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

by the words on the plastic shackle around her tiny little ankle and, while Dad was talking to the nurse, lifted my sister out of the bassinet, scrutinising her minuscule toenails and reverently touching the sprout of pale hair on her crown.
    'You were in, and now you're out,' I whispered. After all those months of watching my mother's belly lift and distort, sudden violent punches and karate chops, I had half-expected the baby to emerge looking like Hong Kong Phooey.
    Actually I hadn't known what to expect, but it wasn't this beady-eyed little person not much bigger than a Tiny Tears.
    'I'm sorry,' said the nurse, striding over, lifting Stella out of my arms and placing her into Dad's instead, giving me, I thought, an unnecessarily hard stare. 'It's immediate family only until visiting hours. This young lady will have to wait in the visitor's reception.'
    Dad didn't even hear her at first. Tears were rolling down his face, riding bumpily over his stubbly cheeks. 'This is her? This is my baby girl? Oh God, she's incredible. Oh Emma, isn't she wonderful?'
    'Yeah,' I muttered, glaring back at the nurse.
    'Immediate family only, please,' the nurse repeated, her arms crossed across her chest.
    I looked defiantly past her and up at a TV on the opposite wall. The sound was turned down, but the picture showed Toyah mutely performing, her flat carroty hair bouncing horizontally along with her manic posturing.
    'Can we call the baby Toyah?'
    Dad ignored me, still unable to tear his eyes away from the bundle in his arms. The nurse looked twice at the time on the upside-down watch pinned to her apron.
    'Mr. Victor, I hate to be a spoilsport, but I must ask that this young lady comes back at the designated visiting hour. Immediate fam -'
    Dad looked up briefly from his in-depth examination of Stella's fingers. 'Emma is immediate family. She's our daughter. This is her new sister.'
    The nurse looked confused. 'I'm sorry. I wouldn’t have been so insistent, it’s just that I understood that Dr. Victor was a first-time mother.'
    After another long pause, Dad grinned at me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Dr. Victor was already a mother.’
    I beamed back at him, and at my little sister in his arms, her conker-sized fists punching the air. The nurse arranged her features into an apologetic expression. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You might as well sit down and wait, then. She should be back any time now.’
    The three of us sat and waited. I could hardly breathe, terrified that I might be wafting germs into the baby’s face. Meanwhile, in his simultaneous elation about Stella and anxiety about Mum’s wellbeing, Dad’s expression was changing so frequently that he reminded me of the toby jug we had sitting on a high shelf at home. When it was a good day in the Victor household, the jug was placed smiley-side out, but if there had been bad news, Mum turned it around so that its droopy pottery lips formed a mournful frown. If someone had put that jug on a potter’s wheel and spun it around, it would have resembled Dad’s face.
    ‘ Don’t worry, Dad,’ I kept saying, patting his arm. ‘She’ll be fine, the nurse said so.’ She must have tripped and fallen, I thought to myself, to need stitches. I’d had stitches once, when I went flying over a low chain-link barrier in the Tesco’s carpark. I’d been so preoccupied at the time, trying to decide if I wanted a Curly Wurly or a tube of Smarties, that I hadn’t even seen the barrier until it smacked me in the shins and catapulted me head first onto the concrete.
    The lines at the corners of Dad’s eyes were rigid with tension - until Stella opened her pink mouth and yawned noisily, and then the same lines relaxed into joyous creases. ‘Would you look at that?’ he said, with as much awe in his voice as if the newborn Stella had just recited the first two verses of The Ancient Mariner .
    I could not keep my hands off the velvety skin on Stella’s pliant skull. It was the softest thing I had