Читать книгу The Elephant in the Room - Maya Fowler - Страница 5

When I was born, my mother thought she could get away with attaching the label Lilith Fields to me. She thought I’d go through life that way, and didn’t envisage me becoming a Lily. That’s her story, anyway, but people will do what they like with your name, and if you end up being Lily Fields, so be it.

Finding someone a label is a sensitive process, with lots of potential for screwing up. This my mother did – twice. As if being named after a pasture weren’t bad enough, it had to be Lilith, too. She never even looked it up. I did, eventually. Dust and a family of silverfish sprang from the pages of my grandmother’s faded blue dictionary as I scurried my way to the entry. It said: “Lilith: in Jewish folklore, a female demon who eats children.” So right from the beginning, I was doomed.

People call me reticent. They whisper about me; complain I don’t talk much; I carry secrets. This is true.

Things could have been very different. My mother had really liked Judith, a strong name: the woman in the Bible who’d severed the head of Holofernes. But a friend of my mother’s had already taken the name for her own baby. I was stuck with the L-word.

I must say, everyone thinks I’m a Lily. Down to my plain white face and ghostly eyebrows, I look like a lily. But I’m a Lilith.

My sister Beth arrived, with a new wave of inspiration on the “-th” theme; Ruth was a contender, but in the end my grandmother strong-armed it into Elizabeth – her own name. Then there’s Gracie, who, besides getting a label that really suited her, ended up being named after a famous singer. By mistake.

My mother chose the name just after my dad left. I was five years old, and she had only just fallen pregnant with Gracie. I don’t remember much about Frank, but I recall feeling glad that the shouting had stopped.

Three months after Gracie arrived, he got hit by a milk van in Main Road, Plumstead. Eyewitnesses later told my mother he’d been laughing so hard at one of his own jokes that he didn’t even look before he stepped off the pavement. His young companion had been pulled into the road along with him. Our whole street was scandalised when the details came to light. The two of them had been tied together at the neck by her hot-pink feather boa. Apparently the woman died with her legs sprawled wide, one knee up, the heel broken off her right sandal, hotpants stained. They said my father snuffed it with a smile on his face, which seemed even more pronounced because of his moustache. Nobody said it out loud, but the general feeling was that this was a lucky accident; just about the best thing that could have happened.