Half-truths & White Lies by Jane Davis

balding
father to the man I had seen in Uncle Pete's photograph
album. A black leather jacket with The Spearheads painted on it in white amid a design of an eagle,
feathers and arrows. Infused with the smell of beer and
smoke, this was the jacket that Uncle Pete had
described.
    I picked it up and felt the weight of it. Having seen
the photograph album, it wasn't difficult to imagine my
mother's eyes following my father down the road on the
day that they met and Uncle Pete running after him in
a vain attempt to impress the girl of his dreams, who
would remain just that. I thought of the photos of my
father singing, eyes closed with concentration, and of
my mother focused on the stage, unaware of the camera,
lost in the crowd. And I wished with all my heart that I
had known those people.

Chapter Ten
    It wasn't that I was uninterested in my mother's world.
It was just that oil-stained overalls seemed far more
accessible to me than the treasures of her dressing table.
I was not a pretty child. When strangers met us and
peered at me in my pushchair, the shapes of their
mouths changed from the pre-prepared 'Ahh' reserved
for all babies and toddlers, to the uncertain surprise of
an 'Oh', and they would enquire of my mother
sympathetically, 'Takes after her father, does she?' Being
a tomboy was an obvious choice.
    My mother could look glamorous with a rolled-up
towel piled high on her head after washing her hair.
And despite my father's constant assurances that she
would look good in a bin liner, she had a keen sense of
what suited her. She may have looked a million dollars,
but when I was young she made her own clothes,
shopping carefully for offcuts and ends of rolls after she
had calculated exactly how much material she needed.
Money was tight, and my mother was frugal but
resourceful.
    I can remember the sound of heavy-handled pinking
shears cutting through the fabric that she had marked
out so carefully using a flat triangle of dressmakers'
chalk; can picture her leaning over the table with a row
of pins in her mouth, each with a different coloured
head, spikes projected outwards. With my jaw still on
the mend, I could do a reasonable impression of her
warnings not to make her talk to save her from swallowing
them. She demonstrated how to thread the sewing
machine, concentration furrowing her forehead as the
material passed under the needle. I loved the sheer
magic of watching a dress take shape. I still do. Nothing
bought in a shop ever fitted her the way that her handmade
clothes did. She made sure of that, adding extra
tucks where the pattern didn't result in the fit that she
was looking for.
    I wasn't expecting to find anything old and filled with
memories in my mother's side of the wardrobe. Once
she grew tired of her clothes they were demoted to
dressing-up material or recycled into something new for
me. An unworn dress and jacket bought for a wedding
that hadn't yet taken place brought a lump to my throat.
She would have hated the waste of it. I wondered if I
should put them on one side for Aunty Faye as the
sisters were the same dress size, although they would
both say 'same size, different shape' when asked if they
had ever thought of sharing clothes. The real issue was
not one of body shape but of taste.
    I worked my way ruthlessly through her wardrobe,
not daring to stop and look at individual items. After I
had finished I sat on the padded stool at her dressing
table facing the silver-framed photograph of the three of
us, me in the middle, gap-toothed and grinning, flanked
by Mum and Dad. It had been her favourite family
portrait. I must have been about seven, which would
have made her thirty-one, him thirty-two. We had
visited Russell's Photography Studio and Mr Russell
had taken twenty separate poses before he got a single
shot where one of us wasn't squinting or pulling a face.
    'He can't be very good,' I had whispered far too loudly
within Mr Russell's earshot, 'Uncle Pete always gets it
right first time.'
    Uncle