The restaurant owners, a couple in their sixties, are delighted to have an English girl on their staff and treat me with a gently paternalistic benevolence. The father says I have my head in the clouds, but I am a good worker. He catches me sometimes, silently watching the couples on holiday. I have stopped reading books, but I still invent other people’s lives.
I sleep briefly in the space of the afternoon between the last round of lunch dishes and the first round of evening preparations. In the soft early evening light, as tourists are having their showers, Greek men draw up their seats to play cards, while their women huddle together to talk about them and make food for them. The setting sun draws the tourists to our restaurant. It is further to walk from the centre of the town, but our verandah has a view straight across the water into the sunset. The light turns even burnt bald patches golden. Then, as if suddenly remembering where it needs to be, blinks and is gone. Now the couples turn their attention to each other and more alcohol. By the time the evening is over, my body aches and the exhaustion is a pillow, which gently smothers any possibility of thought.
The only day I find it difficult to sleep is my free day. My body is grateful for the rest, but my mind becomes active in spite of all my attempts to lull it into thinking that this is simply a variation on a theme, a day like any other. I take my moped and splutter into the hills inland. I explore the beaches and pretend to be a tourist, trying in vain to read, or I succumb to well-meant invitations to join local fishing trips. Yet my mind digs a hole in these days and the hole is a cave into the past.
Chapter 55
There was a certain symmetry about my departure from Argentina, which Nick would have found comic. I had arrived, vomiting, and changed my name. After a year-long pilgrimage, culminating in a thwarted attempt to reunite with my dead sister at the edge of a waterfall, I had turned away and got on a plane again. I had vomited in the airplane toilets, wondering what possible kick the mile-high club get out of the exchange of bodily fluids in a venue so cramped and smelly, and I had recognised the old Pippa again.
The vomiting was, I assumed, a perfectly unimaginative attempt by my body to flush out what my mind could not deal with. I told the curious, pony-tailed, Spanish air traffic controller who happened to be in the seat next to me that I was pregnant and maybe, unbeknown to my conscious self, that was a metaphor for something hopeful in this new departure.
There was a drawer that I battled to keep closed. Ignacio. I tried to be like Jenny, I tried to own the decision and not blame life, but it hurt, and I was shocked by how much more it hurt than what I did to Johnny when Jenny died. I ached all over and I longed for Ignacio’s touch to massage the pain away.
I was still angry with Jenny. It was as if she had disappeared in the middle of a play and I was left, facing the audience, ad-libbing madly and glancing surreptitiously backstage to see where she was hiding. I imagined the glint of mischief on her face. It had been there all the way through our childhood in games that went too far for Pippa, but never far enough for Jenny.
It wasn’t until the Spanish controller was slumped in sleep and we were halfway across the world that I asked Pippa what the fuck she was going to do. I had changed. There were old doors I knew I could no longer open. Johnny, Brixton bookshops, dreamy Karen, Jenny’s address book – these had to remain figments of memory. I felt as if I had been given witness protection, a new identity that meant I couldn’t go back to the same places and people that were part of my past, yet the house and the instructions that should be part of the new programme were missing.
I had enough cash for about two nights in a dodgy B&B. I went north of the river just in case, and then chance told me what to do. On my second day back in London, having just discovered that I had an English bank balance of £69.69 (Jenny would have loved that!) I wandered into an internet café with the intention of seeing what my money could buy. I found:
A special offer on a pair of DKNY sunglasses
A week’s car hire with Hertz in Spain
A leather-bound Filofax with a list of famous people’s birthdays and a picture of Princess Di
A case of Pinot Grigio
A subscription for some obscure book society
A red lipstick (I had no idea it was possible to spend so much on a lipstick!)
A ticket to a town I had never heard of on mainland Greece
The flight was the following day. The ticket cost £69.00, so I left 69 pence in my bank account as an investment in my future and got on another plane.
Chapter 56
I honestly don’t think I made the connection at first. I was so intent on the need to secure, fast, at the very least, board and lodging and, with a bit of luck, some pocket money, that I didn’t stop to question, or to feel insecure, or shy, or absolutely anything. I simply acted. This was fresh, novel, almost enjoyable. At the airport I spotted a tour bus. Perfect. Where the tourists went is where there would be work, so while the tour guide fussed on a mobile phone I managed to hide myself in the mess of people trailing onto the bus. I sat at the back and listened as Janet gave us tips about the natives and how to fit into the local community, including the fact that the sun was very hot and we should always wear sun cream. I found my taverna, and my family with a spare room and the will to take me on, and then it dawned on me that, of all the places I could have chosen, I had come to my father’s home country.
Now it nags at me, that knowledge, and lies in wait in the underground of the days when thought has space to find me, and I realise that I am going to try to find him, but I need the routine of these sun-washed days to settle me first. Is this just another fiction? Is this the sensible side of the reef? Jenny, what do you think? You were always determined you never wanted to find him. What comfort could there be in a reunion with a man capable of leaving the mother of his children before they were born? But I want to know why. I want to know what he looks like. I want details about him that will fill in the gaps where my imagination fails.
We found wedding photos once, at the back of a writing desk, and Jenny sneaked them up to the attic, so that we might pore over them in open, honest curiosity, without the shadow of Mother’s disapproval, but they were hand-ripped to cut him out, and tell-tale smudges of spilt tears and vodka blurred our mother’s smile. I wonder where she is now. Does she even know about her daughter’s death?
How important is blood anyway? Why is it that a perfectly normal, contented and well-loved adoptee can feel driven to find their real mother? Is it just the lure of the ‘what if?’, latent in all of us, perhaps more powerful in someone who knows they are adopted? Is it just a yearning for our roots? The drive to understand the history or culture that has gone into the bloodline that has produced us?
I have no answers, only questions. Perhaps that is a good sign. Perhaps curiosity is coming back. Perhaps new answers can fill in the gaps. I really am going to try and find him, Jenny. I have his name, I can guess his age, I will use the net. I have decided.
Chapter 57
I make a note of the date – 15 August 1998 – at the back of my address book. There is already a short list of dates, which reads like a topsy-turvy birthday list with no names, or an attempt to encode the pin numbers that will be forgotten by the time you get back from holiday. There is no code, however. They are quite simply dates that are important in my life. The day Jenny and I said goodbye at a train station on our paths from childhood to different cities; the day I lost my virginity (willingly); the day of Jenny’s abortion, the Friday that will stay with me forever; the day that I was tempted to jump at Iguazu Falls (yes, Ignacio was right to be nervous). Usually these dates are committed to paper retrospectively, but whatever the outcome of today, there is enough history behind it for me to know in advance that this day belongs to the list of key dates in my life.
In the process of finding my father I found an uncle, my father’s brother, who passed on the coded question that I knew only the man who really was my father would be able to answer. I as
ked, ‘What did you find in the bosom of the woman you married?’ She had an uncommonly prominent mole, perched like a third nipple between her breasts.
And now, today, I am in Athens and we have agreed to meet in a café in a square. I have told him I will be wearing a blue dress. It is a deep dark blue and I have contact lenses behind my sunglasses. I am early so that I can be the one to see him arrive, but I suspect that he may have done the same, and so I look around me nervously as I find a seat with the view that I need. Jenny, wouldn’t you like to be here with me now? Admit it, just once! But Jenny is quiet.
A bulbous, dark man of around sixty is crossing the square and loping towards me. His eyes dart from side to side, taking in the shape of a woman’s bottom whenever one passes, while his big body struggles. No, no, oh please don’t let it be him. I catch a glimpse of his stomach, hairy and protruding through buttons that are tired of holding him in. He has not seen me and I think I have time still. I could just get up and walk away. I don’t want to be this man’s daughter. OK, Jenny, you were right again. Oh no, he is still coming towards me. An image of the Blue Masturbating Machine dances somewhere inside my eyelids and Frank laughs in the shadows.
In my haste to get away I do two things. I knock over a glass, which smashes onto the floor, drawing eyes from everywhere, and I collide with a man who is thin, like celery.
‘Sorry, I am so sorry,’ I say, stepping backwards, wanting to cry, but he grips my arm and I hear my name.
‘Pippa?’ Impossibly, he says my name.
And I see him for the first time. The lines in his face are deep and comfortable, lines that look as though they have grown from living and laughing, rather than emerging indiscriminately through the passage of time. The eyes are dark and bright and have none of the soft blur so often a product of ripening age. This, then, is my father. Thank God.
His English is clipped and hesitant at first, but as we talk the deep furrows on his warm face relax and his sentences grow longer and smoother, like snakes waking up in the sun. I ask him question after question, deflecting the focus from me and genuinely hungry for the details of his life.
‘You are very intense,’ he laughs softly. ‘Very different to your mother.’
‘What was she like when you met her?’ I hadn’t wanted to discuss her. It was us I wanted to talk about and yet I cannot stifle the urge to discover something new about her, something innocent, something I could use to dim my resentment against her. My father looks at me for a long time, as if he is being asked to complete an impossibly long mathematical calculation or as if he is weighing something very heavy in his mind. Perhaps he can no longer remember the words in English for what he wants to say.
‘She was full of bubbles,’ he says finally, with affection, ‘like a – how do you say in English – a brook, like a brook, or champagne.’
That’s more like it, I think, but when I look at my father I see there is no irony there, only nostalgia. Why did he leave her, I wonder? There is something not right. This is not the evil, heartless villain of our mother’s sob story, but then maybe time has changed him. Time, which coats torturers and dictators in gentle layers of humanity, so that by the time they are grandfathers they have become merely old men, no better or worse than any other.
‘Now you,’ he says, sitting back and looking straight at me. ‘I am tired of talking. Let me hear you talk.’
Normally this is the kind of line that freezes me, that fills me with fear on a first date. It was easier being Jenny. I learnt from her. I learnt how to warm up to this kind of line, how to deliver lies upon lies, unflinching, through the comfort of contact lenses, but this time there is none of that. Now I am relaxed.
I am sitting at a café in Athens with my father and there is a deep and immediate recognition between us. I tell him about Jenny and about Argentina. I don’t mention that I lived in her name. I think that’s too much to tell the father you meet for the first time in your life, but I feel I might be able to tell him one day and that knowledge is like hot milk inside me, warming me from within.
We talk into the evening and we go for dinner. I learn that I have two half- brothers, teenagers, two years apart in time and ten years apart in taste and character. My mind is beginning to race with the wine and I can feel it fast-forwarding through my future, catching indeterminate glimpses of myself in the heart of this new family. Slow down, slow down, I think to myself, switching wine for water. No more wine tonight. There is too much emotion and I want to stay in the present. Neither of us wants to speak about what actually happened. We are in a tango dance together, avoiding the unmentionable with our heads held high.
When I go to bed it is 16 August and it occurs to me that all the dates I have recorded in my address book are to do with loss. All but this one.
Chapter 58
You see, Jenny, it was worth it. I have taken the biggest emotional risk in my life and it has paid off. We have a father. He is a good man. You can see it in his eyes. I always was better at reading people’s eyes, wasn’t I? I knew Frank’s eyes were bad, right from the first day he walked into our house, but our father’s eyes are bright. Nothing lurks there waiting to come out. I don’t know what went wrong or why he left us. One day he will tell me. One day I will ask him, but there is no hurry. We have arranged to meet again in a couple of weeks. He is going to come and visit me here.
Andreas, the owner of the taverna, will not stop teasing me. He has seen me smiling. He is convinced I have found a boyfriend and I haven’t the heart to tell him I have found a father. His family works together, plays together, grows together like grapes on a vine. What would he make of my story? No, I haven’t the heart and yet I need to think up some kind of explanation for my father’s visit.
It’s because I am distracted in such thoughts that I don’t notice anything significant about the latest sun-drenched, blonde-haired tourists who wander in to choose their table and gaze across the water. They come and go, these postcard couples. Under the spell of sea and sunshine and sex every night, with no football to compete for his attentions, they fall in love again and again. There is no apple of temptation here, no mates or habits that she cannot stand, no credit card-statements, no demands on him to notice when she is wearing something new. They are naked together in the safety of the knowledge, unspoken, that this is time-bound. Leave them here for six months and the apples will grow, for all the sea and sunshine in the world cannot stop the apples.
I have developed the ability to take an order on the outside and on the inside compose songs or paintings, my own private odes to the lives of the many who pass before me. It is when I hear the word ‘bollocks’ said in a tone of rollicking dismissiveness I recognise instantly that the inside and the outside collide.
‘Bollocks, it’s political correctness gone mad. Policeperson, spokesperson, person this, person that . . . I’m not “manning” the shop guv, honest, I’m “personing” the shop. What a load of crap!’
‘Nick, how are you?’ I place two menus on the table. ‘Fucking hell . . . Jenny! What on earth are you doing here?’
There follows a flurry of hugs and incredulous laughter, while one piece of the back of my mind wonders how to tell him that my name is Pippa and another piece of my mind wonders if we will still get on, if I haven’t changed too much for us to be friends.
‘You’re different!’ he says, and steps back to look me up and down.
‘I’ve changed my name,’ I blurt with false confidence, as if it is the most natural thing in the world, like a new haircut.
‘You fucking maniac!’ he laughs. He is really pleased to see me. His girlfriend looks uncomfortable.
‘Are you going to introduce us?’ she intervenes.
‘Sorry, Mel, this is a really good friend of mine. We met in Argentina. Her name is . . .’
‘Pippa,’ I interject.
‘Pippa!’ Nick can’t help himself. ‘What the fuck kind of name is that? Of all the names you could have chosen, you chose Pippa. Why Pi
ppa, for God’s sake?’
Mel is looking at me with blatant mistrust. It’s alright, honestly, I want to reassure her. I am not some secret psychopath, sprung from nowhere to taunt you.
‘It chose me,’ I say. This does nothing to change me in the eyes of Mel. Nick is almost choking on his own laughter.
‘Ever the woman of mystery!’
Yeah, I think, the one tin can you couldn’t open, but I think this with pleasure, not malice.
‘Bring us a drink then, so that we can raise a glass to you, woman. I thought you’d fallen off the face of the planet. It’s good to see you!’
Chapter 59
‘Tell a woman you love her often enough and she won’t notice that you don’t. Mr Kipling bakes exceedingly good cakes. It doesn’t matter if you think they taste like shit or you once met someone who worked in a Mr Kipling cake factory and told you the same cakes went into Sainsbury’s boxes. We want to believe what people tell us. We’re all gluttons for repetition. Look at politics, for God’s sake. We vote for our politicians not because of what they do, but because of what they say. And it’s not just private companies that are cashing in, it’s the public services. You remember, the “sacred” ones, the ones that made us proud to be British when we lived in the Third World. “Lambeth National Health – putting people first . . .” As opposed to what, for fuck’s sake? Stethoscope maintenance? Nurses’ pay? No matter, it makes me feel good when I go to a doctor in Lambeth. I know that if there are any dogs in the queue, they will see me first. It’s me that counts!’
Twin Truths Page 14