Lost Daughter

by Ali Mercer

  Rachel says, ‘Do you want to see the baby?’

  ‘What baby?’

  ‘Becca’s dad’s baby,’ Rachel says, as if she has explained this to him a thousand times before and he has forgotten, which might be the case.

  He says OK. He likes babies a lot – it is easy to know how they’re feeling, like with cats and dogs, and they haven’t learned how to talk yet. Also, he doesn’t get to see them all that often. There aren’t any in the home.

  They all get out of the car and walk over the bridge, and a man opens the door. ‘This is Mitch,’ Rachel says. ‘Becca’s dad.’

  But she doesn’t need to tell him – he already knows. Mitch looks a bit like Becca but not at all like Rachel. There is something about him – a kind of stubborn crossness – that reminds him of the people at the home that like to sit and watch TV all the time, and don’t do the activities. He looks happier than they do, though. He looks quite pleased with himself.

  They go into a living room where a woman with long yellow hair is sitting with the baby lying in her arms. She has lovely shiny bangles, all silvery, and blue flowers drawn on the skin by her hand, which is called a tattoo. There is a pink stone on a little chain round her neck, which the baby is fiddling with and which Aidan would quite like to touch, too, though he doesn’t really know how to ask, and then the woman detaches the baby’s fingers from the jewel which might mean the baby shouldn’t do that and he shouldn’t either.

  Becca sits down and the woman tells her to position her arms just so, then very slowly and carefully transfers the baby into them. The baby doesn’t cry; it looks very sleepy. It is quite a big baby, or at least, not a really little one. It has a bit of hair, and when it yawns he sees a flash of tiny teeth.

  ‘Up all night,’ the woman says.

  ‘Way to go,’ says Becca, which makes no sense at all.

  The room is quite interesting, with a few things for him to look at; the best is a basket of eggs by the fireplace, made of cold smooth stone. Rachel tells him they are alabaster. There are pictures of different things and photographs in shining frames, and they’re all right too. One of the photographs is of Becca standing on a stage, and another one is of a girl with yellow hair who looks a bit like the woman with yellow hair, cuddling a baby who looks a bit like the baby Becca is cuddling now, though it is almost impossible to know for sure if it is the same. Maybe babies are quite alike, like eggs.

  After a bit Rachel says they had better head off and the yellow-haired woman says, ‘Wouldn’t you like to hold her?’

  The look that passes between the two of them makes him think of when you get very dark clouds and then light, bright light, the kind he couldn’t quite make out round Mum but knew was there.

  ‘Yes,’ says Rachel.

  She holds the baby very carefully. Her body is all stiff as if it is hurting her, even though it is still sleeping and can’t really do anything. Then she relaxes. The baby stirs and snuffles but doesn’t cry. After a bit Rachel gives the baby back to the yellow-haired woman, and the woman looks at Aidan and asks, ‘Would you like to hold her?’

  He says no as hard as he can. ‘No-no-no-no-no.’ He is not at all sure about holding something precious that can break, which is what a baby is.

  Rachel says, ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.’

  But the woman says, ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

  He sits the way Rachel and Becca had done, and the fat slightly moist-seeming bundle of the baby is put into his arms.

  It stretches a bit and sits up – it must be bored of sleeping now. It wants to get moving. Then it opens its eyes and looks at him and smiles, and wraps its little hand round his finger. Like bindweed, which grows by clinging on.

  The yellow-haired woman takes the baby back off him and goodbyes are said. How strange it is, all these people who were little tiny babies once. One day they will stop living and people will sing hymns for them. Though perhaps not quite so many people as sang hymns for his mother.

  He and Rachel leave Becca there. Rachel hugs Becca but he doesn’t – there is only so much cuddling he can do. They go out to the car and then they are on their way back to the home.

  Rachel drives quite fast but doesn’t break the speed limit. It is odd how you can go really quite fast in a car and it quickly feels normal, even as if it should always be like that and will carry on forever.

  She says, ‘I hope the day was OK.’

  He says it was and remembers not to mention the bad smell of the brussels sprouts, and to say thank you. But he wants to tell her something else, something important. The words start to coalesce in his head, ready to come out. Something about his mother.

  He needs to explain that she hadn’t really gone anywhere, because they had been in her house and it hadn’t felt as if she was missing. There has been a big rearrangement, yes, but she’s definitely around somewhere. There are many things he isn’t sure about, but he is absolutely certain about this…

  But then the words elude him. He is conscious of the speed of the car on the road, pushing on through everything like a rocket soaring into space, but at the same time he is as safe and comfy with Rachel as if Mum was right here with them.

  He hasn’t lost her. As long as he can feel like this, she hasn’t really gone. Realising this, he understands also that he is happy, and it no longer seems to matter that there is so much it is impossible to say.

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  There was never really any question about who would have custody of me when my parents broke up. It was 1980, and I was seven years old; after the split I lived with my mum. I visited my dad, who lived abroad, in the summer holidays, and saw him now and then during the year.

  Decades later, this novel got started with a question. What if those roles were reversed? What would it be like, as a mother, to be the absent parent – the one who rings up at Christmas, and who, on a day-to-day basis, isn’t there, and can’t be there?

  By this time, the old assumptions of the Peter and Jane books – Jane helps Mummy bake, Peter helps Daddy with the car – had long since given way. The days of ‘Wait until your father gets home!’ had gone. Fatherhood looked different, and motherhood did, too. Just as there were women in the boardroom and daughters who admired the handbags their mums carried for work, there were stay-at-home dads, dads who used baby carriers and changed nappies, dads at the school gate, dads on parental leave. The balance had shifted; in lots of households, including my own, the work of family life was shared out in a different way. But then – what happens if you stop sharing? It was a prospect that scared me – and since storytelling is a way of making sense of your fears, I began to write about it.

  Throughout my own children’s childhoods, my other half got them up and out of the house most days of the week – which, at times, was a really challenging and exhausting task, given that our son is autistic and has learning difficulties, and went through phases of being very resistant to getting ready for school. Having a child with disabilities shaped our experience of parenting and changed our horizons. It fed into what I was writing, too. I became aware that there had been a time when parents of autistic children were routinely advised to put them in institutional care. That got me thinking: what would it be like to be separated from your chi
ld because you had been persuaded that separation was the right thing to do, was indeed the only thing to do – even if you had doubts about it yourself?

  In Lost Daughter, Rachel attends a group for mothers who live apart from their children, and a noticeboard with photos of the children is displayed during the meetings. That idea came from a parenting course I went on, which was run by the National Autistic Society. It was a really powerful way of having the children there, too, even though actually, they were all at school; it was a way of bringing them into the room with us.

  Finally, while I was writing Lost Daughter, my dad passed away. I learned what a dislocating experience grief is, and how vividly people can return in your thoughts after they’ve gone. That final separation is a shock. But even that isn’t the end.

  Loss is as universal as love, the flipside of the coin, and it has its moments of both darkness and illumination – the light is always love, the only way to get through the dark bits. And so this book is dedicated to my dad, with all my love.

  Thank you so much to all my readers – I hope Lost Daughter has touched you, made you smile and maybe even made you tear up a little. If you enjoyed reading my book, I would be so grateful if you could write a review. I’d love to know what you thought, and it’s really helpful for other readers when they’re looking for something new.

  Do get in touch – I’m often on Twitter or Instagram (too often!) and you can also contact me through my Facebook page.

  All good wishes to you and yours,

  Ali Mercer

  www.alisonmercerwriter.com

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Judith Murdoch, my agent, and Kathryn Taussig and all the team at Bookouture for giving this book its chance.

  Thank you to my family, with a special mention for Tom, Izzy and Mr P (without whom, chaos is come again).

  Thank you to the good people of Abingdon, the oldest town in England (probably) – and to all my patient readers who asked from time to time how the new book was coming along. Thanks also to my friends, especially Nanu and Luli Segal and Helen Rumbelow, and to everyone I had the good luck to spend time with at the North Cornwall Book Festival in 2015, in particular Patrick Gale, Patricia Duncker and Neel Mukherjee.

  And finally, thank you to all those whose work provided useful insights and information as I was reading around the subject matter of this novel, including the website of MATCH, a charity that supports mothers who live apart from their children: www.matchmothers.org.

  My son’s autism and learning difficulties prompted me to read numerous non-fiction books that fed indirectly into the writing of this one, including the following:

  For a first-person perspective on what it is like to be autistic – Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures; The Reason I Jump and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8, by Naoki Higashida.

  The autobiography of the mother of an autistic son – Let IT Go, by the entrepreneur and philanthropist Dame Stephanie Shirley, who came to the UK as a child refugee on the Kindertransport.

  On the history of autism, and society’s attitudes to and treatment of autistic people – Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes and In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, by John Donvan and Caren Zucker.

  A big, wide-ranging study of relationships between parents and children, which includes a chapter on autism – Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.

  There are lots more books, both non-fiction and novels, about the kinds of experiences and family situations I’ve explored in Lost Daughter – more than I have space to list here, and I’m sure there are plenty I don’t know about. Do get in touch with your thoughts and recommendations. I’d love to hear from you.

  Published by Bookouture in 2019

  An imprint of StoryFire Ltd.

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.bookouture.com

  Copyright © Ali Mercer, 2019

  Ali Mercer has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-78681-966-6

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.