by Amanda James
Outside the sun is still shining brightly, making a mockery of our solemn mood as we gather round the oblong hole in the earth. The vicar is saying lots of lovely stuff about Mum as if he knew her. She never attended church – well, apart from funerals and christenings – so it’s doubtful that they were best buddies. Why am I being so horrid? The man is doing his best, everyone else seems to appreciate it, so why can’t I? I look around the faces hidden behind a variety of tissues and handkerchiefs. There’s a woman a little way off under a tree dressed in black and wearing a hat and sunglasses. I shield my eyes from the sun but can’t make her out. No idea who she is. She obviously doesn’t know about the request to wear bright clothes today. When she sees me staring, the woman pulls her coat collar up around her ears and walks away. Odd. I must remember to ask Dad who she was.
The earth is damp and cold in my hand. As I scatter it, I wonder what it’s like for Mum to be inside the coffin in the ground right there in front of me. Then I scrap the idea, because Mum’s not alive, is she? In the coffin is just the shell of the woman who brought me up. Her essence, spirit, has gone, leaving us with just memories. Dad throws his earth and a rose, his lip trembles and I slip my arm around him, feeling my body shake as the tremors of grief flow through his body. Uncle Graham takes his other arm and we lead him back to the car. It’s as if we’re all in some awful nightmare in which I’m playing a starring role but can’t remember my lines. No amount of direction from the wings can prompt me, nor encourage a worthy performance. I’m just numb. Paralysed. Perhaps I’m dead too.
3
If I had been told six weeks ago that I’d be grateful to see Adelaide Heggarty’s pinched face framed by two arcs of pencilled eyebrow on my doorstep each day, I would have found it very hard to believe. When I was a kid, I’d asked my mum why Mrs Heggarty’s eyebrows looked strange. Mum had explained that ladies of a certain age sometimes lost their eyebrows and chose to fill them in with an eyebrow pencil. It was clear to me our neighbour hadn’t learned that skill very well and, as a result, looked permanently surprised no matter how she was feeling. Only a few months ago I had remarked to Mum that Mrs Heggarty must draw her eyebrows on with crayon, without a mirror, possibly in the dark.
Dad had picked up the baton. ‘Yes. Just look at them. She’d do better to cut out bits of black felt and make Groucho Marx ones instead.’
This had brought near hysterics from Mum who’d been waving to the owner of the eyebrows from the window. When Mrs Heggarty had gone indoors, she’d thumped his arm. ‘Steve! You’re awful to that poor woman.’
‘Poor woman?’ Dad had said, holding an invisible cigar to the corner of his mouth, bending his knees and doing the Groucho walk around the living room. ‘Oh, come on, Hannah. She strikes terror into even the hardest kids on the estate. All she has to do is wiggle those brows and they wet their pants.’
The memory brings a smile as I watch Mrs Heggarty cross the street and walk up our path. I want to share Dad’s joke with her, but of course I can’t. She would be upset and certainly wouldn’t find it funny. Mrs Heggarty doesn’t find things funny. If she smiles – a rare occurrence – it’s a brief affair. Her small mouth, normally set in a thin line, twitches at the corners and then returns. It’s as if her lips have never learned how to bend, or just don’t have the willpower. Nevertheless, since Mum died she’s been a godsend.
‘Hello, Mrs Heggarty, how are you today?’ I say, standing to one side as she breezes into the hallway.
‘Oh, you know me, Lu. Always ready to do what’s necessary.’
I think Mrs Heggarty’s lips are gearing up for a twitch but at the last minute they stay put. ‘Yes, I do. You have been really marvellous since …’ I’m still not ready to say what had happened to Mum out loud. I can think the words to myself in my head, but if I try to speak them, my throat closes over.
‘Nonsense, it’s a pleasure. And how many times have I told you to call me Adelaide? Mrs Heggarty is very formal.’ She checks her reflection in the hall mirror and runs her finger over one eyebrow. ‘I do prefer it for people with whom I’m not too familiar, of course. It’s just what I was used to growing up. Did I tell you that my mother always used the surname of her friends and they hers, even after thirty-odd years?’
‘Yes, Mrs … Adelaide, you did.’
‘And how is your dad today?’ Adelaide looks in the mirror again, smooths the other eyebrow and pats her short grey hair.
I lead the way to the kitchen and switch the kettle on. ‘The same, I’m afraid.’
Adelaide sets two mugs on a tray and opens the fridge. ‘Well, that’s to be expected. It will take some time – it hasn’t been that long since the funeral.’
I sit at the table and watch Adelaide make the tea. She always takes over even the simplest of tasks and at one time it would have annoyed me. Now, however, I expect it, am grateful for it. I know I wouldn’t have been able to cope with things day to day without her, and certainly wouldn’t have coped alone with Dad.
After that dreadful evening when I’d walked in and found the police in the house, Dad changed into somebody else – a stranger to me. Apart from pulling out all the stops the day of the funeral, he’d locked himself down, shuttered his mind, become monosyllabic. I’d asked him if he knew who the mysterious woman was with the hat and sunglasses at the funeral, but he couldn’t even remember seeing her. Each day I witnessed a little more of the life drain out of him along with his colour. Now he was completely grey.
Grey face, grey hair, grey man.
Last night I’d found him in the dark staring at the TV, the bright flash of scene changes lending animation to his face. I was reminded of the phrase ‘he had become a husk of a man.’ That described Dad exactly. A husk sitting in Dad’s chair, all the goodness, vitality – juice of life – sucked away by Mum’s decision to dash across a busy road. Evidently, she’d just left the hairdressers and must have opted for a shortcut to get to her car and out of the rain.
For at least four days after the funeral, unable to function beyond getting up and sitting in chairs, we had relied on Adelaide and occasionally Uncle Graham and Aunty Christine. Graham couldn’t do much because he had to keep the carpentry business he ran with Dad going, and Christine had elderly parents to care for. So, given that I was in deep shock, Adelaide had volunteered to do everything for us, and all the time tears weighed heavy against the back of my eyes while my cheeks were dry deserts praying for thunderclouds. That wasn’t normal, surely? Adelaide had reassured me it was okay that I couldn’t cry, and that grief had no set pattern, nor master.
While my uncle and aunt had done the nitty-gritty after Mum died, Adelaide had arranged the funeral, contacted relatives, sorted the wake. She liked to be useful and she knew about death, having ‘seen two husbands off’ as she’d put it. I thought that sounded as if she’d set the dogs on them or something, rather than outlived them. Adelaide believed the most important things in life were serving church and community. She knew everyone’s business and the names of all the neighbours. I liked to think that Adelaide might have escaped from a 1960s black-and-white film, in which women wore floral aprons, folded their arms, and talked in hushed tones over garden fences. Not that Adelaide would be seen dead in an apron of course. She was always neatly turned out in a skirt, smart jumper and pearls.
‘No luck with that last job interview, then?’ Adelaide says and places a mug of tea in front of me.
I pick up the tea and blow along the surface. I don’t want to talk about the interview. Adelaide comes around every day to sit with Dad while I go out job hunting. Then she does the shopping, cleans the house or whatever needs doing until I return. Adelaide has a very strong feeling that Steve shouldn’t be left alone. He has ‘that look about him’. Thinking about Dad’s vacant stare, I presume Adelaide can detect something about it that I can’t. There isn’t an argument there though. I feel much better when I’m away from the house and grateful that Adelaide is happy to stay with him.
; Adelaide looks at me across the table, her eyebrows ratcheted up a notch, and I realise she is still waiting for an answer. ‘Oh, sorry. No, not heard anything yet. The thing is, I’m not really as qualified as I need to be for the jobs I’m applying for now.’
‘The manager of a clothing store, wasn’t it?’
‘Yep.’ I drink the tea and look out of the window at a couple of sparrows fighting over nuts in the bird feeder. Under Adelaide’s scrutiny I know how the nuts feel.
‘Is that what you really want to do?’ Adelaide opens a packet of chocolate digestives and pushes them across the table.
‘Managing a store? It would be better than the last job.’ Heat seeps up my neck. I take a biscuit.
‘I think you do what really makes you happy. Don’t just settle for something because it’s better than the last job. You only get one life, so they tell me,’ Adelaide says, and her lips actually twitch and curl fleetingly at the corners.
‘That’s what Uncle Graham said to me recently.’
‘Did he?’ Adelaide takes a sip of tea. ‘I hope you listen to us, Lu. The world is your oyster and it’s time to cast away stones.’
‘Sorry?
‘A time to cast away stones. It’s from the Bible – Ecclesiastes if memory serves.’
‘But what does it mean?’
‘There are different interpretations, but most say it’s about clearing land for planting. So, it’s about new beginnings – starting again.’
I shift my weight and look out of the window at the bird feeder. My eyes have filled, and I don’t want Adelaide to see. She will fuss and flap and ask if it was something she’d said to upset me. It is something she’s said, but I’m not upset. Not in a sad way at least. Those words have reached into my mind and begun to unravel the knot of thoughts that have been getting more confused and difficult to untie since Mum died. I know I have to get out of the house right now in order to be able to make sense of the loose ends.
‘Right. I’ll be off. Thanks again for all you’re doing and see you in a while,’ I say, swivel in my chair, and stand up facing the cooker so I won’t have to look at Adelaide.
‘Okay. I’ll go and have a little chat to your dad and then make a nice stew for later.’
I silently wish her luck with the little chat, as Dad hardly speaks nowadays, and the antidepressants don’t seem to help. The doctor’s decision to prescribe these drugs so quickly after such a trauma might have been a good one, but I suspect it will just make living even harder after he’s stopped taking them. I frown at that as I close the front door behind me. I’m a fine one to talk.
Park benches, cinemas and coffee shops were the reality of my fantasies about job hunting and interviews these past few weeks. I walk up a grassy hill overlooking the urban sprawl of Sheffield and wish I was looking at the sea. Oceans and sandy beaches often visited me in dreams but living so far away from the coast means a trip to the seaside is rare. When I had managed to go there, it made me instantly calm. Calm is elusive in the city. It tends to get buried under traffic noise, tall buildings and litter.
I sit on a bench and look at a line of ants busying themselves along the length of a discarded cola bottle. Such purposeful little things directed by a collective conscience. My conscience has been troubled lately, which hasn’t made thinking about the future very easy. I watch the ants move on to a sweet wrapper, the morning turns to afternoon and the sunshine chase cloud shadows down the hill.
The breeze plays with my hair and whispers in my ears, and the words of the wonderful Adelaide finally allow me to tie those loose ends. After today, I promise myself that there will be no more sitting on benches while ostensibly looking for jobs. No more lies. I will cast away stones, start again – literally.
In the weeks since Mum died, I’d filled my time with thinking. Tentative introspection swam in the submerged caves of my mind, graduating to soul searching and then, latterly, a brutally honest appraisal of Lucinda Lacey, the first thirty years. Those years have come and gone so quickly with little to show. I don’t want the next thirty to play copycat. A nucleus of an idea has divided and grown, but my conscience, armed with sensible arguments, has restricted it time after time. The sensible arguments say:
It wouldn’t be fair on Dad …
It could all go wrong and then you’d feel worse …
Flights of fancy are normal during the grieving process, you’re not thinking straight at the moment.
The nucleus has been given its freedom today though and I feel giddy under the acceleration of its development and strength. I realise that I need to find out who exactly Lucinda Lacey is, and though it might be painful, scary, and hurtful to some, particularly Dad, I will return to the start and look for my birth mother.
4
The pub smells of beer, sweat, competing perfumes and aftershave. I want to stand up and walk out of the door into the cool night air. I think about getting up and just leaving, because an hour is enough time to spend on anyone’s birthday, thirtieth or not. I also think about telling my two friends from the old job that I am going to cast away stones, and then watch their reaction. Ellie and Sally would probably look more like meerkats than the abandoned puppies they had channelled when I said I really didn’t want to celebrate at all. They would sit upright and raise their eyebrows in an Adelaidesque manner and—
‘Your miles away, Lu,’ Ellie says, tapping my hand.
‘Am I?’ I say, wishing I was.
‘Yes, we just said we fancied getting a bite to eat here. How about you?’
‘No, I ate earlier, thanks.’
‘So, did we, but I fancy some chips,’ Sally says with a giggle that sounds as if she’d borrowed it from a child. ‘Shouldn’t really, I’ve worked so hard to reach my target weight,’ she adds, smoothing her short skirt over toned thighs.
‘Well, you go ahead. I’ll get off now, I have lots to do.’ I stand and picture myself out in the street.
‘No! You can’t go yet, it’s your birthday!’ Ellie says, grabbing my hand and tugging me back into my seat. I don’t want to be tugged back into my seat, especially as I had been so close to escaping.
‘And what’s so important that you have to do it at nine o’clock on a Thursday night, a thirtieth birthday night?’ Sally asks, her amber eyes directly on me.
‘I have to check my emails to see if there’s been any progress on tracing my birth mother.’
Meerkats and goldfish. My smile forgets to be fixed and stretches wide across my face as I look at the raised eyebrows and open mouths of my friends. A fly lands on a sticky circle on the table that had once belonged to the contents of Ellie’s cider glass and then buzzes past her nose. I will it to have a look inside her open mouth, but Ellie’s hand flaps it away before it has a chance to consider it.
‘Bloody hell, I had no idea you were adopted!’ Sally says, her eyes round.
‘It’s not really something I talk about, or think much about, really,’ I say, though the last bit is a lie. I have thought about it for many years, and about a year before Mum died I had made my mind up that I would try and trace my birth mother. It was just something I felt I had to do. The kind of ‘in your gut’ feeling that wouldn’t be ignored. So around six months ago I hired a genealogist, Maureen Henson, to do some digging. One of the adoption websites I had been on had a forum and a member had put me in touch with Maureen. I had given her all the details from my birth certificate and my adoptive parents’ information and asked her to act as an intermediary. She told me it should be fairly straightforward, and I should hear something in a few weeks.
Not long after, however, I had second thoughts, cold feet, whatever. I never answered Maureen’s email I’d received about a month later. Not even opened it, just deleted it and emptied my recycle bin to be sure. I had sent one to Maureen though. Told her I didn’t want to know what she’d discovered, if anything, settled the account and apologised for her trouble.
I worried that she’d found her. I worried that she hadn
’t. It was all too sudden, too stressful. I’d just not had the guts to find out, or to tell my parents of course. The time had never been right … until now. Yesterday I’d emailed Maureen, apologised again, and explained that I had decided to go ahead, asked if she’d found anything.
I smile at Sally’s stupefied expression. ‘But now I want to find my birth mother to try to make sense of my life,’ I finish, though I hadn’t known I was going to say it.
Ellie frowns, presses her lips together and leans forward. I can’t decide if she looks worried or has a bout of stomach cramps. She sucks her teeth and shakes her head. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Lu.’ Her dark eyes focus on mine and blink meaningfully a few times. I know that she is doing her sympathetic and ‘I know better than you’ look and wonder what she would say if I told her to mind her own bloody business.
‘Luckily, I do think it’s a good idea. I’ve thought about it very hard over these past weeks and I honestly think it’s the best thing for me.’
Ellie clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth and shakes her head. Then both she and Sally stop being interested in my news and watch a man from the next table get up and walk to the bar. They nudge each other and Sally whispers something to Ellie that I can’t catch. Ellie catches it, evidently, snorts down her nose and fans her hand next to her cheek. ‘I wouldn’t’t mind,’ she sighs. She leans in close to me. ‘Just saying what a gorgeous rear he has, and—’
‘Evening, ladies,’ the friend of the man from the next table says. He has appeared unnoticed and silently by my chair as if through a trap door. ‘Dave over there is at the bar and we wondered if you’d all like a drink? My name’s Harry.’