Chapter 48: Does She Not, To Put It In a Nutshell, Have Any Mates?

So much has happened so fast that I have forgotten to mention some things. It’s because they haven’t felt germane, exactly, but I want to say them now because they might make me seem less of a freak.

For instance, I have talked about my excellent relationship with my ‘real’ parents – the ones who brought me up – and I have mentioned having friends, and generally hinted that my life seemed quite normal ten days ago (or at least up until my wedding, which was a week before that). Since things went haywire, I have periodically mentioned that I wanted to get in touch with the people I knew, but have been stopped from doing so by the Teacher, Johnny Depp, et al. I was stopped because I was in the middle of crises, or my friends hadn’t been re-vetted, or various other good reasons, given that the people stopping me were operating under a war-footing. But of course, in these last ten days, at quieter moments, I have been allowed to speak to my family and friends. If I hadn’t, they would have assumed I was kidnapped and called the police, and made a fuss in the news, etc., and generally done what they could to counter the ludicrous pictures of me shopping with Victoria Beckham and snogging poor evil Matt Damon. I couldn’t tell my friends the details, but I said that there was something crazy going on which needed me to play a role, and that I would explain it all as soon as I could. Then, I said… Look. I’ll stop there. Suffice to say that I spoke to them, and at the end of the conversation they were reassured – not completely, but enough to let me be for the short time this whole nightmare was going to take. Talking to them made me feel better. My parents took it better than my friends and also worse. They took it better because they are much wiser than my friends, and more sensible, and they had also always known there was something curious about how I appeared in their lives, so deep down they were less surprised. But they took it worse for the same reason: it was something they had always feared.

What I am saying is that, in spite of the impression you might have got from this story, I was a normal sort of youngish person living in London. I went to work every day. I went skiing every Christmas. I had some great friends I saw most weekends, and some less good friends I met up with for drinks during the week. Because of all what has happened since my wedding, I’ve ended up telling all the most colourful bits of my history, as if it was all leading up to now. But that’s not how any of it seemed at the time. Take the archenemy period with Cathy Calloway: I used to think it was just a good way of telling an anecdote about my student days. Also, there is nothing the faintest bit unusual about the crush I had on my work-neighbour which I never did anything about. I dare say the night I spent with lovely Will, which was our secret, was unusual, but everyone who is thirty has done some things that sound colourful if you write them down – we all have baggage and mine is nothing to write home about. It’s not like I was a happily married soap-starlet’s lesbian mistress, and even if I were, it is totally possible to be one of those and have a very ordinary boring life, I happen to know, because, well, we’ll not go into that.

I don’t know why I’m saying this. It’s protesting too much, since my life has turned unusual to a world-changing degree. But put it this way: I bet it’s normal for normal people to go on and on about how normal they are when they are put in a situation where other people might think they are abnormal. I wasn’t a different person, in spite of what had happened. I wasn’t cleverer, braver or more beautiful. I had been forced to make certain decisions, and I was convinced that I was somehow important in spite of my intrinsic ordinariness, but I was the same person to look at, with the same worries and uncertainties. Thus, in need of comfort, the most comforting person I could think of was my mother. Thus, when told I couldn’t get in touch with her, and in such a way as to indicate that something terrible had happened, I flipped out. I can’t remember what I shouted at Miss Smallbone, but I do know that the next thing I knew she was standing with two fingers pressed to my elbow while I was frozen, every nerve and muscle locked helplessly. ‘No, Mary Sue,’ she said. ‘We cannot afford this. Your mother cannot afford it. Time is a luxury we do not have. So is rage. We must keep moving forward. I will release you now, and you will then be calm.’

She released me, and my body rebooted in sections. My tongue was clumsy as I stammered, ‘Is she safe? Where is she?’

‘The Master has her, and…’ Miss Smallbone’s face went white and her hand covered her little round mouth. ‘Oh Mary Sue, I am so sorry. Of course. I am not… I mean… You do not mean your…’ I was as terrified by Miss Smallbone’s stumbling as I had been by anything else she had said, and I started to realise how much I has subconsciously come to depend on her calm omniscience. ‘The mother who raised you is fine. She is untouched. I mean… The Master has your birth mother.’