The Storyteller's Daughter (28 page)

Mark arrives, not in spandex, but in well-shined shoes, freshly pressed jeans and a sensible waterproof jacket, which would be my second choice of outfit for Rationality Man. Just seeing him is like a drug for me. Watching him stride confidently up the front path, full of composure and self-assurance, I already feel my confusion and anxiety starting to subside. By the time he has cleared the kitchen table of baskets of fruit, sat me down and said, “Right. Let's start at the beginning,” I am ready to abandon myself to his powers of orderliness.

By the time I have finished telling Mark everything I have found out, he already has a list of facts and questions written out neatly on a piece of paper.

“So,” he says, rubbing his chin and examining his notes, “this has certainly filled in a lot of the gaps. But there are now several questions that arise as a result of this new-found knowledge. For example, question one, where is your biological father now? You have a right to know.”

“I told you,” I say, “it was just a fling. She probably can't even remember his name.”

Okay. So perhaps I haven't told Mark
everything
. I may have glossed over the circumstances of my conception. I know that what happened to my mother is not a reflection on me, but I can't help wondering if Mark would see me differently. Tainted. Impure. Guilty… all these things that keep popping into my head and I keep trying to push out because I know they are illogical. I don't want Mark to see me as any less than perfect.

“I don't think I want to think about my real father just yet,” I say, swiftly.

“Okay,” says Mark, as if he's chairing a meeting, “we can come back to that. Let's move on to question two. Is your mother still married?”

This hadn't even occurred to me. The thought that she could still be legally tied to that man makes my stomach turn. I could still legally be his stepdaughter.

“Now, on the one hand,” says Mark, “we know that your mother uses her maiden name. This is fairly standard practice when a woman divorces her husband. However, this evidence is somewhat counteracted by the fact that your mother would have needed to maintain some sort of contact with Robert Scott, even if only via a solicitor, in order for a divorce to go ahead, and we don't think this is likely. Now – ”

“Mark,” I interrupt, “I'm not really sure I want to talk about Robert Scott right now either.”

“If your mother is still married, Meg, it could have legal and financial implications when your mother dies. Have you thought about that?”

I shake my head.

“Well, you need to. Now, I'm not a solicitor, as you know, but I imagine this Robert Scott fellow may still be entitled to some of your mother's money. Perhaps we should brainstorm possible routes to pursue depending on what your mother's answer is.”

I nod, starting to feel rather overwhelmed again. “Okay,” I agree. “Answer to what?”

Mark looks a little exasperated. He likes to work faster and more efficiently than this. “Her answer to whether she's still legally married or not.”

“Oh right, sorry. How will we know that?”

Mark's fingers tighten against his pencil, turning them white at the tips. “Because you're going to ask her.”

“What? I… am I?”

This morning my mother had dragged herself downstairs in her dressing gown, pale and weary, but forcing her usual smile. ‘Good morning, Darling,' she had said, as if nothing had changed.

She had examined some eggs, some cereal, some bread and some milk as if it were all contaminated, before declaring that she was not hungry.

‘Are you still feeling faint?' I had asked, watching her shuffle unsteadily around the kitchen.

‘Was I feeling faint?' she asked, confused.

‘Well, yes. You fainted,' I told her, ‘yesterday afternoon. When you saw Gwennie.'

My mother shook her head, baffled. ‘Who's Gwennie?'

“I don't see how I can question my mother about any of this,” I tell Mark, “when she doesn't even remember Gwennie being here.”

Mark raises one eyebrow, sceptically. “So she says. Look, Meg, your mother's a wonderful liar, you know that.”

“I'm not sure she's lying. I honestly don't think she remembers anything in between picking fruit yesterday and waking up this morning.” Then, remembering Ewan's words yesterday, I add: “There's a difference between pretending and believing.”

Mark shakes his head and looks at me in the way one might look at a mistreated puppy. “Meg,” he says, taking my hand, “doesn't that seem rather convenient? This way your mother doesn't have to answer any awkward questions, she can deny all knowledge of Gwennie, and she can carry on just as things were before, telling you silly stories, denying you the truth. I suspect the reason she fainted yesterday was sheer panic, panic that her lies were all about to be revealed. Or, even more likely, she pretended to faint, just like last time. She used exactly the same transparent strategy. She pretended to faint as a distraction. She hoped that in the chaos Gwennie would just go away. But what she still doesn't know is that Gwennie didn't go away. She sat here and told you what really happened when you were little, and so now you are the one holding all the balls. You're in the perfect position to catch your mother out, to take her by surprise and make her own up to the truth.”

I rub my eyes, feeling exhausted. I didn't sleep a wink last night and this is all too much. Catch my mother out? Take her by surprise? My mother's not the enemy. This isn't about tactics. I hope this isn't the bit where Mark expects me to whip out my copy of
Talk!
and wire her up to the food processor because I simply am not going to do it. But Mark seems so confident in what he's saying, and his line of reasoning sounds so logical. And he has a pencil and a piece of paper with points listed on it…

“My mother's very weak,” I tell Mark, “what if all this is too much for her?”

“If what's too much for her? Her only daughter wanting to fill in the missing pieces of her life? Her only daughter wanting to know the truth, so that she doesn't keep making a fool of herself by repeating silly stories about getting nipped by crab cakes and having her fingers dipped in sugar.”

“Toes.”

“Whatever. The point is that you have a right to this information. And you said it yourself, soon it will be too late.”

I shake my head, more confused than ever. I wanted Mark to make me feel in control again. I wanted him to help me sort my thoughts into piles and my feelings into compartments. I wanted him to do what he does best; take what's there and give it structure, tidy it up, make it neat, rid it of any emotion and reduce it down to hard, cold facts that can't be felt, only known. But I forgot that there's another side to what he does, and that's the research. He not only processes facts that are already known, he builds on them, searching for answers, prodding and probing until he gets to the bottom of every single question. That's what a good scientist does; he never stops questioning. Out of nowhere a memory comes back to me of a science lesson in secondary school when we had to dissect a daffodil. We pulled it apart bit by bit, locating the stamen, the receptacle, the stigma, the sepal… By the time we had finished we knew what was beneath those pretty, yellow petals, but of course all the beauty had gone, and all that was left was a tattered, ruined mess.

“Maybe I don't need to know anymore,” I say, wearily, “maybe I don't want to.”

Mark lets go of my hand. “You mean you would rather not know the truth because it's easier that way,” he says, disapprovingly.

“I would rather spend the final days with my mother some way other than confronting her, and fighting her, and trying to wheedle things out of her that she clearly doesn't want to remember and I might not want to know.”

“That's what this is about really, isn't it?” says Mark, rather harshly. “The fact that you don't want to know. This isn't all about your mother. It's about the fact that after going on and on about how you wanted to know the truth, you don't like what you've heard and you suddenly don't want to know anymore.”

“Is that really so wrong?” I snap, suddenly annoyed by his lack of understanding.

“It is when you've been saying for months, and quite rightly so, that your mother needs to face facts.”

“Well, perhaps I was wrong!” I shout, jumping out of my seat. “Maybe she doesn't want to face facts!”

“You mean maybe
you
don't want to!” snaps Mark, standing up.

“Okay, maybe I don't want to! Maybe the childhood I knew was just a pack of lies, but at least it was a happy one, and at least it felt like mine. I threw it away and in return I got a miserable childhood that doesn't feel like it has any connection to me at all!”

“So you would have preferred not to know the truth? You would have preferred to carry on living a life of ridiculous stories and silly lies?”

“Yes!” I startle myself with my response. Yes, yes I would have preferred it. If only I'd known what was to come…“I want to have been bitten by a crabcake!” I shout, my voice trembling with emotion. “I want to have dipped my toes in the neighbours' tea! I want to have been involved in a high-speed chase from Tottenham Highstreet to Enfield Chase!”

“Then you are just as delusional as your crazy mother!”

“Maybe I am! So what? What does it matter?”

Mark shakes his head in despair. “I thought you were better than that. I thought you were a paragon of truth and reason and logic, but it seems that was just when it was convenient for you. I'm disappointed in you, Meg.”

Disappointed in me! I clench my fists by my sides, swallow down the lump in my throat and look the admirable Mark Daly squarely in the eye.

“If that's the case,” I say, “then I guess this particular experiment has reached its conclusion.”

Lying on my bed I close my eyes, trying to go back to the day the spaghetti plant sprouted in our window box. If I concentrate hard I can see it there, stringy pieces of spaghetti hanging between green leaves…

‘Well, I never!' My mother had exclaimed. ‘I bet that came from Mrs Trivelli in the flat above. She's always leaving bits and bobs on her kitchen windowsill for the birds. I bet she went to put a piece of spaghetti out and it fell down into our window box and sprouted.' My mother licked her finger and held it out the kitchen window. ‘Yes,' she nodded, ‘I thought as much. A westerly wind. That will make a spaghetti plant sprout before you can say Bob's your uncle. You know the problem with spaghetti plants, don't you?'

I looked up at her and shook my head. Being only four-years-old I had no idea about the problems with spaghetti plants.

‘They grow and grow and grow, and before you know it they're as big as a house. In South America there's a vast jungle of spaghetti plants, so dense and thick that nobody who has ever gone in there has found their way out alive. In 1953 an explorer by the name of George Wallis Boo Cooper entered the spaghetti jungle, and they say he's still in there now, wandering around and around in circles, eating spaghetti all day long. Do you know what the moral of that story is?'

I thought carefully. ‘Don't go into a spaghetti jungle?'

‘No, don't throw food out your window when you live in a flat. You never know what might grow from it. Now, the only way to stop a spaghetti plant growing and spreading is to pick the spaghetti as quickly as possible. So I think the best idea is if I dangle you out of the window by your legs and you start picking.'

I thought about the number of stairs we had to climb to get to the fourth floor, and about all the traffic going by on the main road below. ‘It's a long, long way down,' I said, curling my hair anxiously around my finger and chewing my lip.

‘We all have to do things we don't like in life, Darling,' said my mother, picking me up by the ankles and swinging me out of the window. I felt my dress fall over my head and the wind whipping around my bare legs.

‘Nobody's looking at you,' said my mother, in the way that mothers do when their children are clearly exposed to all and sundry. ‘Now, if the spaghetti is ripe it will feel warm and soft, with still a little bit of bite. If it's hard and brittle it's not ready for picking. Do you understand?'

‘Yes,' I called from underneath the skirt of my dress. All the blood was rushing to my head and I felt pleased I couldn't see the traffic whizzing by below. I started picking as quickly as possible, going by feel alone as I couldn't see a thing, and after my initial fear had subsided I started to quite enjoy myself. ‘Look how much I'm picking!' I shouted to my mother, as I dangled from her grasp.

‘You're doing wonderfully, Darling!' She called. ‘You'll be a champion spaghetti picker when you grow up. The best in the world!'

And so that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. I planned to travel to South America and earn my fortune picking my way through the spaghetti jungles. I wasn't scared of getting lost like George Wallis Boo Cooper, who clearly didn't have the natural knack for feeling his way around spaghetti plants like I did. I was going to pick enough spaghetti in six months to feed the whole of Italy, and then I'd buy a big house for my mother to live in, so that she didn't have to put up with Mrs Trivelli throwing old bits of dinner into her window box.

I open my eyes and look up at the ceiling, somehow surprised to find myself still lying on my bed. A faint smile on my lips and for the first time in days I feel calm.

Ewan has picked the last of the fruit due for harvesting and left it in three Tesco carrier bags, outside the kitchen door. I can't see him, but every so often I catch a glimpse of Digger crossing the bottom of the garden, so I know he must be down there somewhere. I put the kettle on and make two mugs of strong black coffee, before shrugging on the baggy green jumper that my mother keeps by the back door for gardening purposes, and heading outside.