by Clare Empson
‘My grandfather was into punishment. I think we can safely say he was a sadist. There were the regular beatings – he broke my ribs several times – and there was the locking me out of the house in the middle of winter. I slept – or rather didn’t sleep – in the car. But the thing that made me miserable was the way he talked about me, as if I was disgusting, the lowest form of species, corrupt, sinful, all of that. When I was young, it was difficult not to believe him. Sometimes it still is. Sometimes his is the only voice I can hear.’
I am crying as I stand up and walk over to him.
‘Is that why you …?’ I leave the rest unsaid.
‘Yes. He made me feel worthless. That life wasn’t worth living. And it’s hard to shake that feeling sometimes.’
‘Oh Jake, I can’t bear it for you.’
My arms are wrapped around him, my face pressed against his chest. I hate the factualness of his voice. When he states these feelings, it’s as if he believes they are true. For the past year I’ve longed to understand his demons; I’ve thought, naïvely, that I could help him overcome them. Now I am beginning to understand how deep-rooted his self-loathing is; I’m not sure the baby and I will be enough to fix it.
‘Please don’t cry. I hate you being upset. Can we talk about something else now?’
‘Why didn’t your mother help?’
‘I suppose she was a bit frightened of my grandfather; she must have known how violent he could be. But I think she was so committed to her quest for freedom, she didn’t care about anything else. And then she met someone and she wanted to start over. And that meant leaving me behind. I just wish she’d had me adopted. I used to dream about it sometimes, this wonderful older couple turning up to take me away. I’d imagine their house, an old ramshackle farmhouse with a huge garden and lots of animals, ponies and dogs and cats.’
‘You honestly think it would have been better to be adopted?’
‘Of course it would. It was just me on my own dealing with my grandfather’s rages, and this went on for years, all the way through my childhood. But you know what that’s like. An only child, with no other siblings to take the edge off.’
‘Sometimes I think I hate my mother more than my father, for not standing up to him. Never trying to protect me.’
‘We are exactly the same, you and I. And it’s the thing that brought us together.’
When Jake goes out to baste the chicken and check on his roast potatoes, I sit back down on the sofa, the framed photograph balanced on my knees. It gives me a feeling of vertigo, this picture, not just the past, his past, the past that up until now he has kept hidden, hermetically sealed inside him. I also feel, as I stare and stare at ten-year-old Jake, that I am looking into the future and in some bizarre sense I am time-travelling forward to meet our unborn child.
Now
Luke
As expected, Alice has a mini nervous breakdown when she sees the bear. I’m standing at the sitting-room window, Samuel in my arms, waiting for her to arrive. Samuel is holding the bear, face outwards, with ugly new eyes on show – Hannah did her best, but essentially it’s cut-price plastic surgery. A bear with caring black and amber eyes made of glass now has the flat, cold glare of cross-stitch.
As soon as I hear Alice’s knock, I bring Samuel to the door with me, our daily ritual. She makes her funny face, he laughs and reaches out for her, and then I’m off in a swirl of anxiety about the day ahead. This time, though, she spots the bear immediately and cries out.
‘What did you do?’
Samuel is rolling his R’s like a gift, but Alice ignores him.
‘This, you mean?’ I point at the bear, acting casual, ignoring the dramatic plunge of my heart. ‘Hannah has a thing about glass eyes. She’s thinks they’re a choking hazard.’
But the words come out like sawdust. Dry to me and to her. I understand the cruelty of the crime.
‘The bear was yours, Luke. It means a lot to me. Perhaps it was wrong of me to give it to … Samuel.’
Her hesitation is enough.
‘Alice, let’s have a coffee. I feel like we should talk.’
In the kitchen, I set Samuel down on the floor and he begins his exhausting new semi-crawl: face-plant, press-up, chest forwards, face-plant. Alice spreads the blue rug out across the floor and relocates Samuel to its soft woollen stripes.
‘The floor is too slippy, little bird,’ she says.
The kettle is reaching boiling point, thunderously loud it seems to me as I strain to catch the tone of her voice. How quickly the bear has become symbolic of the wrong we cannot right. Alice giving me away, me being taken from Alice, is a pie chart without an intersection, two spheres that cannot be blended, just like the worlds we inhabited. Separated, that’s the word they should use for adoptees. A separated child. A separated mother.
I bring a cafetière of coffee and two mugs to the table, milk from the fridge. My hands are shaking. I abhor confrontation of any kind. I’m an adoptee, by nurture a people-pleaser.
We sit down opposite each other and it’s an effort for me to look up into Alice’s face. But when I do, I find that, as usual, she is calmer than me, assuming her role of adult.
I watch her bring her mug to her mouth, setting it down without taking a sip. Perhaps it’s too hot. Perhaps she’s just thinking.
‘You loved that bear,’ she says, and each word lands on me like ointment. ‘Rick gave it to you, and from about two weeks old you used to sleep with a fist curled around an arm or a leg. You were too young for me to worry about glass eyes, or perhaps I was too young to understand about them. After you’d gone, I kept the bear with me. For years I slept with him on my pillow, and then I relegated him to a shelf, a reminder but nothing more. I told myself that was progress.’
It’s the most she has ever said to me about the past.
Samuel is making small moans that will soon evolve into full-blown tears, a little ‘he-he’ noise that is hard to ignore. Alice gets up from the table and stoops down to collect him.
‘Come on up, my friend,’ she says, and she settles him on her lap, finds him the salt and pepper pots to play with, kisses the side of his face.
‘What was I like?’
She looks at me, surprised.
‘You were just like him. Happy. Always smiling. And laughing.’
Happy. Always smiling. I think of the way Christina often describes my first weeks – ‘you cried and cried, you wouldn’t stop’ – and it cracks my heart a little bit more.
‘Alice?’
Her face, lovely as ever, is impassive.
‘You call Samuel Charlie sometimes. Did you know?’
‘Oh, that. Yes, I can’t help it. He’s so similar to you at that age, I get confused.’
I’m nodding my head, too many times, trying to find the right words.
‘I’m beginning to feel as if we’ve got this the wrong way around. You looking after Samuel instead of getting to know me. It was our fault for suggesting it in the first place, but I really think it’s churning us up. Well, me anyway. I’m not sure it’s very healthy.’
‘It’s about as healthy as you can get. We’re family. Isn’t that better than farming out your child to someone you don’t know?’
I nod again, unconvinced. Suddenly, for the first time, I am really quite concerned by the depth of her love for my child. And the thing is, I don’t know Alice. Not really.
‘You don’t want me to stop looking after him?’
There’s anxiety in her face now. Burning eyes. I can’t look at them for long.
‘I know I don’t talk to you enough about those weeks when we were together. I know you mind. Sometimes I try to talk about it, but there’s just this great big block, memories I still can’t cope with all this time later.’
‘You can’t imagine how much I want to hear about it. The circumstances of my
birth seem so mysterious.’
‘I remember you being born as if it was yesterday. It was very quick for a first baby, just a few hours.’
‘What did we do together? I know it’s about sleeping and eating in the first weeks, but is there anything you can remember apart from that?’
Alice smiles. ‘Actually, you loved swimming. Well, not swimming exactly, but lying on a little blow-up boat. You liked the sensation of floating, I think, and the sound of the waves.’
‘Waves? Surely we weren’t in the sea?’
There’s something here, a slight nervousness that I pick up on but cannot understand.
‘I meant the sound of lapping water. Sometime I’d like to take Samuel swimming. I think he would love it.’
Alice is smiling now. When the light comes into her face, when you see those straight white teeth and the indentations around her eyes, she looks extraordinary. Heart-stopping. Head-turning.
‘I feel embarrassed to say this, but sometimes I’m jealous of Samuel. Because he gets to spend time with you and I don’t.’
‘Oh Luke.’ She reaches out and squeezes my hand, just for a second. ‘How could you be jealous of this little thing? But I do understand. The whole situation is a little strange, isn’t it?’
Samuel starts trilling like a bird and we both laugh; it lightens the atmosphere.
‘Yes, you are very clever,’ Alice says.
When the phone rings, I leave the answering machine to pick up, not for one second expecting my other mother to call.
‘Hello, darling. I called your office and they said you weren’t in. Just ringing to make sure you’re not ill. Kiss that beautiful boy for me and say hello to Alice.’
We regard each other, Alice and I, when the machine clicks off, me wretched at the duplicity.
‘It’s a bit like having an affair,’ I say, ‘only much, much worse.’
Alice smiles.
‘Maybe you should tell her?’
‘Not sure I can. The lie just gets bigger the longer it goes on.’
I look at the kitchen clock; it’s 10.30.
‘I should get going, I’m already late. I hope it was OK having this talk?’
‘More than OK. We needed it. Luke?’
Alice’s eyes are her strongest feature. A deep black-brown, framed with thick, long lashes, cartoonish eyes.
‘I am churned up. Same as you. But this helps.’ She drops a kiss onto Samuel’s head. ‘Being with him helps. Thank you for inviting me into your family. It was very generous of you.’
I’m trying to process this as I walk to the Tube station, trying to understand why these final words of hers slither in the base of my stomach with the dull ache of unease.
It was very generous of you.
Then
Alice
It is a cold night in late January when the phone call comes in. Jake and I are midway through a black and white thriller on BBC2 called The Deadly Affair.
‘Leave it,’ Jake says when I start to get up from the sofa. ‘They can call back.’
The phone rings on and on. It stops, then starts again ten seconds later.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Jake says, crossing the room and snatching up the phone.
As soon as he realises who the caller is, Jake turns his back on me. He is silent, listening to the voice on the other end of phone.
‘I see,’ he says.
He talks only occasionally and I sit on the sofa, ignoring the television, trying to make sense of this one-sided conversation.
‘No, I can’t do that.’
‘Why don’t you go if you care so much?’
‘I don’t owe her anything.’
‘All right, I’ll think about it. But, believe me, I’m not going to change my mind.’
His voice crescendos on this last line, he slams the phone down and throws himself out of the room without another word.
In the kitchen I find Jake pouring whisky into a wine glass, he fills it to the brim. I see how his hands shake as he puts the glass to his lips and swallows down an inch or two of liquid.
He puts the glass down on the table; he still hasn’t looked at me.
‘What’s happened?’
‘My grandmother died yesterday. My mum wants me to go to the funeral.’
‘Isn’t she going?’
He shakes his head, meets my eye for the first time.
‘She’s not coming back from Canada. The flights home are too expensive.’
‘I’d go with you if you wanted.’
‘I am not going anywhere near that bloody hellhole. Why should I?’
Standing a few feet apart, divided by our little Formica table, I can see that his whole body is shaking, with anger or fear.
I think of his confessions at Christmas, the childhood beatings, being locked out of the house on a freezing winter’s night a bit like this one. I walk around the table and wrap my arms around his waist. He allows me to hold him for a few seconds before he wrenches away and I watch him pacing around the kitchen in tiny restricted circles. He picks up his glass and downs the whisky in three or four gulps.
‘Talk to me, Jake.’
He sits down at the table, body curved away from me, face in hands, a cliché of despair.
‘There’s nothing to say,’ he says and he fills up his glass again, though he lets it rest untouched on the table. ‘Nothing.’
Thoughts and ideas run through my brain but I’m scared to mention them. I am thinking, doesn’t this mean it’s over? Both grandparents dead, Jake freed from his childhood. What if he went back to that house as an adult with his lover, with his child soon to be born, and faced the ancient horrors that still haunt his dreams, those quiet unguarded moments of sorrow?
‘Let’s watch the rest of the film.’
He picks up his glass and holds out a hand to me and we return to the sofa, but it isn’t the same. Jake might be watching the screen but I know he sees nothing but his past.
Grimness settles upon Jake like a cloud of dust. He is silent, preoccupied, haunted. The morning after the phone call, he says not one word to me. We shower and dress in silence as if we are flatmates and not lovers and I see that the effort of acknowledging me is more than he can manage.
We leave the flat together and when I walk towards Bar Italia, he says: ‘I’m not going to bother with coffee today. You go.’
He reaches into his pocket and hands me a pound note for my breakfast, but I shake my head.
‘I won’t bother either.’
‘I’ll see you later,’ he says. Then, ‘Sorry.’
I stand in the street watching him walk away, examining the stoop of his shoulders, his laboured gait. I don’t know what to do.
At college, I try talking to Rick about it.
‘He seems so down. One phone call and he’s like a different person. I can’t get any sense out of him.’
‘Maybe it’s brought everything back. He probably just needs space, Al.’
At lunchtime, I go shopping for our supper. Jake always cooks, but I think that tonight I will surprise him. I will make my mother’s chicken, mushroom and courgette casserole, the one fail-safe dish she taught me.
Jake isn’t in the flat when I arrive back in the late afternoon and I miss walking in to the strumming of his guitar or the blast of The Rolling Stones or Fleetwood Mac from the record player. But I’m contented enough as I begin to prepare the casserole, rolling chicken thighs and drumsticks into a plate of seasoned flour. Frying mushrooms, onions and courgettes into a soft, sticky mush, then browning the chicken pieces.
By eight the casserole is ready and Jake still hasn’t come home. I turn the oven down to its lowest setting and then I pace around the sitting room, too stressed to listen to music or read or draw or do anything except stare out at the street below, my whol
e being waiting for the sound of his key in the door.
In desperation I ring Rick and catch him on his way out to meet Tom at The Coach and Horses.
‘Thank God,’ I say. ‘If Jake’s there ask him to ring me. I am going out of my mind. Tell him I’ve cooked.’
‘Alice, my love,’ the unexpressed laughter in Rick’s voice soothes me. ‘Do you think you might be overreacting just a teensy bit? You are nineteen not forty. So what if Jake wants to go out and get smashed?’
‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘I know you’re right. But Rick—’
I catch him just before he hangs up.
‘Phone me if he’s not in the pub. Please?’
At a quarter to nine I turn the oven off and take out the casserole. I have no appetite for this greasy pale-grey sludge which used to be my favourite thing to eat not so long ago. I return to the sitting room and resume my wait, an unopened book on the sofa beside me, the television on with the sound turned low.
Rick calls at ten. He’s been at The Coach and Horses and now he’s in the French House and there is no sign of Jake.
‘He was here with Eddie earlier, they’ve probably gone on somewhere else. Maybe they went to get some food.’
‘Why hasn’t he called me?’
We are interrupted by the beeps as Rick’s money runs out.
I sit in darkness for a while, the street lamps below throwing occasional stripes of light across the brown carpet. Jake is out getting drunk with his oldest friend, the one person who knows the truth about his childhood. There is no reason for me to worry.
Why then as I lie in bed is my chest so tight it’s hard to breathe, my mind a blizzard of fear and anxiety I have no wish to examine? Beneath the romance and the passion and the euphoria of our love, there has always been this stubborn, inextinguishable truth. The man I love is unstable. He once tried to take his own life. I live in dread of that ever happening again.
Now