In the years to come there will be times – in fact, more often than not – when, due to location, lack of availability and cost, the likes of the erudite Errol will evade me. I will end up surrendering my locks to a hairdresser who is incapable of ‘dealing’ with my ‘type of hair’. These will largely be upsetting and embarrassing experiences. There will be those occasions when I will walk into a ‘European’ salon and be ignored, or the salon receptionists will simply turn me away with, ‘You need to go to someone who does that kind of hair.’ Some places will only be able to wash, not cut; some cut, but not dry; some will expect me to guide them through step by step, huffing and puffing in frustration or fear. On more than one occasion, my hair will be ruined by a scissor-happy have-a-go hero who once cut her sister’s boyfriend’s cousin’s daughter’s hair who was ‘also half caste’. By the age of twenty-one, having learned from my black friends that I’m fortunate enough to have ‘good hair’, I vow to only ever go to black hairdressers again. My white friends think I’m being racist.
CHAPTER 8
All things fall apart
* * *
The notion that opposites attract is certainly true of my parents, although any concept that opposites endure is not. After a few years, cracks start to appear in their marriage, which later turn into craters. By the time I am well into middle school things have started to fall apart, beyond repair. There are arguments, yes, but worse than that is the tension. Dad is angry and Mum is weepy. I find myself holding my breath a lot, and start to wet the bed. Every night. I awake to find myself drenched in my own piss. Peeling off urine-soaked pyjamas and stripping the wet sheets from the bed while still half asleep becomes my disgraceful nightly routine. Before long a rubber sheet is placed on the mattress. Mum says we must protect it from permanent damage. I am sick with shame.
Eventually the bed wetting becomes such a problem that a health visitor is called in. She comes to see me a few days after my tenth birthday. We sit in the garden and she presents me with a chart of the days of the week. Each day has a smiley face and a sad face. She tells me I am to use the chart to record my bed wetting. Each time I manage to have a dry night, I am to tick off a smiley face. If I wet the bed, I must circle the sad face with a red crayon. Seven smiley faces in a row and I get a chocolate bar. It doesn’t work; instead my ten-year-old little brain comes to associate food with reward.
The last resort is to instal a bed-wetting alarm. It goes under my bed sheet and at the first hint of piss lets off a cacophonous shriek, which startles me (and the rest of the household) from sleep. It works. I live in such terror of the alarm going off that I will my bladder under control. Through all of this no one thinks to ask me how I’m feeling…
I find solace from the unrest at home in reading and riding. The Wilsons have several horses and Mrs Wilson and Katherine have taught both Adam and I to ride. I become the quintessential pony-mad little girl. On the weekends and during school holidays, I am out of bed at dawn, mucking out, feeding, grooming and riding with Katherine and a couple of other horsey kids from the village. It is usually dark by the time Mum calls me in for supper, demanding I leave my mud- and manure-covered boots at the back door and head straight upstairs for a bath. At night I tuck myself under my Barbie bed covers and read until my eyelids droop and the book falls out of my hands and onto the floor.
It is on Christmas Day, when I am ten that my dad announces to my brother and I that he and my mother are splitting up and that ‘there will be a divorce’. I’m furious that he has ruined Christmas and watch silently as my brother rages at both my parents. Because his job requires that he frequently travel overseas, when Dad eventually leaves the family home, I do not really feel the impact of his absence. Prior to officially moving out, Dad spends a night or two with the Wilsons next door. It seems silly to me. It’s not as if my parents share a bedroom in any case. The distance put between the two of them by his simply having gone next door is negligible. One night he calls and asks me to go around to see him. As I’m walking the few short steps across the lawn to the Wilsons’ front door I see him through their living-room window. It dawns on me that this is the only time in nearly five years that I’ve seem my father inside the Wilsons’ house. Once inside he pulls me on to his lap and bursts into tears. I am appalled. ‘Daddy is sad,’ he says, clinging to me and stroking my hair. I am horrified at his vulnerability. The Dad I know does not cry. I lean away from him, determined not to be accomplice to his momentary weakness. ‘I want you to know that this is not your fault, yours or Adam’s,’ he says. I say nothing but think to myself, ‘I know.’ After about five minutes of unbearable discomfort I edge myself off my father’s lap, and walk back home. My brother, who has not been invited to watch my dad lose himself on the Wilsons’ couch asks me what happened. ‘Nothing,’ I say, picking up Bleak House and turning to the page where my bookmark is. ‘As all partings foreshadow the great final one, – so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be.’
The very next day my father starts to rent a room in a bedsit, some twenty miles away from Magpies. Although the number of dogs is now down to five, I can’t imagine my father has much enjoyed being licked awake by one of the Wilsons’ rough-haired collies.
Once my father leaves, my parents decide that we will see him every other weekend. Adam is not keen, and is also at an age where he is able to talk with his feet. His relationship with my father has deteriorated over the years and he has begun to seek affirmation in other areas – namely by being the school delinquent and hanging out with more and more unsuitable company. For a while the arrangement goes according to plan. Every second Friday Dad drives to our house and pulls up outside, keeping the engine running. He refuses to come inside and instead gives seven rhythmic beeps of the car hooter. As I run around picking up my books, my homework diary and overnight case, and throwing my dirty wellies into a plastic carrier bag, my mother pointedly says how terrible it is that he won’t get out of the car and knock on the door. Terrible for you, she says. I shrug, thinking I can imagine much worse: the two of them in the same room, for one.
I go to my dad’s new place, the bedsit, only once. I hate it. It is one room in a large, imposing house built in the sixties. There is a sparely furnished lounge, with a brown sofa and no television. The carpet is also brown and worn and it smells funny. Because Dad is only renting one room here, I have to sleep in a sleeping bag on the sofa. I lie awake most of the night, restless from a sense of the unfamiliar and terrified one of Dad’s ‘housemates’ will walk in and see me and want to know what I’m doing on their grungy sofa. At the far end of the house there is a kitchen, which smells of sour milk and chip fat left in the pan too long. There is no dishwasher (unlike at our house) and piles and piles of cutlery and crockery are stacked up in and around the sink. The pattern on the plates is unfamiliar and the knives and forks are not at all like the ones we have at home.
My dad’s room is up two flights of stairs, covered by more of the same brown carpet. Inside is a single bed, a kettle with the price tag still on, and the cafetière I recognise from when it lived in our house. There are other things in the room that also used to be in our house. All these displaced items make me feel anxious and I wonder why Dad doesn’t just buy new stuff. You can’t just take something from one life and put it into another, I think. There will always be something of that old life left behind that means it doesn’t quite fit into the new. Most disturbing of all about Dad’s new life is the box of condoms I see in the cupboard in his bedroom. I say nothing, but for weeks I cannot get the idea of what those condoms mean out of my head. I am confused, in a disgusted kind of way.
I tell Mum that I don’t like Dad’s house and never go there again. Thereafter we mostly spend our weekends camping and staying in youth hostels. We do the things Dad loves to do – camping, hiking, bike-riding – which I pretend I also love to do, although secretly, and I would never tell him, but just once I’d li
ke to maybe go and watch a movie or have a swim at the local leisure centre.
On one of our weekends, Dad takes me to Handel’s Messiah. I enjoy parts of it, but mostly the fact that it’s just me and him. Things at home are becoming more and more difficult and Adam, with his increasingly bad behaviour, is managing to monopolise the majority of Mum’s attention. I start to feel like an extra in the dramatic production of our lives. The main roles are the focus and I haven’t even managed to secure a bit part.
At the end of the concert Dad asks me if I would like to go to another concert soon, this time with his girlfriend as well. Girlfriend? I’m not upset; instead, I am strangely rather excited by the idea of my dad having a girlfriend. I’d seen enough American teen TV shows and witnessed enough of my friends fathers’ mid-life crises to know what girlfriends are like and conclude that my dad having acquired himself one is pretty cool. Girlfriends are young. Of course they are – they are ‘girl’ friends. Girlfriends are pretty and wear their hair in ponytails and chew gum. Girlfriends mean fun and make-up. Probably pop music! Possibly pointy high heels. My mind is already envisaging me and the girlfriend becoming firm friends. Cuddling up on the sofa to watch Grease and Beaches, gently teasing Dad conspiratorially and, maybe, if the time ever comes, talking about sex and boyfriends. The addition of a girlfriend will make everything better, I think.
A couple of weeks later Dad comes to fetch me. I hear his car pull up outside the house and I grab my bag and start to half-run, half-walk down the path. There is someone else in the car, in the front seat where, since I was nine, I have been allowed to sit as a special treat.
‘You remember Sarah,’ he says. He is talking to me, not her. I do remember Sarah, of course. She has been my grandparents’, and at times our cleaning lady for as long as I can remember, but now, incredulously it seems, Sarah is ‘the girlfriend’. She smiles broadly at me from the front seat and, stunned, I climb into the back of the car and secure my seatbelt as we head off down The Lane.
And so it comes to be that my dad enters into a relationship with ‘Big Sarah’, as she’s always been known in our family. Granny is beyond horrified, Mum fairly nonplussed and I am deeply, deeply disappointed. Sarah is not the girlfriend I had in mind. For starters, she’s not pretty. In fact, quite the opposite. She’s mannish, has whiskers on her chin and a short, square haircut that makes her look even less feminine. She’s also not young, probably only a few years younger than my parents. She doesn’t wear pointy high heels; in fact, her shoes (either clodhoppers or Jesus creepers) are even worse than Mum’s. She’s not even into pop music.
One good thing about Sarah is that when I stay the night at her house (Dad moves in with her soon after that first outing), I can stay up as long as I like, and watch things on TV Mum would never let me watch. The only other good thing about Sarah is that she has two daughters, whom I immediately start referring to as my stepsisters. They do not reciprocate. They are older than me by three and six years respectively. I have always wanted a sister and am sure that, despite their disappointing mother, they will live up to my expectation of what stepsisters should be. They will let me hang out with them and their friends, teach me how to apply make-up and answer my endless questions about periods. But they don’t. They ignore me, and instead I become a third wheel in my dad’s romance with our cleaning lady.
The weekend visits become fewer and fewer until neither Adam nor I have seen my dad for months. It becomes too difficult. I am devastated and bewildered that it seems so easy for my beloved dad to have walked away from us so easily.
One day, when spending the weekend with my friend Mandy – herself a child of divorce – we are driving with her dad in his Porsche. Her parents’ break-up has been a real boon. Both have remarried; her dad has bought himself a sports car and a huge converted barn and a lake with a boat on it. We are in his car, Mandy next to her father in the passenger seat, and me in the back. We are listening to Capital FM on the radio, a frequency alien to my own parents, when the DJ introduces the next song. From the back seat, I watch Mandy and her dad, the pair of them animated and smiling, singing in unison. Without even realising why, I am suddenly aware of my eyes filling with tears. I clamp a hand over my mouth, desperate not to allow even a murmur of my sadness to fill the car.
At home, the fallout from my parents’ break-up has begun. One night Mum goes to collect Adam from youth club, which is held in the drama block at his school. When she arrives he is drunk. He is thirteen. Within a few short, terrible months it becomes clear – to me, if not to my mother – that Adam has inherited his biological mother’s addiction to alcohol. By the time he is fourteen, my brother is a full-blown alcoholic. He has begun stealing alcohol from my parents’ drinks cupboard and takes every opportunity he can not just to drink but to get drunk. For years I seem to be the only one who understands that it not so much a case of him not wanting to stop, but that he cannot stop.
I come to be afraid of my brother, whose disease is loud, violent and permeates every corner of our home. We become scared of him, my mother and I, and we are often forced to call the police, although this never makes me feel any safer.
To fund his drinking Adam begins to steal. He steals money from my mother’s handbag, from my piggy bank, even from the Wilsons’ ceramic chicken, which sits on the dresser in their kitchen. He steals other things too. Booze, obviously, my treasured CD collection and various piece of jewellery, including the charm bracelet sent to me by Kris on my first birthday. My mum kept the bracelet in her chest of drawers and every so often I would take it out and hold it in my hand. It was small and silver, but heavy, I remember. It carried too much weight for something so small. A lion marked my arrival into the world. A lion, because of the stars. She’d lain down in Sagittarius and I had arrived in Leo. Her cub, born in her own image and her own disgrace, its mane chiselled in silver. Silver, not gold, like lions are supposed to be. Why had she had given me the wrong colour? On my first birthday, a crown appeared. That was harder to decipher. Was it a reference to her own married name, or more likely a tip of the hat to the ill-fated royal wedding that took place just a few days before my birthday. After the crown there was nothing. Links of silver remained unadorned. She was told not to send any more by the social worker.
In a situation like this there is inevitably a lot of pain and heartache for you. However, I am sure you recognise that your daughter’s happiness and future is now bound up with her adopted family … It was thoughtful of you to remember Sarah’s first birthday but there can be no benefit to anyone if attempts to continue this tenuous contact are maintained through the years ahead. I do not wish to seem hard, but I am unable to deliver any further presents or written communication to Sarah or her parents.
For years the bracelet, like the cub, was forgotten about, hidden, kept out of sight, until one day it was gone forever. Taken by my brother and sold so that he could drink away the memories of his own loss.
CHAPTER 9
The letter
* * *
I am fourteen years old when I find the letter hidden in my mother’s chest of drawers. It is buried at the back, among silk scarves and discarded lipsticks I’ve never seen her wear. The chest of drawers has held untold secrets and has let slip many revelations over the years.
The letter is written on several sheets of pink paper. Pink is my favourite colour. The handwriting is uncannily similar to my own. The letter has been folded over several times and placed inside a matching envelope with my name on it. I see no reason why I shouldn’t read it. I’m more concerned about being caught in Mum’s bedroom without permission, but as far as I see, the letter is mine.
I sit down on the bed and start to read. The letter is dated 25 July 1981. Almost a year after I was born.
I won’t try to make excuses for the hurt I have caused… why you were adopted and not allowed to live with me, your natural mother.
From the start, there is an air of contrition and I am reassured. I do not yet bristl
e at the ‘natural mother’ part, although in years to come it will grate and offend me. There is nothing ‘natural’ about the way she disposed of me.
The ‘natural mother’ talks about moving from England to South Africa with her boyfriend, Ken. She writes about ‘apartheid’ – I pronounce it apart-eyed – and how black people are considered second-class citizens. I already know black people aren’t as good as white people so I simply read on, unmoved by what she seems to think is a noteworthy part of the story. I just want to get to the bit where the ‘natural mother’ gives me away.
Killing Karoline Page 8