The Stepmother (21 page)

 

I
HEARD FOOTSTEPS ON THE
stairs and dragged myself off the floor in a hurry. I was back on the sofa when Amber came in. “You okay, Mum?”

I smiled at her innocently. “Hmm?”

“I thought I heard a crash.”

“Must have been next door. You should be in bed.”

“I was,” said Amber, watching me closely.

“I'll come and give you a kiss.”

“What are you watching?”

“There's nothing on. I thought I'd watch a video.”

She stood looking at me, then peered over the sofa to get a better view of the TV. I noticed too late that I'd left the cover open on the floor.

“Please, Mummy, don't watch that again.”

“What do you mean ‘again'? I thought you must have had it out. Getting some tips for your best-man speech.”

“Did Gran tell you about that?”

“She shouldn't have needed to. You should have.” She looked at her feet. “Amber?”

“I didn't want to upset you.”

“I wouldn't be upset.”

She looked at me. Hearing my words, believing them, because she knew I could be trusted, but sensing a trap regardless. The ground seemed safe, but…She hesitated.

I lured her in. “It's very exciting. A real privilege. And very grown-up.”

“Daddy asked me,” she said suddenly, beaming broadly, bursting to tell me her plans. “It's almost the most important role on the day, he said. I've got to carry the rings. Usually a boy does it, and they have pockets, but I want to wear that blue dress from Harrods. I've already asked Granny if she'd buy it. She said yes, but it's got no pockets and, um, so, I was thinking maybe a handbag to match, and shoes.”

“Were you really?”

“To carry the rings.”

“Daddy has already got a ring.”

She didn't pick up the danger signs. Neither did I.

“And I'm going to sing my speech. I've got a friend helping me with it and he's brilliant. I think he's going to be a songwriter and I could sing his songs. He has all these big thoughts, you know, about the world and poverty. He's so refreshing.”

Refreshing? You're fourteen! How refreshed did you need to be? “You're going to sing a song about poverty?” I said, through an aching jaw.

Amber laughed. She thought I was joking. “No, Mum. I'm going to sing about Daddy and what a brilliant guy he is. He's so kind and funny and he's just the best dad. All my friends say so. I tell you, Clara's dad barely speaks. He'd never play dress-up and sing.”

“Daddy does that?”

“Well, he did. Until…” Amber's beautiful face frowned with confusion. I knew what she was thinking: Where did that happy feeling go? Alarm bells were ringing. She was learning to read the early-warning signals, but still wasn't sure what to do with them.

I jumped in. “Until Tessa came along. It's okay, Amber, you can not like her, you know. It's difficult to share sometimes.”

“I do like her, Mum. That's okay too, isn't it? I'm allowed? Shouldn't we be glad that she makes Daddy happy? That's good, isn't it?”

My anger rose like lava. “Good?” I laughed meanly. I could see Amber feeling the cracks underfoot. She tried to leave. I wanted to let her, but the anger put a mallet in my hand, and all I wanted to do was smash those cracks until the house came down. “Jesus, you're naive.
Happy! Refreshing! Good! You have no idea what the real world is like.” I laughed again.

If there was terror on her face, I couldn't see it. The red mist of alcohol had descended. I was in a Baskervillian fog and I couldn't see the beasts. Or the damage they could cause. It was the laugh that scared my daughter most. The mealy, mean laugh, that condescending, ugly sound that echoed my drunken, irrational thoughts about my beautiful child. I turned back to the television screen. “No, Amber,” I said, “it's not good. It's not good at all.” I picked up the remote control from where it had fallen. From where I had fallen.

“Please, Mummy, don't watch that again.”

“Go to bed, little girl,” I said.

Consumed with irrational anger, I rewound the tape and watched our pristine white invitation emerge on the screen. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Frazier request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their daughter Belinda (Christ, how I'd fought that, fought and failed, as usual). No one knew me as Belinda, I lamented, but I didn't understand that my wedding had nothing to do with me and was, in fact, all about my mother showing the rest of us how it should be done.

I have to give it to him: Jimmy was a saint. We'd lie entwined at night, bitching about her ridiculous, snobby ways, and how we would stand up to every stupid request she was making. And then, the following day, we'd acquiesce again. Maybe it pushed us together. Whatever my mother did was irrelevant. Because as long as we were there and said “I will” at the right time, what else mattered? We were so young. We knew so little.

Now I was laughing at the camera. My hair in rollers. My nails drying. Wearing a green silk kimono, which had worn so thin now it was translucent in places. I was holding up my nails, my hands about fifteen inches apart. And I'm laughing because Suzie, another friend I no longer see, was asking me whether that was how “big” Jimmy was. We were using my dad's old eight-millimeter camera. It had long since been transferred lovingly to video by Jimmy but, thankfully, hadn't lost any of the slipping, skipping quality of the old home movies.

I fast-forwarded to the wedding. My dad. Alive again. Holding my
hand. Holding me up. It was only when I'd got out of the car that it had hit me. I was getting married. Nine months of painstaking minutiae, of sugared almonds and placements, of hemlines and hors d'oeuvres, and only now did it register, one foot on the gravel, that I was going to a place from which I would not return.

I looked at my bare hand. Divorce or no divorce, I'd been right about that. I still had not returned. I looked at the girl I had been. Her tiny waist, her shiny black hair, her bright, bright blue eyes. Immaculate ivory shoes, a dress so pinched I could barely breathe, a dress that only Amber could wear now, a dress I kept hidden in a vacuum-packed bag because of the grotesque comparison it made when I held it up against my postpartum silhouette. It had two hundred silk-covered buttons from the neckline to the end of the train. And Jimmy had undone every single one. Slowly, methodically, each one accompanied by a kiss, stripping me down to what was finally, rightfully, his. And I had been laid bare.

What had that day done for me—to me? It had given me my children. My wonderful, beautiful children, whom I loved beyond comprehension, whom I loved beyond breath, for whom I would gladly die and die again. Whose sleeping bodies I stood over and cried because I was looking at perfection. Whose chubby baby fingers had gripped mine, who had depended on me for life, and a life it had cost me. I stared at the television screen—where had I gone? Where had that smile gone?

I watched my perfect form turn into the church doorway and be sucked into the darkness inside. The camera did not follow me in. That had been deemed inappropriate by my mother. The film cut and a second later I emerged a wife. I paused it, and stared at my shuddering form. Was there a difference already? A tiny atomic shift? Had I shrunk? Had Jimmy grown?

Who giveth this woman to be married to this man? I hadn't thought of the implication of the traditional words. My mother had wanted them. Said it was tacky to have anything else and, once again, we had acquiesced. If I had been thinking about the implication of the words, maybe I would have fought harder. But I wasn't thinking about anything beyond the day. Frankly, I wasn't thinking at all. I loved Jimmy. What did the words matter? So my father had stepped up and given me away.

What was the difference between the girl who had gone in and the one who had come out seconds later? I knew the answer. The one who came out had been given away. I wasn't even allowed to do that for myself. We think we are so in control of our futures. We think we are in the driving seat of our lives. We believe our decisions are our own. But it isn't true. We are molded, manipulated, forged, and formed by society and expectations and biology—especially biology. Our biggest strength is our womanhood. It is also a profound weakness. The species needs to feed off us to survive. We die so that they may
live
. Procreation falls to us. Men might give up part of themselves to their offspring, but we offer up our whole. We give everything we can and they owe us nothing. They didn't ask to be born. We did that. Jimmy and I thought we were making a decision to start a family, but that outcome had been put into motion before I was born. I had eggs before I had eyelashes. In my mother's womb I already carried my unborn children. All of them. The three I had given birth to and the one I had killed.

I threw the remote control at the television set. What did I know? What the hell had that stupid, naive girl known? Nothing. No wonder she had made mistakes. The anger slipped away, the hole reopened, and regret flooded in.

“I'm sorry,” I sobbed. “I'm sorry…I'm sorry…I'm sorry…I'm so, so sorry.”

 

T
O MAKE IT UP TO
the girls, Jimmy had called me and asked if they could stay with him on Friday night. I said no at first, it was too disruptive, but he told me Amber had rung and asked specifically if they could come to stay. It was fear that had made me change my mind. The fear of a dream you can't quite remember. The plan was that he'd take the kids to Faith and Luke's on Saturday morning and I would collect them from there at lunchtime.

I didn't quite stick to the plan. It wasn't yet eleven when I arrived at their lovely double-fronted house in East Acton. “Sorry,” I said to Faith. “The house was too quiet.”

Faith laughed loudly, which I didn't understand. “I bet. Come on in. You look amazing. I can't believe how much weight you've lost.”

Funny how hearing that wasn't making me feel as good as I'd thought it
would. I was winning the battle with food, but it was an empty victory. All my willpower went into denying myself solids. Which left me dangerously open to liquids. Once again I'd woken on the sofa with a throbbing head and the taste of death in my mouth. It always happened when I was alone. The emptiness consumed me. The bitter regret. The acrid self-loathing.

“The kids are in the garden. Coffee?”

“Love some.” I followed Faith to her immaculate kitchen, where Charlie's artwork hung framed on the wall, alongside his week's itinerary and meal plan. “We've had a giant trampoline put in. Can't get them off it,” said Faith, putting fresh coffee in the pot. “Lulu's pretty good.”

“Maybe it's the circus for her. Her reading's still atrocious.”

“I think Amber's more likely, isn't she? After her dramatic running-away performance.”

“What?”

“Last night.”

“I'm getting a bit fed up about not being told anything. What's happened now?”

“Haven't you seen Amber?”

“No, Faith. She's here.”

Faith was beginning to look deeply concerned. “She's not. She went home.”

“When?”

“Last night. I thought you were being sarcastic about it being quiet at home.”

“She stayed with Jimmy. They're all here.”

She grabbed the phone off the wall. “Call Amber now. She isn't with him. They had a fight.”

“What are you doing?”

“Calling Jimmy.”

Panic was swelling in my chest. I was racking my brains. Had she come home? Would I have known? “Bea, call her. Jimmy, hi, it's Faith. You said Amber didn't stay with you last night, right?”

I was frantically pressing buttons on my mobile and listening, trying to remember to breathe. I pressed the wrong button. “Shit!” I tried again. “It's ringing,” I said.

“She left the flat at about nine last night,” Faith said.

“They let her leave without calling me?”

Faith shrugged.

The ringing in my ear ceased. “Yeah?”

“Amber, is that you? Thank God…Where are you?”

“Home,” she replied.

I ignored the surly tone and glanced at Faith. “She's at home.”

“It's all right, Jimmy, she's at home. Yes, I'll tell her.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Silence.

“Amber?”

I looked at Faith again, confused. “I'll tell you,” she mouthed.

“Stay there. I need to talk to your father. I have absolutely no idea what's going on.”

“You wouldn't,” Amber said, and ended the call.

I was flustered. Faith thought she knew why. “What did she say?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Sit down, have this.”

“What on earth happened?”

“Amber took your wedding video to Jimmy's flat.”

“What? When?”

“Last night.”

I tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone dry. I sipped the scalding coffee.

“Tessa came home to find Jimmy and the girls curled up on the sofa eating takeout, which, I gather, she has some sort of bugbear about, watching the wedding video. Amber said she'd only taken it because she wanted to learn about best-man speeches.”

I'd heard those words before. They'd been a lie then, too. My child was defending me. Protecting me. Lying for me.

“Trouble is, they were listening to Jimmy's speech about you. Do you remember it?” asked Faith.

Remember it? I knew it by heart. It played like a mantra in my lonely, sleepless hours.