Lexi is still doing tours of her, Teddy’s and Liam’s bedrooms. This time, my mother is being shown everything.
Apparently, the tour guide’s spiel goes along the lines of: ‘Liam’s is messy. Don’t bother going in. Teddy will kill you if you rearrange her cuddlies. And mine, isn’t it the best? Mum and Dad say I can have one whole wall for posters. I want a big mirror there.’
Two lovely hours have passed, much vacuuming has been done, the men have shifted the furniture around and the boxes have all been installed in the correct rooms. I know it’s time for Mum to go because Dad’s carer is only on the clock for another half an hour.
Granddad Eddie has finally stopped his monologue about how it was ‘... far from detached houses you were raised, lassie’, directed at me. The tales of his old home on the East Wall, where apparently the whole Abalone family lived in premises about the size of a matchbox and only the posh people had indoor toilets, has gloriously ground to a halt. I think Dan has given him a drop of whiskey, a known cure for Eddie’s ‘in my day...’ monologues.
Mum is getting her charges ready to leave when Lexi races up to me, waving the magazine from one of the newspapers Maura and Pip brought.
I have no idea why: animal instinct? But a frisson of fear hits me at the joyous look on my daughter’s face.
‘Mum!’ she says. ‘Elisa’s got a contract with Surella. It’s in the papers. Isn’t that brilliant?’
My mind races over the implications of this at high speed but I manage to keep smiling.
‘Brilliant,’ I say and hug Lexi, wishing Maura had not bought any Sunday newspapers and that we were living in a hut on an island somewhere.
My daughter’s birth mother has reinvented herself as a style influencer of mild reputation in Ireland but not beyond these shores – despite the fact that she lives in Spain.
This gig, in Lexi’s eyes, makes her on a par with, oh, I don’t know, Lady Gaga.
I have a real job, get paid real money and put dinner on the table every night. But compared to Elisa poncing around in Spanish sunspots wearing tanning oil, minuscule alleged bikinis on her admittedly fabulous for aforty-year-old body and Tom Ford sunglasses she has bought with her trust fund, all the while rattling on about ‘how juicing changed my life’, my job seems to mean nothing. Personally, I think liposuction and surgery have changed her life; but that’s me.
Elisa comes back to Ireland occasionally to ‘model’ but is thankfully never around long enough to ask to see her daughter. Astonishing, right?
But what if that changes? It is three years since she saw Lexi. Three years. And now, Lexi is interested in her.
It hurts so badly I can hardly bear it.
‘So Surella ...?’ I say, stifling the urge to say that these Surella people must surely make cream for badlysun-?damaged skin for women who like photographing themselves around pools drinking cocktails.
Careful, your bitch is showing, says Mildred.
Ignoring this, I zip up mysecond-wife mouth and manage to politely ask: ‘What do they do?’
Lexi rolls her eyes and the hurt locks around my heart.
‘Surella are the best newmake-up brand around, Mum. Askanyone.’
She leans in to me and puts an arm round my waist.
‘It’s OK,’ she says comfortingly. ‘It’s not your thing, Mum. They’re really cool. Everyone in school loves it.’
‘Oh,’ I manage to say. ‘An Irish brand?’ I manage a bit of enthusiasm. If they’re international, I will know that there is absolutely no justice in the world.
‘Yes, they’re Irish and they are justhuuge! I might WhatsApp Elisa – just to say hi,’ she adds, in a tone that’s questioning because even though she has her birth mother’s phone number – given to her last Christmas by Dan’s interferingex-mother-in-law, who needs to die horribly and who issonot coming to our house anytime soon – she has never till now made any attempt to get in touch with Elisa by herself.
‘Why not?’ I say blithely.
Be agrown-up about this, I tell myself. I knew this could come. I have read the adoption books. I know the drill but the fear overwhelms me. What if Elisa hurts her?
And, even though I do my best to smother this selfish thought, a pain of a different type hits me like a small truck.
I am Lexi’s mother. Me!
A tiny china cup falls victim to my rage. The small handle, stuck on for possiblyseventy-five years, comes off in my hand. I stare down at it.
Lexi is at an age when a girl longs for approval, and now she appears to want it from the woman who gave birth to her and then, casually, forgot her.
