I say, spooning Shreddies into my mouth, head still whirring, ‘She’s probably not cut out for it, is she?’
Mum’s face looks tired underneath all the make-up. I can tell she’s hung-over from last night. ‘Look,’ she says as she flaps around, tidying up. ‘Is it wrong that I want you girls to do something exciting? Something glamorous, obviously. I haven’t turned into one of those feminists with hairy armpits or anything, but I want you to be fulfilled. I want you to do something worthwhile, like beauty therapy or ideally, in Hayley’s case anyway, performing. As it is I’ve got two daughters in their thirties, one with bags of talent but no ambition and another who wants to be some sort of hippy. Frankly Marianne I’m praying you’re going to get inspired at some point and start taking hairdressing more seriously. If you did, you could have your own salon one day.’
I roll my eyes, not in the mood for a lecture.
‘All I’m saying is that when your dad upped and left, I realised I’d wasted my life being a girlfriend and wife to him. I was so young, still am really, but life has passed me by and I’ve never had anything to fall back on. I don’t want that for my girls.’
The fact she’s even referred to her past life with Ray is very unusual. I seize the opportunity to turn the conversation back round to him.
‘So, when my dad left, did you ever wonder whether there was more to it than him just wanting to … get away?’ I ask tentatively, searching Mum’s face for clues. Knowing she lied to us all these years is a hard pill to swallow and not something I’ve had the chance to even consider until this very second.
She looks away and busies herself with heaving the vacuum cleaner out of the cupboard and plugging it in. This all gives her time to think. I see that now and find myself wondering how I could have been so dense all these years not to have noticed her rubbish attempts to conceal the truth. Angry suddenly, and determined to get an answer, I get up and pull the plug out of the wall just as she’s started vacuuming.
‘Hey,’ says Mum, looking annoyed. ‘You know I don’t like talking about that time, so let’s drop it shall we? Plug me back in.’
I shake my head. I can’t do it. I can’t pretend and don’t see why I should have to any more. ‘I know he went to prison,’ I say steadily.
Mum freezes and even though her back is to me at this point, her shoulders go rigid, so I know she’s heard what I just said.
‘Who told you?’ she asks, her voice little more than a whisper. When she turns to face me, her skin has gone a rather strange colour. The colour of a mushroom. Not the black bit, the grey bit obviously.
‘I found it on the internet,’ I say, not sure I should deliver all the facts just yet.
‘Right,’ she says, swallowing. She looks momentarily confused because of course the information isn’t online or I would have found it long ago, but then she seems to accept that it must be.
‘Why didn’t you tell us? Why have you lied to us all these years?’ To my horror my eyes start filling up. ‘You had no right.’
Abandoning the vacuum cleaner, Mum sinks down onto one of the stools at the breakfast bar and for a second seems close to tears herself. Taking a deep breath she runs her immaculate peach fingernails through her hair.
‘How could I tell two young girls their dad was a criminal? You were four Marianne, are you telling me you would have understood that? That you would have liked to have known he was a villain?’
I consider this for a while. ‘OK, I understand why you didn’t tell us when we were little. But later, when we were older, didn’t we deserve to know the truth then?’
‘And how would you have felt? You believed what I’d told you. What day would have been the right day to break my daughters’ hearts?’
I swallow. ‘I don’t know. Look, I get that it was hard for you Mum. I really do. Being left to deal with everything must have been awful, but surely it would have been better at some point to tell us the truth? At least we would have known he didn’t leave us out of choice. As it is I’ve spent my entire life staring at pilots in the airport, scanning their faces for family resemblances. I haven’t even been to Australia because I thought it had too many unpleasant associations.’ I wail, as these side effects of the whole situation occur to me.
‘I’m sorry, all right,’ says Mum, sounding more angry than sorry. ‘But I was ashamed too you know. My husband was a low-life criminal and I put up with it, and turned a blind eye for years. I was still so young when he went down, far younger than you are now,’ she adds pointedly. ‘And I was heartbroken if you must know. I lost my husband that day, just as you lost a father. He let me down,’ she shouts and her voice becomes quite shrill.
‘I know,’ I reply quietly.
Mum pauses as she tries to find the right words to express what she wants to say. ‘Look, the one right thing I did was have you girls, and the day he went, I realised you deserved better than the start you’d had. I wanted better for you. So I started afresh. We were better off without him anyway.’
‘Were we?’ I stammer. ‘Surely that wasn’t your decision to make alone? Like it or lump it that man is our dad and if we’d known he was in prison then maybe we could have decided for ourselves whether we wanted him in our lives or not. Don’t you think we had a right to that choice?’
‘No, I don’t actually,’ says Mum plainly. ‘I had to do what I thought was right, for all of us, and it wasn’t flaming well easy I can tell you.’
‘Why wasn’t it?’ I sob. ‘I want to know, all of it. I need you to tell me what happened. You owe me that at least.’
Mum looks at me for a while and it’s as if the day she’s been dreading for so many years has finally arrived. Maybe it’s even a relief for her because she doesn’t put up any more of a fight. Instead she just tells me everything. And for once, I can tell it’s the truth.
‘When I met Ray, your dad, at school, he was the lad everyone looked up to. He was … what’s the word? He was … charismatic. All the girls fancied him,’ she says, looking vaguely glassy eyed. ‘And when he picked me, when he could have gone out with anybody, I couldn’t believe it. But he was a troublemaker Marianne and by the time we’d left school he was already up to no good. Not that I knew quite what a bad crowd he was in with. All I did know was that by seventeen he was one of the only lads who had their own car and that he always had money to take me out. He dressed really nice too, looked after himself. Anyway, I’d got myself a job working for my mate Tracy’s mum in her shop, only Ray didn’t like me working. He said it was up to him to look after me and I suppose I liked his old-fashioned values in a way. I mean, I liked my job too, but I liked being looked after better. I was probably a bit lazy to tell you the truth.’
She gets up from the breakfast bar at this point and comes to sit down at the table next to me. She swallows hard and I can see it’s difficult for her to talk about this time in her life. Or rather how unused to it she is. I remain silent, not wanting to put her off her stride. I’m still so full of mixed emotions but need to hear what she has to say.
‘Then I got pregnant. Your dad had just turned eighteen by this point but I was still only seventeen. Anyway, a week after I told him I was expecting he asked me to marry him, at your Nan’s house, in his room, and I said yes. It doesn’t sound very romantic but actually, at that stage, we were really in love …’
Mum
