Chapter Four
Four
I was not, obviously, compos mentis at my birth, but I would imagine the look my mother is giving me now is not too dissimilar to the one she gave me when she first laid eyes on her wrinkled, scrunched newborn.
Our first meeting was not, by all accounts, the joyous occasion that is written about in novels.
Birth rarely is. This wasn’t helped by the fact that there were two of us.
For nine months, my sister Marcie and I shared a womb.
Squashed together in our amniotic fluid, we divided everything: Every morsel of food was halved, every toxin from the illicit cigarettes Mum would sneak in the back garden divvied up between us.
Marcie came out within twenty minutes of Mum going into labor: dark blond, easy smile already plastered to her pretty face.
Forty hours later, after near-fatal complications, I emerged: black-haired, blue-tinged, with a head misshapen by the birth canal.
“They told me they’d never seen such an angry baby. Well, ‘vocal’ was the word they used. But I knew they meant angry. Couldn’t shut you up,” Mum told me when I was eight. The words she refrained from saying sat heavy between us anyway: “Not like your sister.”
Mum was still covered in her own bodily fluids when she was handed the babies she’d birthed.
Marcie had been cleaned up by that point.
She was wearing a one-piece that had been gifted by my grandparents.
A cashmere hat was placed delicately over her downy head.
And I was naked. Still wrinkled from the birthing fluid and smeared with blood.
In the picture my father took of the happy moment, Mum—looking exhausted—cradles a child in each arm.
But it’s Marcie she’s staring at. Marcie who was the recipient of that unique, adoring motherly gaze.
We’d divided everything up until that point, but now we’d emerged it was clear there was not enough love for both of us.
Mum, who had never experienced that maternal ache for a child, fell hard and fast for Marcie.
Prior to giving birth, she viewed babies with the sort of clinical apathy that Victorian doctors had toward women with hysteria: a necessary evil bestowed upon the female sex that—once acquired—was difficult to shift.
Ironically, her choice to have us was one of the most rational decisions she ever made.
Children were a nonnegotiable for my father, and—like with most things he desired—she bent over backward (perhaps literally in this case) to give them to him.
She went above and beyond, as usual. Provided him with two for the price of one.
She never did quite master the art of compromise.
So she allowed her belly to balloon and her hormones to spike and counted every new stretch mark that appeared as the months passed. “Thirty, Iris. You gave me thirty stretch marks. Your father never looked at me the same way afterward,” she told me when I was ten.
My father was a kind man who took an impressively hands-off approach to child-rearing.
Two, as it turned out, was a bit more than he’d bargained for.
For the first three years, home was a chaotic mess of nappies and formula and sick and poo, and Dad took refuge in the office.
I think he viewed himself as some sort of jovial, benevolent Santa Claus.
A judicial figure, a connoisseur of punishment and reward, who appeared at the end of the evening to review the evidence presented by my mother and make a final judgment on whether we’d been naughty or nice.
I can’t help but feel that the ruling was never quite weighted in my favor.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d emerged first. How life might have turned out differently.
Because there is another photo of Mum with her newborns.
This one was tucked away in the back of a cupboard for years.
It can’t have been taken long after the first one, but the difference is stark.
For one thing, Mum’s looking at me. Her expression, laden with love when directed at Marcie, is now one of mild distaste.
She could have pretended, I suppose, but I suspect her acting skills weren’t up to par after two days of labor.
Weakened, filthy, and deflating like an old balloon as she was, her indifference toward this spare child was obvious.
—
It certainly is now.
“I nearly forgot you were coming!” She delivers this from the doorway with a casual flick of her hand.
I smile thinly in response, in the way you might at a child who has just told a blatant lie.
It is blatant: The net curtain in her bedroom had twitched as I struggled down the street with my boxes and bags, and, unless she’s found a man who can tolerate her frankly disgusting habits (unlikely), she’s been watching for me.
I don’t bother to catch her out: It’s too early for that, and I didn’t sleep well last night.
She doesn’t allow me in immediately. Her eye travels the length of me, lips lightly pursed.
I’ve dressed down for the occasion: I’m wearing my oldest pair of joggers and—as much as it pained me—I didn’t wash my hair last night, so it falls in lank, greasy curtains.
She must be satisfied, because she gives a sharp nod of approval and steps back to allow me to pass her.
In the hallway, there’s a brief moment of awkwardness.
We both know how we should act, were this a traditional mother-daughter relationship, but that’s not really our style.
It’s a question of whether we bother to pretend before slipping back into the familiar, serrated roles we’re more comfortable with.
Clearly—tediously—she feels we should. I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes as she steps forward and wraps her bony arms round my waist. I pat her stiffly on the protruding notches of her spine.
She stinks of last night’s indulgences: stale booze and too many cigarettes.
I let go as quickly as is polite and wonder how she’d react if I applied my sanitizer. Probably best not to risk it.
“Well?” She steps back and bares her teeth in what I can only assume is her attempt at a smile. “How does it feel to be home?”
Unlike her, I’m a brilliant actor, but I cannot find a single positive to focus on.
It’s disgusting. “Home” (in heavy quotation marks) is a terraced house on a tree-lined street in Battersea.
Bought by my parents thirty years ago, it still exhibits many of the decorative faux pas of the nineties, when the fast approach of Y2K—and the possibility of the world imploding—resulted in some questionable interior design decisions.
I can only assume that the resurgence of net curtains was so that they would be able to make out the silhouette of the meteor hurtling toward the Earth.
Unfortunately, it is clear that my mother has not had a change of heart toward either the décor or standard-practice hygiene and cleanliness in the six years since I last set foot in this house.
Yellow nicotine stains dribble thin lines down the browning floral wallpaper.
The threadbare runner on the stairs peels away to expose damp, rotting wood.
Even the plastic orchid by the front door appears to have died a long and painful death.
The air is thick with stale cigarette smoke.
I try not to indulge in self-pity—when you’ve experienced as much tragedy as I have, there’s a very real risk of total submergence—but today is an exception. I allow myself a moment of longing for my lemon-scented flat. Even, briefly, for Barry, but I dispel that thought quickly.
“Did you do something new with the carpet?” I keep my voice light and point to the network of thread on the floor.
Mum’s eyes narrow. “You’re forgetting, I think, who took you in, in your hour of need.”
Annoyingly, she’s right, and it’s not in my interest to piss her off too early. I duck my head—the picture of subservience. “You’re right, Mum. I’m sorry. I really appreciate it.” Smashed it. There’s a lovely deep sincerity to my tone, which I must remember to use again.
She seems mollified, and finally the awkwardness of the initial reunion is over. Mum leads the way to the kitchen.
I thought the hallway was bad, but this is a total disgrace.
It’s a mess of plastics. Only one thin layer of dirty linoleum separates us from the foundation of the house.
The surface of the tiny Formica table is mostly hidden beneath bills and shopping bags, though a small space has been cleared at one end for an overflowing ashtray, a chipped mug, and a bottle of Tesco own-brand vodka.
The counter surfaces aren’t much better.
It’s filthy. Visibly filthy. Doesn’t-even-bother-to-pretend filthy.
All I can think of are the millions of bacteria that must be crawling over every surface.
I hover in the doorway and wonder if there’s a way I can avoid touching anything.
Mum bustles around the kitchen as though salmonella and E.
coli and bacillus and H. pylori don’t feature in her vocabulary.
I dry retch quietly. I’m going to have to sit down.
If I make a scene, it will rupture this uneasy pretense at peace, and it’s too soon for that.
I inch into the room and perch on the very edge of the laminated wooden chair, watching her.
The tap splutters with limescale, and I close my eyes and say a silent prayer to a God I don’t believe in.
“So tell me how you’re feeling about Frank,” she says, flicking on the kettle and lowering her voice conspiratorially. I’ll give it to her: She’s committed to the act.
“Frank?”
“Frank.” She nods decisively to herself as she reaches for the mugs above the sink. “Or Freddie, that’s it.”