All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

  Michael said that I should tell him when I was ready, he wouldn’t ask again.

  And instead of going all the way, we went all different ways.

  Then we put our clothes back on, splashed our red faces and sat picking the Smarties off Jean’s gingerbread men. When we took our tea tray back to the kitchen, Michael would sit discussing the beauty of the London skyline with Jean and my mother, and I would stare at him and not be able to imagine what we’d been doing just half an hour before.

  Chapter 46

  On Michael’s last day at school, he won loads of cups in assembly, and off he went on a six-week post-A level self-improvement project building schools in Mozambique.

  I asked my mother if perhaps we could go on holiday to Spain. She started fanning her face with a magazine, saying, ‘I’m never setting foot in that country again,’ so I stayed in Chelsea, reading every book that had ever been written about the city of Córdoba, scouring London’s libraries with an insatiable hunger to understand my own history, so that by the time I started in the sixth form, I was a genuine expert on Andalusia, but had still never been there.

  I sat with my eyes shut dreaming about the orange trees which lined the streets, and the big old river, and the dark-eyed gitanos on the other side of the bank, dancing flamenco.

  Michael called me every Sunday morning from a phone box to tell me about cisterns and trusses and porridge called ncima. We kept talking for up to an hour, as if giving up too early would be an admission of something we preferred to ignore – the fact that our conversations were quite boring. What I missed was the boyish smell of him, the feel of his arms around me, the taste of his mouth. Words weren’t really what I was after.

  ‘Love you,’ he said, aiming to end with a flourish.

  ‘Love you,’ I said, because how wouldn’t you?

  I wondered if it meant something different if you kept the I in, like I used to with Bridget – she was the only person who’d ever said that to me.

  When Michael came back, I ran out of reasons why I didn’t want to meet his parents.

  ‘Aren’t you curious?’ he said. ‘To see what they’re like?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘I’d really like to meet your father,’ said Michael.

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever see him again,’ I said.

  ‘You look just like him in those Father Christmas photos,’ he said.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ I said coldly.

  Michael took me in his arms and held me.

  Like Bridget used to.

  (But also not.)

  Bridget said that if she wasn’t going to have a relationship, the best she could hope for was living through mine.

  The questions in her letters became more and more forensic.

  Sometimes her letter was only a list of questions.

  Why didn’t I think that was strange?

  ‘You must tell me about your life,’ I said.

  ‘I have no life,’ she replied.

  Hahaha, I thought, funny laughing Bridget.

  ‘What do you do every day,’ I asked her.

  ‘Put on weight,’ she replied.

  Hahaha, I thought, hearing the words in her old voice, never wondering for a second if she might have a new one.

  I didn’t know that she was struggling to learn Hebrew, like she’d struggled to learn French at school.

  That in Israel, with no mother, and no language, and no friends, her loud cheery voice had turned very quiet.

  So quiet that even I couldn’t hear her.

  ‘Will you wear that white dress?’ Michael said.

  ‘Have your hair down, won’t you?’ Michael said.

  ‘Wear proper shoes,’ Michael said. ‘Not flip-flops.’

  When he came into the hall, my mother flitted about pinkly, laughing at his jokes and fiddling with the straps on her sundress.

  ‘My mother is pretty full-on,’ Michael said as we pulled into their massive gravel drive, with a fish pond in the middle, which Michael said had Koi carp in it.

  I was wearing high-heeled sandals, bought by my mother. They were made of wood which didn’t bend. And I’d put on the white dress. And kept my hair down. Which looking back seems oddly obedient.

  Michael’s mother came out.

  She was wearing tight white jeans, and had very tanned skin, blow-dried blond hair and enormous gold earrings.

  She stood next to the pond, and the front door was open, and you could see straight through the open glass doors of the garden room to a turquoise swimming pool beyond.

  ‘Michael, show Eva the fish,’ she said.

  I said, ‘Are the carp actually coy?’ (which I thought was quite funny).

  She said, ‘It’s spelt K-o-i, and they’re just coloured variants of the Amur carp.’

  Speaking is so risky, I thought.

  ‘Oh, your skin,’ she said to me. ‘I’d pay good money for your skin. You look more Indian than Spanish, but you’re gorgeous.’

  (Did I? Was that worth noting in my Quest Book? I didn’t think so.)

  She nodded approvingly, as if I was a potential purchase, and I walked into the house like a dressage pony, with my wooden shoes clip-clopping along the path.

  When I went into the house, Billy disappeared into the back garden.

  I crept outside while Michael was in the loo.

  Billy was playing ping-pong with himself, half of the table folded up like a wall.

  ‘That’s clever,’ I said.

  ‘What is?’ said Billy.

  ‘The table,’ I said.

  ‘Ideal for people without friends,’ he said, and he laughed.

  And I laughed too.

  ‘I could play with you,’ I said.

  But Michael came into the garden, and I realised that I couldn’t.

  It was well known that Billy hadn’t been encouraged to stay on for the sixth form. Rumours swirled that he’d been kicked out for fancying boys, but it was probably his poor grades. He was going to a boys’ boarding school, Daunton Lodge in Dorset, and although I knew it would do him good to get out of the shadow of his brothers, it would be all jockstraps and testosterone, and not his thing in the least.

  Michael’s mother’s phone seemed to ring every few minutes, and she answered very loudly: Christine Orson!

  I saw a post-it note on the cover of her leather diary which said Questions for Supper.

  Questions for Supper!

  That is honestly true.

  Out of the window, the table was laid next to the swimming pool under a rose pergola, with a white cloth and pots of lavender – all too perfect, like a film set.

  Mr Orson rushed into the garden when he got home from hedging, freshly changed into a linen shirt, smelling of expensive aftershave, with fat feet in deck shoes. He kissed Christine’s cheek and drank his large glass of wine with a big sigh of pleasure.

  I stared at his stubby fingers, and his very clean nails.

  ‘So, everybody,’ said Michael’s mother, ‘what would you say is your guiding principle for life?’

  (Oh my word – Questions for Supper.)

  I started frantically trying to think what I might say, but I was entirely distracted by, actually, everything.

  ‘You start,’ Michael’s mother said to Mr Orson.

  ‘I’m going for success,’ he said. ‘What about you, darling?’

  ‘Intentionality,’ she said.

  I’d never heard intentional made into a noun.

  ‘That just gets you,’ said Mr Orson appreciatively, in what sounded a slightly American accent.

  He wasn’t at all handsome.

  Or, as it turned out, at all American.

  ‘Michael?’

  Michael was wearing a pale blue shirt and jeans, and he’d come home from Mozambique wearing lots of bands around his wrist. It was funny seeing him again after six weeks of absence. My eyes caught sight of his bumpy denim crotch, and I quickly turned away. I remembered what his penis look
ed like in my hand. How hot it was. And fragile.

  ‘I wish you’d take those bands off your wrist,’ said his mother.

  ‘Michael?’ said his father again.

  ‘Knowing how to play the game,’ said Michael. ‘That’s what guides me.’

  The game? I thought. What game?

  His father nodded, and said, ‘You got it,’ again sounding American.

  ‘Billy?’

  Billy said, ‘Survival!’

  Underneath his elfin smile, he wasn’t smiling.

  Everyone laughed, but surviving wasn’t funny.

  Not for Billy.

  I wondered if Billy knew that I ripped his brother’s clothes off in the wicker furniture room, if he knew that one minute I was a normal person, and the next, I was the Incredible Hulk, bursting out of myself. And then I thought, staring round the table, that this must be normal, it must happen to everybody else, even (weirdly) Michael’s parents, even (maybe, a long time ago) my mother and father, but nobody ever talked about it.

  This was certainly not the chosen topic for Questions for Supper.

  ‘Eva?’ said Michael’s mother. ‘What guides you?’

  I could see that Michael was sweating a little, and I could see that his mother was judging me – not just me, everyone. Everything we said was being measured and graded into gold, silver, bronze – and fail.

  Michael touched my thigh under the table, which didn’t help.

  ‘What guides me?’ I said, using the trick that everybody knows because you are taught it in eleven-plus interview practice.

  ‘Yes,’ said Michael’s mother, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read.

  I looked into her eyes.

  And I said, ‘Longing.’

  Chapter 47

  ‘Your mother’s a very beautiful woman,’ I said to Michael when we went for a walk the next Saturday evening.

  ‘And my father is not a very beautiful man!’ said Michael, smiling.

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘My mother says that all men end up ugly, but not all men end up rich!’ said Michael, killing himself laughing.

  I didn’t laugh.

  ‘My mother found you enigmatic,’ he said. ‘Particularly when you said your guiding principle was longing.’

  I smiled.

  ‘What did you actually mean?’ he said, and he stopped walking and sat down on a bench.

  ‘What did you mean about playing the game?’ I said, deflecting, because there was no way I could ever explain to a logical, realistic boy like Michael the longing that raged inside me, a feeling so strong that it was almost as if life was longing for itself, as if I lived permanently on the cusp of some colossal dawn.

  ‘You just have to learn the technique,’ he said, putting his feet up and leaning his back against the wooden armrest. ‘Whether it’s acing exams or getting into Cambridge. The whole of life is like that.’

  The whole of life is a game?

  No, the whole of life is a mystery and a puzzle, with no answers at the back, that’s what I thought, but I wouldn’t say. I was well-practised at not saying anything I felt inside. So I’m not at all sure, looking back, who Michael thought he was in love with.

  Turning myself around to face him, I changed the subject.

  ‘Are you excited about Cambridge?’ I said.

  We were sitting feet to feet, like mirror reflections of each other.

  ‘Course I am,’ he said, looking handsome.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather be single at Cambridge?’ I said, because the girls at school kept saying that boys were always unfaithful once they got to university.

  ‘Course I wouldn’t,’ said Michael.

  Sometimes, when I saw how much the other girls fancied him, I couldn’t believe he’d chosen me, especially as I was two years below him and he’d been head boy.

  In Bridget’s last letter, she said I would definitely lose him if I didn’t sleep with him before he started at Cambridge, and once I had, could I please describe the entire thing – in detail.

  ‘I’m sixteen now,’ I said to Michael. ‘I think I’m ready to go all the way.’

  Michael swivelled around and kissed me all around my neck, and led me back to his Mini which we’d left in the car park.

  I hadn’t exactly meant right this minute, but it was dark now, and his arms were around me, sending whooshes through my body, and I was hoping it would all go OK because sometimes a tampon seemed a bit of a squeeze.

  Michael folded the seats down, and we collapsed on top of each other in a big flail-around of unbuttoning and breathing. At the start, I felt like I was watching myself through the car window, and then I forgot myself, and when it was over, quite quickly, I felt sore and stingy and odd. But Michael held me very tightly and said I was amazing, or it was amazing, or something was amazing, and that was a nice warm feeling.

  Bridget wrote asking, ‘Have you done it yet?’

  I wrote back saying, ‘Yes.’

  But when I thought of describing it, I felt like crying.

  She wrote back saying, ‘You said you’d describe it to me.’

  I wrote back saying, ‘It’s not very describable.’

  And she didn’t reply.

  Chapter 48

  My father sent me four orange trees, from Papá, in typed print, with no further explanation, right after I lost my virginity. I don’t remember feeling I’d lost anything, but it was hard to see what exactly I’d gained.

  Whatever – the timing of the orange trees made me feel as if my father knew, which was horrible. Also, it was 25 August, the date he’d left us, but that was, I imagined, just another coincidence.

  My mother took to her bed.

  I made her echinacea tea.

  With her eyes closed, she said, ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Are you lying to me?’ she said.

  I shook my head, though she still had her eyes closed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said, picturing myself flailing about in Michael’s Mini, wondering if she had the slightest idea about the reality of my life.

  Jean asked next door’s gardener to put the four orange trees on the patio, and I went and examined them, feeling the texture of their leaves and smelling their sweetness as if they would reveal some great secret about me.

  ‘Your mother is not at all well,’ said Jean.

  She made a lot of phone calls.

  Then Jean’s mother died, and she had to go and be with her adult brother, Nigel, who couldn’t live alone because of his Down’s Syndrome.

  ‘I’ll be lost without you,’ said my mother.

  Jean gave her a shy shoulder squeeze.

  ‘I hope you’ll be OK, Eva,’ said Jean, handing me an envelope and, most unexpectedly, kissing the top of my head, my first head-kiss since Blue Mother died.

  ‘I’ll try not to be too long,’ said Jean. ‘And you can always call your grandparents. And I also put my phone number on the card. You know, just in case.’

  ‘I’m so sorry about your mother dying,’ I said, still feeling a bit shocked by her head-kiss. ‘And thanks, you know, for everything. Especially the gingerbread men. I’ll miss them.’

  I opened the envelope.

  Jean opened the door.

  I still have the card, and I’m looking at it now.

  The blossom is swirling in the wind with a swarm of orange and yellow butterflies.

  When I looked up, Jean was standing on the pavement.

  I rushed down the slippery steps, and I hugged her. And she hugged me back. Tightly. She said that, on the worst days in her life, she would go for a walk and pray that she’d see something lovely. It might be a cat sitting in someone’s window. Or a blossom tree. Or a baby in a bobble hat. She hoped that might help me, if I ever felt lonely.

  It did help me.

  It does help me.

  That was when I realised that there was something love
ly about Jean.

  The minute she left, my mother plummeted.

  She slept, almost all the time, in her rose-pink princess arbour, like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake. Which, eventually, and rather unexpectedly, she would be. We’ll come to that.

  For now, the house was silent as a tomb.

  I don’t know what I would have done without Michael Orson, and I’m not sure I ever told him that.

  He was, honestly, all I had.

  Since I’d failed to describe sex to Bridget, she hadn’t written to me.

  So I didn’t write to her either.

  When I spoke to my mother, she answered from far away.

  Then she disappeared.

  To the same place as before.

  Home Place, it’s called, accommodating, in en-suite bedrooms, the wealthy depressed and the wealthy addicted, hundreds of them, apparently.

  Granny and Grandpa Green thought up all the reasons why they couldn’t live at the house in Chelsea with me for longer than a couple of weeks.

  Chapter 49

  I told Michael my grandparents were looking into different girls’ boarding schools for me to start immediately. I was terrified: I’d always been slightly frightened of girls once Bridget wasn’t there to protect me.

  Oh, Bridget – I tried not to think about her.

  My grandparents found a school called Hayworth Hall, in Exeter, which had places in the sixth form.

  ‘Exeter!’ said Michael, with a horrified expression. ‘That’s like five hours from Cambridge. And they’d never let you out to see me. And we’d never have any time together.’

  I wondered if he was thinking, more specifically, that we’d never have any sex together. Once we’d done it once, Michael couldn’t stop doing it. It was as if he was addicted to me.

  I translated this as love, and was consoled, and also flattered, I suppose.

  I knew this love was nothing like the Blumey love I’d once known, but they’d been gone five years, and this was the only kind I was being offered.

  Michael said he’d speak to his mother, he was sure I could move into their spare room – after all, his parents would have no boys left at home, with Michael off to Cambridge and Billy to boarding school in Dorset.