by Joanna Glen
‘So what’s the earliest photo you’ve got of me?’ I said to my mother when we got home.
She produced a pocket album.
I held my breath.
‘Do you remember the beach house in Alvera?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, feeling wobbly with excitement that we were actually going to talk about my life before now, my Spanish life, which no one ever mentioned but which made me feel exotic and special, even though I couldn’t quite remember it.
Here were ten photos from the beach house in Alvera which seemed to have been taken on the same day – me under a palm tree; me by the swimming pool; me eating calamares from a large white plate, scowling.
I grabbed the album.
‘Was I born at the beach house?’
My mother didn’t answer.
‘Questions, questions!’ she said crossly, and I didn’t feel I could ask again.
I stared at the photos very carefully, noting my scared eyes, and I asked my mother if I could please have the album and keep it in my bedroom. She said no.
My mother’s hands were shaking.
They had eczema on them.
‘Did I know anyone at the beach house?’ I said to my mother. ‘Any children?’
‘Your cousins from Jerez visited one weekend,’ she said.
I looked for them inside my mind.
Nothing.
I must tell Miss Feast I have cousins, I thought.
I turned the pages of the album, backwards and forwards.
The beach house had a blue gate with a pool, and two hundred palm trees planted by my father for my mother, and a plate of small squid with tiny cooked curled-up legs. And maybe I did remember it a bit, the way you remember dreams.
‘How old was I there?’ I said.
‘Three and a half,’ she said, fast as anything. ‘It was June 1978.’
‘Three and a half,’ I said slowly.
‘Three and a half,’ she said quickly.
‘You really like making everything match,’ I said, in a slightly disapproving voice.
With my lilac dress, I was wearing a lilac bolero cardigan, lilac shoes and a lilac ribbon – as if I might be displayed in a shop window.
‘You were my best present ever to your mother!’ my father used to say, looking rather pleased with himself.
This made me think of cellophane wrap and gift ribbons, and when I lay awake in bed at night, I wondered if I was a strange mail-order child who’d arrived in Spain, three and a half years old, chosen by my father, a package, which my mother had unwrapped, like a doll, for dressing up. She did love to dress me up.
Perhaps I wasn’t even properly alive.
I checked my heart.
It was beating.
I crept along the dark landing, took the nail scissors from the bathroom cabinet and tried cutting my skin.
It bled.
I stared at the birthmark on my right thigh.
Perhaps I came from an alien race with birthmarks on their thighs.
‘Can I have this mark taken away?’ I said.
‘No, you can’t,’ said my mother. ‘It’s absolutely enormous.’
‘But perfectly shaped like the Iberian Peninsula,’ said my father, explaining that this meant the land mass of Spain and Portugal.
Eva from Iberia – it had the ring of a fierce female warrior, but I didn’t feel much like a warrior, lying in bed in the dark, running my fingers anxiously across the raised edges of my birthmark, wondering why on earth thieves would steal anyone’s baby photos, and then wondering if the thieves were lies, and the stolen albums were lies, and in fact, something more terrible than I could imagine had happened to me.
Chapter 8
My father was at home less and less, which made my mother more and more anxious.
The house seemed darker without him.
Not only metaphorically, but because my mother had an obsession with closing all the triple-lined curtains while it was still light outside (which my father didn’t allow when he was at home).
I remember lying in the dark, thinking that nobody cared properly about me.
Except Bridget.
And my father quite a bit (when he was here).
And Miss Feast (possibly). Miss Feast, with her long black plait, her tiny heart earrings and the mole above her lip. Miss Feast, who very quickly became Mrs Tomkins, though we never called her that. Almost immediately after changing her name, she was (to my mother’s alarm and consternation) pregnant. Like Mary in the school nativity play – a pretty girl called Julia in Class 6, with a pillow up her dress, ready to give birth to Jesus.
Bridget and I dreamt of being Mary when we got to Class 6.
For now, we decided to make do with playing nativity in the playground using the rocking horse as the donkey.
To my surprise, Bridget got on all fours mooing like a cow to allow Baby Jesus to come out of her bottom.
‘Do all babies come out of their mothers’ bottoms?’ I asked.
‘Yes, and there’s this big jellyfish thing that comes out with them,’ she said authoritatively. ‘Called the percenta.’
Wow!
I’d come out of my mother’s bottom with a big jellyfish thing.
The more you found out about life, the weirder it seemed.
I was filling up with questions every day.
‘Why was God a baby?’ I asked Miss Feast when she was on break duty. ‘Babies aren’t any use to anyone.’
‘Everyone starts off as a baby,’ said Miss Feast.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ I said, thinking that this might turn out to be a significant quest conversation. ‘Every single person on the whole earth?’
She nodded.
‘Also,’ I said, ‘was Mary Jesus’s real mother?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And was Joseph Jesus’s real father or was God Jesus’s real father?’
‘They both were.’
‘Can a baby have two fathers or two mothers?’
‘Not normal babies.’
‘Might I have been a not-normal baby?’ I said, thinking that this was hopeful, that there might be a second mother lurking about somewhere, maybe a lovely blue or green one.
She hesitated.
‘This is very important, Miss Feast,’ I said.
‘So many questions, Eva Martínez-Green!’ she said, bringing the conversation to an abrupt close and ringing the bell.
When I got home, I kept staring at my mother, trying to picture her on all fours mooing like a cow while I came out of her bottom.
It was very hard to believe that this had happened.
‘Did I come out of your bottom?’ I asked her in the end, concluding that it was the only failsafe way of finding out.
‘Who told you that?’ she started, before turning very pink, wiping her upper lip with a tissue and saying that these were not things anybody spoke about, and could I please not speak about them either.
If I hadn’t come out of her bottom, whose bottom had I come out of?
These questions were blasted clean out of my mind when Miss Feast cheerfully announced: ‘I will have to leave you all soon to go off and have my baby.’
Yes, cheerfully.
Did the poor woman know what was involved?
‘When will you come back to us?’ I whispered to Miss Feast.
‘I’m not coming back,’ she said. ‘Mr Tomkins and I are moving to Ireland.’
You’re not coming back to St Hilda’s, I thought, never in your whole life?
‘I’ll think of you all,’ she said.
I sat very still.
She’d think of us all – what was the point of that?
What about Forever Eva?
The woman hadn’t even lasted the full year.
Chapter 9
It was no sooner hello Miss Dixon and hello Class 1 than it was goodbye Miss Dixon because her mother had cancer.
Rumours swirled through the school that Miss Dixon had ca
ught cancer from her mother, and now we were most probably all going to get infected too and die a mass death, slumped over each other under our desks, fighting for breath.
I’d spent my entire life worrying about my beginning, but I now started to worry about my end, and whether it might come far too soon, right there in the classroom – the classroom into which Miss Cracey, the headteacher, burst crossly to explain that cancer was not catching, so she didn’t want any nonsense spoken about it, or any histrionics. Cancer happens, she said, when abnormal cells grow and spread very fast. Normal cells, she went on, know how to grow and divide, and they also know how to stop and die. But the abnormal cells don’t know any of this, she said. They go on and on growing and dividing, and sometimes cause little traffic jams, or pile-ups, called tumours, which can be removed by surgeons.
‘I thought people died of cancer,’ said Annabel to Miss Cracey, bravely, as people didn’t as a rule speak to her.
The class fell silent.
Miss Cracey swept her head right to left, like the grey parrot in the pet shop in Fulham.
‘Of course not everyone dies,’ she said tightly. ‘The surgeons are very clever these days.’
Nobody spoke.
‘I don’t want to hear another thing about it,’ said Miss Cracey. ‘We have ten chicken eggs being delivered to your classroom on Monday. And if there’s any more nonsense from you, they will go to Class 2 instead.’
Nobody moved.
‘This is the end of the matter,’ she said firmly. ‘Do you hear me?’
Yes, we heard her.
That’s what ears do, and even if you put your hands over them, as I did when my mother had arguments with my father, they still went on hearing.
‘Not everyone dies,’ that’s what Miss Cracey said.
We were learning subtraction, using ten beach pebbles per table.
‘Not everyone,’ I said to Bridget, ‘means nearly everyone,’ and I took away nine pebbles, one at a time, putting them solemnly in the shadows under my desk.
‘All the pebbles die except one,’ I said.
We stared at the one alive pebble.
‘Let’s ask our parents about cancer tonight,’ said Bridget. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as it sounds.’
I nodded and said yes yes, acting like we had those kinds of big conversations all the time in our house, oh we never stopped talking about life and death and terminal diseases.
In the taxi home with my mother, I sat silently imagining cancer like a bird of prey, up above us with its wings stretched out, deciding who to pounce on. And it came to me that up in the sky, behind the clouds, there were probably lots of other horrible beasts we didn’t yet know about, all of them monstrous, with wings and hungry beaks, looking for prey.
Chapter 10
The next day, Bridget reported that her doctor-dad had confirmed that cancer was indeed a serious illness.
But, good news:
‘He says that there are treatments, which sometimes work.’
Well, good-ish news.
‘What are treatments?’
‘Medicine.’
‘Like Disprin?’ I said, trying to think of the names of medicines in my mother’s bathroom cabinet. ‘Or Prozac?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Bridget, looking a bit uncertain. ‘And he said just because we know there are wasps about, it doesn’t stop us going on a picnic.’
‘I like that,’ I said, repeating it in my head. ‘I’ll remember that.’
‘“Enjoy the picnic,” my dad said, “and if a wasp comes along, we’ll swat it away together.”’
It seemed to me – both then and as we moved into Class 2 with Miss Philips, in a whirl of seventh birthdays – that there were wasps everywhere: puzzles and uncertainties and unanswered questions, and during our visits to the King’s Road library, I avoided the fiction shelves and took out books about God and heaven (and occasionally UFOs) because books never said back at you, ‘Questions questions’.
Just before the autumn half-term, Miss Cracey announced that a woman called Sister Ruth was coming to visit us. Miss Cracey bigged her up like Sister Ruth was God himself, and said we could ask her any question at all, and she would know the answer. I could hardly wait.
Sister Ruth, when she arrived, had buck teeth, a pastry-coloured face and unusually large feet. She asked us if we ever thought about where we were before we were born and where we would go after we died, and not one person put up their hand. Nor did anyone ask her a single question about anything at all.
I went up to her on my way out of the classroom (as I still didn’t like speaking aloud in front of the other girls) and I said, please, if she didn’t mind, and if it was a suitable question, where was I before I was born, because I had no idea.
She gave me a bible and said the answer was in there.
By now, I was the best reader in the class, but it still looked like a very long and complicated answer.
I then asked her if it was true that all babies, without exception, came out of women’s bottoms. She said this was indeed the case, and very quickly asked if I had another question about something else. I asked her where I might have been from when I was born until I was three and a half, where there seemed to be a long and alarming gap in my life.
She smiled very kindly, and said: ‘In God’s arms.’
‘All that time?’ I said. ‘Wow!’
And she nodded.
I said, ‘Could I have ended up with a mother who isn’t my mother?’
She said, ‘That question is too difficult for me. Perhaps you should ask God.’
Which was disappointing, in view of Miss Cracey’s stellar build-up.
Sister Ruth took us on a very slow walk, and she told us to look around and notice everything, even flies and wasps and cracks in the pavement. As I walked along, solemnly and observantly, I remembered Bridget’s dad saying: If a wasp comes along, we’ll swat it away together. And everything felt very OK in the world, like it didn’t normally.
We all lay down and closed our eyes, and a big blob of peace fell on top of me.
‘This is the sacrament of the present moment,’ said Sister Ruth, and we paused, and the world seemed to stop and tremble, and her face lit up.
I wrote this in my diary and underlined it twice, with serious comments about the possibility that we had seen or at least sensed God’s presence on the school lawn.
Then I said loudly into my empty bedroom, ‘God, if I may please ask, have I ended up with the wrong mother?’
But, disappointingly, God didn’t answer.
I asked him again, a bit louder.
Nothing.
Zilch.
Zero.
I leafed through the bible to see if I could find out where I was before I was born, but it was full of very small writing and very long words, so I gave up.
I wrote in my diary, When I grow up, I want to be Sister Ruth.
The next day, Bridget said, ‘Sister Ruth was a weirdo.’
So I went home and crossed it out.
Chapter 11
It was after Sister Ruth’s visit that I started my Quest Book – subtitle, WHO AM I? – looking for some kind of a framework that might explain me. I wrote down important memories and underlined key phrases in thick black pen. Things like this:
Memory: my father calling me into his study and asking me to choose a name for my mother – Mum or Mummy or Mamá – and me saying I would call her Cherie, please, as he did.
Looking back, I wonder if I knew that this was a strange conversation, or that it was odd to call her Cherie unless you came from a very hip family like Laura Stephenson. Or, did I, a confused bilingual child, think Cherie was an alternative, mother-ish word?
These are things lost in the mists of memory.
I went back to The Rainbow Rained Us and noted key points in my Quest Book. I could now understand, with the aid of a dictionary, the section which dealt with the positive and negative aspects of each colour, but even the goo
d things in the pink section – delicate and sensitive – seemed to me like bad things. And everything my mother did continued to seem pinker than pink.
From now on I shall think of her as Pink Mother, I wrote grandly, perhaps convincing myself that I was being clever and funny, but in fact making the distance between us even bigger in my mind.
Oh dear, Pink Mother is crying again, I’d think.
Oh dear, Pink Mother has taken to the chaise longue again.
It was as if I was trying to protect myself from the painful realisation that she didn’t seem able to love me.
My father seemed to love me, sort of, or at least to find me diverting when he was in the right mood, which often came after a glass or two of his favourite fino sherry, when I took to asking him apparently casual questions relating to our family’s past. I wrote any relevant answers he gave in my Quest Book.
He told me, for example, that Granny and Grandpa Green had chosen the name Cherie, which means darling, as she was their one and only darling, coming along, after ten years of waiting, when they thought they couldn’t have children. This went straight into the Quest Book.
1 – Some married couples can’t have children.
2 – Some have to wait ten years before they get them.
I felt sure these facts were relevant to the quest, but couldn’t think exactly how.
I also wanted to ask my father if I might be, in any way, his darling, but I couldn’t think how to bring it up, and anyway I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know the answer.
‘I met your mother when Granny and Grandpa Green brought her to Jerez on a wine-tasting holiday,’ said my father, out of nowhere. ‘I’d never met anyone called Cherie.’
Her name, spelled differently but pronounced the same, he went on, was the name for fortified wine – sherry – which was his favourite drink.
‘Perhaps that’s why I chose her!’ he said.
I didn’t bother to write that down because it was a stupid thing to say.
‘Your Spanish grandfather’s wine company,’ said my father, ‘makes sherry, and also red, white and rosé wine, and is the most famous in the whole of Spain. And now he’s too old to run it, he’s given it to me.’