Hide and Seek

by Amy Bird

But the key fits the lock on the top drawer. Ellie slides it open. And the drawers underneath work too. We are in.

  I let Ellie rifle because there is only space for one of us – or two of them, including Leo. I shine the torch as she pulls out and replaces endless boring-looking typed papers in their segmented folders. No handwriting, no Max scrawls. I stop watching her, instead just watching the door, lest it start to open – the old horror movie worry of the slowly-turning door handle.

  Then Ellie grabs the torch from me. I look to see her shining it right to the back of the drawer.

  “There’s something here,” she whispers. “After the files stop.”

  She reaches in. Her hand returns with two pieces of paper clipped together. I hear her gasp. She flicks over to the other piece of paper.

  Then, “This is it, Will. I love you, remember.”

  She hands me the bits of paper. I’m expecting a letter, but I don’t get that. I get my birth certificate. With something else clipped to it.

  And I stare. I stare and I stare and I stare. I’m sinking into the floor as I look and then I’m rising, I’m rising, up and up and up the stairs to where the people who claim to be my parents sleep, and as I go I’m hitting the walls with my fists as hard as I can and I’m shouting:

  “Lies! Lies! Lies!”

  Because it’s true: the whole house, the whole fabric of it is made of lies. And I reach the top and there are lights going on, in the landing, in my brain, and I’m at the threshold of the door of their room and as soon as I see them I shout it:

  “I’m adopted? I’m ADOPTED?”

  And they’re cowering then beneath the covers as if that will cloak the years of deceit. I think they’re speaking maybe but there are no words that I can hear coming out of their lips because the only thing I can hear is blood rising, hammering in my ears, and the words in my head which I then say:

  “I’m thirty-four fucking years old – and you’ve never never told me I’m adopted? That you adopted me when I was four?”

  Again, they are moving their lips around and their tongues are doing something like speech but I don’t have to listen because they are not, they are NOT my parents. Neither of them.

  “Because apparently my parents are Max Reigate and Sophie Travers.” I thrust the birth certificate in their faces. There will be no more lies now, no more denials. “And you adopted me – you adopted me when I was four. So for the last thirty years when I thought you were looking out for me, taking care of my admin, you have been systematically lying to me!”

  And I throw the birth and adoption certificates down onto the bed and this woman, this Gillian, who has claimed to be my mother, who didn’t even have the foresight to have an affair with Max Reigate so that she could still be my mother, so that there could be some piece of truth in this whole horrible horrible house, she, this woman, moves a hand to pick up the certificates. But I snatch back my identity before she can again get her grip around it. Because on these papers is me. I am not in this room, in this house, in this life that has been created to fool me. I am only on these bits of paper: this is all I have. And I have nothing more to do with these two people. This Gillian and this John.

  I turn to leave the room. There are hands on my shoulders. People telling me it was for the best, to keep me safe, to protect me.

  “You are nothing to me – nothing!” I shout. “You have stolen myself from me. I have no idea who I am! Everything – it’s just gone! And you knew that Ellie knew something and still you wouldn’t tell me!”

  I’m trying to move away but they have me caught, trapped. The pair of them are holding my shoulders, turning me round, shaking me. And I’m shouting wordlessly now – this is just rage pure sorrow pure inward disintegration and my brain is full of blood, pulsating louder and louder and louder until I’m sure I must explode.

  Then there’s a sting on my face. Someone has slapped me! One of these bastards has dared to slap me! I feel the blood recede but not the anger. The room becomes more real again, words become tangible and so I use them.

  “I’ll find myself again,” I shout. “I’ll have my other life, that you’ve kept from me. But you won’t be in it. Do you hear me? You won’t be in it! I’ll find them, my actual parents, my real parents. This Max and this Sophie.”

  “Will, darling – ” one of them, Gillian, John, some other liar is saying.

  “So if you were scared about me finding out and rejecting you, guess what – this is me rejecting you. But I’m doing it, what, fifteen, twenty years after I was entitled to? If you’d told me, when you’re meant to tell me.”

  “Will, listen – ”

  “No! I will not listen. I will not listen to one further word that you have to say to me. You’ve had time to tell me what you wanted – or no, sod what you wanted. You’ve had time to tell me the truth. In the fucking stolen time – my time, my real parents’ time. You’ve made me a non-person. And so you get nothing more. Nothing.”

  And I run, down, away, one two three steps at a time. I take Ellie’s hand and I drag her with me because she is the one who has brought me the truth. The others they are shouting after me and I try not to hear because they have told me so much rubbish, so much nonsense, so many lies over my whole life now which is not my own.

  I slam the door of my fabricated existence. And as we run, Ellie and I, Max’s music plays a tune in my head: Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?

  Who am I, now that I’m not who I’ve been for thirty-four years?

  Chapter Fourteen

  -Ellie-

  Well, that went well. No really, I think it did. OK, so Will is pretty upset. And we’re running pretty fast – I’m going to have to slow him down soon, I’m not meant to get out of breath. But at least he knows the truth now. Or at least, most of it. Apart from whatever other stuff there is that his non-parents know. Because while Will was doing all his – totally understandable – shouting, I heard what they were saying, quietly to each other. And so I know that there is more. There’s something else going on here, some other explaining to be done. Apart from what I already knew. Which I need to finish telling Will. At some point, when he’s ready. Because he doesn’t know all of it yet. About Max Reigate.

  But I want Gillian to know that I know there is more. More than just her, frankly, evil over-mothering, her creation of this whole fictive life that’s, like, imprisoned Will. And of course she wasn’t going to tell him the truth before. Sly fucking bitch. Because then he’d be able to leave her, to find his real mother, this Sophie Travers woman. So as we’re running away from the house, I turn round to Gillian while she is still in sight, and I put my fingers up to my eyes and then turn them back to her in an ‘I’m watching you’ gesture. Although, actually, I never want to see the woman again. Quite a bonus, actually, that it was adoption not just an affair with Max Reigate, because Will is never going to fucking forgive her, and we might never need to go back to that house again. Even though she is starting to make sense to me now, with her ‘Give Will a family’ comments on the eve of our wedding. She meant a real family. She knew, in her heart of hearts, that she didn’t count.

  But now, now that we’ve lost her, I need to slow Will down. Or we’ll lose Leo too. And I’ll just be Ellie again. Which isn’t really what I want. I suppose.

  “Will,” I breathe. “Will. Stop.” I squeeze his hand too, to give my words some weight.

  Gradually, he slows down. We stand next to each other, panting.

  Then he turns to me, and he just says the most tragic thing: “I don’t know who I am.”

  But I do know who he is. And I tell him. He’s my husband, soon to be a father, a wonderful medical academic, the son of Max and Sophie Reigate.

  He shakes his head.

  “But my core,” he says. “In here.” He thumps at his chest, where I guess he imagines his heart to be. “Who am I? What are my values? What’s my history? I thought it was all in that house. But that house was all a lie.”

  “They
should have told you,” I agree. “Years ago. But you’re still you. You’re lovely, kind, strong, sexy, clever you. And I love you.”

  I put my arms around him. He stays rigid for a moment then he hugs me back.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  And slowly, slowly, we walk home. Will doesn’t talk. I talk. I prattle about how great it is that he knows the truth and can find out more about his real parents, how we can move on from that bitch Gillian and her stooge John, about how wonderful parenthood will be. There is no response. His head, I think, must be full. There is no space for my words too.

  But it was for the best. A brutal way to find out. Yet they wouldn’t tell us any other way. They wanted to keep him captive in his fake life forever. Wanted to be the ideal parents that they could never be. Partly because they were fake. Imagine living in a house with such a secret. Where every act, every form to fill in, every request for a birth certificate, is a challenge to stop ‘your son’ finding the truth. I could almost feel sorry for Gillian, and the strain it must have placed on her, if she weren’t such a witch. But partly because of that oppression – over-bearing protectiveness of a false life is one thing. Over-bearing protectiveness of a real little boy, a real teen, a real adult is another. Sure, I didn’t see him in those first two stages, but I can imagine. If her smothering affection is anything to go by now. My mum, she always got it just right. She was there when I needed her, but drifted away into the background when I didn’t. Like she’d cease to exist for a bit. But she did always go on existing, throughout, presumably. As Caroline. As a wife. As a woman. As a nurse. Even if I only saw her as Mum.

  When we get home, Will goes straight to bed. I help him undress, then pull the covers over him as he clambers into bed. I think he is asleep, but then I see his eyes on me as I undress. I climb into bed next to him, facing his way before we get to our customary spooning. “It was better to know,” I say, and he nods.

  I roll over and he clasps me tight in our usual position, him right up against my back, arms round my front. His body is shaking. Tears. “It will all be all right in the morning,” I whisper. I feel the lie of it, as Mum must have done, sometimes. He must do too, because the shaking continues until it is rocking me to sleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  -Will-

  Is there some kind of protocol you’re meant to follow when you find out your world is a lie? That your life is not your life? That your father is not your father, but the man who is, has been living on your CD player for weeks? That your mother is a non-mother, and that your real mother abandoned you? That your whole life, you have unknowingly been lying to all your friends, and that all your ‘relatives’ have been lying to you? Think of all the people I’ve introduced Gillian and John to as my parents. Think of all the conversations where people have said ‘Do you take after your mum or your dad?’ And maybe, rather than just accepting the nonsense they spun me that my chin is like my mother’s and my toes like my father’s, I should just have looked in the mirror and at my feet and realised that the only resemblance is what you expect in any human being. Or maybe if I’d looked closer I’d have realised that John’s feet were as cloven as the devil’s, and Gillian’s chin just a hiding place for her forked tongue. Think of the conversations with their relatives! Was there one of my aunts, maybe Clare, worthy, stable, Clare, who always gave me a pound coin when I met her, right up until I was eighteen, who in hushed whispers insisted they ought to tell me? Had Uncle Gavin, that jolly lover of magic tricks, been making my parents squirm when he’d quipped ‘It’s amazing what you can suddenly pull out of a hat?’. Or had Gillian and John lied to all of them as well – stayed hidden for years, then suddenly produced a child as their own: ‘Here’s one we made earlier, in Dartington’?

  Because if there is a fucking protocol, nobody has fucking showed it to me. I’m inventing it as I go along. Inventing, or re-inventing, myself as I go along. And my best bet for how you conduct yourself in these circumstances, whoever ‘yourself’ actually is now, is that you stay in the house and sometimes you sit and sometimes you stand, or you pace or you cry but always you remember. You remember back over the years and try to find something real. Was my childhood bedroom at home real? My own private sanctuary – or again, a false construction? I think of the walls with the posters of Coldplay, CSI, Batman. I genuinely liked those. That is real. Although taste is a mix of nature and nurture. Maybe the nurture element would have been different had I been with my real parents. Then beneath those posters, the X-files, Pulp, Judge Dredd. Still further, there are Thundercats, Dangermouse, Spiderman. In my mind, I rip and I rip and I rip through the layers and the years until I am there at the original pirates wallpaper that ‘Mum’ chose and ‘Dad’ hung to conceal the walls beneath. The wallpaper that provoked a phase of ‘Shiver my timbers!’ and ‘Walk the plank!’ uttered by me happily gleefully trustingly to the people who were supposed to be my parents. That provoked pirate-themed birthday parties where they continued the charade for all my childhood friends, spreading the conspiracy. No. None of that is real.

  Ellie is real. Soon Leo will be real. They are mine, my choices, my creations. I must cling to them. Just like my non-parents are clinging to me.

  Because the non-parents, the lying parents, they are encamped outside your house. Look at them there, now, sitting in their Audi. Look at them staring in at you, as you contemplate each other in silence. Look at them drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. I mean, why are they even thinking of coffee? How, on any protocol, could they have decided ‘We have been lying to our son – who isn’t our son – for thirty years, fabricating his existence, keeping him from his real family. So let’s have a cappuccino!’. Because I tell you, I am not having a cappuccino. I am nil by mouth. Or maybe I’m not. Maybe Ellie brings me food. Maybe I eat it. Maybe I chew, maybe I swallow, maybe I don’t. But I don’t go to fucking Starbucks!

  And so whatever the protocol does or doesn’t allow you to do, I’m crossing the room to the window and I’m pulling the curtains shut tight, blocking out the non-parents and the too-fierce sun. And I’m opening up the CD player, and there they are again, skipping forward to the deliciously delicate and soft bars that start the second movement of Max’s concerto. If I have to find a new me, to fill a new life, then I’m going to need new parents. And one of those parents is here on CD. Together, in here, in the softly lilting darkness, we could be tranquil.

  But no. No we can’t. I don’t know if I can really even call them parents. Because as much as my recently discovered non-parents faked my whole life, these other parents are non-parents too. They are non-parents because they abandoned me. They are not me either. Over the years, their ability to be part of me has drifted away, commensurate with their annual failure to find me, to get in touch, to beg forgiveness and reclaim me as their own. Yet I must have something of them. Something in them that I can recognise of myself. I must see the people who gave me life, even if they then shut me out of their existence. I do at least look like Max. He can’t deny that; Ellie found the proof on the CD case. I can take the CD to him when I meet him. Because I will meet him. And my mother, too. My real, non-mothering, mother. I will demand an explanation. I will demand to know who I really am.

  And although I love the soulful quiet of the middle movement, it’s too slow, too quiet, because it doesn’t drown out the doorbell, or the sound of the letter box flicking, and the sound of ‘Hello, hello, let us in’ from my non-parents. So I have to go back to the first part, with its loud crashing chords building always to a tumultuous crescendo. But even that doesn’t hide the flip-flopping slippered waddling of Ellie to the door, and a fresh clanging of the letterbox as she shouts ‘Go away! He doesn’t want to see you!’ Because she knows you see, Ellie, she knows all these things. She knows I don’t want to see them. And she knew Max was my father, even though she didn’t know my mother wasn’t my mother.

  She has a copy of the protocol. She seems to know that when she comes into the room just to sa
y hello, I must violently hug her, cling to her and keep her here with me because she cannot abandon me, like this other woman in the past, this Sophie Travers, has abandoned me, and this man on the CD, this Max Reigate.

  And Ellie, she’s been reading a guidebook to this strange territory again because she says:

  “You don’t know why you were put up for adoption. Don’t hate her for it. It must have been a difficult decision. Maybe Gillian and John coerced her.”

  Because in her world, I suppose, in the world where she’s about to be a mother, it is the abandonment by the mother that is the key betrayal. Hence her focus on the choices of my mother. But for me, it is the father. This great father, playing this great music, who rejected me.

  “I’ll find him,” I tell Ellie, as though she can read my thoughts. “I’ll find him and I’ll show him he shouldn’t have abandoned me. That I was worth keeping. That I still am. I’m someone worth knowing.”

  And Ellie, she opens her mouth to say something. Then she frowns a little, and closes her mouth again. She just kisses me on the forehead. The kiss that says ‘Of course you will, dear’. But for some reason, doesn’t believe it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  -Will-

  Eventually my non-parents go. They drift away from outside our house, and they drift away from my mind. They allow me, at last, some space to think. Some space to dream. Not sleep dream. No, I’m not sleeping yet. To think dream. Of my new parents. I’m listening to him, my father, and as I do, this resentment at the abandonment and the lies start to regroup into excitement. I listen to the music of my father over and over again and I listen to the bit of my soul that says:

  You have a grand, exciting, musical father. A genius – listen, just listen, to that exquisitely shattering music that he not only wrote but composed for his debut album. Think what he must have done since, what there is to discover! Forget the fake father with whom you spent your childhood hanging round Bentalls shopping centre and Sainsbury’s and the British Museum. Listen instead to the dissonance of your real father’s great talent! That must have been your theme tune until you were adopted. The crashing chords, lyrical medleys, exultant crescendos would have been your daily existence. You must have sat under the piano at his feet as the music pounded overhead. And the blood must have pounded like this in your head always, rejoicing at being alive, hammering, hammering, hammering in your brain, in rhythm to the underlying tempo of the concerto. Of your father’s concerto. This is who you are.