As she sits with her pen raised waiting for me to respond, I think about her questions.
Heart disease?
I’m all of a sudden aware of my heart beating hard inside my chest.
I don’t know.
Asthma?
I inhale deeply but my breath falters and I can’t catch it.
I don’t know.
Cancer?
I look at the mounds of my breasts cloaked underneath my vest and feel the need to touch them.
I don’t know.
Stroke?
I know I need to answer but I have suddenly forgotten how.
I don’t know.
Madness?
I look across at the thick file in front of her, the one with my name on it and my shame within it, while simultaneously running the tips of my fingers along the knife scars on my right arm.
I don’t know.
It is true, I don’t know. (I have never even conceived of the very likely possibility that my own mental-health issues could some how be part of a legacy inherited from the people the interloper doctor is really asking about.)
Still waiting with her pen, and now her eyebrows, raised, I return my thoughts and my eyes back to the unknown doctor. I open my mouth, but before I speak, I instinctively lower my eyes and my truth away from hers and focus on a pile of Pfizer Post-It notes collecting dust at the edge of the table next to an old-fashioned blood-pressure gauge with a black hand pump.
‘I’m adopted.’ I spit it out, loudly and more aggressively than I had intended. At best, I want to sound confident and self-assured, at worst that my ignorance really isn’t something I was concerned by and that I am not sick and tired of not knowing. I achieve neither; the overwhelming air of inadequacy I am feeling, the lack of sense of self, has affected my performance.
‘Okay,’ she says and puts the pen down on the desk. ‘Now, if you can just pop your shorts and knickers off and get up on to the bed I’ll begin the examination.’
I do as she says, still thinking about the overwhelming feeling of not knowing. Moreover, it isn’t just that I don’t know. It’s that no one I know knows either. Only one person in the world has the answers to these questions and – as I think to myself in that moment, to the thousands of others I am beginning to realise have been brewing inside me – as I sit, shifting on the chair in the locum’s office, I also realise that perhaps now is the time for her to speak.
CHAPTER 12
Persona non grata
* * *
‘I’m going to contact Kris,’ I tell my mum a few days later.
‘Oh … Okay.’
I go to the box file in her room, where all of our ‘important’ papers are kept. Our school reports dating back to primary school, our first drawings of wax-crayon stick people and houses with triangle roofs, our medical cards, and swimming badges which were removed and then replaced onto to our bathing costumes every time we splashed another ten metres at the local pool. I find several envelopes with my names on all. All the names I’ve ever been given. There are letters inside, but I need only the top one right now. The letterhead reads ‘The Independent Adoption Society’, and has been typed on a typewriter, the lines often wonky, as if refusing to fall into order. It is addressed to me: ‘Dear Sarah Jane…’ There is an almost identical one addressed to Angela and Malcolm. I’ve read these and the other letters before, more than once, but somehow, each time after reading them, their contents are erased from my conscience, the details become cloudy, fade and then disappear like photographs left in the light for too long. Each time I return to them it is like watching a film I think I’ve seen before, but am never able to remember all the names of characters or how the movie eventually ends.
I dial the number at the top of the letter and explain to the woman who answers who I am and that I would like to make contact with my biological mother. She is kind; nothing about what I am asking is strange to her. She knows I do not know about diabetes or heart disease or crazy and makes me feel that this is perfectly normal. We agree that I will come to the offices in South London later in the week.
I arrive in Camberwell at 11am on 21 July 2001 and am greeted by Wendy, one of the adoption social workers. She is clutching a mud-green folder crammed thick with papers. Most pages show the creases and distress of having been suffocated inside a filing cabinet for years. I can see my name on a white adhesive label on the front of the folder. I want to grab it from her hands and tear through it to find out who I really am. Instead I smile and shake her hand.
Wendy tells me she is the social worker assigned to my case. I dislike the idea that I now have a social worker. I hate the idea that I am a ‘case’. To me, social workers are people sent in to fix the lives of undesirables. The type of people who, through every fault of their own, have fucked up their lives and need someone else to come in and mop up the mess. In my distaste at now being part of the great unwashed, the hapless, the socially inept, I rename her ‘Wendy From The Adoption Agency’ to make the whole situation more palatable.
The first thing that strikes me about Wendy is that she is black. She looks black and she sounds black. She has an assistant, Caroline, with a C. Caroline is also black. Young and black. Maybe just a few years older than me, in her mid-twenties. It’s something that initially makes me uncomfortable. I am still unsure how to act around black people, especially black women who I cannot win over with what I’ve come to learn is my ‘good hair’ and pretty features.
In a small room with a low sofa and a window looking out onto an unkempt garden, I open my mouth. I tell them how it is that I come to be there. And for the first time I begin to give a voice to the questions I have been scared to speak for what feels like forever. The two black women sit and look at me.
When I am done talking, Wendy and Caroline smile reassuringly.
‘Yours is a most extraordinary story Sara-Jayne. We’d be delighted to help you,’ says Wendy.
‘This is a very important part of your adoption story,’ adds Caroline. ‘You have every right to know where you came from and have your questions answered.’ She tells me that everything I’m feeling is normal, expected, is okay. I am okay. I feel a wave of relief sweep over me.
‘Our job is to be here for you, to support you. Reconnections can be extremely difficult,’ they warn me. They explain the importance of navigating contact cautiously and remind me that in the time that has passed since the adoption biological parents – if they have not dealt with the past – can often be very broken, damaged. I nod, but in my mind I am sure that my biological mother is not like that. She will be pleased to hear from me, I tell myself. She will want to help me. She will want what’s best for me.
They ask me what my expectations are. What do I want? I tell them simply: ‘All I need are the answers. I just need to know. Nothing more. I’m not after a “reunion” and I am certainly not looking to replace the mother I already have. I just want answers.’ They tell me I am being realistic, but remind me again that what is to come is unpredictable. I hear them, but perhaps I am not really listening. I still think we are dealing with the woman who wrote to me all those years before. The one who had described me as her ‘beautiful baby daughter’, the one who had openly acknowledged the hurt she had caused by her actions, the one who wrote that I would always be close to her heart. She will be relieved to hear from me, I think. I am so certain that I have already begun to imagine her reaction in my mind.
She will instantly see the familiar, long, loopy handwriting so similar to her own and she will know. I picture her, holding the corner of the writing paper to her mouth while gazing thoughtfully out of her apartment window. She will take the letter, a glass of wine, and possibly manoeuvre a belligerent cat from her favourite armchair and begin to read. She will marvel at my humility, feel overwhelming gratitude and relief for my forgiveness, and proudly read and reread the letter, impressed by my eloquence. Yes, if nothing else in her life, she had given birth to this.
‘The thing we
have in our favour,’ says Wendy jarring me from my daydream, ‘is that over the years your biological mother has kept us updated as to how she may be contacted if one day you decide you want to.’ I nod and scramble in my bag for a letter from the adoption agency my mother had shown me a few years back.
Dear Mrs Kirk,
This is just confirm our recent telephone conversation. I have had recent contact with Sara-Jayne’s birth mother Kris who let us know that she has remarried and is no longer resident in South Africa. She has left me a contact address for Sara-Jayne should she ever decide to pursue this. Kris did not give me any other personal information.
The letter is dated 8 December 1997. ‘This bodes well for a positive response, Sara-Jayne,’ says Wendy once she has read the letter. They tell me that my biological mother has provided them with the contact details of her parents, and say they will write to them on my behalf to initiate contact and ask me to prepare a letter that they will forward. As I thank them and we all get up to leave, I am unable to hide my excitement. It’s at that moment that a photograph falls out from the file Wendy has gathered to her breast. And that’s the first time I see him.
He is smiling shyly up at me from the Polaroid that has landed face up on the tan tile carpeting, midway between Wendy’s brown-stockinged calves and court shoes and my holiday-tanned legs, flip-flops and multicoloured toenails. I reach down and pick him up, staring silently at his deep dark eyes, long blonde hair and the spattering of freckles dotted over his familiar nose and cheeks.
‘Who is this?’
There is a shuffling of paper and we all take our seats again. After a moment, Wendy looks up at me.
‘That’s your biological mother’s second child. So … your half-brother.’
I burst into tears.
The two women leave me to cry for a few minutes, until Caroline reaches across and turns the photograph over in my hand. On the back is written, ‘Alex at two’, plus his full name and date of birth in that now familiar handwriting. His date of birth is exactly a year and four months after mine. My brain starts doing frantic calculations. I keep having to stop and then start again. In the end, I use my fingers to count.
‘That’s about six months,’ I say to Wendy. ‘She would have been pregnant again about six months after giving me away.’
Six months. Twenty-four weeks. Days, just days. Two hundred and seventy-five days.
Wendy and Anna watch me cry. They think I am sad. I think I am happy. I am. I am happy. Because I have a brother. There is blood, red and running, and a heart beating inside another person that corresponds with mine. I can’t take my eyes off the photograph. His grinning round face, his shining, but slightly wary, eyes. I look like him, I decide immediately. I definitely look like him! It never occurs to me that he looks like me, me being the older one, the first one, the one who came before. By myself, I am not legitimate, but the discovery of this other person, this little boy, this brother, another inhabitant of the womb to bear witness to myself, means that I must be real, I must exist.
I leave the agency feeling renewed, elated and hopeful. As I climb in the car and turn the ignition, the rapper Tupac blares out at me. From beyond the grave he is spitting lyrics about rumours that he had died, how his mother had wept for her son and how in end the story had been false and he had lived to tell the truth.
Within a couple of days, I hear back from Wendy. She has made contact with Kris’s parents. My grandparents. They are not pleased by the ‘intrusion’ into their lives by ‘that girl’. Wendy tells me they seemed to want to get her off the phone as soon as possible and reluctantly tell her they will contact the biological mother. I am confused, but not disheartened. Confused because I can’t help wondering why she would have given her parents as first point of contact, knowing they would feel – as they clearly did – hugely displeased to have been contacted.
Undeterred, as soon as I end the call with Wendy I sit down and start to write.
Dear Mr and Mrs Harris,
After almost 21 years of life experience, it is with great difficulty and caution that I write to you, my ‘natural’ maternal grandparents. Difficulty, as I fear the appropriate words and sentiment may evade me, and caution as my last wish is to offend or cause distress to yourselves or your family.
I have always been aware of the details of my adoption as my parents have been, and continue to be open and honest with me about this issue. I am also fortunate in that I have several letters both from the adoption agency and from your daughter, Kris, that have afforded me a basic knowledge of who I was and where I came from before being adopted. I continue to be grateful for this and am aware that others are not so fortunate.
In spite of this basic knowledge and my own lack of bitterness or angst surrounding my adoption, I have now reached a stage in my life where I feel that, for want of better words, curiosity has got the better of me. I am not looking for a duplicate or replacement family, simply answers to questions that I am not able to obtain from those people currently in my life, questions that only Kris herself is able to answer. It is hard to explain to those not in my predicament exactly what it is that motivated me to pursue contact after 21 years.
I recognise that you may (justifiably) have concerns regarding my somewhat unexpected arrival in your lives, both now and 21 years ago, however, I must assure you as far as I am able, that dragging up every complex and painful memory of the past is not my intention. I am simply a young woman with questions about herself.
Obviously, I appreciate that situations such as this are difficult for all involved, however I would greatly appreciate any assistance you may be able to offer regarding this sensitive matter.
Your sincerely, Sara-Jayne
I slip the letter in an envelope and walk to the red post box in the village. When I get home, I start to make a list of everything I will need to take with me to start my new life at university in a few weeks. I also write a separate, mental list of everything I need to leave behind.
CHAPTER 13
Play dead, stay dead
* * *
A couple of weeks into my new life at university I receive a call from my mum to tell me that some letters have arrived for me. I make a plan to return home to do my washing for free, collect more of my things and pick up my post. One of the letters has a Camberwell postmark. I open this one last. There is a note inside as well as a letter. The note reads, ‘We have received the accompanying letter from your biological mother. Please get in touch with us once you have had time to consider it.’
This is it, I think to myself. This is the missing piece of the puzzle. The dot of the ‘i’, the cross of the ‘t’. The days of worry and wondering are over. I am smiling even before I start reading, although when I open the letter I am slightly disappointed that it is typed, and only the signature is written by hand. I had hoped to see more of the handwriting that looks like mine. The formality of Times New Roman stings ever so slightly, but I blink through it. I start reading, right from the top, the date 14 September 2001, and in less than a minute later I am done. Done and done. I read the letter over and over until the words on the page begin to whirlpool and make me nauseous. But even when I stop reading, the stillness causes bile to rise into my mouth. The back of my head aches and I feel like it needs to be lifted of my shoulders to relieve some of the pressure.
Dear Sara,
I have spent a long time thinking about your letter and equally long writing a reply. It is clear, and I am happy that you have become an intelligent, well-educated young woman. It would seem your parents have raised you well. Your natural curiosity to learn where you came from is understandable, but your good intentions not to cause distress by getting in touch with me are completely unavoidable.
It is not true to say you were the product of a romance story, nor that your adoption was simply down to the politics in South Africa when you were born. The time of your birth was difficult, I was in a relationship with Ken and had an affair with another man I hardly k
new and became pregnant with you. I never saw your birth father again. I am not proud of my actions. I am in fact very ashamed. Your conception and birth were partially responsible for my divorce not long after you were born. The blame for the divorce lies with me not Ken. I have had an extremely painful and difficult life ever since. I have caused my parents and both families much sadness and pain. I have spent the past years trying to overcome this and find some happiness in my life. When I married again recently, my new husband knew nothing of my past and when you got in contact and entered my life again I was forced to tell him and relive the pain of all those years ago.
Your curiosity about your ancestry is understandable, but is the curiosity of a young idealistic woman worth the pain I am once again feeling? While I feel I have a responsibility to answer your questions, once I have done this I would like to stop communication between us. I want to keep that part of my life in the past. You have so many more years ahead of you and the first days of your life are not important on that scale. You are cared for by your family, so move on and forget the past.
Please do not contact my parents in the future. They have been very upset by this intrusion into their lives, and your social worker did not handle communication with them very well. I do not want to cause them any further distress. Also, please do not contact anyone from my old life in South Africa. My irresponsible actions also caused them a great deal of pain. I have seen my son infrequently in the past 19 years and this hurts me deeply. He is the only contact with the family that I lost in South Africa.
Please understand, Sara. I am happy that you have become an independent, outgoing young woman and I wish you a wonderful life, but I let you go from my life 21 years ago and I do not want to change that now. I will do my best to answer your questions, but after that please let me go from your life.
Killing Karoline Page 11