Free A Daughter's Secret by Eleanor Moran Page B

twenty at her. The fact she doesn’t even protest makes me wonder just how broke she really is. She jumps on the train. ‘Love you,’ she mouths as the carriage spirits her away from me.

March 1994 (fifteen years old)
    Mum is properly terrible at painting her nails. The red varnish smears itself over her cuticles, making it look like she’s got her hand caught in a Victorian loom and is slowly bleeding to death. She’s sitting at the kitchen table right now, wobbly right hand waving over the left, swearing under her breath. I watch her from the kitchen door, sneakily pulling down my black tube miniskirt and sliding behind the table so that, when she looks up, she can’t see how short it is.
    ‘Me and Lysette are going to the cinema,’ I say, as casually as I can muster. ‘I’ll be back by 10.30.’
    ‘Hang on,’ she says, head jerking up, a globule of varnish landing on the battered kitchen table. ‘Shit! Don’t you know we’re having family supper tonight?’
    ‘Do you
see
Lorcan?’ I say, in my ‘whatever’ voice. Big mistake. She hates that.
    ‘No Mia, I don’t. I’m not blind. But we agreed it, so I’m sure he’ll be walking through the door any minute. He’s bringing fish and chips,’ she adds, like it clinches it.
    She’s scraping at the splodge on the table with a tissue, oblivious to the fact she’s turned a tiny spot of red into a full-scale crime scene. She’s only started all this – painting her nails, using mascara – since Lorcan came back. She’s always been a natural beauty, her long wavy hair and delicate features giving her the look of a Pre-Raphaelite portrait. I hate watching her trying to be something else. Besides, it feels like she’s stealing my moment, the time in my life when I’m meant to be casting off into the exotic ocean of womanhood.
    ‘I’m not hungry, anyway.’
    ‘You have to eat. You’re a growing girl: it’s vital for your brain. Have you got much homework this weekend?’
    I’ve done it all already. I stayed up until one last night doing my maths, and I wrote my
Jane Eyre
essay in the library after school, but something won’t let me tell her that.
    ‘Yeah, loads,’ I say.
    ‘Then you need an early night. If you’re going to the cinema, I’d much rather you went to the early screening. Or not at all, tonight.’
    ‘Lysette’s waiting for me!’
    Mum’s hazel eyes flash with anger.
    ‘That’s not my problem. You made an agreement . . .’
    ‘A sort of agreement,’ I snarl back, taking a theatrical look around the messy, Lorcan-free kitchen. Her face crumples, and I come close to crumpling along with it. I nearly stand up, miniskirt and all, and rush round to the other side of the table to hug her, but then I remember that I’m almost there, almost out. The whiff of freedom is too seductive. ‘If he’s not back in half an hour, then can I go?’ I can taste how much I hate myself. It’s bitter, like the dregs at the bottom of the coffee pot.
    When I get to the Odeon, there’s a queue snaking right round the block. I rang Lysette’s house to say I’d be late, but I could only do it after the allotted half an hour, or I’d have had to straight off cancel. I knew Lorcan wasn’t coming, even if Mum didn’t. He’s recording his new album in the bowels of a Soho recording studio, and every Friday night is cause for a celebration. He’ll be in the Coach and Horses or the Ship with the rest of the band: if Mum really wanted to see him she should have invited herself along. I know why she didn’t though.
    I was right about Frog Features: she was Lorcan’s girlfriend for a while, but eventually that bonfire burnt itself out too, just as Mum was starting to take some timid steps out into the big bad world of dating. At first she made him sleep in the spare room, but it didn’t last more than a month or so. I think she should’ve kept up the act a bit longer – all queenly and regal, going out for drinks without telling him who with.