Chapter Eighteen
Everyone on the terrace is quiet as Keera finishes her story.
Rose says nothing for a while.
She’s helped many famous people in her time and Keera’s tale is not unusual. Her mother sounds tricky and Rose doesn’t want to pin a label on her too soon. People are complex after all. But Rose has seen momagers in action before.
They can’t understand when their child doesn’t want to be a piece of merchandise any more.
Rose wonders what sort of mother Dr Bobbi is: a dynamic force of nature or someone who wants to use her daughter for her own gains?
Time will tell.
‘Is there anyone in your life other than your mother whom you feel you can trust?’ Rose asks suddenly.
‘What you’ve told us says that you have friends in the business but that they work for you or with you.
If they get too close, like Taniqua or your friend Cat, they affect the family dynamic, perhaps? ’
Rose lets the statement drift off into the air.
It’s a comment designed to probe.
Keera looks thoughtful, like a student in class concentrating on a knotty problem.
‘I’m thinking of who I trust and, for sure, Taniqua’s top of the list but …’
She pauses: the thoughtful student is back.
‘… there’s also Connie, she’s a marketing lady from Xochi, my record label,’ she says. ‘It’s not spelled like it sounds: Xochiquetzal is the most important Aztec goddess, you say it Show-chee-set-zal.’
‘I know,’ says Dan, leaning forward, ‘she’s a fertility goddess, the most—’
Rose cuts him off at the pass with a gentle raising of her hand to show that Keera has the floor right now.
‘Connie and I spent a lot of time together two years ago when Mom had pneumonia and I had a three-week tour in Canada.’
‘I love Canada,’ says Grazia approvingly. ‘Nice people.’
Again, Rose raises her hand but Grazia’s interruption is over.
‘Connie lives in LA and she’s married but no kids. Has two dogs: one’s a French Bulldog and the other’s a kind of mixed breed. Mom said they called them “butcher’s dogs” when she was a kid. She’s not a fan of dogs!’
Keera smiles.
Nobody else does.
Rose waits.
‘I love animals: dogs, cats, hamsters. I follow a lot of animal accounts on Insta and TikTok. We couldn’t get a dog when I was younger because we were travelling around so much.
Dogs tie you down,’ Keera adds sadly. ‘You’ve got to give a lot of normal stuff up to be a performer.
’ She looks at the group as if for confirmation that this is true.
‘It means that Mom and I are a strong unit: me and her against the world. We’re like sisters.
Obviously we argue but, like, who doesn’t, right? ’
And there it is.
A mother who presents herself as her daughter’s closest friend, her sister. Rose thinks this scenario can be possible if the daughter is an adult, if said mother has actually been the parent until their child has grown up. Then, the early parenting is done.
But a best-friend spiel when the kid is just a kid: not healthy.
‘So your mother is your best friend,’ says Rose idly. ‘Is that unusual?’
Keera’s face is confused.
‘She does so much for me,’ she says.
‘I’m sure she does,’ Rose remarks, ‘but you need friends too. Do you have any friends who are not connected to you via work? Say if you and your mother are not getting on, who do you talk to?’
This time, Keera’s face goes curiously blank.
‘I had my friend, Cat, but we lost touch …’ she offers.
‘Nobody else?’ Rose asks.
Keera says nothing.
Rose knows that she’s pushed Keera as far as she can go.
Keera has told her story but she needs time to think about telling it to everyone else: that’s the magic.
Time to move on, Rose thinks.
She gets up and hands Keera some juice from Christos’ little fridge on the edge of the terrace. ‘You need to hydrate and a little juice might help. Thank you for your story, Keera,’ she says.
Keera blinks up at her, almost dazed by what she’s just said.
‘See you all in the kitchen at half six,’ Rose says.
And she’s gone.
I don’t know when it changed. Probably when I was expecting the baby. Pregnancy is when some men show the world how fertile they are. A woman with a big belly is like a totem pole of virility.
Look at me, I’m a true man.
My mother had been so happy when my brother’s wife was pregnant but then, he was her golden child. I was … I’m not sure now what I was.
The internet is full of pop psychology pages telling you who plays which role in the family. In my family, there weren’t many of us, so it’s tricky to figure out where we fitted into the toxic family plan. But we were toxic. I know that now.
So my mother wasn’t pleased at the pregnancy, which is a long story. But my husband – we’d married by then – was happy.
Not happy when I was tired and had to lie down.
Not happy when the people next door saw me struggling with bags of shopping.
‘Here, let me take that,’ said the man next door. He’d been cutting his grass and he’d seen me.
I knew I was in trouble when I unlocked the door and Mr Next Door came in with the bulging grocery bags.
My husband was sitting in an armchair watching sport. He’d watch two flies walking up the wall if he could bet on it.
He barely turned around until Mr Next Door said: ‘Mate, you can’t have your missus dragging in all this stuff in her condition. She’s about to pop.’
Oh, I knew I was in trouble, then.
‘Let me take it!’ he said, leaping to his feet. ‘I tell her not to go by herself but she sneaks off,’ he said cheerily, rescuing the bags off Mr Next Door.
‘Women: they’re all the same,’ laughed Mr Next Door, pleased there was a reason for this.
People don’t want to see.
They’re happy with a reason for slightly odd behaviour. Considering what the reality might be – that’s too shocking. Nobody wants to go there.
He swiftly put the bags on the counter and told me to get my feet off the floor.
‘It’s a lovely day, sit in the garden. I’ll bring you a cuppa, love,’ he said.
I sat in the garden even though I didn’t want to. I wanted to go to bed, to lie down and rest my belly. But I was scared to do that.
Mr Next Door was still there. I was guaranteed safety by his presence.
‘You need to rest,’ said Mr Next Door, poking his head outside when my husband brought me tea. There was no sugar in it, of course.
I took sugar. He knew that. Not that he brought me tea normally. I was the cook, the cleaner, the housemaid, the maker of tea. But not adding sugar was a little reminder that I was in trouble.
Mr Next Door had a beer in his hand. He looked happy, grass-cutting forgotten. Seeing his heavily pregnant neighbour staggering in with the shopping had been a misunderstanding. All was right with the world.
The two men drank a few beers and watched the sport. I sat in my deck chair and, eventually, went upstairs to lie down. The baby was a kicker, full of energy.
I was lying there, hungry and wondering if it was safe to go back downstairs, when he came in.
‘He’s gone,’ he snarled. Mr Next Door. ‘Why did you do that?’ he hissed.
‘I didn’t want to bother you,’ I said in my fawning voice.
I was a wonderful fawner. You don’t choose your trauma response: it just appears.
I never tried freezing or running away.
No. I fawned.
‘You’ve had a hard week at work, you need a break. It’s all OK, though, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ he said in a voice colder than the North Pole.
He turned and left then, his whole body stiff with rage.
He ignored me for the next three weeks.
That doesn’t sound like much – he could have hit me, after all. But he didn’t do hitting. The silent treatment was a very powerful weapon.
Imagine living in a small house and trying to exist when one of the people in the house refuses to speak to the other for three whole weeks. When their rage taints the atmosphere, their coldness can freeze a person.
Being silent is like saying ‘You no longer exist for me.’
I’d been hardwired to try to make it better.
I tried everything: cooked better meals, smiled, touched his arm, found shows on the TV he liked to see. Nothing worked.
He’d brush off my arm as if I was carrying poison.
He chose to punish me, and only he would decide when that was over.
My waters broke three Saturdays later. I’d been worried because the baby hadn’t been kicking for the past two days but I hadn’t wanted to make a fuss. I’ve never forgiven myself for that.
He was out when the contractions started. I didn’t know where because he’d simply gone. I waited nearly three hours for him to return, feeling the contractions deepening.
I was terrified. I didn’t want to give birth on my kitchen floor but I knew that if I went for help with him gone, he’d never forgive me. It would be a great public rebuke: he had left his pregnant wife alone.
What mattered was not that I was alone, but that people would know this.
That was the crux of everything: how it looked to other people.
Nothing else mattered, not me in pain or the fact that I needed an ambulance now.
The fear of giving birth, the knife-point of labour plunged into my lower back: all immaterial.
I rang Mrs Next Door then and said that he would be so upset, he’d feared going out even for a moment in case I went into labour.
This was the mantra. Not the pain or the dreadful fear over the baby not having moved. But how upset my beloved husband would be.
‘He’ll be so upset, you’ve no idea,’ I said again and again.
I almost believed it myself.
‘Where’s he gone?’ she asked. This was before mobile phones.
‘He’s gone to get groceries and buy me flowers,’ I lied.
I’m not a liar but I can be. Have been often.
‘You poor dear,’ she cooed, ‘we’ll find him. He’ll never forgive himself if he misses the birth of his baby.’
I knew that if he missed the birth of his baby, the person he’d never forgive would be me.