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

by Parks, Adele

  Then I see it.

  An A4 manila file on his desk. It is the title that catches my eye: ‘The Swap: working title.’

  It is a good title. Arresting, not gender specific. But while I’m thinking this, I’m also fighting the dread and fury that are bubbling up inside me. Because I know. I just know.

  He’s altered the gender of the changelings. The story is about two boys but, even so, the plot is absolutely identifiable. The boys are called Karl and Oliver. Oliver is one of three children and his mother has recently died, leaving the ‘bright, worthy but somewhat artily pretentious father with the role of lone parent’. Karl is an only child. ‘His father is a renowned and respected architect, his mother a highly controlling housewife.’ Those genders haven’t been swapped, then. Not to protect the innocent. Or the guilty.

  My eyes flash across the paper. I can only skim-read, as words fall in and out of focus, blurring, sharpening, morphing again. I force myself to concentrate and yet I don’t want to know what’s written there. It’s a little like it was whenever I received a Visa bill in my twenties, only a hundred times worse: ‘From the view point of a middle-class couple … parents to one fifteen-year-old son … devastated to discover … adored child isn’t theirs … Stranger appears … doorstep … medical evidence … unequivocal … swapped at birth.’ I’m so shocked I’m gasping for breath. I think I’m going to choke. No. No. It’s impossible. Vile. Beyond cruel. A tightness in my chest makes me think I am in danger of suffocating. My legs shake, my knees knock together, I collapse into the desk chair. I read the same paragraph three or four times to be certain, but there’s no room for doubt. There really isn’t.

  I read the entire document as best I can, my hands shaking as I turn the pages. ‘A profound and terrifying ordeal.’ What the hell? That doesn’t cover it. ‘Devastating effect on family life … revealing deep-seated issues and rifts’. What can he mean? But I know what he means. He means this: him writing a manuscript about our life together and me having no idea.

  It is quite a well-plumped-out synopsis; plus, the first chapter of the novel is complete. Jeff is serious about this project. I imagine he and his agent are bent over it right now, reading it through, perhaps marking up possible edits or making small changes. I don’t suppose there’s much leeway in terms of character development: that’s all been worked out for him. ‘A highly controlling housewife.’ The four words cut me like a blade. So reductive, so insulting.

  At all right?

  I rush to the final paragraph of the synopsis, desperate to know how he ends the book. There is a genetic illness. Not the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene; ovarian cancer wouldn’t fly, as the changelings are now boys. The illness is Wilson’s disease. I read on and discover that the child is categorically diagnosed with it. Jeff suggests that the book end with a cliffhanger, not specifying whether the child dies or not.

  I can actually taste vomit.

  Then I notice another section: character motivation. ‘The mother, seemingly unlikable at first, is only truly understood when it is revealed why she clings so passionately to Karl. When she was sixteen she fell pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl who she gave up for adoption. This is something she deeply regrets and despairs of but has never come to terms with. Having already given up one child, she is devastated to find the child she’s reared is not her own.’

  Now, the vomit is on his desk.

  28

  I do not clear up my vomit. I leave it there to fester. Not through malice, especially; through indifference. I do not care if the leather top of Jeff’s eighteenth-century desk will now always smell like the doorway of a pub at kick-out time on a Friday. It’s all I can do to drag myself back into the sitting room, crawl under the rug and wait for him to return.

  He arrives home just before seven. I can tell he’s had a bit to drink, although he’s not drunk, he’s just full of bonhomie. It’s a fairly rare commodity in our house recently so it’s noteworthy. He claps his hands together and a big confident whack of a sound reverberates through the sitting room, telling me that the meeting went well. I expect it was a fine wine, a decent year, a celebratory bottle, not the sort to leave a hangover. He puts on the lights and then almost jumps out of his skin when he notices me curled up into a defensive, defeated ball on the sofa.

  ‘What are you doing sitting in the dark?’

  ‘Isn’t that where you like to keep me?’ My comment is a little too left-field for him to catch my meaning immediately.

  ‘I’m parched. Going to make a cuppa. Do you want one? Or maybe something stronger for you? I’ve had enough.’

  ‘I’ve had enough, too.’ But I don’t mean drink. I follow him through to the kitchen and watch as he goes about his usual business – selecting his favourite mug from the cupboard (the one that says ‘World’s Best Dad’; the irony is not lost on me), flicking through the tea caddies until he finds the loose lapsang souchong, locating a strainer, opening the fridge while he considers whether he wants milk and then deciding against it.

  ‘When were you going to tell me?’

  ‘Tell you what?’ He opens a drawer and pulls out a teaspoon. Such ordinary, familiar actions, yet there’s a stranger, a monster, in my kitchen.

  ‘That you are using our life as the inspiration for your next book.’ He freezes, his back to me. He doesn’t turn to face me straight away. I know he’s gathering his thoughts, forming his defence. It’s repellent. ‘Were you even going to tell me, or just let me catch on when it hit the bestseller list? Or maybe when you did a first-person promotional piece for the Daily Mail?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t try to deny it. I’ve seen the file on your desk.’ Now he does turn to me, and I wish he hadn’t, because he’s still the same man. He hasn’t physically changed, as surely he ought. He is not grotesque, scarred, deformed like Dorian Gray’s portrait, and yet he has sold his soul. He looks like the man I fell in love with at the hat stall, so many years ago, the only man I’ve ever trusted with my story of the agony of giving birth to Peter, the hundredfold agony of giving him up. The man I imagined I’d spend the rest of my life with. But he is totally different.

  ‘Look, you really have got this all wrong.’ He moves towards me and tries to place his hands on my shoulders, but I shake him off, back away, out of reach.

  ‘Did you or did you not meet your agent for lunch today?’

  ‘Well, yes. I did.’

  ‘And was that to pitch the idea for your next novel?’

  ‘Yes!’ He looks pleased with himself, animated. I splutter indignantly. ‘Really, it’s so wonderful to be writing again. I can’t explain just how wonderful, and Sue is very excited about the concept. It’s a great story.’

  ‘No, it’s a terrible story! What are you thinking?’

  ‘What?’

  I cut him off. ‘Changing the gender of the characters doesn’t stop it being our story. Our terrible, tragic story. It all makes sense now! All that stuff you’ve been saying about us just waiting to see what will happen, letting it play out! I thought you were being calm and clear-headed, but you weren’t: you were being experimental and we were the experiment!’ I’m shouting, but I don’t care. He deserves it. He deserves to be yelled at. ‘You took notes when we went to see the counsellor. You’ve been watching us a bit like a scientist watches rats in a lab: you wanted to know what we’d do next, how we’d react with one another.’ He looks down to his feet, doesn’t deny it. I wish he would. I wish it weren’t so. ‘Was that the reason you suggested the joint sleepover party for Olivia and Katherine? No doubt you thought that might make a glorious crescendo to the book, but you couldn’t even make that much up! You needed to put us through it, for the sake of authenticity, no doubt.’

  Now he looks up at me, but I don’t see any hint of shame or regret, as I expected. He looks defiant, cold. ‘How could you think that of me?’

  ‘How could I think anything else?’

  ‘Look, admittedly, I played wit
h the idea. A few months ago. When Tom first came round here. I was in shock. We all were. I wrote up the synopsis as a way of processing the events. You know I do that. I’m a writer, that’s how I make sense of the world, but I haven’t presented it to my agent as an idea for a novel. Certainly not. You have to believe me.’

  I don’t, actually. ‘OK, so what did you present today?’

  ‘Something different.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, you’re not interested.’ He sighs, frustrated.

  ‘I’ve never been more interested in my life.’ He stares at me, fury emitting from his every pore. I can only assume he’s furious with himself for being so careless with his filing. For letting me discover his awful plan. He can’t pitch me an alternative idea because there isn’t one. He’s too taken aback at being rumbled to manage to come up with something that might convince me there’s another pitch. I glare at him. Hurt. Disgusted. Betrayed.

  He crumbles in front of me. Sagging, he falls back into a kitchen chair. ‘Alison, you have no idea how hard it is.’

  ‘What is?’ Does he mean the swap? Of course I have an idea how hard it is.

  ‘Writing.’

  ‘Oh God.’ I fling my head back and growl in disbelief.

  ‘It is,’ he insists. ‘You like the lifestyle well enough – private school for Katherine, the big house, the cars.’ Actually, I don’t much care about the house or the cars, but he’s right that I do like it that we can give Katherine the best of everything. ‘But you undermine the actual process. You laugh at it. You think it’s easy. A hobby I got lucky with. It’s not that. It’s hard. If you do it well and with honesty, then it’s extremely hard. Every day for months now – for over a year – I’ve woken fearful, wondering whether I’m going anywhere with my ideas or whether I’ll just hit another dead end, another brick wall. It’s tough to be continually individual, original, inspirational.’

  I don’t like the fact that he’s come up with three words in a row that end in ‘al’; it seems contrived and practised. It might be that he’s a natural orator but, most likely, he’s rehearsed this speech in front of the bathroom mirror or, worse still, on some writer groupie. Someone who will have listened sympathetically: a wannabe writer, a publicist who is paid to look compassionate, maybe his agent. They’ll have nodded seriously, indulging him like a child whining about his homework.

  ‘I’m terrified, Alison. It’s so ephemeral. What if my last novel was it? What if that’s as good as I can be? What if I never sell that many books again?’

  We’ve had this discussion. Often. I’ve repeatedly told him that sales don’t necessarily reflect brilliance. He knows he lives in a modern world where competitions and promotions, prizes and reviews, mean more than anything, more than maybe they should. I can’t be bothered to say it all again: I am not going to indulge him; there are real children wrapped up in this chaos.

  ‘Then this came along. Tom knocked at our door and what he told us blew my mind.’

  ‘He blew my world apart.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’ But he doesn’t mean the same thing. ‘I had to write it down. I couldn’t not.’

  ‘You called me highly controlling.’

  ‘Is that what’s bothering you?’

  ‘You give the child the illness.’

  ‘It’s just a plot idea.’

  ‘No! It’s ill-wishing.’

  ‘What I type into my computer will not affect the outcome of Katherine’s tests.’

  My heart is pounding so wildly I think it will explode, tear right out of my body. It would be fitting: my useless, hopeless heart that’s never been able to keep anyone who mattered truly safe.

  I so rarely say his name. It might be fifteen years since I’ve done so. I’ve had to bury it. There are some memories that just can’t be revisited. Some things that cannot be spoken of. The effort it takes leaves me breathless. ‘You used Peter.’

  I don’t know how he answers that one because I don’t wait around to find out. I pick up my handbag, car keys and coat and I walk out of the house.

  Twenty-Two Years Ago

  Christmas came with prodigious expectations; every direction she turned was evidence of other people’s glee and the incessant promise of their future happiness, tenderness and closeness. It was hard to stomach. Obviously, Christmas was for children. It was a time when kids stuffed their faces with selection-box chocolate bars, mums took them to meet Santa in department stores and tear-jerking nativity plays were performed up and down the country. If that weren’t torture enough, December was also Peter’s birthday month. He’d been born on the 14th, at 9 p.m.

  When they’d returned to her mother’s he had looked out of place, her beautiful boy amidst the scrimping, the shouting, the bitterness and blame.

  They came to collect him on the 23rd. There was no question that she’d get to spend a Christmas with him.

  ‘No point in making a meal of it, Alison. What’s done is done. You said this was what you wanted. Now get out of bed and come and help me with your brothers. We’ve got to get the tree up. The bloke on the market gave it to me, said there was no point in charging on Christmas Eve, any stock he had left would just be pulped. I knew it was worth waiting.’ Her mother had left the room, a whiff of cigarette smoke and callousness trailing behind her.

  Alison had developed a crazy ritual since moving to London; she always visited Hamleys on Regent Street to imagine what she might have bought her son for his special day and for Christmas. She’d walk slowly around the shop, inching her way through the excitable crowds of boys and girls, mentally selecting the very best gifts. It was a peculiar custom; bittersweet. Hot, sticky kids with flushed faces, warm hands and bright eyes wide with anticipation ran past her, sometimes accidentally bumped into her. She felt ghostly yet she was glad of their touch. He’d be eight this year. She supposed that, by now, he’d have lost any baby chubbiness he might have had. She put her hand on her hip and tried to guess what height he might have reached. What he’d look like standing by her side. Was he boisterous, cheeky, sporty? She hoped he was a kind child. She thought that was likely. Most of all, she hoped he was happy. Please, God, at least that.

  She didn’t know anything much about him. It was better that way. Everyone said so. They talked of a clean break, but that was rubbish, because broken hearts were always filthy messy. She did know he lived in America, her Peter. Imagine that! He’d already travelled further than she ever had. They said that the father had been offered a marvellous job over there, an offer they couldn’t refuse, but she privately wondered whether they’d simply wanted to put some distance between her and the boy. An entire ocean. An insurmountable distance.

  This year, on her way to the toy shop, she happened to bump into her new friend Jeff outside Liberty; he was doing his Christmas shopping, he explained. Her pulse quickened, literally, as the heroines of nineteenth-century novels insisted theirs did when a handsome stranger walked into their lives. Some things never changed.

  ‘That’s all I’m doing, too,’ she said, slightly defensively.

  ‘Maybe we should join forces?’ He offered this with that confident, positive air he had, fully expecting she’d accept. Normally, she would have said yes.

  ‘I prefer shopping on my own.’ She glanced along Regent Street, which was packed with vehicles, lights and harried shoppers. She was finding it difficult to get her breath; it must be the crowds.

  ‘No, that can’t be true.’ He smiled, sure he knew better. ‘Everyone likes company when they are Christmas shopping.’

  ‘Not me.’

  He was surprised by her resistance. ‘But a second opinion is always helpful. Honestly, I could do with your advice on picking gifts for my mum and sister. I mean, I never have a clue which smelly thing they might like. They’re all the same to me.’ She didn’t look convinced. He grinned charmingly. ‘And, bearing in mind that you very nearly bought the orange hat not the blue one on the day we met, obviously you could do with my help
, too.’

  He had remembered the hats. Even the colour of the one she’d rejected. The thought was like a candle on a birthday cake: warm, bright, hopeful. He was a hard man to ignore. ‘I have to visit Hamleys to buy a gift.’

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘My nephew.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Eight.’ The candle was snuffed out; the fictitious nephew punched her, glared at her, punishing her for denying her son.

  Jeff clapped his hands together, a gesture that said, Bring it on. ‘Sounds like fun.’

  ‘You’ll hate it. It’ll be hell, overrun with crazily excited kids and exhausted, put-upon staff.’

  ‘I don’t scare easily.’

  Desperately, she added, ‘Hamleys has five million people through their doors a year and most of them come this Saturday, just before Christmas.’

  Determined, he insisted: ‘I don’t mind.’ She couldn’t shake him, but she had to go to the shop. It was her only motherly duty. She sighed and gave into the inevitable with an ungracious shrug.

  So they trailed around the enormous toyshop, picking their way through children hyperventilating over various stuffed toys, dolls and plastic weapons. Jeff entered into the spirit of things; he picked up one item after another: Lego sets, Meccano kits, Action Men. As Alison never actually bought a gift for her lost baby, and the ritual was simply imagining a world where she could give him things, she was forced to make continual excuses why Jeff’s ideas were unsuitable: ‘I think he has one of those already’; ‘Oh, that’s not very him’; ‘I was looking for something more original.’

  Eventually, fighting exasperation, Jeff asked, ‘What’s this nephew of yours called, then? You’ve never said.’