All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

  Mary came in.

  I said, ‘Is my father never coming back?’

  Nobody answered.

  I said, ‘Will I ever see him again?’

  Grandpa Green said, ‘That’s a question that only your father can answer.’

  I ran upstairs and grabbed my diary.

  If he doesn’t want me, I wrote, I don’t want him. And I shall never try to find him. Simple as that.

  Then Granny Green came in.

  ‘We’re going to be staying the night,’ she said, rather surprisingly. ‘Mary has to go on a special outing tomorrow, so we’ll be looking after you.’

  Granny Green was holding a jigsaw wrapped in cellophane, which she suggested that we should do together.

  So we did.

  It was a bit too hard for us but neither of us wanted to admit it.

  Chapter 19

  The next morning, which was Sunday, Granny Green made me breakfast, and Mary walked through the kitchen wearing a navy blue dress I hadn’t seen before, with pink lipstick making her mouth look bigger than it usually was.

  Granny and Grandpa Green took me out to lunch and asked me lots of detailed questions about the different lessons we did at school, although their eyes glazed over when I answered.

  Granny Green and I ploughed on with the puzzle in the afternoon.

  Grandpa Green said, ‘You’re making heavy weather of this.’

  He came over and stared at the puzzle for a while, and then he said, ‘You’ve done all the easy bits,’ and went and read his paper.

  Mary didn’t come home for supper.

  I went to bed.

  In the morning, Granny Green came into my room, opened the curtains and told me that Mary was going to get married.

  I burst out laughing.

  I tried everything I could to stop.

  Granny Green said, ‘Stop that right away!’

  I rushed into the bathroom, but the laughter didn’t go away.

  I sat on the floor and stuffed a towel in my mouth.

  Mary called upstairs that it was time for breakfast, and hearing her voice set me off again.

  I went into the kitchen and told Mary the first joke I could think of, which enabled me to carry on laughing in little spurts as I ate my cereal. She looked at me strangely, but we kept going with our normal morning routines as if she wouldn’t soon be prancing around in a bridal gown and sleeping in a double bed with a man.

  At registration, I told Bridget that Mary was getting married, and she laughed so much she almost cried, which set me off again.

  The laughter burst out of us again in a violent gush while we were singing ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ in morning assembly, and we had to write out the lines from the hymn one hundred times – ‘Forgive our foolish ways: reclothe us in our rightful mind; in purer lives your service find’.

  When I got home, Grandpa Green said Mary was owed lots of days off as she’d never taken a holiday, and this had implications, whatever they were.

  He had some good news and some bad news to tell me.

  ‘The bad news is that Mary will be leaving,’ said Grandpa Green.

  That was actually good news.

  ‘And your mother may not be back by then,’ said Grandpa Green.

  ‘And we’re going on a cruise for our Golden Wedding anniversary,’ said Granny Green.

  ‘But the good news …’ said Grandpa Green.

  If bad was good, could good be bad?

  ‘… is that Mrs Blume has agreed that you can go and stay with Bridget until your mother comes home.’

  This was the best news ever.

  All my Christmases had come at once.

  I started laughing again.

  But for quite different reasons.

  I never knew that laughter was so versatile.

  I thought it was only for jokes.

  Chapter 20

  I packed for Bridget’s house with my heart full of joy.

  While folding my denim pinafore, I felt a crumple of envelope, and remembered with a start the something that the man with the trolley had dropped, which had entirely slipped my mind because so many dramatic things had happened in such a short time.

  I carefully unsealed the envelope and peered inside.

  It was a photo.

  Of a baby.

  A baby who had black hair shaped like a swimming cap and pretty dark eyes.

  I stared at the baby.

  Stared and stared.

  I started to feel something inside me, the same feeling I had when the first chick came out of the egg in Class 1, or when a goldfish flashed up to the surface of the school pond, or when I opened number 24 on my advent calendar.

  Except this was a much bigger feeling.

  I went into the bathroom and stared at my own face in the special magnifying mirror.

  Then I held the photo next to my own face.

  I looked at the skin on the baby’s arms, and then I looked at the skin on my own arms.

  I felt like it really, most probably, even definitely, could be, yes, yes, me.

  I’d prayed for a baby photo, and God had sent one from heaven in a white envelope.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to the most-probably-even-definitely faded me, using the voice Bridget used for Bessie and Bella when they were little.

  ‘Hello-o!’

  I went back into my bedroom and stared at the photo under my desk light.

  There were two quite old hands holding the baby who was probably, even definitely, me. The face of the person would have been in the photo, but it had been cut off with scissors. All you could see was a grey dress.

  The grey person holding me had been beheaded.

  Is the beheaded person my real mother? That’s what came to me.

  I started doing little shallow breaths.

  I felt like I might throw up.

  Either that, or burst with joy.

  Real mothers didn’t lie about in bed all day and not pick you up from school.

  They didn’t disappear without explaining why.

  No, real mothers were made to mother you.

  That’s what their job was.

  But why and how had I got separated from my real mother and ended up here in Chelsea with Pink Mother?

  There were no photos of me before the age of three and a half.

  Was that because Pink Mother didn’t get me until I was three and a half?

  Did she kidnap me?

  Breathe, breathe, breathe.

  The beheaded mother and I were in a patio, what looked like a proper courtyard from Córdoba, just like the Andalusian patio that Rory the gardener had made for us in Chelsea.

  Why did my father make a replica patio?

  Why did I love the patio so much?

  The patio in the photo definitely wasn’t the flowerless courtyard in Jerez with the yellow-ochre walls and the three-tiered fountain with no water in it, and it definitely wasn’t the beach house with two hundred palm trees and a swimming pool.

  No, this was a dream of a patio, with an old wagon wheel up against the wall, and every single white wall covered from top to bottom in brown terracotta pots, and pots lining the stone steps and placed around the edge of an old stone sink, all of them bursting with red geraniums and mauvey-blue hydrangeas with pale green centres – and two hot dusty cats asleep, left and right.

  Cats!

  Yes, there were cats!

  Behind me and the beheaded woman, there was a tall whitey-cream statue of an angel.

  I felt as if I was melting inside, and I might go on and on melting until I could be hung out on a branch like those Salvador Dalí clocks we’d been shown in art.

  Chapter 21

  When I arrived on a rainy Sunday afternoon at the Blumes’ with my suitcase on wheels, Bridget’s mother took me to the corner of the kitchen and she let me sit on her lap in the big armchair.

  ‘The others have all gone out with their dad,’ she said. ‘They won’t be back until later.’

&nbs
p; She wrapped her arms around me, and let me sink into the softness of her, and I felt sure that heaven must be full of bosoms exactly like hers. She held me tightly but she didn’t say any words.

  ‘What kind of place is my mother in?’ I said, wondering if I should tell her that the woman she thought was my mother almost certainly wasn’t.

  ‘It’s a cross between a hotel and a hospital, with special nurses who know how to help her get better,’ she said. ‘The sort of nurses who understand bodies and minds and feelings and how they all connect together.’

  I burst out crying, though not about the hotel-hospital with special nurses, but because she’d kissed me on my head. That kiss brought all my feelings into the open, which was completely against my principles. And this was the longest, biggest, most tiring cry I’d ever had.

  By the time I stopped, it was evening, and I was exhausted.

  ‘We’re so happy to have you here with us,’ she said.

  Gaspy sobs shook my body.

  When Mr Blume and the five children got home, I wiped my eyes and slapped my cheeks.

  Bridget raced across the kitchen and hugged me so tightly that my feet left the floor.

  ‘Shall we pretend we’re starting at boarding school?’ she said. ‘Like Malory Towers. And we’ve just arrived. Let’s have a look round and find our dormitory. And our tuck boxes.’

  We took a Tupperware box each and Bridget opened a kitchen cupboard and we started to put KitKats inside, and Quavers, and powdery strawberry bonbons and those fruit salad chews that pull your teeth out. I kept looking around nervously, expecting somebody to tell us not to do this. But nobody did.

  Bridget’s mother said, ‘I hope you won’t find us too bohemian, Eva! And I hope you’ll cope with our funny old messy house.’

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

  We went up to Bridget’s bedroom, and Bridget showed me my bed, which was covered in an old-fashioned eiderdown and masses of un-matching pillows.

  Bridget and I moved the little table and pulled our beds together.

  When it was bedtime, Bridget’s mother rested the palm of her hand on each of our heads, saying, ‘Peace and sleep and happy dreams!’

  Liquid joy ran from her palm through my skin.

  When she’d left the room, I said to Bridget, ‘What’s bohemian?’

  ‘It’s people who wear harem pants and shoes other people think are ugly,’ said Bridget. ‘And don’t shave their armpits. You know, like my mother.’

  I nodded, trying to look knowledgeable.

  ‘Will you shave your armpits?’ said Bridget.

  This was a question that had never once crossed my mind.

  ‘It’s weird the places we get hair,’ said Bridget. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I stuttered, feeling very red in my face.

  ‘Have you got any hairs down there yet?’ said Bridget, pointing at her crotch.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Will you show me if you get one?’ she said casually, as if showing people around inside your pants was a normal thing to do.

  I didn’t want to get our cohabitation off to a bad start, so I said yes in a way that sounded a bit like no.

  ‘Let’s make our code word follicle!’ she said.

  I burst out laughing.

  I think it was nerves.

  Chapter 22

  I remember limbering up, almost daily, to tell Bridget about my secret photo. I was planning to take it out, let her look at it, and then tell her my suspicions that I’d been kidnapped – but I couldn’t make myself do it. It was so much easier keeping things inside.

  Also, I wanted to find words that were big enough and important enough, because, I suppose, I knew how badly I needed a reaction that was big enough and important enough. Was it that, or was I just terrified of opening up to her? Or scared that she wouldn’t believe that I was the baby in the photo? Or scared that I didn’t totally believe it myself?

  In addition to this massive thing I hadn’t told Bridget, I also hadn’t told her something else, and that was that I was madly in love with her older brother, Barnaby.

  Barnaby was nearly thirteen. He was tall and broad with a mop of dark curls on his head and freckles on his nose and big strong arms which he let me fall into when we were playing the trust game. He wore a gold star, like two upside-down triangles, on a gold chain around his neck. (And we soon spotted that he was getting a load of dark hair in his armpits. This hair made me feel a bit funny. Not funny-haha, like I pretended to Bridget – funny-peculiar.)

  I used to dream that one day all the other B children would have to go out for some reason, and Blue Mother would say that Barnaby and I could go into the playroom or the garden, just the two of us.

  Just the two of us!

  Like the song Pink Mother used to play in the rare evenings that she liked my father.

  Anyway, once all the other children had gone out, in this daydream of mine, Barnaby and I would play the trust game, and I would fall into his arms, and instead of dumping me flat on the ground and going on to the next person, there wouldn’t be a next person, so somehow we would swivel around, and I couldn’t work out the exact physiological mechanics, but we would end up sitting on the sofa or the bench together, with my head in his lap, looking up into his dark eyes, with his gold star hanging over me, like a sign, and he would ask me if I would like to be his girlfriend because he had always been in love with me, ever since the moment he first met me.

  This hadn’t yet happened after my first week of living with the Blumes.

  But Barnaby had said, ‘You can call me Barny,’ which made it very obvious where we were headed.

  Chapter 23

  My crush on Barnaby practically knocked me over: it was the first blast of hormones, which came a bit early, like an unexpected summer day in March.

  When actual summer came, Pink Mother still wasn’t better, so Bridget’s mother said I could go with them to Lyme Regis, and she took Bridget and me to Miss Selfridge and bought us both a pair of baggy denim dungarees – the nicest things I’d ever owned.

  As we headed out of London, we ate sherbet dib dabs and sang along to Abba, and I felt the freest and happiest I’d ever felt in my life.

  We stayed in a giant house with a dormitory bedroom. Sometimes when Barnaby was still asleep in the morning, I would look down from my top bunk, and see his gold star glinting under his undone pyjama top, and I’d think he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  The first two days, we went to Charmouth to find fossils, which was Barnaby’s favourite thing on earth.

  ‘What would you most like to find in the sand?’ Bridget said to me when we were lying on the beach looking at the clouds. ‘I mean, if you could find literally anything at all.’

  I took a deep breath and said, ‘A mother.’

  ‘What do you mean? A mother?’ said Bridget.

  She sat up.

  I sat up too.

  We both talked with our eyes downwards, not looking at each other, fiddling in the sand with our fingers.

  Come on, I thought, get started.

  ‘Bridget,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure the person you think is my mother is my mother.’

  ‘Whose mother do you think she is?’ said Bridget.

  Now that was a question I hadn’t thought of, and it took me slightly off track.

  ‘Maybe no one’s,’ I said, and that got me on to a possible explanation.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘she couldn’t have a baby …’

  ‘Some women can’t,’ said Bridget in a dramatic tone of voice.

  ‘So she stole me,’ I said back in a dramatic tone of voice.

  ‘Do you really think that?’ said Bridget.

  Then she nudged my upper arm, and said, ‘Are you joking, Eva?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’m deadly serious,’ I said, staring at her.

  ‘Really honestly?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, why don’t you
think she’s your mother?’

  ‘She looks nothing like me,’ I said.

  ‘But don’t you look like your father?’ said Bridget. ‘Kind of Spanishy.’

  ‘Also,’ I said. ‘You might have thought the photo on Miss Feast’s board was me, but it wasn’t.’

  I thought this was a bit of a showstopper.

  ‘Photo on Miss Feast’s board?’ she said hazily.

  Do happy people have less need to remember the details of their life, I wondered.

  ‘In Entrance Class,’ I said. ‘We all had to bring in a baby photo.’

  ‘Did we?’ said Bridget.

  ‘And I had to bring one of my dad,’ I said.

  ‘Did you?’ said Bridget.

  She was starting to annoy me now.

  ‘Also, there are lots of other things,’ I said. ‘My mother can’t seem to remember anything about me. What I was like as a baby. Whether I even liked my pram.’

  ‘Liked your pram?’ said Bridget.

  ‘I haven’t told you the main thing,’ I said, now feeling a bit desperate. ‘I have evidence that she isn’t my mother. That she stole me from someone else. Actual evidence.’

  Surely if I showed Bridget the photo of the woman with a cut-off head, and the baby who looked exactly like me (well if not exactly, then definitely quite a bit), she would see for herself what kind of a mystery I was wrapped up in.

  But right at the moment that I was about to show her the photo in my pocket, I saw something gold glinting among the pebbles.

  I reached down and I picked up a perfect gold-coloured ammonite.

  ‘Look at that!’ I said, placing it in the centre of my palm.

  Bridget squealed and said, ‘Quick! Let’s go and show D!’

  The dramatic revelatory moment – in all its bigness – had passed, and been surpassed by the tiny gold ammonite, which, I have to admit, was very cool.

  Barnaby got all cosy and up close with me because he wanted to have a look at it.

  I nearly collapsed.

  Chapter 24

  I zipped the gold ammonite into my pocket with my photo (still unseen by anyone but me) as we headed off to a restaurant called Smugglers, decorated with dried-up starfish and fishing nets, where we over-ate deliciously and got home late.