The Stranger In My Home: I thought she was my daughter. I was wrong.

by Parks, Adele

  ‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail,’ the librarian had said. She was old, at least forty, strict and sensible looking, with flat, brown, lace-up shoes, a plaid skirt and short, greying hair. Alison liked her. Strict and sensible women didn’t run off and leave half their family in the lurch. ‘Benjamin Franklin said that.’ Alison wasn’t sure who Benjamin Franklin was exactly and, while his advice seemed sound, she decided she needed to know more about the man before she accepted it as gospel. Before she left the library she took out a slim Ladybird book about him. The biography was no doubt too young an edition for her, but that was all they had. On discovering that this working-class man was not only one of the Founding Fathers of the United States but also a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman and diplomat, she decided to put her trust in him.

  Alison had gone home, drawn up a timetable, read, made long notes, distilled them into shorter notes and stuck word prompts above the kitchen sink and in the loo. She had completed all the past papers several times. Alison had studied, practically around the clock, for the next six months. She was prepared for this exam and all her others.

  She’d even gone as far as to order the prospectus for three or four universities. It had been the librarian who suggested she do so: ‘Just to be informed.’ Alison hadn’t even heard the word before. ‘Prospectus’. Doing so felt daring. Presumptuous. Then they glided through the letterbox and landed on the thin carpet in the hallway. Their glossiness was exotic and out of place. She had had no idea that such possibilities existed. The brochures (because that’s what a prospectus turned out to be) were far more glamorous and promising than the Argos or Littlewoods catalogue or even the holiday brochures she’d glanced at at friends’ houses. The paper was thick. She felt she had to wash her hands before turning the pages. The photographs were of young people beaming, swathed in scarves and opportunity. They were like her, except not like her at all. The courses listed were overwhelming. Ostensibly, she was doing research into studying law, because she knew that paid well and that lawyers (like funeral directors) were always in demand, but she could easily imagine herself turning to theatre and film studies, management and economics, French, history of art. There was so much choice. Could she? Could she perhaps have that chance?

  Now, she worked her way through five of the questions in section B. The numbers fell into place, coming together like that time when she went on holiday to Great Yarmouth with her dad and they’d played the slot machines on the front every night for a week. Once – just once – three sevens had come up. They’d won over thirty pounds in ten-pence pieces! Magical.

  She even had time to check her answers. Someone had opened the window in the hall and fresh air floated in, a summer breeze and the buzz of an insect. One or two kids jerked their heads up, furious and distracted by the bee, but Alison felt something marvellous tremble in the air. A hint, a suggestion, opportunity. Maybe, maybe. She was waiting for something to happen, something to change for the good, and the clean air seemed to suggest it might. The future was on its way, and it had to be better. It had to be.

  That was it, she had finished, and while she never counted her chickens before they’d hatched, been reared and arrived on her table as Sunday lunch, she thought she’d done well. Very well. She didn’t dare move her head left or right. She was the sort of girl teachers accused of cheating, although she never would. She didn’t want to or need to. She kept her wide, serious eyes to the front, tucked her hair behind her ears, barely moving her head to glance at the clock. There were four minutes to go. It was then she noticed that Pauline Cooper, who was sitting right in front of her, had a dark patch of blood seeping through her grey school skirt. Poor cow. It had happened to most of the girls at some point or other. So mortifying. There was nothing you could do except take your jumper off and tie the sleeves around your waist, pretend it was a fashion statement rather than a cloak. Alison wondered whether Pauline would have a jumper with her; it was such a warm day. Imagine being on during your exams – what a bloody nuisance. Alison thought that, if blokes were the ones to have periods, the human race would probably have been eradicated by now. Knowing Alison’s luck, she’d come on in the next day or so, bound to. She made a mental note to go and buy extra sanitary stuff; she’d wear two at once in an exam, rather than risk the mess Pauline now had to deal with. Great – the best she could hope for was to sit on a four-inch-thick wad of cotton wool that wouldn’t stay in place: how was that fair? She wished she could afford those ones with adhesive wings; maybe she’d buy them, just for the exams.

  Then, suddenly, it came to Alison, as fluidly as the answers to the algebra equations had. It had been two months since her last period. Easter. Her stomach sloshed inside of her. Heat prickled under her arms and yet a shiver ran down her back. A dry lump of sand appeared in her throat. Her legs began to quake; she could hear them banging quietly but relentlessly against the underneath of the desk. She was too clever to tell herself it was nothing, that the stress of revision had caused her periods to stop, that she hadn’t been eating well, or anything else comforting. She knew it. Somehow, she knew it for certain.

  Of course she wasn’t going to get good results and go on to A levels. She wasn’t going to go to university. She wouldn’t be a lawyer. Stuff like that didn’t happen to girls like her.

  Shit happened to her.

  5

  Can he make us have a DNA test? That is the question swirling around and around my head. Go away, go away! I’m not sure if I mean the question or, more likely, the man himself. The problem, which he’s literally brought to our door, is too awful and enormous for me to process. It’s madness. I lie on the bed, pulling at my hair, actually yanking it, as though I’m trying to wrench it out of my head. I’d had no idea people really did this, but it turns out we do, in fear, in frustration. It hurts and the pain is a temporary distraction.

  Jeff puts his head around the door frame. He looks pale, almost transparent. He tentatively edges into the bedroom, carrying a cup of tea, which he quietly places on the bedside table. I eye it resentfully. What good can tea possibly do? I loathe the fact that we British are seen as so conventional and simple that a cup of tea can fix everything. I expect him to sit on the edge of the bed, but he doesn’t, he hovers helplessly. I am not used to seeing him unsure and can hardly bear it. His hurt makes this nightmare authentic. I am ashamed of my reaction; sulking in bed like a teenager is unlikely to solve anything, but the pain and confusion are too vivid and extreme for me to deal with my shame.

  Let alone the bomb that has just been dropped upon us.

  It takes everything I have for me not to say, Sod tea.

  ‘Thanks.’ I look away from him, won’t meet his eyes. If I were to see acceptance of the situation there, then I’d never forgive him. I feel betrayed by him, although I can’t explain why. If Katherine isn’t ours, he’s let me down somehow, because when I thought she was ours I was so proud and grateful that he’d given me such a gift. I’m not being fair. He looks devastated, too. Eventually, he sits on the edge of the bed, but he still doesn’t touch me. I’m glad of that. Some women like to be comforted in times of stress and difficulty; I curl in on myself.

  We sit in silence for a while letting the tea go cold. I still can’t think of the words. After a while, I say, ‘We should ignore him. Pretend he doesn’t exist, pretend he never came here.’

  ‘I don’t think we can.’ Jeff lets out a heavy sound that reverberates around the room, staining the Egyptian cotton sheets, making the super-king bed uncomfortable, casting dark shadows across the Louis XV dressing table; exposing the interior decor as meaningless, pathetic. I’d always thought, or at least hoped, that we were safe here in our lovely big house, so tastefully and thoughtfully put together, but I was wrong.

  ‘You mean, legally?’ Can this man – this stranger – force us to have our child’s DNA tested? Is that legal?

  ‘I don’t know wher
e we stand, legally. I imagine we’ll have to get a lawyer,’ says Jeff, delivering another one of his horrifying groans. I’ve never been more regretful that I didn’t go to law college. ‘What I mean is that, morally, we can’t ignore him.’

  ‘“Morally”?’ I splutter with rage and indignation. ‘You can’t think that, if Katherine is his, genetically speaking, we’ll hand her over.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Jeff looks impatient. Neither of us has it in us to be nice to each other, we are too shocked, our lives detonated. ‘I just think, morally, we have a responsibility to get her tested.’

  ‘Why? Why would we have the test done?’

  ‘Because of the cancer thing, Alison.’ His words are slow, careful.

  Oh God, oh God. Their meaning seeps under my skin. She might not be ours, but there could be worse news even than that. My stomach heaves. ‘Without that, I might feel like you do.’ Jeff moves his hand a fraction so that his fingertips are resting on mine. The gesture isn’t very him, it is too tentative, but in it I find some understanding. ‘I might hide away. Run away. We could pack up and go where Tom Truby would never find us, but if she has a genetic cancer gene—’ His words catch in his throat, almost hiccup out. Pain is so primitive and awe-inspiring. He continues. ‘But if she has the gene, he might be a help, after what he’s been through with his wife. He’ll know things we don’t.’

  ‘Aggghh.’ The sound I make is enormous, animal. I bury my head in the pillow to try to stop it coming out but it throws itself around the room anyway. Katherine might have a cancer gene. Unbearable. ‘What shall we do? What shall we do?’

  I feel for Jeff. I know that my hysteria is not helping the situation at all, but I can’t behave better. It’s beyond me. I simply can’t do what is expected of me. I need him to have answers.

  ‘We’ll do the DNA test first. A step at a time.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ I groan into my pillow.

  ‘What can I do to help?’ Jeff strokes my head, the way I stroke Katherine’s when she’s ill.

  ‘Say it isn’t true,’ I plead.

  He won’t do as I ask but instead states, ‘We have to know. We have no choice but to face this.’ I suppose part of me is relieved he sounds confident about what we should do; another part of me thinks what he is proposing is impossible. How can he ask so much of me?

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then, I don’t know. Then we’ll decide what to do next.’ He leans forward and kisses my head.

  Slowly, I nod. What choice do I have? ‘If it turns out as he says it will, you know—’ I won’t say the words. ‘Then we could tell her she’s adopted. We could still run away with her.’ I grab Jeff’s hand and squeeze it tightly. ‘We can’t let Tom Truby meet her, you understand that, don’t you? Because if he meets her he’ll want her. Naturally, he will, she’s so wonderful,’ I finish breathlessly.

  Jeff looks confused. ‘What about Olivia?’ I stare at him, unable to understand his comment. Does he mean Tom Truby won’t want Katherine because he has Olivia? Or is he suggesting we might want to meet Olivia? I daren’t ask him to clarify. Even the tremor of the thought of meeting Olivia seems like a betrayal of Katherine. I can’t begin to deal with that right now. It’s too painful, too complex.

  ‘I don’t care about Olivia. Katherine is my daughter, it’s as simple as that. You don’t need to confuse things.’

  I can imagine how it will be for Jeff. He is solidly middle class; he attended a selective grammar school where boys were drilled into having a sense of community, a stiff upper lip and a desire to act responsibly. Jeff will always do the decent thing. He overpays at honesty bars, he buys books at full price from independent booksellers, he clears the snow from the elderly neighbours’ path before he does ours. I’ve always loved this about him. ‘Sod you, and sod doing the right thing!’ I snap. Jeff looks at me with a complex expression somewhere between disappointment and disbelief. I’m sick with shame and need. I let a silence settle around us. After a few moments I ask, ‘Can we do it without her knowing? The DNA test. There’s no point in alarming her.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He must catch something in the look on my face that makes him think better of such brutal honesty. ‘Yes, yes, I’m sure we can. Then that will probably be the end of it,’ he declares firmly.

  I feel something in me shift, a speck of relief supplied by Jeff. A step at a time, yes. Tom Truby might be mistaken. His birth daughter might be with another family. The hospital records could be wrong. There could have been another Caucasian girl born around those dates. Katherine is ours. She is. She is. I will not – cannot – accept anything else.

  Yet.

  And, God knows, this thought is an unwelcome one. There was something about Tom Truby that was familiar from the very first moment I saw him. Katherine has dark auburn hair, but then so does Jeff. Both men and my daughter have brown eyes. Katherine’s are almond-shaped. They seem to rest in her face with a sort of nonchalance which I’ve always found irresistibly beguiling, especially when they sparkle with happiness or excitement. She has the most spectacular eyelashes; I’ve joked that, when she slept as a baby, they brushed her cheekbones. Jeff’s eyes are much smaller; he doesn’t have noteworthy eyelashes. When I pushed and jabbed Tom in the hallway, shoved him out of the door, he’d closed his eyes, as though batting away my agony, shielding himself from it; I suppose he has enough of his own. I noticed his eyelashes and then, when he opened his eyes to plead silently with me …

  I saw Katherine.

  Thirty Years Ago

  Straight after the maths exam, instead of using the lunchtime to revise her French verbs in the school library, Alison ran all the way home. She grabbed her money box off the windowsill with shaking fingers. It was a ceramic pig with flowers on its back; she’d had it for ever, her gran had bought it for her. She prised out the rubber stopper and shook the contents on to the bed, carefully counting out the coins, feeling somehow ashamed and grubby that she was dragging the cute little gift, a symbol of her childhood, into this horror. She needed a Clearblue home pregnancy test; there were adverts for it in all the teen magazines she picked up in the common room. Thank goodness – otherwise, she wouldn’t have known what to do. The idea of going to a doctor was horrifying.

  She caught the bus into town, knowing she’d miss her French exam, but how could she even think of turning up to it now? Besides, while going to the local chemist would have been quicker, she couldn’t risk it; the woman who worked in there knew her dad. She went to Boots but still had to ask for the test over the counter. A middle-aged man served her; there wasn’t anyone else. He looked concerned, pushed his glasses up his nose and put the test in a plastic bag. It cost a fortune! She could have bought a new skirt from the Saturday market for that. The results took thirty minutes. A three-step process using a dipstick and a small tray.

  Of course, there was always the hope she’d done the test wrong. She hadn’t used the first pee of the day.

  Of course, there was no hope at all.

  She turned up to the majority of the remainder of her exams but she might as well have not bothered. She couldn’t concentrate. All she could think about was that her dad was going to kill her. Probably throw her out. How sad and disappointed Steve’s mum would look. Steve’s older brother had been ‘trapped’; it was the stuff of family legend. Apparently, the girl was ‘no better than she ought to be’. That marriage hadn’t lasted more than eighteen months after the baby was born. That girl had taken the baby away somewhere. Hull, they thought. None of the family ever saw or heard from her. The whole thing made Steve’s mother cry. Alison didn’t want to make her cry. She was alone.

  6

  Sometimes in life we do things we’re not very proud of. Even nice people do. People pretend to like their boss more than they in fact do because they want a promotion. People send texts full of elaborate lies about traffic, illness or workload to avoid a commitment, rather than just saying, ‘I fancy a night in watching TV.’ People have affairs
and break the hearts of their spouses after twenty years of marriage. Sometimes, we’re not very good at all.

  Jeff and I did not tell Katherine the real reason we rubbed a cotton-bud stick on the inside of her cheek, twenty times. We told her that Jeff had been invited to go on that programme on TV, Who Do You Think You Are?, where ancestral DNA searches are quite common, and Jeff is occasionally asked to be on such TV shows; he was once on Pointless and he turned down University Challenge because of a clash in his diary. Like all lies, it was a mistake. Even the lie ‘No, your bum does not look big in those jeans’ is a mistake, because you might save your friend’s feelings for a fleeting second in the sweaty changing room on a damp Saturday afternoon but there will come a point when a bunch of builders snigger at her as she walks down the street and she’ll know you lied. Illogically, she won’t be furious with the builders. It will be your fault. Lying is wrong but, at the time, this lie seemed, if not right, then at least not as wrong as everything else. Easier, I suppose.

  Jeff and I also rubbed swabs on the inside of our cheeks. Contrary to popular belief, it is not saliva that is tested; the swabbing collects cheek cells. The process is simple and streamlined. Designed to bring fast assurance or, perhaps, Jeff says, like ripping off a plaster, best done quickly, with one determined stroke. I think it’s more like lobbing dynamite or pressing the big red button.

  It took us just a matter of minutes to find a reputable DNA-testing centre on the internet. The company we chose used a product that had apparently been voted best ‘Peace of Mind’ paternity test last year.