SEVEN

I scrolled through the numbers in my phone, wondering who I could turn to. Elliott had messaged me asking if Owen was okay and I replied that he was, that he had gone to visit family. It was the only answer I could think of that would prevent him from coming to the flat. There must have been clients expecting to hear from him, and soon there would be bills to pay, but I didn’t know the password for his laptop so I couldn’t check.

I regretted not getting the password from him, but I had always felt so guilty whenever I accidentally spied on him, reading his messages over his shoulder, or asking for too many details from a night out. I wanted him to share everything with me, but I didn’t want him to feel that I was invading his privacy. That was before I consumed him. Now his privacy was the least of my concerns.

More than two weeks had passed, and I had not spoken to anyone about what had happened. Every time I thought about asking for help, or even just talking about my feelings, I was struck dumb. Who would believe me? But it was becoming clear that my coping methods – keeping my head down at work, avoiding my friends, and passing my evenings and weekends in a sweaty, broken half-sleep – were unsustainable.

I had never really thought to expand my social circle outside of Owen, and I felt now that I could only try to talk to someone who did not know him in his own right. I would not be able to explain the events I believed to have taken place, but if I skirted around the issue, I might be able to take steps towards some sort of resolution.

I understood that most people would turn to their families in difficult times, but I had never been that type of person. I had never blamed my parents for not telling me about the adoption. They had done what they thought was right, and it probably did buy us some time to bond as a family. I was grateful to them for taking me on, but it was this active gratitude that I had grown to resent. To be grateful for something meant you had to understand the weight of losing it. This responsibility was too much to bear.

The rift between me and my adoptive parents had opened up during my adolescence; either that, or it had always been there, and I had not realised my own otherness until I was accidentally exposed to it.

As I pondered what was happening to me, I began to realise that – although I had always thought I was close with the person I knew as my mother – I had taken every opportunity to isolate myself from her. My first three periods had been absorbed by wads of toilet paper wrapped around my gusset. It was months until I confided in my mother the secret of this blood that symbolised the separation of myself from her. When I got my first boyfriend, I did not talk to my mother about him. I accepted our relationship – and his insistence that I was doing it wrong – as the natural way of things. I didn’t once turn to my mother for advice on how to be a woman, and when she proffered it, I tightened my shell to keep her out. When I first left for university she would check in almost daily, but somewhere along the line she had convinced herself that her love was a burden on me, and had drifted into the background of my life, where I held her at arm’s length.

My father and I had never been particularly close, but I had always understood this to be only natural for the relationship between father and daughter, a distance that grows wider as a young woman’s sex takes hold. Was it really me who had pushed him away, afraid that letting one man close would somehow spoil me for another?

Perhaps it was this pushing away of my parents that had me pulling Owen into me. I had been failed by two sets of guardians; four bearers of unrequited love that had been withheld or ignored. I had grown starved of love and completely ignorant of it.

For Owen, family was especially important. His mother had evidently not provided him with the support he needed, but his aunt had. He had always told me that I should let my parents get closer to me, but it wasn’t until now, having absorbed him, that I felt I could really start to understand what he was getting at.

I know it can’t have been easy for my adoptive parents. I always assumed my past had dirtied me for them, that they were suspicious, as if I might someday sprout wings and hooves and call the dark lord into our lives. I regret not asking them how it felt. I had projected my paranoia onto the people who had made it their lives’ work to love me, and in doing so I had peeled away a protective layer which I now desperately needed.

With Owen inside me, I was coming to understand a lot about the way I had approached the relationships in my life. But it wasn’t just understanding; I was feeling things differently. It wasn’t like my opinions changed dramatically, or my memories became warped, but I was now beginning to see everything from this perspective that I had always thought was right. I was starting to see the world in the way I thought Owen had seen it, the way I thought it was supposed to be seen.

I scrolled and clicked on the number marked ‘home’, a label that had never really applied, but had always seemed to be the only option.

‘Sweetheart!’ My father had the kind of voice a walrus might have if it could speak, booming and gentle. ‘We’ve been meaning to—’

‘Ali!’ My mother grabbed the receiver, and I could hear her tell Dad to go and pick up the phone in the bedroom, so we could ‘have a three-way’, which made my toes curl. I waited until I heard the scraping sounds of Dad picking up the bedroom phone, and then I told them that Owen had broken up with me. I wasn’t sure how I could have said anything different. But the sentiment was the same: Something bad has happened, I don’t think you can help, but I need you.

The soft rap of plastic on wood told me my father had put the phone down. He hadn’t hung up, just rested the receiver on my mother’s dressing table. And then I heard him whisper, ‘Have you told her yet?’

‘Told me what?’ I interrupted.

I was sure they were about to drop the big reveal, to tell me that I was cursed, or possessed. Had they always known this would happen? That at the age of twenty-nine I would consume another human? Within one second, I decided they had figured it all out and were going to put an end to it.

It turned out they had booked a trip to Thailand. They would be gone for ten weeks and were leaving in two days. They told me they had only just booked the tickets, but I didn’t believe them. I said I was happy for them.

‘Are you sure, sweetheart?’ Dad piped up. ‘If you need us to be here, of course, we will be?’ He ended on a question mark, but I knew that the question was not for me. Of course, I wanted them to stay. An obscene horror had happened to me, and I wanted to rely on my parents to fix it. They were the only people who knew everything I had been through, who probably knew more about my past than I did. I had not expected them to abandon me like this.

I couldn’t tell them what had really happened with Owen. They would blame it on post-traumatic stress as a result of my birth parents’ arrest, and I did not want them to send me back to counselling, not even with Georgina, who had helped me to accept so much as a teenager. It had been years since I had found out the truth and I had been coping with it marvellously, I thought. Until now.

‘Dad, I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I don’t even know what’s going to happen with Owen, and anyway, I’ve got loads of friends, I’ll barely even have time to think about it.’

‘That’s the spirit!’ said Mum. ‘And it’s all just experience isn’t it, for the book? How is the writing anyway?’ I held back a scream.

I don’t know what I expected them to do. I suppose I thought that seeing as they had tried to rescue me once, they might be able to try again. It seemed a little harsh, going away for nearly three months when I had just been dumped by my partner of a decade. But this was their time, their reward for saving me once. And anyway, they’d already booked it.

I hung up the phone feeling that a lifeline – perhaps my only one – had been pulled away from me. My parents would not be around during the critical point in this crisis. In ten weeks, I thought, the situation would either be resolved, or I would have resigned myself to it. The thought of suffering for longer than that was unbearable.