Are You My Mother?

by Louise Voss

  She told me how Charlie had kissed her and touched her and it was lovely.

  How they’d walked out to his car and got in the back and kissed more; and then he had put his hand up her dress and pulled her knickers across to one side so he could touch her with his fingers.

  I twitched my own fingers involuntarily against the white porcelain, forcing them to mime the notes for ‘Creep’ by Radiohead, hearing it in my head as a tinny descant, wishing that I could make it drown out what Stella was saying.

  She told me that they’d got close to having sex, but that neither of them had any condoms, and that it didn’t bother Charlie at all, but then she’d said that she couldn’t, unprotected. She wasn’t on the pill, and besides, in this day and age....

  She told me how he hadn’t listened; just yanked the thin waistband of her lacy pants so it snapped clean through, and how the last barrier was gone, and she had felt the first sublime sensation of heat and solidity as he began to enter her. How at that point it had felt too good to protest.

  And then how it had all gone really wrong, when, three seconds later, she’d come to her senses and sat up in the car – quite happily – and said, ‘Oh well, next time, eh?’, and tried to pull her dress down again.

  ‘He called me a fucking pricktease. He grabbed my arms and tried to force it back inside me. I wriggled away, but I couldn’t get to the door. He got hold of my hair and pulled my head down and stuck his dick in my mouth....’

  I couldn’t bear to listen to it. I jumped up and ran over to the bath, I supposed, to give Stella a hug. But she was under the water, hiding beneath its inviolable smooth surface, and I couldn’t reach her. So I sat down again, drawing my knees up to my chin, feeling utterly helpless.

  ‘I bit it.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I bit his dick. Really hard. I think I drew blood.’

  I sighed, a very distant long-lost cousin of a laugh. ‘Oh Stella. Then what?’

  She trembled and the water rippled slightly, tiny vibrations of pain.

  ‘He kneed me in the face, and hit me a few times, really punched me. I don’t think it sunk in at first, what I’d done to him, until it started to hurt, because he suddenly grabbed his dick and screamed, and that’s when I got out the car and ran off. I hid until I heard him drive away, and then I went and waited by your car. I couldn’t go back into the party. I couldn’t bear all your “I told you so” faces.’

  She sloshed back in the bathwater, out of sight.

  ‘As if we’d ever say I told you so’.

  We were silent for a few more long minutes, and then I remembered Percy. I reached across and turned on the hot tap. ‘I’d better go, Stell. I won’t be long, I promise.’

  Feeling sick to my stomach at what I’d just heard, and at the thought of what I might find, I tentatively let myself into Percy’s flat. The usual sour smell engulfed me, and I had to put my sleeve over my nose before stepping into the hallway, still calling Percy’s name over and over: ‘Mr. Weston? Are you there? Are you OK? Mr. Weston?’

  Percy’s cat, a starved-looking tabby with a perpetual expression of desperation on its face, shot down the hall and began hurling itself at my legs, mewing tonelessly. ‘Go away, cat,’ I whispered, trying to walk further into the flat but hindered by the weaving feline. I imagined I could actually see the fleas leaping out of its fur and onto my ankles, making new homes in the turn-ups of my jeans. ‘Where’s Percy then, eh?’

  Then I saw him – his feet, at least, sticking out of the living room and into the hall. As I ran up to where he lay, I became aware of a dark puddle surrounding him, and couldn’t prevent myself screaming: an inadvertent but ineffectual girly sort of yelp, which I felt briefly glad that nobody but the cat had heard. When I realised that the liquid wasn’t blood, but stout – a can of it had fallen with Percy to the floor and saturated his limp body – I had to lean against the dank, dark walls of the hallway, hyperventilating with relief and panic in tandem. He seemed to have tripped over the lead to his television, as there was a socket in the hall nearby, and a plug tangled loosely around his ankles. It looks as if someone has unplugged Percy.

  My first thought was, Oh God, I wish Mum was here. She’d know what to do; and my second thought, Why on earth was he plugging in his TV in the hall anyway? I dithered for a second, wondering if I should try and resuscitate the old man. His eyes were half open, milky and coated, but I was certain he wasn’t breathing. To my utter shame, I could not even bring myself to crouch down next to him and hold my ear to his fragile chest to make sure, let alone think of administering mouth-to-mouth. Instead I ran back down the sticky-linoed floor, almost falling over the frantic cat, out of his flat and up to our own, where I lunged for the telephone and dialled 999.

  ‘Stella,’ I said on my way out again, barely believing that this was happening. ‘Percy’s collapsed. I have to go and let the police and the ambulance in. Are you OK?’

  That nod again. She had turned off the hot tap, but otherwise hadn’t moved. Even from a distance I could see how pale and shrivelled her fingers and toes were.

  I sat waiting on the front doorstep downstairs, hugging Percy’s milk bottles, gazing with eyes as unseeing as Percy’s out into the street. I tried to think who to tell the police to contact about Percy – for I was sure that he was dead - but as far as I knew, he had nobody. No friends, no children, no relatives at all that I’d ever been aware of. Susan, the child he sometimes accused me of being, had been drowned in an accident on holiday, mown down by a speedboat; The Age Concern lady told me that. The Age Concern lady was the only person I had ever seen go into Percy’s flat, apart from the GP, and I couldn’t remember what her name was.

  Poor Percy, I thought. What a way to go – completely alone. Nobody even to grieve for him. Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t in that much of a different situation. Apart from Stella, there was nobody that would miss me, not really, if I died. People would be sorry; Gavin, and Mack, and all the friends I was out of touch with. They’d say nice things about me, probably shed a few tears, but my death wouldn’t change their lives.

  I looked down at the bottles I held, and the words of a Jam song flitted through my mind: ‘and a hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts’. Funny how I still knew every single lyric of that song, even though I hadn’t heard it for years.

  The police arrived first. They asked me to show them where Percy’s body was, but I couldn’t move, transfixed by depression and self pity, and could only point back and up to the first floor, towards Percy’s open door. They loped up the stairs with their long black-clad policemen's’ legs, like two tall dark shadows. Like Death, coming to take Percy away.

  Within a minute, one of them was back. He hovered awkwardly above me, until I realised that he was waiting for me to stand up. I slowly hauled my cold body off the step, feeling very old and stiff, still holding the bottles.

  ‘The ambulance will be here shortly,’ said one of them, ‘but I’m afraid you’re right, he is dead. We’ll need to call a doctor to certify it. Do you know who his GP was?’

  I shook my head, and leaned against the doorframe. This was all like a terrible dream. ‘Age Concern lady – don’t remember her name,’ I muttered.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’ I shook my head again, and took off my glasses to clean them on the hem of my shirt, hoping that the act of giving my hands something to do would distract my brain from the fizzing, burning, urge to cry.

  Everything was horrible. Everything was wrong: Stella, Charlie, Percy, Gavin, Harlesden Ann, and I knew that crying wouldn’t make me feel better, about any of it. I just felt so cold – my backside was numb from the iron chill of the step, and my hands equally frozen from the cold glass of the milk bottles. But even that cold misery was more appealing that what I had to do next – go upstairs and deal with what a drunk six foot six rugby playing Neanderthal had done to my eight stone beautiful sister. Every fibre in my body begged me to walk away, to no
t have to face it…. but I couldn’t.

  I pulled myself together, and took a decision for which I hoped Stella wouldn’t hate me forever.

  ‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘I need you to come and take a statement from my sister. She was attacked last night. Sexually attacked.’

  ‘I see,’ said the leggy copper, shifting from one big foot to the other. He was young, inexperienced looking, with bum-fluff and traces of acne, and his uniform seemed somehow loose on him, as if he was trying desperately hard to grow into it. I instantly myself. As if Stella would tell him anything.

  ‘Would it be better for us to come down to the station? I think she might, um, want to talk to a woman about it.’

  He looked relieved. ‘Yes. I’ll radio through and get someone to look after her when she comes in. We do have specially trained personnel to, ah, deal with this kind of thing.’

  ‘Right then,’ I said despondently. My limbs felt like lead weights; pendulums swinging relentlessly off an old, faceless clock. I wanted it all to stop, but it wouldn’t. ‘I’ll go and get her ready.’

  ‘And I’ll need to take some details from you, too, about your neighbour. If you’ll be at the station with your sister I can do it then.’

  I nodded, and trudged back upstairs to break the news to Stella.

  ‘He’s dead,’ I told her.

  ‘Poor Percy,’ she whispered. I could see the gooseflesh breaking out all over her body through the bathwater, a slow graceful sweep of a response. It reminded me of a field of corn disturbed by the wind.

  We were silent for a moment, but the clamouring inside both our heads sounded loud in the quiet bathroom, and I knew we were both remembering the last time I’d told her about a death. Two deaths. One ripped up patchwork quilt. The sound of screaming. The mixed-up memories of loss and pain and unhappiness which were our shared legacy.

  I yanked a towel off the towel rail, an old bald beach towel with pulled loops of threads, in colours which didn’t match anything else in our bathroom, and held it out for her. Why couldn’t we at least have matching towels? I ought to have been able to wrap her in huge fluffy pre-warmed bath sheets; one to swallow up her body, another to gently rub her wet, injured head.

  She rose slowly, stiffly out of the tepid water and I wrapped the inadequate towel around her.

  ‘Your hands are freezing,’ she said, as my fingers made contact with her shoulder.

  ‘It’s really cold out there. Is the Neurofen working yet?’

  She shrugged. ‘A bit. I think.’

  I let her dry herself, and then handed her her bathrobe. I shouldn’t have let her have a bath at all, I thought. It might have got rid of the evidence. ‘Stella. You have to get dressed now. We have to go to the police station.’

  ‘About Percy?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, they want to talk to me about him. But more about what Charlie did to you.’

  I waited for the scene: the rage, the fear, the refusal. But it never came.

  ‘I know,’ she said simply. I had to turn away, as tears flooded my eyes at her unexpected maturity.

  At that moment I decided that, in all likelihood, I was never going to have children. I never wanted to go through this again, ever. It was hard enough to bear from my little sister. It would have been impossible to bear, from my own child. It would have broken my heart.

  Chapter 24

  Mid-December. Christmas trees were appearing in front windows in a rash of blinking lights as I walked back from the tube, after baby massage. Four o’clock, and already it was cloudy-dark, feeble prongs of streetlight trying and failing to compensate for the truncated daytime. Since the attack on Stella, and Percy’s death, I had not regained any of my enthusiasm for the Ann Paramor Project, as Mack called it.

  ‘Sounds like a Seventies concept band,’ I said, trying to be jolly. ‘Sorry Mack, we’ll go to the next Ann soon, honest; it’s just that I’ve been really busy with everything lately.’

  It was true that a lot seemed to be going on. Stella was jittery and hyped, waiting to hear if she’d have to go to court for Charlie’s assault trial. The swabs that the police doctor took from her mouth had been sent away for analysis, and apparently it would be a while before the results came back. Because Charlie had denied the assault – denied everything except going for a walk with Stella, and then going home – the police could not charge him until they proved that his DNA had been present in Stella’s mouth.

  Stella and I were both raging that he hadn’t been examined on his arrest, since the damage to his penis inflicted by Stella’s teeth would have proved where it had been that night, and we would already have had a date for a jury to decide which of them was telling the truth, regarding consent. This way was far more tortuous. But apparently he had refused to allow an intimate examination, and according to our solicitor, for some reason this had been within his rights.

  ‘Still,’ I told her. ‘Better to have the actual evidence.’

  ‘If there is any,’ she said glumly. ‘I might have got rid of it when I cleaned my teeth the next morning.’

  The police had told us that even though Charlie hadn’t actually ejaculated, and Stella had cleaned her teeth, it was still possible for traces of his DNA to be there. I imagined those traces, lurking like infinitesimally small shadowy minnows in the secretive dark cave of Stella’s mouth, trying to disguise themselves, waiting to be found out. I felt so sorry for her – if it was me, knowing that bits of him, however small, were still inside her, I’d have been throwing up for days.

  We too just had to wait and see.

  Charlie turned out to have a criminal record already, for an assault on another woman five years before, so the police had instantly been able to identify him and arrest him after the attack. They’d had to contact the college to check his address, and in doing so had let it slip as to why they were enquiring. To Stella’s great relief, Charlie had been promptly expelled. He had also spent twenty four hours in a cell at the police station, in between vigorous sessions of questioning, before being released on bail; so Stella and I revelled – miserably - in the knowledge that he was probably not a very happy bunny.

  But however bad things were looking for him, Stella was in a worse state; volatile as a volcano, as unpredictable as lava; alternately terrified that there wouldn’t be a court case, and then terrified that there would. She was hard to be around, but I couldn’t blame her.

  Thankfully, work was busier, and it took my mind off Stella’s problems, at least during the day. I’d landed a new on-site corporate account, and a couple of my old, lapsed, aromatherapy clients had began coming over for regular massages again.

  All in all, then, despite Mack’s chivvying, I felt that I had neither the time or the emotional resources for the search. After Christmas, I told myself. A new year.

  ‘Just don’t leave it too long, please,’ Mack pleaded. ‘My film’s got to be finished by March.’

  If I had been carrying the Bastard with me on that particular day, I’d have been bent over from the weight of it, and probably wouldn’t have noticed Gavin close our front door, lope down the path, swing his leg over the seat of his bike, and drive away in the opposite direction. In a subconscious part of my mind, I might have recognised the throaty sound of the engine as belonging to a Harley, but probably wouldn’t have bothered to look up and identify it as Gavin’s.

  But because it was baby massage day I was unburdened by anything heavier than my backpack. I was just greeting the Blind Shop ladies at the end of the road, who were closing up shop for the day, when I stopped, mid-sentence. Gavin was hurrying out of our house, practically running, and leaping onto his bike. My heart simultaneously pole-vaulted into my throat, eyes stinging, at the welcome familiarity of the sight.

  ‘Gav!’ I yelled, just as he turned the key in the ignition and threw his weight forward on the bike to release the kick-stand. The ensuing meaty roar drowned me out. ‘Wait!’

  ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go,’ I said over my
shoulder to the yellow-haired old ladies, dashing towards the house, my backpack bumping against my shoulder blades and my coat flapping open at the sides as I ran.

  But it was too late. Gavin’s bike had vanished around the now empty, blank corner, and I slowed to a despairing walk.

  Before I even got in through the door of the flat, I heard Stella’s voice on the telephone, shouting at someone. She turned her back on me as I walked in.

  ‘Anyhow, I’ve got to go now,’ she said sulkily down the phone. ‘I just can’t believe you did that – you’ve only made things worse. He wouldn’t have rung me if you hadn’t got him all mad.’

  There was an enraged female squeaking from the receiver.

  ‘But it’s none of your business!’ Stella slammed down the phone, and turned to me, fists clenched by her sides. ‘Oh, that bloody Suzanne. She does my head in. You won’t believe what she went and did in the pub last night.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Stell? You’re all red in the face.’ I badly wanted to ask what Gavin was doing there just now, and couldn’t Stella have called me on the mobile to let me know – but I could see by Stella’s puffy eyes that this conversation with Suzanne wasn’t just a falling out over whether Eminem was any good or not. I swallowed down my questions like medicine.

  ‘Listen to this.’ Stella pressed PLAY on the answer machine and I heard a spiteful Sloaney voice, slightly slurring and indistinct in places, pompous in others. The same feeling of desolate frustration I’d experienced before, when I found Stella sobbing in the cupboard, flooded over me.

  ‘….Charlie Weatherby here. It’s the final straw when some little bimbo throws her drink at me in a pub and calls me all kinds of names. Innocent until proven guilty, I think you’ll find. And you don’t have a hope in hell of getting me found guilty, because you know, and I know, that I’m not fucking guilty. I never touched you – more’s the pity. I suppose you think you’re so clever, spinning that story to the police. Well, this is to let you know that you don’t stand a chance. If you take it any further, I’ll sue you for damages. You’ll be hearing from my solicitors. See you in court. Goodbye.’