by Neha Yazmin
Chapter 10: Parentage
“Ellie!” called Kim for the third time in a row. “Ellie!” Fourth time.
Though I’d been surveying the house from afar for a short amount of time, Kim’s tone seemed to bug me as much as it did her teenaged daughter. That night, it seemed overbearingly annoying, as it must have done to Ellie. I could hear the deep sigh the teenager let out as she scrambled up to a sitting position on her bed.
“What?” Ellie finally answered, annoyed to have given in.
I imagined her placing a bookmark in the novel she must have been reading whilst lying on her bed. It was Wednesday evening, five days after we’d had that brief chat in the café near her college, and Ellie hadn’t been speaking to her mother since Monday. They’d argued about Ellie’s plans to celebrate her upcoming 18th birthday by taking a road trip to London. Kim had refused outright and her daughter was fuming.
“Ellie, come down here,” her mother instructed sternly.
“No!” I heard the poutiness in her tone. It made me smile. I was easily amused by her. Strange.
“Yes. And now!” This time, Ellie’s mum sounded infuriated. I could imagine her face going red.
“Fine,” huffed Ellie. “Whatever!” I could almost hear the roll of her eyes. I chuckled to myself as deliberately slow, grumpy footsteps made their way down the stairs to the living room where Kim stood waiting.
“Glad you could join us,” her mother said to her when she finally entered the lounge. “Sit down.” I heard the shuffling noise that meant Kim had sat herself down.
“No!”
“Yes.”
Ellie exhaled noisily and dropped to the sofa. “You want to forbid me from a few more things, do you?” she asked acidly. “No road trip, no birthday party–”
“I never said no party,” Kim interceded. “You don’t like parties–”
Ellie spoke over her. “Maybe you’ll ban me from having a birthday, having a life. Just coz you don’t have one.” There was harsh accusation in her tone. Parent and child had spoken to each other this way in the few days I’d been spying on them, but tonight it was even more emotionally charged.
Sensing that their frustration with each other was at boiling point, about to overflow, I knew I had to get closer to the house, the action. Something big was about to go down tonight, and I needed to be in the same street as them, not a good couple of miles away.
Call it intuition, or an instinct for my prey, but I had a feeling that my moment was coming.
Edging closer towards the barrier their witch Amber had created with her powerful spells, I could feel the warmth of her magic. On the doorstep of the protective wall which surrounded the entire street, I could almost taste it on my tongue.
“Now that’s enough young lady!” I heard Ellie’s mother scold her, her tone hard. “I didn’t bring you down here for the regular quarrels you seem to love–”
“I love?”
“Yes you! But like I said, I don’t want to argue. I just want to have a nice chat.”
“About what?” Ellie snapped. I imagined her folding her arms across her chest stubbornly.
“You’re going to be 18 soon,” Kim started, her voice firm yet maternal. Then she had to speak up a bit because her husband Jake turned the volume up on the TV. “You have to start being more responsible. You’re almost 18 love, you can’t keep acting out like this every time something doesn’t go your way.”
“Every time you stand in the way of my happiness,” Ellie threw back at her.
“That’s not what it is,” Kim urged, tone softer than before. “You used to be such a good girl. And you’re so smart. Your teachers always said the nicest things about you. If there were parent-teacher meetings at college, then I’m sure your lecturers would sing your praises too. But you’re always fighting with me.” The frustration spread through her tone now. “Why are you like this with me?”
“Why are you like this with me?” Ellie asked in return. I chuckled at the whiny ring to her voice. It was sort of cute, I suppose.
“Oh this is pointless! You say I’m always shouting at you, lecturing you, well I can’t get through to you any other way can I?”
“Huh,” Ellie grunted. I laughed under my breath.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Kim’s annoyance was growing again.
“It means huh,” Ellie answered and I laughed harder. She was such a kid sometimes. “It means you have no idea what’s going on in my head and you have no idea that you don’t get through to me on any level, in any way. And the shouting and lecturing, well, I just tune most of it out. Because it’s always the same thing.”
My laughter came to a halt. Even from the outskirts of her street, I could sense the pain behind those whiny words, the frustrations that she lived with everyday.
“You’re trying to explain that I have to grow up because I’m nearly 18, but how can I, if you don’t let me?” Ellie complained. “If you keep treating me like a child. How will I grow up and find my own path, when you’re always trying to control me?”
Mother and daughter were quiet for a long moment.
“I’m not trying to control you,” Kim murmured eventually. The shakiness to her voice made me think that she might start crying soon.
Her daughter was either oblivious to this or didn’t care that her mum was becoming emotional. “You are trying to control me,” Ellie insisted. “You’re a control-freak and you want to turn me into one. You want to turn me into you.”
A slightly shorter pause from before, but it was clear a nerve had been hit by those words.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Ellie suddenly blurted out, seemingly enlightened. The next second, I heard her jerk upright. “That’s why you’re always in my face, my life. You say you want me to have the life you never got – thanks to getting pregnant with me and having to give up your hopes and dreams and marry and settle down. But what you really want is to live through me. Live vicariously.”
“You’re wrong,” Kim argued, sniffling. “The last thing I want is for you to turn into me. And frankly, I don’t care if we become polar opposites, sometimes it feels like we are anyway, as long as you don’t make the same mistake–” Her words came to an abrupt halt.
“Don’t worry, mum.” Ellie was being sarcastic. “I’m not stupid enough to get pregnant by my best friend at 18. In fact, I don’t have a single male friend, thanks to you. I’m not desperate enough to fall for the first stranger that shows an interest in me either.”
“Well I wasn’t desperate either,” Kim snapped.
Then she was silent.
“Of course you weren’t desperate,” Ellie said slowly, the sentence broken up. “You and… dad were a couple…”
She had some difficulty saying the word dad. I had noted the coldness between father and child, a stark contrast to how Jake was with his youngest daughter, Heather. The siblings got along though. They weren’t as close as some sisters could be, but they loved each other. I didn’t get the feeling that Ellie resented her little sister for being the apple of their father’s eyes. Teenaged brat or not, Ellie was clearly mature enough to deduce that Heather wasn’t to blame for their father’s differing treatment of them.
“Yes we were good friends,” Kim murmured. I sensed a confession coming along. “We weren’t a couple at that time… He didn’t get me pregnant. Jake isn’t your biological father.”
It took Ellie a long moment before she could make an utterance. “I’m not – he’s not – I’m not – he isn’t my – my real father?”
Her mother didn’t respond to the stuttering with words but with soft sobs instead.
“Tell me who is,” Ellie demanded. “Tell me everything about him.”
Despite the longing in Ellie’s voice to hear about her real father, all Kim said was, “His name is David Ryan and he lives in London.”
“And?” Ellie probed angrily.
“And nothing. He’s not worth it love, trust me.”
“There’s nothing to tell, Ellie. He isn’t worth it.”
“Well, if you won’t tell me then I’m going to find out myself,” she challenged.
“No you are not!” Kim shouted.
“Get your hands off me. I’m never going to forgive you for this. And I’m not staying in this house.”