Are You My Mother? by Louise Voss Read Free Book Online

it. It felt like a real sting; a bee sting - tweezers easing it out a little way until it snapped off and stuck obdurately in my flesh.
    But I couldn’t have asked for better parents than Mum and Dad; I mean, I really liked them, most of the time. As a kid, they gave me as much of a sense of identity as they possibly could have done. And I’d certainly much rather have had Dad and Mum as adoptive parents than my friend Esther’s real but miserable and uptight kin, who’d slap her round the legs for even thinking about cheeking them, and only gave her half the pocket money I got.
    Plus, if being given away at birth was part of the Grand Scheme of Things for me, I was relieved that I hadn’t ended up in some sad, badly funded children’s home; too many kids crowding round a television trying to get a sense of stability from the Saturday morning cartoons. Wetting the bed, crying at night, underperforming at school; never having money for new clothes or records.
    Yes, I’d been one of the lucky children. I never felt that I had no place in the world, not even when Stella came along and I no longer had Mum and Dad to myself. I’d thought I’d feel excluded, but my parents’ joy was infectious. Stella’s birth became the most unexpectedly wonderful thing that had ever happened to our family.
    She arrived slightly prematurely, quite unusually for a first child, and – as usual – took us all by surprise. On that particular rainy Wednesday Dad had, as a rare treat, taken me on a shoot with him. In her late-pregnancy befuddlement Mum had copied down Dad’s contact number at the studio with a 7 where an 8 should have been. She couldn't remember the name of the company who'd hired him for the shoot, or the location of the studio, or even when he'd said he'd be home. Consequently, she ended up enduring the intense eight hour labour alone.
    Meanwhile Dad, to his eternal remorse, had not bothered to check in with Mum from a payphone that day - he'd thought about it at lunchtime, but hadn't been able to locate any two or ten-pence pieces amongst the fluff of his trouser pockets, and I’d searched equally fruitlessly along the vinyl seams at the bottom of my Holly Hobby purse. The baby wasn't expected for another ten days, so he had carried on with the business of photographing a lissome lady clad in pink legwarmers, ballet shoes and a selection of up-to-the-minute dancewear for the brochure of a west London dance studio.
    I sat patiently on a stool just outside the brightly lit enclave of big umbrellas, wide shiny screens and jumble of black cables snaking around the edges, and watched my father as he called out 'Lovely, super, smile darling, chin up, head down, a tiny bit to the left - beautiful!' all the while clicking, clicking, clicking away with his big camera, deftly twisting it in every angle.
    The model smiled continuously, which did quite impress me. Later that day, when I’d begun to get bored, I surreptitiously tried it, and discovered for myself that it wasn't easy. I held my lips up and apart in a rictus of bared teeth and appled cheeks, and timed myself on the second hand of my Snoopy watch; but my smile only lasted one minute and eleven seconds before I had to relax my aching cheek muscles.
    At that point I had to go outside and have a pee. The model’s make-up bag was spilling open on the edge of the sink in the tiny bathroom, and my fingers twitched with the effort of not trying her sticky bright pink lip gloss and the brick red blusher. I managed to resist, instead contenting myself with stroking my cheek with her huge soft brush. It felt like the velvety inside of a foxglove.
    When I returned to my stool, I passed the by-now thoroughly dragging time by absorbing myself in a mental exercise to award points to the different styles and colours of leotard worn by the model. Top marks went to a black-and-coffee striped number, with a V-neck and quite low-cut over the model's narrow hips. The stripes themselves