Are You My Mother? (49 page)

‘
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….’

She broke off for a moment as we reached the gate, away from the silent somnolent trees, back into the roar of traffic and the grey poison of exhaust.

‘
I suppose I just wanted to say, Em, that you kept me going then. You always have. And even though I was pissed off with you for threatening to storm down there and ram a till-roll up Daphne’s bum after they finally fired me - well, I suppose I did appreciate that you were angry on my behalf.’

I grinned. ‘Have you still got that newspaper cutting?’

Stella smiled back at me. ‘You bet. I keep meaning to frame it and put it on the wall as a reminder to keep the faith: “
Daphne McVicar, 49, convicted for stealing over £11,000 from the tills at Sainsbury's, where she was a supervisor
….” Fantastic.’

I stopped to rub the handle of my racquet down my left leg, scratching an itch where I appeared to have been bitten by a mosquito, and was nearly crashed into by a weary-looking father who was pushing a tiny screaming baby along in a three-wheeled buggy.

‘
See?’ I said, dodging the buggy. ‘It all turns out OK in the end, if you just hang in there long enough.’

‘
But what about you? It didn’t turn out OK for you finding your mother, did it?’

‘
Yes it did. I met Ruth and Evie. You could argue that it was the search which brought me closer to Denise and Greg too – if you and I hadn’t had that scene in their garden at Christmas, I wouldn’t have stayed up talking to them for so long. Then I helped Mack with his documentary. And best of all, I met Robert, and all because I got off my ass and went to look for Ann Paramor.’ I had a sudden fantasy that one day Robert would be the dad pushing the buggy containing our own baby, and couldn’t help turning to stare after the other father. Stella stopped, too, and I faced her.

‘
Just because I didn’t find her doesn’t mean I’m any worse off than I was before. I was depressed before. I’m not now. Ann Paramor gave me a life – literally, gave birth to me; and now it’s like she has again.’

‘
But don’t you
mind
that you didn’t find her?’

I sighed. ‘Well, of course I’m disappointed. Gutted, if I let myself think about it too hard. But I’ve got to tell myself that maybe it’s better never to know – and maybe that’s true. I mean, it could quite easily have turned out badly, and she could have been someone like Mack’s birthmother. I always vowed that if I didn’t find her within a few months then I wasn’t going to keep trying, and that’s what’s happened. I can live with that.’

We walked on, turning the corner past the shops at the end of our road, which was when I heard the familiar throaty chug of the Harley slowing to a stop behind us. I turned to see Gavin taking off his helmet, revealing a broad grin on his disgustingly brown and healthy looking face. Less hair than the last time I’d seen him, though.

‘
Anyone for tennis?’ he said, glancing lustfully at mine and Stella’s bare legs in shorts, as he climbed off the bike and kicked the stand forwards. He advanced towards me but I remained still, my arms at my sides. What a weasel he looked in comparison to Robert, I thought coldly.

‘
Have you missed me?’

I shot a look at Stella, who was intently tracing a whorl of lichen on top of a low garden wall. ‘Actually, no, I haven’t.’

Gavin was a little taken aback. ‘All right, Stell?’ he said in her direction.

She ignored him. ‘Well, I think I’ll go on home and let you two talk,’ she said to me.

‘
You’re not walking home on your own!’

‘
Don’t be ridiculous, Emma, you can see the house from here. I’ll be fine.’ She marched away, and I saw Gavin’s eyes slide surreptitiously across her bottom as she walked. Curiosity got the better of me.

‘
Where have you been for the last six months, Gavin? Obviously not in prison, by the looks of that tan.’

Gavin hooked his helmet over his forearm - like Little Red Riding Hood’s basket appropriated by the big bad wolf - put his hands on either side of my waist and tried to look into my eyes, but I shook him off.

‘
I’ve been in Goa. I just had to get away for a while, lie low. There was some deep shit going down - I’m really sorry. But I’m back now, and I was kind of hoping we could carry on where we left off, what do you think? You knew I was away, right? You got my message?’

I snorted, looking away to watch Stella walk towards the house, swinging her racquet between her thumb and middle finger with each stride. She was walking slightly oddly, as if she were drunk; her feet in their big trainers seeming to be doing a small subtle dance on the pavement. I knew that she was probably just trying to avoid the cracks. She used to do that, often, when under stress.

I didn’t even feel the old, tired urge to ask Gavin if they had a postal system in Goa, and if so, why he hadn’t taken advantage of it. ‘A lot’s changed since then, Gav. More than you could imagine.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Really? Did you find your mother then, or what?’

Stella turned right into our front garden, out of sight, and I opened my mouth to blurt out my rehearsed speech.

‘
Gavin,’ I began. But I was interrupted by a truncated scream coming from outside our house.

Chapter 37

‘
Shit!
Stella!
’ I screamed back, ripping myself into a flat out run, pounding the pavement, skidding round the corner and onto our front path. Stella was there, by the bamboo plant we’d given up for dead but which had finally started sprouting tiny new bright green leaves and furled spears of shoot, but she wasn’t alone.

She was clamped against Charlie’s broad chest, face outwards, in a way very similar to the way he’d held her at Yehudi’s party, except that now there was an empty wine bottle held tightly against her throat, and her terrified face was the sickly greyish-white of a prawn cracker.

I stopped at the gate, barely able to breathe. ‘What are you
doing?
’

I was trying to make my voice sound schoolmistressy and in control – this had once worked in a similar situation when Stella and I, walking alone in a dodgy part of East London, had been accosted by a hollow-eyed thirteen year old wielding a knife. He’d said ‘Give me your money,’ and I had somehow managed to give him a withering look and say, pompously, ‘Don’t be so ridiculous. Come along, Stella,’ as we brushed past him and on our way, unscathed.

But this time it didn’t work, and my words came out in a mangled kind of shriek. I accidentally bit my tongue with panic, too - it tasted metallic; the taste of blood and fear. Charlie was a lot more intimidating than a skinny adolescent in a mangy parka with a flick knife. I gripped my racquet, wondering if I could bash him over the head with the handle.

‘
This little slut has ruined my life,’ Charlie said, almost conversationally, his words thick and slurred into Stella’s ear. I could smell the alcohol coming from him, pumping like toxic emissions into the air with his mingled rage and adrenalin. He pulled the bottle harder and Stella gagged and whimpered against the thick green glass. She was trying to say something, but at first I could not work out what. I couldn’t help thinking: how
typical
, that it was a wine bottle, and not Scotch or vodka – what was worse than a psycho but an upper class psycho? I couldn’t see the label, but it was probably vintage.

Charlie, I thought, had doubtless gone to some minor public school where he’d been ritually humiliated, bullied, and beaten, leading to a lifelong inferiority complex and a desire to subjugate what he thought of as the weaker sex, but at that moment I hated him in a way that I’d never hated anybody in my entire life. It was a strange, new, unpleasant emotion - but one which was quickly submerged again underneath the great stormy waves of my fear. I finally realised what Stella was repeating, like an invocation;

‘
But I dropped the charges; I dropped the charges; I dropped the charges.
’

She was trying to scream it, but she wasn’t able to raise her voice above a literally strangled mantra.

I glanced to my right, but there was no sign of Gavin. Oh God, please don’t let Gavin desert us now, I prayed, regretting the times I’d denounced him as a feckless flake, just in case it would somehow psychically count against us when we needed him most.

I was just deciding that it would be better to try and aim the racquet handle into Charlie’s already - hopefully permanently – impaired groin, when there was a blur of movement behind him, and Gavin appeared, in flight, leaping dramatically off the low wall dividing our building with next door. He was shouting fearsomely, and landed an impressive punch to the side of Charlie’s head which knocked him sideways and made him drop the bottle, releasing Stella. When I re-lived that moment later, it occurred to me that Gavin had probably really enjoyed it - it was the sort of Jackie Chan movement that Mack would have spent ages setting up, rehearsing and then shooting.

Charlie yelped with pain, and the bottle smashed on the ground. I dashed forwards and grabbed Stella, fumbling with trembling hands in my pockets for my keys, as Gavin and Charlie grappled one another on our narrow front path, locked together. With a small glimmer of satisfaction, I noticed that they were both rolling over the ornamental triangles of tile tips which formed the edge of the path.

They weren’t far away from the broken glass, either, and satisfaction rapidly turned to anxiety at the thought of Gavin’s back being ripped to shreds. However antipathetic I felt towards him, I didn’t want to see him really hurt, especially not when he was leaping – literally – to Stella’s rescue.

Gavin managed to roll on top and struggled to his feet, first pushing Charlie’s chin backwards with the heel of his hand, and then kicking him as hard as he could in the ribs and chest and back. His formative years as a Bristol boot-boy had obviously not gone to waste. It made a horrible dull thumping sound.

‘
Quick, get inside,’ I said to Stella, pulling her sleeve and trying to make her look away from where she was standing, transfixed with horror. As my unsteady right hand jiggled to try and get the key into the lock, I pressed Ruth’s door buzzer with my left, praying that it wouldn’t choose this opportunity to be temperamental. But she answered immediately and I howled into the intercom, ‘Call the police, Ruth, now, there’s a fight!’

I just couldn’t get the damn key in. Gavin was still attacking Charlie, but Charlie had at least a two stone advantage and although very drunk, was much fitter. With a growl of pain he pushed Gavin away and lunged for the broken bottle neck.