by Clare Empson
‘I’m sure Jacob would like another glass of wine,’ I say, and my father looks at me in disgust. But he picks up the bottle and empties the rest of it into Jake’s glass.
‘I’m not sure we approve of Alice spending her summer in Italy. She should live here and get a job like everyone else.’
‘I don’t think you understand,’ Jake says. ‘Alice is being commissioned to do a show, and for that she needs to be in Italy, working on her drawings of the band.’
‘A vanity project, that’s all this is. I don’t want Alice hanging around some band with a dubious lifestyle. Don’t think I don’t know what you lot get up to. She’s far too young.’
I would speak, but the threat of tears keeps me quiet, and I will not cry in front of my father. My mother and I are frustrating victims; we don’t react. What happens is that my father’s scornful put-downs escalate; he needles away at us, childlike in his quest for victory.
‘I think you might be surprised by how hard-working we are.’ Jake’s voice is soft, polite, but I know without looking at him that inside he is clenched with anger.
‘Hah!’ My father takes a sip of his wine. Jake, I notice, hasn’t touched his. I understand the rebellion.
‘What is it, if you don’t mind me asking, that you object to? Alice is being paid for her work. This commission will earn her far more money than a summer job washing dishes or whatever else you had in mind.’
‘I object,’ the word imbued with hostility, viciousness, the way only my father can, ‘to all of it. Our daughter is nineteen. We don’t want her spending a summer with your lot, picking up all your habits. Drugs, free love, whatever else it is you’re into.’
‘It’s not up to you,’ I say, pushing my plate away and standing up.
‘I think you’ll find it is for as long as this is your home.’
The moment erupts.
‘I don’t want it,’ I say. ‘I don’t want this home.’
‘If I were you, daughter of mine, I would take that back right now.’
We stare at each other, my father and I, with our matching masks of rage. Why, on the one day when it mattered to me, could he not have behaved? Hate does not have enough bite for how he makes me feel.
‘No. I won’t take it back. Because I meant it.’
‘Then get out. Go on, get out right now.’
My father’s face, always flushed, has turned an alarming shade. Purple madder would be the closest; I used it in Gordon King’s class last week.
‘Fine,’ I say, and now Jake is standing up too. ‘I just need my passport.’
I’ve already spied it on the dresser. I’m wondering if I should make a dash for it, just in case. But my father saves me the trouble. He shoves back his chair, a screech of metal across parquet, picks up the passport and hurls it at my face. The corner catches me just beneath my eye, and the shock of it, more than the pain, and the absolute humiliation, makes me cry, an unguarded, instantaneous reaction.
‘For God’s sake.’ Jake stoops to pick up the passport, then wraps his arm around my shoulders. ‘Let’s just go.’
My father says, ‘You’re going to have to choose between your family and this inappropriate love affair of yours, which, mark my words, you will come to regret.’
I look right into his eyes while the anger coruscates inside me like fuel. I know the answer, of course I do, but I’ll make him wait for it. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six … Mentally I’m counting down until I say the words that will make my family life implode.
‘In that case, I choose Jacob.’
Now
Luke
The absence of a biological mother and father feels as intense as death to the adopted child. He is submerged in unexplained loss. And unless the facts of his birth are discussed openly, untold grief will be at the root of his character.
Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris
I wouldn’t admit this to anyone, but I feel a little bit pissed off when Hannah goes off for her second tête-à-tête with Rick. Like she’s getting to know him and I am not.
The Sunday Times is running her interview as the Culture section lead and flagging it on the front page of the newspaper. In conference, the editor described it as ‘the scoop of the year’.
Rick has been customarily indiscreet, spilling confidences about Grace Jones, Mick Jagger and Lucian Freud, nothing off the record.
‘It’s all true,’ he told her. ‘So write what you like.’
For a man who hates intrusion, he has been extraordinarily generous.
I am immensely proud of Hannah and slightly put out. And my jealousy – there, I admit it – is compounded by the easy, relaxed way Alice and Hannah communicate at night. Alice loves to hear Hannah’s stories about the other journalists she works with, the shows she is reviewing, the artists she has met. When Hannah gets back from work, Alice will often stay for a cup of tea, while with me she invariably rushes off. She doesn’t seem to care that I am working my arse off trying to sign Reborn; since they are a band she has seen and liked, I would have thought she might be more interested.
I have no right to feel like this, I know that. This week, when Hannah has had to work extra days to finish her Richard Fields profile, Alice stepped in to cover without any complaint and refused to take any more money for it.
‘I love looking after Samuel,’ she said. ‘You never need to feel bad about asking me.’
She is lovely, always, but slightly withdrawn.
‘You can’t bridge a gap of twenty-seven years overnight,’ Hannah said yesterday when I tried to tell her how I was feeling. ‘I know it’s hard, but you have to give it time.’
Today, however, there’s no time for reflection. Industry gossip tells me that Universal have made a colossal offer for Reborn; figures are not known, but it’s expected to be a million. There’s no way my label, Spirit, can match it, but I do have a brilliant idea up my sleeve and the trump card of allowing the band creative control when it comes to mixing their album. With Universal, they might as well be signed to Simon Cowell and have done with it. Cash-rich and the say-so of a monkey. That’s no choice at all.
As if there could be any doubt, my boss, Michael, calls me into his office at four o’clock when the rest of the company have decamped to the pub for the traditional Friday piss-up. He offers me a drink from the fridge behind his desk – neat rows of Red Stripe, Chablis and Bollinger lined up – which I refuse. I try to stay sober around Michael.
‘I took a risk on you, Luke, didn’t I? Giving you your own label to run when you weren’t yet twenty-six?’
‘You did. And I appreciate it.’
‘I’ll cut to the chase, shall I? We had a directors’ meeting. The accountants were in, and two of the directors – I won’t name names – were in favour of closing Spirit down. Cutting our losses, as it were.’
‘Michael …’ I try to speak but the words won’t come out.
I have dreaded, projected, catastrophised about this possibility endlessly. Take Spirit away from me – my own label, the thing I care most about in the world (aside from Hannah and Samuel) – and I hate to think what I would do. Spirit is my sanity, my security; it gives me a blueprint of how to be.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Luke. You have my support one hundred per cent. All I’m saying is you need to close the deal with Reborn. You’ve got them on the hook and the whole of the industry wants to sign them. Be the one who does.’
‘What if I can’t?’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. We need a little triumph here.’
It’s after five when I call Steve Harris, the band’s manager, a miserable, diminutive Scot whom nobody likes.
‘Luke! How’re you doing?’
He is uncharacteristically warm and I realise within a few seconds that, like everyone else, Reborn have been whiling
away their Friday afternoon in the pub.
No is not an option when Steve says ‘Come and join us?’ even though I’m due home at six for Alice (Hannah is working late again). I tell myself I’ll only stay for one, and if I get a cab, I’ll still make it back in time.
But I hadn’t factored in the drunkenness of the band, who are in an optimum state for me to make my pitch. Steve stands up and embraces me and the rest of them follow suit, hugs all round.
‘Shall I get us a bottle of champagne?’ I say.
Drinks are always on the record company, and with a fledgling band, champagne never fails to impress.
The lead singer, Daniel, follows me up to the bar.
‘It’s good you came,’ he says, while I put in my order for not one, but two bottles of champagne. ‘Thing is, we all really like you, but we’ve had a pretty incredible offer.’
‘I heard. But I have an idea that could really transform this next album into something pretty epic.’
With the champagne poured, matching ice buckets to emphasise the flashiness, I outline my plan.
‘Your songs already have an edge of disco,’ I say. ‘I think we should amp it up, a full-blown disco record but reworked for the twenty-first century. Your lyrics, your political message, only come through on second or third hearing. It’s subliminal, and that way we reach the masses, the people who don’t think they care and then find out that they do.’
‘I like it,’ says Daniel. ‘I like it a lot.’
‘Like it?’ shouts Bex, the bassist, slamming down her glass so that champagne slops out onto the table. ‘It’s genius!’
I refill everyone’s glass and bask a little in the acclaim. I feel almost light-headed from the spectre of success. No one is saying it, but I can feel how close I am to clinching this deal.
It’s only when I’m on my way home in the back of a cab that I register the travesty of my lateness. It’s already past seven o’clock. Hannah will be furious; she reminds me on an almost daily basis that we must never take advantage of Alice.
I’m just about to walk through our gate when the sight of a navy-blue Golf parked up outside the house stops me dead. My mother’s car. I stand there staring at it, frozen in the horror of the moment, champagne fizzing in my veins. How can I have allowed this to happen? I remember now that my mother is on her way back from a painting trip and said she might spend the night. And I, stupid moron that I am, have forgotten. My heart bangs against my ribs as I slot my key into the lock and push open the front door with no idea what I’m walking into.
My two mothers are sitting together at the kitchen table.
‘There you are, darling,’ says Christina. ‘We were starting to get worried. Has something happened at work?’
‘Hi, Mum,’ I say, my voice fading on the word. ‘Alice, I am so sorry. I tried to call but my phone was flat. I had a last-minute meeting with Reborn. It feels like they’re going to sign to us and it was impossible to get away without seeming rude. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’
‘It’s fine, Luke. I understand. Samuel is asleep in his cot. Your mother’ – she says the word evenly, but to me it is laced with pain – ‘put him down ten minutes ago. I was just about to leave.’
‘It’s been so lovely to meet your au pair,’ says my mother, and instantly the term seems insulting, belittling. ‘I do think you were sensible finding someone a bit older. You don’t mind me saying that, Alice, do you?’ Christina laughs but Alice doesn’t.
‘That’s fine.’
‘You’re so wonderful with the baby. He clearly adores you. Do you have your own children?’
Inside I’m howling like a wounded dog. No. Please, no. I try to meet Alice’s eyes; the sorrow I am expecting to find there will be my punishment. But Alice doesn’t look at me.
‘Sorry to rush, Christina,’ she says, ignoring the question. ‘But I must get going. I have to go and see someone and I’m already late. Have a nice evening, I’ll see myself out.’
My mother crosses the room for one of her air kisses – ‘Darling, hello’ – and I hear the click of the front door with a plunge of sadness.
‘Do you know, I had the strangest feeling that I’d met Alice before. Of course, that’s impossible, isn’t it? She’s nothing like I expected. How did you did find her? Was it through the agency?’
Communication is impossible, throttled as I am by panic, by guilt, a tide of self-loathing that rises from my chest to my neck to my brain.
‘Mum, I’m just going to check on Samuel. You know we don’t put him in his cot.’
‘All right, darling.’ My mother laughs. ‘Though he’s absolutely fine. The painting trip was lovely, thanks for asking.’
We painted Samuel’s bedroom one weekend shortly before he was born, back in the days when Alice was no more than a figment of my imagination. We chose a vivid lemon yellow – neither of us favours those generic saccharine pastels meant for babies – with lime green for the woodwork and a little second-hand chest of drawers that we painted orange. We bought an armchair and a reading lamp for Hannah, who planned to catch up on novels while the baby slept – a concept that now seems hilariously naïve. In the first weeks after Samuel was born, she barely had time to brush her hair, let alone cross Tolstoy off her list.
I peer over the cot at my beautiful sleeping boy, who has one arm flung out, the other curved around a soft toy I don’t recognise. I don’t know what makes me look twice at this teddy, an old-fashioned one with sewn-on glass eyes, the kind Hannah has forbidden as a potential hazard. I retrieve it carefully from Samuel’s grasp and sit down in the chair, bear balanced on my knee. Its fur feels rough and matted beneath my fingers. On an impulse, I press it to my face and inhale. The mustiness of age, and behind it something faint, but it’s there, a sharp, citrusy smell I recognise. Alice’s perfume. It must have belonged to her.
And then, slowly, devastatingly, the truth of this bear’s origin smacks me between the eyes.
Then
Alice
Emancipation from my parents is at once exhilarating and terrifying. I have stood up to my father for the first time in my life, and although I cry throughout most of the journey home, Jake driving with one hand on the steering wheel, the other clamped around my own, beneath the tears is the fierce thrust of pride. I am not like my mother and I never will be.
‘Actually this is all very hip,’ Jake says, emphasising the word, because he always knows how to make me laugh. ‘We are living through the decade of liberation, and you, Alice Garland, are at the coalface.’
I move my belongings – two paltry black bin liners of clothes and books and about a hundred sketchpads – out of my student lodgings into Jake’s flat. My bottles of shampoo and conditioner line his bath, my clothes in two drawers he has cleared out for me.
‘Let’s buy you things to make this place feel more like yours,’ he says on the first night, as we lie naked and entwined on his brown corduroy sofa, surrounded by candlelight.
‘Everything I need is right here,’ I say, smoothing my hand across the S of his body, his thigh curving into his hip, the dip of flesh beneath his ribcage.
But Jake shakes his head.
‘I’m serious. I want this flat to feel as much yours as mine.’
He takes me to Nice Irma’s Floating Carpet to stock up on wine-coloured beanbags, joss sticks, a rug of swirling brown and orange, a wall hanging of a bejewelled Shiva.
He loves to surprise me with gifts, small things to begin with: an orange jug he has filled with sunflowers, a pair of striped woolly socks he bought at the market because my feet are always so cold, second-hand copies of A Room with a View and The Leopard in preparation for our trip to Italy.
Then one afternoon I come back to a little wooden desk in the corner of the sitting room, the kind we used to have at school, with a lid and a hole for the inkwell. Jake has filled it with m
y sketchpads and watercolours, my pencils in a holder made from a baked beans can rewrapped in bright blue paper. It’s so touching, this gesture, that unexpectedly I find myself crying, and he pulls me into his arms, his face anxious.
‘It’s meant to make you happy.’
‘I am happy,’ I say, crying even more, though I’m laughing too.
‘I’m your family now. And you are mine. We don’t need anyone else.’
Now our evenings are spent working, me drawing at the little desk, Jake on the sofa or the floor, picking out chords on his guitar, writing lyrics in his notebook. If he’s songwriting we work in silence, the focus of one motivating the other so that often it will be one or two in the morning before we stop.
We’ll go to bed exhausted and fall asleep straight away, but then I’ll wake again a few hours later and realise I’m alone. I’ll stumble through to the sitting room and Jake is always there, surrounded by candlelight, hunched over his guitar. Once I stood in the doorway watching, and the expression on his face shocked me; I knew I was witnessing something private, something he always tries to hide. I crept away and went back to bed, but it was impossible to forget the pain I’d seen, pain and something even more menacing. To me, standing there, it looked like hatred or despair. I lay awake, waiting for him to join me, promising myself that somehow I would find a way to make him tell me about his past. Together we would eradicate those memories, we would make him strong.
With his music, at least, Jake’s self-belief is unfaltering. He never has any doubt about whether he has what it takes to succeed.
When Robin offered me a show at his gallery, I had second thoughts immediately afterwards.
‘I’m not ready for this,’ I told Jake again and again, until he finally became impatient.
‘How can you expect people to believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself? Robin hasn’t offered you a show as a favour to me. He’s a businessman; he thinks your work will sell. He knows it will.’
