Book of Lost Threads - By Tess Evans Page 0,13

never occurred to her that there was anything remarkable about having two mothers.

She was still in first grade when, walking home from school one day, she was confronted by three older boys who shattered her simple view of the world. She was with Zoe and Michelle, her two best friends. They were nice friends, she remembered. It was a nice day and they were talking about—she couldn’t remember what, but it was funny. They were giggling, smothering their giggles behind grubby fingers, doubled over with secret laughter. She did remember that—that and a little cloud, shaped like her granny’s Staffie, Geordie. The three friends crossed the road at the lights and began to skip across the park. They were nearly at the other side when three fourth-grade boys leaped out from the bushes in front of them.

‘M’randa’s mother’s a lezzo!’ they chanted. ‘M’randa’s mother’s a lezzo!’

The little girls moved closer together. Puzzled, Zoe and Michelle looked at each other and then at Moss, who was equally puzzled but on the defensive. The trouble was, she wasn’t sure whether it was Amy or Linsey she had to defend.

‘Which mother?’ she challenged.

The boys feigned paroxysms of laughter, snorting and guffawing, punching each other with delight. ‘Which mother! Did you hear what she said? Which mother!’

The little girls took the opportunity to flee.

‘Lezzos,’ her tormentors called out after her. ‘Lezzos.’

Moss burst through the door and flung herself at Amy. ‘David Hynes and the other boys said you and Mummy Linsey are lizards,’ she sobbed.

Twenty-three-year-old Moss slid down into her sleeping bag and remembered Linsey’s distressed indignation and the embrace of Amy’s soft arms as her mothers attempted to explain their relationship to a little girl struggling with matters beyond her comprehension. She had finally found comfort in one certainty. ‘I knew you weren’t lizards,’ she told them firmly. ‘David’s a stupid idiot.’

Kids like me have it so much easier today, Moss thought. It was so unfair. They were good parents, both of them.

Yes, she loved them both, but there was a stillness, a placidity, in Amy that made her seem somehow safer. As she matured, Moss became aware that Linsey was all angles and energy, and she saw how Amy’s slow, slovenly beauty drove her partner to a distraction of love and fury. In many ways Moss was like Linsey, but despite that, or because of it, the child gravitated to Amy. As a consequence, she too experienced Linsey’s sharpness and often felt she had fallen short. In her childish way, Moss tried to please, tidying her bedroom, for instance, only for Linsey to cluck over the books she’d pushed under the bed, or flick at the dust she’d failed to see on the dressing-table.

‘Miranda, is it too much to ask that you put a little effort into your room? Go back and do it properly.’

And if Amy didn’t come to her rescue, Moss would sulkily comply.

She tried hard at school, but soon discovered that she wasn’t the prodigy Linsey believed she ought to be. Despite her best efforts, the As were elusive and Cs more common than Bs. With the exception of music, at which she excelled, Miranda tries hard was the best she could hope for on her school reports.

Linsey was neither cruel nor ignorant. She knew that a child who is trying and only achieving Bs and Cs is worthy of praise, possibly even more so than the gifted A student. But Moss always ran first to Amy with her report and sheltered there from the frown of disappointment she sensed rather than saw as Linsey scanned her meagre achievements. It mattered little that this was always followed by: Good girl. Maybe better next time. Moss didn’t want to be a good girl. She wanted to be a smart girl. A clever girl. A girl of whom Mummy Linsey could be proud.

‘To think your father was a mathematician,’ Linsey once said, shaking her head over the results of a maths test. Moss was instantly alert.

‘Linsey . . .’ Amy’s voice was laden with warning.

Moss had filed that snippet away. It was all she knew of her father, and she never dared to ask for more until much later.

The last of the rain spattered like gravel on her father’s tin roof, and Moss became aware of the stirring of a new day. A cock crowed in the distance and the window shape emerged, a faint luminosity on the opposite wall. She thought of the morning when Linsey (she was just Linsey,

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