Are You My Mother? (13 page)

As I talked, I watched the mothers and thought about what made a mother a mother; whether nature or nurture, birth or death, love or responsibility. There was nothing these women wouldn’t do for their babies. They were gagging to learn how to massage them, cure their wind, soothe their cries – not just to make their own lives easier, but predominantly with the simple intention of making their babies happy, so they’d grow up stable and confident and loving.

My own birthmother had never done this. She’d never gone to the department store and agonised over which model of pram to buy, fingering Aircell blankets and testing the equilibrium of bunny mobiles with the tap of a finger – not for me, anyhow. Even if there had been such things as baby massage courses in 1970, my birthmother would not have signed me up. All she had done was to push me out of her and then move on, without me.

I circulated photocopied sheets around to the group, with diagrams of the different strokes and feathery fingertip movements. As I guided the women through the basics, watching them lovingly rub almond oil into their babies’ tiny chests, I wished someone with great big gentle hands would come and smooth away the fist of misery in my own chest. I wondered what Gavin was doing, if his dark nervous hands were stroking someone else’s body now, hesitantly, uncertainly, but thrilling with the touch of new flesh.

The babies’ faces seemed to be glowing in the reflective light of their mothers’ love; and I reaffirmed the decision which I’d been wavering about since meeting the man on the train.

I really
was
going to try and trace my birthmother this time, not just half-heartedly as I had before. Last time I’d given up at the first hurdle; partly because Stella needed me, and partly because I felt it somehow unseemly to go out and find a new set of parents to replace those I’d lost. Every time since then that I’d considered the prospect anew, Stella had manifested her continued need of me: boy trouble; funds needed for orthodontia; that dreadful time when she was set up, and accused of stealing from her Saturday job at Sainsbury's. There had always been some crisis which chased any thoughts of my birthmother out of my mind.

Up until now. The previous night’s row in itself had demonstrated several further things: Stella did not need me anymore. She could fight her own battles; she was nineteen, an adult. No longer a helpless baby kicking on a changing mat; a spoilt toddler; or a woebegone ten year old orphan in a droopy black taffeta dress. I’d done what Mum and Dad would have wanted. Stella had never been taken into care, or abandoned by the system, like that man on the train. I personally had seen her through first periods and O levels and ill-advised party outfits.

Surely I too had every right to look for a bit of mothering, now that I had the chance.

Chapter 13

‘
When you were at school, did the fact that you were adopted make you feel you were different from your classmates; and if so, was this in a positive or a negative way?’

Most of the time, it didn’t make me feel different. I had a mum and dad, same as everyone else.

Actually, for a long time it was Betsey who made me feel as if I was set apart from the others. I believed – probably mistakenly - that people were more impressed by the fact that I had an orang-utan as a playmate, than the fact that I was adopted. Until one particular school trip to the zoo. After what happened on that trip, I really began to wonder whether I was special at all.

I could still see the pink slips of paper which Mrs. Meades handed out to the class one afternoon, in that five minutes of pre-bell subdued hysteria; the pink slips which heralded the most eagerly anticipated event of my entire primary school career. As my slip skidded across the lid of my desk, carrying with it the faintest scent of Mrs.Meades’s Sea Jade perfume, I remembered catching sight of the words, and a thrill of excitement had rushed so fast up to my chest that it felt as if my school tie would roll up of its own accord.

“
Form 3Y will be going by coach to the orang-utan enclosure of London Zoo on October 23
^rd
. To coincide with our forthcoming project on primates, Dr. Barbara Victor will be giving a talk on her work with orang-utans. Your child will need a waterproof and a packed lunch. Cost £2. Please sign and return the slip below to confirm your permission.”

After school I catapulted myself and my satchel through the front door, waving the form and yelling, ‘Mum, Mum, you didn’t tell me it was definitely happening!’

Mum was studying at the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of books and notepads, her huge glasses teetering on the very tip of her nose and several blotches of fountain pen ink decorating her fingers. She was still wearing her flowery vinyl apron, which her pregnant belly had pushed out so far that it almost touched the edge of the table in front of her. A delicious smell of baking scones drifted indolently around the room.

‘
Well, I didn’t want to tell you until all the details were worked out. Besides, it wasn’t up to me to let you know. I won’t be there as your mother, I’ll be there as Dr. Victor.’

‘
I know, I know, but isn’t it brilliant? I can’t wait for them all to meet Betsey. Do you think she’ll do that thing where she pretends to clean my glasses? I hope she doesn’t wee on my foot again, though, that would be so embarrassing. Will you come on the coach with us?’ I flung myself at her, wrapping my arms around her middle, the vinyl apron forming a cool slippery barrier between us. Laughing, Mum lifted the apron up and stuck my head underneath it so that my face rested on the familiar warmth of her taut stomach instead.

‘
Hello baby brother-or-sister,’ I mouthed against her, pressing my cheek firmly down in the hope of feeling a kick.

‘
No, I’ll probably just meet you there. I want to take the car so I can go to the library afterwards. I hope Wayne will be better by then – his flu’s been dragging on for weeks. The vet came again yesterday.’

I nodded sympathetically, still buried under the apron, although I was somewhat scared of Wayne. Wayne was Betsey’s father: five foot five, with a seven foot arm span and an impressive beard, and he did not much approve of my friendship with his daughter. Having him lying feebly on the straw in the next cage was considerably less nerve-racking than having him swinging along the fence which separated us, yelling at me, as he usually did.

‘
Are you making scones? Can I have one?’ I emerged back out into the warm scented kitchen, cheeks flushed and hair coming adrift from the bobble securing my ponytail. Mum adjusted it for me, and stroked my face.

‘
Yes, darling. I made them for you. Get the jam out of the larder please, and we’ll have one together.’

The twenty-third had dawned clear and cold. A coach, with long droopy wing mirrors like Dennis Healey’s eyebrows, wheezed up to the school gates at 8.45, and we were allowed in, jostling and sniggering at the novelty of being on board, able to smell that distinctive school-trip smell of petrol and plastic, to run our hands over the scratchy softness of the tartan seat backs and to stake our places by the great big windows, all the better to make faces out of. While most of my classmates piled towards the back, satchels and lunch boxes bumping along the seats, I, without hesitation, took the prime position at the front nearest the driver.

The driver was a tiny little man, no bigger than most of us nine-year olds. He had an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear, like a badge of proof that despite his size, he
was
old enough to be in charge of this large vehicle.

I’d felt so bursting with pride that my feet barely seemed to touch the steps as I ascended. This was my day. Darrell Hawkes tried to pinch me as he went past, but I stuck my nose in the air and ignored him. Whereas we were all togged up in macs and anoraks and duffel coats, Darrell wore nothing warmer than a t-shirt which bore a peeling decal reading, ‘If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’ His nose dripped like a faulty tap, he really did eat worms – I’d seen him do it - and he already had a criminal record for shoplifting. Everybody hated him.

My friend Esther climbed on last, late as usual. ‘Can I sit with you?’

I hesitated. I had been entertaining a swottish hope that Mrs. Meades would ask that question, so that I could fill her in with more details of my intimate knowledge of the primates we were about to visit. But Mrs. Meades had already settled herself across the aisle, her register sticking out of the top of her big plastic shopping bag, and her legendary enormous furry boots filling up the entire space between her seat and the back of the driver’s booth. People stopped in the street and stared at those boots when she wore them. They were luxuriantly, opulently furry, like two well-groomed Persian cats. The whole effect was of a strange hybrid, half-teacher, half-yeti; something that might have escaped from a zoo in a Roald Dahl book.

‘
OK,’ I’d said to Esther, who scrambled up on to the seat next to me and opened her lunchbox, pulling out a packet of Skips.

‘
Want some?’

‘
Yes please. Are you looking forward to seeing the orang-utans?’

Esther shrugged. ‘Yeah. Though I’d rather see the elephants. Orannatans are boring.’

I felt as if she had just insulted my family, and so when she proffered the Skips, I took a much bigger handful than was strictly polite. The truth was, whilst acting like some kind of junior primate specialist, I had somewhat played down the closeness of my actual relationship with Betsey. I’d instinctively felt, even from a young age, that it might make me a target for ridicule to my classmates. Any form of difference was frowned upon amongst the pupils of Linley Road Junior School. You could be viciously prodded in the playground for not knowing all the words to ‘The Big Ship Sails On The Ally-Ally O’; or for wearing glasses, as I’d discovered to my cost on the day that I first got mine. I’d been in the first year then, and so mortified that I had actually walked into the classroom backwards.

So, regardless of how proud I was of my enduring friendship with an orang-utan, I was also aware that if I overplayed it, it could be a potentially ostracizable offence, on a par with poor Rosemary Thatcher’s burns.

Rosemary was in 3R. The day before she joined the school, all the teachers had had a quiet word with their classes, telling us that we were to be nice to her. That a terrible fire which had started in a chip pan in her house, when she was little, had left her with some scars. I had imagined that these would be long white scars like the ones found on pantomime villains and picture-book bank robbers, but the scars on Rosemary’s face weren’t like that. Her whole face was a red weal, with twisty pink bits around her eyes, nose and mouth. She looked as if she had been dropped into a pot of boiling water, and my stomach shrank and contracted every time I saw her. I was consumed with the urge to befriend her , but every time I saw her sitting alone on a bench, the one furthest away from the portable goalpost in the playground where the big boys congregated, I just couldn’t think what I could possibly say to her. Her aloof distance scared me as much as her boiled cheeks.

So although most of my fellow third years knew that I went to the zoo a lot because my mum worked there, none of them really had the whole picture, not even Esther. I had decided it was time to change all that. I hugged myself in anticipation of the awe on their faces when they saw me walk amongst the orang-utans issuing commands, like a lion-tamer subduing the mighty beasts in a circus ring. Well, if I was lucky, Betsey would give me a cuddle. 3Y would be so impressed that not even Darrell Hawkes would think about ever teasing me about it. I prayed Betsey would be generous with her affections and not having an off day.

The coach pulled away, the tiny little driver swinging the immense steering wheel around and narrowly avoiding a row of parked cars as he eased his way out onto the main road. He clicked on a radio, and speakers filled the interior with a high, breathy, squeaky woman’s voice – I later found it was Fern Kinney, singing “Together We Are Beautiful”. He sang along, only about two octaves lower and out of tune
. You walked into my life
, he growled, and
together we are beautiful! Oh, so beautiful!,
his fag dropping ash onto his stay-press trousers as we barrelled along the ring road. His legs were so skinny that the trousers seemed all crease and nothing else.

I didn’t speak much to Esther after that She ate the remainder of her Skips, and I gazed out of the window unseeing, dreaming of the moment of glory when I was to be the only one allowed inside Betsey’s cage, and my classmates would realise that I was the special one, the lucky one, the chosen one.

On arrival at the zoo, we traipsed in a straggly crocodile towards the orang-utan enclosure, my hot dry hand resting in Esther’s Skip-sticky one, Mrs. Meades’ boots stroking each other as she strode noiselessly in the lead.

Mum was already there, a white lab coat straining at the buttons across her bump. ‘There’s your mum.’ Esther was finally beginning to sound impressed. And not before time, I thought.

With only a tiny cursory wave of acknowledgement to me, Mum led us all around the outside of the enclosure, pointing out the orang-utans’ habitat, discussing their diets and exercise preferences, and touching on their mating rituals. Darrell Hawkins of course sniggered uncontrollably at the mere mention of the word ‘mating’, but my mother was a trouper, and took no notice.