I soon became homesick and lonely. Also I was unable to accept the way the political situation was in South Africa … It was at this time that I got to know your natural father who was working as Head Chef at the hotel I was working in. At the time, and still today, it was generally unheard of for black and white people to become friends, but the hotel was managed by English immigrants and most people took to ‘Jackie’ (his name was Jackson) because he was ‘different’ … I’m not going to write you a romance story. Of course, absolutely no one guessed that what was on the surface just a couple of hotel staff becoming friends was really a deep and understanding relationship.
I take all of this in – ‘a deep and understanding relationship’. It is all I have and so I believe it. It doesn’t occur to me that she may be whitewashing the truth.
When I discovered I was pregnant, it would be wrong of me not to hide the fact that I did consider abortion. [Ken and I] were not married, I was not happy with South Africa and of course there was the nagging doubt that the child I was carrying wasn’t Ken’s but the result of my affair with Jackie.
Ken, on the other hand, was overjoyed… [We] were married and began our life together with a renewed understanding of each other and an intensity which remained with us. Of course my relationship with Jackson ceased when it was discovered I was pregnant, but he could not see the necessity for it, nor did he want to believe that there was the remotest possibility that I was carrying his child… Ours was a relationship with no possible future, although we sometimes foolishly talked of one… Jackie was married and had a daughter… [He] also later had a son.
I stop reading. I had a brother and sister. A real brother, a real sister. Where were they? Who were they? Did they look like me or I like them? I conjure up fantasies in my head around my real siblings. That one day when I am old enough to be in control, we will sit together around my father’s table and break bread (or whatever it is people break in Africa) and crack jokes (in English, of course) and push to the very past, the time in which we were strangers.
As my pregnancy drew on I became very anxious and eventually shared my secret with my doctor… My original plan was to go home to my parents but naturally a father wants his wife and newly born child to be with him so I could not go without telling Ken the truth, which I feared to do.
My dearest Sarah-Jane, I must admit with shame that your future rested on your race – I cannot put it any other way. If you had been Ken’s child then things would have been so different and no one would have had to know my terrible story, but if you were Jackson’s then a whole problem had to be faced, but one which was not insurmountable at the time of your birth when no one except the hospital staff would have known the real reason for your disappearance.
But it didn’t work out that way. At birth you had the ironic fortune of being pronounced a white baby … until you were about three weeks old and I began to see signs of who your real father was, namely you were turning a pale brown colour. Again and again I took you to my doctor, but he refused to believe what I was convinced was true. Eventually he agreed you were Jackson’s daughter, not Ken’s and what followed was a nightmare.
Ken was spellbound by his little daughter… How could I now tell him you weren’t his child?
Just tell him. Tell him and leave, leave if that is what it takes, because that is what you do, don’t you? For your child? You do what it takes! You sacrifice anything, everything because the needs of your child, what’s best for your child comes first. Always first. The more I read, the more I begin to believe that I was adopted not because of race, or politics, or paternity – these were mere excuses – but rather because I was an inconvenience.
I decided to leave Ken and take you home to England and decide there what to do. Even if Ken were to accept you for his own, it would have been no use – in South Africa it is a crime for black and white people to make love, a contravention of their ‘Morality Act’ [sic]. Jackson and myself would have been sent to prison, you would have been taken from me and Ken’s family disgraced.
After a night of agonising discussions, questions, answers, self-reprisals Ken decided to stay by me. He forgave me and together we had to decide how best to pull through. And Karoline?
You must not think that from then on you became a millstone around our necks. One cannot stop loving a child just because she does not belong to you… We would have kept you if there had been any way possible but there was not.
But there was! There was a way. It may not have been the easiest way, but it was a way, if she’d really wanted me. If she’d wanted me more than she’d wanted to keep the status quo and avoid disrupting her own, apparently already unhappy life. Why not leave South Africa, this country she claimed to feel so displaced in? Leave and go somewhere, anywhere, if it means you’d get to stay with the child you created and who had lived inside your own belly for nine months. Even Angela and Malcolm, who had no reason to, loved me and I knew, knew that if it ever came to it, they would have fought for me with everything they had within them. They would have given their own lives to save mine.
[W]e took you out of South Africa on the pretext of seeking medical help for you. How I must have broken our families’ hearts with such a terrible, unforgivable story.
It is not with any pride that I tell you that our plan worked out. Our friends and family sympathise with us and my parents have to carry the burden of knowing the truth.
What about my burden of knowing the truth? The truth that my own mother would rather give me away to complete strangers than admit what she had done, admit that she had made a mistake! Even knowing how much I was loved by my mum and dad was not enough to stop me playing over and over again the truth of knowing that saving face held greater importance to her than hearing me say my first word, or watching as I gingerly took my first step.
I told Jackson the truth too, but sheer fear of the consequences of his ever being discovered by the authorities made him simply refuse to believe it – what he feels now I do not know.
Sarah-Jane, what do you feel? I do not expect you to feel any understanding of the situation and it will not be until you have a child of your own that you will have any idea of what it was like to give up my beautiful daughter… [You] will always be so close to my heart, no matter whatever you decide on reading this letter.
Take care. All my love to you.
Kris (your natural mother)
I sit back down on the bed in my mother’s room and stare at my hands. The hands that would once have wrapped around Kris’s finger, squeezed at her breast. The same hands that created the slanted, loopy, but precise, script so similar to that which I have been transfixed for the last few minutes. She had called me Sarah Jane in the letter. Sarah Jane. Perhaps she had been told to? Told that it was best. But it feels to me that, to her, I am still Karoline. I reread the last line over. All my love to you. Love? But she left me. Is that what love is? Leaving?
I refold the letter as best I can, slide it back inside the envelope, tearing it slightly in my haste to get it out of my hands and back in the drawer.
I remember thinking of Karoline as a being, an entity, someone who had existed at some point, but who was now gone, although I didn’t really know where. When I was very young, I think there was a part of me that felt perhaps she had died; I certainly knew she was never coming back and, in the innocence of childhood, I felt compassion for the mummy and daddy who had lost their little girl. In the safety, affection and love of my own family, it would have been unfathomable for me at that time to have believed the truth, or rather the lie, as it was.
I can’t even remember the first time I learned about Karoline. At a guess, I’d say I was around three or four. I do remember feeling excited by her, but the excitement was short lived, based partly on the fact that for a moment I thought I might have a justifiable excuse for abandoning the despicable Sarah – the name, not the person. The desire to take leave of myself would manifest later in life.
By the time I
enter my teenaged years I’ve started self-harming. I don’t know where I initially get the idea, but it only takes the first break of skin under the sharp, cold, silver blade for me to realise that it works. Slicing into myself and watching my filthy blood run into rivers of unspoken hurt delivers a feeling of such overwhelming relief that I am unable to stop. I carve the word ‘hate’ into my forearm and when the blood dries, I cut again and again. Cutting becomes my way of healing.
I take my first overdose at the age of thirteen. I stand over the kitchen sink and pop paracetamol after paracetamol into my mouth while intermittently sipping water direct from the running tap. It only takes a couple of hours before I tell my mum what I’ve done and minutes later an ambulance is whisking me off to the nearest hospital. I don’t even need my stomach pumped, but I am given a backless hospital gown and told I need to spend the night in order to be ‘monitored’. I am in a private room and every five minutes a nurse pops her head around the door and asks if I’m okay. It’s wonderful. In the morning a man comes to see me. He tells me he is a doctor, but I’m suspicious. He doesn’t even have a stethoscope. He says he’d like to ask me a few questions. For an entire hour we sit, just him and me. I don’t say very much. I don’t know what to say and, even if I did, I know I’m not supposed to say anything. When the hour is up I want to cling on to him. It has been nice having someone just for me.
A few days after the overdose, a letter arrives from Dad. It has worked! I open it, the sight of his fat handwriting already making up for his absence over the past few months. He gets straight to the point. He says I am an attention seeker and need my bottom spanked. He signs off with ‘Malcolm’. I cry for days.
I never see my dad again, except once, three years later, when I am on a train. It pulls into the station in the town where my dad and Sarah are living. They have married and their ‘I do’s’ now mean she and I have exactly the same name. As the train stops, I look out onto the platform and see him. A flash of the familiar. I look straight into his eyes. He doesn’t see me. To this day, I’m not sure whether he really didn’t see me or whether he chose not to. Part of me thinks he may not even have recognised me.
CHAPTER 10
The fallout
* * *
When he is fifteen, my brother disappears. It is at least two days before I find out he has run away. To Jersey. To visit his biological mother, Margaret. She has been in sporadic contact for a couple of years, and the timing of her re-emergence into Adam’s life, coinciding with my parents’ divorce, couldn’t be worse. At first, there are a few letters and then the phone calls begin. Not regularly, but enough to illicit a confusion and curiosity in my brother that prove extremely disruptive and damaging.
I answer the phone to her once and she asks in a drunken drawl to speak to ‘Aaron’. I innocently tell her she has the wrong number and politely suggest she tries redialling. Seconds later the phone rings again. This time my brother picks up the other line. I can hear the excitement in his voice and I secretly, silently, stay on the phone listening in. I hear her telling my brother that she is his real mother, and calling him Aaron.
He manages less than a week with Margaret in her council flat and is changed forever when he returns. Theirs has not been a happy reunion and he is traumatised by the meeting. For the first day or so, my brother – who abhors authority – is seduced by Margaret. Her lack of rules, her tolerance and even encouragement of his drinking and her delusional fantasies of how wonderful their lives would have been if she’d never given him up for adoption. She asks him to call her ‘Mum’, and for a short time his need to believe in greener grass is met. But it doesn’t last long. Margaret is unemployed, living with another woman, and drinking herself to death. One night she tells Adam that he is the product of a rape, and that she knows nothing about who his biological father was. ‘Black’ is all she says. After five days, he phones my mother, distraught and begging her to send him money to come home. He leaves Jersey and Margaret behind, leaden with the knowledge that he is the son of a black rapist.
Not long after coming home, Adam puts himself into voluntary care. It should be devastating, but I am mostly just relieved knowing I will no longer have to lock my bedroom door, hide my valuables or call the police in the middle of the night when his violent rages become too terrifying to simply ignore by burying myself in Dickens or demolishing a packet of biscuits. Living in close quarters with his pain and violent unpredictability has taken its toll on Mum and me. Mum starts to cry a lot and talk about not being able to ‘cope’. It terrifies me. If she can’t cope, I think, who will look after me? I already feel as if I’m looking after myself, but what if something really bad were to happen? Would I too have to go and live somewhere else? What if no other family wanted me?
Because of Mum’s job – she is working as a child protection social worker – Adam has to be placed outside of her ‘patch’. He ends up in a children’s home in Streatham in South London. It is a world away from the farm. The home is mostly full of young black kids, and when we go to visit him one weekend he has picked up a strange accent and sounds like the black boys in the soap operas on TV who’re always having run-ins with the police. He now kisses his teeth to show disdain, litters his speech with a type of Jamaican patois he has picked up from his new foster siblings and bawls me out for being ‘so fucking white’. Everything is ‘blood clart this’ or ‘bumber clart’ that. His jeans hang loose and low on his arse and he has styled his hair into dozens of small plaits. He looks like someone from a music video and, for a kid who grew up without a single black male role model, he’s done a great job at morphing into a stereotype.
Once he leaves home, Adam never really comes back. A few times over the years he moves back in, usually when he’s gotten into trouble with the police or has been fired from his latest job due to drinking, but it’s never for long. By then, Mum and I have moved to a little cottage in a neighbouring village. Now and then he turns up on the doorstep with a mouthful of promises and a backpack of good intentions, but it doesn’t take long for his demons to claw their way to the surface and he soon disappears again, often in handcuffs, shackled to his own misery, drowning his discontentment in booze and smoking his suffering away in a haze of weed.
Because the new house is small, when Adam does visit it feels even smaller. It’s like there simply isn’t enough room for everyone’s pain under the one roof. I come to hate the house, and as soon the opportunity comes to leave, I take it. At eighteen I move in with Paul. He’s thirty, divorced and the part-time father to three chilren. I’m seduced by his age, his company car and his ability to provide an alternative to the hell of living at home. I’m already deep in what I think is love by the time I find out Paul is suffering from a mammoth ‘small man’ complex and is jealous, possessive and controlling to the point of insanity. I become convinced that this is what love looks like and when he starts to cut me off from my friends and my family, I reassure myself that it is only because he loves me so fucking much. I am lucky, I think. He has rescued me, and I should be grateful. The unlovable are rarely so lucky.
One night, after I’ve been living with Paul for a few months, we’re asleep in bed when the phone rings. Such an intrusive, unwelcome cry, bleating at me from downstairs. I let it continue for several rings before turning to Paul and saying matter-of-factly, ‘It’s Adam, he’s dead,’ and then I lie, motionless, and wait for the ringing in my ears to stop.
I was always scared my brother would kill himself.
He was forever pulling plastic bags over his head, leaving me watching, thirsty for air and prickling with panic. He would stand on the bridge near the big house with a lemonade bottle filled with water and pour it onto the rail tracks below. I would watch, electric with fear, calculating how long before earth would meet fire and he would be taken, zapped into another world.
He used to leap from the twelfth rung of the silver birch in the Royal Wood or ‘GERONIMO!’ from the highest branch of the painting ladder that lean
t idly against the side of the barn. The same barn he would scale and on whose roof, with its precarious tiles, he would run along, arms out and trainers loosed.
Sometimes he’d hold himself under water for the longest time. Nose pinched, eyes squeezed tightly shut, legs squatting as much as they were able to, under water. Other times he’d float … face down … arms hanging listlessly alongside his child’s body, legs splayed out behind him like the frogs we dissected in the science room. I was sure that had I dived down to look up at him from underneath, his eyes would have been wide, open and glassy. I was past the age of believing ‘dead’ meant eyes closed. I knew death made no secret of its preference for the gaping, the exposed, and the vivid pretence of alive. Once he went up in a flying machine, precarious and tinny. He came down earlier than he’d paid for, landing in the field where a local boy had died. He didn’t like the height. That’s why he never went up in the air balloon for his fifteenth birthday – that, and the fact that it would have ruined his look: the oversized Levi’s, the baseball cap and the £60 Nike Air Jordans.
When he was fifteen he was shot in the chest. but he didn’t die. He laughed and rubbed his knuckles furiously into the shooter’s hair. ‘Wanker!’ he shouted through a proud grin, poking at the entry wound with joy and reverence and disbelief. The pellet lodged itself mid-sternum and was, at some point, removed. I found out sometime long after the event, but when I did, I pressed my hand to my own chest, looking at him in terror, as if now, years later, his body might realise it had been compromised and simply release delayed red floodwaters and leave him bloodless and lifeless on the ground.
Killing Karoline Page 9