Are You My Mother? (6 page)

‘
It’s just so much more creative,' he said to Mum on many occasions.

That particular shoot had ended at six o'clock. I was weary from sitting still for so long, and my eyes were scratchy from the bright lights and the flash gun; but I felt so proud of my father and his important, glamorous job.

I was bursting full of stories to tell Mum about the day, but we had returned to a cold, empty house and a note shoved through the letterbox from Mrs. Polkinghorne, the arthritis-ridden elderly lady next door:

'Barbara in Labour, ambulance has took her. I'd of gone too only me knees is playing up again. She says please hurry up when you get back. Florence .'

The next thing I remember was rushing down long hospital corridors, the thwack of the thick plastic doors echoing behind us, and my hand sweatily clutching Dad's. Dad was in such a state that he had forgotten the original plan, which was to leave me next door at Mrs. P’s, eating Battenburg and listening to descriptions of her operations for the duration of the labour; and just to present me with my new brother or sister once he/she was a neatly-swaddled
fait accompli
. There was no way that I was going to remind him. This was a momentous day, and I didn't want to miss a second of it. Dad had, however, remembered to bring his camera, and its heavy black case bumped against my side as we ran.

We were lost in the hospital labyrinth within minutes, Dad too phased to read the signposts, and me too young and flustered to follow them. We began frantically asking everyone who passed by: 'Maternity?' 'Maternity?' 'Maternity?' until a porter who looked exactly like my headmaster frowningly directed us, and we set off again at a trot, too fast for my short legs. I remember the swish swish of my marigold-yellow elephant cords rubbing together at the thighs, and the mingled tones of exasperation and excitement in Dad’s voice: 'Keep up, Emma! The baby could be here at any moment!'

But by the time we reached the Maternity wing, Stella had already arrived, and was lying pinkly and complacently alone in a huge bassinet next to an empty bed. Dad actually grabbed hold of a nurse, leaving a small crumpled damp mark on the sleeve of her immaculate uniform.

'Where is she? Where's my wife - Barbara Victor? My wife. Is everything all right?'

The nurse fixed a smile to her face, although far less enthusiastically than the leotard model had earlier, and gave Dad a look that even I could easily interpret as 'oh no, another panicking daddy. That's all I need.'

'Everything's fine, Mr. Victor. Mother and baby are both doing well. We just had to pop your wife up to theatre for a few stitches, that's all. Nothing to worry about, she'll be back in a tick. Would you like to see your daughter?'

I had already identified Baby Victor, as confirmed by the words on the plastic shackle around her tiny little ankle and, while Dad was talking to the nurse, lifted my sister out of the bassinet, scrutinising her minuscule toenails and reverently touching the sprout of pale hair on her crown.

'You were in, and now you're out,' I whispered. After all those months of watching my mother's belly lift and distort, sudden violent punches and karate chops, I had half-expected the baby to emerge looking like Hong Kong Phooey.

Actually I hadn't known what to expect, but it wasn't this beady-eyed little person not much bigger than a Tiny Tears.

'I'm sorry,' said the nurse, striding over, lifting Stella out of my arms and placing her into Dad's instead, giving me, I thought, an unnecessarily hard stare. 'It's immediate family only until visiting hours. This young lady will have to wait in the visitor's reception.'

Dad didn't even hear her at first. Tears were rolling down his face, riding bumpily over his stubbly cheeks. 'This is her? This is my baby girl? Oh God, she's incredible. Oh Emma, isn't she wonderful?'

'Yeah,' I muttered, glaring back at the nurse.

'Immediate family only, please,' the nurse repeated, her arms crossed across her chest.

I looked defiantly past her and up at a TV on the opposite wall. The sound was turned down, but the picture showed Toyah mutely performing, her flat carroty hair bouncing horizontally along with her manic posturing.

'Can we call the baby Toyah?'

Dad ignored me, still unable to tear his eyes away from the bundle in his arms. The nurse looked twice at the time on the upside-down watch pinned to her apron.

'Mr. Victor, I hate to be a spoilsport, but I must ask that this young lady comes back at the designated visiting hour. Immediate fam -'

Dad looked up briefly from his in-depth examination of Stella's fingers. 'Emma is immediate family. She's our daughter. This is her new sister.'

The nurse looked confused. 'I'm sorry. I wouldn’t have been so insistent, it’s just that I understood that Dr. Victor was a first-time mother.'

After another long pause, Dad grinned at me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Dr. Victor was already a mother.’

I beamed back at him, and at my little sister in his arms, her conker-sized fists punching the air. The nurse arranged her features into an apologetic expression. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You might as well sit down and wait, then. She should be back any time now.’

The three of us sat and waited. I could hardly breathe, terrified that I might be wafting germs into the baby’s face. Meanwhile, in his simultaneous elation about Stella and anxiety about Mum’s wellbeing, Dad’s expression was changing so frequently that he reminded me of the toby jug we had sitting on a high shelf at home. When it was a good day in the Victor household, the jug was placed smiley-side out, but if there had been bad news, Mum turned it around so that its droopy pottery lips formed a mournful frown. If someone had put that jug on a potter’s wheel and spun it around, it would have resembled Dad’s face.

‘
Don’t worry, Dad,’ I kept saying, patting his arm. ‘She’ll be fine, the nurse said so.’ She must have tripped and fallen, I thought to myself, to need stitches. I’d had stitches once, when I went flying over a low chain-link barrier in the Tesco’s carpark. I’d been so preoccupied at the time, trying to decide if I wanted a Curly Wurly or a tube of Smarties, that I hadn’t even seen the barrier until it smacked me in the shins and catapulted me head first onto the concrete.

The lines at the corners of Dad’s eyes were rigid with tension - until Stella opened her pink mouth and yawned noisily, and then the same lines relaxed into joyous creases. ‘Would you look at that?’ he said, with as much awe in his voice as if the newborn Stella had just recited the first two verses of
The Ancient Mariner
.

I could not keep my hands off the velvety skin on Stella’s pliant skull. It was the softest thing I had ever touched – even the dancewear model’s make-up brush seemed like a Brillo pad compared to this.

‘
Dad. Did the baby really come out of Mum’s
bottom
?’ I remembered whispering, whipping my hand away from Stella’s head with the sudden realisation of where it might have been. It occurred to me that all the facts of life I’d been given must just have been elaborate wind-ups; Stella’s head was far too big to come out of any hole that I’d ever been aware of. Perhaps pregnant ladies developed trap doors that swung down when the time came, like the one we had in our loft.

‘
No. Well, yes. She came out of her….hmm….vagina. Mum’s told you about vaginas, hasn’t she?’ For the first time since arriving at the hospital, Dad sat up and gave me his full attention. ‘Hey, weren’t you supposed to stay at Mrs. P’s until the baby came?’

I looked pityingly at him. ‘Well, yes, but the baby’s already come, hasn’t she? And I was with you, not Mrs. P. So do boys have vaginas
underneath
their willies then, or what?’

I had only recently become even vaguely
au fait
with the workings of the human reproductive system. When I was about five I’d asked my friend Esther’s mother where babies came from, and with considerable embarrassment she had pointed south and said, ‘From a little hole at the top of ladies’ legs’, and so for years I used to look at my inner thigh and wonder exactly whereabouts this magic hole would open to let the baby out, and how. Daft, really – it never even occurred to me to get Mum to elaborate on this information, until she was about eight months pregnant, and I asked her one day how the baby would manage to swim down the inside of her leg without getting stuck.

The ward doors opened, and we both looked up to see Mum being pushed through in a wheelchair. Her face was ashen white, her hair was a flattened, matted mess, and worst of all, she was crying hysterically. Dad practically flung Stella on to my lap, and ran over to her.

‘
Darling, oh, my darling, what’s the matter?’

Mum couldn’t speak. Tears just flooded down her face, and she shook her head. Fear sat like a brick in my gut – something must have gone terribly, terribly wrong. Perhaps Stella wasn’t ours at all. Or perhaps Mum had needed an emergency stomach removal.

The nurse who was wheeling Mum up to her bed beckoned to a passing orderly, gesturing to him to close the curtains around us. He complied, averting his eyes away from Mum’s grief, and with a practised flick of the wrist, wrapped our family up around the bed like an overwrought but well-intentioned birthday present for Stella. The nurse and Dad together levered Mum out of her wheelchair and steered her on to the bed, gently lifting her legs for her and swinging them under the blanket.

Dad just held her, rocking her back and forwards, the same as he did to me when I had a nightmare, and she was still crying. I could only watch in mute panic. Was Mum going to die? He looked over the top of her mussed-up head at me, and made ‘clear off for a minute’ faces. I hesitated, torn between a wish to stay and help calm her down, and a strong desire to go away until Mum came back to normal again.

As I reluctantly handed Stella over to our parents, I whispered in her minuscule ear, ‘Mum’s not usually in a state, you know, but she had an accident and needed stitches. Don’t worry. I’ll pass you over to her for now, but I’ll be back in a minute.’

‘
Good girl.’ Dad fished 50p out of his pocket. ‘Go and see if you can find a vending machine to get yourself something nice, and pop back in ten minutes, OK?’

After some considerable flailing along the nylon walls around the bed, I eventually found the opening in the curtains and slipped through, pretending to walk out of the ward. As soon as I was out of their line of vision through the chink I’d left in the curtains, I doubled back again and round the other side of the cubicle. The lady in the next bed was asleep, her mouth wide open and her breath stertorous, so I was able to eavesdrop undetected.

Mum was still crying, but talking low-voiced at the same time, her words all tumbling over each other as if she wanted them out of her body as fast as possible: ‘Oh my God, Ted, it was unbelievable, as if the delivery wasn’t bad enough, which it was, it was horrible; they had to give me a drip because I kept throwing up so I had all this fluid inside me, and when she was born I ripped’- I felt, rather than heard, Dad wince – ‘but they said I didn’t need stitches which was a relief only then I was dying to pee but every time I tried there was just all this blood, so eventually they tried to put a catheter in me and they kept jabbing it in, but there was so much blood they couldn’t see what they were doing, and it was agony and I was screaming and you weren’t there, and eventually they said they’d have to stitch it up so they could get the catheter in, and they took me to theatre and gave me two injections, one on each side, and that hurt even more but it still didn’t stop me feeling the needle and thread going in and out and it was sooooo painful, worse than the delivery, and I thought my bladder was going to burst too, and
then
they put the catheter in and apparently I weed out eight pints of liquid and it took fifteen minutes….’

Eventually Mum’s crying subsided and then petered out, but I was still frozen with horror on the other side of the curtain. I couldn’t comprehend the details of what she’d been through, and I didn’t know what a catheter was, but it was plain that she had been suffering unspeakable agonies. She had told me, beforehand, that having a baby hurt quite a lot, but I had never imagined that it could cause her
this
much grief.

I didn’t really understand why she seemed so upset about the stitches, either. My stitches had hardly hurt at all, and I’d had seven. Injections: fair enough, those were agony. But, in a way, I thought she appeared to be overreacting somewhat, which was most unlike her.

Then she said something else, which made me forget about stitches.

‘
Imagine going through all that agony and then just giving the baby away afterwards? I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know how
she
did it. I mean, that’s the only thing that makes it worthwhile, isn’t it, the end product?’

Mum was talking about my birthmother. I couldn’t believe it at first, and then when I took in the enormity of what she was saying, I interpreted it in my own, nine-year old and less than rational, way: That my birthmother hated me so much that she was prepared to go through agonies like that, and then
still
didn’t want me.

My heart pounding, I slunk out of the ward, loitered for a couple of minutes outside, and marched back in again, empty-handed. To my relief, the atmosphere was more normal when I stuck my head back through the curtain. Dad had taken his camera out of the bag and was checking light levels and arranging a red-eyed Mum and the sleeping Stella into a Madonna and Child-type pose.