by Clare Empson
The baby is out, the cord is cut, there is a newborn cry, tiny, tinny, a kitten’s mewl.
‘It’s a boy, Alice,’ Rick says, and I don’t need to look because I always knew that.
He’s first to hold the baby, wrapped up like a package in a perforated white blanket, just a flash of deep pink skin to behold. He walks around the small, hot room gazing down at the bundle nestled in his arms.
‘You look like Joseph in the school nativity,’ I say, and he laughs, his loud, shouty laugh.
‘Here you are.’ He places my son on my chest. ‘Your turn.’
He unwinds the blanket from the baby’s face and we look at him properly for the first time. And right at this moment he opens his eyes and then there is no mistaking him, and I bite my lip, but the tears won’t stop coming, and Rick is crying too.
The midwife is back with a clipboard.
‘Mother’s name Alice Garland, father’s name Richard Fields, time of birth six seventeen. Just checking all the details before we send this off.’
I see Rick look at me and I give a tiny, sharp nod.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That’s right.’
‘And do we have a name for baby yet?’
‘Charles Jacob Garland,’ I say after a moment’s pause, and my voice comes out strong and steady even though I’ve spoken his name out loud for the first time since he died.
When the midwife has gone, Rick leans over the bed, over the baby, and puts his mouth against my ear.
‘Alice Garland, you are a survivor,’ he says.
And the thing is, Jake said the exact same words to me once before.
And if he said it, if he believed it, then, I tell myself, it must be true.
Now
Luke
It is not unusual for an adoptee to wait until the wheels have fallen off and the car has crashed catastrophically before he seeks help. This is because an adopted child grows up masking or burying their true feelings; in effect, they lock them up in a safe and throw away the key.
Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris
There are whole days when I cannot get out of bed. The tasks of showering and brushing my teeth and getting dressed overwhelm me. Sometimes I am paralytically sad, grieving with ceaseless tears that drop down my face for a man I never met. Other times I am subsumed by panic. Not the short, sharp attacks I am used to, two or three minutes of raggedy old-man breathing before the anxiety begins to subside. This is different, a pervasive terror that can last hours at a time. I cannot voice it because mostly I am unable to speak; words have become meaningless and impossible, a language unknown. I feel as if I am slowly losing my hearing, my vision and my mind. If only I could speak, I might break the penetrating quiet that surrounds, engulfs and suffocates. Instead I wait in desperation for Hannah to come and see me, thinking she will understand. But when she does come, I turn my head away and look at the wall, and after a while she kisses me and goes back downstairs to my mother. I am drowning in ignominy.
The doctor comes back again and this time he prescribes Xanax to be taken regularly throughout the day. These small blue pills bring the first moments of relief, knocking me into a thick, exhausting sleep. I sleep through the day and night, waking for water and sips of soup before plunging back into chemical darkness.
On his third visit, the doctor tries to find out more about my genetical history. My mother is present, which is just as well, for I am unable to speak about Jacob’s depression without crying, unable to speak full stop.
‘We only have the patchiest details from Alice – Luke’s birth mother – about what happened,’ Christina says. ‘We know that he was a depressive and was prescribed medication, which he stopped taking. It was during an episode that he killed himself.’
‘It sounds like he was bipolar – a manic depressive as it was known back then. This kind of depression is often determined by genetics. You say Luke’s breakdown has been triggered by finding out about his natural father, but it’s also likely that it has been coming for years. Has he had depressive episodes in the past?’
My mother turns to me with so much compassion in her face I have to look away.
‘He’s very sensitive,’ she says. ‘He always has been. He takes things to heart, if that’s what you mean.’
‘The real danger with manic depression is that it can tip over into a state where someone is so full of negative feeling they present a threat to themselves. I think Luke is ill enough to warrant inpatient care. I’d like to organise a place at the Priory Hospital in Roehampton.’
‘No, no, no. That is not going to happen.’ My mother jumps up from her chair, her face lined with anger. ‘I am here by his side and I do not intend to leave until he is fully recovered. Luke is not suicidal. He is depressed, and with good reason. There’s a difference.’
The doctor nods. ‘I thought it wise to point out the risks. Let’s keep a close eye on his medication and find him an outpatient appointment as soon as possible.’
Once the doctor has left, my mother returns to her bed-watching post. I’d like to thank her for this outburst of loyalty, I’d like to apologise for not realising how much she loved me. But words are as unstructured as cotton wool and I say nothing.
Next door, Samuel begins to wake up, and my mother smiles at his midday coos, the clucking and trilling that signals not just his alertness but also his sunny, optimistic mood. The baby who loves to laugh.
‘Shall I bring him in?’ she asks, and I nod.
I’d speak if I could, and I do try moving my tongue around my mouth, but it’s as if I have forgotten this most fundamental of skills. She stops at the door and turns around to look at me.
‘This is a blip,’ she says. ‘Brought on by traumatic circumstances. But you are strong and you will get through it.’
‘How do you know?’ My voice when it comes is thick and rasping, an old man’s voice.
There is no doubting the tears in my mother’s eyes.
‘I know because you are my son,’ heartbreaking emphasis of the pronoun, ‘and you have always got through everything.’
Then
Alice
I suppose my parents would always have found out. They could have rung all the hospitals on a daily basis. Or perhaps the hospital rang them, informing the parents of this young, unmarried, seemingly deranged mother, who cries so hard when she feeds her baby, his small, soft head is soaked in tears.
They arrive on the third day of my hospital stay, Charlie asleep in his tiny cot on wheels. I love it when they bring him in from the neonatal unit, wheeling him through for his four-hourly feed.
‘Your parents are here at last, lovey,’ says Penny, my favourite nurse, with her soft Scottish accent and her bleached Norwegian-blonde hair.
My father is wearing a suit and tie, which seems oddly formal for a hospital visit, and my mother too is dressed in a matching skirt and blouse, her rarely worn pearls a note of discordance, a hint of something I cannot comprehend. She is carrying a cellophane-wrapped bunch of carnations – did I never tell her how much I hate those flowers? – and I wave it away.
‘On the table, thanks,’ I say.
My mother tries to take my hand, but I snatch it away.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ she says.
‘Look at the baby,’ I say, gesturing to Charlie in his see-through cot, asleep with one small fist resting beneath his cheek, lips curved in a rosebud pout.
‘Lovely,’ says my mother, looking.
‘Now, Alice,’ says my father, sitting down next to the bed, not looking.
I stare at my beautiful sleeping boy, Jake’s boy, and I try to blank out the noise of my father talking.
‘We’re here to help you. And we forgive you, absolutely. Let’s start with a clean slate for all of us. I’m sure you want this baby—’
‘Not this baby,
my baby.’
‘Your, er, child, to have the best chance. And so we’ve asked Mrs Taylor Murphy from the adoption agency to meet us here. Just for a chat, a preliminary chat, you understand, so that you have options.’
‘Fuck off. I’m not giving my baby up.’
This time he ignores the swearing (I never used to swear, it’s been a surprise for us both), though I see the purple flooding his face, the violence in his gaze.
‘But have you thought about how you’ll manage without your … er … boyfriend to support you? And as your mother said, we’re very sorry about all that. Alice, you’ll have nowhere to live and no money. Please be sensible. Don’t throw your life away. You could have a summer at home with us to recover and then go back to college in the autumn, and it will be as if none of this ever happened.’
‘Get. Him. Out.’
No one reacts. My father sits in his chair, regarding me with his high colour and his popping-out eyes; my mother gazes out of the window with her practised mask of a face. Her life like one long uninterrupted meditation.
Into this scene of joy trips Mrs Taylor Murphy, dressed as if for a garden party, with a voice to match.
‘Alice, my dear, what you have been through. I do hope you don’t mind me popping in?’
She exclaims at the vision that is my sleeping child – ‘Isn’t he a beauty?’ – and asks my parents if she can have some time alone with me.
‘Is that all right with you, Alice?’
‘It would be better if they didn’t come back at all.’
Despite the floral dress, the perfume – too strong, too sweet now that she is standing next to me – the dark red lips and the patent heels, I like the woman instantly.
The moment my parents have left the ward, she pulls the curtain around my bed.
‘Let’s have us a bit of privacy,’ she says.
She sits in the chair just vacated by my father and observes me with her head tilted fractionally to the side.
‘How on earth are you coping? Motherhood and grief all rolled into one, you poor darling.’
I allow her to take my hand while I sob, and she tells me, ‘Let it all out now, that’s the only way. You’ll feel better if you have a good cry.’
She doesn’t speak but continues to hold my hand, and I like her for that. What is there to say? What words of comfort can she possibly offer?
After a while, I begin to tell her things.
‘He was so excited about the baby,’ I say, while Mrs Taylor Murphy nods and listens. ‘We used to sit up in bed every night choosing names – Charlie was the one we both liked, for a girl or a boy. We would chat about our future, how we’d manage with my art and his music. How I’d finish my degree. How I’d cope when he was away on tour. We had it all worked out.’
‘I’m sure you did.’
‘He didn’t mean to kill himself. I know he didn’t. He just didn’t want to go to the hospital. It was an impulse thing. What he wanted was to be there for me and the baby, it was one of the last things he said to me.’
‘It’s such a tragedy. I cannot imagine what you must be going through.’
‘I don’t want to give Charlie up. He’s all I have left.’
‘I can understand you feeling like that. I know I would feel exactly the same. I will tell you something though about babies, Alice. They soak up their environment like a sponge and this acute grief you’re experiencing, it’s going to affect him. I wonder if you can step outside of your own situation for a moment and imagine these two choices that Charlie has and see which one you think is better. He could grow up with you, his natural mother, who would love him with all her heart and who would struggle and fight, I’m sure, to provide him with a good life. But it would be hard, for you and for him. Hard to find enough work to support yourself. Hard to get back to your career as an artist. Hard to find anywhere decent to live. I think I’m right in saying your parents don’t support your choice to keep the baby?’
‘My parents are shits.’
‘And then,’ Mrs Taylor Murphy carries on regardless, ‘Charlie could grow up with two parents who are desperate for a child, particularly a little boy, and have plenty of money to give him the best possible education, and a beautiful house in Yorkshire with acres of land and a swimming pool and a tennis court.’
‘I don’t care about money. It’s my child’s life we’re talking about.’
‘Exactly. You do see, Alice, don’t you, how different those lives would be for Charlie?’
And the thing is, I do. Her words, her pitch, her bid for my boy: just this, it makes so much sense. I’m not sure I will manage to bring him up on my own. Where would I live? How would I finish my degree? How would I ever support us? I might be able to draw a single-parent allowance, but would it be enough to cover rent, food, clothing, heating, all those things I’ve never had to think about? I am twenty years old and I don’t know where to start.
Penny comes in now and wheels Charlie away for his bath.
‘Cup of tea for you, my darling? And one for your visitor?’
And perhaps it is simply because my son is out of sight that when Mrs Taylor Murphy brings out the ‘preliminary’ adoption papers for me to look at – so much emphasis on that word today – I say, ‘Just tell me where I have to sign.’
I don’t see my parents again, although I am sure Mrs Taylor Murphy will have imparted the good news, the impending handing-over of my son.
Just before she leaves, she asks why I put Rick’s name down on the hospital certificate instead of Jacob’s.
‘The nurses only allowed him to stay with me because he said he was the father.’
‘You know what, Alice? Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe in the future, when your child wants to contact you, he’ll find two parents ready to meet him instead of one.’
And she gives me that little fantasy to hold onto, the prospect of meeting my child again once he’s an adult.
In our last days together, the nurses, aware that I’m having Charlie adopted, ration the time I spend with him.
‘Don’t let her get too attached,’ I hear one of them telling Penny, who smuggles him in outside of feeding time. ‘It will only make it harder when she has to say goodbye.’
Goodbye. How is that even possible? I have an acute pain in my heart, physical, like the gouging of a javelin, every time I contemplate it. During the night-time feed, three o’clock on the dot, I am left alone with him in the darkness. And I whisper my secrets to him, filling his tiny ears with hopes and dreams as the stars stud the sky outside our hospital window.
‘You’ll be like your father. You’ll be tall and handsome and funny and brave. You’ll be musical. Artistic. I will love you all the way through your childhood. And when you’re eighteen, we will find each other again.’
On our last day – Mrs Taylor Murphy is due to arrive at ten the next morning, to take Charlie off to his foster parents – Rick comes to visit.
‘Tea and biscuits, Richard?’ asks Penny, who loves Rick and always gives him extra custard creams.
‘You’re a wonder woman,’ Rick says. ‘And do you think we could have a few minutes undisturbed? Just want to make sure Alice is all right about tomorrow.’
‘Leave it to me,’ says Penny, pulling the curtains around the bed.
For a moment we just look at each other, no need for words.
‘Don’t bully me, Rick.’
‘He looks like Jake even now at a few days old. Imagine how much he will look like him when he’s older: twelve, eighteen, twenty. And you won’t be there to see that happen. How can you bear it?’
‘I don’t have a choice. Not if I want what is best for him. And I do want that, more than you could ever imagine. Where would I live? In your squat?’
Rick shakes his head. He grins, then grabs hold of my hand and kisses it.
�
��The thing is,’ he says, ‘I’ve just had the most genius idea.’
Now
Luke
Adoption is one of the last great taboos. No one talks about the fact that the adopted child might carry their relinquishment wound into adult life. It’s like a conspiracy, everyone contriving to present a united view. Adoption is a good thing, a fantastic thing. How could you possibly think anything else?
Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris
If you’re going to go nuts, you may as well do it in the company of Kate Moss and Robbie Williams. I’m to be treated as an outpatient at the Priory, infamous rehabilitation centre to burnt-out celebrities but also home to some of the best psychotherapists in town.
I am in my mother’s car, with all its checkpoints of familiarity: the flower dangling from the mirror, once a tasteful air freshener now a defunct piece of cardboard; the folded rug on the back seat; the tin of sweets on the shelf beneath the glove compartment. Samuel is in the back, asleep in his car seat, one fist closed around his squinting old bear, a needle of pain each time I see it.
A moment of misgiving when my mother drops me off in front of this palatial white building (turrets, arches and Doric columns for the celebrity breakdown). She offered to come in with me, but that meant bringing Samuel too, and somehow I couldn’t bear the thought of it.
‘Good luck, darling,’ she calls as I get out of the car, as if I’m going for a job interview or about to sit my physics GCSE.
The first thing I notice as I am taken on a tour of the facilities – ping-pong tables and instant coffee, just like a sixth-form common room – is the friendliness of all the other patients. On every turn there’s another unasked-for greeting, ‘Hi there,’ a smiling face, an infrared beam of reassurance, the unified, silent message: ‘Come let us help you over the start line.’ It’s a bit like joining the Moonies, I’d imagine.