Michelle Vernal - The Traveller’s Daughter

“Yeah you’ve told me, it’s well weird that.” Yasmin’s voice was muffled, and Kitty pictured her cradling the phone between her chin and shoulder as she undid her laces.

“You didn’t know my mum, she wasn’t weird, just as stubborn as they come and if she made her mind up about something, then that was it, end of story.”

“Still, you don’t believe all that crap about her childhood being uneventful, do you because otherwise why all the secrecy?” Kitty could hear Yasmin unlocking her locker. Probably fishing her bag out of it with her spare hand. Kitty’s mother had been an enigma, unlike Yasmin’s mum with her hard face and dodgy back that got noticeably worse whenever she’d dragged her brood into the local benefits office to sign on for the sickness.

Yasmin’s childhood had been so very different to Kitty’s quiet and civilised upbringing. She’d grown up in a council flat fit to burst with half-brothers and sisters in Hatfield. There hadn’t been much in the way of money, but there was plenty in the way of noise. Their reasons for coming to London were so very different too. Yasmin’s had been to escape that noise for a while. She wanted to make her way in the world far away from the council estate existence she’d always known. Kitty’s had been to put as much distance as she could between herself and her ex, Damien, who lived in a posh Manchester apartment.

Both women had their dreams, though, and this was the common denominator that brought them together and sealed their friendship. Kitty’s was to open her cupcake café, and Yasmin’s was working towards designing her clothing label. One day, she would often say, the High Street stores she loved to browse, fingering the newest fabrics and imagining how she would improve the latest looks, would be stocking her brand. The models would be wearing her signature twist on the rockabilly look as they showed off her designs at London Fashion Week. They would strut their stuff down the catwalk to the tune of her all-time favourite performer, Elvis, after which they would spend their morning tea breaks at Kitty’s gorgeous little café. Slamming the locker door shut before sitting down on the bench, Yasmin asked, “Have you seen it, this photograph I mean?”

“No.”

“Didn’t he attach it?”

“He did, I just haven’t opened it yet.”

“Why the hell not?”

Kitty cringed. “Don’t shout, Yas and I haven’t opened it because I am scared. This is the first real clue to my mother’s past I have ever had.”

“All the more reason you need to open it!”

“I know, I want to, I just can’t seem to make myself do it. I wish you were here with me, and I wish I could bake. Baking always calms me down.”

“Right, Kitty Sorenson, listen to me! Now is not the time to be thinking about cakes.” Yasmin adopted the tone she used with her little brothers and sisters when they were awkward little toads. “You, my girl, are going to hang up this call, and then you are going to count to three, and when you get to number three you are going to open that attachment. Got it?”

“But–”

“No buts. I said got it?”

“Got it.”

“And then when you have done that you are going to forward the picture to me for a sticky beak. Right?”

“Right.”

“Right then, hit the red button.”

Kitty disconnected the call and counted to three.

Kitty chewed her bottom lip as she stared at the black and white photograph filling the small screen. Her eyes alighted instantly on the young girl pictured, and she barely registered the man next to her. It was like looking at a picture of herself as a teenager and at a stranger both at the same time. The difference being that her go-to outfit at sixteen had been a black T-shirt, denim mini and leggings, her hair had been straightened with almost religious regularity to resemble Jennifer Aniston’s do of the day. This girl in the photo, her mother, albeit a much younger and softer version than any she’d ever known, was dressed in a demure, feminine style.

Her look was that of Audrey Hepburn. Rosa was wearing a white, boat necked dress with puffed sleeves, cinched waist and a full skirt; her shoes were flat sandals. Her blonde hair was pulled up into a high ponytail, and she was sporting a blunt fringe that was sitting just above startlingly thick and dark eyebrows at odds with her fair hair. They were Kitty’s eyebrows, except her mother’s were obviously unfamiliar with tweezers back then, and as for that fringe, she cringed. It suited the times, but the length was one that would have seen her suing Tamsin at ‘Your Style’ who cut her hair whenever it got to the driving her bonkers length.

She continued to soak in the photograph absorbing not the background scene with its hazy stone archway and buildings but rather the look on her mother’s face. She was gazing up at the man next to her with a broad smile on her face obviously laughing at something he had just said. It was the naked longing in her eyes that shocked Kitty, though. His brooding, good looks were half hidden beneath a head full of thick, slightly too long dark curls as he looked down at Rosa. He was dressed in a plain shirt, half tucked into a pair of loose fitting, dark trousers. His sleeves were rolled up and on his feet he had a pair of boots that looked like they had seen better days. Strong worker’s hands gripped the wide, handlebars of an old-fashioned bike, its big wheels denoting its era.

The light surrounding the couple in the picture was dappled by sunshine peeping through the leafy arbour they were wandering beneath. This, their obviously private moment had been captured forever in a photograph that had the title Midsummer Lovers scrawled across the bottom left-hand corner of it. Her mother’s face was positively luminous Kitty realized, unable to tear her eyes away from the picture. “Oh, Mum,” she whispered aloud to the empty room for the second time that afternoon. It struck her then that she had never seen her mother look at her father the way she was looking at this stranger in the photo. Was that kind of blatant adoration the sole domain of the very young, she wondered, knowing that nobody who had ever been hurt or let down would ever be able to love with such an obvious unguardedness. It had been a long time since she had looked at anyone with that kind of heart on your sleeve openness and after Damien, she doubted she ever would again.

“What’s your story, Rosa?” Kitty closed her eyes. It was too much to take in. All these years of not knowing and now this photograph. It was a clue to her mother’s past, and yet at the same time, it told her absolutely nothing. All she knew now, was that at sixteen, she had been so bold as to be in some small town in France with a bloke with whom she was clearly besotted. Did she even want to know the story behind this picture? Her mother obviously had her reasons for never talking about the first nineteen years of her life.

As a child, Kitty had been curious but not bothered about what her mother had done before she’d married and before she had entered her life. For one thing, she simply could not imagine any other existence of importance for Rosa than that of being her mother and her father’s wife. That had changed though when the hormones had come home to roost, and she had begun to resent the secrecy behind Rosa’s past. As a teenager, she’d desperately wanted to know her maternal history. She’d imagined the worst, no matter how many times her mother assured her there were no skeletons hidden away in her closet. Mean Nuns hadn’t reared her in a cold stone convent or anything like that; it was just a past that was not worth revisiting. This vague, hand sweeping reply had not satisfied Kitty in the slightest, but her mother would not be swayed to confide in her nor would her father whom she could normally twist around her little finger. Eventually, she ran out of steam and had to let it go, exhausted from her years of pent-up teenage frustration.