Book of Lost Threads (6 page)

The next thing she heard was the sound of the back door opening again. It was now full daylight, and a watery sun lit the figure of Finn as he stooped to pass beneath the low lintel.

She sat up, running her fingers through her tangled hair. ‘Hello, Finn. What time is it?’

Finn looked startled, as though he had not expected to find her still there. He pointed to the alarm clock on the mantelpiece, put a plastic shopping bag on the table and continued on down the hall. It was seven fifty. Moss climbed out of her sleeping bag and went into the bathroom. There was a striped towel on the handbasin with the name MOSS written on card with a magic marker. She turned on the shower and waited. Tepid water flowed sluggishly from the old-fashioned showerhead, and she found that she needed to duck and weave to get wet, washing herself in sections. Her shower was understandably short, and she was grateful for the roughness of the towel that warmed her a little with its friction.

When she arrived back in the kitchen Finn had lit the fire and was once more engaged in stuffing bread into the toaster. ‘I got Vegemite,’ he said with a shy smile, indicating the jar. ‘And some cheese. For lunch.’ He returned his attention to the toaster and lapsed into silence.

‘I’ll make the tea if you like,’ Moss offered. Finn took down a canister from the mismatched assortment lined up beside the clock, then nodded towards the teapot with its colourful knitted cosy. Moss was puzzled. Puzzled and hurt—he wasn’t making any effort to speak to her, and she began to feel like the intruder she undoubtedly was. The kettle boiled, and soon two steaming mugs of tea joined the wedges of toast which Finn had liberally coated with Vegemite.

‘You found the towel, then?’ Finn, unused to visitors, had been inordinately proud that he’d thought of the towel. ‘It just came to me,’ he said. ‘The idea of the towel.’ He looked at her hopefully.

‘Just the thing,’ Moss said. ‘Thank you.’ She couldn’t work him out. Was he a bit—well,
simple
? Hadn’t he been a mathematician? A brilliant one, from what she’d learnt. Perhaps he was just absentminded. Genius tended to be that way— at least in popular folklore. She bit thoughtfully on her toast and suppressed a grimace. For some reason Finn thought she liked Vegemite. Still, she ate her toast without complaint: she needed time and didn’t want to offend him.

The salty taste of the Vegemite was sharp on her tongue, and as she and Finn carefully chewed their toast, the sound of crunching mingled with the ticking of the clock. Neither of them spoke until Moss poured them both a second mug of tea. She could wait no longer. Her plan had been to let Finn broach the subject, but his silence was resolute.

‘You do know who I am, don’t you?’

‘What year were you born?’

‘Nineteen eighty-three.’

‘Your mother was Amy Sinclair? Partner of Linsey Brookes?’

Moss felt a sudden wave of nausea.
Dear God, don’t let me vomit. Not now.
She forced herself to breathe slowly, deeply, before replying. ‘Yes. Amy and Linsey—my mothers.’

‘Then you must be my daughter.’

And he just sat there, sipping his tea.

Moss had pictured this moment quite differently. This was when her father was supposed to open his arms wide and hold her for the first time. She had even imagined the roughness of his whiskers against her cheek. They would both cry a little and then laugh, and he would look at her with wonder and regret. Instead, he went on relentlessly sipping his tea. She tried to read his face but it was blank. Even the kindness she had recognised last night had been erased.
Say something
, she begged silently
. Please.

But Finn was struggling. He had lived alone for so long that he found even small talk a challenge. Last night, before sleep claimed him, he had tried to cobble together some thoughts, some words that might at least be adequate
. I’m so
happy to meet you at last.
That was patently untrue and Finn was a bad liar.
I’ve often thought about you.
Also untrue. And dangerous. It might make her think she was welcome. The last thing he wanted was another person in his life. Why was she here, anyway?
Keep the conversation as neutral as possible
, he advised himself.

‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

Moss swallowed her disappointment. ‘Maths,’ she said. ‘I followed the maths trail.’

A few months ago, while looking through some of Amy’s sheet music, she’d come upon the contract that had brought her into being. It was typical of Amy to be careless with such an important document. Her mother snatched it away, but not before Moss had seen the name: Michael Finbar Clancy. So, as she explained to Finn, at that point she had both his name and his profession. Fortunately, Michael was a prolific writer in his years as an academic, and had been making quite a name for himself in probability theory. Her search was temporarily frustrated when, after a few years of regular publication, his name suddenly disappeared from the learned journals. It seemed he had vanished without a trace, but by then Moss’s initial curiosity had hardened into resolve. She saw that he’d written quite a few of the articles with a Philip Cousins who was now Associate Professor of Mathematics at Monash University. It was Phil who told her where to find Michael Clancy.

‘He’s changed a lot,’ he warned her.

‘I never knew him, so it won’t matter to me,’ she replied with a shrug. ‘As I said, I’m only looking him up because my family used to know his family, and Granny would like to get in touch.’ She was surprised at her own glibness.

Finn was appalled to learn how easy it was to find him and angry with Phil for revealing his whereabouts. ‘So old Phil keeps track of me, does he? Never could mind his own business.’ Seeing the hurt on Moss’s face, he continued more gently. ‘So what started you looking?’

‘The contract. I found the contract.’ Moss was being evasive. In fact, she couldn’t really articulate her motives because she didn’t fully understand them, preferring to sidle up and consider them obliquely. Initially, there was the simple fact that she was different. None of the children she knew had two mothers. The teasing at school had ebbed and flowed as the bullies and their satellites were diverted by newer victims. In primary school it was masculine, sporadic and almost ritualistic. ‘Lezzos!’ the boys would shout, and Moss would run to the shelter of the girls’ toilets. Her friends would then cluck and cluster around, enjoying the drama. The little girls were not sure what ‘lezzos’ were, but knew they had to band together against the boys.

At high school, though, the girls were the predators, in particular the pretty queen bee, Jessica, who tormented her with such refined subtlety that Moss longed for the predictable cruelty of the boy gangs. The other girls milled around behind Jessica and her three cronies. It was better than being out front in the firing line. Moss met the taunts stoically but wept secretly in her room at home. By this stage she had no friends and spent lunchtimes in the library.

In childish desperation, Moss decided to buy Jessica a present, hoping to win a reprieve from the bullying. She saved up her pocket money until there was enough to buy what all the girls in her class coveted—a Magnetique Supa Gloss lipstick. She agonised over the colour and told the salesgirl it was for her big sister who was blonde and blue-eyed. She had it giftwrapped, and the next day she waited until home time, edging up to Jessica as they rounded the corner from the school.

‘I’ve got something for you. A present.’

Jessica raised her eyebrows as she took the parcel. ‘A present? Let’s see. Come over here, everyone. Miranda’s given me a present.’

When her audience was large enough, she struck. ‘Yeech! A lipstick! She’s a lezzo like her mothers. Yeech! She wants a big red kiss.’ And amid screams of laughter and exclamations of revulsion from the other girls she grabbed Moss’s tiny breasts and kissed her full on the lips. ‘Where else do you want to be kissed, Lezzo?’ she asked with a sly smile at her audience. ‘Come on, girls, who’s next?’

Moss turned to run, but her arms were pinioned. The crowd began to slink away, but not before two more girls had kissed her and another squeezed her breasts painfully. Then Jessica opened the lipstick and wrote something on her victim’s forehead, before stepping back to admire her handiwork.

‘Quick! Miss Webb’s coming.’ The remaining girls melted away as the teacher turned the corner. She stopped and put her arm around the weeping girl who was rubbing a red smear on her forehead.

‘Miranda, what on earth’s the matter?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Was it Jessica?’

‘It’s nothing, Miss Webb,’ Moss gasped between sobs. ‘I just don’t feel well.’

For several days, Moss was granted a reprieve. With Miss Webb hovering protectively in the background, Jessica lay low. Pale and peaky, Moss crept into class and scurried to the library in her breaks. The other girls kept their distance, and Moss felt sick and hollow and somehow dirty. She was ashamed of her mothers and ashamed of herself for feeling that way.

These thoughts were too painful to leave lying around unattended. She might come upon them at just the wrong moment and they would trip her up, sending her sprawling helplessly as the contents of her head poured out into the unforgiving sunshine. Her face became watchful and grim, the effort to control her feelings begetting a stubborn will for survival. Moss was only thirteen and felt an aching need to protect her mothers. Nevertheless, action was required.

‘I have to change schools,’ she announced abruptly one night at dinner. ‘The teachers are picking on me.’

Her mothers looked at her with concern. ‘Picking on you? The teachers? Which teachers?’

‘All of them. They hate me.’ And she burst into tears. The two women looked at each other as she jumped to her feet, knocking over her water glass.

‘I’ll go,’ said Amy, and went off to her daughter’s room, where she tapped on the door. Ignoring Moss’s ‘Go away,’ she entered and sat on the bed beside the sobbing girl, who finally blurted out the whole story. Amy sat stroking her daughter’s hair until her sobs subsided and her breathing became deep and even. She pulled up the covers and went back down to the dining room, unaware that Moss, who had been feigning sleep, had padded down after her and was listening at the door.

‘She’s being picked on because of us,’ Amy told Linsey.

‘Those little bitches. I could kill them! With my bare hands.’

‘She wants to start afresh at Bradfield and . . .’

Linsey’s voice was dry. ‘I think I can see where this is going.’

‘I’m sorry, Linny. She doesn’t want the new school to know she has two mothers.’

‘Well then. I’ll have to become her aunty,’ Linsey said bleakly.

‘We can discuss that later.’ Moss heard the pity in Amy’s voice. ‘It could be me—the aunt, I mean.’

Linsey’s words were brisk but her voice was husky. ‘Don’t be absurd, Amy. Of course it will be me.’

At thirteen, Moss had little notion of what this offer might have cost Linsey. At the time, her predominant emotion was relief. Only in later years had she come to realise that, in all her relationships, Linsey had always been the lover. For Linsey, the beloved always came first.

Six years after Linsey’s departure, when Moss turned twenty-one, Amy had finally told her about the odd circumstances of her conception. She was startled by the truth; while understanding her mothers’ relationship, she had assumed that Amy had conceived in the usual way. She had had no inkling that they’d taken so much trouble to find the right father.

‘All you need to know is that he was a good man, but the agreement was that he play no further part in our lives. We must respect that, Miranda.’ Amy still called her Miranda when she needed to impress her with the seriousness of the matter at hand.

‘I didn’t make any agreement,’ Moss retorted. ‘What if I want to meet him?’ She had a sudden moment of comprehension. ‘I suppose this was all Linsey’s bright idea.’

‘Well, it was Linsey’s . . .’ Amy began.

‘I knew it. I knew she never thought I was good enough. She tried to make me something I’m not, and I wasn’t and somehow I’m to blame. She
experimented
with me.’ She stopped and glared at Amy, who was processing this convoluted speech. ‘You know what I mean.’

Amy opened her mouth to protest, but gave up and shrugged inwardly instead. She didn’t want to get involved in a dispute between these two passionate souls. It was true Linsey expected a very different child from the one Moss had been. Besides, while their separation was reasonably amicable, old wounds still festered in Amy’s breast.
No-one could ever measure
up to Linsey’s absurd standards
, she thought petulantly.
And that’s
a fact.

But Moss brooded. If Linsey had a particular child in mind—a child who was beautiful like Amy and clever like her father—she, Moss, was obviously a disappointment. She glared at her reflection in the mirror. She was clearly not the tall, clever, blue-eyed blonde of Linsey’s imagining. Small of stature, she had the wiry brown hair and gamine features of her Grandmother Sinclair. Her saving grace was her blue eyes, darker than Amy’s but with the same long lashes. Aside from this, she saw herself as a failed experiment. Not to Amy, of course. Moss had always been sure of Amy’s love and approval but perversely valued her praise less than the exacting Linsey’s. Now, mortified to discover that she was a designer baby gone wrong, she realised she could never live up to Linsey’s standards so there was no point in continuing to try. She felt a terrible hollow in her sense of herself. She needed to lash out. Place the blame squarely where it belonged. She would confront Linsey and then cut herself off from her entirely. After that, she’d find another parent—her father—to take her place.

That’ll put paid to all her schemes
, she reflected with spiteful satisfaction.

Privy to only some of her daughter’s thoughts, Amy, while not encouraging her, did nothing to intervene. She did point out wryly that Moss was sounding just like Linsey, but her daughter failed to see the irony. She had carried out her plan and now, two years later, here she was, drinking tea with the man Linsey had chosen to be her father.