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

by Clare Empson

  ‘Yes I do. You’re worried that Samuel loves Alice more than you. And I’m telling you that’s crazy. Babies don’t have thoughts at this stage in their lives. They don’t remember one day to the next.’

  ‘How can you say that when you’re so fucked up about the first months of your life?’

  I step backwards, a physical defence; the wash of shock makes me cold and alert. I can hardly look at her, this woman I love.

  Hannah starts crying again.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.’

  Samuel, marooned and motionless in his pram, begins to wail, and Hannah wiggles the handle, distractedly, demonically.

  ‘We used to be so happy,’ she says.

  ‘We still are, aren’t we?’ Please say yes. I cannot stand any threat to my existence, surely she knows that. I’m an adoptee, I’m addicted to the status quo.

  I watch as she bends down to take Samuel out of the pram, unclipping his straps, kissing his face. The minute he’s propped against her, he stops crying. Isn’t that proof enough?

  ‘See? See how he loves you? Shall we walk up to the common? We can talk as we go.’

  Hannah looks at me now, her focus absolute.

  ‘I really hope you fully comprehend what just happened,’ she says, and there is a coldness to her voice I don’t like. ‘Alice needs to go. Alice needs to be sacked or whatever it is you do when it turns out that your birth mother’ – nasty, hostile emphasis of the words – ‘has been stealing your son.’

  ‘Hardly stealing, H. But she’s definitely weird around him. I tried to tell you.’

  ‘Why didn’t I listen to you? Why didn’t I see it? What kind of woman pretends another woman’s child is her baby?’

  ‘And dressing him up in my old clothes. The whole thing is strange. She seems to have zero interest in me, her actual son; her entire focus is on him.’

  ‘Do you think she’s dangerous?’

  ‘Christ, I hope not.’

  I’m relieved Hannah has finally come around to my way of thinking, but she’s making leaps here that are bordering on the extreme.

  ‘Come on, it’s not like she’s a psychopath,’ I say, expecting her to laugh, but she doesn’t.

  ‘I really hope you’re getting the magnitude of this. Should I spell it out for you? I want that woman out of my life.’

  Then

  Alice

  Jake’s deterioration is easily measured through his phone calls: the ones he makes, then the ones he doesn’t. I can always pick out the alcohol in his voice, even if I don’t hear it at first. At the start of the tour he seems mildly drunk, high after his shows and a late dinner with the band. But within a week the drinking has accelerated into something else. Night after night, his voice is so slurred and indistinct it’s hard to understand at times. He tells me he loves me, that he misses me, that it’s so hard being away. I lie awake long into the night after these calls, while our baby wriggles and shifts inside me, heels and elbows erupting alien-like from my stretched stomach, and I worry. Is this it, the start of his decline? Is he going to become ill again? I am counting down the day until the tour finishes.

  When Jake calls, I often ask him to put Eddie on the line, but he never does.

  ‘You’re not looking after yourself,’ I say one night when I’ve woken up at three to take the call. ‘You’re drinking too much. You need a break. Remember how depressed it made you last time? You have to stop.’

  But Jake rarely listens on these phone calls.

  ‘Love you,’ he says, his voice thick with booze. ‘No need to worry ’bout me.’

  He hangs up without saying goodbye, too drunk, it seems, to remember he’s in the middle of a phone call. My demons are at their peak in the middle of the night, my brain a cinematic projection of all the things that might go wrong. Jake staggering into the middle of the road, where he is mowed down by a truck. Jake overdosing on sleeping pills like Jimi Hendrix. Jake choking on his own vomit while he sleeps.

  Eddie sounds the alarm just a few days before the band are due back.

  ‘Alice, it’s Eddie.’

  My heart freezes over.

  ‘Oh God, please tell me he’s OK.’

  ‘He’s a mess. We’ve had to cancel tonight’s show. He’s been off his face for the past two weeks. We’ve been telling him to cut it out, but he won’t listen. He’s ruining the tour. But it’s his mental health I’m worried about. He’s a bloody fool.’

  ‘Come back, Eddie. Cut the rest of the shows. Please. Do it for me. Do it for the baby. We need to get him home.’ I realise I am crying, but it’s painless, unconnected, just a wetting of my cheeks.

  ‘I think you’re probably right. I’ll talk to Tom.’

  Jake’s call comes in much later the same night. It’s three in the morning, but that doesn’t matter, I’m instantly awake on the second ring, waddling into the sitting room and snatching up the phone by the fourth.

  ‘Hey.’

  How can one short syllable contain such profundity? I know from this greeting just how far Jake has fallen.

  ‘I’ve been so worried about you.’

  ‘Alice …’ He breaks off; is he crying?

  ‘Jake? Are you there?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Please talk to me. I’ve missed you so much.’

  There’s a gasp, that’s all, and then his voice, so weak and stilted I find I am crying myself.

  ‘I’m fucked, I think. So scared. Scared of everything.’

  ‘What things? Try to tell me.’

  ‘The trip home. Talking. Thinking. Going to sleep. Waking up. Having a shower. None of it seems … possible.’

  ‘Are you on your own? Where are the others?’ My voice sounds frantic even though I’m trying to stay calm.

  ‘In the hotel.’

  ‘Jake, go to bed. Please promise me you’ll do that. Everything will seem better when you wake up. And as soon as you get home, I’ll look after you. You’re going to be OK.’

  ‘Am I?’ he says, his last words before the line goes dead.

  Sleep is an impossibility; instead, I lie on the sofa waiting for the pitch black of 3.30 in the morning to move towards dawn’s pale-grey sludge. The rattle of taxis, I long to hear that. Stallholders shouting out to one another a couple of streets away. The Bar Italia opening up for morning custom. In Soho’s silence I hear nothing but gloom.

  A telegram arrives at nine in the morning and I’m almost too frightened to open it. I sit on the sofa, Jake’s sofa, our sofa, a sofa with so many memories, holding the envelope between hands that shake.

  We’ve cut the tour. Arriving home tonight. Eddie.

  Half an hour later, telegram still clutched in my hand, I realise with an energy my heavily pregnant self has almost forgotten that I need to get the flat ready for him. Oh, the relief of having a purpose, as I haul my bulk from one room to the next, changing sheets, cleaning the bath, plumping cushions, replacing candles. In the afternoon, I walk to the Iranian shop on Beak Street and buy tins of soup, bread and two bottles of Lucozade, invalid food. I think of my mother, briefly, as I unload the Heinz tomato soup into the cupboard, sliced Mother’s Pride into the bread bin. As a child, with recurring tonsillitis, all I ever wanted was tomato soup. I remember how my mother sat by my bed, right through the night when the pain was at its worst, and I wonder how we have got to here.

  The doorbell rings at six o’clock and I find both Jake and Eddie on the doorstep. Jake looks like a ghost, that’s the first thing. His skin is blue-white and his eyes slither from side to side, unfocused.

  ‘Jake!’ I say, reaching out to embrace him, but he takes a step back.

  Eddie, I realise now, has been supporting him with one arm around his back, and he says, ‘Let’s get him to bed. Then we’ll talk.’

  How I have longed to see this man, this thin
, gaunt ghost, and now, as he and Eddie climb the stairs ahead of me, one step at a time, I do not know how to feel. They stagger past the sparkling sitting room with its brand-new orange candles just waiting for a match, past the record player with The Dark Side of the Moon ready on the turntable. At the bedroom door, Eddie says, ‘Best to stay there, Alice, while I settle him. I’ll only be a minute.’

  How can this be happening? How can he have fallen so far in less than twenty-four hours? He sounded desperate last night on the phone, but today he is catatonic.

  ‘Heavy dose of Valium,’ Eddie says, sitting down next to me and taking my hand. ‘They had to sedate him to get him on the bus. He’s a fucking mess, the worst I’ve ever seen him. Did you know he’d stopped taking his medication?’

  There is no tone of accusation in his voice, but that’s what I hear, and I plant my face into my palms. All I can see is Jake popping out his sachet of pills into the lavatory.

  ‘Yes, I knew. He hates it so much. I should have made him take it. I didn’t understand.’

  ‘Alice?’ Eddie’s voice is sharp; he has picked up my remorse. ‘This is no one’s fault except Jake’s, and not even his. He’s a manic depressive and he has to keep taking his medication to avoid extreme episodes, or whatever this is. The doctor in Paris called it psychosis.’

  ‘What’s going to happen?’

  Eddie sighs. He keeps hold of my hand.

  ‘When’s the baby due?’ he says.

  ‘Ten days.’

  ‘His timing’s really off, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m just glad he’s home.’

  Eddie nods, several times. I can tell he’s trying to choose his words.

  ‘Alice,’ he begins, and then he stops himself.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You do understand what this means, don’t you?’

  ‘He’s depressed. He needs medication. He needs peace and quiet. Of course I understand.’

  It seems to me that the look on Eddie’s face is one of unutterable sadness, and this time he takes both of my hands between his.

  ‘He won’t be allowed to stay here.’

  ‘But why not? I love him. I’m going to look after him. We’ll be fine.’

  Eddie shakes his head. ‘They’ll make him go to hospital. And he won’t want to go. You know as well as I do how he feels about hospital.’

  ‘Then he won’t have to go. Why are you looking at me like that? I don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘I think you do. Tomorrow they’ll probably section him. You have to be prepared for that. Tomorrow they will take him away.’

  Now

  Luke

  The adult adoptee longs to experience the absolute love a mother has for her child at birth. But this is never going to happen. You cannot overcome the layers of defence that build up over twenty or thirty years. You cannot replicate the newborn experience.

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

  By the time I arrive at Alice’s studio (I haven’t called because she never answers her phone on a Saturday but works without fail in her studio), I am in a frenzy to get the deal done. I intend to burst in, surprising her at work, delivering my missive as I walk through the door, short, sharp, brutal, a rebuttal to match my own.

  Leaving the taxi, I stand for a moment outside the red-brick ground-floor flat. The studio is an open-plan space, I’d imagine, four rooms knocked into one, although this is conjecture, because last time I was here she wouldn’t allow me through the door. I hover. I ponder. My hand reaches up to press the bell and pauses just a centimetre or two away, frozen with indecision. My heart rate, now that I’m attuned to it, has definitely speeded up. I feel breathless with anger but also fear at the confrontation that comes next. The man who has carved a career out of maintaining the equilibrium, about to implode it with a few hostile words: ‘Alice, we don’t want you to look after Samuel any more.’

  I try the door handle, for it is easier this way. Just walk in, I tell myself, and say what you need to say. The door opens easily, which is a surprise. Nothing could have prepared me for what I find inside.

  How can I describe to you these first seconds of shock as I take in the images of Samuel on every inch of wall space, every surface, a vast half-finished canvas in the middle of the room. Like a hall of mirrors, or a nightmare, my boy laughing, sleeping, crying, one whole wall dedicated to Polaroid snaps with their eerie, ghostly light.

  My eyes swivel from one canvas to the next, so many, such likeness, such accuracy; the skill and depth of artistry is astonishing. Here is Samuel propped up against a tower of cushions on an unfamiliar blue and white blanket, his bear beside him with eyes of glass. Now he wears a top of mustard yellow and brown stripes, a pair of orange shorts. In another he sleeps in his bouncy chair, dressed in the tiny dungarees of before. To me he seems a little sheepish in his seventies garb, as if he understands the equation, the alchemy that takes place here in Alice’s studio, the transformation of Samuel into me.

  ‘Luke!’

  Alice enters the room with a small, half-pleased cry of surprise. But then I turn around and she sees my face.

  ‘I can explain,’ she says, but she has no words, no defence.

  I am having the strangest experience, out of body almost; I look at Alice and feel all connection to her dissolving away. In front of my eyes she becomes the thing that deep down she has always been: a stranger. Who was I trying to kid in this wretched attempt to turn her into my mother? I have a mother, one I’ve treated pretty badly of late.

  ‘What the hell, Alice? This place is a shrine. It’s weird, devotional shit. Like, I don’t know …’ I wave my arms around, ‘kind of psycho stuff.’

  Our worst fears are realised is what I’m thinking, but as always, Alice’s face remains impassive, her voice quiet.

  ‘Can you really stand there and say that to me?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I can. Shall I tell you what happened today?’ My voice is bitter, cruel, loathsome. ‘Hannah and I went to the North St Deli for a coffee. Ring any bells?’

  I watch the shame flooding into her face; I’m glad of it.

  ‘I see that it does. So what happens when Hannah …’ my voice falters a little on her name, ‘and Samuel’ – arch overemphasis – ‘and I walk into the deli is that a friend of yours, I believe he’s called Stefano, rushes over to say hello to Charlie. He asks where Alice is, Charlie’s mother. He says the two of you go there all the time. Can you even begin to imagine how that made Hannah feel?’

  I am full of indignant rage and yet I’m crying. I feel as I speak with such contempt to my mother as though my heart is immolating. I am angry and ashamed.

  Alice says, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry? For stealing our son and pretending he’s yours? Sorry for wanting him to be me?’

  ‘Look, I can see how upset you are and I can explain.’

  ‘Explain what?’ I gesture to the studio with its wall-to-wall Samuel. ‘The evidence is all here. You want Samuel to be me. You want my baby to replace the one who was taken away from you.’

  ‘No, Luke, it’s not like that, I promise you.’

  But I don’t want to listen to her. I know she is not to be trusted.

  ‘You can’t look after him any more, that’s what I came to say. This whole thing has been such a big mistake.’

  Alice gasps. ‘You don’t mean that. Who else will look after him? You know how Samuel adores me.’

  ‘We’ll work it out. My mother will help us to begin with.’

  This incendiary word, mother. One I have stumbled on so many times. But not now. The difference between Christina and Alice has become starkly clear. One the woman who has looked after me my whole life, the other a virtual stranger. A dangerous one, it seems to me now.

  Alice begins to cry, both hands conc
ealing her eyes, but I see how her shoulders tremble. I wish I could step towards her and put an arm around her and make things right between us. But here in this bizarre setting, with my tiny son looking down at me from every wall, I know things have already gone too far.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alice. But Hannah is completely freaked out. She doesn’t want you around Samuel any more. I don’t want you around Samuel any more.’

  Such hostile words, but I can find no other way to say them. There is a fury in me and it’s not all to do with this blatant idolatry of my small son. For Alice has done nothing but lie to me all along.

  ‘This isn’t just about Samuel, it’s about the way you’ve treated me. Can you imagine what it feels like finding out who my father is after twenty-seven years of not knowing, only to discover that actually it’s not Rick, it’s someone else entirely and you won’t even tell me his name?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Alice says, not looking at me, her gaze directed somewhere near the floor. ‘I’ve made some bad mistakes. But I’m trying to fix them. I don’t expect you to understand, but I’ve spent my whole life running away from it. It’s so … incredibly painful for me to face it.’

  ‘Oh Alice,’ I say, and I think that in this moment perhaps there will be a way back for us. But then she blows it, utterly, with her next line.

  ‘Please don’t take him away from me. I won’t be able to bear it. When can I see him again?’

  Not ‘you’ but ‘him’. Not me but Samuel.

  ‘Goodbye, Alice,’ I say with a cruelty I don’t recognise in myself.

  Then

  Alice

  Jake is asleep, curled on his side, facing the window. He has a hole in one of his socks and the three middle toes have broken free. Something about those toes, that sock, breaks my heart. I sit down on the bed more heavily than I intended. I roll my bulk towards him, my arms wrapped right around his waist, our unborn child filling the gap between us, and this is how he wakes.