As it was, he does kill himself. On 16 July 2000, he puts a dog chain around his neck, walks down the bank adjacent to the bridge and hangs there until he isn’t alive any more. He is twenty-two. His body is found by a dog. He would have liked that. He couldn’t pet it, though, because he was dead and neither of them would have felt it.
At the inquest into his death we hear from the people first on the scene: the owners of the dog and the police officer who untied him. They speak to us briefly after the coroner records an official verdict of suicide. The officer tells us there was no sign of a struggle, no regret, no second thoughts. His legs were crossed at the ankles and there were the remnants of a joint in the mud next to his feet. In that instant, I forgive him. Forgive him for leaving me, for doing what I had not yet had the courage to do. I am overcome with admiration for my big brother, and his act of ultimate courage. My big brother, who in that moment seemed to have found the clarity he had been searching for his whole life. His longest battle had come to a terrific end.
At his funeral it feels like I am saying goodbye to a stranger, or at best to a memory of someone I once knew. There are people at the service I do not recognise, people from the many lives my brother has lived. We play Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ as the coffin enters the crematorium and I hold it together while my mother shakes and sobs beside me. At one point I think she might collapse. I hold her hand and stare at the wooden box on the plinth, unable to quite believe that my own brother is inside. His body torn apart by a pathologist’s cleaver. I imagine his chest, gaping and exposed on the mortuary table just days before, now inelegantly sewn back together. Dirty scars tracing their way from his sternum to his middle. Did they take out his brain, I wonder.
I am vaguely aware of the celebrant talking while I sit and grip my mother’s hand. He has never met my dead brother, of course, and yet he is somehow authorised to speak about him. At one point during the service someone shouts out from behind us. I feel my mother flinch next to me and I turn in my seat, trying to trace the origin of the voice. About four rows back on the left is an impossibly thin, fragile-looking creature in a denim jacket. Margaret. She calls out again, something indecipherable, and I turn back in my seat. After the service, as everyone is filing out, Mum and I make our way to the small family room at the back of the crematorium. Margaret is waiting there. While Mum dutifully thanks her for coming, I search her crumpled, weary face for signs of my dead brother. There is nothing.
A week later we go to collect the ashes. Only then do I realise that my father didn’t come to the funeral.
Wrapped in ‘Blanket’ and waiting for my first teeth
Sweet like chocolate
Dad and I testing the water
Mum and I in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, in 1982
At my second birthday
Smiling for Dad behind the camera
Smiles in the snow in Tandridge, Surrey
With Adam on a family holiday in Portugal
Helping with the gardening at the house in Tandridge
In the back garden in Tandridge
Dressed in my Sunday best, (hair as yet un-brushed)
Flower girl
Standing outside our topsy-turvy house in Tandridge
Running for first place, but I was destined to be a bookworm, not Zola Budd.
With Granny at my grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary party
Brown girl in the ring: my fifth birthday party with friends in Tandridge. Grandpa can be seen in the background.
University days, Greenwich, London, 2001
Skinny and singing at The Fresher’s Ball, 2002
Master of Arts – graduating in Canterbury, 2005
My hubbly-bubbly brief life in Dubai, 2007
Full circle: Back in South Africa and mourning the Father of the Nation
Georgia greeting me at Cape Town International the day after Mandela’s death
With Mum in Paris for my thirty-fourth birthday
With my own adoptee, Siza
Working girl – in studio at CapeTalk
CHAPTER 11
The resurrection
* * *
I really only like London on two specific types of day. The first, in winter, in the final approach to Christmas when everything sparkles and looks like a Christmas movie. I love to take the train into town and watch the festive lights smile brightly along the River Thames. It’s as if the whole city has been gift-wrapped. An abundance of red and gold and Santa hats. The approach into the capital always excites me, it feels like I’m being granted access to the set of a magical movie, swept from reality into fantasy, Mary Poppins jumping into the street painting, into the land of carousels and perpetual, unfading, Technicolor.
Nearly an hour after leaving the ruralism of the green belt behind, landmarks begin to announce themselves on the horizon and then, as quickly as they have appeared, zip into memory as we fly towards the train station. Battersea Power Station, Tower Bridge, Big Ben and the London Eye. By the time we’re approaching the station I’ve morphed into a character in the epic motion picture called London. Sometimes I have the lead role, strident, vivid and unapologetic, other days I’m an extra, blending unobtrusively into the set. Blink and you’ll miss me, but set the playback to slow motion and there I am, incognito in a hat and sunglasses, searching, behind my dark lenses, the eyes of strangers on Shaftesbury Avenue, wondering if our blood tastes the same.
I also like to pretend I’m a tourist, which I suppose in one sense I am. Once out of the terminus, I head up Victoria Street and past House of Fraser. Then it’s across the road to New Scotland Yard and its revolving sign, which, in person, reveals itself to be so much shorter than it looks on the news, positioned behind the heads of reporters doing ‘pieces-to-camera’. In real life, things are often less assuming than we are led to believe. I usually end up walking all the way past Westminster, pausing on the way to acknowledge the statue of Nelson Mandela, then across the road and past Downing Street, across Trafalgar Square and onto the steps of the National Gallery, where I like to sit and shiver and people-watch and chain smoke. I stare for hours at faces in the National Portrait Gallery. On the South Bank, I feel romantic, but also lonely. I try for highbrow at The Tate and amble through a Christmas-box Covent Garden, half expecting to see a grubby Eliza Doolittle offering me a posy of lavender for half a crown. I marvel at the twenty-foot silver reindeer grazing on the cobbles outside the Opera House, and pretend not to be enthralled by the gold statues who come alive for sightseers and pound coins, but never for unaccompanied applause. On days like these, I am at the mercy of my sentiment and succumb to the smell of extortionately priced spiced chai lattes and cinnamon muffins tantalising my nostrils. Starbucks capitalises on my childhood imaginings of the perfect Christmas and I am helpless.
When, after a day playing make-believe, I catch the train back from London to my particular corner of the Surrey countryside, I like watching Christmas shoppers awkwardly manoeuvring soon-to-be-gifts through the carriage doors. I watch them collapsing into seats with their purchases balancing on their knees, or wedged awkwardly in the aisles, from the metropolis to the fields and farmhouses of the home counties. As the train leaves the platform, the automated female announcer’s voice reassures us we are heading home, back to where we came from. ‘This train departs from London Victoria [London proper] and will be calling at: Clapham Junction [still London], East Croydon [poor-man’s London], Riddlesdown [outskirts of the London Borough of Croydon], Sanderstead [where Mummy grew up], Upper Warlingham, Woldingham, Oxted [where Granny lives], Hurst Green, Lingfield [where we live], Dormans and East Grinstead.’ It is a reassuring voice, but also, a firm, authoritative one. Like a kindly headmistress. Often I will spend the journey home thinking about this faceless woman who tells us where we are going and where we have come from. This omnipotent being who knows it is ‘Clap-um’ and not ‘Clap-ham, who confidently pronounces ‘Sahnder-stED’, not ‘Sand-er-steed’. I try to give her a fa
ce, a hairstyle, a Colgate smile, but she resists. She does not want me to know her. She could be anyone, I often think. She could be the glamorous, ebony-haired, femme fatale sitting on the seat across from me in the expensive winter coat, or the mumsy-looking forty-something, with her woollen gloves still on, flicking her way through the Marian Keyes with the butterflies on the cover. One person she definitely is not is the woman about a foot away from me, crammed in by the train toilet, a scuffed, tan leather bag pressed to her hip, whose face I cannot see, but whose long hair falls in knitted lengths to her dancer’s behind. I need only see her coral nails contrasting against her black-black skin to know this is not the woman behind the voice. When we arrive at East Croydon station, she awkwardly manoeuvres her bag and her behind in an almost three-sixty-degree turn towards me, then opens the train door with her slim, polished fingers. Before stepping down onto the icy platform, she pauses, pushing wide the heavy door. A middle-aged white man with a briefcase and ill-considered brown suede shoes elbows past her, but she seems not to notice, and gestures to me with her head to get off the train ahead of her. I don’t move. This is not where I get off. She gestures again, silently assuming that this must be my stop, and as she does the femme fatale pulls her knees towards her and lifts her feet to allow me to pass. She too thinks this is the end of my journey. People who are ‘black like us’, me and the scuffed tan bag, don’t live past the boundaries of East Croydon. It’s not that we can’t, but rather than we don’t. Uncomfortable, I turn my head and look at my own reflection in the window, willing her to leave the train. As she begins her wintry walk along the platform to the underpass I catch her glance back over her shoulder. The light from the street lamps hits the white of her eyes and we look straight into each other’s soul. I feel guilt, shame, confusion, the feeling of ‘otherness’. Still to this day, once the train passes East Croydon station, mine is more often than not the only black face you will see on board apart from the ticket collector’s. Something happens to me past East Croydon station. I am conditioned into putting on a familiar but slightly uncomfortable hat, or is it taking a new, but better-fitting one off? One that I like, but that I am not sure suits me. One that I’m not sure the folks to the south of East Croydon station would understand or approve of.
The other kind of day on which I like London occurs only in summer. When the sun is your constant and perfect companion. From the moment you allow that first promise of light in through your eyelids at dawn, there is a sense of elation and excitement that today is going to be one of those days. I cannot wait to enter into the capital’s summer buzz. London smells great when it’s hot. Like Pimm’s and battered fish and chips, or chilled white wine and stockbrokers drenched in expensive cologne. Such is the atmosphere on days like this that you can be walking down The Strand and you’ll be convinced you can smell a barbecue. It’s London as a melting pot – and I love it.
Sometimes I like to abandon the train and put myself in the driver’s seat. If I’ve borrowed Mum’s car, the first thing I do is switch the radio from Classic FM, to a CD of loud bass-driven rap. I put my foot on the accelerator, wind down the windows and blast it, while at the same time aiming for ‘cool’ in dark glasses, a faux-gangster frown and chewing invisible gum in time to the beat. It’s phony behaviour I despise in others, but it makes me feel better than I am, so I do it. I like to pretend I’m in a music video.
The drive from the village to the City is marked in shades. Ninety minutes of shifting landscapes. As the scenery morphs from green to grey, so my colour changes too. It is a journey of transformation. The fields and farmhouses start to become bus stops and betting shops. Sheep become people, who in turn become sheep again and trudge their way in and out of offices and tower blocks. Where schools in the country are surrounded by carpets of green playing fields, in the City they are enclosed by chain fences and built onto concrete with hopscotch markings daubed on in primary colours. I turn up the rap music and chew harder on my gum.
It is on one of these perfect summer days in early July 2001 that I arrive in Camberwell, South London, at the offices of the Independent Adoption Society. I am soon to turn twenty-one. Outwardly, I am confidence personified, inside I am lost, worthless and undefined.
I am – belatedly – heading for university in a couple of months and have just emerged from my first serious relationship break-up. I have spent much of the summer in Thailand recovering from what I believe is a broken heart, but do not yet comprehend as the result of my abusive, toxic relationship with Paul. There are still a few weeks before the university semester starts and I must put on what I think is my ‘adult hat’ and knuckle down in order to catch up on life. The life my school friends have been living, according to the book, for the last three years. They have taken the path of the enchanted and completed their high-school studies without being prematurely asked to leave, and have done what middle-class kids from Surrey do. Entering red-brick universities (not old polytechnics), studying towards English degrees and becoming teachers or respectably taking a single gap year to travel to Thailand on money they’ve saved working in Debenhams at the weekend and school holidays, before returning to embark on proper, grown-up lives as wives and husbands and mummies and daddies with their high-school sweethearts.
A few weeks prior to the Thailand trip, I decide, mid-heartbreak, to do what I think is expected of me. The thing talked about in the movies and played out dramatically in soap operas. To embark on the next chapter of the adoptees’ handbook and contact this woman from whose womb I dropped. I almost feel a duty to do so. A duty to all those people who have spent years asking me if I ever will, if I feel the need to, if it is ‘part of my journey’. Despite the questions always being asked, there hasn’t been a sense of urgency for me to get in contact with Kris, my biological mother. I knew it was something I would do one day, but ‘one day’ never had a date to it.
I have time, I always thought. I have time, because this woman, the one who calls herself the ‘natural mother’, the one with the handwriting that looks like mine, is waiting for me. Waiting for me to be ready or, if not waiting, at least expecting. She is expecting to answer my questions. How could she not be? It has never occurred to me that she will not be expecting me to get in touch one day. Plus, it seems obvious that, despite the awful, unforgivable lie she has concocted, she knows the truth. She knows that, far from being buried in a shoe-box coffin in some corner of England or scattered as ashes across the dales of Yorkshire, I am alive. Living, breathing, feeling. She knows.
The idea to contact her strikes me one day when I am at the doctor. I have finally taken seriously the reminder letters that have been arriving for me consistently over the past few years from the local health service. Although at the time I am resolute in my decision to never have children, I am long overdue for a cervical smear test and should get checked, lest I wake up one morning, my dormant womb now barren and decayed and on its way to killing me.
I am called into the doctor’s room by a locum; my regular doctor is away, she tells me. I am immediately despondent. This new doctor has probably read my medical notes. She is already judging me. Overdose at age thirteen, history of self-harm, morning-after pill and pissing in a pregnancy pot at sixteen. The familiar feelings of shame and embarrassment surge from my feet to the top of my head and I sense my hot, black, angry wall of defence being rebuilt firmly brick by brick. I sit purposefully in the chair. I tell her why I am there and sigh as she says she’d like a to get a few more ‘details’ from me. I am prepared to tell her that the stuff in the notes is all over and done. That I had been going through a tough time, ‘family problems’, and that everything is now fine and I’m happy, happy, happy. Part of me has even managed to convince myself that this is true. But instead of referring to the notes, she begins asking a series of pedestrian questions about the general state of my physical health.
Do I smoke? How much? Do I drink? How many units of alcohol per week? Do I take regular exercise? These questions are easy.
Yes. Lots. Yes. Lots. Depends. Then … Does your family have a history of heart disease? Does your family have a history of diabetes? Does your family have a history of asthma? Does your family have a history of cancer, stroke, mental-health issues? They are questions I had faced for years, from schools, doctors, employers, insurance companies and, until the age of about fourteen, when it began to occur to me that I was not, in fact, part of the people and the history that made up what I referred to as ‘My Family’, I answered as best I knew at the time. Because, yes, Grandpa had had asthma, and I knew everyone on Mum and Dad’s side did wear glasses and, as far as I was aware back then, no, no one was mental, not properly anyway. So when it dawned on me that the answers I had been giving were useless. I began to dread the questions. It was embarrassing not to know. Shameful. How can you not know? How can you not know about your own family, and if the information about the ‘family’ you do know is no more relevant than the lines on the face of a stranger then, really, who are you and to whom do you belong, and do you even matter at all in the bigger scheme of things?
Killing Karoline Page 10