by Clare Boyd
I thought of Rosie’s head clunking into the wall, and worried about concussion. Had it been hard enough? I didn’t think so, I didn’t remember so. Her scream suggested otherwise, but I knew how piercing her scream could sound when she didn’t get the shoes she wanted. I thought of Noah, fast asleep, and then worried he would wake up and need me. I knew my mother would comfort him, in her no-nonsense way, and I knew Peter would make him laugh so that he forgot why he was sad.
There was a garage coming up. I indicated and pulled in. The lights in the shop were bright and welcoming. It was pitiful that I was grateful for them.
Having wandered down the sweets aisle, picking out a large packet of chewy mints, I made my way over to the counter to pay, and then spotted the locked cigarette cupboard.
‘Could I please have a packet of Marlboro Lights?’ I asked boldly. My cheeks flushed. It had been over ten years since I had bought a packet of cigarettes and I felt as though I was asking for a bag of crack-cocaine.
‘We only have Marlboro Menthol,’ the young woman said, unfazed.
‘That’s fine, and a lighter please.’ I wondered if she could tell I was pregnant.
As I waited for my bankcard to go through, I noticed a special-offer gift box of a mini bottle of Baileys and chocolates to go with it. It was the perfect size for one. I wanted to buy it but I couldn’t face the humiliation of asking for it. Instead, I nipped to the back of the shop and I chose a bottle of cheap Merlot with a screw cap so that I wouldn’t have to buy a corkscrew.
Back on the dark windy roads again, I picked my brains for ideas of where to pull over. The lay-bys were too dark, some with lone cars sitting there. Or an anonymous residential street in town, until I remembered that there was no such thing as anonymity in a small town. On every single road, I knew at least one someone, or one someone’s friend. I longed for London and considered driving up there. The less radical idea was a pub car park. If I spotted anyone, I could jump in quickly and drive away.
The Swann Inn was the closest. I pulled into the corner of the car park, right at the back. Hidden behind the bonnet of the car, I sat on the waterproof rug that I kept in the boot, took a swig from the bottle of wine and lit my first cigarette in ten years. It was bliss. I groaned in pleasure. And apologised to my unborn baby. One wouldn’t hurt.
The dizziness reminded me of my first ever cigarette when I was thirteen years old in a fast-food restaurant with my best friend. I remembered how naughty and reckless I had felt, just as I felt now, and I was sad that my adulthood had been completely devoid of such fatalism. Everything had become about ‘doing the right thing’, about controlling the outcome.
With each drag, the anger dissolved, as though it had been bolstering me, helping me cope. As it slipped away, I felt small and weak and unworthy. I wanted to hold Rosie in my arms, feel her warm softness, to kiss her better, to feel her love, her forgiveness. In spite of Rosie’s behaviour, what an idiot I had been to stomp into her bedroom like that. Unknowingly, I had been a walking pressure cooker: one little tap and all the heat had come out at once.
And now my mother knew everything.
Despair crept in through the cracks of my coping strategies, and then a deluge of melancholy engulfed me. The battle to keep my head above water was all at once completely unmanageable. I had been gripping onto the routine, the rules, the sameness, for what? What had it brought me? I had been charging around in a permanent state of exhaustion, juggling work and fridge schedules, clocking in and out of the children’s lives, while they didn’t get a say in any of it. All in the name of providing the best for them. But what was The Best? A child who hated me? A husband who drank too much? A family whose members passed each other like ships in the night? For what? For a better house that drained our bank account, for brilliant careers that left us too tired to have sex, for a bigger car that killed the environment, for a smarter school that rewired anxiety into their young minds.
I was holding a mirror up to The Best and its reflection was ugly.
How much room was there left for spontaneity, light-heartedness, romance, boredom, generosity, for hours whiled away fruitlessly, thoughtfully, with books flicked through, newspapers discarded, laughter and games and chatter and innocence.
Didn’t I only have one life? Didn’t the children have only one childhood? Did I really want to live it like this? Was I mad?
My stomach flip-flopped. I lit another cigarette – two wouldn’t hurt. I loathed to end my short snatch of rebellion and contemplation (who would have thought the two went together?).
The journey home was quieter. I thought of my mother. She would be smarting from a decade in the dark, a decade of ignorance, a decade of seeking out resemblances in her granddaughter, finding pride in supposed inherited traits, seeing the line of her genes follow down into another generation of Campbell Women. Her inability to wink was an odd quirk, which was traceable only to Kaarina’s genes, and seemed to highlight so much else that we didn’t know about her heredity. The apocryphal Campbell family stories of rare talents or unusual features from great-aunts and great, great grandparents did not apply. Rosie had been an unwitting fraud. And my mother would have to relearn her relationship with her in the light of their new, less biological, connection to one another. If she had always known, there would have been no trauma of finding out. She would have accepted it without hesitation. Just as Rosie would have. The thought was spine-chilling.
* * *
When I slipped back in, sheepishly, I found the front of the house silent. My mother and Peter were in the sitting room by the fire.
It was too hot in there. There was a sharp tang of alcohol in the air.
They looked up casually as though I was the missing guest they had been expecting.
My mother was in the blue-velvet wing-backed chair to the right, and Peter was on the sofa next to her. I was unable to look either of them in the eye, scared stiff of what I would see. Perched on the edge of the sofa opposite Peter, I was like a schoolgirl in a head teacher’s office.
I straightened the coffee-table book in perfect line with the book underneath it, neither of which I had ever made the time to read.
‘How was Rosie’s head?’
‘I gave her some paracetamol. She’s fast asleep.’
‘Go on, tell me how awful I am.’
‘I’m sure it was an accident,’ my mother stated firmly.
‘You don’t sound so sure.’
‘Gemma, don’t,’ Peter said.
My mother’s wan face was turned at Peter’s as if they were embroiled in a torturous love affair.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Get narky,’ my mother said, rattling the ice in her tumbler before taking a sip.
‘I’m too tired for all this,’ I said standing up.
My mother slammed her glass on the side table. ‘Sit down.’
I slumped back into the sofa, sliding my eyes back and forth across the picture rail that we had fixed in there, exactly ten inches from the ceiling.
Sitting forward, I said, ‘If we’d told you about Prague, we would’ve had to tell everyone.’
‘I’m not worried about what I was or wasn’t told, I’m worried about what Rosie knows.’
I glared at Peter, assuming he had persuaded my mother that it was best for Rosie to know the truth, after all these years, as though either of them could possibly understand it from my point of view. ‘So it’s two against one, is it?’
‘Stop being so childish,’ my mother snapped.
‘I’ve never felt right about telling her and I still don’t. Especially now. Sorry,’ I sighed, sulkily, sounding very un-sorry.
My mother sat up straighter, and closed her eyes for longer than a blink.
‘You did the right thing.’
I was flummoxed, and I looked to Peter and back at my mother. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, darling. You did it for her own good.’
I was then embarrassed by her support, unused to it. I didn’t
know what to do with myself or what to say. My throat crunched with un-cried tears. Ten years of holding it back, ten years of unnecessary guilt.
‘I did it for my own good too,’ I said, my voice wobbling.
My mother came around the table and knelt by me, squeezing my knees with her hands. ‘You’ve been so strong.’
‘I don’t know though, Mum, I don’t know. Look at us now.’
Had I? Was it strength or weakness? Certainly, my mother’s support would make it easier to continue as we were.
My mother returned to her armchair. ‘Well, Peter and I were talking about this. If she found out so close to the hearing, it’d be destabilising, actually, you know, potentially disastrous. Is there any chance, any chance at all that she could have overheard anything at any point?’
‘She didn’t need to overhear, I pretty much told her.’
‘Peter said you reassured her it wasn’t true.’
Turning to Peter, I asked him, ‘You still think she believed me?’
‘Yes,’ he replied simply, brushing a hand through his hair. I so wanted to believe it.
‘I have an idea,’ my mother said, sitting forward. ‘Do you have any old photos of when you were pregnant with her?’
‘You think that would reassure her?’
‘Might be worth a try. You and Jackie used to love looking at yourselves in baby photographs,’ she grinned.
‘Did we?’
‘You were so sweet.’
We beamed at each other, mother and daughter, rebooting the love.
‘We’ve got those lovely ones that you took in the south of France by the lavender fields, Peter, remember?’
‘The last holiday we ever enjoyed,’ Peter joked whimsically.
‘One thing though, does she know what an egg donor is?’ my mother asked.
‘Of course not,’ I guffawed. ‘She’s only ten.’
‘They’re frighteningly well informed these days,’ my mother added.
‘There is no way she’d jump to that conclusion. I think the photograph idea is brilliant.’
‘She’ll see where she really comes from,’ Peter said, smiling shyly at me.
My mother held her glass up to me, and announced proudly, ‘Indeed. She’s a Campbell girl all right.’
I swallowed away a fountain of tears. ‘Yes, she is, isn’t she?’
‘And a Bradley, thank you very much,’ Peter added.
‘You’re probably in there somewhere,’ my mother laughed, rolling her eyes at him.
Relief and elation made me giddy for a few moments, until I thought of my sister.
‘What about Jackie?’
‘We can’t tell her too. It’s too risky,’ my mother said.
‘But she’ll be so hurt.’
‘How can she be if she never finds out?’
‘Right, yes, I suppose,’ I muttered, feeling uneasy, my sense of shame reinforced.
For the rest of the evening, I tried very hard to maintain a buoyant mood. All three of us did. We upheld the pretence of being a normal family, although we probably sensed that normal was a thing of the past.
I wondered whether there was a part of me that had wanted my mother to challenge our decision. Her surprising and unquestioning acquiescence and her desire to keep the truth hidden away had prodded at a ball of shame, lodged somewhere deep inside me that I hadn’t known was there. I was taken right back to the doctor’s box of tissues on the mantle, to my inability to cry, to the strange embarrassment I had felt about being infertile, about being imperfect, about being desperate. The memory of those messy, disturbing feelings overwhelmed me. I wanted to crawl into bed and pull the duvet over my head and sleep like the dead.
I looked at my watch. My jaw clicked as I yawned.
‘I’ve got to be up in four hours for an early meeting.’
Tomorrow, I would be slinking out of the house before everyone woke up.
Chapter Forty-Seven
URGENT
Dear Mrs E (I can’t spell it, sorry)
Can I come to your shed please? Please bring some chocolate biscuits.
Love,
Rosie.
P.S. I really like the dark chocolate digestives.
* * *
Mira had found Rosie’s note in the blue bucket just before she left for work. The lined notepaper had almost broken apart in her fingers, suggesting it had been in the damp air all night. Mira had sent back a mini-gingerbread man wrapped with a reply:
Dear Rosie,
Do please come over any time after four thirty today. Eat his toes off first!
Love Mrs E.
* * *
The blue bucket had flung itself about on the dank line as though the gingerbread man was on a rough sea, which had made Mira giggle. It reminded her of how much joy she had felt when Rosie had first moved in and delivered her I’m called Rosie and I’m 3 note, which she had kept in a drawer with all her other cards from her children at Woodland’s.
Having returned the latest blue bucket message, Mira had been distracted all day at school, counting down the minutes until she could leave.
At four o’clock she raced to the supermarket to buy the biscuits, and then to the garden centre for some seeds, which she took straight to the shed.
With two pairs of socks on to keep her toes warm, and the radio to keep her company, she shook out the soil into green trays ready for her cabbage and leek seeds.
There had been no time or date on the note from Rosie, but she suspected she meant after school sometime today. Or maybe after dark. Either way, Mira planned to wait in the shed all night if she had to.
It had been about a quarter past five when Rosie had burst in on her.
‘Did you get the biscuits?’ Rosie said, out of breath. Her ponytail skewed to one side, a sore rough patch edging her bottom lip.
Mira gave her the packet of biscuits.
‘I’m really hungry,’ she said, picking at the packet frantically, checking behind her at the door, her breathing ragged.
‘Give them back to me, Rosie,’ Mira said sternly.
Rosie stopped fidgeting, and handed them over.
‘Sit down and calm down.’
She sat down, but her teeth bit at her bottom lip and her eyes darted behind her frequently.
‘Nobody followed you here did they?’
‘No, definitely not,’ she said earnestly.
Mira gave her a biscuit. Rosie nibbled it around the edge with quick mouse-like bites. ‘I’ve’ – nibble – ‘got’ – nibble – ‘to get’ – nibble, nibble – ‘get back in ten minutes.’
Mira was bitterly disappointed. She had hoped for some more time with Rosie.
‘Your note said urgent. Is something the matter?’
‘It’s so urgent I can’t even tell you.’ She was leaning forward, gesticulating at Mira, waving the half-chewed biscuit above her head.
‘You know you can trust me.’
‘Cross your heart, hope to die, stick a cupcake in your eye?’
Mira tried not to laugh at this reworking of the phrase. ‘Yes, cross my heart.’
‘I think I’m adopted,’ Rosie blurted out, stuffing the rest of the biscuit into her mouth and taking another.
Mira wiped her mouth, tasting metallic earth, soil across her lips. She stared bug-eyed at Rosie, who she had never thought looked like her mother. Her whole body flushed with heat.
At first Mira couldn’t hear any sound coming out of her mouth, so she cleared her throat. ‘Why do you think that?’ But it had come out too loudly.
Rosie’s chin dimpled and her face crumpled. ‘I heard her say that Catrina Doo-doo Shitface or something mega weird was my real mummy,’ she cried, her face mottling red and white. The bad language was like needles in Mira’s eardrums.
‘Are you certain?’
Rosie spoke through sobs. ‘I opened my window in my bedroom to tell Mummy not to go in the car but then Granny Helen came out and they argued and I heard it.’
Mira knew she should go to Rosie, to hug her, but she was rooted to the spot, looking on at the child as though she were a stranger or an apparition.
‘When did this all happen?’
‘Last night.’
‘Didn’t you ask them about it today?’
‘Mummy had a work meeting and I was too scared to ask Daddy or Granny Helen.’
‘Why were you scared to ask your daddy?’
‘I’m worried that my daddy isn’t my real daddy either,’ she cried, heaving out her tears, her little shoulders rounded, her arms wrapped across her stomach as if it ached.
‘Shut up,’ Mira snapped.
Rosie held her breath, stunned by Mira’s outburst, but her face fell apart again and quieter tears rolled, one after the other, down her cheeks. ‘I thought you were nice,’ she sniffed.
‘I am nice, but you don’t want Mummy or Daddy to hear us, do you?’ Mira knew that nobody could hear them. The shed was too far from the house.
Rosie’s expression darkened. ‘Why don’t you call them Peter and Gemma?’
Mira didn’t like her melodramatics and she turned to her soil trays and ripped open a seed packet.
‘It’s not such a bad thing to be adopted, is it?’
‘What? Are you kidding me?’ Rosie shrieked.
Mira’s jaw tightened. ‘You’ve got a roof over your head and food on the table, haven’t you? It’s not so bad.’
‘How can you say that? It would be the worst thing in the whole world!’
‘It depends who your birth parents are, doesn’t it? They might be murderers and rapists.’
Rosie looked petrified. ‘What are rapists?’
‘Horrible, horrible people.’
‘If they’re horrible then that means I’m probably all horrible too, just like them.’
‘Don’t be silly, you’re not all horrible.’
‘Mummy thinks I am.’
‘Your mummy is the horrible one.’
‘Don’t say that! I want her to be my real mummy!’ Rosie sobbed, her face paler with each juddering breath.
Mira raised her voice, ‘Your real mummy is the mummy who gives birth to you, and don’t you forget it.’ Black spots were swimming before her eyes and headiness weakened her knees. ‘Your real mummy loves you so much.’ Mira groaned, dropping to her knees, holding the side of the workbench with both hands as she let her head hang between her arms.
