The Dress

19.

A pair of ballet shoes. Red silk. Not for sale.



‘But I still don’t understand,’ David was saying, ‘The girl’s told us everything. So why do you still want to leave? I don’t get it.’

Ella clattered the coffee filter against the side of the sink.

‘That makes two of us, then,’ she said.

Fabbia sighed. Her hand hovered over a cardboard box that she’d set on the draining board, ready to pack with kitchen equipment.

‘It’s really very simple. There are things that neither of you know or understand and I’m not going to start explaining them. But it’s even clearer to me now that we’re not welcome here and we never will be. Jean Cushworth, Pike, they’ve got it in for us, they don’t want us here. And where they lead, hundreds of others will follow. So we have to leave before things get any more complicated.’

‘No, you don’t,’ David said. ‘Fabbia, please. You don’t have to leave. You don’t have to go anywhere. Just stop for a minute, Fabbia. Slow down. Listen to me.’

He took her gently by the wrist. He prised a coffee cup wrapped in newspaper from her hand and laid it carefully on the table.

‘Please, Fabbia. I’ve told you. I want you and Ella to come and live with me. Please let me take care of you.‘

Ella watched as Mamma pulled her hand away. She saw Mamma’s eyes flash in that dangerous way. She watched her draw herself up straighter, tighten her lips in that thin, hard line. Her words were precise and carefully pronounced.

‘David, I think I’ve been very clear. That’s not what I want. Now, please, I must ask you to leave, to let me get on with what I have to do.’

David’s body went limp. It was as if she’d hit him, right there, wallop, in the middle of his chest, thought Ella.

She followed him down the stairs.

‘David,’ she whispered and, when he turned, ‘please don’t give up on her. Please. I don’t want us to leave either.’

David shrugged and held up his hands in a small gesture of helplessness. ‘I don’t know what else I can do, Ella. I just don’t know…’

As she watched him cross the courtyard, she felt hollowed out, emptier than she ever had before.

She could feel the air thickening around her, the gathering of The Signals in swirls of yellow static, around her neck and the back of her head. She could hardly breathe.





The story of the red shoes



To understand my mother, Fabbia Moreno, there are two more stories that I need to tell you. The second of these stories is the story of the red shoes. I’m sure you know how it goes.

As a young girl in Tehran, Mamma was taken to see The Red Shoes one Saturday after school. It was the first film she’d ever seen. She remembers sitting in the darkened cinema with Madaar-Bozorg and looking up to see the motes of dust drifting in the beam from the projector and how the woman sitting next to her paused, her handful of pistachio nuts halfway to her mouth, as the curtains swished apart and the film appeared on the screen.

There in the dark, Mamma fell in love with Moira Shearer, the ballerina with the long red hair. She was already taking ballet lessons at the lycee.

She told me that she would stand in front of her dressing-table mirror, practising plié, port de bras, whilst whispering lines from the film out loud:

Why do you want to dance?

Why do you want to live?

She was too young to understand the irony. All she wanted was red shoes with red ribbons.

That long hot summer, she begged her grandmother. There was a shop in their neighbourhood, on the corner by the café, that would dye your shoes for you in any colour.

Madaar-Bozorg would not give in.

‘Child, don’t you remember how the film ends? Don’t you know what happens when you want something too much? It eats you up from the inside. You’ll never be free of it, never be able to rest.’

When Mamma turned eighteen, she couldn’t wait to leave. She packed her small blue suitcase with the essential things that she imagined she might need for her new life in Paris. She kissed her grandmother and took a taxi to the airport.

‘Go. Yes, you must go,’ Madaar-Bozorg had agreed. The city was already changing around them and it wouldn’t be long before little girls could no longer take ballet lessons, before women couldn’t even go out into the street without a headscarf covering their hair.

On the way to the airport, they passed through streets she’d never even seen before, neglected shop-fronts, dusty squares where the café windows were half-boarded over.

The taxi driver slammed on the brakes.

A woman had run out into the middle of the street. Mamma could see that her face was bleeding. There were deep gouges down her face, her dress was ripped and her feet were bare.

For a moment, the woman was caught there, framed in the windscreen, her eyes too wide and the blood on her face, before a man appeared and dragged her backwards by her hair onto the pavement.

Mamma could see now that there was a small knot of people around them and still more gathering. One of them, an old woman wrapped in a black chador, spat at the woman and muttered something. Another man picked up a stone from the street and flung it at her. The woman cowered, trying to shield her face with her bare arms. She crouched in the dirty street and Mamma could hear her voice: ‘Please, please, Safiq, listen to me, I haven’t done anything…’

‘What’s happening?’ Mamma asked.

‘She has brought shame on her family,’ said the taxi driver, scratching his chin. ‘What’s to be done? They will probably kill her.’

Sitting there in the back of the taxi, with the taxi driver’s prayer beads swinging from the rearview mirror and the woman’s voice in her ears, Mamma remembered the ending from her favourite film, the part where Vicky, the ballerina, has jumped from the balcony and is lying broken on the stretcher, asking her husband to please take off her red shoes.

As she sat there in the back of the taxi, Mamma said, she realised that perhaps she might have to choose.

For so many years after, she wouldn’t talk about the Old Country, the one that she’d lost. It’s a different place now, she used to say. The place that I’m from doesn’t exist any more.

This was why she refused to teach me any Farsi. Because she believed that people in the West associated it with ignorance and lack of education, with young girls swathed in black from head to toe and women stoned to death in their own streets. They think we’re all terrorists, she said.

But she did tell me my great-grandmother’s stories, the stories from that lost country, the one that came before.

Yes, to understand the woman I learned to call not Madaar in her own language but Mamma in her husband’s language and then eventually Mum, you have to understand how much she wanted to leave the past behind.

In the end, it wasn’t so much that she wanted something else, something more. It was the thing that she didn’t want, the thing that she was afraid of, that ate away at her from the inside. That was the reason she couldn’t be still. That was what made it so hard for her to stop moving.

It took me a while to work it out. She was so good at pretending. She’d put on a dress, line her eyes with kohl, outline her smile with red lipstick and no one would ever know.

But despite all this and the beautiful shoes in her suitcase - leopard print and gold and, of course, glossy red - she wasn’t dancing. She was running.


‘So where will we go, Mum? What’s the plan? And what about school, my exams, all of that stuff…’

Mamma refused to meet her eye.

‘I’m not exactly sure,’ she said ‘I haven’t quite got it all worked out yet. But I will. You know me. By the end of the week, I’ll know what’s happening.’

Ella picked up a magazine that she’d left on the kitchen table. It was folded back at a page from the classifieds:

‘Wanted: Live-in housekeeper for private home in beautiful setting in rural Scottish Highlands. Own accommodation provided to very high standard in separate coach house, plus use of car. To provide meals for Italian family of four, supervise cleaning and general maintenance. Fluent Italian a definite advantage… ‘



Ella didn’t finish reading.

‘Is this what you’ve got in mind? THIS?’ She didn’t even try to keep the anger out of her voice. ‘Rural bloody Scotland?’

‘Don’t swear,’ said Mamma, automatically.

‘But what about the shop, your business, everything you’ve worked for? What about me? I don’t want to live in some big old house in the middle of nowhere. For God’s sake, mum. I’ll end up like Katrina!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Mamma, quietly.

But Ella could see that she hadn’t made up her mind. There was a little chink of doubt, a little gap in Mamma’s usually cast-iron determination.

‘What about David?’ she said.

Mamma waved her hand in irritation, as if she were swatting away a fly.

‘Tsk, Ella. Let me get on.’


Ella had only been to David’s house a couple of times before. The houses in his street all looked the same. Large stone terraces of three stories, small front gardens behind iron railings, front doors painted in elegant shades of green or grey and flanked by carefully manicured bay trees.

But David’s house, Ella remembered now, had roses growing around the doorway. Mamma had remarked at how beautiful they were, the flowers big and pink and wind-blown. Ella breathed their fragrance in as she took the knocker in her hand. It sounded too loud in the quiet street. She waited.

No answer. Perhaps he’d been called to the surgery.

A woman came out of the nextdoor house, negotiating the steps with a pram. She smiled at Ella.

‘If you’re after Dr Carter, you’ve just missed him. He went out ten minutes ago.’ She nodded to the gap where David always parked his car.

‘Thanks,’ said Ella. She wondered what to do next. Perhaps she should leave a note. She fished in her bag for a piece of paper.

The neighbour was already half-way up the road. Ella could hear her, cooing to the baby in the pram. She tried not to think about what it would be like to live here, in this nice neat house, on this nice quiet friendly street with Mamma and David.

She decided to walk to the surgery. Perhaps she’d find him there.

She turned left through the park at the end of the street and kept going, over the bridge where she’d sat with Billy that night, up the steps, hitting the main road now, with its steady flow of traffic.

Only a couple of weeks, but it already seemed such a long time ago. She thought of Billy and felt that familiar fluttery feeling in her stomach. She hadn’t told him that they were leaving, after all. Not yet.

As if on cue, her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket. A text message from Billy: El? Where are you? XXX

She swallowed. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t let herself.

She was so lost in her own thoughts, walking towards the surgery, that she almost didn’t see it. Up there, on the left, outside Katrina’s house, a flash of yellow between the trees. She got closer.

Yes, it was what she’d thought. An ambulance parked in the driveway, its doors open. She started to run towards it, the gravel getting into her sandals, slowing her down.

And then out of Katrina’s front door, ahead of the stretcher, came David, bending to help lever the wheels of the trolley down the steps.

‘David!’

He turned.

‘Ella,’ he said, and a wave of concern crossed his face, ‘Is everything alright? Your mum?’

‘Oh, yes. Yes. She’s… well, she’s OK, I suppose. I was just looking for you. But what’s happened?’

From the stretcher there came a low moaning sound. Ella made out a limp figure under the red blanket, a face with a plastic mask over it, before the ambulance people – a man and a woman – began trundling the stretcher towards the ambulance, the man holding a drip full of some clear fluid high above his head.

David took her arm, manoeuvering her off to one side. ‘It’s Katrina’s mum,’ he said. ‘I got the call fifteen minutes ago. I told Graham to call an ambulance, right away. They were very fast. I got here at roughly the same time.’

‘But what happened?’

‘I don’t know yet. I shouldn’t even be talking to you about this, you understand? Overdose, we think. Graham found her collapsed on the living room floor. She’d been drinking a lot. She was on some medications…’

Katrina appeared in the doorway now, with Graham behind her, his hand on her shoulder. Katrina looked dazed and white-faced. She looked over at Ella and smiled weakly. Ella waved her hand.

‘Will she be OK?’

‘She should be,’ said David. ‘Graham heard her fall so it was all very immediate. She’s just about conscious now and her breathing’s not too bad. They’re pretty efficient with this kind of thing. I hope they’ll soon get her stabilised.’

Katrina and her dad disappeared into the ambulance.

‘Are you going with them?’

‘No. Nothing I can do. I’ll phone in a bit and find out how she is.’

They watched the ambulance pull out of the driveway, its lights flashing. David took his car keys out of his pocket.

‘So, you say you were looking for me? Want a lift?’