Killing Karoline

by Sara-Jayne King

  As a teen and later an adult, that primal sense of loss I could not put a name to would manifest in my being moody and distant. I would often check out emotionally or take myself away when my birthday came around so as not to create another opportunity to be abandoned. It took me years to understand why I felt so detached. If I did celebrate I would go overboard, arranging week-long birthday celebrations, as though to validate my existence somehow. ‘She may not have wanted me then, but look how many people love me now,’ I would try to tell myself. I fluctuated between wanting to disappear completely and feeling compelled to scream, ‘It’s my day! I’m here! I’m here! SEE ME!’ My emotions leapt from excitement to dread to apathy to misery, and each year would be consumed by a desperate expectation that this year would be different. This year there would be no tears, this year I would be spared the feeling, the one I could not name or explain, and maybe even this year someone might ask me, ‘How are you feeling?’ and give me permission to speak my unspeakable truth.

  To this day, every year, I think about Kris and the questions rise again. Is she thinking about me? Does she remember? Is she too battling an unspoken grief, or does the day pass like any other? The wondering almost chokes me.

  Despite having existed for a mere twenty-four months, I feel as if I have always been here. I know I’m not the oldest but I’m definitely not the youngest either. Babies are brand new. I’ve been here for much, much longer than babies. I’ve even held a baby so I must be a much bigger person than a baby. Two is definitely significant. When I think now of how short a time two years actually is, it makes me think. Could she, Kris, really have gotten over such a momentous episode in her life, our lives, in just two quick-as-a-flash years? Some cellphone contracts are longer than that and when the time comes to upgrade, bow out or look for another provider, I’m always, without fail, stunned at how quickly the time has gone. Surely the maternal pull must be stauncher than the small print of a cellphone contract?

  And now, at my party, the mummy at the front door hands me a secret wrapped in shiny paper and a card I’m less interested in. She walks past me and into the house with a mini-version of herself.

  Both mother and daughter have wide, dark eyes, gingerbread freckles dusted over the nose and a small, tight, uneven mouth that looks like a mistake. The bottom lip is disproportionately full compared to the top one, as if it has been given the lion’s share of plumpness. There is no denying the little girl and the woman are related. It’s like simultaneously looking back in time and also forward by way of a crystal ball; they are in essence the same, forever unchangeably linked, in life, in death, in distance.

  It’s something I will always be fascinated by. Familial likeness.

  I don’t look like Mummy or Daddy, or Granny or Grandpa, or Yorkshire Granny. I do look like Adam because we are both brown. Adam has long eyelashes, though – that’s what everyone says. When I’m older and at first school, Adam will sometimes come to fetch me from my class and we will have to go to the dining hall and sit on the gym bench and have our pictures taken. All brothers and sisters have to do it. There’ll be a big white umbrella and a bright light and Adam will sit behind me and the lady will say, ‘Say cheese,’ and I will wonder why, but say it anyway and then we’ll go back to class and I’ll be disappointed that it’s all over, so I’ll walk back really slowly, take my seat and begin fluently reciting my five-times table. When the pictures come back, there will be much excitement in class. When they are handed out, I see my and my brother’s faces looking out from behind the protective cellophane. Adam’s symmetrical, even toned and pretty, mine gap-toothed, mono-browed, eyes far too large for the face. I will shuffle through each of the various pictures, large, small, smaller, hoping – despite knowing they are all the same – that I will find one where I look … non-ugly. The year Adam leaves for middle school comes as something of a relief for me. I am still ugly, but not by comparison.

  Downstairs Mummy is in the kitchen handing out birthday cake wrapped in pink napkins with stick-figure little girls with blonde straw-like hair on them. The little girls are holding hands. Mummy is dragging on a Peter Stuyvesant and wearing her apron with the Manneken Pis on the front. Daddy bought it for her on one of his business trips to Brussels where they speak differently.

  I do and will always find the smell of Mummy’s cigarettes hugely comforting. The apron, less so. It is made of a plasticky material that doesn’t feel good when I cuddle her. She says it’s great because it’s wipe-clean, but I don’t like it. I like Granny’s apron, because if you mess, you can scrub and scrub and the stain never quite goes away. Plus, it’s soft and doesn’t stick to my face.

  At two I am a precocious, amusing and consistently chubby child. Doughy rather than cherubic. My hair is a short, untameable sticky-outy mass of undefined curls. It is cut regularly by a white hairdresser who has not a clue how to deal with it. Thanks largely to her, I am often, too often, mistaken for a boy. It’s one of my earliest experiences of my identity being called into question or assumed to be something it is not. It never ceases to make me angry; often it proves utterly mortifying. I internalise every incident and feel the need to apologise for myself. What’s more, I have an overwhelming desire to make things okay for whoever hasn’t had the good grace not to ask the question in the first place. In twenty-four short months, I have learnt to feel shame about who I am and become a people pleaser.

  I suck my thumb constantly. I will continue to do this until I’m in my late teens, which, as a teenager under the spell of Oprah, I convince myself is related to having been taken away from the breast too early. I also have a blanket, called ‘Blanket’ bought by mummy the night they collected me from the adoption agency. Blanket and I were both new. Even though I’d been handed over by Kris in a yellow one, Blanket was the only one I ever wanted and felt comforted by. Just as Kris had been replaced, so too had the old yellow blanket. In fact, I became so attached to Blanket that when it perished, the only thing for my parents to do was buy an immediate replacement. Sometimes, I would love Blanket so hard his edges would fray and the silky part, the best part, would come away all together and I would have a small, secret piece to carry around with me, because Blanket wasn’t really okay when I was five, six, ten, thirteen, twenty-two. One day the unthinkable happened. I returned home from school to find Blanket on my pillow, recognisable but changed. Too blue, too bright, too arranged. Immediate distress and panic rose up in me as I counted off on my fingers, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. WEDNESDAY!’ Maureen, our cleaning lady, came on a Wednesday. Blanket had been sacrificed to that which makes the unclean clean. Every scent, stripped from his fibres, his comforting properties sluiced away. The essence of Blanket was gone and I was enraged. That night I wet the bed.

  We live in a small village in Surrey in the South of England where I go to playgroup and, because he is three years older than me, Adam goes to big school. The playgroup is held in the village hall next door to the school, and since both are close to our house, we usually walk there in the mornings. Sometimes if we are late I go in the buggy and Mummy and Adam run behind, with Adam grumbling, ‘We’re going to miss the bell!’ over and over. You get told off if you miss the bell. At playgroup there is no bell and you can just go in when you want to and no one tells you off. Once you’ve said goodbye to your mummy, you go to the cloakroom and must hang your coat on the silver hook with your name written on a white self-adhesive label above it. I love seeing my name, S-a-r-a-h written in big, curly, teacher writing. It confirms who I am, and my right to be there.

  The summer I graduate to big school we go to a village fête being held in same the hall where playgroup is held. It’s been only a few weeks since I was last there, but I am a big girl now and I’m feeling nostalgic. I break away from Mummy and Daddy and excitedly make my way to the cloakroom, my see-through jelly shoes sticking to the linoleum with each step. The cloakroom looks different. There are no coats, of course, and no pink and blue lunch boxes cluttering up the floor. B
ut there’s something else. It takes me a few seconds to register but then it clicks. The names have gone. Crudely torn from the wall. Remnants of the labels remain, but not so you can read them. A faded a-r is still visible, but the rest of rest of my name is gone. Ripped away to make way for a new child with a new name. I stand and stare at the spot above my hook for so long that Mum sends Daddy to come and look for me. I am lured back into the main hall with the promise of a beaker of Coca-Cola and a slice of Victoria sponge.

  At our house, Mummy does the cooking and Daddy drives off in the morning and comes back home in the dark. I know he is my daddy because he is married to my mummy and he eats a bacon sandwich and drinks a bitter black coffee for breakfast every morning. He also sleeps in a daddy’s bedroom. I think this is normal.

  Some of my favourite things are scrambled eggs, riding on Daddy’s shoulders, the waxy feel of his bald head and the smell of his scalp, the smell of maleness. I also love watching cartoons after church on Sunday while Mummy cooks roast dinner, being allowed to answer the telephone (‘Tandridge 4718, hello!’) and Granny reading Peter Rabbit to me. This part of life is simple. I wish everyday meant scrambled eggs and cartoons. Things I don’t like are getting my hair brushed (we all have to sing the ‘Ouch-ouch’ song just to get me through it), driving in Grandpa’s car (which makes me feel sick), Adam hitting me, and Daddy getting home late.

  We live in a house that looks normal from the outside – bricks, roof, front door, garden – but which inside is odd, topsy-turvy. It has a downstairs kitchen and a bedroom on the second of three floors, a bedroom that doesn’t quite fit and seems like it must have been a mistake. My family is a bit like our house; looks normal from the outside: a mummy, a daddy, a brother and a sister, but when you look closer you realise it doesn’t quite match. The children don’t look like they fit; they look like they must have been a mistake. My put-together family was assembled by chance, the outcome of a barren womb, a drunken fuck and forbidden love, but to me everything about our family is normal, normal, normal. I can’t explain what love is, but I know what ‘safe’ is and I feel it. Mostly, anyway.

  Back at the party and I am sitting in the ‘Pass the parcel’ circle. My absolute favourite party game. I am among the youngest of my little group, so I have already played the game several times before at the birthday celebrations of my toddler clique. Usually it is the ‘big’ boys and girls who win the final prize, but I am plucky and also, since it is my birthday, feel entitled to all the good stuff. The music plays, probably some infantile nursery-rhyme soundtrack stamped onto a vinyl and played on the not-to-be-touched record player. Grandpa is at the controls and every so often, as the parcel is tossed, thrown, and more often, reluctantly delivered on around the circle, he lifts the needle from the record. There is a nanosecond of silence, and then a cacophony of high-pitched squeals. On one of the goes around, the music stops while I am holding the parcel. I frantically rip off a layer of newspaper; it is a tense moment, I want to win, to find out what’s underneath all this wrapping. I am disappointed because I haven’t won the main, proper prize, but because Grandpa is the best, and because he knows how vital it is to keep the energy in pass the parcel, a raspberry-flavoured boiled sweet has fallen out of the paper as a consolation prize. Second best. I can live with that. For now. The music starts again and the magic parcel is once again taken and passed on, taken and passed on. This is my earliest memory. Turning two.

  CHAPTER 6

  Black like me

  * * *

  Until I go to big school at the age of five, I get to spend most of my time with Mummy. She doesn’t go to work, because that’s what daddies do. Mummies stay at home and make lunch, and drink tea and sometimes go to Sainsbury’s to buy food. When I am really little I watch Mummy carry out her domestic duties, assisted by our cleaning lady Maureen, from the security of my wooden highchair. I do not love being confined in the ligneous arms of the highchair, but its height offers the ideal vantage point for surveying the comings and goings in the house. If I am situated just right, I am able to see from the kitchen, through into the lounge, straight up the stairs and right to the front door. It means I can see exciting visitors arriving (non-exciting visitors, regulars to the house, simply arrive at the back door, via the dark, slightly scary passage down the side of the house) or the postman’s hand teasing phone bills and postcards through the letter slot. If the window in the front door were clear and not bevelled I would be able to see right into the garden, past the cherry tree and over the hedge almost to the road, but its opacity means my outlook is restricted to close-up silhouettes. It’s a good thing really. People don’t like you being able to see everything that goes on behind closed doors. The glass is like a partial truth, but to get the full story you have to sneak down the creepy side path and go through the back door. It all depends how badly you want to see inside and whether you’re brave enough to risk it.

  The highchair also offers me a prime view of the rear of the house and the large kitchen window, which affords me a perfect panorama of the entire length of the garden. I can see the swing, the topiary archway that separates the back gardens, the silver birch accommodating Adam’s treehouse, the enormous greenhouse where Adam and I will camp out in our sleeping bags when we are a little older, the shed and the chicken house. I can also see Mummy’s veg patch and the small iron gate at the far end of the garden that leads out onto a footpath and then acres and acres of green fields and, depending on the time of year, sheep and their lambs, although sometimes just sheep.

  To Mum, I am ‘Pickle’ or ‘Tottie’. Tottie Hardbake. To me she is the comforting smell of cigarettes and Chanel No. 5. She knows smoking is bad and only does it because the doctor told her to when she was younger. She tells the story a lot, often while puffing away in her distinctive style; a long pull in at the front of the mouth, an exhale out through the corner of the lips, head tilted up towards the ceiling. God forbid she blows smoke on anyone. She says that back in the old days when people used to go to parties and wear lots of make-up, the smoke from other people’s cigarettes would hurt her eyes and make her mascara run. She says that when she told the doctor, he suggested she take up smoking so that her eyes would get used to the smoke. The responsibility for my mother’s continued smoking and degenerating lungs lies with a hippy doctor. I never ask why, when it’s discovered that her ten-a-day habit could eventually kill her, she doesn’t quit. I just never ask.

  When it rains she wears a long, bright blue, leather-looking raincoat that falls just below the knee. The collar comes down in two points over each of her shoulders and pointing towards her breasts. The coat has clearly made its way from the seventies into the early eighties without embarrassment. Her hair, which to my frustration is always short, can be either dead straight or worn in manufactured curls. When she comes back from the hairdresser after her first ‘perm’, we shriek, ‘Mummy’s gone curly! Mummy’s gone curly!’ Mummy’s curls are the good kind, though, not like mine and Adam’s, which are the wrong kind. Her hair is black, save for the one time she tries a home colour. The day after she has applied the dye, we are on a school treasure hunt around our village, arranged by the Parent Teacher Association, with which my parents are both actively involved. It is summer and pissing with rain. Trudging through the fields and footpaths around the school are dozens of children and parents trying, through the downpour, to read the clues my dad has cooked up for the hunt. It’s proving difficult, the clues (Daddy’s super brain works on a different level to that of most people) and the weather, especially for those who have not had the forethought to bring wet-weather gear. The rain is falling in great torrents, and my mother who, despite being enveloped in the blue mackintosh, is falling victim to the elements. Umbrellas are proving futile by now and the rain is persisting in its soggy assault. People start to notice what looks to be blood trickling down Mummy’s face. As she strides determinedly on through the mud and rain, Clairol’s Vibrant Conker Red begins to betray her. Before long it has
created the illusion of a violent injury. ‘Angela, you’re bleeding!’ ‘God, Angela, what’s happened?’ Concerned members of the PTA cry at her in alarm. She wipes away the ‘blood’ with a tissue she has retrieved from the pocket of the mac; it leaves a slight stain, but the excess is gone. The home-dye job is declared a disaster and foreign colour will only return to my mother’s hair in the mid-nineties, care of a professional.

  It is not until we move house in 1986 that Mummy gets a proper job (she returns to teaching part-time and eventually to social work), so for the first six years of my life she is a ‘housewife’. That’s what it says on the adoption papers. About my father, along with his high-school education, it says ‘Consultant Engineer’. Sometimes, in addition to being a mum and a housewife, Mummy also helps with ‘reading time’ at Adam’s school, and on those days, when the three of us make the short journey to St Peter’s in the morning, instead of walking back home after Adam has gone into class, we stay. We set ourselves up in the ‘reading corner’, a small carpeted space at the back of the classroom, filled with cushions covered in itchy sixties material. My brother’s classmates take it in turns to come over to where we are sitting, me sometimes still in my blue-and-white-striped buggy with the grey plastic foot rest, Mummy bent into the tiny wooden chairs that tuck into the tiny matching desks that measure to her calves. They take a book from the shelf. Always the same and not really a proper book. It’s more like a matte-red paper magazine with only ten or so pages at most, which feel rough when you touch them. They always have the same two people in them. Janet and John who always have the same clothes on, despite the fact that Janet has a washing machine. John has a briefcase and a hatstand for what seems to be his only hat. These are not at all like the books I love to read, which are thick and shiny and smooth and have lots of different characters and dialogue to follow. Janet and John talk too slowly and their conversations are mundane in the extreme. Mostly about the washing machine. I often become frustrated as I listen to the children at the school stumbling over the simplest words and frequently, involuntarily, correct them when they mispronounce something or spend too long struggling to make out a particular word. Such behaviour earns me a glare from my mother and I eventually end up bored to actual sleep.