Did she get that stubborn streak from me? Is that the only characteristic of mine she did inherit? I think, guilt suddenly magnified tenfold.
‘Now Lily, you know I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do, love …’
‘Miss Pettyfour is mean and I hate her too but the one I really HATE more than vegetables, more even than bwoccolli is …’
‘… Let me guess … A little boy in preschool called Tim O’Connor. Would that be right, love?’ I say softly.
An angry, furious nod, then suddenly she starts to wriggle awkwardly beside me, like she knows what’s coming next and is physically trying to get out of it. Such, it would seem, is the cognitive reasoning process of a small child; run away from the confrontation and it’ll just go away all by itself.
‘You know Lily,’ I tell her, gently pulling her back then folding my arms around her so she can’t toddle off. ‘I’ve just been to see Miss Pettifer and she told me all about what happened.’
The blue saucer eyes look worriedly back up at me, like a little puppy that’s just weed on the carpet, and knows right well it’s in trouble and there’s no backing out of it.
‘So honey, would you like to tell me your side of it? Don’t worry, Mama’s not angry,’ I tack on, pulling a stray, scraggy red hair back off her freckly face and biding my time, waiting for her answer.
‘Tim said I had no daddy,’ she eventually tells me sheepishly. ‘He said every other kid had a dad ’cept me. He said all I had was a mummy and a minder who collected me. So I smacked him and he cried and cried and then Miss Pettyfour made me go on the naughty step till bweak time …’
‘Lily,’ I say gently, ‘you know it’s very wrong to smack anyone, especially other children?’
A small, guilty nod.
‘I’m sowwy Mama.’
‘I know you are bunny.’
‘Won’t do it again.’
‘There’s a good girl.’
Then the little arms fold defiantly and the chin thrusts out.
‘But I’m still never going back to smelly pwre-school. EVER. ’Kay?’
‘That’s absolutely fine. No one, and especially not me, is going to make you do anything you don’t want to.’
She thinks for a second, then seems happy enough with this. So now that she’s not in trouble any more, she flashes me a gap-toothed smile and snuggles tight into me, warm and heavy and woozy with sleep, smelling of milk and plasticine.
I let her cuddle tightly into me as my thoughts race. Because how best to bring up that other, far more delicate subject? Her earlier words, the ones Miss Pettifer quoted back to me, are swirling round my brain now.
I do have a dad and one day he’ll come for me.
How in the name of arse am I supposed to explain this to a small child?
‘Lily?’ I begin slowly, gently.
‘Mmmmm?’ she says, sounding groggy now after all the drama in her little day, her sleepy, heavy head buried deep under my arm.
‘You know all families are different, don’t you? Some families have a mum and dad, whereas some just have a dad and then there are families like us, where the mummy is the one in charge.’
And just like that, she’s bright-eyed, alert and awake again.
‘But I DO have a dad. I DO. All kids do. Tim says you can’t be born unless you have a mummy an’ a daddy.’
Shit. Deep breath, try again. Try better.
‘Well, that’s true, but only up to a point.’
‘What’s uppa point mean?’
‘It means that some families have a dad who lives with them, and that’s fine. But plenty of families, like us, don’t live with their dad and that’s fine too.’
‘But where is my dad? Where’d he go? Did someone bold steal him?’ She’s looking intently at me now, little freckly face now frowning with worry.
‘He mus’ be somewhere Mama!’
‘Of course he’s somewhere love, but the point is, we don’t know where and we don’t need to know.’
‘Is he hiding? Like in a game? Is he playing hide and seek with us, Mama?’
Bugger. I’m making a right pig’s ear of this.
‘No pet, you see he doesn’t exactly know that we’re here. But then, that’s not really important, because we don’t need him, do we? We’re fine without him, aren’t we?’
‘But where did he go Mama?’ she pleads, looking dangerously close to tears now. ‘Why doesn’t he come to see me? It is ’cos I was naughty?’
My almost-three-year old looks at me with puzzled, monkey eyes, desperately wanting answers that her mother can’t give. Please, please, please, I find myself absently praying to a God I don’t believe in, send me the right words to explain this inexplicable situation to the tiny, precious bundle that’s cradled in my arms, looking up at me with absolute trust in my judgement. Please, just once, please Allah, Buddha, Santa, anyone up there who’s listening, steer me through this icky conversation in a way she can grasp.
Another deep breath.
‘OK Lily, let me put it to you this way. Before you were born, I wanted you so, so badly, that I had to go to a very special hospital to get you. And they planted you in my tummy and nine months later, out you came. Tiny and perfect and so good you rarely cried, ever.’
‘So …’ she says, frowning, concentrating hard and scrunching up her tiny, freckly nose ‘did you pick my daddy out when you were in the ’pecial hospital? Did you meet him there?’
Not for the first time, I’m totally taken aback at just how bright the child is; at the fact that she can grasp something so vague and inexplicable. With great pride, I cuddle her closer and she slips her thumb in her mouth, plump little arms locked tight round my waist.
‘No darling, I never met your dad either. Sometimes mummies don’t need to, you see. And that’s OK you know. mums and dads don’t always need to know each other or even be friends, just so mummies can get babies.’
A long silence as she tried to digest this.
And then it comes.
‘But … but I wanna see him Mama. I wan’ him to be my fwiend. I wanna see him. I wan’ him to play with me and give me piggy back rides and … and … I want my dad to take me to the park and the movies, like the other dads in pwe-school all do. Can we just find him and say … Hello?’
‘Sweetheart … I don’t think that’s going to be possible …’
Now her face is getting pinker and the bottom lip is dangerously close to wobbling, a red-light warning sign that tired, cranky, exhausted tears aren’t too far off.
‘Mama PLEASE! Is it ’cos I was bold in playgwoup?’
‘No, of course not …’
‘I only want to meet him, that’s all! And I’ll be a good lickle girl. I pwomise!’
I sigh deeply. One the one hand, you should never make a promise to a child you can’t keep and on the other hand, there’s every chance she’ll have clean forgotten all about this by morning. But most of all, I never again want to see this level of disappointment in my daughter’s big saucery blue eyes. Again.
‘All right pet. I’ll try my very best.’
I’m rewarded with a toothy smile, then, as only small kids can, she puts the whole thing clean out of her little head, sticks her thumb in her mouth and cuddles back in tight to me, her worries banished as though they never were and all set for her afternoon snooze. I pull a cashmere throw off the back of the sofa and wrap it round her, tucking it tight in around her pudgy little legs and gently settling her down for her nap.
Then, just as I’m about to ease myself off the sofa without waking her, I hear the sound of footsteps click-clacking down the back stairs.
Ooooh, this’ll be good.
I stand up, arms folded, calmly waiting. The element of surprise, I feel, being the essential element here.
And sure enough, in trots Elka, wearing my silk dressing gown and with a sea-green facepack on her that looks suspiciously like the Crème de la Mer one sitting on my dressing table.
&
nbsp; She nearly leaps six feet in the air when she sees me, standing nice and composed by my slumbering daughter, waiting like a praying mantis for her.
‘Eloise!’ she says, in her clipped, over-articulated English. ‘What are you doing back home? I did not expect you for a long time …’
‘You handed in your notice this morning, remember?’ I say coolly, voice even, fixing her with a steady, measured stare. One I save up for special occasions in the office, if I really need to terrify the bejaysus out of someone. Rarely fails me. Been known to reduce grown men to tears on occasion.
‘Eh … Of course I do …’
‘Well, I’ve got wonderful news for you, Elka. You can leave even earlier than you thought. Like – how about right now? And what’s more, you can take your manky laundry strewn across my hallway and your abandoned, half eaten pizza with you. Oh and by the way? I’d strongly suggest you don’t come looking to me for a reference. Trust me, it would be a really, really bad idea.’
In the end, of all people, my sister Helen ends up being my saviour, my messiah in this hour of need. In total and utter desperation, I put out not so much a distress flare as an SOS to her, and to my astonishment and eternal gratitude, she tells me not to panic, that she’ll be on the next train up to Dublin from Cork.
Miracle. It’s a bloody miracle. I feel huge gratitude, mixed with a pang of sharp guilt when I think of how dismissively I’ve treated her over the years. And now, here she is, in my hour of need, dropping everything and running just to give me a dig out.
Hours later, while I’m still at home dealing with the massive backlog of phone calls and replying to all my emails from the office, while simultaneously seeing off Madam Elka, my nagging conscience won’t let up on me.
Would I have done the same for Helen?
The answer’s obvious. Not a bleeding snowball’s chance.
Bad mother, bad sister … Soul searching is something I rarely have the luxury of spare time to indulge in, but somehow there’s just no avoiding it today.
And then there’s little Lily, snoozing peacefully on the sofa, clinging to her battered and almost threadbare comfort blankie, worn out after all the high-octane drama of her day.
She’ll forget all about that other matter, I think smugly to myself, feeling a cool, tigerish joy flood over me at the happy sight of Elka finally getting her arse out of here in a taxi. She’ll wake up shortly, all refreshed and happy after her nap and the whole notion of her father will all have been banished right out of her little head, as though it never was.
I continue to think that as I tidy the spare room to get it ready for Helen. I still think it when Lily wakes up, beams to see me still in the house, then immediately waddles upstairs to her bedroom.
She’s ages in there, and in between firing off an email to Seth Coleman and putting a clean duvet cover on the spare bed, I suddenly realise the child is gone suspiciously quiet, so I stick my head round her bedroom door to do a lightning quick check on her.
‘Look at me Mama!’ she squeals excitedly as soon as she sees me, twirling round in the outfit she’s just changed into. A pink leotard and a matching fluffy tutu with bits of diamanté all over it, along with sparkly little pumps in … what else? Bubblegum pink.
‘You look lovely sweetheart,’ I tell her distractedly. ‘Now come on downstairs, I want you to have some dinner.’
‘NO! I HATE dinner! And I’m playing dwess up!’
‘Later, you can play dress up later. Is this so you can wear something pretty for Auntie Helen?’
‘NO Mama!’ she yells at me, stomping her foot in a gesture that a silent movie actress would shudder to use. ‘This is what I’m going to wear when we go to meet my daddy. Like you pwomised. Wemember? You pwomised!’
With that, the mobile tucked into my suit pocket rang out loud and clear. And this time, I never even bothered checking to see who it was.
Chapter Three
Pay absolutely no attention to this, I tell Helen as soon as she’s settled in and used to us all. Lily’s just developed a bee in her bonnet about the whole idea of having a dad and maybe even getting to meet him, nothing more. But she’ll pretty soon forget all about it; wait and see. All we need to do is starve the whole thing of oxygen. Simple as that. Not unlike my strategy with her whenever she’s stomping her feet and demanding whole dessert spoonfuls of Nutella on top of her toast for her breakfast on our Sundays together; I just blatantly ignore it, distract her by dangling some kind of toy in her face and in no time, all her little demands disappear as though they never were.
Such are the vagaries of being almost three years old it seems; you’re cursed with the short-term memory of a fruit fly. What was bringing on hysterics two seconds ago is banished instantly at the sight of anything pink and glittery dangled in front of your face. Complete doddle.
I continue to believe that the whole ‘when am I meeting my daddy?’ issue has finally been put to bed right up to the following weekend which, in spite of my best efforts, is the next window of peace I get from work, so I can spend a bit of time at home.
I race home on Friday night so I can give Lily her bath and put her to bed, aching to do some mother/daughter bonding with her, but to my dismay I find out I’m already too late.
Helen’s waiting up for me, watching TV while texting away on her phone downstairs in the family room, wearing an oversized dressing gown and a mansize pair of fleecy socks, sofa-lising. (New buzzword dreamt up by Marc, from Arts and Culture. A bastardisation of words to describe the act of socialising whilst your bum is glued to the sofa. Marc, as you see, is very fond of his word mash-ups.)
She doesn’t hear me slip into the kitchen at the far end of the room and looking at her from this distance all I can think is … so much about Helen has changed over the years and yet so much has stayed exactly the same. She’s gained weight, but she’s lucky, it happens to suit her. Fills her face out and makes her look even younger. She still has the same even temperament and insuppressibly sunny good humour, the exact same general Pollyanna, glass-half-full outlook on life, at all times, always. Just like an air hostess, smiling through her pretty, even white teeth and unfailingly polite, even when living under the same roof as a termagant like me.
She and I don’t look even remotely alike. Helen is bright-eyed and fair-haired, with a sunny, sparkly, outgoing personality to match; not so much a glass-half-full person, as a Waterford crystal, limited edition glass, half full of rare, vintage champagne. Then there’s me; small, dark, unsmiling, with deathly, Morticia Addams-pale skin that’s the bane of my life and a permanently hollow, sunken-eyed look about me, which, in spite of the most expensive face creams money will buy, still seems to be permanently etched in.
Helen’s adopted you see, something which always left me with the lifelong sensation that I somehow wasn’t good enough for my parents, which was why they felt the need to go out shopping for another daughter, as I’d seen it at the time. It had hurt me as a little girl, hurt me far more deeply then I ever let on, and to this day remains a searingly vivid memory, one that still has the power to sting even now, from a safe distance of decades. Coming home from primary school to be told by Dad that there was a ‘surprise’ waiting for me in the good front room. Course I was all excited at first, then bitterly disappointed to discover nothing other than my battered old cot with a new baby sleeping in it. I’d thought at the very least that I was getting a new home computer or a maths set. Something useful.
As time went on though, I realised the truth; that Mum and Dad had just brought home what appeared to the five-year-old me to be an improved version of what a little daughter should be. One who grew up to be pretty and blonde who lisped and giggled and wore pink and got invited everywhere. And although they’d die rather than admit it, one who they both clearly preferred; to this day, I can still hear the three of them happily laughing and messing about while watching some TV programme together night after night, like a proper family. All while I sat all alone upstairs in m
y room, getting ahead on the next day’s homework and trying to choke back hot, furious tears at being so blatantly excluded. Five years old was a young age to learn all about rejection, and yet that’s exactly what I had to do.
Course years later, after several gin and tonics, my mother has told me that this actually wasn’t the case at all; that she and Dad were if anything just utterly exhausted and worn out by all the various demands involved in rearing a child genius – the special tutorial classes, the constant IQ tests, the violin/cello/clarinet lessons, the way I never seemed to need sleep for more than a few hours, instead reading book after book throughout the long, lonely nights.
According to Mum, they could deal with all that though; what worried them was always hearing that other kids in my class were organising birthday parties for their friends, trips to the movies or else days out to the zoo, none of which I ever seemed to be invited to. But once they adopted little Helen, all that changed for them; because this, thank God, was a more normal child, one who failed maths tests and struggled with her reading, but who was bubbly and friendly and perennially popular; forever getting invited out on play dates and sleepovers with all the other kids in her class. The complete polar opposite to me, in other words.
And now here we are, living under the same roof together, for the first time since we were teenagers. Except now, instead of feeling old pangs of childhood jealousy towards her, all I can think is, this girl really must be some kind of walking saint. I can’t describe just how hugely grateful I am to her for doing this and for putting up with me, when not many would. Grateful to her for dropping everything to help me out in my hour of need, though I did insist on paying her far more than I ever paid Elka, stressing that this was just a temporary measure till I found someone more permanent. (Not an easy task, given that I’ve been blacklisted by just about every nanny agency in town.)
‘Hi, I’m home. So where’s Lily?’ I ask, still breathless from the mad dash to get back to see her and knowing full well what the answer will be. The house is way too quiet, for starters; course she’s already in bed.
A Very Accidental Love Story Page 7