Are You My Mother? (54 page)

‘
Oh, yes please, definitely,’ I’d said, as I jumped tearfully into Robert’s arms, half expecting a haphazard smattering of leathery applause to drift across to us.

Tony was looking at me, with the same loving expression I’d seen in my other dad’s eyes, long ago, when I’d been crying in the larder with prepubescent outrage and heartache.

‘
Come on then, spit it out,’ he said, as I dithered and bumbled and couldn’t meet his gaze.

‘
I – er – wondered if you might consider…. giving me away at my wedding,’ I finally blurted out, the blood roaring in my ears.

My father held out his arms to me. ‘I’d be honoured,’ he said.

I burst into tears.

Stella met us at the Yellow River Café – she’d come straight from her and Zub’s new flat in Putney - and when she heard Tony’s news, she poked me in the ribs.

‘
There you go, Em, another little brother or sister for you to fuss over,’ she said, and I gave her a hard stare.

‘
I’m so happy for you,’ I told him. ‘Specially because I won’t have to take care of this one. It can come and stay with its big sister and her husband – and then we’ll put it on the train back home to Scotland again afterwards.’

‘
Now you’re getting married, do you and Robert think you’ll start a family soon?’ Tony asked, as we settled ourselves around a table and perused menus.

Stella laughed a loud barking laugh. ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ she hooted. ‘Of course Emma’s going to have children. It’s
obvious
that Emma is going to have children. You’re
gagging
to have children, aren’t you, Em?’

As it happened I had, by then, well and truly got over my earlier fear that I’d never be willing to put myself through the fearful protectiveness of parenthood. I’d watched Robert with Grace, and Ruth with Evie, and realised that the measure of instinctive adoration a parent felt for a child far outweighed the terror of that child being harmed in any way.

‘
Actually,’ I said, lowering my menu and withering Stella with a glance before turning to my father. ‘Yes, I do, and I hope we will – but not for a few years yet. Robert and I see Grace every other weekend, who’s nearly five, and that’s lovely; but to be honest I’m sort of tired of looking after everybody else.’

I saw Stella’s stunned face. Her tongue stud appeared slowly from between her lips before sinking back out of sight again, as she took this in.

‘
I don’t mean just you, Stell. I mean, generally, I want to stop care taking. Looking for my birthmother was the start of it, but now I want to let go of everything else I’ve been clinging on to: even the baby massage and the aromatherapy business. I want to do something for myself. I want to travel.’

‘
Travel?‘
Stella was obviously remembering how I got galloping nervous diarrhoea just organising the two of us on a charter flight, for a week at a hotel in Portugal on our last holiday, four years earlier.

‘
Yes, travel. I told Robert, and he’s said he’s always wanted to do it too, so we’re going to take an extended honeymoon; at least six months. It’s going to be hard for him to be away from Grace for that long, but when we come back, we’ll buy a house closer to where she lives. Listening to all Tony’s stories of his travels made me realise how much I want to see some of the world, before I think about having a family. There are so many things I know nothing about. I want to go and eat real Chinese food in China. I want to climb up mountains in Nepal, and do a Vipassana course in India and – and – oh,
everything
. Once we sell the flat, I’ll be able to use my half of the money from that.’

‘
Wow,’ said Stella.

‘
That’s fantastic,’ said Tony.

‘
Thanks,’ I said, beaming at them both.

Two elderly ladies on the next table were peering at a large portrait on the restaurant wall. ‘Don’t you think it’s a little blatantly political that a Chinese restaurant would have a portrait of Chairman
Mao
on the walls?’ we all overheard one of the women say to her friend, in hushed tones.

‘
Yes, my goodness, and look, they even have him on the menus,’ her friend replied nervously, peering over half-moon glasses at the line drawings of a jovial bald Chinese man, and clearly wondering if they’d stumbled into a hotbed of anti-capitalism. Not at these prices, I thought, feeling wild with exhilaration.

Stella rolled her eyes, and I leaned in towards the centre of the table, beckoning them to join me so that our heads were almost touching. ‘That,’ I said solemnly, ‘is why I want to go travelling. So I don’t end up thinking that Ken Hom is a Chinese leader and not a celebrity chef.’

We all laughed conspiratorially, and I felt comfortable, happy. Like people did, with their families.

When we came out of the restaurant again two hours later, we set off for the flat in the dusty summer heat, walking around the corner past Stamford Brook tube station. There was a Big Issue seller there, partially blocking our path, deep in conversation with the corpulent, red-faced owner of the flower stall outside the station, leaning on the handle of an old tartan shopping trolley containing all his copies of the magazine.

‘
Excuse me,’ said Tony politely, waiting for him to move aside.

The man turned and thrust a magazine, its pages flapping, towards us.

‘
Bi-iiig
Iss
ue?’ It sounded like a sneeze.

We all stopped, awkwardly, and performed a small pocket-searching dance for change. I was the first to find a pound, and began to reach my hand out towards the seller’s, a young man with tanned, weatherbeaten skin and bright, bright green eyes. I froze, the coin in my fist suspended in mid air.

It was him; the man from the tube. The man I’d led up the escalator. Something was sticking out of the front pocket of his jeans; the neck of a small brown pill bottle. Half the label was showing, and I tried unsuccessfully to see if I could make out his name from the writing on it. He must be on medication, I thought, feeling relieved and somewhat proprietorial. But I’d have known that, even if I hadn’t seen the bottle. For a start, he could never have been doing that job if he was in the same state he’d been in last year; and besides, I could tell from his eyes. They were still striking and compelling, but the terrible wildness had gone from them. His jeans were clean, and he didn’t smell bad.

I stared at the hand he had stretched towards me. No more thick yellow claws; just slightly ragged, shortish, grimy-ish fingernails. I had a moment’s doubt – his old fingernails had been so much a part of him that I couldn’t believe he no longer had them. Maybe it wasn’t him….. Then I looked at his eyes again. It definitely was.

‘
Are you all right, Em?’ Stella slid her arm protectively around my waist, and stood closely behind me. I nodded, without taking my gaze off the Big Issue seller.

The man looked at me blankly. ‘That’s a pound, please,’ he said, nodding towards my clenched fist. Sunlight flashed and glinted off the diamond in my engagement ring, dappling his face with tiny dancing dots.

‘
Are
you
all right?’ I blurted back towards the man, as if I’d taken the baton of Stella’s enquiry and was passing it on. I was suddenly dying to know if meeting me had changed his life, in the same way he’d triggered the changes in my own.

He made a face at me. ‘I’m all right. Are you all right?’ He turned to Tony. ‘What about you, mate – are
you
all right?’ He was mocking me.

Tony laughed uneasily. ‘I’m all right.’

‘
Good,’ said the man decisively. ‘We’re all just bloody peachy then, ain’t we? That’s a pound, please.’

My hand finally unclamped enough to allow me to drop the pound into his own and, as if in a trance, I took the copy of the magazine. Its paper cover felt warm from where he’d been holding it.

I opened my mouth to say, ‘I’ve seen you before,’ when he beat me to it.

‘
Oi, I recognise you.’

I waited for him to mention that day on the tube, the hand-holding on the escalator, but he didn’t. ‘Yeah. Saw you on the telly. You was in that documentary, weren’t you?’

Stella hugged me tighter. ‘She certainly was.’ Then she added, with considerable smugness, ‘So was I, actually.’

‘
Didya find her, then, your mum?’

I felt blood rush to my face. ‘No. But I found him,’ - pointing at Tony - ‘and he’s my dad’.

I didn’t think the man would be interested in hearing that, via my search, I’d also found a husband and a soon to be step-daughter with coffee coloured skin and the sweetest nature imaginable. And a new best friend, Ruth, and her gorgeous daughter Evie. And had managed to extend the circle of my other friends considerably, including Mack and Katrina and Greg and Denise. And had totally changed my life around. I was tempted to explain how this was all due to our original, inauspicious meeting, but thankfully decided that it was best left unspoken.

‘
Excellent,’ said the man, with more than a trace of sarcasm in his voice. ‘Well, we’re all happy then. Good luck to you.’

I tucked the Big Issue into my bag, and we moved off, Stella and Tony talking to each other across me; and I realised that it didn’t actually matter that I’d never know whether I helped that man or not. I thought again about how we weren’t steered onto the paths of our lives by anybody else: not me, not Stella, not Ann, Tony, or anybody. They were our own paths, created by our own choices.

As my sister chatted to my father about what a completely innovative and show-stopping wedding dress she planned to make me, I tried to work out when would be the best time to tell her that, actually, I’d seen this gorgeous one in the window of a little shop off the Portobello Road. In my head I began to rehearse my defensive speech: it was my wedding, I was very grateful for the offer, etc, but - and then I thought, for God’s sake….

‘
Stella,’ I blurted. ‘Sorry, but I’ve found the dress I want already.’

‘
Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh well. Actually I didn’t really want to make it anyway; not
your
dress - it’d cost a fortune and take me for ever, and I really have to knuckle down to my degree project next year. But just wait until you see what I’m planning for my bridesmaid’s dress! It’s going to be so outrageously fab. I thought perhaps a mini, with a fishtail at the back and a really tight basque top, maybe we could use some really interesting fabric – there’s a great sort of silvery hologram-type material you can get now….’

Stella’s words washed through me and over me, and then away into the wide sky over our heads, mingling with all the other words that had ever been said, and all the choices and decisions ever made, good, bad or indifferent. Tony looked up, following my gaze. Then he pointed at something, a small scrap of primrose fluttering away over the rooftops.

‘
Did you see that?’

Stella stopped. ‘No. What?’

‘
Little yellow bird. Must be a canary or something that’s escaped from someone’s house.’

We carried on walking.

‘
Maybe he’s just learned to fly,’ I said.

THE END

CATCH YOUR DEATH
by Louise Voss and Mark Edwards

Imagine if Dan Brown and Michael Crichton sat down together to write a fast-paced medical conspiracy thriller set in the English countryside, featuring evil scientists, stone-cold killers, a deadly virus and a beautiful but vulnerable Harvard professor.

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Esteemed virologist Kate Maddox thought she was escaping to a new life. But before she can face the future she must deal with the ghosts of the past.

20 years ago, Kate was a volunteer at a research unit in the English countryside where scientists experimented to find a cure for the common cold. That summer, Kate fell in love with a handsome young doctor, Stephen. But her stay at the unit ended in Stephen’s tragic death and Kate fled to Boston and a new life at Harvard.

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by Louise Voss and Mark Edwards