A Very Accidental Love Story. Claudia Carroll

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       Chapter Three

      Pay absolutely no attention to this, I tell Helen as soon as she’s settled in and used to us all. Lily’s just developed a bee in her bonnet about the whole idea of having a dad and maybe even getting to meet him, nothing more. But she’ll pretty soon forget all about it; wait and see. All we need to do is starve the whole thing of oxygen. Simple as that. Not unlike my strategy with her whenever she’s stomping her feet and demanding whole dessert spoonfuls of Nutella on top of her toast for her breakfast on our Sundays together; I just blatantly ignore it, distract her by dangling some kind of toy in her face and in no time, all her little demands disappear as though they never were.

      Such are the vagaries of being almost three years old it seems; you’re cursed with the short-term memory of a fruit fly. What was bringing on hysterics two seconds ago is banished instantly at the sight of anything pink and glittery dangled in front of your face. Complete doddle.

      I continue to believe that the whole ‘when am I meeting my daddy?’ issue has finally been put to bed right up to the following weekend which, in spite of my best efforts, is the next window of peace I get from work, so I can spend a bit of time at home.

      I race home on Friday night so I can give Lily her bath and put her to bed, aching to do some mother/daughter bonding with her, but to my dismay I find out I’m already too late.

      Helen’s waiting up for me, watching TV while texting away on her phone downstairs in the family room, wearing an oversized dressing gown and a mansize pair of fleecy socks, sofa-lising. (New buzzword dreamt up by Marc, from Arts and Culture. A bastardisation of words to describe the act of socialising whilst your bum is glued to the sofa. Marc, as you see, is very fond of his word mash-ups.)

      She doesn’t hear me slip into the kitchen at the far end of the room and looking at her from this distance all I can think is … so much about Helen has changed over the years and yet so much has stayed exactly the same. She’s gained weight, but she’s lucky, it happens to suit her. Fills her face out and makes her look even younger. She still has the same even temperament and insuppressibly sunny good humour, the exact same general Pollyanna, glass-half-full outlook on life, at all times, always. Just like an air hostess, smiling through her pretty, even white teeth and unfailingly polite, even when living under the same roof as a termagant like me.

      She and I don’t look even remotely alike. Helen is bright-eyed and fair-haired, with a sunny, sparkly, outgoing personality to match; not so much a glass-half-full person, as a Waterford crystal, limited edition glass, half full of rare, vintage champagne. Then there’s me; small, dark, unsmiling, with deathly, Morticia Addams-pale skin that’s the bane of my life and a permanently hollow, sunken-eyed look about me, which, in spite of the most expensive face creams money will buy, still seems to be permanently etched in.

      Helen’s adopted you see, something which always left me with the lifelong sensation that I somehow wasn’t good enough for my parents, which was why they felt the need to go out shopping for another daughter, as I’d seen it at the time. It had hurt me as a little girl, hurt me far more deeply then I ever let on, and to this day remains a searingly vivid memory, one that still has the power to sting even now, from a safe distance of decades. Coming home from primary school to be told by Dad that there was a ‘surprise’ waiting for me in the good front room. Course I was all excited at first, then bitterly disappointed to discover nothing other than my battered old cot with a new baby sleeping in it. I’d thought at the very least that I was getting a new home computer or a maths set. Something useful.

      As time went on though, I realised the truth; that Mum and Dad had just brought home what appeared to the five-year-old me to be an improved version of what a little daughter should be. One who grew up to be pretty and blonde who lisped and giggled and wore pink and got invited everywhere. And although they’d die rather than admit it, one who they both clearly preferred; to this day, I can still hear the three of them happily laughing and messing about while watching some TV programme together night after night, like a proper family. All while I sat all alone upstairs in my room, getting ahead on the next day’s homework and trying to choke back hot, furious tears at being so blatantly excluded. Five years old was a young age to learn all about rejection, and yet that’s exactly СКАЧАТЬ