‘Why?’
‘You’re as white as a ghost. Are you coming down with something?’
‘I have the start of a migraine coming on.’
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she says. ‘You’ve not had one of those for years. What’s brought that on?’
‘Probably the strip lights in the library basement. I’ve been down there a lot today.’
‘Have you taken anything for it? I’ve got some aspirin somewhere ...’ She turns her back to me and moves towards the cupboard where she keeps all her medicines. Inside is a shelf crammed with packets and bottles. She is her own pharmacy.
I need to keep a lid on the anger I’m feeling towards her right now. It wouldn’t take much for me to grab the first movable object I see, like the kettle, and hit her across the back of the head with it.
‘Yes, I have taken tablets,’ I reply. ‘I might lie down for a bit.’ I don’t wait for her to reply as I hurry up the stairs, scared as to what I might do if I am alone with her any longer.
Once behind my closed bedroom door, I finally unclench my fists.Poor Bobby, I think. How confused he must be right now. Earlier tonight, and after realising that I might be sitting next to my son and not my half-brother, I panicked, made my excuses and left without explanation. It was too much to take in all at once. I promised him it wasn’t anything he’d said or done and that I’d be in touch soon, but I had to go. I didn’t even give him a chance to reply before I hurried out of the pub. I will explain everything to him as soon as I figure it out myself.
When I came out of the fog after Dylan’s death, almost everything from my previous life had vanished from the house. ‘We need to start you again,’ Mum had informed me. ‘So I’ve taken away things that might upset you.’ By ‘things’ she meant photographs, clothes and music. She had casually tossed away my whole life. But I was still too fragile to argue with her. She was doing what was best for me, or so I thought.
However, there was something she missed; something I found by accident many years later. It was a flyer for a Hunters gig that I promised Jon I’d go to. Among the blurriness I remember that clearly, because it was the afternoon I went into labour. And despite the fear and the pain, I kept thinking how disappointed Jon would be not to see me there. The flyer was kept pressed between the pages ofWuthering Heights, my favourite novel as a teenager. Now I open the pages and find it still there, a sheet with a fold along the centre and a photograph of the band on it. I pause to take in Jon’s image. The likeness between father and son is subtle, but it’s definitely there.
I thought Mum was putting my feelings first by hurrying my child away before I even had the chance to hold her. But now I know why. She didn’t want me to hear my baby’s first breaths or cries. She was already planning to give her grandchild away. There are so many questions I need answers to, all rattling around in my head at once. I know she’s unlikely to give them to me, so I need to find them elsewhere.
It being a public record, ordering a copy of Bobby’s birth certificate was a simple online process and it arrived within two days. It proved the copy he had shown me was genuine. His name was Dylan Simmonds, he’d been born the day I gave birth and Maggie was listed as his mother. Twenty-two years ago she wouldn’t have been able to predict the scope of the Internet or how social media could shrink the world.
‘There’s an envelope for you on the dining-room table,’ Mum says.
‘Thanks,’ I reply and pick it up for closer inspection. It’s white, about half an inch thick and, as I requested, hasn’t got a surgery stamp on it. It’s only taken five days to order a printout of my medical records. She hovers, as if expecting me to tell her what’s inside. I don’t.
I’ve said nothing of what I’ve learned so far. But every moment in her company is spent going through the motions, and it’s pushing me closer and closer to breaking point. I’m on the edge and it won’t take much for me to step over it. And from then on, there will be no coming back for either of us. I am sure of it.
I close my bedroom door and tear open the envelope. My heart pounds through my chest as I read each page, my entire life documented from my birth to my recent request for antidepressants. Everything is listed, from measles to mumps and pneumonia. Everything except the reason why I have requested these files in the first place.
Dr Kelly was right – it says here that between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, I did not see a doctor. The home visits Mum told me Dr King had made? There is no record of them. His prescription for antidepressants? No mention. My breakdown? Not a word. It’s as if I have just fictionalised an entire chapter of my life. I even double-check the page numbers to make sure some haven’t been left on the surgery printer. Was Dr King doing Mum a favour and treating me off the books? If so, for what purpose? I can’t confront him and ask him the question because he died years ago. Only Mum knows the truth.
Another of the many things I don’t understand is why Dylan was born healthy, when I’m a carrier of estroprosencephaly. I search back a few pages to read up about my diagnosis but I can’t see it charted anywhere. I return to the very start as I’m sure that Mum said I was tested for it when I was seven. But there is definitely no mention of it. Surely the specialists or my parents would have informed my GP? Something this important must have been documented.
I pick up my phone and for the first time, I google estroprosencephaly. Having the condition isn’t something I’ve given much thought to for years. The last time I researched it was in a library medical journal when I was pregnant with Dylan and wanted to know more about what to expect. Only when I saw the photographs of disfigured babies, I couldn’t read on. Now I wish I’d continued. Because if I had, I’d have known much sooner that Mum was a liar. It says here that estroprosencephaly is not passed on from father to daughter, nor is it genetic. There is no rhyme or reason as to why it occurs. It is a condition that cannot be tested for. In fact it’s so rare that only five babies are struck by it per year in the world. The chances of me having it are less than one in a billion.
I think of the place in the garden where Mum told me she buried Dylan, and all the comfort that visiting this spot has given me over the years. Only each tear I shed there for my child was a wasted one. I wasn’t crying over a grave, I was crying over a flower bed. All that time, Dylan was alive and living forty miles away from me with somebody else’s family.
Perhaps I should take time to digest this, I think. But I can’t. Too much of my life has been wasted already for me to delay this any longer. My bedside alarm clock tells me it’s only 7.40 p.m.; I have a couple of hours to wait before I can act. Mum is usually in bed by 9.30 p.m. and the high-strength sleeping tablets she’s dependent on take a half an hour before she is out for the count. Then I will get to work.
Suddenly, it hits me. I have what I always wanted. A child.I am a mother. I smile for the first time in days, then force myself to rein it in. There will be plenty of time to enjoy this later.
CHAPTER 48
NINA
TWO YEARS EARLIER
When I hear Mum’s heavy breathing from the other side of her bedroom door, my search for the truth about who I really am and what happened to me begins. You can’t just give a baby away without there being a lengthy paper trail. I need cold, hard, legal, irrefutable proof of what she has done. If she’s been sensible, she’ll have destroyed everything. But knowing what a hoarder she can be, I’m hanging on to the hope that she might have forgotten something.
Using my phone as a torch, I make my way into her room, tiptoeing across the carpet. I feel my way around inside her chest of drawers and wardrobe, though I know it’s unlikely to be that easy. As expected, I find nothing incriminating in there or in the two empty bedrooms, dining-room sideboard or writing bureau in the lounge. When I finish in the kitchen empty-handed, all hope rests on the basement.
I turn on the light switch and make my way down the concrete steps. I can’t recall the last time I had a reason to come down here. It’s a sizeable space and runs the entire length of the ground floor of the house. One of the first things Dad did when we moved here was to get a damp course fitted, electrics installed and the walls plastered. It was going to be ‘his space’, only he never got around to installing the snooker table he always wanted. Now it’s just a dumping ground for our family history and is crammed with clutter. I don’t know where to begin.
It’s been swallowed up by decades of objects and old tables and chairs that Mum hasn’t thrown away. There are abandoned sets of broken garden furniture, two of my old bikes, shelves of half-empty paint cans and a broken tumble drier. Yet there is something strangely comforting about being among so much that reminds me of my childhood. Down here I feel impervious to what upstairs has to throw at me.
