‘This is Auntie Dervla, who’s been missing,’ Marie said. For this family had always viewed me in this way. I soon became aware that I’d always been discussed with Marie’s children – spoken of as part of the family, not seen as a shameful secret. It was just Vernon who had never been told.
I’d been getting on, having a marvellous life of course, unaware of them as real people, thinking of them as mysterious story book characters, who might or might not one day appear in the flesh. Having discovered that grave, and having believed Marie to be dead, made it even more difficult to reconcile the past with the present.
Chapter 15
Just an ordinary afternoon
Later, once the relatives had been dispatched, Vernon drove Marie and me to the nearest pub.
Finally, we could be on our own.
Our recent letters and phone calls had gone some way to lessen the awkwardness, but Marie still felt like a stranger. I couldn’t quite comprehend that she had given birth to me. I felt as if everything had happened to someone else, as if I was standing in for them. But I couldn’t stop looking at her face. Despite our different styles, we were strikingly similar, so there was definitely no mix up on the part of social services.
Still unable to get over seeing her in the flesh, I made my excuses and went to the bathroom. I was dawdling in the cubicle, mopping up tears with bits of loo-roll, trying to compose myself, when I heard her outside the toilet door.
‘Are you all right, love? You’ve been ages. Thought you’d changed your mind and gone back to Bristol. You’re not ashamed of me, are you?’
‘No! Don’t be daft, Marie,’ I replied, ‘I’m not here to judge you.’
We tucked ourselves into a little corner of the pub, and sat next to each other. I sat sideways on the chair to watch her. The afternoon that followed was filled with Marie’s grief and regret, most of which was probably easier to say as it was fuelled by Chardonnay. She seemed driven by a desperate need to explain her actions of so many years ago. We covered nine months and thirty-six years in three hours. But during that time, I discovered that Marie was funny, open and honest. As the afternoon and the wine took effect, I began to warm to her.
Perhaps her recounting of events went some way towards helping me understand the predicament she had found herself in. Pregnant with twins in 1967, an Irish Catholic and homeless. She had little option but to give up her baby, a double grief as her other twin baby girl died at a few days old. Marie had lost both of us.
I had been raised to think the best of her, with only sympathy and understanding for the situation she faced. So, I pulled myself together to go through the motions of what I’d been taught. I tried desperately to take Marie’s guilt away – kept telling her it wasn’t her fault, and that it was all right now. Nevertheless, there were times when empathy failed.
Marie was the bigger hearted of us. Her tragic life events hadn’t made her bitter. In fact, she had grown from them to be a compassionate and caring woman.
‘I didn’t have any choice but to give you up. Tommy left me pregnant a week before our wedding,’ said Marie.
‘You were going to get married?’
‘We loved each other so much. We were engaged, had been for eighteen months. We’d been to Ireland and everything to ask permission from my father and the priest to get married over there. They both said no. It made me so angry. I felt my father had no right to say no to me. When Tommy and I returned, we arranged for the wedding to be back here in England. Finally, my father sent a permission letter. Well, my mother must have got hold of him. I expect she explained that if I didn’t get married my life would be over. That was what it was like back then. But shortly after Tommy and I got back to England,’ she continued, ‘he went back to the barracks, while I stayed with his mother. We were meant to be getting married, but only a few days before the wedding he sent a letter, breaking it off. He said he was being posted to South East Asia, so his mother kicked me out. I ended up homeless.’
‘Oh Marie,’ I said, and from that moment the sympathy I felt for her was real.
‘A few months later,’ she went on, ‘I married a man who was known to the family. He’d always fancied me,’ Marie paused to recollect the events that led to my adoption. ‘I thought I’d be able to keep you if I did all the right things. But as the pregnancy wore on, it became apparent that he didn’t want you. I worked night-shifts in a factory to try to save up some money, but it was useless really. It wasn’t ‘till I’d actually given birth to you that the midwife said there was another baby in there. There were no scans in those days. You only weighed three and a half pounds each, you were little scraps of things. You had to go into incubators, so they took you off.’
‘Did you get to hold us?’
‘Yes, of course, every day, but I didn’t feed you. Your twin died at three days old, and after ten days I left hospital without either of you. It broke my heart. I never went to the funeral, they wouldn’t let me out of the hospital. Mothers stayed in for a week or more back then.’ She paused again. ‘At that time, Tommy was abroad, so he didn’t even know you’d been born or what had happened to your twin. We weren’t able to bury our own child.’
How tragic it was that her whole life had been marred at the age of seventeen when she found herself pregnant. She had endured an enormous amount of sadness – too much for one person.
‘I had a breakdown,’ she said. ‘It were several years back, but I’m all right now, love. Having you sitting here in front of me, seeing my child. I never thought this would happen.’
Guilt set in. Obviously, I hadn’t chosen any of this to happen, but since my arrival into this world, Marie’s life had been set to be a disaster. I wondered if we were both still defined by the events that happened such a long time ago, the consequences of which had been so far reaching.
‘I feel so bad that all those things made you ill,’ I said.
‘It’s not your fault. Things were different back then, Dervla. People didn’t go to counselling in my day. They sent me to hospital in the end, years later. Poor Vernon, he’s such a kind man. And poor Carla! She’s such a worrier – she’d only just had her first child at that time.’
‘Did they keep you there for a long time?’
‘Yes, a fair time, till they made me better.’
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What happened when Tommy left?’
‘When you were well enough to leave the hospital, I put you in a private foster home. I visited you all the time. Then social services stepped in, trying to persuade me to let you go. You were my baby, no one else’s, but they seemed to forget that. They kept bringing these papers for me to sign, giving my permission. I was all over the place, I was only just eighteen. I couldn’t take you back to my house as my husband didn’t want you, so…’ She broke off mid-sentence and looked down at the table.
I lit a cigarette. It was exhausting, trying to make sense of it all; trying to catch up on decades of information in one afternoon. But Marie had much more to tell me.
‘I couldn’t take you back to my own foster parents to live. My foster mum offered, but my foster father was a bastard. I wouldn’t have let him get his hands on you. He was a cruel man. In the end, the social worker put so much pressure on, telling me you’d have a good life somewhere else, a life I couldn’t offer you, that in the end I believed it. I did it for your own good, but not for mine. I never wanted you to go away from me, Dervla, I wanted you with me. I tried everything to keep you.’ She reached out and stroked my hand. ‘I used to get you from the foster carer all the time, take you out for a few hours. One day I had to take you to the social worker so she could see how I was trying to care for you. She wanted to get her hands on you. She was a bitch to me, pressing me to sign all these forms, telling me it was the right thing to do. I was busy trying to feed you, but you were fractious that day. It wasn’t anything I’d done, but she said to me “
She doesn’t know you”. I had so little control over my life, she tried to take that last thing away from me – the fact that you and I had a bond.’
That afternoon, we consumed a whole bottle of wine, which wasn’t a wise thing to do, because alcohol, Marie told me, gave her a migraine. This particular session resulted in Vernon getting the car out again to come and collect us. He pulled up outside the pub and wound down the window.
‘Oh, crap, look at the state of her,’ he said. ‘She’ll have to lie in a darkened room when we get back. It can take up to three days to shift one of her headaches.’
I sat on Marie’s large white sofa, which was so big my legs wouldn’t reach the floor. I was tucked up waiting patiently for my mum. Although I was thirty-six, I felt about ten years old, but with the attitude of a teenager. The room felt hot, a gas fire hummed out its warmth. I looked around; the room was cream, minimalistic. Marie clearly didn’t like clutter. The only ornament was a silver and white Art Deco figurine, carefully placed, which sat alone on the mantelpiece shelf looking down on us.
Vernon and I sat next to each other, facing the biggest television screen on earth. That day, I watched TV for the first time in years. I normally only listened to the radio as I agree with the subliminal advertising theory. That couldn’t possibly be happening to Radio 4 listeners! I glanced at my watch. It was seven o’clock. I was going to miss The Archers.
When Marie surfaced, she looked washed out; her face, without the foundation, was pale. Despite how she must be feeling, she leapt up and started bustling about in the kitchen, clanking pots, rummaging in the fridge.
‘What do you want for tea, Dervla?’ she asked. ‘What would you like, love? I can make you anything.’
I refused her offer of dinner. I didn’t want to eat her food – I didn’t want her to give me anything. It was too late to fix things with a meal. After all the years of wondering, there was too much to digest. What I did know, though, was that I didn’t want meat and two veg on a tray in front of the telly.
Chapter 16
The Jeremy Kyle experience
I stepped out of Marie’s bungalow into the damp January streets. I’d promised her I wouldn’t be long, wouldn’t wander far, but ended up going miles down the road to get a signal –
‘What are they like, Diz?’ Will asked.
‘Kind, they’re really kind, Will.’
He’d been waiting all day to hear this news. I imagined him in our home, surrounded by trees rather than the rows of grey terraced and prefabricated houses I was now facing. I found the tiny gardens and yards depressing; there was no greenery, no space to be yourself. As much as anything else, this day had been a culture shock.
‘And what’s it like there?’ he asked.
‘You’d hate it up here, you don’t like the city at the best of times,’ I said.
‘But you’re okay?’
‘I wish I were home with you,’ I told him.
I walked back up the street. Darkness had fallen and the windows in Marie’s house were lit by lamps; it looked warm and cosy in there, but it wasn’t home.
Once I was back inside the bungalow, Marie greeted me like a special guest. I was fussed over, worried about. It seemed bizarre to be here, in Marie’s actual house – the events that followed that evening were no less surreal. Carla and Helena came over and we went for a drink at a pub that looked like The Rovers Return. They said we could have gone up social club with Vernon but, as Marie still wasn’t feeling well, the two women who called themselves my sisters, accompanied me for the evening.
By midnight, Carla, Helena and I were pissed and in a taxi, telling our whole sorry tale to the driver. He said we ought to be appearing on the Jeremy Kyle Show. In fact, he seemed so genuinely pleased about our story that he switched off his meter. At one point, he pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the engine, flicked on the inside light of the car, and turned around so he could scrutinise our faces for any family resemblances. All the while we entertained him with tales of teenage pregnancy, abandonment, private detectives and a reunion of which he was now a part.
‘I’m not going to charge you your fare,’ he said. ‘That’s made my night to hear your story.’ People “up north” were “right friendly”, I thought – it was definite.
I’d already decided that it would be a bit much to stay at Marie’s house, so I was booked into a commercial-scale hotel; the sort of thing you find on every motorway services, where the beds smell of dead people. Inside my room, my half-sisters and I consumed Irish Cream until four in the morning. They recounted tales and recalled the visits to stay with their Irish grandmother when they were young.
Putting on their best Irish accents for my benefit, they impersonated her with enthusiasm. ‘The ghosts, Dervla, the ghosts! Get under the bed or the devil will come for you.’ And the three of us leapt under the duvet, pulling the covers up to our eyes, screeching.
In Carla and Helena, I had found two delightful new friends that I was strangely acquainted with. We shared so many family resemblances. It wasn’t long before we had our socks off so we could compare our feet and our three similar sets of unattractive chubby toes. The family trait of the webbed toe was discussed, and we all peered at my foot in mock horror. How did they both manage to squeeze their flat feet into high heels? I glanced furtively at my sensible Doc Marten boots cast aside in the corner of the room. My sisters were open and welcoming. This, as I later learned was true of Marie and all her children, but back then these people were new to me. I was grateful for Carla and Helena’s generosity. It swept away the tensions of the day.
I found it easier being with them than Marie. Perhaps it was because there weren’t too many years’ difference between us and our children were a similar age. All half-siblings together, all born to the same mother, but with a dampening down of the genes, except, I thought, my life had been like one of Vernon’s TV programmes, Lucky Escape to the Country.
My new-found family had decided for me that I would be lonely in a strange hotel, so Helena had been selected to stay the night with me, and Carla was bundled home in a taxi. Helena and I giggled at the thought that it might be that same driver that we’d met earlier, or the one who had helped Carla break in through her bathroom window recently, after she’d forgotten her key. He’d seen quite a lot of her as she’d climbed through the small opening wearing a short skirt and tiny pants. In fact, the taxi drivers of Sheffield already knew far too much about us.
Helena and I finished off the last of the Irish Cream, but the tone of our conversation became sombre as we got ready for bed. How odd would it be, sharing a double bed with a stranger? Not only that, this stranger was a relative – even more alarmingly, she was my half-sister.
But Helena didn’t seem a bit fazed about the sleeping arrangements. As she got ready for bed, she told me of the day a few months before, when she and Carla had accompanied Marie to meet my birth father Tommy.
‘I thought I was going to harm him… being there with Mum, seeing her reaction to him. I couldn’t believe his nerve.’ Helena pulled off her shoes. She disappeared into the bathroom, continuing to shout the conversation through the half-open door. ‘Mum was so shocked – she hadn’t known she was going to meet him. Carla had a phone call, from this woman, Irene. She said she knew Tommy and asked if Carla would meet her. She said that she had some information about you.’
I heard water filling the sink next door. After a few minutes of her splashing and clattering, it gurgled away as the plug was pulled. The top half of Helena reappeared round the door frame, still holding her toothbrush.
‘It was so strange. Carla took me and Mum with her, obviously, because we thought something was up. We went to meet this lady, Irene, but Tommy was waiting.’
‘I think he wants to try to put things right, he was very young when it all happened,’ I said.
She came out of the bathroom, now wa
ving the toothbrush, pointing it accusingly as she tried to get her message across. She paused between words to scrub dramatically at her teeth.
‘Yes, but my poor mum. Christ! This is all Tommy’s fault. After all, it’s him that facilitated this, what with the private detective and social services!’
‘I do think he’s truly sorry, and Marie seems relieved to have the chance to explain,’ I said. Helena grinned at me. ‘She is, of course she is, love.’ Her voice softened. ‘It’s so much better for her, now you’re known to her.’
She flung her toothbrush onto the dressing table, then climbed into bed.
‘But,’ she continued, ‘he was the one that made her pregnant. The prat left her for thirty-six years, then hired a private detective and found you. I’m sorry for giving him a hard time. But he really pisses me off.’
She was feisty and outspoken – but who was I to judge?
There was a lot to think about in the three hours of dream time that followed, before another day abruptly started, and we found ourselves on our way back to Marie’s – preparing to say goodbye again.
*
It was early when Helena and I entered the bungalow the next morning and I was shocked to hear from Vernon that Marie had already been cleaning for hours. Marie, however, was oblivious to Vernon’s concerns. She was in what appeared to be her favourite position, hovering near to her Dyson, ready to plug in and vacuum.
‘I’ve stripped the beds, love, cleaned the windows and sorted out three wardrobes,’ she said. She moved further up her kitchen, dishcloth in hand. Vernon shot me a look.
‘She’s obsessive about cleaning. Her nickname’s Marie Dishcloth,’ he said.
‘Take no notice of him, Dervla,’ Marie said, turning her back on Vernon. ‘I cleaned out the wardrobes because I was searching for something. I found you this – knew I’d put it somewhere safe.’
Marie held out her hand and signalled for me to take the shiny red box.
Strays and Relations Page 9
