Page 64 of The Tapes
She stands and moves around me, quietly heading for the hall. ‘I love you,’ I say – and, in it, I hear my own mother saying the same in her crackly voice on the tape.
Faith misses half a step, though doesn’t stop. ‘Thank you,’ she replies.
PAMELA
Extract fromThe Earring Killerby Vivian Mallory, © 2015.
It was three minutes past nine in the morning when my daughter, Pamela, said I was being over-dramatic. She was seventeen and I suppose seventeen-year-olds and their mothers are destined to argue over silly things.
We had definitely done that.
I always thought a part of that was payback because she was such a quiet child. She wasn’t crying when I gave birth. Instead, there was a sniffle, a wrinkled nose, and a baffled expression at why everything was so bright and loud. By four months, she was more or less sleeping through the night – and, even before that, she was so quiet when she’d awaken in the early hours.
My mother used to tell me how it wasn’t fair.Ididn’t sleep through the night until I was five years old, a fact she never let me forget. ‘You owe me five years’ of sleep,’ she would remind me, well into my thirties.
I was the devil and my daughter was the saint.
But perhaps that’s why we argued.
There was the fight about her bedtime when she was five; her refusal to wear anything that wasn’t pink at six; then the refusal to wear anything thatwaspink by seven. She wouldn’t wear a coat to school at eight, and kept leaving lights on when she was nine.
It’s hard to know why I cared about any of those things. My dad would always tell me off for leaving on lights and, somehow, I morphed into him over the same issue. Now I know that if Pamela didn’t want to wear a coat to school, the worst that would happen is she would get wet. She’d learn a lesson, and even if she didn’t, all it meant was that her young mind was working out the boundaries of the world for herself.
By the age of ten, Pamela was pushing back over why her friends’ parents could afford to go to Disney World but we couldn’t. At eleven, she wanted to play football with the boys and was angry that the school wouldn’t let her. By twelve, she didn’t like her school uniform because she wanted to wear trousers but girls had to wear skirts. I agreed with her, yet we still argued because I wanted her to see that there are battles that are worth fighting, and the key is picking them wisely.
I was wrong.
If a twelve-year-old girl wants to go to war with her school over a clearly sexist uniform policy, the least she should expect is her mother to back her.
I didn’t and I was wrong.
But because we argued about that, we kept on going. She had her ears pierced without asking. Two months later and it was her nose. Because she objected to the school uniform policy, she went out of her way to break it. She would be suspended, or sent home for the day – and then she would skip school entirely. It turned into a three-way battle of wills between Pamela, the school, and myself. I would lie in bed at night, thinking of my perfectly silent little baby, wondering why she couldn’t just fit in.
I was wrong about that, too.
It would have meant an easier life for me – but Pamela wasn’t the sort to simply ‘fit in’. She saw things differently. While the vast majority of girls would wear a skirt, happily or not, Pamela was brave enough to question it.
Now, I can’t remember why I was so keen for her to stop asking those questions.
I’m on the main street of Sedingham again, where a yawning man in dark trousers and a white shirt is opening the shutters of Tails. A couple of months have passed since Kelsey and Adele shared memories of the HAVE FUN education scheme with me at the bus stop. It’s a part of town I have to force myself to visit, because Tails used to be known as Phoenix, which replaced Eclipse, that was once Jewel, and before that Enigma. Provincial towns and their idiosyncratic nightclub names are quite the combination.
Pamela was fifteen when she first got herself into Eclipse on a Friday night. She’d told me she was staying at a friend’s house. It was a few minutes after two in the morning that the doorbell sounded. I flew out of bed, confused and half-asleep, finding my way downstairs to the front door, where a uniformed police officer with a fluorescent jacket was waiting for me. Pamela had thrown up on one of his colleagues’ shoes, before being taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. She was fine, of course, more embarrassed than anything. On the back of that, Eclipse almost lost its licence, and ended up rebranding as Phoenix.
I walk past Tails now and then, picturing the scene of my fifteen-year-old daughter somehow getting past security. I imagine her delight at passing from the chill of outside into the sticky, humid hall beyond. Obviously, she wouldn’t have been wearing a coat. Tails is not Eclipse. The ridiculous patch of sodden red carpet that used to be at the door is no longer used,nor the clippable rope across the door supposedly to signify VIP status. The dank lighting has been replaced by bright bulbs and chandeliers across the ceiling. The pound-a-drink promos switched for ten-quid cocktails, or mocktails.
It’s different, yet this will always be the place at which my daughter was sick on a policeman’s shoes.
Pamela and I argued about those shoes, the stomach pumping, and the sneaking into a club while severely underage. I tried to ground her but that didn’t go well. I had a job and places to be – so Pamela would leave the house anyway.
But then a miracle happened less than a year later – or that’s what I thought. Pamela got straight-As in her GCSEs, one of only four people in her year to get perfect results. I considered it a miracle because of what had gone before, completely disregarding everything else in front of me. The truth was, she found the level of education beneath her, because she understood it so naturally and easily. She picked fights over uniform policy because there was little else in the curriculum to push the boundaries of her intelligence. Somehow, I’d never seen that. I’d been to the parents’ evening and, instead of focusing on the ‘She’s so clever and understands everything put in front of her’ part of a teacher’s comments, I’d hone in on the ‘but…’
We didn’t fight over my daughter’s GCSE results – but it was the worst I ever let her down. She showed me her paper, with that perfect row of As and I looked at the marks, then I looked at her, then I looked at the marks again.
‘This is unexpected,’ I said.
They are three words that have haunted me ever since, because I should have only needed one.
‘Congratulations,’ is what I added afterwards, but it was too late by then. I saw it in Pamela’s face, a subtle shift in the way she sucked her lips into her mouth and bit down on the bottomone. No argument, no fight, nothing thrown, no threats, just a soft bite of the lip.
