Starchild

by Michaela Foster Marsh

  I turn to his father, “Frank told me you’ve been to the UK.”

  “Yes, yes. I liked the UK. It was good.”

  “Did you see Janet when you were in the UK?”

  He does his little seat shuffle again. “Oh, yes. I went to visit with her a few times. I was studying to be a medical administrator and traveled a fair bit in the UK—different hospitals. I was lucky—I got to go all over the UK.”

  Bloody hell, I’m thinking. So this is the medical student—this guy really is the father! He’s the one who must have arranged for Janet to go to Scotland in secret and have her baby. He could have easily set it up. I want to hit him! I want to yell at him: You self-righteous son of a bitch! Tell us the bloody truth. But he sits there looking complacent and doesn’t even ask anything about Frankie. I remember what my father told me, “It’s what people don’t say, Michaela. Listen to what they don’t say. The truth is in the silence.”

  Frank’s father tells me again how he was very good friends with Janet. Oh, I’ll bet you were. I’m thinking to myself. I’d say you were a bit more than friends. You had two, possibly three children together. One of them, I’m guessing, was my brother. Who you left in Scotland, in a children’s home! If it hadn’t been for my parents then God only knows where he could have ended up.

  Oh, I am seething inside, but for Frank’s sake I’m trying hard to “keep the heid” as we say in Glasgow.

  I want to turn this man upside down and shake the truth out of him. At the very least I want to pull off his baseball cap and large glasses and check out his face. I want to see if I can spot a proper resemblance to Frankie.

  I have to fold my hands between my legs to stop myself from whipping his cap off. Instead I go on with my interrogation. “How often did you manage to see Janet in the UK?”

  “Oh, not much. Holidays mainly. Christmas time and New Year. We got a break around then, and I went to see her in Belfast.”

  Bingo! It doesn’t take a genius to figure all this out. He wasn’t going there for a cup of tea and Christmas cake—he was going there for his nookie! How many months between January and September? Nine. The length of a pregnancy.

  They say the truth will always come out in the end. Everyone in the room knows, but no one is saying anything. Why doesn’t Frank just ask the question I know he wants to ask? But he remains quiet—unusually so.

  “What was Janet like?” I ask, hoping to see his eyes light up from behind those big glasses. I’m still searching for a shred of romance to my brother’s conception in Belfast.

  “Oh, Janet was good fun.” He shuffles again smiling this time. “She was always laughing, always smiling. She was good fun.”

  Good fun—I’ll say. I tell him Frankie was like that too. Always laughing and smiling. I tell him it sounds like Frankie took after his mother.

  He looks at me for the first time. “It’s a good trait to have. Being able to laugh is a gift. You know Janet and I were good friends. Good friends till the day she died.”

  Oh, how I want him to tell me if he knows he is the father. I look over at Frank. We both know we are thinking the same thing. Did he talk Janet into the adoption? Did he arrange for her to go to Scotland? We both know this man has all those answers, but he’s still holding onto the family secret as tightly as his arms are folded across his chest.

  The old man passes Frank the photograph album and reaches for his newspaper, which we take as a sign that we are to leave. He moves out of his chair with difficulty. This might be the first and last time I ever see him. I am gracious and tell him how wonderful it was to meet him. I give him a hug. He says, “Thank you for coming to visit me. It was good to meet you. It’s good to know Frank has a sister.”

  When we are all safely outside, I ask Frank, “Are you thinking what I am thinking?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Then why could you not have asked him outright if he was Frankie’s father?”

  Frank’s head is down. He says he wanted to, but it’s just not done in Uganda. He tells me he could never ask his father a question like that.

  All the questions I wanted to ask the old man I now heap on top of Frank, but he has none of the answers. Finally, he is saved from my onslaught by his phone ringing. It’s his father. Frank speaks to him in Luganda while I hang on to every foreign word, hoping that it’s confession time. Frank hangs up.

  “What did he say? Did he admit he was the father?”

  “No. He just wanted to know what you muzungus wanted.”

  Frankie’s father might have thought that when he left little Francis behind in Scotland he would never see or hear anything about him again. But now, as an old man, the past is coming back to haunt him. If he really is the father then he just got to see pictures of his son and hear about his life in Scotland.

  It’s strange though. My reaction to meeting Frankie’s father is so different from what I would have expected. I’m not moved; I’m angry. I am not sure where the anger has come from, or why I want to lash out at him. I really want to ask him how he felt about abandoning his son in a country full of white people in the ‘60s. I want to ask him if he knows how much pain a child feels when taken from his mother at birth and how much pain a mother feels. I want to witness some remorse from this man. I want to tell him my brother was too good for him and I’m glad he didn’t grow up with him. I want to tell him what he missed out by not knowing my brother.

  The Broken Plate

  Uganda, 2012

  After our visit with Frank’s dad, Frank arranges for Rony and me to have dinner at his home. The house belongs to his dad, and Frank shares it with his half-sister, Violet, and her daughter.

  It’s a lovely home—above the standard of most I’ve seen so far. In fact, I am well impressed; they even have a VIP loo rather than the usual hole in the ground.

  We sit together on the porch while the ladies of the house prepare the food. Frank cannot believe that Rony is the one who cooks back home and is more domesticated than me. Very few men cook in the family home in Uganda. Many believe a man cooking at home is degrading. Frank thinks he has to teach his new sister a thing or two about Ugandan customs or I will not be accepted in his country. However, today is a special day. As it is the first time I have visited Frank’s home, I am allowed to relax with the men on the porch and have a Coca-Cola.

  My curious mind is working overtime about Frank’s half-sister, Violet. Frank has already told me she is older than him. So there has to have been another woman in Frank’s father’s life before Janet. If I had a glass of wine in my hand rather than a Coca-Cola, I would probably have asked the question by now and without much delicacy. Eventually I ask Frank about Violet’s mother with as much subtlety as I can muster.

  Frank tells me Violet’s mother got married to his father when they were both young. After Violet was born it was discovered that his wife had mental health problems and she was put into a residential hospital for the mentally ill. Frank then tells me shortly after her incarceration his father started a relationship with Janet, who was twenty years, his junior.

  He explains they had wanted to get married, but because his first wife was still living, and the delicate circumstance surrounding her health, he was not allowed to marry Janet. However, everyone in the community accepted their relationship. “After all,” he says, “men have needs and his wife was in an institution.”

  Stephen was the first born from this new relationship. Then Frank. Then—well—my guess is Frankie.

  Wow. The jigsaw puzzle is really starting to come together.

  It’s a beautiful day. The view from the porch looking out over the walled garden is especially lovely. No flowers are planted in the garden, but it has tremendous potential for those with green fingers. Frank wants to show us his farm. I’m relieved when he tells me it is outside, around the back of this house, rather than in a room.

 
A small goat hut and a makeshift chicken coop make up Frank’s farm. He asks me how many goats and chickens I have in my home, and is utterly shocked when I tell him I don’t keep any—either in my house or my garden! He’d assumed we would have lots of goats and chickens running around in Scotland. I try to explain what my flat is like in Glasgow, but he has a difficult time believing that we don’t keep animals and I don’t own masses of land.

  We go back to sitting on the porch, looking through lots of old family photograph albums. I can’t believe I am learning so much about Frankie’s biological family. I’m taken aback by just how alike Stephen, Frank and David were to Frankie in their youth.

  Family albums must have been difficult for my adopted brother. They will have emphasized the void in his life, the sense of not knowing where he came from when other families had vast albums of their roots. Frankie had to create his own idea of his lineage, like other adopted children. I wonder if he made up old photographs in his head.

  Once again, I have to pinch myself: here I am looking straight into Frankie’s biological family’s history, in his family home in Uganda. But maybe he’s here in his own way, right beside me, looking over my shoulder. It certainly feels that way.

  Violet prepares an exquisite meal. Frank knows my love of fish and is excited to show me the Nile perch he has bought especially for me. Violet and her daughter set out a feast on the living room table for us to help ourselves. The steamed fish is wrapped in banana leaves and smells delicious. The avocados and spinach fight for my attention, as do the steamed matoke, rice and potatoes. I heap what I think is loads onto my plate but it’s still not enough to satisfy Frank—he thinks his new sister is far too skinny and needs to eat more.

  I take my plate over to the couch and sit down. I place it on my lap and wait for Frank to say grace. Just after he has finished, the plate on my lap breaks cleanly in two with an audible snap! Everyone freezes as if a gun has just fired. They stare at the intact food arrangement still sitting on my lap, with the plate underneath now in two pieces. I sense embarrassment and anxiety coming from Frank and Violet. They start fussing in case I am hurt. They tell me that a plate has never ever broken in their house before. I can sense they are superstitious—so am I.

  I think quickly and tell them that in Greece this is a sign of happiness, that it is the custom for Greeks to break plates at weddings and special occasions of celebration.

  “Really!” they chorus. They have never heard of this custom.

  I assure them this is a good sign—that I love Greece and even wrote an album about Greek mythology.

  “Yes, yes, Sister, this must be good. Good, we are happy, this is a good sign.”

  How can I tell them my inner thoughts about the symbolism of the broken plate and adoption? Is Frankie trying to tell me something from the other side or what!

  Okay, maybe it’s a total fluke, a strange coincidence that my plate snapped in two. I have no idea, but no one else’s plate broke, and I have never had anything like that happen to me before. Nor have they. They assure me they are good plates, the very best. I am sure they are.

  I feel certain Frankie is telling me something. He’s reminding me of how he felt all his life. Frankie had experienced a break in the continuity of bonding. Our family was like a glue that bonded him to us, but the trust in his environment has been compromised from birth. His plate had been broken, and although the replacement piece was good and the glue strong, he must have felt he only ever had a tenuous hold. The plate could break again at any time. Now, his family and I have been brought together. These fragile pieces of history are being glued back together after years of separation, of being lost to each other and now, I myself am a piece from a broken plate.

  If I was Japanese I would have the crack of the plate on my lap glued together again with a precious metal of gold or silver. A technique called Kintsugi or “Golden Joinery” would give a new lease of life to the broken plate and enhance its “scar” so it could be admired. The repaired plate would become unique because of the randomness of where it was cracked. It would become a work of art with its own beauty and story. I love the symbolism that once the crack is repaired it becomes of more value. It is the essence of resilience. To find beauty in broken things and for our wounds in life to make us more unique and valuable.

  I think about asking to keep the plate but I doubt my new Ugandan family will understand my desire to keep a broken object and might think me rather odd. I am sure the broken plate will be confined to the bin.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STARCHILD—the charity

  After we return from Uganda, Rony and I put together a collection of some of our photographs and videos. The presentation of my “pilgrimage” to Uganda moved the people we showed it to—especially the miraculous way I had found Frankie’s family. Those who knew Frankie gasped when they saw a picture of Frank—much in the same way as Frank did when he saw a picture of his brother for the first time.

  People could also see from the photographs that we had been able to help some vulnerable children in Uganda and knew we wanted to continue to help in some way. A number of people asked if I had thought about setting up a charity. It seemed like a good idea, but it would also be a big commitment and I didn’t know where to start.

  A few months later, a friend of mine, Margaret Reid, purchased tickets to see the band Level 42 live in Glasgow on October 18, 2012. Level 42 was Frankie’s favorite band; in fact, it was the last band he ever saw. It was also their song that we played at his funeral. I’d never seen the band live before and was a bit apprehensive about going as I thought I might find it too emotional. But I decided I really wanted to see them as I was sure Frankie would have wanted me to.

  The night of the concert, we were right down front waiting for the band to come on. I handed Margaret the money for the tickets but she refused to take it and said, “I want you to put that to your charity in memory of Frankie.” I told her I didn’t have a charity set up. She smiled and said, “Well you have a donation. You had better start one.”

  Although I had been giving some thought to setting up a non-profit organization, I don’t think it was until that night that I knew I was going to go through with it. It felt as if Frankie was right there beside me, egging me on. When the band started to play “Starchild”, I found I was surprisingly okay—not reduced to the bubbling wreck I had expected. Perhaps the time was right for me to do something in his memory. Besides, Margaret had just given my “charity” a donation.

  I came home from Uganda with a dream to build a school and to help the most vulnerable in Uganda. Mainly orphans. There were as many orphans in Uganda as people in Scotland! I also wanted to help girls receive an education in a culture that did not seem to value them as much as boys. And vulnerable women, to help them survive after husbands had died, beaten them, took other wives, or left them destitute. To me, empowering people and education were key, and fit perfectly into my dream to build a school in honor of Frankie and Janet. Sounds romantic, eh? I was soon to discover that, like anything worthwhile in this world, it required a tenacity, courage, and strength of will I wasn’t aware I had. It also required a lot of help from a lot of other people, not least of all Rony Bridges, who apart from being my emotional rock was my entire right hand.

  Well, anyone who has attempted such a thing as setting up a charity from scratch will know that it is not easy. The only easy part was picking the name—Starchild. One day I found myself sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by the application forms for charitable status. I was finding it so complicated that I was ready to rip it all up and give in to apathy. In my sheer frustration, I posted a status on Facebook saying I was tearing my hair out trying to fill in the paperwork required to set up a charity. Two minutes later—I am not exaggerating—I got a private message from an old school friend, Lynn Campbell, who knew both Frankie and me. She told me she understood the kind of forms I was up agai
nst as she dealt with them at work and offered to help me. I couldn’t believe it! It seemed the universe was giving me exactly what I required, exactly when I required it.

  Then on February 14, 2013—Valentine’s Day—I received an email headed SCIO Award. Lynn and I had done it! Starchild had been granted charitable status by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR).

  I was overwhelmed with joy! One thing I know for sure—I could not have done it without Lynn’s gracious help and that of some very close friends who had agreed to become board trustees. Lynn later told me she had never experienced an application going through so quickly and without any further questions asked.

  Now, my primary concern was to get people to believe in the project as much as I did, and for them to have faith in my ability to carry things forward. To my surprise that part wasn’t as difficult as I had thought. The hardest thing was having faith in myself and believing I could see this through to fruition. My heart was full of good intention, but I was a realist. I knew there were pitfalls when dealing with Uganda; the corruption and bureaucratic red tape there were a well-documented nightmare. I was also cripplingly aware of the do-good tourists and aid workers who come to Uganda with a white savior complex. I might have grown up with a Ugandan black brother and had deeply personal reasons for wanting to help but I was as naïve about Uganda as some of the people and organizations I was criticizing. There was no doubt there was a gulf between myself and those I wanted to reach out to. I was scared. I didn’t want to invest other people’s hard-earned money and get it wrong and I didn’t want to work in Uganda and end up making things worse because of white ignorance. How on earth was I going to navigate it all?