Let Down Your Hair (15 page)

A timid knock sounded through the guest room door. “Are you OK, babe?”

I gargled and spat a glass of water by way of reply. I’d drunk two and gargled three since returning to the penthouse, but the sour taste wouldn’t wash away.

Four calls to Ryan’s mobile. Two calls to the hospital, one to the cops. Three texts and one email. A day and a half and he’d left me to find out where he’d gone from
Shell
. If he’d really decided to dump me, wouldn’t he at least have sent a text?

Maybe not
, said a sinister voice in my head.
He paid a very high price for agreeing to help you find your mother. He’s been maced, and bashed, and taken to hospital, and he’ll be facing criminal charges. Not calling you back is probably his way of saying your relationship is over.

I turned my back on the sinister voice, telling myself there must be some other reason. But the voice was still there, lurking just behind me and casting an ominous shadow.

Emmeline peeked in, looking tentative and fretful. “Dirk’s gone out to drinks with some friends.”

Dirk
. My body stiffened with dislike. Dislike all the more intense because I was now terrified that he’d been right about Ryan dumping me. “Oh, Dirk has
friends
, does he?”

Emmeline flinched. “Please don’t say things like that, babe. Dirk’s a self-made man, and he’s … he speaks his mind, sometimes.”

A twinge of guilt reminded me that this was Dirk’s house. And at the moment, I was as much his kept woman as Emmeline.

“Dirk’s really sorry he upset you,” said Emmeline. “He is, honestly. He even rang Fabian de Carlo and got him to squeeze in a portfolio shoot tomorrow. I don’t know what you think about modeling, but you could try it. Do you have a job?”

“I have a PhD scholarship.” Remembering this lifted my spirits. My grant payments weren’t much, but they were an income. Maybe if I staked out the Humanities building on Monday, someone who knew me might let me in to get my wallet.

“You have a PhD
scholarship?
” She drew back, as if I might explode in a shower of IQ points. “My God, you must be so smart, babe. I bet that pays a
lot
.”

“Not exactly.” The scholarship paid me the minimum wage, and payments were contingent on satisfactory progress. The reassuring thought of my grant sprang a leak. My level of progress would be judged by my Department, which was headed by Professor Andrea Rampion.

“So what happens when you get your PhD? Do you become a professor?”

“You look for a lecturing position.”

The leak widened into a torrent. Lectureships in Women’s Studies were rare and competitive. With Andrea’s fame and contacts I might well have secured one; as things stood now, she might even sabotage me. And before I could even apply for a position, I’d have to finish my PhD. In her department.
Sharing her office
.

Emmeline nodded, attentive and respectful. “And
then
you earn heaps?”

“Not heaps. Entry level lectureships start at about $60,000.”

The torrent grew to a freezing ocean closing over my head. By cutting off Andrea, I’d killed my academic career. And while Ryan had been right to say academia wasn’t my calling, it looked like he’d abandoned me too. All I had left was Emmeline, and a room in her sugar daddy’s penthouse.

Emmeline looked flabbergasted. “Sixty thousand dollars after all that studying? A model can make more than that in a
day!
”

My turn to be flabbergasted. “Sixty thousand dollars in
one day?
”

“A top model,” she amended. “I never made anything like that much. My best one was a wedding dress shoot, where I got about eighteen thousand dollars.”

Eighteen thousand dollars
. The freezing ocean receded a little.

“But look, babe, it’s not just about money. If being a lecturer’s your dream, you go for it.”

Being a lecturer wasn’t my dream. Ryan had seen that within days of meeting me. My dreams had centered around my long-lost mother. Who’d earned almost a third of a junior lecturer’s salary for posing in a big white dress. And while I found this appalling and wrong, I could no longer afford to stand on principle.

I took a deep breath. “What time’s Fabian de Carlo free?”

“Two thirty tomorrow. So you’ll do it?”

I nodded.

“You’re going to be
great!
” She crushed me in an exuberant hug. “Let’s find you some outfits.”

We filled a Gucci suitcase with clothing and swimsuits, and I trundled it back to the guest room. The suitcase was small, but it felt heavy, as though it held a new life. As if I were emigrating to a country where my looks were a saleable asset. I sat and gripped the handle as hard as I could to keep my fears about Ryan in check. Telling myself that whether or not he got back to me, I was going to need a new career.

When I returned to the living room, Emmeline was sitting at the dining table. “Hi, babe.” Her face was a little shy. “Now you’ve decided to do the photo shoot, I thought I’d show you something.”

She opened a daisy-printed photo album to a picture of a blonde, dark-eyed baby in a terry-towelling jumpsuit. And even though I’d always longed to learn more about her life, now that I was about to, I didn’t feel ready. There was no room inside me for her past. Realising that Ryan might have dumped me was more than enough to deal with for one day.

Before I could stop her, she turned the page to a toddler, standing unsteadily, with her hands above her head in the clutch of a tall, skinny man. He had collar-length fair hair and his face crinkled with laughter. My grandfather.

Andrea had told me almost nothing about her ex-husband. I’d begged to know more about Emmeline, but my mother was my business, whereas even as a child I’d sensed that my grandfather wasn’t. He was Andrea’s business, a no-go zone, a closed, forbidden book. And now Emmeline was sitting beside me, her album gaping open like a blouse.

“What do you know about Dad?” she said.

“Almost nothing.”

“He was a Geography lecturer,” she said, as if this summed him up. “I barely remember him. He left with one of his graduate students when I was three. I think he’s living in Vancouver now.”

On the opposite page, a slightly older Emmeline was sitting in the lap of a dark-haired woman in her twenties. My heart jolted when I realized this was Andrea.

Twenty-something Andrea had shoulder-length hair, and her cheeks were round and smooth, with a rosy tinge that had long since faded. Her eyes were softer and wider, and her smile showed no hint of the cynical twist it had now. I reminded myself of the reasons why I’d left her, but looking at that open-hearted face all I remembered was her flicker of hope when she’d thought I might join her in the taxi.

“That’s the only photo of her I have now. I think it was taken a month or so before Dad left. I had more, but I burnt them when I left home.” She flashed me a wry smile. “I was kind of pissed off with her.”

Had Andrea known what was happening when this photo was taken? That her husband was cheating and plotting his escape? When I’d been hiding my relationship with Ryan, I’d told her I was studying late, working in the library, attending fictional meetings. Perhaps she’d recognized those lies. Perhaps they were the ones her husband had told her in the months before he left. Had she believed them then? Looking at her unsuspicious face in the picture, I felt certain that she had. Or she’d tried to.

“What was Andrea like when you were little?” I asked, wondering how that wide-eyed woman had turned into the Andrea I knew.

“Angry. I hardly saw her and when I did she yelled at me. The other kids at creche used to cry when their mothers dropped them off; I cried when mine came to take me home.”

Emmeline tried to smile, as if this was a joke, but the corners of her mouth were unsteady. As if she were four years old, and Andrea had just arrived to pick her up from creche. I watched her mouth, biting the inside of my own. She wanted me to unite against Andrea in a weepy embrace, but I just sat, pinned to her luxury leather dining chair by a small but powerful hand. The hand of another small girl raised by Andrea, whose mother walked out and never came back.

Emmeline’s smile faded, and her gaze retreated to the album, as if seeking firmer ground. “I understand now that she was miserable because Dad left her, and we had no money, and she was getting hassled at work. But all I saw then was that my mother told me off all the time, and that I couldn’t seem to please her no matter what I did.”

Her mouth pinched shut, and she pressed her forefingers into the corners of her eyes for a moment. Then she turned the page to a spread of four photos of herself, aged three or four.

The pre-school Emmeline was impossibly pretty, a Christmas card cherub under plastic. Her hair was long, and she wore frilly dresses that Andrea didn’t yet disapprove of. Stripped of years and makeup, her face looked eerily like my own. As a child, people often said I looked like my mother. Andrea would smile tightly and change the subject, but I was always thrilled, as if my face were a secret message from the mother I didn’t remember. Now that resemblance was on a page in front of me, the thrill was colder, mixed with fear.

“Me in the park,” said Emmeline, indicating the first photo. She was on the high end of the see-saw, ponytail dancing in the sunshine. On the low end was a stocky little girl with a determined expression that reminded me of Fran. An odd expression for a four-year-old face. The daughter of one of Andrea’s colleagues? A friend from kindergarten?

“Who’s the other little girl on the see-saw?”

Emmeline shrugged. “Can’t remember. Someone I played with in the park that day.”

If you only met once, why put her picture in your album?
But before I could say it she went on.

“Me in kindergarten.” In one she was peeking through a tire swing; in another she wore a paint-daubed smock, and stood pointing at a lurid purple finger painting. “Me and Santa.” She was patting his giant, fake beard and peering back over one shoulder.

I wanted to know what it was like going to kindergarten, whether she kept on painting, who took these photos, and countless other things, but she told me nothing more, as if the pictures said enough.

In the next spread she was primary-school age, every shot so picture-perfect she could have been posing for a catalogue. Once again she gave each photo the barest of factual captions—
me playing the recorder, me on school sports day—
and it occurred to me that a catalogue was exactly what this was
.
These photos were a montage called ‘Scenes from my childhood’, assembled not from the pictures most important to her life, but from the pictures where she looked her best.

“Who took these photos?”

“Mom, mostly,” said Emmeline, with a jerky shrug. “She just put them in a box somewhere. I picked out the ones I liked when I got this album.” She turned the page quickly, as if closing the door to an untidy room. “Oh
God
, the corduroy era.”

Four more pictures of Emmeline, aged eight or nine. Her hair had been cut short, and the dresses had been replaced by shirts, and corduroy pants in shades of brown and green. The sort of clothes I’d always worn. In fact, when I looked closer, many of them were the actual clothes I’d worn.

“I wore some of these.” Had I known they were hers, I would have treasured those hand-me-downs, and searched the pockets for a pebble or coin she might have left behind. But Andrea hadn’t told me, and for a brief, blistering moment this was as deep a betrayal as the letters.

Emmeline grimaced. “Poor you. I hated them. Mom tried to make me wear brown boys’ cords to a party once, and I was so upset I cut them up.”

Whereas I’d turned up to Jess’s party in baggy men’s clothes without even realizing how this would look to her friends. But then, I was born into Andrea’s world, whereas Emmeline watched it being built. I was an insider; she was an inmate, wearing her short hair and sensible clothes like a prison uniform. And yet, looking at the album, I realized I preferred these photos to the earlier ones. In drab, shapeless clothing Emmeline looked less like a catalogue model and more like a child in a family snapshot. More like someone’s mother.

“At first I quite liked it when she started femmo night school. She didn’t yell at me as much, I got babysat by someone I liked. Then one night she came home and went ballistic. She threw out my Barbie dolls and nail polish, gave my books and toys to a charity shop, and said she didn’t want me wearing dresses and skirts any more, because they stopped me from romping and getting dirty. The next day she cut my hair and started dressing me like
this
.” She waved an appalled hand at the album.

“Then she started making all these weird new friends. Yoga teachers whose houses stank of incense. Tattooed lesbian couples who did tarot readings. Hairy vegans who ranted about bee torture when I asked for honey on toast. Worse still, she got them to
collect me from school!
It was a nightmare. I was terrified that the kids at school would see with me those freaks. I told her I had sport or detention after school to make sure no one saw them. I mean, God, check out
Ravenwitch
.”

She indicated a sullen Emmeline of about eleven, clamped to the side of a doughy, grinning woman with red dreadlocks, a ring through her left eyebrow and a voluminous green dress printed with giraffes. I recognized a younger version of a loud, flamboyant woman who used to babysit me when Andrea went on conferences. These days she had a shaven head and called herself Zirconia.

“Ravenwitch was the absolute worst,” she said, rolling her eyes. “There was this awful day in the sixth grade when I was walking toward the gates, and saw Ravenwitch in this hideous hot pink kaftan. I pretended I didn’t know her, but she yelled my name and waved, so practically the whole school knew she was waiting for
me
. I wanted to die. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life. People were still hassling me about it four years later.”

Before the karaoke night, I wouldn’t have understood. Zirconia had never embarrassed me. But now I knew the cost of being a “freak”, and I felt Emmeline’s embarrassment like a blowtorch. Because in the mainstream world,
I
was the freak, as shaming for Jess as Ravenwitch had been for Emmeline.