Are You My Mother? (5 page)

At seven fifteen I rang Gavin’s mobile - God knows why, because he always turned it off when he was late for something, to avoid getting yelled at. I left a crabby message on his voicemail. At seven forty five I left a really nasty second message, saying he was an asshole, I was going in without him, and I’d leave his ticket on the door although it would serve him right if I flogged it to a tout.

By the time I was ushered into my seat, I’d missed the first three songs, and I was fuming and upset. After the couple next to me had glanced over at me once or twice, I realised that I was muttering to myself.

I eventually simmered down enough to pay full attention to the music, only to be hit by an overwhelming sensation of missing Dad. I visualised him in Gavin’s empty seat, cheering and probably jumping up to dance, infecting everyone around with his enthusiasm whilst almost certainly embarrassing the pants off me. The feeling hit me in the stomach, almost taking my breath away with its intensity, and when The Who played “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, I nearly cried. It was that sense of longing, of desolation particular to being amongst thousands of other people enjoying themselves; and I resented Gavin’s absence even more. At least if he turned up I’d have a shoulder to cry on.

I decided that the encounter on the tube had probably affected me more than I thought. But it wasn’t just the man on the train, or missing Dad, or Gavin’s flakiness, or even the PMT which upset me that night.

It was the teenagers with cancer, for whom the concert was in aid; a small brave gaggle of them in the audience, wearing matching T-shirts advertising the Teenage Cancer Trust, some with headscarves or baseball caps covering balding heads, a few with steroid-puffy faces. They looked bemused a lot of the time, probably never having heard of The Who until a few weeks earlier. The less-well ones had to keep sitting down, assailed by the loud guitars and ecstatic punters; old - to them - people who knew all the words to these boring - to them - songs with endless twiddly guitar solos. Whatever their music of choice was, it almost certainly wasn’t this. Nonetheless they clapped gamely, and smiled a lot, and cheered, when they weren’t looking tired or bemused. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

About halfway through the show, by which time I’d given up all hope of Gavin arriving, there was a hiatus in the proceedings. The doctor who founded the Teenage Cancer Trust came on stage to be presented with a cheque for a million pounds by the band. He gave a little speech of thanks, and when he announced that ‘some of his cancer sufferers are in the audience tonight,’ a couple of the group of teenagers leaped up and punched the air in recognition. The well meaning, middle-class crowd didn’t know what to do – wanting to applaud their bravery, but cognisant of the fact that it wasn’t at all appropriate to cheer somebody just because they had cancer.

I couldn’t stop wondering what these kids were thinking; how they felt. Were they gazing at the thousands and thousands of healthy adults surrounding them, in seats and stalls and boxes: boxes of people all stacked on top of one another like battery hens, only a tiny percentage of them as unlucky as they were, and thinking
it’s not fair
? Were they wondering if they too would ever get old enough to come to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in celebration of a band whose records they adored thirty years ago?

Suddenly my own gripes seemed unutterably trivial in comparison. Hormones – I was lucky that they were at least predictable. Missing Mum and Dad – well, yes, that was a loss. But it was nearly ten years ago, and I had my whole life in front of me. As for Gavin – I needed to stop moaning about him and decide whether to accept him, warts and all, or not. I
knew
he was unreliable, always late, dodgy – but hell, no-one was perfect. Stella was always trying to make out that the reason I didn’t ditch him was down to my own lack of self-esteem – but she read too many teen magazines. She had no idea, yet, how much you had to compromise in life; she was still young and beautiful enough to believe that she should have the best of everything, all the time. And as a matter of fact, I thought Gavin was good for me, on the whole. He was often sweet, generous, fun and, as far as I knew, faithful.

Pulling myself together, I resolved henceforward to give him more of a break. He would almost certainly have had a reason for not showing up at the gig – after all, he loved The Who as well. He was the best thing that had ever happened to me and surely, if I met him halfway, then he’d be less cavalier about standing me up in future. He was a true original, and I was lucky to have him.

So after the final encore, I bounded out of the Albert Hall, my ears ringing, on an adrenaline high from being at a great concert, thankful that Stella and I were both fortunate enough to be alive, healthy, housed, happy enough, and that I had a bloke who loved me. As I delved in my bag to get some money to throw into the Teenage Cancer Trust collection buckets, I noticed that there was a message on my phone. I dialled in to retrieve it, and it was Gavin.

‘
Yeah, Emma, listen. I’m sick of this. My bloody car got towed away and I’ve had to go and get it from the bloody pound, and it’s been a nightmare. The battery on my mobile ran down after your message so I couldn’t call you back. But you never cut me any slack, do you? I can’t always be there at your beck and call. I was looking forward to the gig too… Anyway, what with one thing and another, I’ve had enough. I think we should call it a day. I don’t need this kind of aggro. I’m sorry, babes. We had a good time but we both knew it wasn’t going to last for ever. I’ll ring you next week and we can sort out our stuff. I mean it; it’s over. Sorry. Bye.’

Breathless with shock, I hailed a black cab and went straight round to his house, letting myself in with my spare key, where I found him spliffed up in front of a video of The Sweeney. Despite his socked feet resting on the coffee table in a manner indicating extreme relaxation, his resolve was even stronger than in his phone message. I made a fool of myself; crying and begging, practically, but he was unmoved.

‘
I can’t handle this any more,’ he said. ‘We’re a habit, babe. You can do better than me.’

Did he mean that he could do better than me, too? My less-than-robust sense of self-worth crumbled even further as, with more than a few tears, I waited for a minicab to take me home.

‘
Can’t I stay? Just tonight?’

‘
I think it’s better this way, honestly, babes.’

He hugged me, and his smell was still delicious: spliff, aftershave, warm skin, taking me right back to the smell of his palm at that party where we first met. I felt shocked, battered by the day’s events, devastated at the sight of Gavin’s socks and the knowledge that I might never feel his arms around me again, or the rub of stubbly skin underneath his chin. The Sweeney’s car raced down an alleyway, chasing a criminal who scrambled away over some dustbins and I watched, dully, with a fog over my eyes and my heart.

Later, as my cab pulled away from the kerb at an only slightly more sedate speed than The Sweeney’s, I realised that I hadn’t even told Gavin what had happened with the man on the train, let alone the decision the encounter had inspired in me. A good story left untold, I thought, staring out at the slick streets of a drizzly Thursday night. I wondered if I would really go for it; if I would really ever try to trace my birthmother. I could certainly have done with a mother right then and there, next to me on the dirt-faded and torn tartan upholstery of that geriatric minicab, enveloping me in unconditional love and reassurance. Hugging me. Telling me that it was all going to be all right.

Chapter 6

‘
Some adopted people believe that they have no identity, no place in the world. Did you ever feel that way? If so, can you pinpoint what prompted it?’

Being adopted always gave me stabs of sadness, especially on my birthdays. The thought that the person who’d given birth to me had just moved on, and possibly even forgotten about me. But it was a self-indulgent sadness, really – I
had
parents who loved me.

It was never any great secret. I had always known I was adopted, although I didn’t have any recollection of when or how Mum and Dad had first told me. It was just something I grew up with, like the dusty smell of orang-utan hair, or the omnipresent flakes of tobacco from Dad’s pipe. Mum had always let me know that my birth parents were very young, not married to each other, and simply unable to give me the kind of life they felt I deserved; and this knowledge did take some of the sting out of being given away; but only some of it. It felt like a real sting; a bee sting - tweezers easing it out a little way until it snapped off and stuck obdurately in my flesh.

But I couldn’t have asked for better parents than Mum and Dad; I mean, I really
liked
them, most of the time. As a kid, they gave me as much of a sense of identity as they possibly could have done. And I’d certainly much rather have had Dad and Mum as adoptive parents than my friend Esther’s real but miserable and uptight kin, who’d slap her round the legs for even thinking about cheeking them, and only gave her half the pocket money I got.

Plus, if being given away at birth was part of the Grand Scheme of Things for me, I was relieved that I hadn’t ended up in some sad, badly funded children’s home; too many kids crowding round a television trying to get a sense of stability from the Saturday morning cartoons. Wetting the bed, crying at night, underperforming at school; never having money for new clothes or records.

Yes, I’d been one of the lucky children. I never felt that I had no place in the world, not even when Stella came along and I no longer had Mum and Dad to myself. I’d thought I’d feel excluded, but my parents’ joy was infectious. Stella’s birth became the most unexpectedly wonderful thing that had ever happened to our family.

She arrived slightly prematurely, quite unusually for a first child, and – as usual – took us all by surprise. On that particular rainy Wednesday Dad had, as a rare treat, taken me on a shoot with him. In her late-pregnancy befuddlement Mum had copied down Dad’s contact number at the studio with a 7 where an 8 should have been. She couldn't remember the name of the company who'd hired him for the shoot, or the location of the studio, or even when he'd said he'd be home. Consequently, she ended up enduring the intense eight hour labour alone.

Meanwhile Dad, to his eternal remorse, had not bothered to check in with Mum from a payphone that day - he'd thought about it at lunchtime, but hadn't been able to locate any two or ten-pence pieces amongst the fluff of his trouser pockets, and I’d searched equally fruitlessly along the vinyl seams at the bottom of my Holly Hobby purse. The baby wasn't expected for another ten days, so he had carried on with the business of photographing a lissome lady clad in pink legwarmers, ballet shoes and a selection of up-to-the-minute dancewear for the brochure of a west London dance studio.

I sat patiently on a stool just outside the brightly lit enclave of big umbrellas, wide shiny screens and jumble of black cables snaking around the edges, and watched my father as he called out 'Lovely, super, smile darling, chin up, head down, a tiny bit to the left - beautiful!' all the while clicking, clicking, clicking away with his big camera, deftly twisting it in every angle.

The model smiled continuously, which did quite impress me. Later that day, when I’d begun to get bored, I surreptitiously tried it, and discovered for myself that it wasn't easy. I held my lips up and apart in a rictus of bared teeth and appled cheeks, and timed myself on the second hand of my Snoopy watch; but my smile only lasted one minute and eleven seconds before I had to relax my aching cheek muscles.

At that point I had to go outside and have a pee. The model’s make-up bag was spilling open on the edge of the sink in the tiny bathroom, and my fingers twitched with the effort of not trying her sticky bright pink lip gloss and the brick red blusher. I managed to resist, instead contenting myself with stroking my cheek with her huge soft brush. It felt like the velvety inside of a foxglove.

When I returned to my stool, I passed the by-now thoroughly dragging time by absorbing myself in a mental exercise to award points to the different styles and colours of leotard worn by the model. Top marks went to a black-and-coffee striped number, with a V-neck and quite low-cut over the model's narrow hips. The stripes themselves were V-shaped too, fitting neatly and strikingly together in a pattern that reminded me of the parquet floor in our living room.

Dad loved getting this kind of job. He was quite new to fashion photography, as most of his work up to that point had been for a local solicitors' firm, by whom he was employed to photograph skid marks on roads after car crashes, scars left by industrial accidents or slipshod surgeons, or - his least favourite - uneven bits of pavement over which old ladies stumbled and injured themselves. This was all supplemental income for his other business, of selling ‘make your own camera’ kits. He had designed two models, the Victortec and the Victortilt, and a factory in Birmingham manufactured the parts, which he then sold in kit form to camera enthusiasts via small ads in the back of
The Amateur Photographer
. Unfortunately there were not an awful lot of people with the time or the inclination to make their own cameras, so Dad was beginning to concentrate more on the freelance photography work. His regular appointments with cracked pavements helped pay the bills, but to be in a real studio with a real model was his idea of heaven.