I raise my hand, vaguely aware of a breeze of voices floating through the auditorium. He makes his way up the ten-or-so stairs to my row. ‘Sara-Jayne?’ He asks. I shrug, unsure if that’s who I am. With a flick of his Cartier-clad wrist he hurls my assignment at me, past several classmates. ‘Keep it up,’ he says, and marches back down the stairs to the white board. I look down at the paper with only my eyes. Ninety-two per cent. First class.
I am overwhelmed when, in what seems a miracle, my academic success continues. Assignment follows assignment, each time my marks never faltering below eighty per cent. I should be thrilled, but instead I feel a sense of impending disappointment and failure. Consistency is not something with which I am familiar, in either myself or others, and I am anxious that good things don’t last forever. They have a habit of lulling you into comfort and then turning on an axis once you’ve let your guard down.
I manage to put Kris’s letter out of my mind and it is not until the New Year that I decide to write to her again. This time, I decide, I will not hold back. I will not try to be the good, understanding, forgiving daughter. She has now rejected me not once, but twice. She will know how I feel. She will answer my questions. She owes me that at the very least.
I reread her very first letter to me, the one written the year after she gave me away, and line by line compare it to this most recent one in which she tells me to ‘forget the past’. I highlight all the inconsistencies in her later version of events and put the ball firmly back in her court. I start to write, only this time I am less forgiving, less apologetic, angrier. I need to speak my own truth. When I’m done, I read over what I have written. It sounds angry. It sounds as though I’m calling her a liar. I think about starting over, scratching out what I’ve written, but I stop when I realise that all I’m asking this woman for is the truth. I’m not asking for her approval, or her acceptance. I don’t need an apology or for her to like me. I need the truth. And I need to ask her why she is ashamed of me. Why she is ashamed of me, of Karoline.
It takes five months for her to respond, by which time I am nearing the end of my first year at university, still achieving good grades, and still not eating. I have hit my lowest weight of just under seven stone and have started to pop codeine pills like they’re Jelly Tots. I start by taking a couple for a toothache, but before long I am taking four or five at a time in anticipation of a toothache, a headache, a heartache, any kind of ache. I become addicted to the feeling they give me. Warm, fuzzy and eventually numb. By the time exams come around at the end of June I’m existing on twenty codeine pills, a bottle of red wine and a packet of Marlboro Lights a day.
I light a cigarette and sit down to read. The first thing I notice about this latest letter is that she has spelled my name wrong. It feels deliberate. It takes me less than three minutes to read through and by the time I am done, it has become clear to me that this is a woman incapable of being honest. What she has written is a defensive, patronising missive in which she seems determined to paint herself as the victim. There are still no real answers.
Even though it feels as if she is being intentionally deceitful, I am aware of a reedy voice in the back of my mind telling me, ‘This is what happens. This is what happens to a person when they destroy themselves. They have to believe their own lies because to face the truth will kill them.’ I get the psychology behind it, but I cannot forgive her for leaving me out on a ledge. For forcing me to carry her pain.
She ends the letter by telling me I may write back if I’d like. To ‘ask more questions if I have them’. If I have them? I laugh bitterly to myself. All I have are questions!
From the moment I had learned about the hows and whys of my adoption and begun to fully understand what had been done to Karoline, I have been beset by endless questions. There was so much I needed to know and my desire for answers would often leave me little room to think of anything else.
Sometimes my need for information trod no further than wanting to know whether Jackson was musical or whether she had kept any of my baby clothes, but other times it strode into the minutiae and I would obsess over imagined conversations they’d had after making love, the curl of his lip when he smiled, and how long she cried after placing her baby into the arms of strangers and walking away.
And it wasn’t just the questions about my birth; I had developed something of a morbid curiosity about my ‘death’ too. I became obsessed with knowing the details. Had there been a funeral? It was one thing to kill off a baby, but quite another to let the event pass by without ceremony or circumstance. If there had been a funeral, had there also been a coffin and, if so, what the hell was inside? Had people really sent flowers or cards? ‘To our darling daughter/granddaughter/niece, we are so sorry for your loss.’ Had friends turned up on the doorstep of the grieving parents, offering arms in which to cry and shoulders on which to lean? How did they continue to wear the mask of such an unspeakable lie? I couldn’t even begin to imagine what type of people were capable of such macabre deception.
And so again I write back to her. I wait a few months, but hear nothing. I write again and wait again. I never get a response. To this day, I’m still waiting.
I am in my second year of university when one evening I receive a call from Mum saying that she has heard through mutual friends that my dad is seriously ill and in St Thomas’ Hospital in London. I have heard nothing of my father for nearly seven years and I have almost, almost forgotten I am his daughter. The last time we had any contact was when I was sixteen and at performing arts college pursuing my dream of becoming the next Whitney Houston. He had written to demand copies of my academic report. Presenting it will ensure continued payment of the child maintenance he is required to pay until I am sixteen, or eighteen in full-time education. I refuse to oblige, vehemently believing that he does not deserve to know anything about what I am doing or where I am doing it. There seem to be too many conditions attached to the love I think should be given freely and without negotiation. I have no concept that perhaps my mother may need the money and that my sensitivities may cause her financial hardship. It’s not that I don’t care, but rather that I’m simply unable to see anything beyond the fact that he has chosen – made a conscious choice – to abandon me. He has become someone I used to know, and even the good memories are beginning to evaporate in the tears I suck down into the dark space behind my ribcage. Our last contact is in a letter in which he outlines the new payment terms and, after I once try contacting him at work, accuses me of ‘harassing’ him when he is ‘seriously ill’.
When I receive the call from Mum, I decide that the right thing to do is to visit this man on whose shoulders I used to ride, so I make a plan with my flatmate to make the trip to see him at St Thomas’ the following morning. In the meantime I decide to call the hospital, tell them who I am and ask for the latest on Dad’s condition. It takes a few minutes before I am eventually put through to a senior nurse. I again tell her who I am and why I am calling.
‘I would like to enquire about my father, Malcolm Kirk. I understand he is being treated for leukaemia on this ward,’ I say, trying to keep my voice steady.
‘Mr Kirk does not have a daughter,’ I am told. I need to call back in the morning and speak to the ward manager if I need further information.
After a sleepless night, I wake early the next morning and call the hospital again. I hang on for at least fifteen minutes listening to Robbie Williams singing ‘Angels’ until the ward manager is located. When he eventually comes on the line, he tells me he is sorry, but Mr Kirk died half an hour ago.
The funeral is all over in fewer than ten minutes. At the end, Sarah, his wife and our former cleaning lady, gets up from the pew and walks over to me. Before I know what is happening she is in front of me with her hand outstretched. I am confused, and do as she says when she tells me she wants to shake my hand. On the drive back from the crematorium I stop off at a local pub, order a double Jack Daniels (minus the Coke) and drink to my dead dad.
> I often wonder what Dad would make of what I’ve made of my life and feel sad that my parents’ divorce robbed me of my greatest champion. There were times that it felt that he was both my coach and my team-mate. Separate we were outsiders, but together we were a force of nature. He would be proud of me, I know, for the tangible accomplishments, the degrees, the career success, the pig-headedness, the pluck, but not for the other stuff. Not for the overcoming, not for the clearing away and the battling through the mess and mire. Life, he would say, is not to be overcome. It is to be approached, as a mountain – to reach to the summit without looking down or back. It is to be solved like algebra, regarded as quadratic equations – ignore the mess and find the square root, treated like long multiplication. Don’t worry about the decimal points when lining up the numbers; just write them down and line up the right-most number.
So, yes, he would be proud, but of the mathematics of life, not the poetry. But proud or not, I do not think it would much matter. Although he hurt me by leaving me behind to become the daughter who always disappointed, he would still and still and still be the first man who ever loved me.
CHAPTER 15
Higher learning
* * *
By a miracle, at the age of twenty-four, I complete my three years at university, and for a long time – because I think it’s true – will tell people they were the happiest three years of my life. I manage to achieve a respectable law degree, but am still too terrified to face the adult world of regular employment and paying taxes and immediately start studying for a master’s degree. I decide on journalism, not because I think I’ll be any good at it, but because other people have always told me I can write. I decide that when I graduate I’ll get a job working in the City for one of the high-end glossy women’s magazine’s I never buy because they intimidate me and are full of thin, successful, happy women, the kind I know I can never be.
I also find myself in a relationship – one of my very own – with Computer Guy, an IT boffin who is unlike any of the men I’ve been with before: unattached, humble, placid, sexually unappealing and tolerant of my vociferous mood swings. For a long time he also pretends to ignore my rampant eating disorder and ever more frequent drinking binges.
Within a year I have completed my master’s, moved in with Computer Guy and found a job as a journalist at a radio station. I love my job and do my best to love Computer Guy, but am unable to settle. Work soon becomes yet another addiction and, along with the binging, starving and drinking, provides further escape from the feelings I am not yet ready to face.
For months I put out of my mind the sense of unfinished business, things left undone, unsaid, as far as answers from Kris. But what I cannot ignore is the pressing knowledge that somewhere out there in the ‘New South Africa’ is the little blond boy with the shy smile.
I contact Wendy and tell I her I want to get in touch with my brother. She says she will help, but we both agree that before approaching him we should try to contact Ken to give him the opportunity to prepare his son for the bombshell. It still amazes me that after all this time the secret, the lie that I am dead, has perpetuated. That no one has thought that Alex, at least, deserves to know the truth.
We manage to trace an address for Ken to a PO Box in Cape Town and Wendy prepares an initial letter to him. Within a couple of months he has replied, but only to say that we should contact Kris, since the whole matter has do with ‘her’ child.
It feels like a cop-out and, undeterred, Wendy sends another letter.
Dear Ken,
Thank you very much for you email and the information you supplied to us.
We have been working with Karoline (who is now called Sara-Jayne) for some time as an agency who support adopted people in finding out about and coming to terms with their birth family origin.
Sara-Jayne has contacted Kris who was very unwilling to respond to her or give her further information about the past. She has always been interested in making some contact with her half-brother Alex, however she felt it would be wise to try to speak to you first as she is aware that her existence may not have been acknowledged by your family.
Sara-Jayne did not wish to email Alex directly or risk doing anything that would cause unnecessary shock or disruption.
We understand that there was much difficulty and complication surrounding the circumstances of Sara-Jayne’s birth.
Whilst our view is that Sara-Jayne has the right to request information about her origins and birth family, we understand that this situation is delicate and needs careful handling.
We would therefore be very grateful if you would let us know your views on the best way to proceed in this matter.
Two months later, having heard nothing, Wendy sends another letter.
Dear Ken,
Following our previous letter, I am writing to establish whether you have given any further thought to the matter regarding future contact between Karoline (Sara-Jayne) and Alex.
I appreciate that this is a matter of a sensitive nature, however, it would be useful to receive your opinion or thoughts on the best way to proceed.
Another two months pass and there is still nothing. I drive myself to distraction envisaging all sorts of scenarios in my head. But always end up in the same place. That I am too disgraceful to be let into the light.
By now Computer Guy and I are doing our very best at pretending we are in this for the long haul. We talk unconvincingly about a future, marriage and even children. We, neither of us, believe it will actually come to that, but for a time it is fun to pretend.
I already know that I will never have children, either my own or someone else’s. Motherhood is not for me, because what if – like heart disease and haemophilia – the ability to abandon one’s own children is hereditary? It’s not a risk I’m prepared to take. I think about the unrelenting resentment I feel towards Kris and decide that that’s not something I could handle being on the receiving end of.
But, nevertheless, the idea of children, the mere thought that I have the ability to create another human life inside me, only fuels the need I have to connect with someone of my own blood. My pull towards Alex simply won’t let up.
But I still can’t bring myself to abracadabra into my brother’s life without warning, and since I’ve heard nothing from Ken, in desperation, I try the only other avenue I can think of: Kris’s sister, Karla. She’d been sixteen years old when I was born and, considered by her parents too young to know the truth, had also been led to believe that I – that Karoline, her niece – had died.
I manage to track her down and to, my astonishment, she tells me that she has known the truth for years, having found a letter from Kris to their father written shortly after I was given up for adoption. I try my best to explain to Karla my need for answers and why I hope to make contact with Alex. She understands, she says. She doesn’t agree with Kris’s attitude and feels that I have a right to know where I came from. ‘Alex has a right to know about you,’ she writes in an email. ‘Kris should face up to her “mistakes”.’ I should feel relief at finally having my feelings acknowledged, but Karla is a strange creature and I get the sense that I am being used as a pawn in a messed-up game of (dysfunctional) Family Fortunes. Karla wants constant reassurance that I will not let on to Kris or their parents that we are in touch; the keeping of secrets is apparently de rigueur for these people. At the same time, she also seems desperate to be involved in some way, like a kid not wanting to be left out. It’s clear from the way Karla speaks about her sister that theirs is quite a strange sibling relationship and I can never quite escape the feeling that she thinks that our clandestine communications somehow give her a one-up on her sister. One day she sends me Kris’s contact details, and suggests that I write to her. Of course, I’m not to let on where I got the information. It’s shit-stirring of the highest order and I refuse to take the bait.
I come to be grateful that my adopted family are only operating in the minor leagues of crazy. Here is a family
, I tell myself, even more fucked up than my own.
Karla and I have been corresponding for a few weeks when I receive an email from my maternal grandmother:
I gather from Karla that you have been in touch with her, wanting to ‘get to know the family better’. This is not something that we want and I would ask that you cease trying to get in touch with my eldest daughter, if that was, indeed, your ultimate intention. She made her feelings very clear in a letter to you some years ago. We would ask that you never contact our family again. We have made this decision as a family. We will not recognise any reply to this message unless it is to agree to comply with our wishes.
The letter is the final straw. I swear off having anything further to do with Karla and decide to put the entire experience down to a lesson well learned. I contact Wendy and together we decide that she will try to make contact with Alex directly. I have known Wendy long enough by now to know that she will do it with the discretion and sensitivity it demands, but I take her advice when she tells me to brace myself for the fallout. And the fallout comes. Within hours of Wendy making the call and getting through to Alex, I receive an email from Karla. The two-faced bitch accuses me of trying to destroy ‘the family’. I console myself with the bittersweet notion that, if nothing else, Kris giving me up for adoption had saved me from a lifetime of dealing with these godawful people.
Killing Karoline Page 13