TEN

Emma

SATURDAY, MARCH 24, 2012

I’ve created a Google Alert for the baby story. I know I said I wasn’t going to do anything about it, but I need to know what everyone else knows, don’t I? Just in case. To be prepared.

And this morning, I find the next installment in my inbox: “Who Is the Building Site Baby?”

A reporter has been poking around, making the story grow bigger, talking to the poor man who found the body. And the police. The police.

I can feel the drum of my heart making my fingers vibrate on the keyboard. Who else will she talk to? I write her name, Kate Waters, on a pad beside my computer and read the story over and over again.

When the phone rings I let it go to answerphone. But I hear Jude leave a message, her voice echoing up the stairwell from the machine in the hall, as if she’s in the house. As if we’re back in Howard Street and she’s calling me to get up for school.

I knew my mum would ring today. It’s my birthday—one of the days she gets in touch since we started talking again. It’s only been a couple of years since we had the big reunion and we are more like distant cousins now, feeling for common ground when we speak.

“Do you remember that terrible bathroom suite your grandmother had?” Jude will say, and I will chime in with, “Yes, thank God avocado went out of fashion.” And we’ll laugh and feel close for a few minutes. But it doesn’t hold us together, this “Do you remember?” game. Because too much is out of bounds.

So we ring each other on birthdays and at Christmas, that sort of thing. It’s a routine that allows us to stay in touch with the aid of a calendar, not our emotions.

The thing is, I have done without a mother for so long I find I don’t need her, and I’m sure Jude feels the same about me.

It’s bizarre, really. None of my relationships are quite like what other people’s are. My mum is like a cousin, my husband is like my dad, and my baby . . . Well, there is no baby. I can’t think about that now. Stop it.

Today, the sound of my mother’s voice makes me shiver. I wait until she stops speaking before I get up and go downstairs to listen to the message.

“Emma, it’s Jude,” she says. She never calls herself Mum. She made me call her Jude from when I was ten—“‘Mum’ is so aging, Em,” she said. “It’s much more grown-up to call me Jude, anyway.” I didn’t like it. It was as if she was ashamed I was her daughter, but I did it. To please her.

“Umm, are you there?” my mother’s voice says. “Pick up if you are. Umm, okay, just ringing to wish you happy birthday and see how things are. Umm, I need to talk to you, Emma. Please ring me . . .”

I need to talk to you. I sink down on a chair. She must have seen the stories. What does she know? I ask myself, almost automatically. It is a question I have tortured myself with for years.

•   •   •

I listen again. In case I’ve misheard. But I haven’t. Of course I haven’t. There is the same quaver in her voice as she searches for me. Are you there?

Am I? Am I here? I sit quietly, eyes closed, breathing deeply, trying to clear my mind. But when I open my eyes, the message light is still blinking. Winking at me as if it knows.

The phone suddenly bursts into life, its ring filling the hall, and I leap up from the chair as if to flee. But I pick up the receiver.

“Emma? It’s me,” Jude says. “Where were you earlier? I’ve been trying to get you . . .”

“Sorry. Busy with work.”

“On your birthday? I thought Paul might be taking you somewhere for lunch. Did he forget?”

“He’s having to work this weekend, but we’re going to celebrate tonight.”

“Good. Well, sorry I didn’t send a card. I forgot to post it. It’s sitting here on the desk. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on . . . Anyway, how are you?”

I pause, wrong-footed by this chitchat.

“Er, so-so.”

“Oh dear,” she murmurs.

“How are you?” I ask. Keep to safe subjects. “How’s your hip?”

“Er, aching,” she says. “I’m all right. Emma? Are you still there?”

The tension in my throat is making me gag and I don’t speak for a second or two. I retreat to the secret place inside my head, where everything is known, where I am safe.

“Yes,” I croak, eventually. And wait. I should say something, preempt it. Say, all casually, that I’ve seen they’ve dug up the body of a baby in our old street. Fancy that . . .

But I’m not sure I can have a pretend conversation about it. I might break down and cry. And she’d start asking questions. She used to put me to bed with a hot water bottle—her panacea for all that ailed me—when I was a teenager and say: “You are getting yourself all upset again, Emma. Have a little sleep and things will look better.”

But of course they didn’t. It must have been terrible for her, having to cope with my moods, but she said a lot of teenagers went through the same thing. “Hormones. It’s all part of growing up,” she said. At first. But the excuses started to pall. And patience never was her virtue. I stopped crying when she stopped reacting. Tough love, she called it. It didn’t solve anything for either of us. I started shouting and breaking things instead. Until she threw me out.

I try not to blame her. Not now—I might have done the same if I’d been the mother. But then . . .

“There’s someone at the door, Jude,” I say suddenly, wrapping my fist in my sleeve and rapping on the table to support my lie. “Sorry, I’ll call you back later.”

“Oh, Emma,” she says.

“I’m expecting a parcel,” I say desperately, tangling myself in the fabrication.

“Oh, go then,” she says. “I’ll call back.”

I put down the phone and the relief makes me giddy. But I know I’ve only postponed the inevitable.

The phone rings again five minutes later, and for a split second I consider not picking up. But I must. She’ll only keep ringing until she gets me.

“Why don’t you come over?” Jude says, as if there has been no break in the conversation. “You’ve never seen my flat and it’s been months since we saw each other.”

I react immediately. Guilt and shame—the Catholic twins and my Pavlovian response to my mother’s passive-aggressive parry.

“It’s a bit difficult. I’m trying to finish this book by my deadline.”

“Well, if you’re too busy. You must prioritize, I suppose.”

“That’s not fair,” I say. “Of course my work is important to me, but so are you.”

“Right,” she says. “But not enough to spend some time with me. Never mind. There’s a new Sunday serial starting on the radio. I won’t be bored on my own.”

“I’ll come, I’ll come,” I say, back to being the sulky teenager.

“Lovely,” Jude says. “I’ll cook a birthday lunch tomorrow, then. Will Paul be coming? He’s always welcome, of course, but it might be nice to just be the two of us.”

I’m silently furious on Paul’s behalf, but he wouldn’t want to be there, anyway. He has tried his best to like Jude, but he struggles.

“I admire your mother’s intellect,” he’d said after meeting her for the first time at a particularly sticky Sunday lunch in Covent Garden. “But she is determined to be the cleverest person in the room, isn’t she?”

His tiny revenge is to call her Judith, a name she detests.

“Actually, Paul’s busy with an open day at college, so it will only be me, anyway,” I say.

“See you at twelve, then. Don’t be late,” she says. “Lots to talk about.”