She bottled it. We had it all planned: Abi would take Lily to a friend’s house and I would wait for her, we’d come back together and do a whole ‘look who I saw near Lily’s friend’s house and who I invited back for a cup of tea’ scene as a background, and then we’d sit down around the kitchen table and Abi would do it. Or I would do it. But one of us would do it and Abi could stop pretending she had food poisoning from the works canteen and get on with being happy to be having another baby.
I should have known from the way she was hyperventilating the whole drive back, and then how she took about five goes to actually put the key in the door and then another full thirty seconds to turn it, that she was a flight risk.
‘Hello!’ she called out, her voice wavery and paper-thin. ‘I have a visitor,’ she added when she received no reply from her mother or grandmother.
As soon as her curious mother appeared from the kitchen, Abi decided to flee. ‘Saw Clemency. Asked her for tea. Need to go to work. Emergency. Bye.’ And that was it – she literally fled the house. I’m sure she actually ran down the path, too, shutting the gate behind her like an obstacle that would slow down anyone who decided to drag her back and force her to unburden her mind.
My other mother blinks a few times at me. She looks as though all her numbers have come up on the Lottery. It’s the reaction I need, one that lessens the anxiety about not telling Mum about this meeting. ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asks.
‘A coffee would be brilliant,’ I say. I am speaking quietly because suddenly I’m shy with just the two of us. We spoke the other time, but everyone was on high alert and there was so much pressure. Today we have none of that.
We take our seats at the kitchen table, the same ones we had last time I was here. ‘The photographs Mrs Smittson gave to us were wonderful. Your father and I have looked through them several times.’
‘I’m surprised he looked at them. He didn’t seem that interested in me the last time I was here,’ I say. I hope that doesn’t sound too bitter or accusatory, just the statement of fact it is.
‘He is interested. This has simply been difficult for him. None of us are sure of the best thing to do. In those situations, those who are most unsure of themselves often do nothing. He is interested. Of course he is.’
I nod. ‘Do you have some photos of you from when you were younger that I can see?’ I ask. ‘I’m curious about what you looked like back then.’
She shakes her head, the strands of her shoulder-length bob move like black silk threads. ‘I don’t like to be the focus of any attention. I have very few photographs of myself. They are in the loft, I think. I will bring them out the next time I see you.’
‘That’d be great,’ I reply.
‘Do you like your grandmother?’ my other mother asks out of the blue.
What sort of a loaded question is that? Is there actually a right answer? ‘She’s all right, I suppose,’ I state.
‘You have a secret, I can sense it, Tal— Clemency. If I asked you what it was, would you tell me?’
‘I’ve spent more time with Abi than I have with her but you don’t want to know what Abi has been telling me.’
‘Don’t trust that woman.’ The words are almost hissed at me and I have to pull myself back in my seat. A thick, poisonous venom is laced through every rivulet of those words and they shock me. Is that how irrational and unbalanced I sound when I talk about Nancy? And why is she suddenly talking about this? Aren’t we supposed to be bonding, not setting up a slagging session about someone else?
‘I am sorry, I am sorry.’ My other mother’s face is anxious now, her hand movements fretful. She’s worried that she has pushed me away, alienated me by showing in that moment the truth of her feelings, the fact she has the ability to feel such emotions at all.
If I think about what she did in having me placed for adoption, I still struggle. I expect her to be frozen, stuck at that moment where she was forced to make a momentous choice and unable to move on from that. It’s not fair to think she would be suspended in time, but part of me, the part who has been ‘other’ all her life because of the choice my birth mother made, expects it as the least she can do and feel. Guilt always stitches its haircloth inside my chest when I have these thoughts about my other mother because I am being unfair. I shouldn’t want anyone to feel how I do sometimes: trapped at a point in time. My point in time where I am trapped is that moment when I realised I wasn’t with the parents who gave me my DNA. From then onwards I always, always felt that I was from nowhere and was unwanted by everyone. My other mother’s ability to marry my father and have more children proves she has had some semblance of a normal existence.
‘Why don’t you like her?’ I ask my other mother.
‘It is not as simple as not liking her,’ my other mother states. ‘When I first came to this house, she treated me like one of her daughters. She was so kind and loving towards me. But when she discovered that her son was interested in me, that he was the one who was the father of my child, she became a person I did not recognise.
‘She did not approve of her son being interested in me. He had a big career ahead of him and it did not involve a wife and a child before he had graduated from law school. I was not good enough in her eyes and she did not want me or anyone connected to me to become part of her family. I do not think she would ever have approved of me because I was not from the right family stock: my parents did not have the wealth of the Zebilas and I had not been chosen by her. The first son, according to your grandmother, has to conquer business, the second son has to marry well.’
She is hinting that it was my grandmother who forced my adoption. ‘Couldn’t you have got married anyway, despite her protests?’ I ask.
‘This was 1978, Clemency.’ That is the first time she has said my name without pausing, without having to get the ‘Talei’ bit out of the way first. ‘We did what was requested and expected by our parents.’
My other mother’s brown eyes look over me carefully. Is she wondering if I am the type of daughter who would do as my parents told me?
‘People talk about the seventies and eighties like the freedoms you all enjoy in this day and age were automatically given when the decades changed. It was not like that. We were not in the fifties and sixties, no, but we grew up with parents from those years. Your grandmother did not want me here, and I could not have gone to Nihanara to my parents with a child born out of wedlock. The shame would have killed them.’
Shame. It is a label, tagged into my skin, into the arrangement of my DNA. Shame is what I am, what I represent. This is a reminder of why I hate my birthdays – each one is a marker of who I am. That in the time before I was born there was no excitement, there was only shame, fear, confusion, worry. My very existence, according to my mother, the only person whose authority I have to go on, meant that I could possibly have killed someone with shame by simply being born.
‘When I went to the hospital to have you, I was put on the ward that was for girls who were not married. I met a lot of English and Irish girls there and only one of us was going to be leaving with her baby. The rest of us, we had the parents who had grown up in the fifties and sixties, who only knew that a child born out of wedlock was wrong. And it is wrong.’
‘Wrong’. I can add that to the list of words that tag who I am. ‘Shame’, ‘Wrong’, ‘Not real’. If I was a wall, those would be the things that graffiti artists would spraypaint on me.
‘We loved our babies but we were told we could not keep them. And we did as we were told.’ My mother stares down at her hands. ‘I fought her as long as I could. But in the end, I could not fight them both. Your father made me accept that it would be better for you to have two parents who would have money and who would be able to give you the life I couldn’t.’
‘You think it was all her and not him?’ I say. It’s difficult enough knowing what to call them all outside the confines of my head, but when we’re having this type of conversation it’s impossible to give them titles that are associated in my head with family, connectedness and love.
‘Your father had, like me, been brought up to do as he was told. He would not have wanted to go against his parents.’
‘Even if it meant keeping his child?’
‘His mother always gets her way. That is why you must not trust her. If she is trying to create a relationship with you it is because she wants something. Which is why I’d like you to tell me what you talked about.’
I could take this demand, couched in quiet, unassuming, friendly terms, as a good sign: she is treating me how Mum treats me – like a daughter who will do as she is told. But I can’t help thinking: Who do you think you are? My mother, or something?
The obedience Mum gets from me is given because she raised me. It’s mostly annoying and unhealthy but it is what it is because she is the person I love, who helped me to grow up. Someone can’t march in and make such personal, intimate demands on me when they weren’t there. Maybe through no fault of her own, maybe through choices she made, maybe through fear and youth, maybe through a combination of all those things, but still, she doesn’t get to make demands on me.
I can’t say this. I can never say this. Because she might turn her back on me. She may never want to see me again. And, indignant as I am, I couldn’t handle that. I feel something for her. When I look at her I ache for the person I think she was back then – trapped into this decision that she felt she had to make. And I ache in a desperate, almost manic manner to find a way over this breach between us. I want her to be my mother. There is a space for her in my life: one space is filled by Mum; the other is still occupied by Dad. But there is another space next to them where she would fit, she could be the other type of parent I need sometimes. I have a ‘Mum’, I need this woman to be my mother. I had a ‘Dad’, I would love Julius to be my father. But Julius isn’t here, and my other mother is, and I want her, more than anything, to be my mother.
I say: ‘She was telling me about her illness. She doesn’t want anyone to know how unwell she feels.’ This is as close to the truth as I can get without betraying my grandmother and lying to my other mother.
‘She wants you to feel sorry for her,’ my other mother dismisses. ‘She has been ill for years. She doesn’t want to look after herself properly. She much prefers to have others running around at her beck and call. She had servants back in Nihanara and being unwell has given her the chance to have that in her life again.’
Whoa! I draw back again. ‘That’s a bit unfair,’ I say. ‘She has some serious, life-limiting if not life-threatening conditions.’ She has the perfectly rational fear of becoming trapped inside her own body.
My other mother’s face changes, as though she is about to start crying. She looks emotionally dishevelled suddenly. ‘This is what has happened to me,’ she says, the tears seep into her voice. ‘I am capable of dismissing another person’s suffering because I dislike her so much.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I sometimes feel like I am a teenager again.’ Is she admitting that she does feel stuck in that moment she made that choice all those years ago? ‘I sometimes feel like no one will ever understand me or realise what it is like to be in an impossible situation.’ She opens her eyes to find me watching her with my heart paused, my breath caught, as I wait for her to be honest again. ‘Then I remember I am being silly. I am an adult and I made the right choice at that time.’
‘Yes, I suppose you did,’ I say to her statement. It stings. At every point, rubbed raw by the fact of being adopted and finding out that she went on to have more children with the same man, it stings to know this. It also suggests that she would make the same choice again. In which case, why not simply admit it? Why not say that you didn’t want to give me up for adoption, but the alternative to not doing so was a price you weren’t prepared to pay? I think. Why can’t you admit that you were young and frightened, and had just given birth, so when you were offered the respectability of marriage, and a child in wedlock – which happened less than two years later – in return for signing the adoption papers, you took it? It might not be palatable for her to hear herself say that, but it’s the truth. And it’s better for me to hear that so I know that it honestly wasn’t me. ‘I suppose your mother-in-law thinks that, too, seeing as it’s what you say she ultimately wanted.’
My other mother is horrified by how she sounds, what is coming across from everything she is saying and not saying. ‘I did not mean it like that. I would not make the same choice if I was in that position again.’ She looks at me like I’m an adult, like Clemency. ‘Please believe me when I say I made the right choice at that time for all the wrong reasons. I would make a different choice if I was in that position again. I know that now. What I am trying to say is that your grandmother was an adult with more experience of the world and more opportunities than I. She was like a second mother to me but when I displeased her she showed me how little she thought of me.’
‘Did she scream at you when you told her?’ I ask.
‘I didn’t have the opportunity to tell her. She asked me had I missed my time of the month and when I said yes, she knew.’
‘That must have been hard.’
My other mother gives me the type of smile I give Mum when she is minimising something Nancy has done. ‘ “Hard” is not the word I would use.’
‘What did my … your … what did he say to her about your condition?’
‘She called a meeting to shame me in front of the family, to tell them all what a dirty girl I was and how I had disgraced them and myself. When she asked me the boy’s name I … I thought your father was going to tell them. To claim me. But he did not.’ The expression on her face shows the hurt she must have felt then, still feels now. ‘He was too scared. She discovered it in her own way, in her own time.’
‘What did she say? Did she take it back once she found out it was her son?’
‘One thing you must know about the Zebilas – once their mind is made up, it is almost impossible to change it. Your grandmother decided that I was a dirty girl who had led her son astray – nothing has changed her mind about that in all these years.’
‘But you did end up married to him,’ I state.
‘Yes, I did. Because it was what your grandmother wanted.’
‘I don’t understand, sorry.’
‘Your father proposed to me and said once we were married and he had finished law school we would find a way to get you back. In the meantime, I had to let you go to people who could take care of you. Your grandmother …’ My other mother stares at her hands, at the unassuming gold band on the fourth finger of her left hand. She is wearing the family metal. ‘Your grandmother made it clear that he was right to offer me that. It was the right thing to do. And she would have to ask my father for my hand in marriage. To do that, she would have to tell them about what I had done.’
The shame would have killed them.
‘I see …’ I say. I do as well. What she is saying is: when you do what my grandmother wants she is fine, but when you deviate from her plan for you, she makes your life a misery.
‘I don’t think you do, Clemency. It was the right choice because it was ultimately right for you, but I made that choice out of fear for myself mainly. I should have put you first. I may have made the same decision at the time, but I did not realise back then that you must always, always put your children first, no matter what you are offered. And your grandmother, she wielded absolute power over me from that moment on. This is the first time since I signed those papers that I have felt free.’
My grandmother isn’t all that bad, I try to remind myself. I actually quite like her. But if what my other mother is hinting at is true then I have no real idea who my grandmother really is, nor what she is capable of. But then, do any of us know what we’re capable of when our lives are threatened with change?
‘I need to go now,’ I say to my other mother. ‘I have work to do.’ And I don’t emotionally know what to do with all that you have confessed.
‘Will I see you again soon?’ she asks.
Considering the conversation, I’m so surprised she has asked that I have to stop moving and replay the question in my mind and think about it before I answer. ‘Is that what you really want?’
She wants to see me, but unlike my grandmother there doesn’t seem to be anything obvious she wants from me except maybe to spend time with me. This whole time with her has been so confusing, muddled, full of confessions and regrets and certainties about the right thing being done, and I don’t know how to feel about my other mother right now.
‘I would like that very much,’ she says.
I nod. ‘OK, then, I’ll come back and see you again soon.’
She grins at me as I stand.
‘I’ll just go and say goodbye to—’ I point towards my grandmother’s room.
My birth mother replaces her grin with a tight-lipped smile and offers me a sharp nod. She’s probably hurt that I have heard what she has said but I am still choosing to engage with the woman who possibly pressurised her to give me up for adoption. I have to see her, though. I can’t explain to my other mother why, that I’ve started to bond with my grandmother, that I’ve been trying to stop her ending her life early, that I have promised to think about helping her to die. That there is all this stuff going on which means I couldn’t cut out my grandmother even if I tried.
My grandmother doesn’t answer when I knock on her door the first time. The last time I came here it took her a while to reply when I called out from the corridor. But even as I wait, the sound of the clock counting out time, I know she is not going to answer. The other side of the door seems too silent, too still. Each tick of the clock seems to resonate into the bedroom, and return a hollow sound.
I hear my heart in my chest. It echoes, too, into the room behind the door. Each beat takes longer to sound out, and when it does, it seems to be magnified. My knuckles rap loudly this time. The knock ricochets around the corridor and is loud enough to bring my other mother to the door of the kitchen.
‘What is the problem?’ she asks.
‘There’s no answer.’
Her eyes flick to the clock. ‘It’s not time for her sleep. She will need her medication soon.’
She is down the hall in a few strides, she knocks on the door but doesn’t wait for a reply before opening it. I wait on the threshold, not sure how much a part of this I will be.
‘Clemency,’ my mother says loudly but calmly. ‘Call an ambulance.’
It begins then, the nightmare that she said she didn’t want to happen. My grandmother wanted to look Death in the eye while she went, she didn’t want Death to sneak in and take her slowly and painfully, leaving her powerless and afraid. Or to take her in even more minuscule increments, by making her a prisoner in her own body. That nightmare is being set in motion.