“How’s the photo studio?” she asks.
“I lost that job, remember?” I tell her now. “Laid off. I did tell you.”
“I don’t think you did.”
“I did,” I jump in, despite my best efforts to stay calm, stay neutral. This is all it ever is. A cold questionnaire of recycled questions she feels obliged to ask. “I’ve been at the hotel for two years now.”
“Hm.” Mum nods, eyes sliding to the side as if she’s considering whether I’ve told her the truth or not. “Well, forgive me, Emmeline, but it’s a blessing, if you ask me.”
I say nothing and avert my eyes to the torn, shabby linoleum at my feet.
“I mean it. The way they preyed on parents. I don’t know how you did it.”
“Preyed?” I say, my face crumpling. “It was a photo studio, Mum. For families. For children.”
“But the prices.” She shakes her head. “All those photos they’d take, knowing no parent would ever in their right mind turn any of them down.” Parent. She says that like she isn’t one herself too. “What?” she presses. “What is it?”
I pause, consider saying nothing at all. “I just… I was made redundant, Mum. I enjoyed it, I worked with families, with kids, and I miss it. You could be a bit more sympathetic.”
“Well, I won’t apologize, Emmeline,” says Mum curtly. “I am not ashamed that I am pleased you’re out of a job for an organization in a line of work I don’t agree with.”
From beside me, Mum huffs, then sips her tea, which is the color of ripe raspberries, and I hear Lucas chime in, in my mind, a smirk in his voice: “So, hang on, your mum doesn’t agree with meat, religion, and… photography? Nice one, Kath.”
* * *
Nobody speaks for a while, and chin resting in my hand, I watch the night outside closing in on me and Mum, a dimming bulb. I wonder what we look like up here, on the hill. A tiny, cozy orange light in the distance, by the sea. Two silhouettes squashed together, catching up on forgotten news, reminiscing about old times. Nothing, I suppose, that is close to what it really is: a stifling tin can with an atmosphere so thick inside, it feels as though I’m inhaling smoke.
“I saw Lucas last weekend,” I say finally. “We talked about going to Brittany again for a few nights.” I almost do it deliberately, mention it to see her jaw tighten, as it usually does, but instead she just nods. “I was talking to Lucas and—was it in Saint-Malo you said my dad—” I stop. “Peter lived.”
Mum looks up at me, eyes narrowing, shoulders stiffening now she knows where this is going. “Sorry?” I find it hard to believe sometimes that Mum was ever that carefree, free spirit she painted herself as. That twenty-two-year-old with the world at her feet, and a passport to anywhere she wanted. Before she had me, and I ruined it.
“You always said Peter lived somewhere by the beach, and that he worked in Saint-Malo in between touring with his band. And I was talking to Luke about it and he said he would take me there if I found out exactly—”
“For goodness’ sake, Emmeline, why would you want to go there?”
I swallow. “To see—”
“Don’t waste your time,” she says dismissively, words clipped. “It’s a seaside town, like here, like Ramsgate, like bloody Southend. Except full of the French.”
“I just wondered if you could tell me where. I’d like to see. Get some sort of idea where I’m from—”
Mum huffs, bored with my insistence, as if the years of my pushing for information is wearing her down. “I don’t know how many times I have had to say this, but you are from me, Emmeline, and all the places we have lived,” she says shortly. “You really must stop dragging up dead bodies.”
“I want to know who he is.”
“Am I not enough?” she snaps, and my stomach turns at the sharp spite in the words. “I brought you up, Emmeline. I looked after you and he was nowhere to be seen. You wanting to find him tells me you’re not content with the parent you do have. How do you think that makes me feel?”
I don’t respond. Her. Everything is about her. Everything I say, or do, every decision I have ever made is how it makes Katherine feel, what people must think about her. And no. The truth is, as much as it hurts to admit it, she isn’t enough. Nowhere near. She never has been.
Mum clears her throat, sniffs deeply, straightens, stroking a hand down her cardigan as if composing herself.
“It’s unnecessary,” she says. “You have other more important things to focus on than that. People get so hung up on genes. It makes me laugh.” People, again. People like me, like everyone else out there. Not her. Not whoever she calls her boyfriend at the moment, I bet. They are better than us. Us clueless sheep.
There is more silence, and Mum finishes her tea. I want to run back to Fishers Way, climb into bed, and pull my duvet over my head until the sun comes back up. I want to call Lucas. I want him to make me laugh through the tears, say, “So you’ve had the Wrath of Kath, have you, Emmie Blue?” He understands Mum. He knows how exhausting, how much like hard work she is, how I spent my whole childhood on eggshells.
“I’m not trying to upset anyone,” I say eventually into the silence. Mum stares straight ahead, her nostrils flaring. “I would just like to know who my dad is.”
I wait for her to say what she normally does: “Well, I don’t know anything more than what I’ve told you, Emmeline.” But she doesn’t. Instead, she looks down at her hands. “I couldn’t see you,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“If you and he… started to have a relationship.” A muscle in her jaw pulses. “I couldn’t bear to see you.”
I open my mouth to speak, but I can find no words. It’s an ultimatum. It’s a toxic, controlling ultimatum, hanging in the air between us. Find your dad, and our relationship is over. My stomach bubbles. Rage. Utter, plummeting sadness and rage, but… hope. The tiniest speck, glittering among the black. She always said she never knew where he was. I’m not sure I ever believed her, but now she speaks like she might. That a relationship between us both could be possible.
“Okay,” I say eventually.
“Okay?” Her eyes are wide, like saucers.
“Okay,” I say again. “If that’s how you feel, then… okay.”
There is silence as Mum stares at me, clears her throat as if snapping herself out of a trance. She fiddles with a box of tea bags, trying to make it so the lid, which is bent, covers the opening, and I sit beside her, staring around the tiny van that took her away from me so many times when I needed her most. Age fourteen when I’d gotten my first-ever painful, heavy period and panicked and called Georgia. Georgia’s mum came rushing around with a hot water bottle and nighttime sanitary pads and ran me a bath. Age fifteen when I’d failed my mock Maths GCSE, when I had my first kiss, when the neighbor downstairs had a screaming argument with her boyfriend, who threatened to “torch the place,” and I waited, for the sound of fire alarms or the smell of smoke, alone in bed, unable to sleep for weeks after that. The Summer Ball. The migraines that had started soon after, and the nightmares. So many, many times I had watched this tiny van disappear down the road, from my bedroom window.