When I was young I used to slide my body against the corridor wall in the darkness to see if I could reach the door to my bedroom without turning the light on. My father would get so angry if the corridor light was left on, screaming at the top of his voice, ‘Turn off that bloody light! Do you know how big my lighting bill is?’

So I’d slink like a snake against the cold wall, counting the pictures that I bumped into, counting them all as I went to help me gauge how close I was to my room. If I even turned on the light for a second and he was in one of those moods he would fling open the door angrily and I would run. I was slight and nimble, used to darting out the way, unlike him. My father was so overweight, I didn’t recognise him as the same slim man from the photo of his younger self. Puffing and panting, snorting after me, his curly hair wet with sweat… I would giggle each time he tried to catch me. I always made it to my bedroom, closing the door on him, leaning against it to make it hard to open. He might have been overweight, but he was weak.

‘Zara, you need to respect me. Do you hear me?’ he would shout in his harsh judge’s voice.

I stayed quiet, thinking about respect. I might have been young, but I knew that it wasn’t something I could ever feel towards a man that treated me this way. If he wanted my respect, he wouldn’t get it by shouting. My father, however, wasn’t going to make me feel bad that night, because I had a delicious secret, a secret that convinced me that life really could feel good at times. No one was going to spoil that.

* * *

Last night I was at my best friend’s brother’s bar mitzvah – she seemed to have invited the whole school, there were so many children there. And I danced with David. A tall boy, with brown hair, olive skin and kind deep brown eyes, he is almost a year older than me

‘I’m fourteen and a half,’ he tells me proudly.

Taking my hand, he pulls me gently away from the party and down the pathway to the garden. It’s a little cold out but I’m still warm from dancing.

Halfway down the path we stop. Taking my face in his hands, he kisses me gently on the lips, and then slowly I feel his tongue pushing into my mouth. I have my eyes open the whole time. I wonder if he can tell I’ve never been kissed before.

‘I’m roasting hot,’ I say, as I lay back on the damp grass.

‘This will cool us down, lie next to me.’

I can feel the warmth of his body as our shoulders touch.

‘That’s a red dwarf star,’ says David as he points upwards into the clear night sky. ‘Can you see it? It’s smaller than the others. Doesn’t burn as much so lives for ages, it actually stops the other stars from shining brighter.’

‘It does?’ I’m impressed. ‘That’s a bit mean, though – everyone should be allowed to shine as bright as they want.’ He laughs playfully.

‘You’re cute,’ he says.

I instantly blush, glad that he can’t see me in the darkness.

‘Isn’t it amazing,’ I whisper to him, ‘that everyone in the whole world lives under the same sky, seeing the same moon?’

‘I’ve never really thought about that,’ he replies honestly, propping himself up next to me.

‘I think about it all the time,’ I whisper. I can feel him looking at me.

‘Why do you think about that?’ he asks.

I decide to reveal my secret, something I rarely tell anyone.

‘My mother… Well, my first mother, she had to give me away. I think about her looking at the sky, seeing the stars and the moon… I think about her a lot.’ I stretch out, touching David’s hand.

‘Do you think she does?’ I ask him.

‘Look at the sky? Of course, she must,’ he replies.

‘I like to imagine that,’ I say. ‘It makes me feel closer to her,’ Feeling self-conscious, I turn towards him and I ask urgently, ‘Is that silly?’

He lays there silently for a moment and then says, ‘No, it’s not silly, but what about your father?’

‘Father?’ I’m truly surprised. ‘I don’t have a father, I only have a teenage mother – that’s what they told me. A mother who couldn’t take care of me, living under the same sky. No one has ever mentioned a father before.’

‘Zara, everyone has a father.’ He sits right up then, looking down at me. A wave of embarrassment washes over me.

‘Let’s go and dance now. Do you want to?’ I say quickly, desperate to change the subject as he takes my hand and leads me back inside.

I feel like I’ve been lifted out of a giant dark cave into the brightest hopeful light. Here I am, just been kissed for the first time. More thrilling than that was the fact that I had another father out there. Very probably a kind, gentle father, because if I were really his child, whoever that man was, maybe he would love me; he would think I was pretty and tell me so occasionally. I would sit on his lap laughing and cuddling him, because that’s what fathers and daughters did. I’d seen it so many times on television and in all the movies: all daddies loved their own little girls.

And so my adopted father’s anger did not scare me. I knew now why he couldn’t play with me and cuddle me. It was because I wasn’t really his, and he didn’t understand me in the way a natural father would.

I felt dizzy with excitement at this new knowledge. Later that night, as my dad stares at the ground, ignoring me talking to him, not raising his eyes to look at me as he’s done for years, I actually feel sorry for him. After all, I have another father – another father out there, somewhere, living under this huge sky. And I knew for a fact that my father that lived in this house didn’t have another daughter.

Poor him, I thought as I closed my eyes that night, poor, poor him.

* * *

There are many children in our street to play with, but my favourite of all is one little girl, Cassie, who is the same age as me. She lives in a big brick house facing my family’s home in our cul-de-sac with her older sister and brother. I admire her sassy smile, the way she wiggles her hips as she walks and her swimsuit, pink and shimmery, with flower holes cut out at the side. She let me try it on once and I felt like a queen as I paraded in front of her.

One afternoon, when we were about eight years old, she and I were sitting on the hot steps that led up to my front door, licking ice lollies. My mother in her pale blue summer dress, covering her shapely body, was lovingly fussing around us with paper napkins to protect our clothes as they melted in the warm sun.

‘Lick them as fast as you can,’ she said smiling, as she walked back inside the house

Watching my mother go, I whisper secretively to Cassie, ‘How were you borned?’

‘Borned?’ she says, a little unsure at first as to what I mean.

‘Yes, borned. When you were a baby, a borned baby, what was your story?’ I ask, looking directly at her face.

‘Oh well, my story is simply spectacular…’ Cassie pauses, pushing back her dark hair with her sticky fingers and taking a deep breath she begins, speaking very proudly, ‘First, I rode on the back of a horse that could fly, to a place…’ She stops momentarily. ‘I forget what it was called, some magical place. There was a princess, I know, there was definitely a princess who came to meet us. She picked me up and placed me in my Mummy’s tummy so I would finish growing.’ Another lick of her lolly. ‘She then gave my daddy a special feather from a golden bird that she had tucked in her pocket. It was a lucky feather and then they just waited and waited.’

My eyes grew wider with wonder as my ice lolly melted down my hands. Licking a red blob off my wrist, I looked at her, wanting her to continue.

‘After they waited a few days or weeks, I was borned.’ She is smiling now, the red lolly around her lips, her hands spread wide dramatically as she continues, ‘They all came and bought me presents, so many that they filled the whole room. My bubba, my grandpa, Mummy and Daddy, all cried and cried.’

‘Why did they cry?’ I ask, a little worriedly.

‘Because they were happy, silly! When babies are born people are happy and they cry happy tears.’ She licks some more. ‘How were you borned?’

Sucking the lolly stick, silent now, then chewing the end of the wood and thinking about her story – the princess, the tears – I speak softly.

‘I wasn’t borned, I was chosen,’ I say seriously.

‘Chosen?’ Cassie’s eyes grow wide with interest.

‘Yes, chosen. There was a room full of babies all lined up in their cots.’

‘Like a shop?’ she says curiously.

‘Yes, I think so. The mummies and daddies walked along looking at each one, deciding if they liked them, whether they wanted a boy or a girl, a fat baby or a small one. I was the last one left in the Jewish baby home.’

‘How do you know you were the last baby?’ Cassie asks.

‘Because my mummy told me,’ I reply.

‘How could you be chosen then if you were the last one?’

I sit silently, my mind trying to make sense of what she has just said.

‘Cassie, I was chosen, my mummy told me.’ I feel tearful.

She links her little arm around me comfortingly. ‘Of course it doesn’t matter how we were borned,’ she says, her voice loud and high, emphasising the word ‘borned’. ‘Shall we pretend forever that we are sisters?’ she asks softly.

We start laughing loudly, leaning back on the hot steps and giggling in the way only best friends can. In those small moments I felt so much hope.

* * *

I’m a secretive little girl, I know. I can’t seem to help myself or give my mother what she wants.

‘My mother and I were always so close,’ my mother says again to me, teasing her blonde hairsprayed do. ‘We did everything together, she was my best friend.’

I stand at her bedroom door, feeling the shame wash over me, along with the knowledge that I’m not what she wants in a daughter.

‘Did I ever tell you,’ she continues, gazing at her own reflection in the mirror, ‘that my mother died in February, the month you were conceived?’

I nod my head. She has told me this many times.

‘Isn’t it strange that she died as you were conceived?’ Pausing, she fluffs the back of her hair in the mirror. ‘You’re like her in many ways. You have the same mannerisms, but of course you couldn’t have got them from her, you must copy things from me. But it’s strange that she died as you were conceived, isn’t it?’ She is looking at me now as she turns to slip on her shoes.

She has rarely said the word adopted, it’s a word she seems to avoid. She did her duty as was suggested by the social services by reading me a children’s book on adoption. I have never forgotten that book – I still see the pictures of the adopted parents so clearly in my mind, peering through the crib at a little baby, saying he was ‘far too serious’ for them, that they would prefer to wait for a different baby, a ‘happier’ one. Are any babies whose mothers have just relinquished them happy? That was how my mother told me I was adopted, but what she doesn’t know is that I still cry for that illustrated serious baby.

I know she wants me to say something, but I can’t speak. I know what she’s insinuating – she wants me to agree that we are similar, that I’m like her. She wants something from me; she wants me to say her belief out loud that maybe I did trade souls with her mother as she passed and I was conceived but I can’t give her that reassurance because it hurts too much that she is so desperate for us to connect.

I’m silent, always silent, so my mother says frustratedly. It’s not that I don’t think or feel, it’s all there, trapped inside. I feel like someone could cut a hole in the top of my head and they would spray into the room, filling it to the brim – I always wonder if it’s the same for everyone else.

As my mother looks at me, I see the hurt in her eyes. My guilt and shame rise to the surface. I don’t feel connected to anyone or anything; I don’t understand how to live and I don’t know how to speak. My voice is so small, so quiet, and she can’t coerce it out of me, no matter what she says.

I continue to listen to her in silence as she sits at her glass dressing table. I wait for her to leave, seeing her walk down the corridor to watch a television show with my father then sit down on the red puffy stool where I can see my face from all sides in the mirror. It’s a place where I have spent ages looking at myself, wondering what I look like; seeing my nose one side and then the other. I listen carefully to make sure the TV is on and my parents are settled, and feel a rush at the thought of doing something that I’m not allowed to do.

I pull open the dressing-table drawer to find buttons and loose thread, some jewellery and lots of pieces of paper all folded up. I open them carefully. Mostly I’m looking at receipts, some from years ago. I don’t understand why she keeps them. Some are newspaper clippings from the Jewish Chronicle, revealing the death of a family member, a wedding, or a birth, the paper now yellow and dry. I wonder if she remembers keeping them.

I think I hear the door leading to the hallway open so I start to quickly put everything back exactly how it was and hide behind the door until I realise it’s just my imagination. My heart is racing as I think about her finding me.

‘Zara, what are you doing, looking through my things?’ I imagine her asking.

I would respond: ‘I’m not looking for anything in particular. I just want to know if you have any secrets that you haven’t told me.’

She would say back to me: ‘What exactly are you looking for?’

I would answer as honestly as I could: ‘I’m just looking for something, Mum. I don’t really know what, but I will know when I find it, and when I find it, I will tell you.’

And my mother would look at me with her blue eyes, a little confused by my behaviour, as she was most days, and say gently, ‘I would rather you didn’t look in my drawers, they’re private.’

If I could have been really honest, I would have told her the truth: ‘But you don’t understand, Mum. I can’t stop, I do this all the time – I don’t know why, I just feel the need to keep looking. And I don’t even know what I’m looking for.’

But we never did have that conversation. No one ever caught me, and nothing new was ever put in that drawer. It wasn’t until her death that I realised I’d been looking in the wrong place. All those years of going through her things I had never made the connection of what I wanted to find. Everything I wanted to know was in the old brown leathery suitcase, tucked high up in the cupboard above her dressing table, pushed to the back, where I would find information on my adoption and letters, the saddest one of all from my mother writing to the adoption agency, asking them for a baby.

* * *

I have very few memories of myself as a young girl. What I do remember quite clearly are the feelings, the fear, the clinging onto my mother’s hand in strange places. The way she walked so fast down the street that I could barely keep up with her. My heart bouncing and pounding in my chest if I was ever made to walk into a room with strangers and say hello.

‘Zara, run over and play with that little girl.’ My mum’s gentle but stern voice would say. But it only made me cling to her harder.

‘Zara, you walk inside first. You’re a big girl, you can do it.’

I knew my mother loved me but I also saw her irritation with me for being the way I was as a child: I was too shut down, too quiet, too sad. She could never understand why I was the way I was, and I could never explain.

And next came the broken-hearted memories. When for what felt like the millionth time my mother had to pick me up in the night from a friend’s house because of the panic and separation that I felt each time I was left apart from her. Or the time I went to Spain with my friend’s family and cried every single day, feeling such dread and fear that something was going to happen to my mother. Sometimes I still feel the embarrassment and humiliation within myself just thinking about it – I just couldn’t seem to do what other little girls so easily could.

‘I just don’t understand you, Zara. This is getting ridiculous. You need to stay away from home for one night, you’re not a baby,’ she said to me as I felt the instant relief of walking back into our house.

‘When are you going to stay away one night?’ she asked again, looking me in the eye sternly as I felt the panic rise. When she was angry I couldn’t speak. I was only nine or ten, but I felt shame seeping into every part of my body.

‘What a baby!’ my brother Gary chimed in. ‘Do you know how silly this is? How old are you, three?’

My mother did nothing to stop him that evening. I remember her drained-looking face in the kitchen and I knew that she had already grown tired of me, I was wearing her down.

I had stood quietly between my mother and my brother, unable to stop the hot tears falling down my cheeks at the shocking realisation that my own family could turn from me when I needed their comfort most. That’s when the longing really started, the dreaming of my birth mother. Some days she was as kind as my adopted mother could be, other days, just as cold.

* * *

I pick up the phone as I lay on the floor of my friend’s flat, curled up in a ball, foetal-like. I am a couple of months drug-free.

‘James, I can’t do this. It’s too hard.’ I hear the self-pity in my voice.

‘Sweetie,’ he says gently. ‘It’s okay, just for today, that’s all. Come to the lunchtime meeting, we’ll be there.’

‘I keep dreaming about things, it’s too much.’

‘Zara, God will protect you. You’re ready to feel it all now. Feelings don’t kill us. You know that, right?’

‘God is always your answer. I’m finding this all a bit too religious for me.’ I can hear James trying not to laugh. ‘I don’t know who I believe in, James, but I need the dreams to stop. How do I make that happen?’ I ask wearily.

‘You just need to trust, sweetie, and let them surface. This is the stuff you’ve been running from. I think it needs to come out, you have to trust,’ he repeats.

‘Trust, trust, trust… Is that your answer to everything?’

He lets out a thick laugh. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Just try it. Don’t give up before the miracle.’

Feeling myself smile at these trite words, I lie back, wrap myself in a soft blanket and let the dreams come.