Are You My Mother? Read Free Page A

realised that this sounded horribly self-pitying, but it was true.
    I could’ve got a babysitter for Stella, and gone out for real, if I’d really put my foot down. But she was so clingy, those first few months, that if I even tentatively mentioned that my friend Esther had rung to invite me to a party, Stella’s eyes would get huge with panic, her voice instantly thick with tears, and she’d whisper ‘please don’t leave me.’ And that would be that.
    Other nights I just meandered about, up and down the residential streets near our house, my head dragging with grief, stumbling and blinded by the tears that I couldn’t shed in front of Stella. I’d walk to the nearest bench and sit down, pulling my knees up under my chin, not caring who saw me crying. I wanted to be rescued: I didn’t care who by. I wanted someone to take the burden off my shoulders and the decisions out of my hands.
    There was no way I’d ever have told that to the camera, though.

 
    Chapter 2
     
    ‘ So, tell me about this book you used to read Stella. What’s it got to do with the man on the tube?’
    ‘ It was called ‘Are You My Mother?’. It’s a really sweet book, about this baby bird who hatches just after his mother’s gone to look for some food for him. He jumps out of the nest and goes to find her, only he doesn’t know what she looks like, so he goes up to all these different animals and asks them if they’re his mother, but of course none of them are. In the end he gets so desperate that he’s asking aeroplanes and ocean liners and, eventually, this big scary digger…
    ‘ Oh no. I can’t believe that even telling you about this is making me sad. It’s a kid’s book…that’s ridiculous. Sorry. I’m a bit emotional at the moment, what with one thing and another. Can we stop for a bit?’
     
    I probably hadn’t given Are You My Mother? a thought for fifteen years. It was Stella’s favourite book when she was three years old. I read it to her, every single night for months, over and over again until the words were printed indelibly on my mind. I could still remember most of them, the same way that you remember all the lyrics to certain pop songs even though you never consciously learned them in the first place.
    At that stage, Stella couldn’t read, but familiarity had branded the text into her head too. She used to recite every sentence along with me, verbatim; cackling and squirming with a toddler’s heartlessness at the subtle pathos of the story. If I ever tried to miss out a single line, or, God forbid, skip a page, it provoked a storm of protest.
    Mum had worried when the book first came into our household; a birthday gift from Stella’s rather tactless godmother. Mum even took me aside and asked if I was OK about it, since I was the one who’d have to read it - I was, officially, on permanent bedtime story duty.
    ‘ I could get rid of it, Emma darling, really,’ she’d said. ‘I could just put it in a bag for jumble before we’ve even read it to her, and she’ll never miss it, not with all these other presents’.
    I was touched by Mum’s unwarranted concern - until she mentioned it, I hadn’t thought twice about its subject matter. After that, though, I did feel a bit funny the next few times I read it. I supposed, subconsciously, I did identify with that poor lost baby bird when I was thirteen years old. Although back in those days, I had Mum and Dad, so why would I need to look for my real mother?
    In the book, of course, it all worked out in the end. The scary digger picked up the bird in his scoop and popped him back into the nest, just as the mother flew home, worm in beak. Mum used to snort through her nose at this part of the book. ‘Typical,’ she said. ‘The mother comes back, completely oblivious to the fact that her baby’s even left the nest. She’d be appalled if she knew what he’d been up to, talking to all kinds of strangers and getting himself in trouble! He should have just