Elisa has decided she wants to be somebody – and that somebody does not want anotherbetter-known somebody in the background: i.e., me.
Just to make a point about being a somebody: fame means nothing other than the fact that more people know you. That’s the way I’ve always figured it. I make more money by selling my books and my recipes on TV and going on radio shows and talking to people around the country and doing demonstrations. It’s my business and even though I love what I do, it’s a job, not a calling that places me on a higher plane to the rest of the planet. I’m not better or more special than anyone else because I am well known, so I don’t buy into celebrity. Except I have seen plenty of people who do. And it looks as though Elisa might be one of the converted.
Fame on my level is limited. I get recognised on the street.
But I still have to buy toilet paper and scrub the bath when Lexi’s used one of her colourful bathbombs and the bath gets covered in sparkles. I still haul groceries from the supermarket into the car, still have to put them all awaywhen I get home, still realise I forgot the milk. In short, I have a job that means plenty of people know me but that’s all.
Thereisa level of fame that includes murderous amounts of money so that people are insulated from all of this, but few people reach that level. I haven’t and I’m not sure I would want to.
My other celebrity factoid is that fame maximises who a person is. If you’re grounded before it, you’ll be grounded afterwards. If you’re an adult who has never had a proper job and thought it a good plan to get her only child adopted, well, your chances of normality are limited.
‘Everyone tells me that to keep it professional, family gets in the way,’ Elisa adds and all sympathy for her vanishes.
‘Let’s meet for coffee soon,’ she says to Lexi, who beams and says ‘Yes!’
‘Then, I have to rush because this is starting soon.’
Someone is waving at her and her attention has waned.
Stab her now, says Mildred.
Just whose inner voice were you before you became mine? Vlad the Impaler’s?
Since you mention it ...Mildred, if she could, would be rocking with mirth.
A man in an expensive suit appears. Definitely one of the people who are putting up the money for this bash. I know this because he is not green.
‘Elisabetta, people are going to be coming in in the next fifteen minutes, so are we ready to go? We need some shots beforehand and I want everything to start on time.’
‘Of course, Gavin,’ she says, and there is a hint of the old Elisa in that pussy cat purr.
‘I don’t think you’ve met Dan, myex-husband and ...’
She turns to me as if she can’t bear to say my name, which is OK because I’m pretty much the same with her. ‘Freya, his new wife and ...’
Dan and I stop breathing for a moment, and then it comes: ‘Lexi, their little girl, isn’t she just adorable?’
I can feel Lexi stiffen and the guy, Gavin shakes hands with everyone, smiles and tells me he loves my shows, and will I stay for photos, which does not please Elisa because she calls loudly for the hairdresser to come andde-roller the crown of her head.
‘No, they can’t stay,’ she coos.
I can’t see Lexi’s face because I’m standing right behind her and I think of all the things my darling daughter could have said, like, ‘You didn’t say you were my mother once upon a time.’
But our darling Lexi is not like that: she’s thoughtful, sometimes anxious. I wonder if I could possibly stand on Elisa’s unshod sandalled foot, put my heel through a few vital bones. It would make Mildred happy. Me too.
‘We’d better be going, Elisa,’ says Dan definitively. ‘We can see you’re busy.’
‘Of course. Talk soon!’ She hugs Lexi again and then waves, and rushes off in the direction of a woman with a comb in her hand.
Somehow we whisk Lexi away carrying a carrier bag with Surella written on it in gold lettering.
‘Why didn’t she say that she was my birth mother?’ Lexi asks as we head to the hotel car park.
‘It could be because I was there,’ I say suddenly, desperately wanting to take away the pain.
‘Exactly,’ says Dan picking up on the cue instantly. ‘Mum has raised you, she’s your real mum, so Elisa was being tactful there.’
We both know that tactful is probably down the list on Elisa’s mind, but she’s back in Ireland and she’s going to be back in our lives on some level, so we need to manage this.
