by Louise Voss
The phone stopped ringing and I almost didn’t notice. There was a lengthy pause, and just when I was wondering if I’d been cut off, the quaveriest old voice I’d ever heard came on to the line. It made Percy sound like a spring chicken. ‘Hellllllo?’
I stared at Mack, my eyes wide with shock. I felt absolutely terrified – of what? That she was the right Ann Paramor, or that she wasn’t?
‘Is Ann Paramor there, please?’ I said, matching the quaveriness shake for shake with terror. I waited for the old lady to say, ‘Yes, hold on a moment, I’ll get her for you,’ but instead the reply came, ‘Ann Paramor speaking. Who’s calling?’
Relief swooshed down my body and pooled at my feet, making me think of how kids at school used to put blotting paper in their socks to see if it made them faint. It never did.
From out of nowhere I heard myself say, ‘I’m doing a survey on…modes of transport, and I wondered if you could spare me a couple of minutes to answer some questions?’
Modes of transport? Why hadn’t I just hung up? I shook my head and made an agonised face at Mack, who rolled his eyes and twirled a finger next to his ear, almost making me laugh out loud. This was so unlikely to be the right Ann Paramor – but now I’d got this far, I supposed I might as well make double sure. Maybe she sounded older than she was. Maybe she’d given birth to me when she was fifty, or sixty. It happened...
‘Yes, dear, just let me sit down a moment.’ There was a pause, and then the soft sound of something expanding, and a sigh.
‘Right, then, dear, how can I help you?’ Thankfully she didn’t seem in the least interested in who the ostensible survey was for.
‘Er, yes. Would you mind first confirming your age for me please?’
‘I’m 96 next birthday. April 20th. Hanging on for me telegram, I am.’ There was a creaky, wheezy chuckling noise.
No, even by the wildest stretch of the imagination, you could not be my mother, I thought. But I ploughed on, regardless. ‘And you live in….’ I pretended to be consulting my imaginary clipboard, ‘Eye-Werny Minster’, struggling over the unfamiliar place name, whilst simultaneously wondering why on earth I was still talking to this old lady.
The creaky chuckle chuffed down the telephone line. ‘No, dear, I live in You-Urn Minster.’
‘I’m sorry’, I said, barely holding it together at this point; my fingers itching to slam down the phone, to run away and hide with a combination of embarrassment and wicked hilarity. ‘Of course, Iwerne Minster. Anyway, I’m afraid that actually I have called you by mistake. You’re not within the age demographic of this particular survey after all. I do apologise for taking up your time. Thank you so much for your cooperation anyway. Good bye.’
Sweat beading my forehead, I hung up, thinking that maybe this plan wasn’t so daft after all. As long as I pretended to be Gavin, who could fib for England, I’d be fine.
‘Well, that’s not bad,’ I said to the camera. ‘One down, four to go. We can cross her off.’
I drew a thick black magic marker through Paramor, Ann S., Iwerne Minster, and dialled the Shrewsbury one, feeling slightly calmer this time.
An answer phone clicked in straight away, and we heard a brusque voice. ‘Hi, this is Ann. I’m away until January 10th, so unless it’s a business enquiry please don’t clog up my machine with messages. The next fair I’m doing will be in Olympia, Earl’s Court, London from the 2nd to the 4th of February. Thank you.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said to Mack. ‘That could really be her. She sounds the right age. Did you think her voice was like mine?’
Mack looked pitying at me. ‘Emma, she had a Yorkshire accent. And her voice is much deeper than yours.’ He took in my crestfallen face. ‘Although that doesn’t mean anything, of course. You’re right, she did sound about the right age. But what was all that about a fair?’
‘Maybe she works in a fairground, you know, like those blokes who spin the Waltzers round until you’re sick.’
Mack laughed, and I had a brief mental picture of Shrewsbury Ann as a heavily tattooed dirt-brown man with bulging biceps and a fag hanging out of her mouth, growling ‘scream if you want to go faster.’ The voice almost fitted – and it made a refreshing change from the Mommie Dearest image of her in the frothy nightie.
‘Well, it’s easy to find out,’ said Mack, marching over to the Yellow Pages and handing it to me. I looked up Olympia, phoned the number, and within minutes an automated voice informed us that there would be an Holistic and Spiritual Fair held there on 2-4th February 2001. Less than two months away.
‘Miss Marple eat your heart out!’ I said, grinning triumphantly at Mack. ‘We just saved ourselves the cost of petrol up to Shropshire. Put it in your diary – we’re going to Olympia.’
And assuming we ruled out all the others first, I thought to myself, then I could be meeting my birthmother in less than three months. My stomach swooped up with excitement.
‘OK. This is the last one we’ve got a number for – the Nottingham one. Let’s give this one a go, and then we can go to Harlesden.’
It was another answering machine, but this time a much less helpful one. A mechanical message, just saying, ‘There’s nobody here to take your call. Please leave your message after the tone.’
I put down the phone.
‘Aren’t you going to leave a message?’
‘Of course not. I can’t ask her to ring me back without explaining what I want. And I’m not using that stupid transport survey excuse again. She’s probably out at work – I’ll just try her again another time. So, can we go to Harlesden now?’
Mack refused to remove the camera from his eye at all, saying he wanted to capture the entire journey. All well and good artistically, I thought crossly, as I took yet another wrong turning, but a bit of bloody navigation wouldn’t go amiss. I was feeling too nervous to concentrate properly on the directions I’d written out in advance.
About forty-five minutes later, we eventually pulled into the correct street in Harlesden. Andover Road turned out to be a long, straight residential terrace, unadorned by greenery of any sort whatsoever, except for a dead ficus plant, still in its pot, lying like a corpse in the gutter. The number on the front door nearest us was 266.
‘Down the other end, then,’ I said, changing up into third gear, and revving the engine out of sheer nervousness. Mack finally detached himself from the video camera to rotate his aching arm.
‘Cramp,’ he said, flexing his fingers. The camera’s eyepiece had left a faint circle around his right eye, as if he’d been wearing swimming goggles with only one lens. He started filming again, adding in David Attenborough hushed tones: ‘And here we are. Andover Road. Home of one of our primary targets.’
I wished he wouldn’t be so flippant. My birthmother might live in this road.
The houses were identical in size and age; terraced two-up-two-down cottages, although many had looming dormer windows signifying a loft conversion. Most had white UPVC windows, and a few were stone clad, or painted in improbable colours - pastel green or nasty blancmange pink. Mack opened the passenger window and was holding the camera out, capturing the mosaic terrace as I drove along it.
An amiable-looking mongrel loped along the pavement, staring at the eye of the camera as if his lifelong ambition was to be on the telly, and two stout Indian ladies in saris stopped their conversation to stare suspiciously at us.
Right at the far end of the street, just before an incongruous butcher’s shop – the only retail outlet in the vicinity - I began to slot the Golf into a space between a brimming skip and a rusted mini with a missing wheel, opposite number 7.
‘What do you do when you see a spaceman?’ Mack asked suddenly.
‘Reverse into it, man,’ I replied automatically, craning back over my shoulder to make sure I didn’t hit the skip. I might be terrible at remembering jokes, but I wasn’t that terrible. ‘Not that this is any time for jokes,’ I added, turning back around to get my first proper look at the house
in question. Then I wished I hadn’t.
‘Hmm,’ said Mack, widening the zoom on the camera to take in the neglected and sorry façade of number seven.
I took off my glasses and cleaned them on the hem of my shirt, bending forward to do it so that I could look away. When I straightened up again, the house still looked like a squat.
‘She doesn’t live here.’ There was no way my mother lived in that house.
‘Emma, you can’t have preconceptions like that. She might. We’re fairly sure an Ann Paramor lives here. What we don’t know is if it’s the Ann Paramor.’
The video camera was fixed on my disappointed face, and I wanted to punch its unfeeling glass eye.
Mack gestured up the street. ‘Look. It’s not a bad little road. Most of the houses are well kept.’
‘Except number seven,’ I wailed.
‘You never know, Emma. Maybe she’s renting it out, or has sold it, or is getting it done up tomorrow. That could be her skip. And don’t forget, this is the reason we’re here, so you can find out for yourself. She might well not even be the one.’
I exhaled so deeply that the windscreen steamed up. I hoped his camera lens had too. ‘So what do we do now?’
Mack reclined back his seat and grinned. ‘It’s a stakeout, baby. I’ve always wanted to do this.’ He pulled a pair of shades from the pocket of his denim jacket and handed them to me. ‘Binoculars would be better, but these’ll have to do. We sit here for a few hours, right. Nothing happens, then one of us goes to buy coffee and doughnuts, and the second we tuck in and stop surveillance, the subject comes and goes and we don’t even notice. That’s how it usually works in the films.’
‘Yeah, right. Grow up, can’t you?’ I meant it as a joke, kind of, only it came out more harshly than I’d intended, and Mack looked hurt.
‘I’m really sorry, Mack. I didn’t mean it. I’m just a bit….tense.’ I handed back his sunglasses, and he put them in his pocket again.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said lightly, and I felt like a heel.
The house really did not look promising. Surely my birthmother couldn’t live in a place like that? It wasn’t the size or the modesty of the house, just the complete dilapidation. It was….slovenly.
I remembered our immaculate Victorian detached house in Acton, with the tiled front path and the stained glass panels in the door. When the sun shone through them, light danced a crimson welcome all around the hallway. I felt a deep pang of sadness at the memory of our lost home, and then an uneasy guilt. No, I wasn’t being a snob. It was only natural to hope that this Ann Paramor couldn’t be the one. Why would anyone want to admit to a relative who lived in a place like this?
‘Sew, who laves in a playce like thi-is?’ Mack joked, in a terrible Loyd Grossman accent, and I rewarded him with a faint smile and rolled eyes.
After an hour, our eyes ached from staring, and our legs were cramped. There had been no movement from number seven, and even Mack had given up filming. I convinced myself that it was either the wrong house, or the wrong mother, and felt as much relief as disappointment. I still had absolutely no idea what I’d say to her, even if she were suddenly to appear.
The Indian ladies were long gone, and only one man had passed by since, a large Rasta whose dreadlocks hung in a long straight tube down his back, secured in three places so that they resembled some kind of plumbing arrangement. He half-walked half-skanked, into the butchers’, and came out clutching a softly-bulging package in a paper bag.
Bored of staring at number seven’s blank face, I studied the butchers’ shop instead. Four weeks before Christmas, and the interior was already festooned with paper chains and crappy plastic trees; snowflakes and deformed-looking snowmen stuck to the edges of the windows. Lurid baubles littered the sawdust, lying with the fake parsley where disembowelled loins and ribs and shiny dead organs jostled for space with one another. Across the middle of the plate glass was a foot high cardboard Father Christmas with a blood-stained striped apron tied over the top of his red uniform. “Ho, ho, ho, and a Merry Christmas from Winthrop the Butcher” said the cartoon Santa, a meat cleaver in one hand and a string of sausages in the other. I thought it would have been funny to have Donner and Blitzen lurking petrified in the background, but there were no reindeer in sight.
I tried to imagine myself growing up in this street; riding my bicycle along its uneven pavements, maybe playing Knock Down Ginger with other local kids – although I’d never played it at our house in Acton. It just seemed fitting, like the thought of me as a latchkey child, letting myself into the cold, dank little house opposite every day after school, making my own tea and watching television while Ann – my mother – was out at work as a cleaner, maybe, or a factory worker. Oh, the crassness of my preconceptions, I thought. Just because she lived in a run-down house? I never realised what a snob I secretly was; me, who always tried to be liberal, egalitarian. I felt ashamed of myself.
‘Come on, Emma. We’ve been here for an hour and nothing’s happened. I really think you should knock on the door – she might not come out all day.’
I took out my mobile phone and rang the number again. Still no answer. ‘That’s because she’s not in,’ I said. ‘We’re waiting for her to come back, not go out.’
‘She’s probably at work.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, knock on the neighbours’ doors. You don’t have to tell them why you’re looking for her. At least they should be able to tell you if she even does still live there. They might know where she works, and we could go there instead.’
He had a point.
‘Come on, then.’ I climbed out of the car and jogged reluctantly across the road, feeling like Anneka Rice, my trusty cameraman by my side. ‘Let’s try this one,’ I said, opening the gate to number five.
I rang the doorbell and a small child with a dirty face opened the door, a thick plug of green creeping from her nostril inexorably towards her top lip, like lava flow. She wore a pair of Bob the Builder pyjama trousers on her head, the empty legs draped over her shoulders. As soon as she saw Mack and his video camera, her mouth dropped open in a gormless stare of bewildered suspicion.
I crouched down in front of her, although the snot was making me feel sick. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked. She was about four or five.
Still staring at the camera, she wiped her nose on her sleeve, dashing the slime across her cheek in a splatter effect. ‘My name is Mrs. Pringle,’ she said, haughtily. ‘Do you like my hair?’ She tossed her head, and the pyjama trouser-legs swung from side to side.
‘Yes, it’s lovely and...long,’ I said. ‘Is your Mummy there, Mrs. Pringle?’
‘Mu-um!’ she suddenly screamed into my ear, so loudly that my eye twitched involuntarily.
A tired-looking blonde woman about my age suddenly appeared in the doorframe. Her roots were black and strong, as if responsible for the energy drain in the rest of her body. ‘Yeah?’ she said, unsmiling, staring at the camera as suspiciously as her daughter had. I felt the old, discomforting shyness flit across my skin like a shadow across the sun.
‘Oh, um, hello. Please take no notice of the camera; my friend’s just filming me for a documentary he’s making. If it’s a problem just say and we’ll stop. I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’m actually trying to get in touch with the lady next door, Ann Paramor. Do you know if she’s out at work?’
The woman rubbed a finger across her front teeth as if checking that she didn’t have lipstick on them. Since she wasn’t even wearing lipstick, it seemed like an unnecessary precaution.
‘This gonna be on telly then?’
‘Possibly,’ said Mack, ostentatiously zooming in on her. The little girl tried to push her way past her mother’s legs to get in the frame, but her mother blocked the doorway and wouldn’t let her through. A discreet but unseemly tussle ensued.
‘I wanna be on teeveeeee!’ came a muffled voice from behind the mother’s thighs.
The woman folded h
er arms across her chest, pursed her lips, and spoke directly to the camera, ignoring me. ‘Her next door works down the Post Office, on the counter.’
‘She’s a weeeeirdo an’ she eats bats,’ added the little girl, forcing her head out in the gap between her mother’s skinny thigh and the doorframe.
‘Shut up, Charlotte,’ said the mother, reaching back to slap Mrs. Pringle lightly on the pyjama-clad head. They both had severely adenoidal voices, and breathed noisily through their mouths when not talking.
‘Is it far?’ I felt sick again, this time with nerves.
‘Nah. Round the corner, second right, can’t miss it.’
‘Thank you very much. Um – can you tell me, roughly, how old she is?’
The woman looked at me as if I’d asked if she knew how many sexual partners Ann Paramor had had.
‘Late forties?’ she said, shrugging.
Shit. The right sort of age. And we knew where she worked.
‘Right. Thanks. One more question – is there a Mr. Paramor?’
‘Telly or no telly, if you’re from the police, I wanna see your badge,’ said the woman, moving to close the door in my face.
A blush branded my face, and I could feel sweat on my palms. It wouldn’t be nearly so awful if Mack and his bloody camera weren’t recording every painful exchange. I considered asking him to stop.
‘No, no, I’m not from the police at all, it’s just…personal. She, um, used to know somebody that I know.’
‘No, there ain’t no Mr. Paramor. She ain’t never been married, far as I know.’
Shit, shit. With every new piece of information, I realised with a sinking hear t exactly how much I didn’t want this to be the right Ann Paramor, and how much she really could be.
I thanked the woman and her daughter, and trailed back to the car, trembling. Mack bounded gleefully in beside me, still filming.
‘Right; Post Office, here we come!’ he said, making ignition-key-turning motions with his free hand. ‘It’s perfect – you can check her out by buying a couple of stamps; she’s bound to have a name tag on.’