Are You My Mother?

by Louise Voss

  It was so strange, how quickly everything could change. Percy was gone, but Ruth and Evie were here. Mack may have laid me bare for the nation’s entertainment, but look what else had come out of it. Maybe not a new mother, but a lover, and several new friends.

  Evie muttered and briefly complained, so, fervently hoping that Ruth had stuck to her promise of switching off the monitor, I began to sing to her. But I couldn’t find the right song. ‘Hotel California’ - which for some reason sprung to mind first - turned out to be very tricky, a cappella, and I couldn’t remember the words to ‘One Man Went To Mow’, when I tried to start that one. I seemed to have forgotten all the lullabies I used to know. I wished I’d had the foresight to bring my recorder down - it was funny how playing it was so much easier than singing, a more tuneful conduit for the notes in my brain.

  Then suddenly it came to me; the song that Mum used to sing Stella as a baby: ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.‘ Not particularly soothing, or somnolent – especially when sung flat by me – but it flooded out of me, even though I hadn’t heard it for years; all the words of the chorus and most of the verse, too. I closed my eyes and saw my mother, my real mother, rocking Stella and singing, smiling at me over Stella’s baby shoulder when I appeared in another doorway, in another age. It was Mum and Dad I missed, I thought, as the tears began to drop again into Evie’s fine hair. Not the stranger who’d given birth to me. I was wrong to even try and replace them – for that was what I had hoped, even if I wouldn’t admit to anybody.

  Evie gradually fell quiet, and the room seemed full of the energies of innocence and safety, a place of transformation; a room where needs were always met and loved ones always close. I felt sad that it hadn’t been that way for Percy – at least, not towards the end of his life. Who knew what had gone before that. Maybe he too had once sat and rocked a child in this room. The magic lantern continued to throw coloured angels around the walls, and golden-pink spirals spinning onto the ceiling, illuminating the shelf full of stuffed animals, the white fluffy rug on the floor, and the clumsily-done painting of Humpty Dumpty.

  Humpty was still perched on his wall, but he had a lopsided look about him which suggested that all the kings’ men - four of them, rosy-cheeked and musketed - may have already had an unsuccessful stab at putting him back together again after some previous unrecorded tumble. Ruth later told me that her mother had painted it.

  After ten more minutes, I did feel much better, and Evie was asleep again. As I stood up and crept gingerly back over to the cot, a tall silhouette appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Hi,’ Robert whispered.

  I smiled at him, and lowered Evie back into bed. She wailed briefly, but was asleep again before she made contact with the mattress. I tucked a sheet around her, and arranged a platoon of soft pigs and small teddies above her head to keep her company. ‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ I whispered, stroking down the haze of fine hair sprouting vertically from her soft head. The feel of it made my solar plexus hurt with love; for Evie, and for Robert, standing so protectively near me.

  As I turned to leave the room, a sudden impulse made me stop and look in the chest of drawers where Evie’s clothes were kept. I beckoned Robert in, and together we peered at a multitude of neat pairs of tiny white socks, and heart-stoppingly cute dresses and embroidered cardigans. Evie’s whole wardrobe fitted into three small drawers. Robert made an ‘aah’ face at me, and then at Evie, and we crept out of the bedroom, escorted protectively by the translucent angels whirling around our heads.

  For the first time, I realised that I’d stopped feeling so fearful at the very idea of procreation, and was daydreaming that one day Robert and I would be cooing over our own baby; that maybe becoming a parent for real – instead of struggling to be a substitute – might lay to rest the ghosts of parents past and missing; that maybe I’d be brave enough to risk the emotional pain of having children.

  One day, though. Not yet. I had some freedom to enjoy first, now that Stella was grown up and settled, and now that I had someone with whom to do all the things I’d never had the chance to do before – at least not without feeling guilty: travel, play tennis, go to gigs and clubs and museums…

  ‘I think the others are leaving in a minute,’ Robert said, when we were back in the hall. ‘Are you going to come up and say goodbye?’

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ I said, hugging him. ‘I’m sorry I ran off like that. I just felt a bit – overwhelmed by it all. I hope I haven’t upset Mack.’

  Robert’s arms felt so good, tightly around me. ‘Well, he’s concerned for you. All your friends are.’

  Chapter 36

  The week after Mack’s documentary was shown, Robert drove Zubin up to Milton Keynes for a Bon Jovi concert, much to Stella’s and my derision.

  ‘That’s a chuckable offence,’ I told Robert, sternly. ‘And you’re corrupting poor Zubin.’

  ‘I’m not corrupting anybody - Zubin likes Bon Jovi, don’t you, Zub?’

  Zubin nodded enthusiastically and mimed a frenzied guitar solo. ‘Hell, yeah. There’s still time for you both to come with us - I’m sure we could pick up a couple of extra tickets from touts.’

  Stella and I exchanged long-suffering looks. ‘I’d rather saw off my own leg with a rusty bread knife than go to an American hair band gig, thanks,’ I said haughtily. ‘Even if Jon Bon Jovi is pretty damn cute. For a midget.’

  Robert had kissed me goodbye. ‘Oh, well, I suppose it’s a boy thing,’ he said sadly. ‘You just don’t understand.’

  Since Robert moved into his flat in Hammersmith, I hadn’t seen an awful lot of Stella - I’d only really been coming home when I had massage appointments booked. It was the first evening in weeks that Stella and I hadn’t had our men with us, so we decided to do something we hadn’t done for a long time - to go and play tennis.

  But Stella wasn’t on good form at all, and I could tell it wasn’t just because she was missing Zub. I thought a bit of running around might shake her out of it. Now that term had finished and her end of year exams were over, she’d been spending far too many nights out drinking with Zub.

  We walked down to Ravenscourt Park and found a free court next to two teenaged boys who were playing appallingly badly – hitting the ball straight up in the air, or over the wire fence onto the grass outside the court. I turned to comment to Stella on how crap they were, and saw her face, glum and closed-down, staring at the bumpy tarmac of the court.

  ‘What’s up, Stell? Don’t you want to play?’

  ‘Oh…sure,’ she said vaguely. ‘I’m just a bit tired, that’s all. I’ll be OK when we get going.’ She unzipped her racquet and opened the can of balls, dropping them one by one onto the ground where they bounced away from her like eager puppies.

  ‘Is everything all right between you and Zubin?’ I persisted, taking off my sweatshirt and stretching forwards, then up, enjoying the feeling of my muscles tensing and elongating, the warm night air soft against the skin of my arms and legs. The clouds were changing colour as the sun began to set; their pearly whiteness edged with peach tinges, and the sky between them had turned an exquisitely rich but pale summer blue.

  ‘Yeah. Everything’s fine with Zub. It’s not that. It’s –‘

  ‘What?’ I stopped, mid-stretch, held my breath, and hoped she wasn’t going to announce that she was pregnant.

  She pulled a hat from her bag and rammed it onto her head. It was her ‘festival hat’, an old, floppy, blue denim hat, so called because it kept off rain and sun alike, and she used it for tennis to keep the hair out of her eyes. She looked away from me, over at the boy who was trying to serve. He hit the ball hard, but it shot straight down the court and into the fence at the opposite end, without bouncing, narrowly missing his opponent.

  ‘Long,’ called the opponent unnecessarily, rolling his eyes and sticking his tongue down into the space beneath his lower lip, to indicate his friend’s extreme ineptitude.

  ‘There’s been a co
uple more phone calls when you’ve been over at Robert’s for the night – you know, hang-ups. And I’ve had this weird feeling that I’m being…. followed. I’m worried that Charlie’s back.’

  I felt a cold, scared shiver in my shoulder blades, remembering the sight of Charlie’s mean eyes peering through the window of a parked car outside our flat back in February. ‘Oh, no. Are you sure?’

  Stella walked over to the baseline and threw the ball into the air, slamming it with her racquet. It flew into the net, and rolled back towards her feet again.

  ‘No. I’m not sure,’ she said crossly, picking it up and trying her serve again, more slowly. I unzipped the cover from my own racquet.

  ‘Have you told Zub?’

  Stella shook her head miserably. Her hair was currently in dozens of tiny little braids which swung about like a bead curtain under the hat, reminding me of when she was a short-haired kid, and she used to clip large clothes pegs to the ends of her hair to try and achieve the same effect.

  ‘I don’t want to freak him out, or make him feel that he has to do anything about it. He’d hardly be a match for that great ugly shit-for-brains.’

  I agreed, quelling a mental image of poor little Zubin, brave but puny, getting sand kicked in his face on the beach by a musclebound bully boy like Charlie.

  ‘If it happens again when I’m not there, ring Ruth and ask if you can go down and stay with her for the night. Why’s he doing this? You must tell the police, the second you see him.’

  I walked around to the other side of the net and we began to knock the ball back and forth, hitting it to one another, playing in the service boxes without moving more than a couple of feet in either direction, so that we could still talk out of earshot of the boys on the next court.

  ‘It won’t do any good, unless we’ve got proof that he wants to hurt me in some way. And I’m probably the Met’s biggest time-waster right now.’

  ‘It was your prerogative. They couldn’t make you take him to court, though God knows I wish you had.’

  Suddenly furious, I lobbed a ball past Stella, hard, down to the other end of the court where it jangled against the fence and rolled to a stop, a small spent missile.

  Stella stopped, leaning on the handle of her racquet. She had gone white.

  ‘When,’ she asked slowly, ‘is it ever going to fucking end? I really did think that if I dropped the charges, he’d leave me alone. I can’t go to the police again. They’ll think I’m crying wolf.’

  I ran up to the net. ‘Oh, Stella, I know, it must be horrendous. You were so brave to report him in the first place, and I’m sure the police would take you seriously again. I wish I could do something about it, though. About him. I’d kill him, if I could.’

  Stella laughed, mirthlessly but with affection. ‘God, Em, how many times do I have to tell you: stop trying to fight my battles for me. I’m an adult. It’s enough to know that you’re there for me - I don’t expect you to come up with solutions as well.’

  I walked miserably back towards the baseline, and we began to hit the ball over the net a little harder, playing a more strenuous rally. We had only just got going when I heard the muffled sound of my mobile phone coming from my bag. Robert had recently, in a bored five minutes, fiddled with the ringtones and changed my existing innocuous one into an offensive, speeded up, tinny rendition of ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee.‘

  ‘Sorry, Stella, it’s probably Robert, to say they’ve just got there….’

  I ran over, cringing at the sound, and just managed pull it out and answer it before it switched over to the messaging service. It was a relief to cut off the obnoxious travesty of a piece of classical music. ‘…..Hello?’

  It took a couple of seconds to place the voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart. Bet you thought I’d forgotten all about you. How’ve you been, angel?’

  Stella looked over the net at me with surprise, and I realised it was because I was brandishing my racquet in my fist like a weapon. I mouthed it’s Gavin at her but she didn’t manage to lipread what I’d said, and pantomimed an expression of incomprehension.

  ‘It’s Gavin!’ I hissed again, burying the phone in my shoulder so he wouldn’t hear. Her eyes opened wide.

  ‘Emma? Are you there? Where are you, anyway?’

  ‘Oh – I’m – um, playing tennis in the park with Stella. What do –‘ But Gavin was already talking over the top of me.

  ‘Ravenscourt? Great! I’ll pop over – can’t wait to see you, babes!’

  And before I could object, the line went dead. I slumped against the side fence as Stella jogged across to me.

  ‘The bloody nerve of that man. After six months, he assumes I’m still here, gagging to see him. What kind of a sad person does he think I am?’

  ‘The kind of sad person you were when you went out with him, probably – always at his beck and call,’ said Stella, picking up a stray ball and bouncing it with her racquet. ‘What did he say? Has he been in prison?’

  I shrugged, deciding to let her first comment pass. It was true, after all. ‘I don’t know. But I think we’re about to find out – he said he’s coming over here now.’ I noticed dispassionately that I didn’t remotely care that my face was bright red, my nose shiny, and I hadn’t shaved my legs for two weeks.

  ‘Oh, right. Well, in Gavin time that probably means he’ll be here in two hours, if at all, so I wouldn’t hold your breath.’ Stella looked at her watch scornfully, but I detected a flicker of nerves across her face.

  ‘Well I hope he does come, so I can tell him that I’m madly in love with someone else, and that I know he tried it on with you, that I think he’s a total wanker, and I have less than no interest in ever having anything else to do with him.’

  Stella grimaced. ‘Oh please don’t, if I’m here. It’ll be too embarrassing. I don’t want to get involved.’

  I rolled my eyes at her. ‘You are involved,’ I said darkly, and she blushed.

  We continued playing, but with an air of tension in every stroke from both of us. By the time we finished the two sets we’d agreed we’d play it was getting dark but there was still, predictably, no sign of Gavin. I won, 6-2, 6-1; Stella was as good a player as I was, but her serve let her down, and she always got so annoyed when she started to lose. I gave her the benefit of the doubt on so many points, and even fluffed several of my own serves, but I still kept winning. I’d forgotten, but it was the reason we didn’t play very often.

  We packed up our things, mopped our sweating foreheads, and finished the last of the water in the one small plastic bottle I’d brought. It tasted warm and brackish. Stella looked even more distant than she had before the game.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ I asked, screwing the top back on and throwing the empty bottle into my backpack. ‘About Charlie? Because, like I said –‘

  ‘No,’ she said, as we closed the heavy iron gate of the court behind us and began to walk through the dusk towards the park exit. ‘In fact, I don’t want to think about Charlie at all any more. Can we not talk about him please? Actually, I was thinking about all that business at Sainsbury’s.’

  I knew instantly what she was talking about, but let her continue. When she was fifteen, she’d had an evening job at Sainsbury’s, which she’d loved, until her till began to be mysteriously ‘out’ or ‘under’ at the end of the evening. She had been convinced she wasn’t screwing it up, because she only worked two three hour shifts a week after school.

  ‘I keep thinking about how I used to come home really stressed, after evil Daphne had cashed up my till. She’d slime over to me and fold her arms and say, “Fifteen pounds out tonight, Stella. You need to be more careful.” It was hideous.’

  I nodded, but wasn’t really listening. I’d heard it all before, and besides, I was still wondering what I could do about Charlie. The trees loomed over us, seeming to draw all the moisture out of the air, and I felt an odd sense of foreboding as we walked beneath them. I turned
sharply, to check we weren’t being followed, but the path behind was empty.

  ‘The first few times I thought I must just be giving people the wrong change, so I kept checking and double-checking every single transaction. But it just seemed so weird that the more careful I got, the more often my till would be out: £5, £10, £15 – it was always a round figure, wasn’t it? Never 96p or 58p or anything. I felt like a failure - I so badly wanted to put something towards the housekeeping as well. That was why I got so angry about it. My first job, a poxy little checkout job, and I couldn’t keep it for more than five minutes.’

  The notion of Stella wanting to contribute to the household finances caught my attention. ‘You never told me that, about wanting to contribute money.’

  ‘Well, I did want to. I felt awful that you were working so hard and I was doing nothing except eat and spend and go to school.’

  ‘But you were a kid. That’s what you were meant to be doing. And besides, most of what we were living off then was Mum and Dad’s life insurance money. What’s making you think of it now?’

  ‘You are. Your reaction to Charlie. The way you always leap to my defence. I just remember you back then, massaging my shoulders and head when I got home every night. I know it drives me mad sometimes, how protective you are, but, you know….’

  ‘You remember that I did that?’ I was touched. Stella had never mentioned it before, or thanked me for all those nights when I soothed the anger and frustration out of her, with love and oils, so that she could sleep peacefully, even though it usually meant that I was awake for hours afterwards worrying about her; believing her when she repeatedly wailed, ‘I’m not doing it wrong!’ Terrified that she’d get branded a thief.

  Stella echoed my thoughts. ‘You never patronised me or told me that I was probably making a mistake; you just kept agreeing with me: I know you aren’t. It’s not you. Don’t worry, with such conviction that it gave me the strength to go back in the next time, and sit like a zombie in that little bleeping cage, swiping and handing out Reward vouchers, bagging up people’s sanitary towels and cereals, getting headaches from all the screaming fractious children and official warnings from the manager, all the time knowing that they thought I was probably robbing them….’