by Clare Empson
‘There you are. This is my Alice,’ Jacob says to Muriel, who is looking really quite flustered in the presence of this beautiful man. Perhaps she’s human after all.
And how that ‘my’ sounds on his lips …
‘Very well,’ Muriel says. ‘Perhaps you’d like to take your “business meeting” outside?’
Jacob is taller than I’d realised and dressed again in black, a shirt with flowing sleeves, a long scarf patterned with brown and cream feathers, flared black jeans and the snakeskin boots of last night.
The three of us walk out of the front door, down the steps and into the courtyard.
‘Thought you guys were going to stick around for a drink?’ Jacob says.
‘The bar was packed,’ Rick replies. ‘The bell for last orders had rung, we wouldn’t have got served. Not much point sticking around when you can’t get a drink.’ He laughs, and Jacob does too.
‘So. I wanted to talk to you about a potential project. A drawing project.’ He nods at our sketchbooks. ‘I’m guessing you’re pretty good at drawing?’
‘Alice is the star,’ Rick says. ‘You should see what she’s just drawn in class. What’s the project?’
‘Potentially our next album cover. Eddie and I had this idea of having a sketch of the band on stage, but very posed, a bit like a still life.’
‘Rick is who you need,’ I say, hoping Jacob doesn’t notice the tremor in my voice. ‘He’s the most talented artist we’ve got. He’s already selling his work.’
‘Sweet, you two. Like a couple of newly-weds. Buy you a coffee and we can talk about it?’
In the flesh, in the mid-afternoon light, Jacob looks older than he did on stage, around thirty, I’d say. But still hauntingly beautiful. Eyes, cheekbones, mouth. Slim neck, pronounced collarbones, the dip between them around the size of my thumb.
‘You go, Alice,’ Rick says, unexpectedly. ‘You’re the best at drawing and it’d be good for you.’
‘Wait. No. Hang on.’ I try to stop him, but Rick just smiles and walks away.
‘I’m meeting someone,’ he throws back over his shoulder, which is obviously a lie.
‘Don’t worry, Alice,’ Jacob says. ‘Strictly business.’
Though the way he says it, with eyes that are serious, a twisted mouth that isn’t, makes me wish it wasn’t just business.
‘Do you like coffee?’
‘Yes, sure, coffee, tea, Coke, anything.’
Jacob leans in, his face now only inches from mine.
‘I meant real coffee. Italian coffee. Coffee that’s more of a religious experience. Coffee to blow the mind.’
‘I’m not sure I’ve ever had one like that.’
‘Then we’re going to Bar Italia.’ He nods at the sketchbook under my arm. ‘Bring your etchings.’
Now
Luke
The psychological wound of an adoptee is internalised at the very beginning of life. There’s a prevailing sense of ‘there must be something wrong with me, I am a disappointment, I am not worth keeping’. Over time, these hidden insecurities can develop into something potent and perilous.
Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris
Hannah has a new title for me.
‘The man with two mothers,’ she said last night in the darkness, stretching out across the baby to place her hand on my thigh.
Today, with the arrival of my mother Christina for the weekend, it feels particularly apt.
I return home from work and see her navy-blue Golf parked up outside the house with a complicated cocktail of feelings. There is, I always feel, an undertow of resentment on both sides: mine in having to feel gratitude for my rescue, hers for me not being the child she actually wanted. Her own flesh-and-blood baby was stillborn in her last month of pregnancy and I don’t think she will ever get over it.
I find her pacing around the kitchen in tight little circles with Samuel draped across one shoulder. She is winding him maternity-nurse style, or so I imagine, having never actually come across one of these mythical creatures (I picture someone large and humourless in a starched white cap).
‘Hello, darling,’ she says and we attempt an air kiss with the baby lodged between us.
Hannah is sitting at the kitchen table with about one quarter of her normal presence. This is the thing I notice first when the two women in my life get together, how my mother saps my girlfriend’s energy until she becomes almost someone I can’t recognise. She says hi, limply, and immediately I know something is up.
‘When did you arrive?’ I ask Christina, trying to piece together potential disaster.
‘Oh, just after lunch. I found Hannah asleep in that chair with Samuel virtually sliding off her lap. So I persuaded her to go to bed while I looked after the baby.’
There’s a small silence, which my mother breaks with, ‘I cannot believe it was Samuel’s first time in his cot. You two are hilarious. He screamed the house down.’
I don’t look at Hannah; I know her tragic eyes will break my heart. One of the many things we are united on is our attitude to parenting. This baby – our son, no one else’s – will never be allowed to cry, not if we can help it. He will be cocooned in safety, a nest of reassurance, powered by our heartbeats. No need for psychoanalysis – I was wrenched from my natural mother’s arms and deposited in an alien environment, where, as Christina loves to recount with a seeming lack of perception, ‘you cried and cried and cried for the first few weeks’. Let’s just say I am physiologically programmed to detest the sound of a baby crying.
‘Mum, I’ve told you that Samuel doesn’t sleep in his cot.’
I fight the instinct to grab my son back and go instead to the fridge, where I take out a bottle of beer.
‘Drinks,’ I say. ‘What would you like, Mum? I think we’ve still got gin from last time you were here.’
My mother is here for forty-eight hours and already I am struggling to think of things to say to her. The conversation never flows the way it does when Hannah’s parents come up from Cornwall – those lovely, semi-drunken, laughter-filled nights when everyone talks at once. When I first met her family, I was stunned by what I initially saw as a lack of respect. Don’t they ever listen to each other? I thought, as the sisters interrupted and vaulted from one topic to the next, no sentence finished, gravity, whenever possible – even the saddest of tales – traded for their easy laughter. And the touching – my God. I’d never seen anything like it. Knee-sitting and hair-stroking and hand-holding; these people were so goddamn tactile, and not just with each other, but with me too. Maggie, Hannah’s mother, hugged me the first time I was introduced, a sluice gate, it seemed, for cheek-pinching and hair-ruffling and the regular chest punches from Peter, her father, the slightly alarming knee-sitting from her younger sister Eliza. If you wanted the North and South Pole of families, then mine and Hannah’s could step up as the perfect candidates.
I realise as I mix a gin and tonic and begin chucking ingredients from the fridge onto the kitchen table that I have slipped into my default position of high alert, a state I assumed throughout my childhood. Keep busy to stay out of trouble was the maxim I lived by. The trouble, I think, was simply my mother’s notice and the likelihood of being forced into worthy pursuits I couldn’t bear. ‘Why don’t you cycle over to Andrew’s and see if he’ll go blackberry-picking with you? We could make a pie later.’ (I was around fourteen at this time.) ‘Let’s ring up the girls from the Grange and invite them over for a game of cards.’ (A pair of sisters so beautiful and cool I’d rather have cut off my own testicles than make that phone call.)
She is a good woman, my mother, and I do love her, albeit a textbook kind of love that is layered with guilt, gratitude and frustration. Complex, like I said.
There are more shocks over supper when it transpires that she has rung up a nanny agency on our behalf and invite
d two prospective au pairs for interview tomorrow. Interfering doesn’t quite cover it.
‘Don’t be cross with me,’ she says, correctly interpreting our shocked silence. ‘Hannah, it’s really not that long before you go back to work and it can take time to find the right person. I thought it might help if I was here for a second opinion.’
‘Oh Christina,’ Hannah says, instant tears in her lovely eyes. ‘I can’t bear to think about leaving Samuel, not yet.’
My mother reaches out to pat her hand.
‘If you change your mind about going back to work, I’ll make sure you don’t suffer financially.’
For the best possible reasons, Christina thinks Hannah should be a stay-at-home mum. She doesn’t perceive the raging torment, the utter wrench, that is the choice for Hannah between leaving our beautiful boy and returning to a job she loves.
And so next morning to the prospective au pairs, the first one arriving at 10.15. My mother has spent the morning cleaning, and the house looks as if it belongs to someone else. She has found a home for every piece of clutter – a new cupboard for nappies, trainers rehoused in neat rows beneath the stairs – and she has even been out to buy flowers (lilies, which Hannah dislikes on account of their overpowering smell).
The way Hannah and I take against Nicole, the first interviewee, before she’s even taken her coat off, is pretty comical. It’s as if she marks a cross in every box on the way down.
First thing she does is marvel at Samuel sleeping on his sheepskin rug in the middle of the floor. She looks at her watch.
‘This is his mid-morning nap, isn’t it? Do you think he might sleep longer in his cot?’
‘They don’t allow the little thing to sleep in his cot,’ says my mother, laughing. ‘They cart him around everywhere they go and then wonder why they’re all exhausted!’
There follows a terse little discussion about Gina Ford, whose childcare manifesto was published last year. First present my mother gave us was The Contented Little Baby Book, an advocate of early starts, rigid routines and controlled crying, that last the most heinous in our minds. Nicole swears by Gina Ford, so there’s little point her even sitting down.
My mother asks the questions, the au pair provides the correct answers – certified first-aider, recent, impeccable references, experience with newborns – while Hannah and I commune with our eyes. And I realise, looking at my girlfriend slouched in her chair, punishing Nicole with her feigned indifference, that none of this really matters. Hannah, me and Samuel, our tribe of three versus the rest of the world.
We actually like the next au pair, Carla, who grew up in Buenos Aires looking after her six siblings while her parents went to work. She falls upon Samuel, now awake and tentatively smiling, and asks if she can hold him.
It’s me and Hannah asking the questions this time – equally coded – and Carla aces every one.
‘Do you think it’s good to let a baby cry sometimes?’
‘My babies hardly ever cry. I wrap them up in a papoose and keep them close to me. They are happy.’
She laughs a lot, which reminds me of Hannah, and she kisses Samuel’s cheek without asking us if it’s all right (it is).
But even so, after Carla has left, my mother says, ‘I could tell you liked her,’ and Hannah shakes her head.
‘Yes. But not enough. I can’t imagine leaving Samuel with her. I can’t imagine leaving Samuel full stop.’
And seeing Hannah’s closed-up face, my mother has the good sense to leave it there.
‘You’ll find someone when you’re ready,’ she says. ‘And if you want me to help out to begin with, you only have to say.’
An afternoon at the park, a garlicky roast chicken for supper, an intense evening watching our latest LoveFilm offering, American Beauty, with its opening masturbatory shower scene at which none of us laugh.
Towards the end of the film, my phone pings with an arriving text and I pick it up, idle, scarcely even curious until I see who it is from. ALICE. Name in lights, in red, inferno-esque flames. My heart on the floor. My mother oblivious. My adoptive mother. My real mother, despite the confusing terminology. Guilt I am used to, but this is something else. I feel like a cheat.
Luke, the message reads, shall we have lunch again? It would be so lovely to see you!
Back in our bedroom, I show the message to Hannah and she says, instantaneous reaction, ‘Fantastic, let’s invite her over!’ and then claps her hand over her mouth. Christina, the mother who has brought me up for the past twenty-seven years, lies just feet away in the bedroom next door.
When I was young, the facts of my birth and adoption were rarely mentioned. But I do remember hearing my mother telling one of her friends, ‘Oh, Luke has absolutely no interest in finding his birth mother. He isn’t curious about her at all.’
My story was mapped out for me, carefully drawn and plotted like an Ordnance Survey map. Here you are, Luke, the blueprint for your life, no need to deviate. Questions? Why on earth would you have any of those? On my first day at prep school, my mother said, all nonchalant and casual, ‘By the way, I wouldn’t mention that you’re adopted. People tend to make such a big deal out of it.’
I could read between the lines. Keep your adoption secret, she was saying, and mostly I did. I was biddable back then, and desperate to fit in.
‘Oh God,’ Hannah says, ‘this is so complicated.’ I feel the flat of her hand resting on my thigh. ‘You know you’re going to have to tell her, don’t you?’
What, tell my mother about my mother? Impossible to even consider it.
Christina, I fear, would be totally displaced by the presence of Alice in my life. For within her is the same instinct that festers in me, the same unanswered question. Is the genetic flesh-and-blood connection different? Is it better, deeper, more natural? Deep down, we both suspect that it is.
Hannah’s title has never felt more appropriate. The man with two mothers, that’s me.
Then
Alice
Walking through Soho with Jacob, mind like a snowstorm. I’m relieved he doesn’t try to make conversation as we pick our way through the litter of Berwick Street, polystyrene cartons spilling out the remnants of lunch – flaccid baked potato skins, bits of burger – stallholders calling out to one another as they pack away their crates of apples and oranges and pears. Jacob walks fast, fractionally ahead of me, with his feathered scarf flapping behind him, and I spot the stares as we cross Brewer Street and turn into Wardour. Is it his beauty that makes people look twice, or do they recognise him, this boy, this man I barely know?
He points out Bar Italia. There are tables outside crowded with men wearing suits and drinking coffee from little white cups; all around us the undulating, fast-paced rhythm of Italian.
‘I know this place,’ I say as we walk into the café with its terracotta floor and the vast chrome coffee machine behind the bar. At one end of the long, thin room there is a television, a crowd of customers sitting on stools in front of it, shouting. ‘They come to watch the football.’
‘For the football, the coffee, the chat. It’s a kind of religion.’
At the counter, a man wearing a waiter’s white shirt and bow tie greets Jacob.
‘Hey, Luigi. This is Alice.’
Luigi extends a hand over the top of the counter.
‘Two espressos?’
‘Alice would like a cappuccino,’ Jacob says, and Luigi rolls his eyes.
‘Cappuccino is for breakfast. Espresso now.’
‘She’s never had one. She has to try it.’
‘OK, Alice. But is not good for your digestive system.’ He waggles his finger like a schoolteacher. ‘Milk in the afternoon will make you sick.’
Sitting beside Jacob at the little red and white Formica table, I fight through a wave of self-consciousness. When he looks at me with a small smile, I wonder if he c
an read my mind.
‘Come on, then. Show us your etchings.’
I open up the sketchbook halfway through. I won’t bore him with the early staged tableaux: the solitary pear on a carefully pleated tablecloth, the vase of flowers, the basket of apples. As it happens, the page I show him is a portrait of Rick, drawn in the first week at college. He is sitting at his desk, chin propped in his hand, staring straight at me; it makes me smile just to see him.
‘Your friend is right. You’re very good. It’s exactly like him.’
‘It’s the first time I drew him and still the one I love best.’
‘Really not your boyfriend?’
‘No. Everyone thinks we’re together, but we’re not. Sometimes I wonder if Rick might be gay.’
It comes out before I can stop myself.
‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘Why? I don’t care.’
‘I might be wrong. I probably am.’
He smiles and says, ‘Alice, I believe you,’ and I feel foolish for protesting so much. But I am as confused as everyone else that nothing has developed between Rick and me. He’s indisputably handsome, he is the funniest, kindest person I have ever met and since day one we have been inseparable. We are as close as any lovers but, so far anyway, without even the tiniest spark of chemistry.
Jacob flips a few more pages and then he comes to my oak tree.
‘A tree that’s actually a man. Or a man that becomes a tree?’
And suddenly I’m telling him about my fascination for all trees, but particularly oaks. When I was a child, growing up in Essex, I spent every spare hour in the fields behind the house. And the trees, especially in the dusk light, seemed to take on their own characters. I don’t feel stupid telling him that they were like my friends. Or that even as I’ve grown older, the character of a tree – the oaks in Battersea Park, the cherries and limes lining the streets of Notting Hill – has remained visible to me, as if I perceive trees in a way that no one else does.