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“Let’s take a deep breath and assess.” She’s not judgy and she’s not harsh, she’s my best friend. Whatever comes next is going to be the god’s honest truth. I have to stay in the moment and not spiral back into the past, which has its hooks deep in my flesh. “She has a business to run. She’s run it since your dad left.”
A sob comes out of me so hard and fast that I know she’s onto something, though we’ve never talked about it, and it’s so far from what I want to think about that I have to fight myself not to hang up. “Do you think she really thinks I’m a slag?” My mother has enough British-English left to use the old word, rather than the more modern ‘slut.’
“God, Lolly, of course not. She’s yourmother.She adores you. But she’s protective of you. Even if she bopped her way through the Eighties, she’s going to want to protect you from whoever’s out there saying whatever they’re saying.”
My voice is so little it’s barely a squeak. “You think people are talking about me? Like that?” The real me—the grown up me, the me I want to be—doesn’t give a shit about my reputationin that way.I’m an adult and I’m allowed to screw whoever I want to screw, but…
But…
I know how it works. I saw it in black and white. The woman is always the brazen whore—even if she is only a girl and at school and did nothing to encourage him—the man an opportunist who gets away withwhatever.It’s unbearable that those words are hunting me again.
And it only gets worse.
The thought of people upbraiding mymotherbecause of somethingI’vedone just makes it icky in a ‘take yourself to the principal’s office and be admonished for your sins’ which will ‘be inscribed on your permanent record’ kind of way. That’s what happened. My dad left. I sort of went a bit off the rails. Then the shit with the trainer went down and Ihad a pastandwasn’t a reliable witness, so she didn’t let me talk to the press or the lawyer, not even the school principal. Instead, she pulled up all our roots and moved us from America to England (and back again, over and over).
“You still there, Lollz?”
“Still here.”
“You need to go and talk to her. Find out what the damage is and make it right.”
“But…”
“No buts, lady. This is business. She’s not wrong. It’s a double standard for sure, but she has bills to pay, and so do you. Think of Velveteen.”
How can she be sologicalabout all of this? Especially when she knows our history?
She knows, just as Mother Dearest knew, and it’s not fair.
My guts are knotted and my brain is reeling and I want to scream at whoever made my mother say such hateful things to me. “He’s being praised. Mariano. The onegettingthe blow job. He’s a stud. He’s not going to lose a single night’s sleep over that newspaper headline.”
“Would you want him to?”
Of course. Not. Yes. No. The man’s an ass and I want him to suffer, but not really. Ugh. How come Alicia knows what to say? Who made her this smart? “But why should I be made to feel guilty for doing something that was between two consenting adults?”
“You shouldn’t.”
“So, what is there to make right?” I want so badly for this to go away. For menotto be punished for giving Mariano a blow job. But that’s not the way the world works, and my mother is a woman of the world. She has a business to protect. And the business comes first. As always.
“We don’t know the answer to that, my lovely. What did she say to you? Precisely. I need the exact words she used.”
I take a deep breath and try to recall what horrific thing Gwen said that set me off. “She said, ‘I see nothing’s changed, Charlotte,’ and shoved that newspaper at me.”
“That was it?” Alicia sounds confused more than anything else. But she wasn’t there. She didn’t see the look of disgust on my mother’s face. The confusion. The hurt. Thedisappointment.She didn’t read the terse text—the notification of which spooked Miss P and ended with me in a splash of mud—that came before that conversation. The cold, unfeeling details about Mummy’s arrival and her expectations for “a discussion with” me.
“You know, Lish, I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not going to give ground this time. It’s not okay that she takes their side, and it’s not okay that the world wants to hound me from my job for doing something that had nothing to do with my job performance…” I’m breathing heavily, my voice high and squeaky, but I can’t stop myself. I’ve been here—right here, in this exact position, with my mother siding withthem—and I can’t do it again. My heart will break. She needs to be on my side, just this once. “I’m going to tell her to shove it. Either stand with me or go to hell.”
“What about Velveteen?”
If ever there was a moment when I was going to trash a room, this is it. I want to smash everything that’s in reach and then move to the next room, then the next, but instead I allow my voice to go deep-freezer cold. “I will walk the streets of London, pimping myself out, to make the money for Teena, but I’m not going to allow my mother to treat me like a slut.”
“Okay, darling. All I’m saying is keep an open mind. Hear what she has to say. And state your case as clearly and calmly as you can. I know you can’t hear this right now, but I believe she loves you, even if you think she’s the Harridan from Hell.”
I can’t believe Alicia would do me like this. She thinks she’s saying what I need to hear but it’s the worst kind of betrayal. If she knew—really understood—what it was like after my dad left, what an insane POS my mother became, how that whole scene unraveled, she’d never ask me to lie down and be walked over in this way.
“Sorry it’s all been so shitty, Lollz. Do you want to talk about him or not?”
No, I damn well don’t. You’ll be telling me to forgive him and take him back and it was all just some ‘silly misunderstanding.’ “Not right now. Bit raw.”
