Are You My Mother? Read Online Free PDF Page A

against the bookshelf drinking a beer, and that he couldn’t take his eyes off me. Although I was sure I remembered him eyeing up both of us.
    He was talking to a much shorter man – when they both propped their elbows against the bookshelf, Gavin’s elbow leaned on the second from top shelf, and the other bloke’s only rested on the middle one. After we had finished dancing to the next record - The Clash, The Magnificent Seven , a surprisingly good record to dance to – we’d gone into the kitchen, pink-faced, breathless and giggly, and Gavin had followed us in. The first thing he asked, gallantly, was what we wanted to drink. The second thing was, ‘Would you like to buy a Barbour?’
    I’d raised one eyebrow at him – or at least tried to. It probably came out more like a squint. ‘A what ?’ I said.
    ‘ You know, a Barbour. Waxy green jacket thing Sloanes wear.’
    ‘ Do I look like a Sloane?’ I remembered saying, all kind of cool and frosty. It was a good eight years since it had last been considered even remotely trendy to wear a Barbour, unless you were a Hooray Henry.
    ‘ Well - no, actually. Thing is, I’m a bit desperate. A bloke in Canary Wharf flogged me thirty-five of them when I was drunk. They’re in the boot of my car now and I’ve got no idea what to do with them.’
    This was Gavin all over. It later transpired that he hadn’t even come to the party in his car, so even in the unlikely event that I had wanted a knock-off Barbour, he wouldn’t have been able to sell me one anyway. It was all talk with him.
    Then he asked me where I was from.
    ‘ Acton,’ I replied, and he laughed.
    ‘ No,’ he said. ‘I mean, originally. You look kind of Spanish, or South American, or something. Where are your parents from?’
    It was the first time anybody had asked me that outright. I hesitated.
    ‘ Um. They’re English’, I said, managing not to add I think. I knew that I’d been adopted in England, and my adoptive parents were both British but, although I’d often wondered, I hadn’t enquired about the nationality of my birth parents when Mum and Dad were alive.
    ‘ People always said that I looked just like my dad, though,’ I added, on safer, if less biologically-pertinent, ground. As a child, it had been a source of much hilarity to me when old ladies in the street would take in Dad’s and my similar dark brown hair and eyes, and short stature, and comment upon our likeness. If only they knew, I’d think with something approaching glee at our shared secret knowledge of their ignorance.
    ‘ Said?’
    ‘ Pardon?’
    ‘ You said, “said”, in the past.’
    ‘ Yes. He died. In fact, both my parents are dead.’
    ‘ Oh. Sorry. Then why did you say “they’re English”, in the present?’
    I sighed. I hadn’t really wanted to get into all this, not in a first conversation. ‘It’s complicated. I was talking about my birth parents when I said they were English. I don’t know if they’re still alive, because I’m adopted. My adoptive parents are dead, and people used to say I looked like my adoptive father, which was mad, because he wasn’t even my real dad.’
    ‘ Right,’ said Gavin, looking as if he wished he’d never asked.
    At first I thought that Gavin wasn’t very good looking, skinny and a bit bald, with a funny curving mouth, and it seemed to be Stella who was the most obviously impressed by his charms. They got on so well that I began to worry that he had his eye on her, and was wondering if I should drop in the fact that she hadn’t even done her GCSE’s yet. And then after a few minutes he began to grow on me, too, and within the hour I’d decided that his curved lips were the most appealing part of him.
    ‘ I love your eyelashes,’ he’d said. ‘Would you consider giving me a butterfly kiss?’ He held out his hand to me, wrist-first as if to receive a free perfume sample, and, self-consciously, I fluttered against the warm, smooth skin of his palm,