Fresh Flesh

by Stella Duffy

  “Indisposed?”

  “Well, either she really was ill or perhaps it was a euphemism.”

  “For what?”

  “Maybe it was their way of perpetuating the story that she was pregnant. Your father writes to his property bloke that he can’t go away because your mother can’t travel, can’t be left, implying what he hopes would be believed … it’s a good way of getting other people to corroborate the story.”

  “Maybe my mother really was sick.”

  “Maybe. We can probably find some way of checking out her medical records, but that’s not actually the most relevant part. What we do know is that something was going on which meant that your father didn’t feel able to leave the country in the months closest to your birth.”

  “My assumed birth. It’s not as if there’s a photo of baby me next to a copy of The Times from August 30th, 1959, umbilical cord still attached. Or September 3rd. For fuck’s sake!” Patrick spun around, smacked his fist into the table, narrowly avoiding spilling another pile of papers on to the floor. “I don’t even know how old I am any more. Not just by days, for all I know they could have been lying about whole years.”

  Saz lunged for the papers and placed a few other things out of the reach of his anger.

  “Patrick, calm down. Even if we don’t really know the exact date, they’re not going to have been lying by much. You do have tiny baby photos of yourself, don’t you?”

  “And my family photo albums tell us what?”

  “Well, though you can lie about your age when you’re as old as we are, it’s a damn sight harder to do the same with a newborn baby. They might have got away with those couple of days, but people would get bloody suspicious if they’d taken it any further than that. And I would have thought the last thing your parents wanted to do was arouse any sort of suspicions at all.”

  “Then why would they lie about it at all?”

  “So they could register you under their name. As theirs. It’s very likely your birthday is August 30th and maybe you were registered for that day by your birth parents, then when the Freemans got you a day or so later they reregistered you in September.”

  “So why tell me the August date in the first place?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, in a way, if they were lying on the birth certificate they had filled out, it’s quite nice that they told you the other date.”

  “Nice? What the fuck are you on about?”

  Saz shook her head, “I just mean that, even though they were prepared to lie to the authorities about your birth date so they could corroborate their story, maybe they wanted you to know your real birth date after all. That’s why they told you August 30th all along. Maybe they didn’t want to lie to you about something as important as that.”

  Patrick wasn’t prepared to be appeased, “Yeah, well, if they’d adopted me properly and not fucking well bought me in the first place, they wouldn’t have had to lie at all. Seems like they had an odd idea about what matters and what doesn’t.”

  “Yeah, but obviously they really wanted to make other people believe you were theirs. It’s not rational, but then I don’t imagine taking on a new baby – particularly under those circumstances – is going to lead to constant sensible and rational thought.”

  He shrugged, “You could be right.”

  Saz smiled, “And the night is young, there’s a whole lot more drawers and files still to attack, and didn’t you mention something about eating?”

  Patrick looked at his watch, half an hour since he’d left it, the salmon was probably close to perfect now and the wine would be acceptably chilled. He nodded, “All in good time, there’s a rather tempting couscous to start with, diced tomato and pepper salad, soda bread …” Saz, her appetite wiping all thoughts of client protocol from her mind, pushed him out of the room and down the hallway, “Patrick Sweeney, you’ve waited forty years for this truth, another half hour isn’t going to hurt.”

  Patrick rounded on Saz, “How dare you? Half an hour? Good God, woman, this meal needs savouring, time. Charm.”

  “Yeah, whatever, you’re the boss.”

  “No. I’m the chef. And the client.”

  Saz followed him down the hall, more aware of her place than ever.

  TWELVE

  The meal took precisely two hours and thirty-nine minutes. Saz timed it. She also ate one and a half servings of couscous with sweet pumpkin confit, a massive chunk of the salmon and an excessive portion of dessert. Saz forced Patrick to give her a second helping of the starter despite his protestations that it would ruin her appetite for the main course. It didn’t.

  As she explained to Patrick, relations between them now markedly warmer after a meal and a couple of bottles of wine, “What’s the point of torturing my body with an excess of exercise every day if I don’t then abuse it mercilessly to make up for it?”

  “Just wait. You’ll pay in the end.”

  Saz looked at Patrick’s full glass, his long lean body, finely sculpted face with barely an unnecessary wrinkle in sight, “Yeah, right. Just like you and Katy have.”

  “We take very good care of ourselves!”

  “Sure you do. Now. But if I’d spent my twenties in a haze of drugs and drink and shagging around like Katy did—”

  “I didn’t do too badly myself.”

  “My point exactly. If I’d done all that in my younger years—”

  “Careful!”

  Saz ignored his protest and continued, scraping up the last of the shortcake from the serving dish, “And if I still managed to look as fantastic as she does now, you wouldn’t find me advocating a quiet lifestyle of yoga and country walks.”

  “Not even to clear out the rage and bitterness?”

  “Nah. Long runs and chocolate. Double the endorphins. And sex, of course. Works every time. Now, are we going to sit here chatting all bloody night or get on with the job?”

  Patrick looked at his watch, “You can’t be serious, it’s half-past eleven! I’m not even sober!”

  Saz waited while he took another great slurp of his wine, “I had noticed. But we’ve got to get through it and you have to be at work tomorrow afternoon – so we do need to put in at least another couple of hours tonight.”

  “You could have mentioned it sooner.”

  “I did. You told me to stop being so bloody boring, pointed out yet again that you were employing me, and went on to rave about the fantastic Australian wine you were opening. How we could drink it all night and not notice any adverse effects. Remember?”

  “Mmm. Sorry.”

  “Never mind,” Saz looked closely at Patrick, “Would it be pushing things too much if I suggested you might have a little coke somewhere about your person?”

  Patrick laughed out loud, “There’s half a gram in my wallet.”

  “Good. That ought to wake you up for a bit and it’ll certainly keep me going for another hour or so.”

  Patrick shook his head sadly and reached into his coat pocket, “I’m shocked that’s the kind of person you assume I am.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I would have thought it might be a compliment – for a bloke of your age.”

  For the next ninety minutes they went methodically through the files. Saz had Patrick start on the earliest ones, while she tackled those starting in the year or so before his birth. She figured that while the early files were unlikely to shed any great light on the matter of Patrick’s adoption, it was still necessary to go through them just in case something had been hidden away. She guessed too that it might be safer if she went through the likely files herself and left the more innocuous ones to him – she didn’t want their whole evening’s hard work ruined if Patrick came across something else that wasn’t to his liking and decided to trash the place again.

  They worked in silence for awhile, every now and then Patrick exclaiming over something from his parents’ past, old photos of his mother as a débutante, a watercolour painted by his father when he first went to university, a stern letter
from his paternal grandfather to a lost little boy sent away from home at the tender age of seven and apparently not certain when he’d be allowed back again.

  “God, he was a bastard.”

  “Your grandfather?”

  “Pompous old tosser.”

  “Was he horrible when you were a kid?”

  “No, not at all. He was wonderful with me. And yet, this—”

  Saz shuffled some blameless papers and filed them away. “Yeah?”

  “Well, in this letter, he just doesn’t get it. My father’s obviously upset about something – he was only seven, it was his first time away from home, and yet all the old git can say in response is ‘It’ll be good for you, son’. Good for him? Christ!”

  “When’s the letter dated?”

  “1929.”

  “Well, exactly. You can’t judge your grandfather by your standards. Everyone sent their kids away to school then. It was normal for your lot.”

  “It can never have been normal to send a seven-year-old off by himself.”

  “Didn’t your parents send you away?”

  “No. At least, not until I was fourteen and even then I asked to go.”

  “You asked to go to boarding school?”

  “I didn’t want to leave home when my mother first died. Didn’t want to leave my father by himself. I felt responsible for him. I think he was really shocked when I eventually asked to go away.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “Tom Dunsford went to Charterhouse. It sounded good.”

  “You fancied him?”

  “Maybe a little. But that wasn’t really the point.”

  “What was?”

  “He could get hold of grass a damn sight easier than I could. So off I went. Of course, once I was there I realized I hated being away from home, but by then it was too late, I couldn’t go back having made such a fuss to get there. That’s the problem with making big decisions at fourteen, you’ve got no way of knowing if they’re sensible or not.”

  “Nah, that’s the problem with making big decisions at any age.”

  They worked on in silence for a few more minutes, then Saz added, “I’m glad your father didn’t want you to go away to school.”

  Patrick looked up from a sheaf of papers from his father’s university years. “Why?”

  “Well, after all the trouble they took to get you.”

  “We don’t know it was trouble.”

  “Patrick, big secrets always involve some kind of trouble – it’s just kind of nice that having got you, they wanted to keep you around. They didn’t do what all their peers did, didn’t shove you off to be brought up by strangers.”

  “Yeah. Nice.”

  Patrick stopped, looked around the room and then looked at his watch. “I’m sorry Saz, I’m just too tired. And to tell the truth, I’m finding it a bit hard dealing with all this. I don’t feel up to going through these things. It’s been good to remember that they did want me, cared for me. Trouble is, it’s …” Here Patrick stuttered a bit, then faltered. Saz nodded for him to continue when he could. “It’s just a bit much. I’ve been able to ignore his being dead for the past month or so. It’s been easier to just be bloody angry with my father since I discovered the letter from Leyton, and now, looking at all this has reminded me. The old bastard’s dead.” Patrick shook his head, “In the past few years, once he’d accepted what I wanted to do with my life, we became good friends. I miss him.”

  “Yeah. Of course you do.”

  While Saz wasn’t sure Patrick would be willing to accept comfort from her, she didn’t know how to stop herself offering it. She clambered across several piles of papers to hold Patrick, and was relieved he accepted her touch, his lean body shaking slightly with held-back emotion.

  “I’m sorry, Patrick, I ought to have been more aware of how this would affect you. You go to bed.”

  “No, we do need to go through all this.”

  “Yeah, but not half-pissed at two in the morning. Go on, I’ll just finish the drawer I’m at and then get to bed myself. I’ve pretty much had enough of paper cuts for one night.”

  Patrick didn’t need much persuading. He headed for the door, turning to Saz as he left the room, “Thank you, I do appreciate the support. Goodnight.”

  Saz nodded and then kicked herself once he’d left the room, guiltily acknowledging that until he’d actually broken down, the thought of his grief hadn’t once crossed her mind. She worked on, resolving to be a bit more sensitive to Patrick’s loss in future.

  An hour later Saz took herself off to the over-pink guest room, more than a little confused, but also gloating happily, all thoughts of insensitive behaviour relegated to the back of her mind. She’d been right to push them to get on with the search, she’d been right to start when they did, and she’d also been right to suggest she be the one to go through the papers from the year of Patrick’s birth. The long night had been worthwhile. At the back of a file she’d nearly put away because it just looked too boring to even think about opening, she’d found another letter from Richard Leyton. Who was very unhappy with the Freemans. He didn’t like their attitude and he didn’t want to comply with their latest batch of insistent requests but, purely because Patrick’s doctor was demanding to know his full medical history, he was prepared to enclose the briefest account regarding Patrick’s birth mother’s state of health.

  Saz flipped over to the attached page. The letterhead gave a private address in St Ives. Doctor Samuel Lees stated that to the best of his knowledge Lillian Hope had not in the past, nor was she in the present, suffering from any form of congenital arthritic condition. If young Patrick had been diagnosed as such by his current medical practitioner, Doctor Lees strongly recommended that the Freemans obtain a second opinion. Given the mother’s history, it was highly unlikely that Patrick had been correctly diagnosed. On an attached sheet of paper, Richard Leyton further recommended that should they ever make such excessive demands again, the Freemans would do well to consider engaging the services of a new solicitor. He did not sign off the letter with his warmest regards.

  THIRTEEN

  Patrick rubbed his eyes again, twisting hard-balled fists into each dry socket, trying to rub through exhaustion and into comprehension. It didn’t work. He raised his hands to his eyes for the sixteenth time, the sound of flesh grating across the rapidly decreasing supply of eyeball lubricant had Saz wincing. Gross body noises had always been far more unpleasant to her than the longest of fingernails on a dusty blackboard.

  “Will you please stop that?”

  “It helps me concentrate.”

  “Yeah, well it helps me throw up. Patrick, your eyes are blood red and now you’ve made them puffy as hell. You look like you’re allergic to yourself. How can that possibly help you concentrate?”

  Patrick grinned, “Yeah, it really pisses Katy off too.”

  They were back in the kitchen, huge windows letting in filtered light from the excessively well-protected grounds outside. Saz had gone to bed with the letter placed carefully on the bedside table, weighted down with the now-empty whisky bottle. She was prompted to hang onto the letter by an irrational concern that, having found a clue for Patrick, it might slip away before light came again – despite the famed security in the grounds. She slept a solid four and a half hours, then rose bemoaning the fact that she had no idea how to turn off said impressive security and so wasn’t able to get into the beautiful grounds for her morning run. Saz was agitated from lack of sleep and lack of exercise. Patrick had a too-much-coke comedown, a mother of a hangover and a father he now couldn’t place anywhere. They were hardly the most cheery of breakfast companions.

  “But Patrick, this could be brilliant. We’ve got a name for your birth mother.”

  “Yes, from Leyton. A man who quite probably arranged for me to be bought as a baby, a man I’ve known most of my life, who clearly encouraged my parents to lie to me, so what makes you think we can trust the name he gives for her?” />
  Saz’s voice whined upwards in exasperation. “We can’t trust anything yet, but at least we’ve now got something to go on.”

  Patrick turned the letter over in his hand again, then threw it down and put on some more dark roast coffee, “It’s all just so many fucking maybes.”

  “So we find out about your birth mother – and see where that leads us.”

  “Assuming what’s written here is true.”

  “Yes, of course, assuming loads of things, that’s how it works. We make assumptions and then have them proved or disproved. Kind of like real life.”

  “Kind of like no one’s real life but mine.”

  Saz sighed. She was furious with herself for letting Patrick drink so much the night before and pissed off that every time she started to think she knew how to be with him, his temper – or her insensitivity – took them back to square one. Or worse. Now that they had a name, the actual search could begin. She would get Gary to work on the mother’s identity. At the very least they could find out if a Lillian Hope had ever existed. The step-by-step method of uncovering the truth was pretty basic. Even Saz, tired as she was, couldn’t fuck up on that one. What she didn’t know was how to deal with Mr Grumpy. It was ten-thirty, they’d done nothing since she’d told Patrick about the letter an hour earlier, they had just three hours left before he needed to head back to London for work. She’d heard that the only way anyone got a response from Patrick when he was in one of his famed “moods” was to simply ignore the tantrum and get on with it. Mindful of what was soon coming her way, the years of breath holding and supermarket trolley terrors to come, Saz figured it was time to get in some mothering practice. She decided to give guilt a go.

  “OK, Patrick. You do whatever you want. You can sit here and complain about how shit it is, and believe me, I agree with you, the position you find yourself in really is truly fucking distressing. But moaning won’t help. Not today, and possibly not ever. God knows, I accept your grief is valid, but it doesn’t actually have any bearing on what we’re trying to do right now. We haven’t got a lot of time today and though we can come back down here again if we have to, I’m sure that you, like me, would actually rather go back to London thinking we’ve made some progress, instead of wasting our time doing nothing except depress ourselves. I’m going back to the study to sort through some more papers. Hopefully we’ll find something else that might take us a little bit further. Which gives you two options. You can sit there feeling sorry for yourself all morning, or you can come with me to do something about this mess. Which is it to be?”