by Clare Empson
And I tell him the thought that always comes at this hour.
‘It was my fault.’
‘I wondered when we’d come to that.’
‘Don’t bother telling me it’s not. I was there, I could have stopped it. I should have stayed with him.’
‘Suicide is never anyone else’s fault. How can it be? You might have prevented it. This time. But in the lifetime of someone with manic depression who had already tried to kill himself once? I’m not so sure.’
‘We’d have had more time. He would have met Charlie.’
‘And he would have been the most brilliant father. It’s so unfair.’
‘How can I carry on, Rick?’
‘You just have to, my love. Because you’ve got Charlie. And Charlie will always be a part of Jake. Do you know what I was really worried about? When you were having him adopted, I thought you’d have nothing to live for.’
That night Rick sleeps in the double bed with me, the baby sandwiched between us, holding my hand across his tiny back until I fall asleep.
And in the morning, when I wake to strong sunshine arcing in through the fine linen, the smell of coffee being brewed downstairs, the prospect of another day spent with my child, there is a kind of peace.
After a couple of weeks, I write a letter to my parents and Mrs Taylor Murphy, which Rick posts to Robin in London to avoid our secret location being exposed. I tell them I’m sorry, that I couldn’t separate from my son in the end. Babies are happiest with their natural parents, I say.
And it does seem to be true. Charlie has the sunniest of natures. Fed on demand instead of the cruelty of the regimented four-hour wait – how I hated hearing him cry just along the corridor; I could always pick him out from the other babies – he is content to lie in my arms gazing up at me for most of the day.
Rick gives him his first toy, an old-fashioned bear with eyes of amber glass, and he curls his tiny fist around its leg, holding fast. The bear goes everywhere with us: to the beach; to the cannons, where we picnic most days; on our daily pilgrimage to the shops in the high street.
I learn how to make clothes, sewing them by hand, first for Charlie and then for myself. I buy fabric from the brightly coloured bolts in the haberdashery shop on the high street and fashion dungarees and shorts and tops of orange, red and yellow. Sunshine colours for my boy. I make purple bell-bottoms for myself with flower badges stitched all the way along the outside seam, and when he sees them, Rick says, ‘You know, I think you could sell these.’
We begin thinking of ways to make money. We drive to an art shop in Norwich and buy an easel, oil paints, sketchpads and canvases for Rick. He’s trying his hand at seascapes to sell to the local galleries, and being Rick, they are wonderful. But I can tell his heart is not in it. I try not to think about what he has given up for me and Charlie, his place at the Slade, his career at the Robin Armstrong Gallery. But it’s there all the time, a pulsing, low-level guilt.
In high summer, Southwold is transformed with crowds of holidaymakers, the beach segmented by windbreaks, a huge, colourful British mess, particularly when viewed from the pier, where Charlie and I love to go. There is a hall of mirrors right in the middle, and it is here that I first hear Charlie laugh. Every day I take him out of his pram and hold him up in front of each mirror in turn so that our bodies transmute: wide and short, tall and thin with elongated legs, or tiny as Lilliputians. I smile at him in each mirror and he always smiles back, ready to embrace the joke, and then, at eleven weeks, he laughs. Can I have heard properly? I make crazy faces at him in the mirror and he laughs again, louder this time, half gurgle, half belly laugh, a pure, sweet sound. Oh my beautiful boy. In this moment I am utterly happy.
I buy a tiny blow-up boat with a perfect baby-sized space in its centre. The first time I take Charlie swimming, he lies back and stares up at a sequence of flitting, Raphael-shaped clouds. He smiles, absorbed in his sky-gazing, and I tell him, ‘You are your father’s son.’ I look up too, memorising the exact colours, and I think that soon I will be ready to paint again, and when I am, I will make huge sky pictures, in remembrance of my lost love.
In the evenings, Rick cooks supper for us. He has perfected the spaghetti vongole I craved from Florence, buying clams straight off the boats in the harbour and cooking the pasta to al dente perfection. Sometimes we share a bottle of wine, but most often we sit in front of the second-hand black and white television set we bought, laughing at the simple humour of Dad’s Army, Are you Being Served? and Man About the House. We sit on the sofa holding hands while our baby sleeps in his carrycot, and we joke that we are man and wife, just without the sex.
‘We’ll always have each other,’ Rick tells me when Charlie and I go up to bed. He says it every day, almost every hour, my dear, darling friend, as if by repeating it often enough he can simply erase my grief.
Now
Luke
My mother and I are in the kitchen preparing supper when Hannah walks in and delivers her bombshell.
‘I resigned from my job today.’
‘Oh Hannah, are you sure that’s what you want?’ asks my mother with surprising tact (she is learning; we all are).
‘I’ve never been surer of anything. This whole situation with Alice has made me realise how I feel deep down about leaving Samuel each day. And, actually, I hate it. I feel sick with guilt and ashamed that I’ve been putting myself and my career first. And missing out on the chance to be with my son.’
‘But you’re doing so well,’ I say. ‘And you love your job.’
‘It’s not for ever. Just till Samuel goes to school. And the paper is being fantastic. Mark has promised me a freelance piece every week. I’m still keeping my job title. I’ll make all my phone calls when Samuel is asleep and write in the evenings.’
‘Well, if you’re sure, then I’m very glad,’ my mother says. ‘I hope you’ll let me supplement your income. And any time you need babysitting, you just have to ask. Samuel and I are used to each other now.’
We have come so far in two weeks, my mother, Hannah and I. Christina has helped me through this terrifying breakdown pretty much single-handedly, sitting by my side during the worst days and driving me to my appointments at the Priory. I feel closer to her now than at any time in my childhood. I am proud of the way she cares for Samuel, ashamed that I once considered her old-fashioned and out of touch.
Hannah walks up to her and puts her arms around her, unthinkable not so long ago.
‘Christina, you have been a lifesaver,’ she says. ‘And we are so lucky to have you.’
Two things of note happen in my first week back at work.
On day one, Michael sends me the usual terse summons: ‘Can you pop in for a minute?’ and, as always, I arrive in his glass-walled office pumped with dread and expectation.
‘Sit down, Luke.’ He gestures to a chair. ‘Tell me how you are. What’s been going on?’
‘Everything just got on top of me, I guess. It’s hard to explain. Things at home, things at work. The doctor said I was emotionally exhausted, and that’s how it feels.’
‘I can understand that. I’ve sometimes struggled with the pressure myself. I’m no stranger to the therapist’s chair.’
He laughs at my shocked expression.
‘Yep, even a tough old bastard like me. Well, you’ll be glad to hear I’ve had excellent feedback from Reborn. They are this close …’ he pinches his thumb and forefinger into a minute gap, ‘to signing to us. I’ve promised them you will put together an A&R pitch to seal the deal. Spend this week getting your ideas sorted and we’ll present it to them next week.’
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday pass in an enjoyable haze of research. I’m listening to seventies Bowie, Chic and James Brown, trying to unpick the production, listening for sounds that will work in a revitalised noughties interpretation. The Dark Side of the Moon (with an accompa
nying jab of regret) lives on the turntable, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones too. This is the part of my job I love the most.
On Friday, just as the rest of the office is decamping to the pub for the weekly piss-up, a courier arrives with a square cardboard package for me. Nothing unusual in that; we’re a record company, we get sent vinyl every day of the week. There’s something about the writing on the front, though, that makes me look at the envelope for a long time. It’s familiar, I know that, and my heart is aching even before I’ve opened it up to pull out a card and an old album from the seventies. The album is called Apparition; it went to number one in the charts when my father died. I’ve done my research, I know the facts.
Nothing could have prepared me for the picture of my two young, beautiful parents on the cover of this album. An oil painting shows a teenage Alice cradling the head of her lover in her lap. He’s asleep, or at least faking it, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, his long dark hair flopping over the side of her knees. She is leaning against a terracotta wall and wearing a forest-green dress with thin straps, one falling from her shoulder. Bold, jump-out colours, it’s a stunning sleeve. But it’s Alice I can’t take my eyes off. She’s not smiling in this portrait; instead she looks out in utter contentment, her smooth, almost babyish face lit up by an internal joy.
I open Rick’s card with hands that shake.
I am so very sorry at the way things have played out between you and Alice. And I hope with all my heart that you’ll be able to fix it. In the meantime, this album belongs to you.
I extract the album carefully from its cover. I walk over to the record player and place it on the turntable with the exactitude, the reverence, of a high priest.
I sit, leaning against the office wall, with the album cover face up in my lap. I force myself to look at those lovers and to listen to Jacob’s voice, my father’s voice, and I tell myself as my heart breaks all over again that this is what I owe them at the very least.
Then
Alice
Jacob’s birthday at the tail end of August is my hardest challenge yet. I’m determined not to cry in front of Rick or Charlie, and I’ve kept quiet about the date even though I’ve thought of nothing else for the past week.
This time last year we were in Italy. I got up early and walked into Fiesole to buy croissants and cappuccinos from our favourite café and brought them back home. I undressed again in the darkness, the room still blacked out by its heavy velvet drapes, and got back into bed and covered Jake’s naked body with my own. I lay exactly on top of him, groin to groin, shifting from side to side, my breasts pressed against his chest, my mouth brushing his chin, his cheeks, his closed eyes. By the time he was fully awake he was inside me, exactly as I’d planned. He opened his eyes and said, ‘Christ, you’re amazing,’ and the memory of this lovemaking fills me with a grief so raw and insistent I cry out.
When I go downstairs to make breakfast for Charlie, Rick is already up, a pot of coffee on the stove.
‘Good morning, my love,’ he says, and I can tell instantly from the way he says it that he knows.
And then I do start crying, even though I have tried so hard not to, and Rick comes over and puts his arms around me.
‘Oh Alice,’ he says. ‘I cannot bear it for you.’
‘I just want today to be over.’
‘It’s still a special day. We’ll find a way to mark it.’
It’s beautifully warm, this August day, and we take a picnic to the beach and sit beneath the sun with all the other summer tourists. Families with foil wrappers full of sandwiches, packets of crisps and flasks of squash. Beside us a little girl is solemnly eating a Jaffa Cake while her father rubs suncream into her shoulders. A few feet in front, a man is building a sand car for his toddler; an empty Ski yoghurt pot marks the steering wheel. Jake loved Ski yoghurt; he could eat two or three pots at a time, and I turn away, scorched.
Charlie dozes in the shade of the buggy while Rick and I eat our sandwiches, and after lunch, Rick begins sketching, zoning in on a couple sitting close to the water’s edge. I watch over his shoulder as he exaggerates the woman’s roundness, her husband’s angularity, all elbows and shoulder blades cuddling his mountain of flesh.
‘You’re mean,’ I say, and he laughs.
‘This is for me, not them. Why don’t you go for a swim while the baby’s asleep?’
I miss my chance, sitting beside Rick, watching him finish his sketch. Charlie opens his eyes at the exact moment I’m looking at him. Instantly he’s smiling. There you are, his smile says.
‘Come on, then,’ I say, picking him up. ‘Let’s take your little boat out.’
The water, the warmest it has been all summer, soothes me. I wade out to my waist, pushing Charlie in front of me, and he gazes up at the cloudless sky and I try to think that somehow, somewhere his father can see him. For me, the sea is magical; the water soaks up my pain, and soon I am swimming, kicking my legs behind me, arms outstretched as if I am holding a float. When I look back, Rick is just a tiny dot on a blue and white blanket. I could do this forever, the physicality so absorbing that for a while I am able to think of nothing; it’s just me and my child and the motion of my legs through the water.
It’s only when Charlie begins to wail that I realise how far I’ve travelled. I turn the boat around and swim back to shore, kicking as hard as I can, but each cry of Charlie’s cuts through me.
Rick is waiting for us at the edge of the water, squinting through the sun.
‘For God’s sake, Alice. You were ages. How can you be so selfish? You shouldn’t take him out there for so long.’
It is the first time he has ever shouted at me, and my anger fires in response.
‘He’s my baby, not yours,’ I say, hurting him in the only way I know how. ‘And he’s fine. Here, you take him.’
I storm up the beach, intoxicated by rage, by anger. I walk all the way up to the cannons, where we have picnicked with Charlie so many times, and pace around them in tight circles, sobbing, sobbing. I want to hurt someone; maybe just myself. I feel like smashing my fist into the black iron barrels until my knuckles splinter and my flesh rips.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ I scream to the ancient guns.
I don’t notice a woman sitting on a bench close by until she calls out to me, ‘What’s wrong, my dear?’
‘My boyfriend is dead,’ I tell her. ‘He died. He’s dead. And I need him. I need him so badly.’
And I cry and cry and this old lady, whose name I will never know, tells me to sit with her on the bench, and she holds my hand and says over and over again, ‘You poor thing. You poor little thing.’ She tells me to keep on crying; she says, ‘Tears help,’ and perhaps she is right, because when I finally stop, I feel exhausted but the pain is almost gone, it’s muted and distant, and I know I can last for one more day.
Back in the cottage, Rick says, ‘Alice, I am so sorry,’ as soon as I walk through the door.
‘No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.’
‘There’s tea in the pot,’ he says, pointing at the table, and neither of us mentions my swollen eyes.
After supper, Rick takes a bottle of wine from the fridge. Vivid green glass, extended swanlike neck. He flashes the label at me.
‘Muscadet,’ I say, though what I really mean is: how could you? How could you remind me of that perfect weekend, you, me, Jake and Tom eating mussels and playing cards and drinking this wine as if our lives would continue to infinity?
‘Sometimes we need to remember,’ he says.
We wrap Charlie up in a sweater and coat and hat and take the wine down to the beach. It’s dark now, and we sit beneath the charcoal sky watching the stars come out, checking off our favourite constellations one by one. We don’t mention Cassiopeia, but he sees it and I see it and I think that he was right to make me come here, drinking the same wine and watching the
same stars of a year ago, linked together in the universe at least.
After a while, he says, ‘Do you know why some stars are brighter than others?’
And I shake my head, although I do know, because Jake told me.
‘It’s because they’re burning up hydrogen at a much faster rate. They last half as long as all the other stars. Live fast, die young. To be fair, we’re talking millions of years rather than billions.’
‘Nice try. But it doesn’t help.’
‘I think it does. You lived so intensely, you two. You experienced more love and passion than most of us find in a lifetime.’
I don’t say anything, because I can’t, but I do hold Rick’s hand, I do drop a kiss on my sleeping baby’s head.
‘I can’t bring him back for you, Alice. I wish more than anything that I could. But you will always have me.’
Now
Luke
In my experience, adoptee and birth parent reunions go wrong more often than they go right. Sometimes catastrophically.
Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris
My mother is installed for her fourth and final week of childcare, and I have to admit she’s pretty good at it. She has somehow managed to get Samuel sleeping in his cot at night, and here’s the thing – both Hannah and I love it.
‘The freedom,’ she’ll say, unbuttoning her pyjama top while I watch from the bed.
‘Exactly,’ I’ll agree as she leaps on top of me, covering my naked body with her own.
My mother has also got Samuel to wake later each morning – seven instead of six – by bolstering his diet (how many mashed bananas can one boy eat?) and by putting him to bed an hour later each night, which means we have more time with him. We will miss her when she goes.
On Friday, once the paper has been put to bed, there’s a leaving party for Hannah at Le Pont de la Tour. Champagne and lobster for the whole of the Culture team, subs included. She’ll come back slightly pissed and tearful and I intend to wait up for her, to soothe away any regrets about leaving. With Reborn poised to sign to us – a big meeting this morning should clinch it – I’m glad it’s her giving up work rather than me, but I do feel guilty about it. I offered to cut back on my days, but Hannah refused, as I knew she would. She understands how vital work is for my self-esteem. Music defines me, it gives me my identity, and without it I’d be lost.
