‘Mum, Mum, what about this?’ Lily is holding out a long, flat shell, its curved back ridged with shades of pearlescent grey. She flips it over in her palm and its underside is a smooth, shiny pearl colour. Flecks of wet sand cover it, but I can do something with that. Lily has a good eye.
‘I don’t know, ask your aunt,’ Abi says.
Lily moves her hand towards me. ‘I think it’s beautiful,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll definitely be able to do something with that.’ Pewter silver for the top, white gold for the underside. White gold paste is hard to come by, though, so I may have to gold-plate it. Which is pricey. ‘Shall I keep it safe for you until I can make your necklace?’ I ask her.
She grins without showing her teeth and her plaits dance when she nods. She watches me as I unbutton the thigh pocket on my trousers and slip the shell inside.
‘Sienna! Sienna!’ she calls as she skips back to her new-found cousin. ‘I’ve got one. I’ve got one.’
‘Didn’t your parents help?’ I say to Abi. ‘I’d have thought they’d be all over their first grandchild.’
Abi snorts dismissively, her eyes darken as she’s suddenly transported back six years. ‘Yeah, we’ve all moved on from me being nineteen, pregnant and unmarried. They were so over-the-top angry about it that I had to move out. I ended up living on my own in a tiny flat in the middle of nowhere because my parents didn’t want to know unless I agreed to tell them who the father was and to marry him. After six months or so of watching me struggle and accepting that I wasn’t telling them the father’s name, and even if I did I wouldn’t be getting married, they let me move back home.’ The resentment at how they were swirls in her eyes. ‘My gran was the worst for it. She kept on blaming my mother for not bringing me up properly, like Daddy hadn’t been there when I was growing up.
‘My brother, Jonas, he tried to help, so did Declan, Lily’s dad. But he was young, too, and his parents were freaking out. And Jonas was going through his own shite. It was really hard. Jonas couldn’t believe it that I moved back in with them after all that they’d done and said. I moved out when Lily was nearly two then came back again about a year ago when Gran got bad. Like I say, we’ve all moved on from those early dark days.’ She makes a small, disgusted ‘ha’ sound under her breath.
‘Is that why you haven’t told them you’re pregnant?’
Abi’s eyes seem to triple in size – the horror of what I’ve said descends upon her features and she turns on me. Her hand clamps around my arm, her fingers dig into the space between the muscle and bone of my bicep. ‘How do you know? Is it obvious? Who else have you told?’
I shrug her off. I rub at where she grabbed me to ease the pain she’s caused. ‘You look a bit off colour, but you seem to be glowing, too. I just guessed. I haven’t told anyone. Why would I? It’s your business.’
‘If you’ve guessed it’s only a matter of time before Mummy does. I can’t go through all that again. Last time she guessed and asked me outright. I couldn’t lie. She looked at me like something disgusting she’d stepped in, and Daddy overheard and went through the roof. I wanted to tell her this time so I’d be in control. But if it’s obvious to you then it’ll be obvious to her.’
‘Don’t you think they’ll react a bit differently this time?’ I suggest gently. ‘Not only are you older and self-supporting, there’s a reason why you can remind them that everyone makes mistakes. Assuming it was a mistake.’
‘It wasn’t a mistake,’ she says. ‘We planned it. I love Declan – Lily and this one’s father. He’s just …’
‘Married?’
‘No! No way! He’s a bit flaky and a “bit some time”.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘He’s one of those men who you know are good for some time but long-term it probably won’t work out. He wanted to get married last time and he wants to get married this time, we go stay with him almost every other weekend and we were talking about living together before Lily and I moved back in with my parents, but he’s … I’m … Nothing lasts when it comes to love, love.’
Seth. The hazel-green swirl of his eyes comes to mind. The lazy smile he fires me before he puts on his helmet. His strong fingers that sneak between mine like a whispered secret as he takes my hand when he’s nervous.
‘Have you tried to make it last?’
‘No, suppose not.’
‘How do you know then?’ I ask.
‘I don’t need to run into the sea fully clothed to know I’m going to get wet jeans, I just know it.’
‘True.’ But love isn’t like running into the sea fully clothed. With the sea and a fully clothed dash into its depths, there are no surprises. With love, there is sometimes a surprise around every corner, a chance to grow and learn and find the ways you are perfect just as you are. I’m not going to say that to her. What do I know? I’m living three hundred miles away from the love of my life and about to go on a date with a man I have a teenage crush on. What do I really know about love? Instead I say to her: ‘Abi, if they start to have a go, you’ve got the perfect comeback.’
‘What’s that?’
I suppose I should be pleased that she’s forgotten who I am, what I am to her. I raise my forefinger and turn it towards my face, a pointer as to her perfect new comeback.
‘Oh, God, yes. I almost forgot.’
Almost.
The girls won’t stop hugging. They keep promising they’ll see each other again soon, and that they can have a sleepover and that they can do drawing together and look for more shells on the beach and ride their scooters up and down the beach and read books together at the library and climb in the park and have another sleepover and a tea party.
‘Are you going to disappear again now?’ Abi asks.
‘No. No, I won’t. I’m going to come with you to tell your parents about your pregnancy, if you want me to.’
‘You’ll come with me?’
I nod. ‘Of course.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Because you’re my sister. That’s what sisters do, isn’t it?’
Abi smiles, and nods.
‘Right, so that’s what I’ll do.’
40
Smitty
She bottled it. We had it all planned: Abi would take Lily to a friend’s house and I would wait for her, we’d come back together and do a whole ‘look who I saw near Lily’s friend’s house and who I invited back for a cup of tea’ scene as a background, and then we’d sit down around the kitchen table and Abi would do it. Or I would do it. But one of us would do it and Abi could stop pretending she had food poisoning from the works canteen and get on with being happy to be having another baby.
I should have known from the way she was hyperventilating the whole drive back, and then how she took about five goes to actually put the key in the door and then another full thirty seconds to turn it, that she was a flight risk.
‘Hello!’ she called out, her voice wavery and paper-thin. ‘I have a visitor,’ she added when she received no reply from her mother or grandmother.
As soon as her curious mother appeared from the kitchen, Abi decided to flee. ‘Saw Clemency. Asked her for tea. Need to go to work. Emergency. Bye.’ And that was it – she literally fled the house. I’m sure she actually ran down the path, too, shutting the gate behind her like an obstacle that would slow down anyone who decided to drag her back and force her to unburden her mind.
My other mother blinks a few times at me. She looks as though all her numbers have come up on the Lottery. It’s the reaction I need, one that lessens the anxiety about not telling Mum about this meeting. ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asks.
‘A coffee would be brilliant,’ I say. I am speaking quietly because suddenly I’m shy with just the two of us. We spoke the other time, but everyone was on high alert and there was so much pressure. Today we have none of that.
We take our seats at the kitchen table, the same ones we had last time I was here. ‘The photographs Mrs Smittson gave to us were wonderful. Your father
and I have looked through them several times.’
‘I’m surprised he looked at them. He didn’t seem that interested in me the last time I was here,’ I say. I hope that doesn’t sound too bitter or accusatory, just the statement of fact it is.
‘He is interested. This has simply been difficult for him. None of us are sure of the best thing to do. In those situations, those who are most unsure of themselves often do nothing. He is interested. Of course he is.’
I nod. ‘Do you have some photos of you from when you were younger that I can see?’ I ask. ‘I’m curious about what you looked like back then.’
She shakes her head, the strands of her shoulder-length bob move like black silk threads. ‘I don’t like to be the focus of any attention. I have very few photographs of myself. They are in the loft, I think. I will bring them out the next time I see you.’
‘That’d be great,’ I reply.
‘Do you like your grandmother?’ my other mother asks out of the blue.
What sort of a loaded question is that? Is there actually a right answer? ‘She’s all right, I suppose,’ I state.
‘You have a secret, I can sense it, Tal— Clemency. If I asked you what it was, would you tell me?’
‘I’ve spent more time with Abi than I have with her but you don’t want to know what Abi has been telling me.’
‘Don’t trust that woman.’ The words are almost hissed at me and I have to pull myself back in my seat. A thick, poisonous venom is laced through every rivulet of those words and they shock me. Is that how irrational and unbalanced I sound when I talk about Nancy? And why is she suddenly talking about this? Aren’t we supposed to be bonding, not setting up a slagging session about someone else?
‘I am sorry, I am sorry.’ My other mother’s face is anxious now, her hand movements fretful. She’s worried that she has pushed me away, alienated me by showing in that moment the truth of her feelings, the fact she has the ability to feel such emotions at all.
If I think about what she did in having me placed for adoption, I still struggle. I expect her to be frozen, stuck at that moment where she was forced to make a momentous choice and unable to move on from that. It’s not fair to think she would be suspended in time, but part of me, the part who has been ‘other’ all her life because of the choice my birth mother made, expects it as the least she can do and feel. Guilt always stitches its haircloth inside my chest when I have these thoughts about my other mother because I am being unfair. I shouldn’t want anyone to feel how I do sometimes: trapped at a point in time. My point in time where I am trapped is that moment when I realised I wasn’t with the parents who gave me my DNA. From then onwards I always, always felt that I was from nowhere and was unwanted by everyone. My other mother’s ability to marry my father and have more children proves she has had some semblance of a normal existence.
‘Why don’t you like her?’ I ask my other mother.
‘It is not as simple as not liking her,’ my other mother states. ‘When I first came to this house, she treated me like one of her daughters. She was so kind and loving towards me. But when she discovered that her son was interested in me, that he was the one who was the father of my child, she became a person I did not recognise.
‘She did not approve of her son being interested in me. He had a big career ahead of him and it did not involve a wife and a child before he had graduated from law school. I was not good enough in her eyes and she did not want me or anyone connected to me to become part of her family. I do not think she would ever have approved of me because I was not from the right family stock: my parents did not have the wealth of the Zebilas and I had not been chosen by her. The first son, according to your grandmother, has to conquer business, the second son has to marry well.’
She is hinting that it was my grandmother who forced my adoption. ‘Couldn’t you have got married anyway, despite her protests?’ I ask.
‘This was 1978, Clemency.’ That is the first time she has said my name without pausing, without having to get the ‘Talei’ bit out of the way first. ‘We did what was requested and expected by our parents.’
My other mother’s brown eyes look over me carefully. Is she wondering if I am the type of daughter who would do as my parents told me?
‘People talk about the seventies and eighties like the freedoms you all enjoy in this day and age were automatically given when the decades changed. It was not like that. We were not in the fifties and sixties, no, but we grew up with parents from those years. Your grandmother did not want me here, and I could not have gone to Nihanara to my parents with a child born out of wedlock. The shame would have killed them.’
Shame. It is a label, tagged into my skin, into the arrangement of my DNA. Shame is what I am, what I represent. This is a reminder of why I hate my birthdays – each one is a marker of who I am. That in the time before I was born there was no excitement, there was only shame, fear, confusion, worry. My very existence, according to my mother, the only person whose authority I have to go on, meant that I could possibly have killed someone with shame by simply being born.
‘When I went to the hospital to have you, I was put on the ward that was for girls who were not married. I met a lot of English and Irish girls there and only one of us was going to be leaving with her baby. The rest of us, we had the parents who had grown up in the fifties and sixties, who only knew that a child born out of wedlock was wrong. And it is wrong.’
‘Wrong’. I can add that to the list of words that tag who I am. ‘Shame’, ‘Wrong’, ‘Not real’. If I was a wall, those would be the things that graffiti artists would spraypaint on me.
‘We loved our babies but we were told we could not keep them. And we did as we were told.’ My mother stares down at her hands. ‘I fought her as long as I could. But in the end, I could not fight them both. Your father made me accept that it would be better for you to have two parents who would have money and who would be able to give you the life I couldn’t.’
‘You think it was all her and not him?’ I say. It’s difficult enough knowing what to call them all outside the confines of my head, but when we’re having this type of conversation it’s impossible to give them titles that are associated in my head with family, connectedness and love.
‘Your father had, like me, been brought up to do as he was told. He would not have wanted to go against his parents.’
‘Even if it meant keeping his child?’
‘His mother always gets her way. That is why you must not trust her. If she is trying to create a relationship with you it is because she wants something. Which is why I’d like you to tell me what you talked about.’
I could take this demand, couched in quiet, unassuming, friendly terms, as a good sign: she is treating me how Mum treats me – like a daughter who will do as she is told. But I can’t help thinking: Who do you think you are? My mother, or something?
The obedience Mum gets from me is given because she raised me. It’s mostly annoying and unhealthy but it is what it is because she is the person I love, who helped me to grow up. Someone can’t march in and make such personal, intimate demands on me when they weren’t there. Maybe through no fault of her own, maybe through choices she made, maybe through fear and youth, maybe through a combination of all those things, but still, she doesn’t get to make demands on me.
I can’t say this. I can never say this. Because she might turn her back on me. She may never want to see me again. And, indignant as I am, I couldn’t handle that. I feel something for her. When I look at her I ache for the person I think she was back then – trapped into this decision that she felt she had to make. And I ache in a desperate, almost manic manner to find a way over this breach between us. I want her to be my mother. There is a space for her in my life: one space is filled by Mum; the other is still occupied by Dad. But there is another space next to them where she would fit, she could be the other type of parent I need sometimes. I have a ‘Mum’, I need this woman to be my mother. I had a ‘Dad’, I wou
ld love Julius to be my father. But Julius isn’t here, and my other mother is, and I want her, more than anything, to be my mother.
I say: ‘She was telling me about her illness. She doesn’t want anyone to know how unwell she feels.’ This is as close to the truth as I can get without betraying my grandmother and lying to my other mother.
‘She wants you to feel sorry for her,’ my other mother dismisses. ‘She has been ill for years. She doesn’t want to look after herself properly. She much prefers to have others running around at her beck and call. She had servants back in Nihanara and being unwell has given her the chance to have that in her life again.’
Whoa! I draw back again. ‘That’s a bit unfair,’ I say. ‘She has some serious, life-limiting if not life-threatening conditions.’ She has the perfectly rational fear of becoming trapped inside her own body.
My other mother’s face changes, as though she is about to start crying. She looks emotionally dishevelled suddenly. ‘This is what has happened to me,’ she says, the tears seep into her voice. ‘I am capable of dismissing another person’s suffering because I dislike her so much.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I sometimes feel like I am a teenager again.’ Is she admitting that she does feel stuck in that moment she made that choice all those years ago? ‘I sometimes feel like no one will ever understand me or realise what it is like to be in an impossible situation.’ She opens her eyes to find me watching her with my heart paused, my breath caught, as I wait for her to be honest again. ‘Then I remember I am being silly. I am an adult and I made the right choice at that time.’
‘Yes, I suppose you did,’ I say to her statement. It stings. At every point, rubbed raw by the fact of being adopted and finding out that she went on to have more children with the same man, it stings to know this. It also suggests that she would make the same choice again. In which case, why not simply admit it? Why not say that you didn’t want to give me up for adoption, but the alternative to not doing so was a price you weren’t prepared to pay? I think. Why can’t you admit that you were young and frightened, and had just given birth, so when you were offered the respectability of marriage, and a child in wedlock – which happened less than two years later – in return for signing the adoption papers, you took it? It might not be palatable for her to hear herself say that, but it’s the truth. And it’s better for me to hear that so I know that it honestly wasn’t me. ‘I suppose your mother-in-law thinks that, too, seeing as it’s what you say she ultimately wanted.’