Mum has her bike. Technically it’s a tricycle, which makes me less worried about her wobbling into traffic on two wheels. It’s a much more substantial vehicle and she has a greater surface area on the road, which can only be a good thing.
Whenever it was wet outside and Seth would speed off to Wakefield for work on his motorcycle, I would worry because he was so vulnerable and had less space on the highways than cars did. All it would take would be one slip on a patch of water or oil, or the misjudgement of a corner, and that would be it. He’d be gone. I’d have lost him and I could have prevented it if I’d stopped him from riding his damn bike.
My fears are similar about Mum, except I fear for those who dare to cut her up, too. I was dragged along to a bike shop out in Littlehampton and was expected to make approving noises and comments, which I duly did.
Guilt about not telling her about Abi unfurled its silky red ribbony threads and bound my questioning tongue so tight I barely spoke during the whole trip – I simply nodded and smiled approvingly. Even when she chose a black helmet with biker girl flames along the sides, and big brand-name trainers almost blindingly white, which she insisted on buying specifically for cycling, I smiled and nodded and showed my full support. Guilt also allowed me to watch her try on pair after pair of shiny Spandex cycling shorts until she came to the conclusion all on her own that khaki Bermuda shorts were more her thing.
It’s too impossible a thing to tell her about Abi. Every time I try, my mouth will not form the words. I know, eventually, Mum will be fine, she will understand that I did not go looking for this and I did not want it to happen. It’s the initial reaction I don’t want to deal with. The way her face will become a blank of incomprehension. How she’ll sit back in her seat or will sit down heavily. The way her eyes will cloud over as she tries to formulate the first of many questions to find out if it was truly an accident or if I had betrayed her after all she’d done for me. How I’ll have to keep reminding her that I love her and I haven’t been in touch with them since.
I feel guilty too about not answering any of Abi’s calls or texts. That is also an impossible thing to do. I want to speak to her so much it’s almost physically painful, but to do that I have to speak to Mum first. Or I have to set in motion a life where I lie to my mother. I left Seth for lying and I do not want to become a person who does it and then justifies it as necessary. I want to talk to Abi, reply to her, but instead I screen all calls from numbers I don’t know and I only call back the people who are clients or potential clients.
In this café-bar courtyard area of a boutique wine hotel in Brighton, I’m waiting for a new client and thinking about Mum out there on the mean streets of East Sussex on her bike. I’ve spoken to this new client a couple of times on the phone and he needs me to make an engagement ring for his girlfriend. He wants to propose at the end of the month and was hoping I would be able to make the ring quickly. ‘I can’t rush it,’ I told him, ‘it won’t turn out right if I rush it.’
‘No, no, I don’t want you to rush, it’s just it’s our anniversary then, and I want to propose.’
Why leave it so late? I asked in my head. I thought of Seth, of course. How he persuaded me against my better judgement to have an engagement party two years ago. I was very proud of myself that when the inevitable happened and we had to cancel it while actually standing in the hall, dressed up and ready to party, I didn’t say to him ‘I told you so’. And Seth was good, too, in that he popped all the one hundred and fifty balloons and ate as much of the buffet as he could before we had to bin it.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I promised the client when I dislodged the memory of how that night went from my mind. I told the client, Declan, to meet me with photos of his girlfriend wearing her favourite items of jewellery, to bring any ideas about the design and a list of her favourite things that could potentially be incorporated into the finished article. From talking to him it turned out that he didn’t want a stone set, which would make it easier, but he did want an elaborate design. I’d wanted to meet at Beached Heads, of course, but this guy could only meet me in his lunch break from work without arousing suspicion from his other half, so I’m here.
A few steps away you have the main road along Brighton seafront with its attendant noise and busyness, beyond that the aqua-green railings that are punctuated by entrances to steep stone steps that take you down to the promenade and then to the beach. Yet, this courtyard feels secluded, quiet, like you could be in a large villa on a private island. There are huge parasols sheltering each table, which from above must look like a giant patchwork quilt with the seams made of daylight. I’m drinking coffee in an ordinary cup. Whenever I take a sip, I experience what feels suspiciously like a pang of missing Tyler. Obviously I fancy him, I won’t pretend to myself I don’t, but missing him? That’s beyond ridiculous when I still have Seth texting me every other day and I don’t know Tyler well enough to miss him. Or maybe I’m missing Seth and, because I don’t want to, I’ve transferred those feelings to Tyler. That sounds far more likely.
I lazily flick through my photo album of Polaroids of my work. In the back of my head I am still looking for inspiration for reworking Melissa’s locket from her birth mother into something new and wearable. I keep coming back to making the locket body into a watch and using lengths of the chain to make the strap. I can’t make clockwork, though, and if I got someone else to do it, the price of the piece would be astronomical. But time seems so appropriate for Melissa: she had that locket waiting for her for such a long time.
‘You’re going to hate me, I know, but I had to do it.’
My fingers holding the corner of a page and about to turn it over, stop working. My heart feels like it has been fired out of a cannon and is now rattling against my chest, trying to find an exit point from my body. I carefully, slowly, raise my head to her.
‘Look, I know it’s not good what I’ve done.’ Abi pulls out a chair and sits down opposite me. ‘But hear me out, please?’ She rushes on whether I intend to hear her out or not: ‘You dropped a huge bombshell on me. It’s not easy to just walk away from that. I only wanted to talk to you.’
I lower the corner of the page in my hand, sit back to regard her. She has wonderfully shiny hair. It’s sleek and hangs just below her shoulders. She has perfectly applied make-up – she obviously learnt long ago which shades of blacks and browns emphasise the shape and size of her eyes, which tints of foundation give her a flawless complexion, which hues of lip-gloss endow her lips with that glossy sheen. She’s wearing a well-cut, expensive-looking suit jacket over a burgundy, ankle-length dress.
We’re dressed the same. Except my outfit has probably cost a third of what hers has. My burgundy dress was from a shop I found in the Markets in Leeds five years ago, my jacket was found in a second-hand shop in Wakefield and was taken in to fit only after much pressure on Mum three years ago.
‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ she asks.
I shake my head. If I don’t say anything, I can truthfully say to Mum later, ‘And I haven’t spoken to them since.’ There is no way I can avoid telling Mum any longer.
‘Why won’t you talk to me? Aren’t you completely freaked out? Cos I am. My whole life has been this huge, colossal cover up. If you met my mum and dad, your mum and dad, you’d know they were never the kind to do this sort of thing. I’ve always thought that they only did “it” three times, you know, what with them having three kids. But they … Before marriage and everything. And they just gave the baby away and got on with it.’
‘That’s me you’re talking about in that matter-of-fact tone,’ I want to say to her.
‘I keep thinking we’re supposed to be hugging and crying and stuff because of those TV shows.’
Reluctantly I smile at her because I know what she means. This feels a little under-emotional and inappropriate. We’re supposed to have exchanged letters, phone calls and arranged to meet on neutral ground. We’re supposed to have prepared ourselves for this moment once we knew the other existed. The meeting is meant to be a moment of great apprehension followed by great joy. Real life isn’t like it is on the telly, why do I find that so surprising?
‘Are you seriously not going to say anything?’
‘Who was the guy with the engagement ring?’ I ask.
‘My child’s father. He wants us to get married. If I’d let him, he’d have actually come today to get you to make an engagement ring. But I’m not marrying him.’
‘How old’s your child?’ I ask. ‘How old’s my niece or nephew?’ I should have asked.
‘I’m not telling you until you tell me why you’ve been avoiding me.’
‘It’s too hard to think about.’ I can feel tears filling up my eyes, ready to fall. I shake my head to will them away. ‘It’s too scary.’
‘Aren’t you even curious? Not even a little bit?’
‘Yes. But it’s all been sprung on me by, I don’t know, Fate I suppose. I didn’t mean to meet you. It was never meant to be like this.’
‘It’s the same for us, too.’ Us. She’s including my parents and my brothers in that. I wonder who else knows about this when my own mum doesn’t.
‘I was also avoiding you because I haven’t told my mum. She—’
Confusion dances on Abi’s face for a second. ‘Oh, you mean your adoptive mum.’
‘I mean my mum,’ I reply. My tone is as sharp as the saw I use for piercing and in response Abi draws back a little. I won’t have her do that, I won’t have her dismiss or downgrade my parents – she has her mum and I have mine. ‘I haven’t told her I met you,’ I say carefully. If I expect her to choose her words wisely, then I should do the same. ‘Mum lives with me. We’ve only just moved down here and my dad died recently. I don’t know what the thought of all this will do to her. It’s not as simple as being curious. If I’d gone looking for this I could have prepared myself and her a bit more. I didn’t, so I’m having to get my head around it in pieces and chunks. I need to steel myself to do the next thing. I would have called you back eventually.’ At least I hope I would. ‘But not until I’d told my mum and not until I was sure I was ready to deal with another chunk of this.’
Remorse, pure and potent, crawls across Abi’s face as she looks down at her hands and my fluttering heart begins its frenetic dance of escape again.
‘What have you done?’ I ask.
Abi’s right leg begins a slight but anxious jiggle. ‘I, erm …’
‘What have you done?’ A terrified type of nausea creeps up my throat.
‘She couldn’t wait. She wa—’
‘Oh, God, no.’ I need to leave. I need to get out of my chair and run as fast as I can away from here. In case of a fire, you’re told to exit the building as quickly and safely as possible; to leave everything where it is and run – do not, under any circumstances go searching for your belongings. I need to run, I need to not sit here and allow my belongings, the people I belonged to, to come for me. I need to run but I can’t move. ‘Please, no.’
‘She only wants to see you,’ Abi pleads.
Abi turns to the glass wall that separates the courtyard from the inside of the hotel’s café and beckons to the person beyond. I didn’t even notice someone sitting there, I hadn’t felt the weight of someone observing me, scrutinising every inch of me while I spoke to my sister.
Run. Get out of this seat and RUN! Inside my head that is what I’m screaming. I cannot move. She’s going to walk out of there and right up to this table and she is going to speak to me. And I am going to … I don’t know what I’m going to do.
She looks nothing like my mum. My mum has peach skin and grey-streaked brown hair that she’s finally stopped dyeing, and she wears Bermuda shorts to ride her tricycle.
This woman looks nothing like my mum. She looks almost exactly what I would expect to look like in seventeen years’ time, but not like my mum. I think I want to get up and hug her. I think I want to scream at her, ‘WHY?’ I think I want to walk away and never, ever look back.
‘Hello,’ she says. A simple and honest greeting. All the best conversations start with hello. I do not know what to say so I say nothing.
In her hands she holds a small cream box, on the outside of which she has drawn and coloured butterflies. She places the box in front of me. ‘This is yours,’ she says as if she doesn’t mind I haven’t said anything in response to her ‘hello’. ‘I made it to keep my pictures of you.’ She sits in the seat that Abi has vacated and she smiles at me like I’m a baby. ‘Talei. That’s what I called you. Of course you won’t remember that. It means precious one.’
I think I want to cry. I want to break down and cry until there’s nothing left inside me. A teardrop escapes from my eye and lands on top of the miniature version of the butterfly box I keep my precious photos in.
I stare at the woman opposite me.
She continues to smile at me as if she knows me, as if she’s always known me. As if I am all her dreams come true.
I can feel a pressure building up in my head that will cause me to explode. Gently, because I don’t want to disturb it, I push the box off my photo album, it really is nothing to do with me.
I am on my feet now. The woman smiles a bit deeper, but there’s sadness now and desperation. She doesn’t want me to leave. How can I stay here, though?
‘Talei,’ she says.
‘Stop calling me that!’ I shout inside. ‘That isn’t my name!’
‘Clemency,’ she says then, as if she has heard my silent screams. ‘Please, just stay for a while?’
I shake my head. No, no, I can’t.
‘Please?’ She says it so quietly, so kindly, I know I should change my mind.
No, no.
She picks up the box, holds it out to me. ‘Take this at least. It’s yours. I made it and kept it for you.’ My teardrop, perfectly preserved, sits on top of the butterfly, distorting in that tiny section the look and shape of its lilac and pink wing, causing a small patch of black veins to bulge.
I don’t want to take anything from her, but are there photos inside? Of me? Of her? Of the other people who are my family? My trembling hand rubs at my face, tries to dry the tears then reaches, still shaking violently, for the box.
‘I wish you wouldn’t leave,’ she says.
I wonder if that’s what I thought about her, the last time I saw her. I’m curious if in my small baby world, governed solely and wholly by the instinct to stay alive and knowing who was meant to do that for me, I looked at her with my blurred newborn eyes as she walked away and thought, I wish you wouldn’t leave. I wonder how long I cried for her, wishing she would come back for me, would take me in her arms, would fill my senses and world with that smell of mummy that all newborns are meant to know instantly. Did it occur to her as she walked away, went off into her new, childless life, that I would be craving that? I doubt she thought that thirty-seven years later she’d be saying the same to me.
I fumble in my jacket pocket, the nylon lining too cold and slippery to provide any comfort until I come across the emergency tenner. It always sits there, a neatly folded escape route if I need to pay quickly without rooting through my bag for my purse or the unsheathed change languishing at the bottom. I slide the brown note under my cup to stop it blowing away.
‘We’ll see you soon,’ she says. She smiles, although there are probably as many tears in her eyes as there are in her voice.
‘Yes, we’ll see you soon,’ Abi adds.
I wonder if either of them realises how much of a threat that sounds. How dangerous it is to someone like me who has been tricked and then trapped into this situation.
I nod. I find it hard to be rude and unfriendly to people, even at some of the worst times of my life. This is, it has to be said, one of the worst times of all. But I still can’t come right out and say no.