PART THREE
MUM/1940s VINTAGE CHEONGSAM

1

It had been three years since Bob had left me and the kids and things were just starting to get back on an even keel when Mark delivered his bombshell. For the last few months he’d been away most weekends - he was going out with one of Ellen’s old schoolmates who was now at art college. I always insisted he came back home on the Sunday night so he was ready for school on the Monday morning - it being his final year and him having exams and all - and I always stayed up until he got home just to check he was ok. Like I say, it came out of the blue. He seemed really happy. I hadn’t met Sadie - that was her name - but he talked about her a lot and I could tell he was keen. As far as I knew, she was the first girl he’d been out with.

Anyway, he came home later than usual that night. He’d texted to let me know - he’s always been thoughtful like that - and I’d thought about going to bed, but then changed my mind. He seemed nervous when he came in; I didn’t get my usual hug. He just looked at me and said “Mum, we need to talk.”
I thought that maybe they’d split up and he was upset. I made him a cup of tea and we sat at the table in the kitchen.
He took a sip and made to speak. “You remember the end of year school party. Last year. When I met Sadie.”
I nodded.
“You were on holiday with Derek, remember?”
I nodded again.
“It was fancy dress. I went wearing…” he hesitated “I went wearing Ellen’s flapper dress.”
I laughed. “Ooh, you’ll have to show me the pictures..” But he looked so upset I stopped straight away.
He continued. “And then that Christmas. Ellen invited me to a ball at uni. That’s when I started going out with Sadie properly.” He looked up from his tea. “I went to that ball wearing a dress too.”
“Mark, I don’t understand…”
His voice was shaking now as he continued. ‘When I go to see Sadie at uni, mum, I go as a girl. Every weekend I’ve been living as a girl. Sadie likes me like that. And so do I, Mum. I…I think I’m a girl. I mean, inside.” He started to cry.
I’d been holding his hand across the table and I let go, recoiling. “ Mark, you…don’t be so fucking stupid. You finish with that girl, do you understand? You fucking well finish with her…” and I stormed away from the table, upstairs to my room.

The following morning he’d left by the time I got up. I telephoned the girls at the salon and told them I wouldn’t be in that day.. I’d not slept all night; thoughts racing through my head. Mark had always been such a sensitive boy - he’d taken it really hard when his father had left. And I remembered it had crossed my mind once or twice that he might be gay so I’d been relieved when he’d started seeing Ellen’s friend. Maybe I should have spent more time with him recently, but he’d seemed so happy. Maybe I’d been too pre-occupied when I’d started dating with Derek again. I texted him, just to ask if he was ok, but he didn’t reply. I sat down at my computer and googled ‘boy wants to be a girl’ and started reading.

I was so relieved when I heard his key in the lock that afternoon. I ran into the hall to catch him, to stop him from going straight upstairs to his room before I had a chance to speak.
“I’m sorry!” I blurted out. He dropped his schoolbag on the floor and looked across at me. “I’m sorry.” I repeated. “For what I said last night. I didn’t mean it.”
He nodded almost imperceptibly in acknowledgement.
We went into the kitchen and he starting talking, picking up from where I’d stormed off the night before.
“It’s not Sadie’s fault, you know. It was there before. Even when I was, like, seven and Ellie and me would play dress up, I always wanted to be the princess. And for years I’ve been sneaking into her room when she isn’t around, trying on her stuff”
“Ellen knows?”
He nodded. “I’m sorry. She’s been telling me I need to speak with you for ages but I’ve kept putting it off. It’s not easy…” He looked up at me with those big beautiful sensitive blue eyes of his and I started to cry.

When I came down for breakfast the next morning he was at the kitchen table, tucking into a bowl of cornflakes just like usual. I reached down and gave him a big squeeze.
“So when do I get to meet her?”
He mumbled through a mouthful of cereal. “Sadie?…”
“No. Lucy, silly.”
He blushed. “Oh. How about tonight? I can make you your tea?”

She was in the kitchen cooking when I got home from work. She had her back turned away from me, and clearly hadn’t heard me come in, and I watched her for a while as she stood at the hob, stirring a pot. She was wearing a short floral print dress with a corseted top and a full skirt. Her hair had been arranged with what must have taken a whole can of hairspray into an artfully mussed-up arrangement, decorated with a ribbon printed in the same fabric as the dress. She reminded me of when I used to watch Paula Yates on The Tube in the 1980s - she looked cool, and arty, and her movements were graceful and entirely feminine.
I put my bags down at the table. “Fucking Hell.”
She span around. “I’m sorry, mum, I’ll go get changed…”
“No! It’s not…It’s fine. It’s just a shock, that’s all. You look…I don’t know…”
She stood nervously facing me, her bottom lip between her teeth.
“Come here. Let me get a proper look at you.”
She smoothed the front of her dress and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. Her heels clipped across the tiles on the kitchen floor.
“Nice dress.” She smiled and, gathering it at her hips, spun it around so it flared out.
“You look just like my mum. I’ve got photos of her, wearing a dress almost exactly like that, back in the fifties. And the way you walked just now. I can remember her when I was little, how she moved. Just like her…”
She smiled “We’ve got good genes, me and you. And Ellie too. You’re beautiful too you know. You don’t appreciate yourself enough.” She stopped for a moment. “Somehow it’s easier saying things like that when I’m…well, when I’m like this.”
I took a step towards her and held out my arms, and pulled her tightly in to me, and she held me there quietly as I cried.

2

Now I’m not saying that everything was all sweetness and light from that point on. It wasn’t. There were some dark times, some really dark times. But there were moments of joy as well; moments that I’d not have experienced if Lucy hadn’t come along.

Mark finished school two weeks after I first met Lucy, and she went full time after that. She’d decided she wanted to follow me into becoming a hairdresser, and she enrolled into college that summer. A couple of days each week she’d come into my salon, where she learned the ropes really quickly.

Not seeing Mark anymore was like a bereavement. I’d regularly wake up in the middle of the night, after dreaming that I’d been spending time with him, and then my stomach would lurch as I realised he wasn’t here anymore. And yet a lot of the things I had loved about him I could still see in Lucy - his sense of humour, his warmth, his gentle soul. His beautiful blue eyes were still there, even now when they were framed with liner and shadow and mascara. Traces of his mannerisms still surfaced in her from time to time - stupid things like the way he bit his lip when he was nervous. On other occasions she was utterly different - the way she moved, the way she spoke. Sometimes in the past when I drove home from work I used to pass Mark as he was walking back from school and I’d recognise him from a couple of hundred yards away just by the shape of his silhouette and how he walked. And it would give me a warm feeling, seeing him unexpectedly like that, and I’d think ‘he’s mine’, and my heart would sing. And I didn’t get that with Lucy - that recognition from the tiniest gesture, or sound, that comes from being a mother. I was making friends with her, and I loved her, definitely. But something intangible wasn’t there anymore, and I suspected that it would never come back, and that made me sad.

Lucy was happy, though, and that was the most important thing. There was an energy about her, a radiance, that I’d never seen before in Mark. She loved her work, and was starting to show a real gift for hairdressing. But more than that, she was clearly head over heels in love with Sadie. The two of them would come over on a Sunday once a month or so. Ellen and Tommy would come too, and we’d have a big traditional family roast. They were the best times - seeing all of them so happy. It was at one of those lunches, a few months after Lucy had come into our lives, that Ellen announced that she and Tommy were going to get married. I was a bit taken aback at first and asked why they weren’t waiting until she’d finished university, but she just looked at Tommy, and he took her hand , and she said “We’ve got the best reason in the world.”
Sadie squealed. “You’re pregnant?” And Ellen just smiled in response.

It was a winter wedding. We kept it small - just family and a few friends. Ellen was happy with that, and it was all that we could have afforded anyway. We held the ceremony at the local church in Woolton and had a meal and a few drinks afterwards in the pub. The girls looked absolutely beautiful of course. Ellen had bought a really simple but elegant off the peg dress. It was full length, bias cut satin with a cowl neck and a short train. Sadie worked her magic to make it into something really special. She took some lengths of green ribbon and wove them around the dress - starting at the train and then spiralling up around the skirt. One ribbon ended in a sprig of snowdrops at the shoulder, another crossed her opposite shoulder and spiralled down around her arm, ending in a bigger bouquet of snowdrops that she carried during the ceremony, and the third crossed over the nape of her neck into her hair where I carefully arranged it into a really elaborate up do, complete with further snowdrops again. She looked incredible - like an elf from Lord of the Rings. Lucy and Sadie were bridesmaids of course, along with Patsy and Sam. They wore khaki green dresses matching the colour of the snowdrop stems and the ribbons on Ellen’s dress, and similar in style. Each of them had a single white ribbon spiralling up and along their arms to more bouquets of snowdrops - smaller and less elaborate than Ellen’s. Lucy did an amazing job of doing all their hair whilst I concentrated on the bride.

It was a perfect day. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. Maybe when I got married - although it’s difficult to look back on that now without remembering what a bastard Bob was to me afterwards. And maybe in the opposite way to how my own wedding was tainted by what came later, Ellen’s somehow shone as a kind of beacon of joy in contrast to the darkness that followed. About a week before the ceremony, I’d found a lump in my breast. I didn’t mention it to anybody because I didn’t want them worrying about me in the run up to the big day. The Monday after, I went to the doctors and they referred me to the hospital oncology department. I took Lucy along to the appointment - Ellen was still on honeymoon - and when the diagnosis came, it was about as bad as it could be.

I started a course of chemo just to try to buy myself some more time - I wanted to see the baby arrive, and my two girls graduate. I was throwing up several times every day, lost a ton of weight and, worst of all for me, lost all of my hair. Ellen and Tommy moved in with us to help out. Lucy took over everything I’d been doing at my salon, on top of everything she was already doing in the last few months of her course. The chemo finished in April, and by the beginning of May I felt ever so slightly better.

The girls had been keeping my spirits up by telling me all about how they were getting on with their studies. Sadie especially was buzzing with excitement about her final fashion show. In honour of her mum, and her mum’s grandad who’d been in the Beijing Opera back in the 1920s, she’d decided to base her show around Chinese Opera themes. But it being Sadie, there had to be a twist, and that twist was Liverpool. She’d enlisted a couple of Chinese friends to act as her models; one to reprise her great grandad’s role of playing a female part (which was the tradition back then, apparently) and one to play the evil baddie. And she’d asked Lucy to play the heroine. Sadie had long since established herself as the star of her course, and it felt like the entire art school was going to turn out to see her show. I was determined not to miss it and, feeling a little better, I’d volunteered to help the models with their hair.

The costumes were incredible. Viewed from a distance, the ones the two guys were wearing looked exactly like traditional Opera outfits - incredibly vivid colours, flowing fabrics with sleeves draped down to the floor and amazingly intricate headdresses. But when you looked closer you could see the twist that Sadie had brought. The headdresses each had a band of circular shapes - maybe a dozen or so on each one - arrayed like a halo, sitting on stalks like insect antennae about four or five inches above the forehead. Traditionally they’d have been simple polished metal globes, but in Sadie’s case each one was a tiny, individual 3D printed head of a famous Liverpool footballer. The fabric of the dresses themselves, which would have been traditionally embroidered with Chinese symbols, were decorated with images of iconic Liverpool buildings - the Liver Building, St. George’s Hall, Sefton Park Palm House. The amount of work that must have gone into making it all was unbelievable.

The dress that Lucy wore was much less elaborate than the other two, and in contrasting with them, it emphasised the qualities of all three. It was a simple, classical, elegant, floor length cheongsam in pale cherry blossom pink with silver embroidery. Again, like the other costumes, it looked entirely traditional at first glance, with cap sleeves and a mandarin collar, but a closer examination revealed that the subjects of the embroidered decoration weren’t Chinese symbols but instead portraits of all the people from the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers album cover. It was stunning and Lucy looked absolutely beautiful.

Before the show I’d helped out by doing the hair and installing the headdresses on the models. Lucy’s was longer now, and I’d dressed it carefully into a French plait that complemented the simplicity of her dress. She’d sat in front of me, her back to me, facing a mirror.
“You look absolutely gorgeous, love. I’m glad I had the chance to help out.”
“Aw, thanks mum! I’m so happy you were able to be here.”
“You know.” I rested my hand on her shoulder.”I’ve never done your hair before. It’s been lovely. I’m glad I had the chance before…well, you know…”
She reached up and placed her own hand on top of mine. “Oh mum, I love you so much.”

After the show I went home and left the girls to it for the partying. But I couldn’t sleep, and I was in the kitchen making myself a drink when I heard Lucy come in. She was crying hysterically.
I ran to her and took her by the shoulders. “What is it love? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Sadie. She’s going to Los Angeles. She’s been offered a job with one of the big film studios over there.”
“Oh Lucy!”
“She said she’d stay if I asked her too, but I can’t do that can I? I mean, it’s her dream. I can’t ask her not to …”
“You should go with her.”
“Oh, mum! You know I won’t do that! Not now. Not with…not with things the way they are…” and she sobbed, violently and ceaselessly, like all the pains of all the world were hers, and hers alone, and I held her tight, wrapping my arms around her as though a thousand men were trying to tear her loose.