The Stepmother
written by: Ginny Swart
My stepmother’s name is Annabelle.
She used to be my history teacher, and as you can imagine, it was pretty difficult to make the change. One minute I was calling her Miss Norris and writing essays for her about Charles 11, and the next minute I had to decide whether to call her Annabelle or just plain Um. It was easy for her, she just carried on calling me Joanne.
My mother referred to her as That Woman, and refused to speak to her at all.
She’d been okay as a teacher. One of my favourites, actually, because she had a way of making history quite interesting. Then one parents’ evening, my Mum had the flu, so Dad said he’d go instead.
“And the rest is history, eh, Mrs Thompson!” Dad had said this so often in front of Annabelle that it wasn’t even remotely funny any more. But having my ex-history teacher as a stepmother felt really odd.
Actually, Annabelle wasn’t the wicked witch who split our family or anything. Dad had been living on his own for more than a year. He and Mum had given me the usual spiel about how they both still loved me but needed time to sort things out between them. That’s what all parents say before they start fighting over the maintenance and the car payments. I know, ‘cos Ben’s folks got divorced last year, and so did Kenny’s. And Maria’s. A trial separation, they’d called it at first, but we’d all known it meant forever.
The first year after Dad moved out, Mum and I had a pretty weird time together.
She kind of went off the rails. Slowly at first, but it got worse. She started her separated life by dating some bearded oddball she met in the library, although she stopped seeing him pretty soon. He drove a dirty old van, and I don’t think he suited her, she was hoping for a better class of transport once Dad had driven away in the old family Ford.
Then she went out with Auntie Maureen’s brother, but I could see that wasn’t going to work, Clive still had pimples, for heaven’s sake! Mum’s thirty-eight and she really needs an older man. She went off to clubs with him, dressed in the most ridiculous clothes. Totally embarrassing.
Then she went through a time where she just stared into space and sort of drifted through life. She seemed to forget she had a daughter of twelve and she just ignored anything I did, which was fine by me. Maria and I hung around Camden Market a lot, and she didn’t seem to mind. She stopped making me get up in time for school and hardly remembered to cook meals.
Dad gave me a clothing allowance, and I started buying most of my gear at Super Goth in the High Street. All black. I dyed my hair Midnight Temptation and used that sparkly black nail varnish, and I looked pretty wicked. And although Mum didn’t notice the new me, the kids at school were pretty cool with it.
These days, whenever I see her, she’s in a sort of Earth Mother mode, all flowing kaftans and jingly earrings and tofu. When she’s not working on somebody’s Tarot reading, she spends a lot of time on the Internet in chat rooms, and any day now she’ll probably start dating one of those losers, and it will all end in tears. I’ve read about women who date chat-room men, but she won’t listen.
A week or two before Dad and Annabelle got married, Mum said I’d be better off living with the newlyweds in the house they’d just bought. She was obviously bent on punishing Dad, kind of testing his commitment to this new wife by lumbering them with me.
But Annabelle seemed delighted and was determined to make a success of being a stepmother.
“I know I can’t take your mother’s place, Joanne, but I’ll always be here for you. I want us to be friends.”
She actually said that with a straight face. I guess stepmothers all watch the same bad movies. Or they all go to the same classes on How-to-be- a -Great- Stepmum, because that’s exactly what Kenny’s new stepmother said to him.
I was happy for Dad that he’d married Annabelle. He was pushing forty, after all, and he needed the companionship. If he hadn’t, he might have turned into one of those sad old men who sit on park benches and suck their teeth when schoolgirls walk past. Like Harriet’s grandfather. But me and her friends? Hardly!
Annabelle was hardly a mother figure. She was really quite pretty and sweet and smiled a lot and wore her blonde hair in a ponytail. She was twenty-six, something which Mum never stopped remarking on.
“Your Dad will kill himself trying to keep up with her,” she prophesied with satisfaction. “Men with young wives usually get carried off by a heart attack within the first year. And then where will that leave Madam?”
“Where will that leave you, Mum, Dad pays my school fees, doesn’t he? And he’s paying for your flat. Besides, surely….”
I was going to add, “Dad’s too old to have sex, isn’t he?”
Then I thought better of it. I’d heard odd noises coming from their bedroom late at night, and it didn’t sound like Annabelle doing Pilates.
Trying to picture her and my Dad writhing around like they do in the films was pretty mind-boggling. Disgusting, really, he’s got quite a lot of grey hair already.
I asked Maria how she felt about her father’s new life, and she said she didn’t know, because her father had moved in with an art gallery owner called Damian, and she couldn’t actually picture anything except her dad and that fellow making supper together.
“When Dad was at home, he wouldn’t even make a cup of tea, but now he wears a stripy apron that says Kiss the Cook,” she said gloomily. “And Damian pinched his bum when he thought I wasn’t looking. But I don’t suppose they actually sleep in the same bed.”
Really, Maria is such a child. But seeing I don’t know the actual details of all that stuff I wasn’t going to contradict her.
Annabelle did her best on the let’s-be-friends thing. She was always asking me if I’d like to help her mash the potatoes for supper, or decorate a cake she’d made for Dad’s fortieth birthday and things like that. She even showed me a picture of some draggy outfit in a magazine and asked if I’d like her to sew it for me. It took her a long time to know when to give up. I hated cooking, and I definitely did not wear homemade clothes.
Once she and Dad were married, Annabelle stopped teaching and went full-time into the whole housewife thing. She seemed to actually enjoy cleaning the house and cooking.
Some of her meals were pretty horrible. She was always forgetting to do things like put salt in the stew, and she was really good at burning potatoes and rice. Then she’d sit there looking anxiously at Dad, to see if he approved of what she’d cooked. I couldn’t believe the porkies my Dad told, pretending her tasteless cottage pie was delicious, when it clearly wasn’t. He even asked for seconds. I couldn’t eat it and offered to ask Mum for her recipe, but Annabelle took this badly and burst into tears. I was only trying to help. Mum used to be quite a good cook until Dad left and she lost interest.
Anyway, once she’d got a few things straight, Annabelle and I got on all right. She gradually accepted that my room was totally out of bounds and she stopped expecting me to sit in the kitchen and tell her about my day when I got home. After supper, I went upstairs to do my homework and listen to music, and she and Dad watched TV. So everything was cool, she didn’t bother me, and I stayed out of her way.
Then she got pregnant. Well, I suppose I should have been expecting it, but I wasn’t
“Of course she’s going to want a baby, stupid, they all do,” said Kenny, whose new stepmother had produced a little stepbrother for him four months after his father remarried. “Take my advice and get some earplugs. Babies never stop screaming, and they smell horrible.”
“Oh, Kenny, babies are cute! You’re so lucky, Joanne, you can be a big sister. Miss Norris- I mean, Annabelle – she’s still young enough to have one. My Mum says she’s done with all the nappies and stuff. Just as well, really, I suppose.”
Maria wasn’t likely to be a big sister to anyone. Her mother had moved in with a silver-haired man who already had three grandchildren of his own, but was, according to Maria, filthy rich. And by now she’d worked out that her dad wasn’t going to present her with a baby brother either.
Annabelle tried to get me interested, saying what fun we’d have together with the baby and how she was hoping it would be a boy: “So your Dad would have a pigeon pair. You’d like a baby brother, wouldn’t you, Jo?”
Yeah. So he could grow up like Kenny and snap rubber bands at girls’ legs. Boys are the pits.
To my surprise, Dad went with her to breathing classes while she learned how to pant and count, something women have to do to have an easy birth, apparently. My dad was really into the whole baby thing, grinning like an idiot and patting her tummy at every opportunity. He even bought her a book called Before Baby Comes and they read it together.
I decided to ignore the whole thing and pretend not to notice the watermelon growing under Annabelle’s T-shirt.
My mother couldn’t ignore it, though. You’d have thought Annabelle had gotten pregnant just to annoy her.
“I expect Madam will insist on a private hospital,” she sniffed. “There goes more money out of your father’s pocket. Of course, I had you at a State hospital, in and out in twenty-four hours, and none the worse for it. She’ll probably demand a nanny or something.”
“I’m sure she won’t, Mum,” I said. “She’s always going on about bonding with the baby and how important it is for a mother to keep it close and hug it all the time. She says it will give it a sense of security.”
Only Annabelle never called the baby It, always Master Thompson. I think she was willing it to be a boy.
“Bonding with your baby, what a lot of nonsense,” said my mother. “I had to go back to work when you were only six weeks old. Nobody ever asked if I wanted to bond with you.”
I suppose there was some advantage to marrying an older man like Dad. He has enough money these days for Annabelle to stay home and be a non-stop mum.
Two weeks before the baby was due, all her mates threw her a baby shower. And this meant most of my teachers turned up at our house, grinning and giggling and carrying bottles of wine and presents wrapped in special baby paper. Annabelle had been making stuff all afternoon, a big chocolate cake and little fiddly things in pastry.
“Won’t you be a sweetie and ice the cake, Jo?” she asked, standing there like a circus tent on stilts. “I’ve still got the cheese straws to make.”
So I said okay, and I quite enjoyed it, actually. It was kind of soothing to smooth the rich icing and hide the bumpy bits. I decorated it with a scattering of shaved chocolate and finished off the rest of the bar while I helped her set out the best glasses. I thought I could escape upstairs after that, but Annabelle asked me to hang around and make the coffee for everyone.
“About ten-ish. I’ll tell you when. If I know this lot, they’ll need a bit of sobering up!”
Miss Willis, the maths dragon? Mrs Conrad, the biology nut? Hard to believe.
But there they all were, hair well and truly down, shrieking with laughter and telling rude sex jokes. I mean, really rude, if my Dad had heard them, he’d have been shocked, but he was away on business for two days. Miss Willis had obviously forgotten I was there and told a really disgusting joke about a pineapple that Kenny had told us the week before.
It’s amazing how juvenile some people get when they’ve had too much wine, even teachers.
By the time they left, I could see that Annabelle was really tired. She’d spent the evening in an easy chair, smiling happily and opening baby gifts while all around, her mates were shrieking like parrots and knocking over their glasses. For nine months, she’d taken the ‘no alcohol’ thing very seriously and stuck to soda water the whole time on account of Master Thompson.
“I think I’ll go straight up to bed, Jo, I’ll see to this lot in the morning.”
The sitting room was a disaster zone of dirty glasses, empty bottles, and crisps trodden into the carpet, and it was very unusual for her to leave such a mess. I watched her go upstairs, holding onto the handrail and kind of pulling herself up, and I suddenly felt sorry for her. Being the size of an elephant was no fun.
So I spent the next half hour tidying up and washing the glasses. I even vacuumed the carpet. Moi! And I was feeling a real glow of virtue when I heard Annabelle calling my name in a funny voice.
She was lying on the bed holding her tummy, her face all red and peculiar.
“Jo, I think the baby’s coming,” she gasped. “My waters just broke.”
Well, I hadn’t read Before Baby Comes, so I didn’t know what she was talking about. But then I saw the bedcover was all wet.
“Shall I phone Dad?” To my surprise, my voice came out in a squeak. And it was a silly question anyway, Dad was away in London.
“No, call Doctor Scott. His number’s in the book next to the phone downstairs.”
There was such fear in her eyes that I thought it was a good thing I knew how to stay cool. She started groaning loudly, like someone on a stage, like she was trying to show the people in the back row she was really in pain. But she wasn’t acting. It sounded awful, and she grabbed hold of my hand and wouldn’t let go.
“Are you having contractions?” Well, everyone knows about contractions.
“Something’s wrong,” she whispered. “It’s like one long contraction. It just doesn’t stop.”
“Can’t you pant or something to help?”
“Noooo.”
I was starting to panic and unclamped her fingers from my hand.
“Annabelle, listen, I’ll run and phone Doctor Scott and come right back, okay?”
All she did was groan and gasp and clench up fistfuls of the bedcover, so I tore downstairs and tried to find his number. My fingers were trembling so much that I dropped the book, but eventually found him under D for Doctor instead of S for Scott. Only he wasn’t there, just a voice telling me to phone another number in the event of an emergency. This was one, all right, but I couldn’t find a pen to write down the other number.
Something clicked in my head, and I dialled 999. I must have sounded like a gibbering idiot, but the nice, calm voice on the other end connected me to the department.
“You’ll be speaking to a trained paramedic who will talk you through it until the ambulance arrives,” she said, but she didn’t understand. Annabelle was upstairs and I was downstairs, and that wasn’t going to work. So when a man spoke, I just shouted our address at him, added, “ And I’ll leave the door unlocked so you can just come straight upstairs. HURRY!” And slammed the phone down.
When I went back, Annabelle’s face had turned from red to white, and she was lying on her back making guttural noises.
“Jo, the baby’s being born. I can’t stop pushing, but I don’t think I’m supposed to yet.”
I started thinking of the movies I’d seen where the kindly old doctor asks for hot water and clean towels. What on earth would I do with those, even if I could get them? Annabelle grabbed my hand again and squeezed so hard I thought she’d break my fingers, but I just said calmly, “Don’t worry, Annabelle, the ambulance’ll be here a minute.”
“Did you dial 999?”
“Yes, and I told them to hurry.”
“Fat chance they’ll come before lunchtime tomorrow,” she said through gritted teeth. She couldn’t mean that!
“Hang on, Annabelle. Please. Please don’t have the baby yet.”
“I can’t help it,” she panted. “I have to push.”
It was awful, she was in such pain, and all I could do was say, “Hang on, Annabelle, you’re doing so well.”
But how did I know how she was doing? In the movies, when the women have babies, they pull faces for about thirty seconds and give a loud scream and the next thing they have this little bundle in their arms. And their hair is still smooth and shiny, and their lipstick isn’t even chewed off. But with Annabelle, it just went on and on and on, with her groaning and gasping and making mooing noises when she pushed. She looked quite violent, her mouth rigid with pain, and her hair all sweaty and messy.
I wiped her forehead with a tissue, and she gave a little smile.
“Thanks, Jo,” she whispered. “What would I have done without you? I’m so glad you’re here.”
Yes, well, I would rather have been somewhere else, but I didn’t have the option, did I?
“Can you see his head yet?” she gasped.
What? I had to look between her legs? Normally, I would have been totally embarrassed, but all this seemed to be happening to somebody else, so I obediently peered down and saw a huge black wet thing. It had to be the baby’s head.
“I can see his head, Annabelle! At least, I think that’s what it is.”
Just then, there was a thundering of feet on the stairs, and two men in white jackets came into the room, smiling and confident. I knew they’d come.
“Ah, something happening here, is it?” The blonde one grinned. “Looks like the cavalry arrived just in time. Don’t worry, Mum, you’re doing a great job. Just breathe in nice and deep, one last bi-ig push should do it..…”
They were so efficient and comforting and seemed to know exactly what to do. I grabbed Annabelle’s hand, and we both looked between her raised knees. And then she gave a loud sort of bellow that trailed off, and out came the whole baby. It shot out in a whoosh. Very messy. And it started to cry straight off, no picking it up by its heels and smacking it. Slippery and mucky and really ugly, but I couldn’t help it, I got tears in my eyes.
Annabelle was grinning and crying too, so there we were, both sniffing and crying and laughing.
“You are so clever!” I choked. “You did that so well!”
“Is he all right?” I suddenly realised she couldn’t see the baby; the two men paramedics were busy doing something with it.
“He’s perfect! He’s lovely.”
But then I looked again. He looked sort of deformed- surely it couldn’t be that long? I didn’t know how to tell her. The other paramedic saw my look of horror and said cheerfully, “Just going to cut the umbilical cord, sweetheart, and we’ll give your Mum your little sister to hold.”
I’d nearly made a fool of myself there. Of course, I knew about umbilical cords and stuff, we did them in Biology.
“A little girl! Oh wonderful! I wish your Dad were here. He’ll be so pleased.”
“I thought you both wanted a boy?”
“It doesn’t matter, as long as she has ten fingers and ten toes.”
She was looking miraculously like the usual Annabelle again, smiling cheerfully with the colour back in her cheeks.
“Here you go, Mum,” said the blonde one, and gave her the baby, all wrapped in a clean piece of cloth, although she wasn’t washed or anything. “Well done. Now you just hold her while we get everything sorted, then we’ll get you off to hospital.”
We both just gazed at the baby, grinning like crazy.
“Your baby sister, Miss Thompson. Are you disappointed that she’s not a brother? ”
“Of course not, I didn’t want one anyway.”
But Miss Thomson was perfect. I looked into her eyes, which seemed black and kind of slitty and scrunched up, and suddenly she opened them wide and looked straight at me. It was amazing, inside her I could see this real person looking out, and I felt a weird connection to this little sister, as if I’d known her for ages.
“She’ll have a lot to live up to, with you for a role model,” said Annabelle, playing with her tiny little fingers. “You were amazing, Jo. So cool in an emergency. I hope she has your common sense. And your musical ability and your sense of style….and you can help her with her homework… she’s a lucky little girl.”
Annabelle wasn’t even being sarcastic.
Actually, I’d never heard her be sarcastic about anything; she’s a really nice person.
I walked alongside her as they took her down the stairs to the ambulance on a stretcher, Miss Thompson still clutched to her chest.
“Phone your dad, won’t you?” she said as she left. “But wait till morning. No point in waking him tonight, he’s got a busy day ahead.”
It was past one o’clock when I went to the bathroom to clean my teeth. I looked at my reflection, but funnily, nothing had changed. I looked just the same. But inside, I felt different. Much older, as though something precious had been passed on to me, some secret thing that only girls know about. Well, women really. I suppose I just felt grown up.
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