by Emily Barr
‘Oh, of course. Good idea.’ I want her to put Humphrey on the phone even though he would be silent, but I have no idea how to ask that. I want to hear him breathing.
‘Michelle,’ I say instead. ‘Could you do something for me? A little favour?’
‘Of course, love,’ she says.
‘Right. Well, you’ll need to go to the study. Is that OK?’
‘I’m on my way.’
‘There’s a filing cabinet. Could you open the top drawer?’
‘What am I looking for?’
‘Ella’s birth certificate.’ My voice shakes.
‘Right you are. Putting you on speakerphone. Hold on.’
I don’t say anything because I have no idea how the filing cabinet is organized. I just leave it to her to look.
‘Here we go,’ she says after a few minutes. ‘You are organized, aren’t you? I’ve got yours and Graham’s, Fiona. Would this be Ella’s? It’s an envelope that says Ella on the front?’
‘Yes. That’s right. That’s the one. Could you open it?’
Oddly, I am managing to talk in Fiona Black’s composed manner while tears course down my cheeks.
‘Right. Oh. It’s an adoption certificate … I didn’t know Ella was adopted.’
‘No. It’s not something we ever talk about.’
My voice cracks at that, and I have to hold the phone away from my face for a few seconds until I regain control.
‘But it’s not a secret,’ I say. It’s not a secret now. ‘Is there a birth certificate with it? Or just the adoption certificate?’
‘Just the adoption certificate that I can see, love.’
‘Could you read it? I just need to check something.’
‘If you like, dear.’ I’m pushing my luck. I know I am. I don’t care. ‘It says: Ella Charlotte Black, female, born 17 November 1999, in Birmingham. Adopters Graham and Fiona Black … and it gives your address. Let’s see. Date of adoption order: 8 January 2000. I had no idea. I won’t go shouting it out. Are you all right, my love?’
I cannot speak, and so I drop the phone on the floor. I curl up on the bed and hug my knees. I never knew. I never had the faintest idea. They never told me. It’s my life, and they never told me. It was in the filing cabinet all along, easily found, and I never looked.
I was born in Birmingham.
Not Kent.
I was born in 1999 and adopted in 2000. The millennium passed and they never told me.
Everything I thought I knew about my life is a lie.
Someone is outside the door. I stare at it. I can hear sounds out there, and then they are pressing the door handle down and it isn’t opening because I bolted it. One of them knocks on the door, and my so-called mother’s voice says: ‘Ella?’
My world has fallen to pieces. My world has always been in pieces. The pretence has fallen away and my real life stands there, looking completely different.
I hate them. I hate them completely. I hate everything about them. I hate them for lying to me. They knew that, one day, I would find this out. My birth mother is looking for me, according to that letter. She’s not allowed to find me so I am going to find her. I try to breathe.
I need my dark side.
GET AWAY FROM THEM.
I know. I can’t see them. But they’re here.
TELL THEM TO FUCK OFF.
I need to focus. I have to do this right.
I know that I do have to get away from them. This is too much. I pick the phone up off the floor and put it back in its place.
I take my passport, my phone, all the cash I can find, and some clothes, and I shove everything into my bag. I take the credit card that is in the safe, hoping that I will be able to crack the PIN as easily as I did the safe code. I take my toothbrush, toothpaste and deodorant. I push it all in, and only then do I unlock the door and stand and stare at them; at these people who pretended to be my birth parents.
‘How are you …?’
Mum’s voice tails off as she looks at my face. Then she stares into my eyes for a long time and I stare right back. Tears are pouring down my cheeks, but I don’t say a word because I need them to say it. Only Dad – or not-Dad; the man I thought was my father – seems to be functioning. He looks past me at the open safe. He closes his eyes, breathes a few times and opens them again.
‘Right, Ella,’ he says, and he puts an arm round my shoulder.
I flinch and push it off.
‘OK. Let’s go and get a coffee at the café over the road. Or something stronger. And we’ll talk this through. I’m sorry. We never meant it to be like this. You had to find out some day and we should have told you.’
I don’t speak. I don’t think I am ever going to be able to speak to either of them again. I watch him put paperwork back into envelopes, and envelopes into the safe. The letter from Mr Vokes is in my bag but I don’t tell him that. He doesn’t seem to notice that my passport isn’t with the others. I watch him close the door and lock it. His hands are shaking.
I take a piece of hotel notepaper and a hotel pen and write my mobile number on it, with a +44 at the start. I fold that and put it in my pocket. Neither of them seems to notice.
Mum is a statue. There is no colour in her face. She looks like an old lady. She looks, in fact, as if she’s had a stroke. I hope she does have a stroke. I hope she dies.
I pick up my bag and follow them out of the door. When either of them tries to touch me, I flinch and pull away. I don’t look them in the eye. I don’t care if they’re looking at each other over my head because I’m not part of their family and I never was.
I was a charity project
an experiment
and I think I failed.
I can’t hear anything but the swooshing of my blood and the ringing noise, which is now so loud it sounds like a fire alarm. The fire is my whole life. I stand waiting for the lift, having an internal conversation with Bella that is different from any we have ever had before.
KILL THEM.
Shall I?
YOU KNOW IT.
I can’t. How and what with?
COULD YOU PUSH THEM DOWN THE LIFT SHAFT?
There’s a lift in the lift shaft.
I stumble because I can’t see very well, and my dad reaches out to steady me, and I walk away and stand on the other side of the landing, leaning against the wall, until the lift arrives.
I am on fire. Everything that is in me, that is part of me, my whole self, is going up in flames. I am like someone’s house on the news: at the moment the flames are leaping, the drama is going on, the change from what used to be there and the blackened ruins is underway. Soon I will just be charred remnants; a wasteland; nothing. Right now, however, Bella and I are burning.
I have no idea who I am. These people are not related to me. I have no family.
I want to stop the lift at floor eight. I try to remember Christian’s room number, but everything from before-the-safe has gone fuzzy and blurred. It began with an 8. I think it had a 6 in it. I can’t slide my number under the wrong door. I will give my piece of paper in at reception.
However, as we walk out of the lift on the ground floor Christian is standing right there in the lobby, and his face lights up when he sees me, and I look at him. He is all I want. I want to tell him this, to tell him about me, to make a new life away from these parents who lied to me all my life.
I was born in 1999. I went to live with the Blacks in 2000. I lived with my birth mother across millennia. That feels important.
Maybe she was young. Perhaps she was ill. It probably wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t manage a baby.
I want to be grown up now. I want to be with Christian. I walk up to him, hand him the piece of paper with my number on it and kiss him on the lips. I feel his surprise, and then I feel his smile.
‘Call me,’ I say. ‘I’ve got my phone back.’
My parents don’t say a word as we leave the hotel. I don’t think they are really focused on anything.
It is warm and sunny, and this is the first time I have been out today. The clouds have gone. This would be a perfect time to take a cable car up a mountain. There would be no clouds there at all.
The man I thought was my father puts a hand on my shoulder and guides me down the road to the traffic lights. I push his hand away without looking at him. The woman who is not my mother walks on the other side of me, but she’s not looking at me either. We are both looking straight ahead.
I know I have asked her about her pregnancy, about my birth, about what I was like as a tiny baby, about how they celebrated the arrival of the year 2000. In fact they didn’t have me then. They didn’t sit up with a tiny me to welcome in the millennium. All those stories were lies. The story of my birth (a dream birth, apparently, in a water pool with no pain relief) was a fantasy. Breastfeeding cannot have happened. All that was made up, just to stop me suspecting. And of course I didn’t suspect. You believe your parents when they tell you that you’re their baby.
We cross the road. The sun is hot. I know why they brought me to Rio. They brought me here because my real mother was looking for me as I’m nearly eighteen. Boring Mr Vokes told them to go away and assured them she wouldn’t find me. I would like to assure him that I will find her. I want to look at the woman who gave birth to me. I want to meet my real family, whoever they are, whatever has happened.
‘Come on, Ella,’ says not-Dad, and he ushers me to a table on the pavement, on the other side of the road from the hotel. I sit on a chair because I don’t know what else to do. Not-Mum sits on one side of me, him on the other. They still think they can keep me under control. I hold my bag between my feet.
‘Coffee?’ he asks. ‘Or a beer or something?’
I would like to get drunk enough to obliterate everything. However, I won’t: I can’t let the parents think they can win me round by buying ‘medicinal brandy’ or whatever they are thinking of, and trying to pretend we’re all in this scrape together.
‘Coffee would be fine,’ I say. ‘I got drunk last night, by the way. I sneaked out of the room and got a taxi to Lapa and met the Americans from the hotel. That’s why I was ill. I kissed Christian in the street.’
‘You didn’t.’
I shrug. I don’t need to pretend any more because nothing they do or say can affect me. They can believe what they like. I had the best night of my life, and I am glad I did it, just before everything collapsed.
I stop to check the inside of my head again for Bella. She’s right there, but she’s not fighting me. We are fighting them. It’s a strange feeling, being complete.
Not-Dad goes in to find the waiter. I see Christian coming out of the hotel with Felix and Susanna. He stands on the other side of the road and looks at me. I raise a hand. I can see from the way he is standing that he is worried. I make a ‘phone’ sign with my hand, and he nods and walks away, looking back over his shoulder.
The woman who did not give birth to me wants to say something. She keeps opening her mouth and closing it without speaking, and I don’t do or say anything to help her. I can see her out of the corner of my eye, but I won’t look at her.
‘We always …’ she says, but then she tails off.
I don’t respond at all. I act as if she hasn’t said a word.
Dad comes back and sits down. He takes a deep breath and begins talking.
‘Your mother and I were desperate to have a big family,’ he says, and every word is a sharp little knife, so much so that I think he must be doing it on purpose to hurt me. ‘But it didn’t happen. There were plenty of pregnancies, but they never made it beyond the first few weeks. Every time we hoped it would be different, but every time it wasn’t. And after it had happened seven times –’
‘Eight,’ Mum says, very quietly.
‘– eight times, then we agreed that it wasn’t meant to be, and that perhaps we were meant to find our family somewhere else.’
‘Second best.’
‘Not second best. Best. Best and only. So we were assessed for adoption. Jumped through a lot of hoops.’
He stops. This is the bit I need to hear them say. It cannot be real until they say it.
‘And then a baby turned up.’ I say it because somebody has to.
‘Yes. Then a baby turned up, and it was a baby girl, and she was the most perfect and adorable baby that had ever lived, and we both knew from the moment we set eyes on her that this was the reason why it had never happened before: because this baby was always going to be out there, and you were always going to be needing a home, and we were the people who were going to give it to you. We were able to take you away from the … difficult … start you’d had and give you the closest thing to a perfect life that we possibly could.’
I shiver. He is talking about a baby, and it’s me.
‘That’s worked out well,’ I manage to say.
‘It has!’ Mum is whispering through tears, staring down at the table, barely audible. ‘Ella – you have no idea how much we love you. I’ve loved you from the very moment I saw you. I’m your mum and I always will be. We’ve always adored you.’
‘Well, it was kind of you to save me from a difficult start in life.’
‘Ella,’ says Dad. ‘We did try to tell you you were adopted, starting when you were three. You refused to hear it. We took you to psychiatrists and tried to work out what to do. This is complicated and hard to explain, but you found it so difficult and distressing that we ended up deciding it was better not to try. We decided that because the circumstances were so … unusual you’d be better off thinking that you were our biological daughter, for the time being at least. It’s not the standard way of doing it, but it made you so happy and secure, and that was the only thing that seemed to matter. Because as far as we’re concerned, you are our birth daughter anyway.’
‘So I’m not ill?’
Dad looks confused. ‘Do you feel ill?’
‘I thought I was here on a bucket-list thing. I can remember those appointments, a bit. I said so the other day. I thought I had some genetic illness and that we were here because I was going to die.’
‘Oh, darling,’ says Mum. I see her start to move towards me, but I lean away and she stops.
‘You’re our little girl,’ she says. ‘Our precious, wonderful girl. I’m so sorry. Everything we’ve ever done has been because we love you.’
‘You’ve lied. All my life. Ever since I can remember, you’ve lied to me. It’s not such a big deal being adopted, but it is if no one bothers to tell you.’
I cannot look at their faces. I am on fire. They don’t know it, but I am gone. I am still here in body, right now, but I’ve gone. Everything I thought I was, I am not. Everything. I have never felt like this before. I knew I had a dark side and I gave her a name and she is in me now. She is me now. I pushed her away because I didn’t want to be like that, but now I welcome her back.
HURT THEM, says Bella.
I don’t try to push her away. I don’t reach for the mantra about the universe.
How?
IT’S EASY OUT HERE. LOOK. HE’S GOT A BOTTLE, RIGHT THERE.
I am shaking all over. My jaw is clenched. I need to get away from these people.
I shouldn’t hurt them. That wouldn’t help.
YES IT WOULD.
It wouldn’t really. Would it?
Mum reaches across and runs her hand down my arm. It’s a stupid feathery touch and I hate it, and so I give Bella an internal nod and she grabs Dad’s beer bottle and smashes it on the edge of the table, and Bella and I are lunging at her – at the only mother I have ever known – with a broken bottle. Dad grabs my arm.
There is all sorts of shouting going on. I don’t care. I am Bella, and Ella has gone, and I want to hurt this woman, and I don’t care what else happens.
I spin round to shake the hand off my arm, and the waiter is standing behind me. I need him to go away so I turn and swipe the broken bottle at him. I want to hurt him too. It cuts across his face and a
line of red springs up. My vision is clouded and I have to run.
I grab the bag from the pavement and drop the bottle, and I am gone.
I am running.
I run and run and run.
My feet pound the pavement. One foot. The other foot. One foot. The other foot. I can’t stop. I can’t think.
I swing round the corner so they won’t see me, and sprint faster than I have ever sprinted before. I run down the middle of the road. Cars can hit me if they like but they don’t.
I run to the beach without any thought other than Get away. On the road beside the beach the cars are coming from the wrong direction – they are going in the opposite direction to the arrows. I dodge between yellow cabs and buses and cars, and they honk their horns and I don’t care. Again, they don’t actually run me over, and if they did that would be fine too.
The other side of the huge road is closed off, and then there is a lot of shouting and whistles are blowing but the police can’t have caught up with me this quickly. Can they? When I stop to look in the direction of the commotion I see that there has been a zombie apocalypse, and a crowd of zombies is making its way towards me.
It is possible. Anything could happen now. The zombies have come.
I run over to the beach side of the road, straight into the crowd. It’s not really a zombie apocalypse. It can’t be. These are people dressed as zombies. It must be a Rio thing, and anyway, whatever it is, I’m in the middle of it and it engulfs me, and perhaps they won’t find me here. I walk up to a zombie who is covered in blood and gore; I want that blood and gore so I hold her face and kiss her on each cheek, and she is laughing so I press my cheeks against hers and she kisses me on the mouth. All the old rules have gone: they were never really there in the first place. I rub my face on the zombie’s until the make-up is all over me, and I know I can be a part of this crowd. I can be a zombie. I can become Bella full time. I am Bella: I look like her on the outside already. I am myself – Ella/Bella – and that is as frightening as any creature in the world.
I smear the goo over my face with my fingers, and then I rub my fingers down my T-shirt and hold my arms out like other people and walk like a zombie.