All My Mothers Read online

  Yes yes yes.

  Pink Mother was sitting upright in a kind of fairy-tale bed, a bit like my mother and father’s, a four-poster, with a roof and curtainy droops around it.

  No no no.

  ‘Pink Mother is delicate and feminine,’ said Miss Feast, explaining that delicate meant not strong.

  Oh no – a stab between the ribs! – Pink Mother looked weak and pathetic like my mother. I didn’t know why she was always feeling faint, or anxious, or collapsing into bed as if she didn’t have enough strength to be a normal human being.

  (I think that sounds mean, but take it from me that a fragile mother is a scary thing for a child – it feels like your whole life is made of paper.)

  Miss Feast was on to Purple Mother, who was dutiful and proper, her tidy purple children standing in a line. Definitely not. Red Mother was dangerous and wild, holding a flaming torch against the night sky. Far too frightening. Yellow Mother had rows of beehives and shelves of honey and was anxiously tying yellow ribbons to a tree to welcome a loved one home, perhaps a soldier son.

  ‘Yellow Mother is busy and hard-working,’ said Miss Feast.

  And a bit tense, I thought.

  My own mother was so tense that when you asked her questions, her entire body stiffened up. Something seemed to be wrong at the heart of her.

  Miss Feast closed the book.

  She said that each of us had been made by our own mother and father, and that’s why we were all different shapes and sizes, and each of us just perfect for being ourselves. I wondered how mothers and fathers made children. I also wondered whether there was any chance that, in the process of the making, parent and child could somehow get separated, and a green could end up with a red, a blue with a pink.

  Because – and this came like a punch in the stomach – my mother and I did not match. It was obvious. I’d somehow ended up with the wrong mother. This thought was both deeply shocking and deeply hopeful. It was a seed planted in the earth of me. It was the moment that my quest began. The quest to find out who I was and what my place was in the scheme of things.

  Chapter 4

  When the alarm clock on Miss Feast’s desk went off, we all nearly had a heart attack.

  ‘It’s dismissal time!’ she said.

  We had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

  It turned out that the school day was over – a day that had felt like a year on a new planet – and there was my mother, all pink like Pink Mother in the book, wearing a tight pencil skirt and a pink silk blouse with a too-big bow at the neck. The mothers next to her were wearing darker colours than she was, and she stood out like a pale pink ice lolly, a strawberry Mini-Milk.

  Miss Feast adjusted my beret from behind me, and my body fizzed with the touch of her hand.

  I wished my mother hadn’t put on that big-bow blouse. I think she was trying to look nice for me. She loved clothes and she wanted me to love them too, so that I would look nice and we would understand each other.

  But I was embarrassed by her.

  I felt like crying at the sight of her.

  Lily Betts started crying again because, although her mother was standing right in front of her, she wasn’t allowed to talk to her.

  ‘I know you’re all dying to give your mothers a lovely hug,’ said Miss Feast. ‘But first we have to learn how to do dismissal properly.’

  A bubble of panic started to rise up my throat at the thought that my mother and I would be forced to hug each other in public. I swallowed it back down whole.

  It wasn’t only that I wanted my mother to be different. I think I wanted me to be different too. Or perhaps, from the beginning, I wanted us to be different.

  What Bridget’s father called our alchemy.

  It was Bridget’s father who told me later on, when I was eleven, that, scientifically speaking, the energy in the universe is not held in each particle, as scientists had originally supposed, but in the space between particles, that is, the energy in everything is in its relationship to everything else.

  This, he’d concluded, was the case for people too.

  By then, I had a special Quest Book in which I carefully recorded his insight, underlining space between – underlining being a significant part of my quest before I was old enough to do anything more proactive about my suspicions.

  The space between my mother and me was approximately two metres as Miss Feast demonstrated the way to do dismissal properly at St Hilda’s School.

  I looked at her, and I felt no pull towards her.

  We hadn’t, as far as I knew, spent a day of our lives apart.

  But I hadn’t minded being away from her at all.

  I’d even liked it.

  She looked as if she was pulling in the muscles in her stomach and sticking out her little bosoms, well-padded in the bra she wore, which stood up by itself.

  I remember wishing she didn’t look so uncomfortable being herself.

  So awkward.

  It made me feel awkward.

  And that was our alchemy: awkwardness.

  Bridget Blume’s mother scooped up Bridget, laughing, kissing her cheek with a big smacky noise and throwing her over her shoulder. Such easy-breezy alchemy. She was wearing a patchwork pinafore and leather boots with thick soles, and she looked exactly like Blue Mother in the book, happy and free, with the wind in her hair against the blue sky.

  The looseness of her, that’s what I saw, and my mother’s tightness.

  That, and the way she and Bridget completely matched each other.

  The saudade longing came over me like a wave as Bridget walked away into what I supposed must be her fairy-tale life, holding the edge of a double buggy containing two identical sisters with dark hair in ribbons.

  Oh, sisters, how I longed for sisters.

  I looked back at my own mother, who extended her thin arms stiffly towards me. When I tried walking into her, like Bridget had walked into her mother, I crashed into her tight stomach muscles, as if she was a wall. She put her hands on my shoulder blades, and left them there for a second or two.

  I reversed out of her stiff arms, awkwardly, with my eyes smarting.

  She said, ‘How was your first day, darling?’

  When she said darling, it always sounded funny, like she was trying it on but deciding against it.

  I said, ‘Fine, thank you.’

  She said, ‘Your father’s in the taxi.’

  (My parents used London taxis like a private chauffeur service, avoiding the inconvenience of walking along the pavement, taking the double-decker bus or parking their large car.)

  When I got into the taxi, my father held my nose between his two fingers (like he often did), and when he let it go, I asked if he could please buy me my own copy of The Rainbow Rained Us, knowing he’d say yes because he loved books – and we stopped three minutes later at the bookshop. We read the book together that evening, and it was only then that I noticed the different-coloured fathers, lurking in the background of the pages, just as my father lurked in the background of my life, coming and going from Spain with a cylindrical leather holdall which had his initials stamped in gold, above the zipped pocket: JMM for José Manuel Martínez.

  Chapter 5

  Miss Feast soon moved on from The Rainbow Rained Us to the life-changing saga of the baby photo.

  ‘We have to bring in a baby photo tomorrow,’ I said to my mother on the way home from school in the taxi, not knowing the impact that this would have on my quest, and indeed my whole life. ‘There’s a letter in my bag. Have we got one?’

  A double-decker bus spewed fumes at us, and my mother closed the taxi window, making a strange little circle shape with her lips, like a cat’s bottom.

  My mother said, ‘Your father’s already tired of the school run.’

  Which wasn’t exactly answering my question.

  The taxi meter went tick tick tick like the crocodile in Peter Pan.

  As she hadn’t answered, I wondered how I could rephrase the
sentence for greater effect.

  ‘Miss Feast says we have to bring in a baby photo tomorrow,’ I said, and when I said Miss Feast, I blushed, as if she were forbidden fruit, my feelings for her secret and unmentionable.

  Again, my mother didn’t answer.

  Then she did answer, but curtly.

  ‘I don’t have any baby photos of you here in London,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t have any?’ I said, feeling a cramping anxiety in my stomach.

  She looked out of the window, away from me.

  ‘Not here,’ she said, drawing her hand over her sweaty upper lip.

  Not here?

  I wondered where on earth they might be.

  The taxi stopped and started at the traffic lights.

  When we got home, Mary had cooked macaroni cheese, which was too creamy, and made me feel a bit sick, though I didn’t say.

  After I’d finished, I sat on the floor and read The Rainbow Rained Us again.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to read a different book?’ said my mother.

  I shook my head, and said, quite firmly, ‘Have we got a baby photo or not?’

  She pursed her lips.

  When my father came home, I ran into the hall, and he gathered me in his arms – he smelled of citrus cologne and sherry. He tipped me upside down and dangled me by my feet before turning me the right way up and patting my shoulder. My mother rushed into his study with him and slammed the door.

  While my mother and father remained enclosed in the study, I stared with my eyes half-closed at the paintings on the hall walls, the orange circles on cobalt blue with stabs of buttery yellow, and they turned into sun and sky and fields of sunflowers – another world, appearing and disappearing.

  My mother and father came out of the study, looking tense.

  ‘Eva,’ said my father. ‘Esta foto es un poco problemática,’ this photo is a little problematic.

  We used to speak both languages at home, sometimes changing mid-sentence.

  I smiled determinedly at my father to stop myself crying – I really badly needed a baby photo. Apart from anything else, it was our first ever homework, and I didn’t want to be told off.

  ‘Come over here,’ he said.

  I walked towards him, watching my feet in their brown T-bar leather sandals.

  ‘Our albums – the ones with your baby photos in – were stolen from the beach house in Alvera,’ he said authoritatively. (This was a key point, underlined years later in the Quest Book.)

  ‘Stolen?’ I said to my father, a bit shaken. ‘From the beach house?’

  ‘It must have happened when we were back in Jerez,’ said my mother, staring into my father’s eyes like she was trying to hypnotise him. ‘Mustn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said my father.

  ‘So a thief got in?’ I said quietly.

  My mother looked at my father, flushed and tense, and they both nodded.

  ‘I thought thieves stole money,’ I said, thinking of stories. ‘And treasure.’

  My father laughed, though it didn’t seem to me a laughing matter.

  ‘Do thieves steal photo albums?’ I said.

  ‘These ones did!’ said my father, swapping (alarmingly) from singular thief to plural.

  ‘So what will I take to school?’ I said, trembling inside.

  ‘You will take a photo of your mother,’ said my father, smiling tensely. ‘Nobody will know.’

  My mother, looking doubtful, handed me a photograph of her as a rather fat and very pale baby, with no hair on her head.

  ‘They’ll know that’s not me,’ I said, looking down at my not-pale knees. ‘We don’t match.’

  My mother was sweating; my father was laughing rather awkwardly, hahaha.

  ‘Well, you can have a photo of me then!’ he said, giving me a nudge in the arm.

  ‘But you’re a boy, Papá,’ I said stiffly.

  ‘Babies all look the same,’ said my father.

  They both went back inside the study, and when they came out, my mother was holding a photo of my father, in a silver frame, sitting up in an old-fashioned pram with a thick pelt of black hair.

  ‘You look like a boy,’ I said to my father, stammering slightly.

  ‘That’s only because you know,’ said my mother, her bottom lip trembling.

  She said she was feeling so anxious that she was going to bed, even though it was only seven o’clock in the evening.

  Mary took me to my mother’s curtainy bed to say good night, and she was all propped up like Pink Mother in The Rainbow Rained Us.

  ‘Why did the thieves want my baby photos?’ I said to her.

  She didn’t answer, so I asked her again.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said in a small voice, letting her head flop to the right, as if she had no bones.

  You’re like a dog with a bone, she used to say to me, making no attempt to hide her exasperation. I asked Bridget if I was like a dog with a bone, and she said I was more like a beautiful bay-coloured pony, brown with long black hair and knobbly knees, rather shy.

  She said bay ponies were her favourite, and she asked me what animal she was like, and I said a koala bear because they were (still are) my favourite animals.

  ‘Except you’re not at all sleepy,’ I told her.

  She said koalas weren’t actually bears but marsupials, which carry their babies in a pouch for six months, and she stuffed a small koala from the class toy box into the enormous green knickers we were obliged to wear over white knickers called liners.

  Our music teacher, Mrs Snell, said, ‘Bridget Blume, what have you got inside your knickers?’

  And Bridget said, ‘Oh, Mrs Snell! What a question!’

  Chapter 6

  Miss Feast put all the baby photos up on the display board, and it felt completely obvious that my old-fashioned photo with the faded frame-marks wasn’t me, and I still remember the empty shaky feeling I had inside me all through that day, as if I was falling out of myself into nothing.

  Also – this hit me even harder – all the other photos had a mother in them, a mother holding her baby. I desperately wanted a mother to be holding me, with her soft lips against my scalp, like Bridget’s mother.

  The other girls matched me quite easily with my father’s black hair in the photo, although Lily Betts said, not unkindly, ‘You look a bit like a boy.’

  ‘No she does not,’ said Bridget furiously, even though, obviously, I did.

  Miss Feast asked us to say a bit about our life and our family, and, when it came to my turn, I had to concentrate very hard to find the courage to speak, with the other girls’ eyes looking at me.

  Nothing came out of my mouth when I opened it, so Miss Feast had to nudge me along.

  ‘Do you have any brothers and sisters, Eva?’ said Miss Feast.

  ‘No,’ I whispered, feeling shuddery inside.

  ‘Or perhaps you’ve got a pet?’

  ‘No,’ I whispered.

  Miss Feast moved on to Laura Stephenson.

  But in the middle of Laura’s turn, I blurted out, ‘My father’s Spanish, and I was born in Spain.’

  Bridget put her thumb up at me, which meant well done, because she knew I didn’t like speaking aloud. She knew a lot more about me by now and, gratifyingly, she still liked me.

  Miss Feast, however, pointed to her right ear lobe, which was a sort of telling-off, and I knew that she hated me now that I hadn’t had listening ears, now that I’d interrupted Laura Stephenson whose father was a well-known journalist.

  How desperately I wanted Miss Feast to love me.

  At break-time, Bridget said to me, ‘You were a really nice baby, Eva. Probably the nicest of everyone in class.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, with a feeling inside me like drinking hot ginger. ‘So were you.’

  This was my first ever friendship, and it would change my life, for good, for wonderful, for terrible, but I didn’t know that yet.

  Bridget and I got on t
he seesaw, sending me shooting up into the air. It soon became clear that there was no way of getting me down without her getting off, which she did a bit too quickly, slamming my bottom (rather painfully) into the tarmac.

  ‘I think the roundabout might be better for us,’ said Bridget, taking my hand and making me feel like bursting with joy.

  The Populars were on the roundabout, Sophia Carr cross-legged in the centre, the others orbiting her like planets around the sun. Bridget and I knew our place: we wandered about the edge of the playground, lifting up stones and looking for woodlice.

  The woodlice girls, that was us – the lowest possible caste in the class!

  But I loved the nervous lifting of the stone, the will-there-won’t-there moment, the sight of the woodlice squirming around and the way they rolled up into little balls, which Bridget then threw at the Populars when they weren’t looking.

  ‘Will that give them a headache?’ I said anxiously (always anxious, you see, even about woodlice).

  ‘No,’ said Bridget. ‘They can’t feel a thing.’

  I didn’t stop to wonder how she knew this without being a woodlouse.

  I believed her without thinking.

  Because I loved her.

  Already.

  Chapter 7

  When Miss Feast gave my mother back my photo at dismissal time, she said, ‘I love those old-fashioned prams.’

  I blushed. My mother also blushed lobster-red, stuck out her little padded bosoms and made the cat’s bottom with her mouth, but no words came out. I wished she wouldn’t make that shape with her mouth, and I wondered if Miss Feast thought we had some sort of genetic blushing disorder in our family.

  ‘What kind of pram did I really have?’ I said to my mother in the taxi.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘Just a normal blue one. You know, navy blue.’

  ‘Did I like being in my pram?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said again. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it? Babies don’t speak.’