my dad while he ate his TV dinner on his stained tray with the beanbag underneath as we watched yet another episode of Songs of Praise and I could see the look of vague detachment in his eyes. As if his glasses were watching the programme, to appease Mummy, but behind the glass, his eyes were elsewhere. They were seeing a beach in the South Pacific; they were playing football at Wembley for Tring Athletic – anything other than this, our miserable musical existence. And I felt for, and just like, him. I’d look in the mirror sometimes and see an alien. Like I’d landed from another planet into this weird world I neither liked nor understood. I would visit school friends’ houses and wish I lived there instead, with their mess and their spilt ketchup, and their boy band music and their laughter, not a hymn in sight. And my friends would assume that I was really religious, and that my family were, whereas in fact I always suspected Mummy wasn’t that fussed about Jesus and the whole God situation. Her love of the church was really just her love of the music. And yes, it glorified God in the extreme and so on, but really she was in it for the pedals.
I was very excited about going to see Miss Saigon as I had borrowed the CD from the local library and knew all the words because I had sung along to them non-stop in my bedroom for two weeks, even though I wasn’t sure what half of them meant. Plus there was a lady in it called Lea Salonga, which had to be the best name in the whole of the universe. Mummy disagreed with me on this – she thought the best name was a crumbly old actress called Googie Withers – but undeterred, I would often practise signing:
love Lea Salonga
in my autograph book for hours. One day I was going to change my name to Holly Salonga and star in Miss Saigon, even though Mummy said that wasn’t a possibility because I wasn’t ‘oriental’ enough. She had said the same when the local amateur dramatic group were putting on The King and I and I wanted to be Tuptim.
My favourite song in the show we were going to see was ‘The Hea
t Is On In Saigon’. I had worked out a whole dance routine to it, using cushions, which I pretended were pom-poms, and lots of high kicks. I was beside myself with excitement that we were finally, finally going to experience it!
But first we were going to do something else incredibly exciting. After taking the train from Tring to London Euston, we were going to have a pre-theatre lunch at . . . McDonald’s!!!! I had never been before. We didn’t have one in Tring. They had them in Hemel Hempstead and Aylesbury and Leighton Buzzard, but not where we lived. I would get so jealous of other children in my class saying how brilliant their lives were because they’d had a shopping trip to Hemel and gorged on eighty-three Big Macs. I had never had that pleasure.
Till now.
Mummy said I could have whatever I wanted. This was quite out of character for her – usually she liked to decree what was best for me and what course of action I should take – but today she seemed remarkably ‘couldn’t-care-less’. She was like a different person. I would have to let her take me to London more often if this was the effect it had on her. She hadn’t mentioned church or the choir once. This new her didn’t really suit her – she seemed ill at ease, nervous – but I really couldn’t care less. We were having fast food.
I ordered a hamburger, a Filet-O-Fish (my friend Kasey Woodlands had told me they were the tastiest thing ever), medium fries and a strawberry milkshake. Mummy plumped for a Big Mac (so I could see one close up), no fries and coffee. With the drinks rattling on the tray, Mummy carried them over to a corner table for two. I looked out of the window onto Leicester Square. It was teeming with people rushing about doing London-y things: families on days out, women with huge shopping bags with fancy names on, coach parties in matching cagoules, a tramp eating a discarded sandwich on a bench with a few pigeons waiting hungrily at his feet. High above on the cinema hoardings were massive adverts for all the latest films: Ghost, Home Alone. I was almost tempted to ask if we could go and see one of them, but that would have meant forgoing my beloved future namesake, Miss Salonga, so I kept quiet.
Mummy seemed to be working up to saying something. This, too, was out of character for her. As a musical director, she was used to speaking to large groups, and as my mother, she was never backwards in coming forwards about offering her opinion. But something was very different today. It immediately made me feel a bit anxious.
I bit into my Filet-O-Fish. Kasey Woodlands was right: it was like biting into heaven.
But then Mummy spoke.
‘You know your cousin Tracey?’ she asked in an unfamiliarly tiny voice.
I nodded. Of course I knew my cousin. She was a total swot and wrote thank-you cards to my mummy at Christmas that said things like:
You’re my favourite aunty, Aunty Jean. And do you know what else? You light up a room. Like a big, sparkly silver bracelet, catching the light and twinkling so everyone knows it’s there.
I couldn’t stand her. Plus she called me Alien. To my face.
‘Well, don’t you think she looks like Aunty Beryl?’
Of course she looked like Aunty Beryl. They both had red hair. I had bitten into my hamburger. It was to die for.
‘I mean, there’s no mistaking they’re mother and daughter, with that lovely auburn hair of theirs.’
‘The boys at school call her Ginger Minge,’ I pointed out. I had no idea what this meant.
‘Oh, that’s nice, dear,’ she said.
Which made me think she didn’t know what it meant either, because when the boys called her it, she more often than not called them ‘gayboys’ and then burst into tears.
‘We don’t look alike, do we, Holly?’ She smiled.
No, thank God. I’d much rather have honey-coloured hair than grey, thank you very much. I shook my head, my mouth full of hot fries and strawberry milkshake. They went so well together.
‘Well . . . there’s a reason for that.’
I stopped chewing. I sat there with my cheeks bulging like a chipmunk. What was she going to say next?
‘And the reason for that is . . .’
She looked like she was finding this the most difficult bit to say.
‘I haven’t got grey hair?’ I said through the mixture of strawberry and chips.
‘Don’t speak with your mouth full, dear. It’s not nice. You know it’s not nice.’
I nodded and quickly swallowed my food. After which I burped.
She looked furious. ‘Holly!’ But then she looked like she was trying her hardest to be nice again. ‘No, the reason we don’t look anything like each other is . . . you’re adopted.’
She gave me a broad smile. Then took her first bite of Big Mac.
I froze. I couldn’t physically move my arms or legs or any muscles in my face. I held my Filet-O-Fish in mid-air in my left hand and the milkshake carton aloft in my right. I literally couldn’t move.
Mummy was making appreciative sounds. ‘Well, I can see why you were so keen to come here, Holly. This is rather delicious.’
I looked at my food. And as I moved my eyes, so the feeling in my body returned and I placed the burger and drink on the plastic table. Outside, I was aware of the hustle and bustle, the noise, someone busking with an accordion. The food and drink now seemed like the most unappealing of things. Like I was looking down at a trayful of vomit with horse dung on the side.
‘I imagine this has come as somewhat of a shock, dear.’
I wanted to nod, but actually all I kept thinking was, So I’m not going mad after all! No wonder I don’t . . . fit in!
And she proceeded to tell me how my real mummy hadn’t been clever enough to look after me and was a bit stupid and probably fat and smoked, and so I had been taken away from her when I was a few months old and given to Jean and Ted, who knew all about looking after babies because they had a garden and knew their way around a washing machine. She continued in the vein of how lucky I was that I’d ended up in sunny Tring, in a house with loft insulation, instead of running feral in some Northern backstreet, a world of smog, chimneys and port and lemon.
‘What does “feral” mean?’ was all I could think to say.
‘Wild, dear. You’d probably have had a soiled nappy and not had it changed for days. You were born into a world of . . . black-and-white Coronation Street, and now you’re . . .’ she seemed to be losing confidence with this analogy, ‘. . . in the sunnier climes of . . . Oh, what was that lovely situation comedy with oojameflip? Julia McKenzie.’
I had no idea.
‘Fresh Fields!’ she shouted, a big grin on her face. ‘I do like her jumpsuits,’ she added. She did. She actually said that.
And from nowhere I found myself crying. I couldn’t stop myself. I was bawling really loudly and the people on the adjoining tables started looking over and I could see Mummy going the colour of a beetroot.
‘Try and be quiet, Holly. I know it’s a shock, but . . . even so . . .’
She passed me some paper napkins to dry my eyes. I dabbed at them a bit and eventually started to calm down. She obviously thought I was devastated by the news, but actually I wasn’t feeling sad that I was different from other children; I was weepy because things were slipping into place, and that suddenly there was a reason for why I had always felt so . . . alien. Gosh, even Tracey had called me it on several occasions. Did she know?
I had known I didn’t look anything like my parents. I had known that they were at least ten years older than everyone else in my class’s parents. I didn’t like the house in Tring and going to church and wearing pigtails. And now I knew why.
These were happy tears. I was crying with relief that I wasn’t stupid. Not that Mummy interpreted it as that. She tried to placate me by passing me my strawberry milkshake. I was now intrigued. If she wasn’t my real mother, who on earth was?
‘What was my real mummy like?’ I asked between strawberry slurps.
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Let’s not talk about her. She’s not important.’
Oh. But she was important to
me, surely? If she was, like, my mother? And maybe I would love her, if I could just meet her. Even if she was fat and smoked and you could see her bra through her blouse and she did common things like wee in the street after going to a pub because she couldn’t wait till she got home and she laughed her head off while doing it. But somehow I could sense there was no point telling Mummy that.
Everything in my life felt like it had suddenly changed. This woman before me who had for eight solid years claimed to be my mother, and done a really good job of lying to everyone that she was, had suddenly told me she wasn’t. I had abided by her rules the whole of my life and suddenly I thought, Maybe now I don’t have to.
‘You know, this changes nothing,’ she said, taking a slurp of her coffee, then realizing it was still too hot and wincing.
Really? I thought. You think so?
I turned to the people on the next table. They were two ladies, younger than Mummy but still really old. One had her hair scraped up in a pineapple; it was blonde on the ends and black at the roots. Her friend was wearing a lopsided beret. I wondered if they were French. Pineapple Head saw me looking and smiled nervously, no doubt hoping I wasn’t going to burst out crying again.
I smiled at her. Then I said, ‘I’m adopted.’
She didn’t react. She turned her head towards Mummy.
‘Holly! Stop showing off!’
‘But I am!’
‘Holly, stop this!’
The women on the next table started talking in whispers. Mummy put her burger down and announced it was time to leave.
I told her I hadn’t finished my Filet-O-Fish. I hardly ever answered back.
She said she didn’t care and that she was going to the theatre and whether I wanted to join her was up to me, but she had the tickets, so there.
I grabbed the fish and ate it on the way.
All the way there I kept thinking, I could run away now. I could run away and go wherever I want. She won’t be able to stop me. This woman is not my mother; in fact, she has nothing to do with me. I hate her. I’ve always hated her, and now I know why. She is not my mother.
The Girl Who Just Appeared Page 1