by Thorne Moore
‘It will be a trip round the distilleries, I expect.’
‘Yes, of course. I hadn’t thought of that.’ Why were they babbling on about Joan, as if she mattered? But she did. Her absence meant that mother and daughter could have a breathing space. ‘Come through,’ said Gillian, and firmly took her daughter’s hand, leading her through to the living room. In the clearer light, she laid her hands on Vicky’s shoulders and looked at her. Pale, but then she was always pale. Not noticeably sickly at least. She could feel how thin she was through the baggy sweatshirt. Was she eating properly? Was she coping? All that work, so many hours, so much studying.
‘How are you, darling?’
Vicky shrugged.
‘I wish you’d kept in touch more, let me know how you were doing. I didn’t like to keep ringing.’ Not after the first couple of weeks of ignored calls. ‘You’re over-working yourself, I know you are.’
‘Work is fine.’ Vicky took a deep breath. ‘Is this what we’re going to do then? Discuss my studies?’
‘Not if you don’t want to, darling. I am interested, you know I am, but—’
‘And it will save us having to discuss the other thing. The thing you never quite got round to discussing for twenty years.’
‘Oh Vicky.’
‘I’ll go up and dump my bag upstairs, shall I? Any chance of a cup of tea?’
‘Yes! Yes, I’ll make tea. You sort yourself out.’ Gillian almost ran for the kitchen, where she could weep at her own cowardice. Where she could splash herself with boiling water as punishment for never getting anything right.
Vicky’s arrival had been so unexpected. Gillian’s instinctive desire to evade any nastiness – pour oil on troubled water – had kicked in before she could brace herself to do the right thing.
She was braced now. And the tea was brewed. It would be stewed if it wasn’t drunk soon. She poured a mug and took it and a biscuit upstairs.
Vicky was standing at Joan’s bedroom door, looking in.
‘Thanks.’ She took the proffered mug. ‘What’s happened here?’ A clean room. White walls, new carpet, new curtains, new bedding, most of the old trash gone. An anonymous room, barely marked by Joan, although there were already tell-tale cigarette burns in the carpet.
‘There was a bit of an accident,’ Gillian explained. ‘So we redecorated it.’
‘Well, you can replace the fucking lot,’ Joan had said, coming home to find the havoc. ‘You can’t expect me to sleep in that. Not safe in my own house with a mad woman. Lock you up, they should.’
So Gillian had taken her at her word, moving in like the guardian angel of house clearance, stripping, burning, consigning to the tip. An act of furious spite so unlike her that she didn’t know how to present it except as an act of contrition, the sort of gesture that all her neighbours in the street would think so like Gillian.
Only Joan had understood it was an act of defiance. And two could play at that game. The cigarette burns had been deliberate. She wanted the room put right, at Gillian’s expense, but she had barely used it since. She was virtually living with Bill now, talking about selling up, using the house money, with Bill’s, to buy a place in Spain.
All talk. Joan couldn’t sell the house from under them, Gillian was fairly sure. It had been their money, hers and Terry’s, that had enabled Joan to buy the house. They had rights. Equity or something.
‘Looks clean,’ said Vicky. She sniffed. Air freshener. ‘I wouldn’t have recognised it.’
‘No, well, it needed a make-over.’ Stop it. Stop chattering. It had to be now. ‘Vicky. If you want to talk… I know we should have talked years ago. I know it’s all my fault, but if you want to talk about, you know—’
‘My adoption.’
‘Yes. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’
‘I already know all I need to know.’
‘You do?’
Vicky returned to her room, picked up the bag on her bed and rifled through. She held out a sheet of paper. ‘I wanted to be quite sure the adoption wasn’t a lie, so I got hold of my full certificate. The one I suppose you took care not to have in the house.’
Gillian put her hand to her mouth. She’d never admitted it, but Vicky was right. She’d kept the short version, the one that looked identical to a birth certificate, telling herself that there was no need to fuss with further paperwork. ‘I was wrong.’
Vicky shrugged. ‘Whatever. I applied for it. Thought it might give me more, but it doesn’t. I’m a certified mystery. Legally, no one knows who my mother is.’
‘That’s right. You were found.’
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s the official line. But it was all there, wasn’t it? The truth. In the papers. I found the story. In the Herald.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ Of course. It explained Vicky’s last wild claim as she’d boarded the bus that she’d found her mother. She’d unearthed the old story in the newspaper. ‘Yes, it was in the Herald.’
‘I don’t get it though. Why people didn’t connect the dots. Too much bother? Or was it just that there were so many women around, wanting babies, like you, it was easier just to let it go?’
‘I don’t know.’ Gillian couldn’t understand her daughter’s words, but she didn’t want to risk another flaming row. ‘I did want a baby. I wanted you. As soon as I read about you, I wanted you.’
Vicky smiled. ‘You wanted a child whose mother left her for dead.’
‘No!’ Gillian threw her arms around her. ‘Left to be found, to be given to me.’
Vicky’s smile was almost a rictus of pain. ‘You really do like to block out the darkness, don’t you? You’d even give murder a rosy glow. She tried to murder me, but that’s fine because it made things right for you. Or are you really asking me to believe that it made things right for me?’
How much could Gillian take without being stung? ‘That’s what it was all for, all my love and care – to make things right for you. If it didn’t, I’m sorry. All right? I’m sorry if I wasn’t the mum you think you should have had. I’m sorry if all I’ve done is make you unhappy and lonely and bitter. I never intended it to be that way.’
‘Oh come on.’ Vicky stomped downstairs. She was already in the kitchen, washing out her mug as if it contained elements of biological warfare, when Gillian followed her.
‘What? I should have told you from the start that you were adopted? Yes, of course. But I was a coward. I didn’t keep silent out of spite.’
‘No.’ Vicky turned away. She was willing to attack, but she wasn’t so keen on being the one under fire.
‘So just tell me where I went so terribly wrong,’ insisted Gillian, following her into the living room. ‘How did I make life so hateful for you? I nagged you, I pushed you. Is that it? I know. I shouldn’t have pushed so hard. I should have been more concerned about you making friends, being happy, getting out and having fun.’
‘Fun!’ Vicky gave a shriek of bitter laughter. ‘Oh yes, we all need to have fun. Good for us.’
‘Yes! You should have made more friends. You should have got out more, gone places, the cinema…’ Gillian groped for ideas, unsure where young people went these days. ‘Discos. You should have been out meeting people instead of being trapped—’
‘You mean boys. I should have been out meeting boys. A bit of how’s your father, that’s what a girl needs. Isn’t that what Joan taught you? Well, don’t worry about me being abandoned on a virgin shelf. I lost my sour little cherry a long time ago.’
‘Vicky.’ Gillian floundered. Sex wasn’t something she had ever discussed with her daughter. She’d always had ideas of doing it properly, tenderly, but Joan’s constant lewd remarks would have spoiled it all. A bit of how’s your father, yes that was Joan. Surely, Gillian had told herself, the school would sort it out. When Vicky started showing an interest in boys, when she started bringing bashful young boyfriends home, that would be the time to speak more intimately. But Vicky never had brought a boy home, any more than she had brought fema
le friends home. She had sat in her room with her books, that was all.
And now she was claiming sexual experience. Declaring it with scorn. Vicky was meeting people, loving people and Gillian knew nothing about it.
Or was Vicky’s boast a sad little lie? She had never done anything to make herself attractive. A frump who had never caught the eye of any man, but who would say anything to avoid admitting it.
She reached out to put her arms round her daughter, but Vicky retreated across the room. ‘I’d better unpack.’
‘Yes, love,’ said Gillian, in despair.
A jacket into the narrow wardrobe, underwear into its drawer, shoes neatly under the bed, laptop on the little desk. Vicky breathed deep. It was stupid to have come home. If it was home. She was better off at college, a different person. She was generally liked by Zoe, Drew, Caz, Jack and all the other happy normal students. Vicky, the asexual swot, never a threat to the girls, never a distraction to the boys, always available to help them out when they were too hungover to make head or tail of their assignments, but never missed when she failed to appear at the pubs and clubs, because everyone assumed she was someone else’s friend. She could relax among them because they would never ask, they would never know.
But instead she had chosen to come home. Why?
It was stupid. She’s been home for five minutes and the antagonism was all her own doing. She should get a grip, look on the bright side. Joan wasn’t there.
Terry came home, glad to see his daughter. Gillian, hypersensitive to their inadequacies, was taken aback by Terry’s cheeriness. Had he really not grasped their horrible quarrel and Vicky’s flight? Probably not. Terry had always watched from the sidelines, this family stuff a bewildering puzzle. Perhaps he always reacted to Vicky with pleasure, but Gillian, so obsessive in her own love, had never seen it.
‘You doing all right at that university then, girl?’ he asked, as they gathered at the table. ‘At the hospital and so on?’
‘Fine,’ said Vicky, letting him give her arm a squeeze.
‘Doctor Vicky, eh. Well, well.’
‘One day.’
‘Me and your mum can’t believe it, can we, eh, Gill? Doctor.’
Vicky shrugged. ‘It’s just a job. Same as yours.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that. Hey, you come to the garage with me tomorrow, yes?’
‘Er.’ Vicky was caught off guard. It wasn’t like Terry to invite her to the garage.
‘Got something to show you,’ said Terry, chuckling as he tucked into his cottage pie and peas.
Had they always communicated, Gillian wondered, watching Vicky climb into the car beside Terry in the morning? Normal father and daughter and she’d never noticed? No. She could see, as they drove off, that Vicky was as bewildered as she was.
Terry’s repair garage, run with his buddy Colin, set up with their redundancy money from the car plant, was just like Terry really. Cluttered, unambitious, grubby, but getting by, ever hopeful and never demanding. Successful enough to keep the wolf from the door and what more could a man ask?
‘Come on through,’ said Terry.
So Vicky followed him into the corrugated workshop, picking her way round patches of black oil, coiled cables, abandoned nuts and bolts and worn tyres, out through the double back doors into the yard where cars were waiting for MOTs, new exhausts and respray jobs. She joined him as he fumbled in his overall pockets for a key.
‘Here it is.’ He fished out the key he wanted, gave her a big smile, patting the roof of a Mini. Lime green. ‘I figured, you’ve done so well… Like to give my little girl something for it all.’
Vicky stared at the car. ‘You’re giving me this?’
‘Yes. Why not? Not much, I know.’ He patted it again. Twelve years old. He had worked hard on the rust spots, done as good a job as he could. ‘But a little run-around, you know.’
Her throat caught. Not with gushing joy. She didn’t know what she was feeling. A noose at her neck, snapping her back. ‘Why?’
‘Well, you work so hard and I’m that proud of you. Thought you deserved it. What’s the point of running a garage if I can’t find a car for my little girl?’
‘But I’m not your little girl.’ She had to say it. ‘I’m adopted.’
Did he realise that this was a revelation to her? The focus of all her simmering bitterness? Apparently not. He must have assumed she’d always known. Gillian’s business, that sort of stuff. ‘Well, I suppose. Keep forgetting. Just think of you as my little girl.’
It wasn’t a remark that she could deal with. ‘You’d have preferred a boy, though, wouldn’t you?’
‘Oh.’ Terry scratched his head. ‘I don’t know about that.’
Of course he would. He would have known what to do with a boy. Take him down the Rec every Saturday to play football. Help him build a train set. Terry was a simple soul who regarded women with respect and utter incomprehension. It was just the way he was. She couldn’t blame him for that.
‘So, you like it then?’ he asked.
‘It’s…very nice.’ And he was a nice man. Not her father, but a nice man, making a generous gift, to a child who wasn’t really his and wasn’t even a boy. ‘I don’t know where my licence is.’ Not true. It was on her shelf where it had been since the day she’d received it. First driving lesson on her seventeenth birthday; a present from her quasi-parents. That first lesson had been such a thrill, liberating. Then the thing had happened and nothing had been thrilling anymore. Not liberating, not even bearable. After that first joyous lesson she had forced herself to complete the course, taken her test and put her licence away. ‘Not even sure I can remember how to drive.’
‘Like riding a bike. You can’t forget.’ His face lit up. At last, something he could do with his little girl. Not football, not train sets, but something. ‘I’ll take you out in it. Let you get the feel of it.’
She laughed, bit her lip, killing the mirth because she hadn’t come home to laugh.
‘This afternoon? Col will be in—’
‘No.’ She wanted to be back in control. ‘Tomorrow maybe. I’ve got things to do this afternoon. In town.’
‘More books, eh?’
‘People to see.’
iii
Kelly
‘Yeah, you can give us the details now.’ The girl at the desk of the Lyford Herald pushed a notepad and pen at Kelly. Her job was to deal with classified ads, and her day was one long stream of adverts for unwanted sofas, Ford Fiestas, fridge freezers. Hard to work up a decent show of enthusiasm for any of it. She went back to another call while Kelly wrote her message.
‘Lyford-Herald-classified-ads-Emma-speaking-can-I-help-you?’
Kelly had poured through the classified section of last week’s Herald in WHSmiths. Mostly cars, but two sunbeds and one set of disco lights. No hay bales and split logs, which was what she was used to. She’d looked at the Evening News too, but decided that a weekly paper would be a better bet. The Herald looked solid. Going since 1893, according to its banner. The sort of paper people would sit down to read properly, not just skim through and dump in the bin.
She smiled as she wrote. Did she know anything about newspaper readers? The nearest thing she read to a paper was the Alternative World news-sheet handed out at the wholefood store. Still psychology must just be common sense, and she had plenty of that. But not plenty of money, so she had to choose carefully where to put her ad, and this was it. The Lyford Herald.
‘There.’ She pushed the notepad back at the bored Emma, who counted the words.
‘Wanted. Any girl born in Lyford and Stapledon General Hospital in the week March 13th-19th, 1990. Please contact…’ She started to absorb the meaning. ‘This is legit, right? Nothing, you know…’ She was wary. She’d got into trouble once before for accepting an ad for youth performances, which, when it was vetted, was promptly passed on to the police. ‘Kids. It’s not some kind of – you know?’
Kelly wasn’t entirely sure what the
girl meant, but she recognised panic. ‘Not kids. We’d all be twenty-two.’
‘Oh yeah.’ Emma grinned. She was only twenty-three herself.
Kelly explained, to put her mind at rest. ‘That’s when I was born, see? 13th March. 1990. It turns out there was some kind of mix-up, because we’ve had tests, and I’m not really related to my mother, not genetically, even though my birth certificate says I am. So there must have been a mistake in the hospital.’
‘Oh, wow!’
‘Which wouldn’t have mattered really, except my mum’s sick, might need a new kidney eventually, and because I’m not related, I can’t give her one. So I thought I could find out who the other baby was.’
‘Yeah!’
‘I thought, if I put an ad in the local paper, perhaps the other girl is still living in Lyford. It’s worth a try. I can stay another week, maybe, and see what pops up.’
‘Right! So you’re not from round here?’
‘Pembrokeshire. We moved to Wales when I was a baby.’
‘Oh, so you’ve come all the way to Lyford to search for this other girl.’
‘Yes. To ask at the hospital really, but since they won’t help, I’m going to stay on for a few more days. Mum is staying with friends for a couple of weeks.’
‘Yes, I see.’ Emma was a would-be cub reporter. She didn’t like to jot down the details openly, but she was memorising fast. ‘So, okay. We’ll get this in this week. You’ve just made the deadline. And can you let us know if anyone responds?’
‘Sure.’ Kelly beamed. ‘I’ll come back and tell you all about it.’
A good, useful visit; two girls made happy by a few random words.
CHAPTER 4
i
Heather
Heather Norris went into hospital on the 24th February, 1990. Saturday, just as she had calculated, although it was two weeks after the doctor’s prediction. Barbara Norris, her mother-in-law, had been summoned the day before, when Heather had decided to clean the house and shift all the furniture. She had been like that before Bibs was born, so Martin decided it was a sign. He was smugly pleased with himself when she had the first pains.