Mine: ‘A powerful, emotive and sensitively written story about love and loss' Louise Jensen

by Clare Empson

  I was in danger of getting caught once, when they slammed to a halt in front of Arcadia, the gift shop. I stood exposed, terrified of Alice glancing to the left and seeing me, her son, Samuel’s father, loitering with intent. A moment of reckoning, that time.

  What the fuck, dude?

  I tell myself that I am checking in on Alice from time to time, as any other new father would, making sure that the woman who cares for his child is doing a good job.

  I’ve been standing at the top of Clapham Manor Street for only five minutes when Alice and Samuel walk right past me. I catch her perfume in the air, sharp, citrusy, a little floral. They might be going to Woolies; Alice goes there a lot. I’ve risked lurking amidst the pick ’n’ mix once or twice just to see her at the back of the shop, examining cake tins and oven gloves that appear in our house later. Another little Alice gift, something useful, thoughtful, transformative – like the corkboard she tacked up to the kitchen wall.

  ‘So we can leave each other notes,’ she said. ‘And I can buy stuff you need.’

  Such a simple thing. So obvious, I wonder now how we lived without it. Alice bestows these gifts upon us with such ease and grace, it’s easy to accept.

  I was right, they have turned into Woolworths, which is perfect. I always think it’s the kind of place I might easily pop into to pick up some pens or a notepad on the pretence of having left mine at the office.

  As always, Alice wheels the pram towards the back of the shop. She is looking not at kitchen equipment or stationery but the selection of toys on the left-hand side of the store. From a distance I watch her pick up a glove puppet, an orange, yellow and brown chicken made of felt. She puts her hand inside it, snaps the beak at Samuel and gives a pretty perfect rendition of a cockerel. Cock-a-doodle-doo. The whole of Woolworths must catch Samuel’s hysteria, a joyful, infectious sound. I creep a little closer, addicted to the tableau between woman and child. I’m lurking three rows away, amidst a job lot of Caterpillar boots, taking a pair from its box, sliding my hand inside one and holding it out for closer examination.

  The puppet routine continues. Alice has moved on to a furry alligator, emerald green with a lemon-yellow stomach and a crimson mouth. She snaps its jaw, hovering right in front of Samuel’s face until she swoops down and pecks his nose. More wild laughter and Alice is laughing too. There is no end to the fun these two can have together. I’m about to leave my post when a blonde girl with a toddler walks up to them.

  ‘Hi there,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen you at circle time in the library. How old is your baby? He’s gorgeous.’

  ‘Six months, almost seven,’ Alice says. ‘How about yours, he looks around a year older?’

  ‘Yes, he’s eighteen months. I’m Kirsty, by the way.’

  ‘Lovely to meet you. I’m Alice. And this—’

  ‘Would you like to try them on?’

  The girl in front of me, green Woolies shirt of nylon, has a quizzical look on her face. Perhaps she’s been watching me. Perhaps she’s wondering why a young guy like myself is peeking over the shelf of boots to observe a middle-aged woman and a baby.

  But my mind is heavy with new intelligence and it’s an effort to speak. Alice didn’t explain that Samuel wasn’t her baby, a child she looks after three days a week. She acted as if he was hers.

  ‘No, I don’t, thanks.’ I’m barging past the shop assistant, incapable of civility.

  Outside on the pavement, I run down the street, realising after a minute or two that I am running away from the Tube, not towards it, so preoccupied am I with this latest development. Is Alice pretending Samuel is her baby? Or am I, increasingly paranoid freak that I am, jumping to conclusions? If I told Hannah, apart from thinking I was a lunatic for spying on my mother in my lunch hour – not spying, H, checking up – she’d tell me not to be so ridiculous. I can even hear the words she would choose.

  ‘Alice looks far younger than she is; she probably gets mistaken for Samuel’s mum the whole time. Sometimes it’s too boring to explain, that’s all.’

  And she is probably right. But that doesn’t stem the cold spread of concern I feel in my lungs, my stomach, my heart. I’m your baby, Alice. Me. Not Samuel.

  I hear how that sounds. Infantile, immature, borderline psychotic. But here is the thing. I am and always will be the child that was given away. I am needy. I am fucked up. I am desperate to be noticed.

  I’m brushing away tears as I walk down into Clapham Common station, as the hard, ugly truth strikes me. I am jealous of my own son.

  Then

  Alice

  In the autumn, we are both working so hard we barely see each other. Jake is out most nights mixing the album; I might stay at college until ten or eleven, painting in a kind of fever. All those ideas and sketches from Italy now morphing into their colour-heightened reality, snapshot meets Renaissance, a style I am working and working on until I can perfect it.

  If I was expecting favoured treatment at college – the girl with the make-or-break art show – the reality turns out to be different. The tutors are working me like a dog, even Rita Miller.

  I now have sixteen drawings and five oils that I consider ready to show.

  But Rita says, ‘Good. But good is not enough. You are capable of better.’

  Gordon walks around the studio considering each work in silence.

  ‘Not there yet,’ he says, although he loves the mock pietà, Jake asleep on my lap.

  ‘This is sheer brilliance, Alice, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because I can see the layers in this painting. There’s an intensity here, and the feeling that you’re almost mothering this boy in your arms. It’s painted with sorrow, or at least that’s how I see it. I want to feel like this about every single painting. I want to look at them, stare at them until the hidden meaning becomes apparent.’

  I am learning to immerse myself in feeling before I begin to paint. Each day I take one of the drawings – today it’s Jake bare-chested, in flared jeans, lying back against the lacy, absurdly feminine pillows of our Italian bed, the wrought-iron bedstead framing his face – and think about what he meant to me in that moment. The drawings took a long time, sometimes a full hour, and you can see that he has forgotten I am here; he is lost in thought. Now, with intense scrutiny, I see I have caught his unguarded melancholy, an innate sadness he tries his best to hide. And I am on a journey of imagining. With his indisputable good looks, Jake has been portrayed as a sex object in the media. I see something different. I see a man on the brink of success if only his inner torment will allow it. I worry for him. I wish that he wouldn’t keep his private anguish locked away, out of reach of everyone. There’s something I could help him with, I feel it, I know it. Yet every time I approach the subject, asking him about his childhood, and, once or twice, his suicide attempt, he shuts the conversation down.

  ‘The past is over. It’s just you and me now.’

  All of this goes into my painting. I’ve captured Jacob’s beauty, but also his darkness, the side of himself he refuses to show.

  When Gordon King next comes into the studio, he stares at the painting in silence.

  Finally he says, ‘Bravo, Alice. This is what will distinguish you. Viscerality. Emotion so potent you feel you can touch it.’

  The band are putting the finishing touches to their album with the producer Brian Eno. If all goes to plan, the record will be mastered next month and released in February, timed to coincide with my show.

  Brian thinks there are four definite hits on the album, one a ballad called ‘Cassiopeia’, written after our night on the beach stargazing. It’s bittersweet, a song not about our love, Jake’s and mine, but about Rick and Tom, their shame at the vitriol of passers-by. Every time I hear the refrain, ‘They built each other up but you tore them back down’, it pierces my heart.

  Our lives fall into a routine as September leans into October. We wake
at eight and go for breakfast, always together, always Bar Italia. The owner, Luigi, is our friend and he brings our cappuccino and croissants without us having to ask for them. More often than not he won’t let us pay.

  ‘It’s my gift,’ he says, ‘to the musician and artist who will soon be very rich. You can look after me when I’m old.’

  I leave for the Slade half an hour later and Jake walks me partway there. We kiss goodbye on Wellington Street, sometimes for a long time, long enough to draw wolf whistles from people passing, sometimes with his tongue searching my mouth, my hands drawing his hips towards me.

  ‘And you think I can concentrate now?’ he says, every time.

  Once at college, though, my focus is absolute, and I’ve barely looked up from my canvas, it seems, when Rick comes in at lunchtime and suggests going out for a sandwich. And it happens that on this lunchtime in early October, the leaves on the trees beginning their dramatic burn of yellow, gold and crimson, I am overcome by a sudden feeling of nausea, so that I sit down in the middle of the street, hand clamped against my sweating forehead.

  ‘Alice?’

  Rick squats down beside me.

  ‘I’m going to be …’ The last word gets lost as I retch the watery contents of my stomach onto the pavement.

  ‘Something you ate?’ Rick says, pulling me up and skilfully sidestepping us away from the pile of puke.

  ‘I’ve barely eaten in the past few days. Maybe that’s the problem.’

  But when we get to our favourite sandwich shop, as I hold my standard tuna and cucumber order in my hands, I find I must vomit again, lurching out onto the pavement. The moment I’ve been sick, I feel a little better.

  ‘I’m not ill,’ I say to Rick.

  He looks at me, head on one side, taking bites out of his ham and cheese bap.

  ‘Well you look a bit green. And, if you don’t mind me saying so, like you’ve put on weight. You’re such a skinny thing normally.’

  ‘That’s what Jake says. Says he likes his women big.’

  The evidence is there, swirling all around us, but it still takes time to piece the facts together.

  ‘I’m exhausted, that’s all it is. We’ve both been working so hard.’

  Rick looks at me again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Alice, my love, do you think you might be pregnant?’

  ‘I’m on the pill. How could I be pregnant?’

  ‘Sweetheart, I’m a gay man. How on earth would I know? But let’s go and find out.’

  Rick, who has had his fair share of transitory sexual diseases, is a face around the Marie Stopes Clinic on Tottenham Court Road. The receptionist recognises him instantly. ‘Oh no, Richard, not you again,’ she says, though she is smiling.

  ‘Actually,’ his voice is low, conspiratorial, ‘it’s my friend. With an altogether different, er, dilemma.’

  There’s an hour’s wait for the results, and rather than going back to college, Rick and I sit in the pub with a half of beer that I cannot force down.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I tell him. ‘I know I am.’

  There’s the new curve to my stomach, the heavier, fuller breasts, which are painful at times, the complete absence of a period, which should have been signal enough. If I hadn’t been so absorbed in my work, I might have noticed.

  ‘Not such a big deal these days,’ Rick says.

  I see him gazing at me intently, trying to read my reaction, trying not to say the wrong thing. Neither of us says the word abortion; that’s for the clinic nurse to mention when she confirms my pregnancy, Rick sitting beside me like an anxious husband.

  ‘Nine weeks, I’d say, maybe ten. Does that make sense?’

  ‘None of it makes sense. I’m on the pill.’

  We’ve had this conversation already, the nurse and I, the fact that the pill is only ninety-nine per cent effective and it’s always recommended to use condoms as well, but no one ever does. I think, but do not say, that neither have I been as diligent about taking my daily pill as I might. I’m a fool. I have no one to blame but myself.

  ‘There’s still time for an abortion,’ the nurse says. ‘But we need to get you booked in. Come back tomorrow if that’s what you decide and we can sort out the paperwork.’

  Rick shepherds me out of Marie Stopes, arm around my waist.

  ‘Want me to come back to the flat with you?’

  ‘No. You’ve been amazing. I need to tell Jake on my own.’

  ‘He loves you, Al. It’ll be fine whatever you decide.’

  The new Disciples album is finally finished, and to celebrate Jake is roasting a chicken and has a bottle of cava chilling in a makeshift ice bucket, bucket being the operative word, though he has filled it to the brim with water and ice.

  He unwraps the foil hood and slides the cork from the bottle with a triumphant pop, and I watch as the wine fizzes right over the top of both our glasses. Jake raises his to mine and we clink.

  ‘To us. To Apparition. To your debut show.’

  He is feverishly happy today, almost too much. There is a craziness to him as he talks and talks and paces around our tiny flat. And while I listen, I am thinking: how am I ever going to tell him?

  According to his label, Island Records, Brian Eno has transformed what was already a great record into a ‘smash’.

  ‘They think it’s going to be huge,’ Jake says. ‘They actually said that and normally they don’t forecast. So Island are pushing for an earlier release. They want to get “Cassiopeia” on the Radio 1 playlist at the beginning of February. We might need to do the launch sooner if you can manage it.’

  I follow him out into the kitchen, leaning up against the counter, watching as he takes the chicken from the oven and bastes it, my head full of the things I cannot say.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ he says, sliding the bird back into the oven, and I tell him, ‘Just tired,’ though the words scream through my brain. Pregnant. Abortion. Abortion. Baby.

  I watch Jake flipping through his box of records, as he does every night, sitting back on his heels, pulling one out, considering, replacing. It is part of our daily routine, this; it can take him five minutes or more to make his choice. In Italy, Tom and Eddie christened him ‘the vibes master’, but sometimes he took so long to choose, all three of us would shout at him, ‘Just play something!’ For Jake, though, it always has to be exactly right. So when he selects Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room, opening track ‘Bird on the Wire’, an anthem of freedom we both love, without warning I find myself crying. So much of our time together has been about freedom and liberation, about finding ourselves and proving ourselves, and now there is a tiny fragment of human that could change everything for us. And in some crazed way, I want it to.

  Jake catches me brushing the tears from my cheeks and is across the room in moments, kneeling before me. He takes my hand.

  ‘Is it the pressure of the show? If it’s too much, we can delay the launch, I’m sure. I forget how young you are sometimes, Alice. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s not that. I’m excited about the show.’

  ‘Then what, tell me.’

  ‘It’s hard.’

  ‘Alice, whatever it is, you need to tell me.’

  Give it to him straight, just like they did at the clinic.

  ‘OK. I’m pregnant. Ten weeks pregnant. Almost three months.’

  Shell-shock words.

  ‘Pregnant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I forget to take the pill. It’s my fault, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry?’

  I’m in shock, I’m confused, I cannot comprehend the expression of utter joy that transforms his face.

  ‘Why on earth would you be sorry?’

  He’s grinning wildly and holding my hands, now kissi
ng them, and I’m smiling too; in fact, all of a sudden I’m laughing.

  ‘You think it’s a good thing?’

  ‘Not good, no. Fantastic. Incredible. Amazing. You’re having a baby. We’re having a baby. Alice Garland, this is the best news I’ve ever had in my life.’

  Now

  Luke

  The separated adoptee and birth parent are, by definition, strangers to one another. How can you understand who someone is and what they might be capable of when you have missed all the nuances, behavioural complexities and fundamental background that has formed their persona?

  Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris

  On Saturdays, Hannah gives me a lie-in. Sundays are her turn, though she rarely takes it.

  ‘I can’t bear to miss out on any time with Samuel,’ she will say, appearing downstairs in the kitchen while the two of us eat our unvarying breakfast: milk and baby porridge for him, toast and Marmite for me.

  I sleep late on this particular Saturday, exhausted perhaps by the combined stress of my job – will they, won’t they close down my record label? – and my ongoing disillusionment with Alice.

  I find my girlfriend and son sitting together in our small paved garden, Samuel leaning against Hannah’s stomach, cradled between her thighs.

  He laughs in recognition as soon as he sees me, and Hannah says, ‘Yes, he’s pretty funny, your daddy, isn’t he? Do you realise you’ve slept for almost twelve hours? You must have been shattered.’