Killing Karoline

by Sara-Jayne King

  Kind regards, Kris.

  I am devastated.

  This wasn’t the letter I had been expecting. She actually seems surprised that I had contacted her. Not just surprised, but angry, resentful even. I am also confused. It had been Kris herself who had provided her parents’ contact details if I’d ever wanted to get in touch and now here she was, angry that I had done just that.

  She is shocked, but I am too. I had been wrong. She had not, it appears, been expecting me. And the answers I so desperately sought? Nowhere to be found. In fact, the letter brought with it even more questions. The letter also forces me to admit something that has been lingering silently at the back of my mind, the idea that this woman has been waiting for me to forgive her. She clearly has not. Her parents, those she hurt in South Africa, they are deserving of an apology, to them she is repentant, but me? I must simply accept and move on and disappear again.

  From this one letter, everything I think I know and have always understood about where I came from evaporates. Not only does it cast doubt on and contradict so much of what I thought I knew about my adoption (most of which she herself had written in her original letter twenty years before), but the tone? Harsh, detached, vexed. Worst of all, she was rejecting me. Again. In the years that had passed she seemed to have forgotten about the lion and the crown and the heartbeat of the cub that had pulsed next to her own. Now she would tell me to stay in the past, play dead, forget and forget and forget.

  It feels like I have a pen in my heart. It etches on the raw, pumping red mass I wear on my sleeve. Sometimes I am the artist behind the pen, sometimes the author. If a picture could paint a thousand words. When the pen moves it tells a story, its nib scratching indelibly into me, my own blood flowing as ink and in cursive I see the words, ‘I shall not trust, I shall not love, I shall not, with this one heart, surrender.’ Sometimes, though, when the pen is still, I see that it deceives.

  Was there ever any grief? I think to myself. Did she ever feel any sadness? Even in the most secret, hidden parts of herself? What happens to a mother in that second when she places her baby in the arms of someone else and turns away? And the lie? Who do you become the moment the deceit is formed on your tongue? When you first speak the words that your baby has died? Is there a diary entry buried somewhere in a loft full of cobwebs and regret that reveals even the slightest fragment of heartbreak? What might it say?

  The first flowers arrived before we’d even boarded the plane back to Johannesburg. They continued to be delivered for days after our return. Lilies mostly, but some chrysanthemums, the odd bouquet of roses (which I thought strange) and the occasional pot plant which I immediately tossed out. I didn’t want to watch anything grow, let alone be responsible for keeping it alive.

  When we opened the front door, there was Thembi, fidgeting around, opening and closing cupboard doors searching for vases, but we only had three. All wedding presents. After a few days I told her she should put all the flowers outside. Hopefully, the last of the morning frost would claim them. I could see her watching me. I could feel them all watching me, hunched in my grief.

  Sometimes I’d stop in front of the fireplace and pick up one of the cards that had been sent and which now sat on the marble hearth. ‘Sorry for your loss’, ‘Condolences’.

  One day while I was standing on the stoep, staring down the driveway, watching the orange sun set over the city, I felt a hand close around mine. It was rough and calloused. A working hand, a poor hand, a black hand.

  ‘You are so brave, madam,’ said Thembi. And then, after squeezing my wrist, she had started towards the False Olive tree at the end of the garden.

  ‘I’m not brave!’ I had wanted to yell at her. ‘My baby isn’t dead!’ But I couldn’t. And so instead I watched her, Thembi, whose own baby, a boy, had been ‘called home’ the previous Christmas. I watched her kneel at the foot of that tree and send up a prayer for my child.

  With the arrival of the letter, everything I’ve wanted – perhaps needed – to believe about my biological mother suddenly flies from my mind with a single thunderclap and I am overwhelmed with anger. Time stands still and the ‘gone before’ catches up to the ‘yet to come’. It is where the two meet that I am most present, but also most afraid. No longer is she the distraught young woman forced to part with her firstborn against the backdrop of apartheid. Now, instead, she reminds me of all those villains in the fairy tales and make-believe stories I never bought into as a child. Cruella de Ville, with her wide eyes, grey skin and blood-red sneer. The wicked stepmother who lured Hansel and Gretel into the deep, dark wood, the narcissist who cackled, ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall’ and fed Sleeping Beauty the poisoned apple. She is all of them. Her voice, the voice I have never heard, is to me a parody of a newsreader’s. Full of affectations and long, drawn-out vowels. She made sure there’s no trace of her chips-and-egg upbringing. Gone the Northern lilt, the ’owt, the ’nowt. Gr-ass and gl-ass have now become ‘gl-ah-ss and ‘gr-ah-ss. I imagine that when she walks into a room she is rigid from her heels to her head, only occasionally does her backbone belie the character she has learnt to play so well. She smiles a fake smile to hide who she really is. She is cold, heartless and cruel. The woman who gave her baby away. The woman who told the world her baby was dead. She is a coward and I am the thing she fears the most. The litter from her belly, the filthy issue, the prodigal daughter.

  She too has a pen in her heart, a pen she grips with a fear so profound that when she pushes down what is written on her heart becomes impressed on mine. There is blood and bruising and the truth falls victim to the scars of denial. I try to understand her need to rewrite over the damaged tissue, but when all’s said and done, no one likes a liar.

  I show Mum the letter, but never my tears. A few days later, when I am back at university, I call the agency and speak to Wendy. She says she is sorry.

  CHAPTER 14

  The learning years

  * * *

  My three years at the University of Greenwich in South London is largely a success, academically speaking. I move into halls of residence on Greenwich High Road for my first year and, at twenty-one, I am – save for a couple of students in their late twenties – one of the older residents. Because of what my mind tells me is the enormous three-year age gap between myself and most of my student friends, I carry myself with an air of superiority I do not deserve. I have really lived, I think. I convince myself I have nothing in common with these ‘kids’, many of whom are away from home for the first time and taking full advantage of being out of sight and earshot of parents, rules, curfews and regular mealtimes. I, on the other hand, have been a grown-up for years. When you’ve been left to your own devices, as I was largely during the early years of my brother’s alcoholism, you come to crave boundaries. When none are imposed, the desire to act out diminishes. Sure, you could start shoplifting, but why bother? Yeah, you could lose your virginity in a toilet to a bald guy named Innocent (I didn’t), but what would it really achieve? Instead, what often happens is that the ‘freedom’ manifests into something else. In my case, destructive eating patterns, self-harm, isolation and fucked-up relationships. They would enter and re-enter my life at various times, often catching me off guard, like relatives who after years of silence suddenly send Christmas or birthday cards, or turn up on the doorstep just as you’re about to get in the bath or put supper on the table.

  The imaginary maturity I have afforded myself at university serves only to inflate the sense of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ I already feel. I make friends, but rarely socialise in my first year. Not for me the Freshers’ pub crawls and drinking games. I don’t fuck people with interchangeable frequency, my dorm room does not have the revolving door of a hotel, admitting a steady stream of night-time visitors. Instead I stop eating and knuckle down to my studies.

  When I arrive at university I am fat. Fatter than I should be at twenty-one, tipping the scales at around ten, maybe ten and a half stone. There is no excuse for it.
I’m someone who eats too much. I decide that I can recreate myself in London, and what better place to start than by losing a few of the ugly pounds I’ve unwittingly gained in the last year. Within the first week of my new life I, along with a couple of other girls in my residence, take advantage of our student status and the discounts it affords and sign up at the local leisure centre. It’s a win-win situation. The monthly fee is less than fifteen pounds and the centre is only one and a half miles from the student residence and a five-minute walk from campus and my lecture halls. My membership means I have unlimited access to the gym, the swimming pool and the step-one-two-three, grapevine-four-five-six aerobics classes that run from five in the morning until ten at night.

  During my induction at the gym, I am told by the painfully young-looking fitness assessor that I am fat and should lose weight. He hauls me up onto the scale and jots down a number on the clipboard he has been possessively clinging to since I walked through the turnstile. It’s a huge number, into the hundreds, and it takes me a while to realise he’s measuring me in pounds. I frantically start trying to divide by fourteen. He pinches the flabby area where my tricep should be with metal callipers and makes me touch my toes. He leans in to my breasts while reaching around to take a measurement of my disappearing waist and I want to vomit through shame.

  When the physical appraisal is done, we take a seat in the ‘membership area’, which is in fact two oversized, faux-leather chesterfields and a perspex coffee table positioned a couple of feet from the free-weights section. He wants to know about my general health and eating habits. My health is fine, I tell him, breathing the smoky memory of my last Mayfair Light into the space between us. Diet? Yes, I eat at least five fruit and vegetables a day. Drink? Yes, I drink. An average of three glasses of wine a week. Bullshit.

  ‘Any family history of…’

  Not this again.

  ‘No,’ I say before he can finish his sentence. I feel like making something up, to sound more authentic – ‘Yes, coronary heart disease in both sets of grandparents’ – but don’t want to tempt fate.

  By the end of the induction, I am burdened with the knowledge that I am above a healthy weight for my body shape and height, pathetically unfit given my age and lack of physical restrictions, and that I should stop eating mayonnaise and drinking full-cream milk. As I leave the gym, feeling silly in my sports top, leggings and sparkling new trainers, I commit to including a couple of visits a week after lectures and to stop eating chocolate.

  Within a week my jeans are looser and no longer have to be manhandled at the waist in order for the zip to close. Within two weeks, the waistband sits on my hips and I have started writing down everything I eat. After a month, I have lost a stone, stopped eating bread and no longer take either sugar or milk in my tea. The most exciting things I let into my mouth are Marlboro Lights (I have started smoking more expensive cigarettes with the money I am saving on food) and my new boyfriend’s enormous Jamaican cock.

  I think I love the gym. At first it is alien to me – my default setting is not a Spandex-wearing gym-goer – but before too long it is my safe place. I come to love the smell of chlorine, sweat and disinfectant that hits the second I walk through the automatic sliding doors. I find comfort in heading into the changing room every day, packing my things into the same locker, securing the laces of my trainers and pressing ‘Go’ on the running machine. I run and run until my legs burn. When my thirty minutes are up, I hit ‘Go’ again and start running again. I tell myself I am running towards a goal. The goal, of course, is thin. The goal is to disappear, and in reality the running is not towards anything, but away from everything. When I am done running, I head to the weights section where I pile heavy iron rings onto steel barbells and lift and squat and pull and dip until my muscles tear and I can barely stand. The whole routine is punishing. It is punish meant.

  The food thing – it is years before I can say ‘eating disorder’ – slithers in through the back door of my fucked-up psyche with such cunning that I am nearing seven stone by the time the first Christmas holidays have come around and it is time to return to Surrey for a month. I look incredible. I have cheekbones again, the space between my hipbones dips in, instead of wobbling out, even my fingers are thinner and I reward them by obsessively having long, acrylic tips added to my nails, and various different patterns airbrushed onto them in an attempt at glamour.

  Not only am I eating only Weight Watchers’ watery chicken soup for lunch and dinner (breakfast is for losers), I am forcing myself to drink three litres of water every day and my attendance at the gym is significantly more than at my lectures. Twice a day during the week and three times over the weekend. When I arrive on my mother’s doorstep a few days before Christmas, all she says is that I look tired.

  It takes me some time to adjust to my thinness and it is not until I have been starving myself for several months that I am able to put eyes on myself. When I go clothes shopping I still instinctively pick sizes that are now too big for me; I am unable to make the mental adjustment. Instead I stand in changing rooms, tugging at baggy crotches and baffled by gaping waistbands. I have not yet reached the stage where I try to cover my weight loss, because I have not yet reached the stage where I am trying to hide it. I want everyone to see. I want everyone to notice that the ugly duckling, the dropout, the fuck-up, the non-conformer, is, by sheer willpower, morphing into a better version of herself. I convince myself that I’ve never been happier.

  For the first five months after receiving Kris’s letter I immerse myself in my studies, scrutinising the nutritional information on the back of food packets and destroying myself at the gym. I am excelling at my studies for an LLB law degree, applying myself to the books with same fierce determination it is taking not to eat solid food or skip a single workout at the gym. I discover that I love the law. I love the language of law. I spend hours in bed at night poring over the wording of statutes and committing to memory key passages of epic legal judgments that, to me, read like Dickens. I decide I will become a barrister. I like the idea of grandstanding in court, but also I like the convention of the cab-rank rule attached to the profession. The cab-rank rule in its basic form means a barrister must take on any case for which they ‘receive instructions’ (in an area to which they purport to hold expertise) regardless of the client or nature of the case. The idea is that no barrister should be allowed to turn down a brief based on the client’s lack of finances or simply because she or he does not like the cut of the client’s jib. It’s the exact opposite of how kids are selected by adoptive parents, who get to state exactly the type of ‘case’ they are prepared to take on. The age of the child, boy or girl, black or white, abled or disabled. It’s one of the issues that highlights the artificial nature of adoption being a solution to infertility, unwanted babies and kids languishing in foster care. Of course there’s no guarantee the parents get what they want, but it certainly explains why older, black boys make up the majority of children in care waiting for a permanent family. They’re just not feasible clients.

  I hadn’t actually planned to read law at university. The plan had been to read English, but it only takes one sitting in that first lecture for me to realise it was a bad fit. A group of still-angsty eighteen-year-olds professing to ‘like, totally, like love Sylvia Plath’ and Nick Cave, while talking over each other theorising the truth behind Kurt Cobain’s death. During the introductory seminar the professor goes around the room asking us to name some of our favourite writers and poets. I want to laugh, but I manage a petulant folding of the arms and a sneer of dismissal instead. The further around the room we go, the more the competition hots up. We begin with the obvious Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and the Brontës. The Bard of course comes up several times, each time eliciting an even bigger eye roll from me, until I am forced to remember that I myself am able to recite on command several scenes from Othello, (‘…All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven. ’Tis gone. Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell!’) and Hamlet (
‘…’to thine own self be true…’). Atwood, a heroine of mine, is of course given a nod and Harper Lee, basically everyone we all read at A-Level. A couple of black writers are thrown in for good measure. How we all love Maya Angelou, as not just writer and poet but also a feminist and activist, and Alice Walker. The Color Purple is one of our favourites and, no, of course we have never watched the film version because, frankly, we wouldn’t want to tarnish the written word blah blah, meaningful frown blah blah. When the time comes for me to share my favourite authors all the good ones have been taken, so I sigh and say ‘Jilly Cooper and Kafka’. Lies, of course. I’ve never read Kafka. When we are told that the first text we will be looking at is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I nearly throw up. When we finally trundle out of class, several rosy-cheeked, hemp-bag-carrying uber-teens are already making plans for poetry powwows and critical-analysis get-togethers. I turn on my heel, head to the law faculty and beg to be allowed onto the full-time LLB degree.

  I must prove myself, I am told by the notoriously difficult head of department. The admission criteria for the law degree are far above that than for English and I have not met them. Do I know how many people will drop out in the first year? I do not. ‘Have a guess… [pause] Fifty per cent. Fifty! Now imagine, if I am to give you one of these valued places and you become one of the fifty per cent?’

  ‘I won’t,’ I tell him. I promise. He says I can ‘have a bash’ at the first assignment of the term and, depending on how I do, he’ll consider allowing me onto the programme.

  A week later, at the second lecture of the year, the entire law school gathers in the lecture hall for a debrief of the first assignment. We have all failed, horribly. Our research, interpretation and application of the law are laughable. If this is the standard of work we plan on submitting, not only will we never be lawyers, we will never – it seems – be anything. My stomach falls a thousand feet and I start nervously picking the excess acrylic from around my nail bed. ‘All of you,’ says the head of department, ‘all of you have failed … with the exception of one.’ I look three rows in front of me to the bookish-looking Muslim girl whose pen never stops sweeping across the page during lectures and who I always see heading to the library the second we are dismissed. ‘Who is…’ – he peers through his bifocals at the essay on the stand in front of him – ‘…Sara-Jayne?’ He pronounces it Sah-ruh, and I sit, still staring at the back of what’s-her-name’s hijab. My room-mate and fellow law student who is sitting next to me taps my foot with hers. ‘Sara-Jayne!’ the head of department bellows menacingly.