‘Would you mind if I did see my birth relatives again?’
It’s two days later. Mum is about to go for a ride on her tricycle and I am going to work via Beached Heads. In the past two days we haven’t talked about it. Mum left me to look at the baby photos on my own and I didn’t. I simply put the box on top of the other butterfly box at the bottom of the wardrobe, looked at the composition, realised that it looked like the big box had given birth to the smaller box so had to move the smaller one to my bottom drawer where I keep my hats, gloves and scarves, which I’m obviously not going to be going through any time soon.
Mum, who had hoisted herself up on to her bike, steps down again and turns towards me but doesn’t rotate enough to look at me fully – instead she stares mostly at the sea. It’s rough out there this morning; the waves seem wrathful, their anger appearing as a white, frothy rage upon the tops of the grey surf. I wonder if that’s what Mum is feeling inside about this.
‘Why do you ask?’ she replies, quietly.
‘Because I want to know how you honestly feel.’
‘How I honestly feel,’ she murmurs. A long pause then: ‘Yes, I would mind.’
Oh. I thought she might try to sugar-coat it, talk around it, gauge if I’m thinking of doing it.
‘Why?’ I ask.
We’ve never talked about this openly, it’s all been carefully, wilfully, left unsaid.
The pads of Mum’s hands are covered by fingerless cycling gloves and she raises her fingers to unclip her Hell’s Angels-inspired helmet and take it off. She ruffles her hand through her hair and continues to contemplate the sea. The first line of ‘Somewhere Beyond the Sea’ plays through my mind as I watch her.
‘Because I’m scared you’re going to get hurt again if you do this. What if they reject you? How will that make you feel?’ She hooks her helmet on to the padded leather seat of her tricycle, traces the outline of one of the flames.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought it through. I just know—’
‘I have. I have thought it through and I know you wouldn’t be able to withstand such disappointment and hurt.’
‘Mum, I’ve withstood worse.’
‘Like what?’ she demands.
‘Like what?!’ I’m amazed she has to ask. ‘Like losing Dad. Like my— my relationship with Seth coming to an end.’
‘They’re not like being rejected by your mother.’
‘But she’s not my mother, is she? You are. At the moment I barely know her.’
‘At the moment.’ Mum seizes on this so immediately I wonder if she has been waiting for me to say something like that. ‘When you do get to know her, you’ll start to think of her as your mother.’
And you think that will mean I’ll love her more than I do you, I think. Mum acts like my love for her is fragile, transient and transferable; as though I’ll never have room in my heart for two people with the tag ‘mother’. As though it is a forgone conclusion I’ll reject her in favour of the person who was there first – even though I have barely met the woman.
‘How do you know that?’ I ask.
‘I just know. A mother knows these things.’
‘So if you had a biological child you’d have loved them more than me?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘How is that ridiculous, Mum? You’re saying that if I get to know someone I’m biologically related to they’ll replace you, so why is it ridiculous for me to say the same about you having a biological child?’
‘It’s not the same,’ she snaps. Defensive, angry, my mum snatches up her helmet, plonks it heavily down on her head. Fumbles crossly at her chinstrap. ‘You know very well that it’s not the same.’
‘I really don’t,’ I reply. Out loud. For once it’s something I don’t keep in.
‘Yes, you do,’ she hisses at me. She mounts her bike, indignation on her features, and without another word or look in my direction, she cycles across the small car park in which we stand and heads to the cycle path that snakes around the building and towards Portslade, the opposite direction to the one I’m heading in.
‘I really, really don’t,’ I say to her retreating form. She doesn’t indicate as she turns the tight corner around our building and rides off at speed.
‘So much for it being wonderful news,’ I mutter.
Tyler’s coffee is going to have to be nothing short of spectacular to see me through this day.