Something I'm Not (10 page)

Mother interrupts to say that Dad might go for his swim now before luncheon is served. Lunches on the beach are always egg sandwiches, without salad cream. Egg sandwiches without salad cream smell of poo.

I watch as Dad hops across the stones in his bare feet, turning round to wave at me, and pulling funny faces because of the stones and the cold water. The sea reaches up to his knees, and now the bottom of his baggy shorts. Then he pushes off, and he doesn't turn to wave any more. I stare at him as he gets smaller. The wind blows my hair across my face, and makes my eyes sting.

The sound of the tide over shingle roars in my ears. There is no sand on this beach – the reason my mother gives for not buying me a bucket and spade. Seagulls cry out overhead.
Yark
, I repeat.
Yark
.

‘That was your first word,' says my mother, and not for the first time. She means ‘bird', not the seagull's screech. So, my first word was something that flies away.

Dad likes his swims, so my mother and I both know that it'll be a while before he returns for lunch. She and I are now utterly alone, sitting side by side, on the knobbly beach. In the huge silence, the sound of the wind is very loud in my ears.

‘I know,' announces my mother. ‘Let's play ducks' tails.'

I've never heard of the game.

‘We throw stones into the water so that they bounce on the waves, and we count how many bounces the stone makes before sinking. That will tell us how many ducks' tails there are.'

This doesn't quite make sense to me, and I feel bad that I haven't understood.

Picking up some stones, Mother places them in her sunhat and strides off towards the water's edge. I follow, staring at my feet in their scuffed red sandals, unsteady on the pebbles. Once, I nearly fall over, so I stop and look up in case my mother wants to help me. Instead, I see that she's already at the water's edge, leaning back into a throw, her right arm extended on a level with her hip. Then, with a twist of her elbow and a whip of her wrist, she sends the stone flying out across the sea. Even before I reach her, I know what's wrong. The grey stones being thrown are too smooth, too beautiful to be tossed away.

Mother turns. ‘That one made four bounces. How many do you think this one will make?' In her powerful grip she holds up the elephant that swam all the way from India.

‘No,' I blurt out.

Mother hesitates, looking down at me with that scary stare of hers. ‘What on earth do you mean, “No”?'

‘No,' I say again, quietly, more like a whimper, for my mother's stares are often enough to make even my dad leave a room. I start to cry, my hot tears splashing on to my sandals.

‘You', snaps my mother, ‘are an unspeakably selfish little girl, and I wish I'd never had you! Just because you're not big enough to throw stones, there's no need to throw a tantrum instead.'

I stand wobbling on the pebbles. I cannot speak. My eyes are locked on the elephant in my mother's hand. My body feels cold in the wind.

‘Right,' snaps my mother, turning back to the sea. ‘Play on your own. See if I care. And you can explain to your father why you were crying over nothing.' And, as she says this, all I can do is watch the brave elephant rise high into the sky and then drop towards the sea.

*

I glance round the courtyard, but no one notices me. I dab at my eyes, blow my nose, and pick up my handbag, before striding out towards Piccadilly. I always terminate that memory at the moment the elephant stone plops beneath the waves. I
must
get back to work.

I have just switched on my computer when Maxine puts through a call.

‘Got that Shields Holdings search completed yet?' a voice barks.

‘I need to talk to you about that,' I say, struggling to get a word past Rex's brusque, ex-armed forces manner. ‘Their CEO's landed a sexual harassment charge. Our candidate for the FD job is threatening to withdraw. It's not looking good.'

‘Look, Amber. I really need— I mean, the firm really needs that fee booked by the end of this quarter. Tell the board to dump the CEO. That way, we could pick up another search—'

‘I doubt it. The Chairman's defending him.'

‘What on earth for?'

I drop my voice. ‘The Chairman's up for three harassment charges himself.'

‘Impossible,' bellows Rex. ‘He played last year in my four-ball in Sotogrande—'

I sigh, and press the button to open the Venetian blinds coating the clear acrylic panels of my office. I stand and gaze out across the open-plan floor. I see Dominic take a detour to the water fountain via Nicole's office and lean incestuously in the doorway. A man who manages to look both fat and fit. Maxine and another secretary stand photocopying CVs while sharing a copy of
Heat
. A researcher is applying lipstick as a prelude to lunch in St James's Park. (
We regret to inform you of the temporary closure today of the staff canteen due to pest-control fumigation.)

While Rex monopolises my right ear, I open an email from Dylan, inviting Matt and me to Sunday lunch. He's obviously online, because his reply to my next email is immediate.

Haven't you spoken to your mother yet?

Not as such.

My mobile rings almost immediately. I could, Dylan suggests, absolve my conscience by entertaining
his
mother instead. Pamela has been invited for lunch to be told of the adoption plans. It's the kind of
family conversation
on which the adoption agency insists. There's a pause in which I hear Dylan give short shrift to a parishioner calling at the door for salvation – then to me,
Do come, I need your support
. His anxiety soothes me; I feel wanted. Perhaps the company of someone else's mother will provide the perfect impetus for me to visit mine.

Having said goodbye to Dylan, I turn my attention back to Rex.

‘—and get Julia to send me a fax when you've done it,' he booms.

That, I think, will be impossible. Julia, in Rex's absence, is avoiding work with all the mutinous venom of a toddler refusing food.

*

‘Where to, love?'

I describe in detail the route to take. I'm exhausted, and want to get home as quickly as possible. As we crawl west towards Hyde Park, the driver maintains an uninterrupted stream of consciousness, until finally I'm aware of a clunking lack of sound.

‘I said, what you do, then?'

I come to and tell him, picking at a stray thread in my trousers.

‘Got my CV in 'ere somewhere,' he laughs, reaching over to the glove compartment while I roll my eyes. ‘Hah! Only kidding. Reckon you can get me a job?'

I explain that headhunters don't find jobs for people; rather people for jobs. Even I can hear that I sound prissy.

‘Sounds like jobs for the boys to me!'

So I use the analogy of finding him a wife.

‘Be my guest, darlin'. Only, do a better job than what I done last time rahnd!'

I laugh. He's growing on me. ‘Well, I interview
you
to find out what kind of woman you want. And then, after I've interviewed the best candidates, you meet the shortlist.'

‘I like
that
bit!' He has a deliciously throaty snigger. ‘So, what sort of people do you, er—'

‘Place?'

‘Yeah, “place”.'

‘I mainly do chairmen and chief executives now—'

‘Very high-powered, I'm sure. Bet you're good.' There is a minute pause. ‘Kids?'

My stomach contracts. The question is always there. As if it mattered. As if everything beforehand, the apparent interest in my career, the flattery, has been merely preamble.

Stuck with Blu-Tack to his dashboard are photos of two ‘kids' in school uniform. The boy, no doubt yanked off the football pitch and made to sit still, sports a cowlick. The girl, older, wears a bulky cardigan, the type in which grandmothers excel.
Why did you bother having children
, I want to ask?
Where are they now, as you ferry me around on a Friday evening? When do you see them? Or are these photos to remind you they exist? What happened to your first wife? What effect did divorce have on your kids? Is your life more complete with them in it? Are your children happy?

Or do they hate being a child as much as I did?

And now I can't stop the memory, the one I can usually freeze the moment the elephant stone sinks beneath the waves, from barging in. How, as I turn to follow my mother back up the wobbly pebbles, I step into an ice cream someone has dropped, one with a square cone and a brick of yellow ice cream like I'll be allowed to have when I'm bigger. First of all, I feel the cold ice cream on my toes. Then I feel tickling. I look down to find tiny black creatures crawling all over my feet. Ants! They run across my nails, and over my scuffed sandals. Then they are circling my ankles, and running up my leg. I scream, and stamp my feet up and down. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and I want it to end now. I jiggle my legs, and overbalance. And still they cling on.

Finally, I scream once more, and sense my mother turn around. The tickling on my legs is unbearable. Mother comes towards me and then stops. She will get rid of them. I gulp for air.

‘Serves you right,' she says, staring at my legs. Digging her heels into the pebbles, she turns around and clambers back up the slope. I watch her hike to where a plastic Spar carrier bag sits knocking in the wind. I have forgotten the ants. All I want is for my mother to turn round and reach out her hand. She picks up a library hardback, opens it and begins to read.

Her voice, as I recall it now in the cab, contained all the triumph normally reserved for observing the painful demise of one's husband's mistress.

Chapter Fourteen

‘W
ELL
, that wasn't too awful, was it?' says David brightly, slamming the front door. From the far end of the church cul-de-sac, Pamela's

car can still be heard straining in first gear. Dylan's vicar-cage is a modest Victorian cottage near ‘Colombia Common', rechristened for its popularity with drug pushers. The more narcotically desirable the area, the greater the number of car-chase-repellent road bumps. Soon Pamela's car can be heard in the distance attacking one at speed.

We return to the kitchen to wash up. Or, rather, David washes, Matt and I dry, and Dylan smokes and tells us where to put things. Dylan has never seen the need to acquire a dishwasher. That's what parishioners are for.

‘I thought she was choking on a roast potato,' remarks David, as yet unused to Pamela's repertoire of voices and facial expressions. Dylan's mother lives by her wit. Unskilled, as were so many women of her class and generation in anything but marital mergers and acquisitions, she was raised to believe that her passport in life was not so much to entertain as to be entertaining. Her parents having disapproved of a career on the stage, the woman has reacted by turning every encounter into a vaudeville act, every conversation a chance for a soliloquy. Years of practice have proved constructive, for now she has a regular spot on Tuesday nights as a cable television quiz-show panellist.

‘I wish she had,' mutters Dylan, in between cigarettes.

‘Darling, she wants to make sure you're happy. That we're doing the right thing,' says David, depositing a baby meringue of soap suds on Dylan's nose. I want to vomit.

Dylan laughs. ‘I know, I know. But even
I
was appalled by her outburst, and I've seen some in my time. She'll be off now on one of her Michael Douglas
Falling Down
rampages. Anyone would think we're planning to adopt a Siberian throat monkey. I hoped a mother whose son is gay would be more, well, tolerant.'

‘She'll be fine in a day or two,' says Matt. He makes it sound as though Pamela is one of his patients. Perhaps she is!

‘And it's not as though the adoption's definitely happening,' I say, attempting to sound casual. ‘Is it?'

‘No,' groans Dylan, hand to forehead. ‘The whole plan's a nightmare. Tell them about the video, darling.' So, David describes how at one of the agency meetings they'd watched footage of a supposedly authentic story depicting a family destroyed by the arrival of a disturbed adolescent. ‘They certainly do their best to put you off.'

‘I think it's good they make you reflect,' says Matt, reaching for cups. A rare personal opinion, I observe, from my husband. I married the epitome of nonchalance, after a childhood of critical judgement. I smile, as he continues. ‘It's a pity more people don't consider the effect kids will have on a relationship before they conceive.'

‘You wouldn't be thinking of the lovely Louisa and Ed, would you?' smirks Dylan.

‘Not especially,' Matt replies, arranging the cups on a tray. ‘There are lots of unhappy children out there. Most of them are grown up, now, of course.'

I can feel my cheeks reddening, and make a point of rummaging in the fridge for the milk.

‘So, isn't it up to people like us to offer a fresh start?' says David, above the rolling boil and click of the kettle.
But you've got children already
, I think.

‘David, you might be right,' says Matt, lifting the tray and making for the lounge. ‘But if you carry on saving broken spirits at this rate, I'll be out of a job!'

*

After evensong, Dylan and I return to the vicar-cage; Matt cries off to dictate case notes, David, to attend to lingering post-divorce matters. Around Dylan's kitchen table, he and I sip black coffee and prise apart pistachios; Dylan thinks two-syllable snacks are common.

‘How are you feeling about your dad?' asks Dylan.

I manage a nod and a sort of grimace.

‘It takes time,' says Dylan, crossing to a cupboard under the sink to retrieve his
baise-en-ville
from behind a tub of household cleaning products.