Mine: ‘A powerful, emotive and sensitively written story about love and loss' Louise Jensen

by Clare Empson

  He indulges me, though, when I want to make my own version of it. I ask Eddie to photograph me leaning against the terracotta garden wall with Jake asleep, his head in my lap. Wearing only his ripped jeans, his dark hair wilder and longer than I have ever seen it before, with a long, beaded rosary around his neck, there is something of the modern deity about him. Unlike Pieri’s Jesus, his corpse a depressing greenish grey, my Jesus is suntanned and there is an almost imperceptible smile on his sleeping face, there only to those of us who know.

  ‘Take the fucking shot, Eddie!’ he shouted after half an hour of posing.

  Catholicism was inflicted on Jake by his grandparents, theirs the menacing, unforgiving kind, but he is still drawn to its trappings. Rosaries, incense, crucifixes, candles. Iron grilles for confession, the gilded robes of the priest. He loves this canvas, loves the fact that he is immortalised in a 1970s rock-and-roll pietà.

  He takes a photograph of the painting and mails it to Robin in London, and a few days later we receive a telegram.

  Congratulations. Your album cover, I think? Call it Apparition.

  The word fits the picture, I can see that, but why does it give me that familiar tug of unease, the way I once felt when my father’s mood threatened to turn?

  Eddie says, ‘Album cover. And also album title. Apparition, by Disciples. It’s perfect.’

  The working album title has been Cassiopeia, named for our night of star-gazing in Southwold, and Eddie, perhaps because he wasn’t there, perhaps because it was a little clichéd, didn’t like it.

  Jake fetches a bottle of sparkling wine and we toast the second album.

  ‘To Apparition,’ we say, clinking glasses, inspired, proud and wholly unaware that this spectre would soon implode our lives.

  Now

  Luke

  The power of the internet continues to astonish me. Less than six months ago, I typed my birth mother’s name into a search engine and ping! a match came back with an artist named Alice Garland living in Chiswick. After several days and several drafts, I sent her a letter to introduce myself and tentatively enquire about the two of us meeting. And the rest is history. Except, of course, that it isn’t. For the dream I had when I wrote that letter is not reaching fruition in the way I expected. My real, natural mother might come to my house three days a week, but I know little more of her than I did when I first typed her name into Google.

  Today in the office I find myself googling my birth mother again. Richard Fields and Alice Garland, I’ll try that. There’s a picture of the two of them – my real live parents, still hard to take in – at the opening of Rick’s retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery. I stare at them, Rick in a checked three-piece suit, Alice wearing a slim-fitting black dress, her hair up and exposing her neck, which is almost unfeasibly long and swan-like. She must have been so beautiful when she was young.

  I find a small article about her that I haven’t seen before, in a local magazine called Chiswick Life. There’s a picture taken in her studio, Alice wearing a paint-spattered shirt and sitting in front of a comical portrait of a pug, exaggerated squinty eyes and rolls of fat on its tiny-toy body.

  A quote from her makes me laugh: ‘This pug has a lion-sized character, the resilience and determination of a giant.’ Inside I know she’s amusing herself; outside she’s pitching for more business from her clientele of pooch-obsessed old ladies.

  When I type in Alice Garland, the Slade 1973, nothing comes up. I realise there are no press articles from that time on Google; if I wanted to find out more I would have to go somewhere like the British Library and sift through reams of microfiche. Or I could ask Hannah to look up Alice and Richard in the cuttings library at The Times. But what would I say? Hannah, I’m beginning to think my birth mother is not exactly who we think she is; can’t put my finger on it, just a feeling I have.

  Samuel is bathed and ready for bed by the time I get home, and dressed in something I don’t recognise. Instead of his usual white sleepsuit, a pair of pyjamas, navy with ladybirds on them, sweet though not exactly to mine and Hannah’s taste.

  ‘You bought him some pyjamas, Alice,’ I say, scooping him up from his sheepskin rug. He’s sitting up now, though Alice has him propped against a beanbag just in case. ‘How kind of you.’

  ‘Oh, I made them, actually. I thought I might have forgotten how, but it came back straight away.’

  ‘You made these? I’m so impressed.’

  Alice laughs, pleased. ‘Well, I’m glad you like them. I could make him other things if you wanted. Dungarees? I used to make those for you …’ Her voice fades, but I press ahead, keen to glean something from the past we briefly shared.

  ‘You dressed me in dungarees? I’d love to see some photos. Do you have any?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ll have a look.’

  ‘Really? No photos from that time? How long was it we were together? A month? Six weeks?’

  I hate myself for the way I press her, but she leaves me no alternative. Surely it can’t go on, this reluctance of hers to discuss our past?

  ‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘It felt like barely any time at all.’

  She gives me a sad smile and then turns away to pick up her handbag, and I curse myself for reminding her.

  ‘The fish pie is ready to go into the oven. It will take around forty-five minutes. What time will Hannah be back?’

  Hannah is working late again but she promised to be home in time for supper.

  ‘Around eight, I think,’ I say.

  ‘Well, have a good evening and I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodnight, little bird.’

  She blows Samuel a kiss as she leaves the room, and I succumb to the now familiar dip of disillusionment.

  The fish pie is perfectly brown by the time Hannah arrives, and I’ve laid the table with napkins, candles, a bottle of white wine.

  ‘Thought we ought to celebrate your success,’ I say, pouring her a glass.

  Hannah serves the pie, a gorgeous yellowy mess studded with prawns and chunks of salmon. We’ve eaten it several times before and it’s become our favourite.

  ‘God, that’s good,’ she says. ‘We are so lucky with Alice.’

  We have a variant of this conversation most nights and I usually agree, but now I allow a little of my bleakness out.

  ‘Lucky in one way, I guess. But in another way this whole thing is starting to do my head in. I don’t feel I’m getting to know her at all.’

  Hannah looks up at me in surprise, mid-mouthful, fork frozen in the air. She puts it back down untouched.

  ‘How do you mean? I thought you liked her. I thought we felt the same.’

  ‘Of course I like her. But I don’t know her. And wasn’t that the whole point? Mother and son being reunited. Spending time together. Forming some kind of bond. The only bond being formed here is between Alice and Samuel.’

  I take a big drink of wine. I’ve said more than I meant to. But Hannah is looking at me with concern. She gets up from her side of the table and comes around to mine.

  ‘Budge up.’ She squeezes in next to me on the bench. ‘Poor baby,’ she says, reaching up to kiss the side of my face. ‘This is harder on you than we realised, isn’t it?’

  I can’t rely on my voice just yet, so I have another swig of wine and allow Hannah to do the talking.

  ‘You do know, don’t you, that this is ridiculous. But completely understandable.’ Firm emphasis on the words. ‘The thing is, Alice has to form a bond with Samuel just by the fact of being his carer. If she didn’t, we would be bloody worried. In fact, we’d have to sack her.’

  She pauses, expecting me to laugh, but I can’t.

  ‘Luke, it’s going to take time for you and Alice to have the kind of relationship you want. In a way, I think there’s too much hurt on both sides. Yours at the fact that she gave you up, hers at the fact that sh
e had to and she still feels guilty about it. And when you feel guilty, you get defensive, you put up barriers. It’s going to take time to break those barriers down, but that’s all right. Time is something we have. You’re young and so is Alice; she’s not even fifty. You’ve got years and years to get to know each other.’

  ‘You know me. Always wanting to rush things.’

  ‘The thing is, you’re actually quite lucky. So few people get the chance to form a relationship with their parents as an adult; they have all the baggage of childhood, all those disappointments and rows that get in the way. You and Alice have a clean slate.’

  And, for the first time ever, I think: Hannah doesn’t get it. The baggage is what I want. The history is what I crave. I’d like to pick up that clean slate and dash it to the ground, little fragments of black scattered across our immaculate, Alice-swept, Alice-washed oak floor.

  Then

  Alice

  In August, the heat becomes unbearable. The little basement studio where the band are recording is anvil-hot, tolerable only in the coolness of night. Jake declares a week’s holiday.

  Tom and Eddie are content to lie around the pool deepening their suntans, playing cards and drinking vats of cheap red wine at night. But after just one day of this, Jake takes the bus into Florence and comes back driving a tiny lemon-yellow bubble car. All three of us, Eddie, Tom and I, gather around to watch him unfolding his long, thin body from the confines of the car; at six foot two, it’s a miracle he managed to get inside it in the first place.

  ‘We’re going on a road trip,’ he says. ‘Just you and me.’

  ‘In Noddy’s car?’

  ‘This magnificent machine is a Cinquecento. We couldn’t possibly travel in anything else.’

  Cars, cappuccinos – authenticity is Jacob’s drug.

  The Cinquecento has a top speed of around eighty kilometres per hour, so we decide upon a few nights in Siena, just a short drive up the road. The euphoria of those first hours, the two of us alone at last, puttering through a backdrop of Tuscan hills now burnt bronze from the weeks of scorching sun. It looks as I’d imagine Africa to look, beautiful but parched, bleached, bleak from the lack of green. Jake turns on the radio and the opening bars of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ start up, and he says, ‘Fuck.’ We listen in silence, volume right up, and afterwards he tells me about seeing Jimi play in a tiny little Soho pub called The Toucan.

  ‘You knew he was different right away, even before the mental guitar solos. He had it like no one else, not Jagger, not Bowie, certainly not The Beatles. That was the moment I knew nothing else mattered apart from music. I came back from that gig and I began playing guitar obsessively, all the way through the night. Sleep felt like a waste of time. I wanted to be just like him. I taught myself to play bass and rhythm guitar, I felt like I needed to be able to do everything better than anyone else.’

  He holds my hand and we’re quiet again and I know he’s thinking about Jimi, his death, a drug overdose that could have been prevented, people said, if only his girlfriend had reacted sooner. I remember her name, it’s scorched into my memory: Monika Dannemann. If she had dialled 999 half an hour earlier, he would probably still be alive.

  ‘But he might have been brain-dead,’ Jake says, as if we’ve been having this conversation out loud instead of in our heads.

  ‘What must it be like to be Monika?’

  ‘Hard to see how she’ll ever get over it.’

  Hendrix’s manager found a poem he’d written hours before his death, ‘The Story of Life’. A love song, really, to Monika, which talked of love being a series of hellos and goodbyes. A beautiful poem or a suicide note? No one will ever know.

  Jimi Hendrix’s death affected all of us, but with Jake you can tell it’s still raw. He rarely talks about his past and always tries to steer away from anything negative, but right now there’s a surround of sorrow in our tiny little car. I reach out my hand, tanned brown from our summer of sun, and place it on his thigh. He picks it up with one hand and kisses it quickly before returning it to his leg. No words are ever needed.

  When we see a sign for a vineyard, Jake pulls off the road. We drive at around five kilometres an hour up a bumpy track riddled with potholes, olive groves on either side, and finally, after a long and jarring five minutes, a farmhouse comes into view, standard Tuscan fare of cream stone walls and a red tiled roof. Behind it the sweep of a vineyard, acres and acres vanishing into the horizon.

  An elderly woman comes out to greet us, talking in fast, lyrical Italian that neither of us understands. We stare at each other in confusion.

  ‘Mangiare?’ she says bringing her fingers to her mouth.

  ‘Si, signora, grazie,’ Jake answers with the only Italian he knows. He mimes putting a bottle to his lips, head tipped back like a drunk, and she laughs.

  ‘Ovviamente! Chianti Classico.’

  There could be no more perfect place for lunch than this. A little wooden table set up beneath the shade of a sprawling cypress tree. A cheerful blue gingham tablecloth, tumblers filled with red wine, a plate of home-cured salami, a basket of bread and a bowl of the fattest olives I have ever seen. We eat greedily, assuming that this is it, but we are in Italy and we should have known better. Soon we are given bowls of truffle tagliatelle, wide ribbons of pasta that gleam with oil and taste more intoxicating, more sublime than anything I have ever eaten before.

  ‘Oh my God,’ we say to each other, over and over again.

  Jake, with his hamster store of extraneous knowledge, can tell me all about black truffles. The specific breed of dog used to hunt them – Lagotto, he even remembers its name – the wars that break out between locals when one stumbles across another’s secret stash.

  ‘It’s a bloodthirsty business,’ he says. ‘People die for truffles. You can see why.’

  ‘Sometimes I think I’ve fallen in love with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. How do you know all this stuff?’

  He laughs, then takes hold of my hand.

  ‘By the way, will you marry me? Any time you like,’ he says. ‘Today, next week, in five years.’

  ‘Should I answer?’ I say when I manage to speak, and now he smiles, tilting his head as he observes me.

  ‘I’d have thought so.’

  ‘Then yes, of course I will. Any time. Today, next week, in five years.’

  Siena in August is empty of Italians; just foolish tourists like us braving the heat, spending our days cowering within the thick walls of the Duomo. Not that it’s a hardship to be in this mind-bending building, more opulent, more dramatic than anywhere I have ever seen, in life or textbook. Acres of marble, columns that are striped and preposterously tall, a frescoed ceiling so gilded it is almost blinding. There is an altarpiece with four saints sculpted by a teenage Michelangelo, each one perfection, and I find it hard to take this in, that here in Siena, we casually stumble across Michelangelo.

  ‘Can we live here one day?’ I ask Jake as we brace ourselves for the burning sun of the piazza.

  ‘Just what I was thinking,’ he says.

  We rent a hot little room above a bar and spend our days seeking out shady restaurants, eating long, indulgent lunches of wild boar pappardelle and a porcini risotto with pecorino cheese that amazes us. It’s hard to sleep at night, so we have afternoon siestas instead, knocked out by our calorific lunches and carafes of red wine, waking thirsty and fuzzy-headed when the sky is turning dark grey. I love the evenings best of all, walking through streets so narrow we must go in single file while on either side tall coloured buildings lean towards each other like lovers. We’ll stop at our favourite café in the square and drink espressos, sometimes with a balloon of grappa.

  The sketches I love best come from this time, Jake freer, happier than I’ve ever seen him. While I’m drawing, he’ll scribble lyrics in his little leather notebook or take sips from his coffee or stare up at the
sky, searching for the hallmarks of his childhood, stargazing his consolation from those demons he will never share. We are so relaxed with each other in these days that I’m tempted to ask him. What happened? What is it that sometimes makes you so sad? But then I look at him, almost absurdly beautiful in his loose black shirt, hair that now reaches his shoulders, and he smiles back at me, raising his brandy in a salute, and I know that I will never do anything to recast him in gloom.

  Now

  Luke

  To tell you the truth, I’m a little bit addicted to my amateur sleuthing. I’m good at it, that’s the thing. I have Alice and Samuel’s timings down to perfection; I know exactly where they will be during my lunch hour. I have a little argument with myself most mornings. Today you will not follow your mother and son, I say as I sit down at my desk. But by midday the craving is upon me. I need the fix of looking, watching, examining; I like to catch the scent of Alice in the air – lemons or cedar or fig, an indefinable yet instantly recognisable perfume that is beginning to drive me mad.

  Alice, I discover, is a creature of habit. After Samuel has had his lunch at midday – relentlessly puréed slops, poor sod – she always walks up to the park or the high street, depending on whether or not she’s had a chance to go shopping in the morning. Sometimes they stop off in the library. I haven’t had the nerve to follow them in there. I stand outside the old sandstone building watching its passage of visitors: Clapham mummies wrestling buggies up the steps, pensioners who go to read the papers or perhaps in the hope of a random hello, a shaggy-haired tramp once, who was ejected minutes later.

  It’s better when, as today, they head for the shops and I can follow at a distance. I love walking behind Alice; there is much to glean from the unguarded posterior view. I see that she is happy and relaxed, occasionally I’ll even hear a fragment of a song she is singing – she has a good voice, clear and strong. Mostly I observe how devoted she is to Samuel, talking to him softly if he’s awake, constantly telling him about his surroundings. I can’t hear exactly what she says from this distance, just a muffle of words. Sometimes she stops, sharply swivelling the buggy in front of a shop window, where she’ll point out something of interest. The butcher’s, with its hanging pig carcasses, feels a little indelicate after his lunch of carrot mush.