Free Are You My Mother? by Louise Voss Page A

Annette’s here. I let her in just now.’ Stella glanced up at the television. ‘And by the way, I was watching that video, if you don’t mind.’
    I turned off the TV properly this time, and sat down next to her, unable to believe what I had to say. ‘Stell, something terrible’s happened.’
    She looked at me then, and I broke down, keeling over on the sofa, pressing my face into the edge of the colourful quilt on her lap, causing Ffyfield to jump up in panic and bolt across the room. I shouldn’t be doing it like this, I thought. I ought to be strong for her. It all seemed totally unreal; preposterous. I wanted to be excited about the prospect of going to a party with Simon, or of seeing Robert Smith on telly, red-lipped and bashful. Not this.
    ‘ What?’ Stella tugged at my hair in panic. ‘What? ’
    I managed to sit up again, reaching out for her, hugging her narrow shoulders towards me and pushing her head into my chest so that I didn’t have to look in her eyes.
    When I told her, I felt her whole body go rigid. Then she elbowed her way free of my embrace and stared at me, her small white face twisted with horror.
    ‘ No!’ She screamed and hit me, hard, catching my ear and the side of my head. Before I could grab her, she leaped up and began clawing at her own face, clawing and ripping at her skin, and then at the quilt she’d spent so many countless hours on. I just about managed to grab the scissors from her sewing basket and kick them out of the way under the sofa before she lunged for them. She was howling like a banshee, screaming gibberish. PC Fletcher and Annette rushed in just as Ffyfield shot out of the door, his tail upright and bushy, like an oversized squirrel’s.
    By the time we managed to calm Stella enough to stop her screaming, we were all sobbing and shaking, apart from the PC, who was red-faced and a little breathless. Pieces of torn-up patchwork carnage lay everywhere, like twisted metal and broken glass on a blood-stained motorway verge. For the first of many times to come, I regretted passionately that Stella and I hadn’t been in that car too.

 
    Chapter 8
     
    The letter from my birthmother just turned up in my hand, during the uniquely painful exercise of clearing out my parents’ things; all those years of household paperwork, crammed into dozens of shoeboxes all over their bedroom: under the bed, in the wardrobe, on top of the wardrobe. The social worker who’d handled Stella’s case, Janice, more or less insisted on coming round to help me, since left to my own devices, I’d never have done it. I would have just shut the door behind me and let it all stay in there, gathering dust.
    Janice and I waited until Stella had gone back to school to start the sorting, and it had taken ages; several days of squatting on Dad and Mum’s crushed-strawberry pink bedroom carpet, surrounded by a printed inventory of the Victor family, with Janice valiantly trying to cheer me up with stories of her days in a punk band and her pink-haired struggles with the Establishment. I barely even answered her, just noticing that the more animated she became, the more her meagre breasts bobbed around underneath her threadbare CND t-shirt.
    It was a teeth-grittingly gruelling thing to have to do, but eventually we were nearly finished. Under Janice’s expert guidance, everything that needed to be kept was sitting in piles on the floor, waiting to be filed, and everything else thrown away. I had to be ruthless because we were moving to a flat in Shepherd’s Bush – I already had an offer in on the house. My parents had taken out life insurance, but I wanted to be extra certain that there would be enough money in the bank to pay for the rest of Stella’s education. Plus Janice had, gently, suggested that a fresh start might be the best way forward. We would only rattle around in that great big house by ourselves.
    It did mean, though, that however much I instinctively wanted to keep them, there