SIX

I hadn’t tried to do anything about Owen because I didn’t feel as if he had gone anywhere. I understood that I had absorbed him, but I wasn’t lonely. I missed his touch and the sound of his voice, but these things seemed superficial in comparison with what I was beginning to experience. For the first time in my life, I possessed love. I was possessed by love.

But I did have a secret that I was too ashamed to discuss, an element of my past that had turned my life into a lie. The secret made me feel that I was someone radically different from whom I had portrayed, and I was always afraid that someone would find out who I really was, where I had really come from.

I found the birth certificate not long after we got broadband. Until then I had mainly used the internet to speak to strangers I met in chat rooms.

The name on the birth certificate was that of a girl I had never heard of, but who shared my first name and birthday. I opened AOL and fidgeted through the pained animal screech of the dial-up. I searched for the name, and it was only then that I realised the girl was me. That was how I found out I was adopted. I was thirteen and I had no idea. I scrolled through the search results, terrified of being caught but unable to stop, feeling entitled to these words that were rightly mine. That was how my adoptive mother found me – hours later – dry-eyed and stoic, squinting at the screen and trying to make sense of it all. She didn’t say anything, she just pulled a dining chair up next to me and sat down. For a long time, we sat there not speaking, the silence punctuated only by the clicking and whirring of the mouse. She didn’t try to explain or censor, but she sat so close that the warmth of her body held me together like glue as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. After a while, I asked.

‘Did they do it?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘there was no evidence.’

I wasn’t sure if that made their abandoning me better or worse.

I was adopted almost immediately after my birth parents were taken away. I was only between families for a few weeks, and I don’t remember where I was or what happened to me during that time. I can only imagine that it was neither bad nor good. It never seemed of any importance anyway.

I always felt guilty when I heard people talking about foster families and care homes. I knew that awful things happened to children who were not adequately protected, but I couldn’t empathise as I felt I should. People always said that it was the unlucky children who slipped through the net, but I think it was probably the lucky ones – of whom I considered myself an example – who were the edge cases.

After I found out I was adopted, I started to imagine that I could remember fragments of my past life. Certain smells would visit me as I lay in bed at night: lemon furniture polish, stale milk, the synthetic sweet perfume of young women, the stiff cotton of older, sterner ones.

My parents had run a day-care centre, and I imagined that I could remember the faces of the women who worked there, gummy-lashed college students and thick-lined matrons. I had never suspected that I had not always lived with these parents in this house; but when I saw photos of the day-care centre, I wondered if I could dimly recall being there. I had spent the first three years of my life there. Surely it must hold some memory for me. But it just looked normal, nondescript. How anyone believed that such horrors had taken place there surprised me at first, but I suppose that’s always the way.

After that day, I spent hours looking at my birth parents’ case, trying to conjure memories that might belong only to me. Perhaps I was the only one who could truly know what had happened. It felt traitorous to have forgotten.

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I was an only child, but I imagined that I could never have been the only child. I feel that I was never put first, but in truth I can’t remember. Perhaps this is something I tell myself to justify what my birth parents did, after. When I started school, I was quick to draw comparisons between myself and my peers: there were children who were prettier than me, children who could spell more words, children who made everyone laugh, children who were loving, children who were lovably independent. All these children were better than me. As I grew up, I realised there were people everywhere who were better than me in some way, but I have never seemed alone in feeling like that, in spite of my unique circumstances.

s

When I googled the name on the birth certificate, I asked my mother if I had been abused. She said I hadn’t, and I asked how she could be so sure. I don’t remember medical exams. I don’t remember police interviews, although sometimes I try to imagine the pressure of the questions they could have asked, the desperate desire to give the right answers. When I was eight, I lied to the optician so I could get glasses I didn’t need. I didn’t remember it, but it had become a family in-joke, so I knew all about it. How many other lies could I have told, how many secrets could I have kept more successfully, what consequences could there have been for my dishonesty?

Later, I would stare at the pictures of my birth parents I’d found online and try to remember anything I could about them. It was difficult to remove them from the context of the articles I’d read.

‘They loved you,’ my mother told me that day at the computer, ‘and you loved them too.’

I felt sick.

‘I don’t remember them,’ I told her. She smiled that sad smile of acknowledgement and didn’t say anything.

There were pictures of police officers escorting them from the day-care centre. The photos were sombre and serene, and I have no reason to believe that they didn’t go willingly, with quiet dignity. I can still see those photographs when I close my eyes, and I wonder: why didn’t they fight? Do the innocent accept blame so readily?

In the photographs, you could see children’s faces in the windows. They were blurred, but I spent hours staring at them, trying to identify which of those children was me. Which of those smudged little faces seemed most confused, most desperate? Although, I suppose, my birth parents were parents to all of those children in some small way, which is precisely why what they had apparently done was so disgusting.

The pictures I looked at most were those of my birth parents’ faces: mugshots, court photos, photos of our family life that the press had dug out. It was more worrying in those days, before family photos could readily be found online.

Their faces were never blurred, and I suppose it’s not surprising that they weren’t able to continue after all that happened. There was a lot of press coverage, so everyone knew what they had been accused of. In light of the horrible crimes they had allegedly committed, there would no doubt have been a lot of people who were unable to wholly accept their acquittal as truth.

When I looked at the photos, I would ask myself, Do I look like them? Was I really made up of those two people? What if they had done what they were accused of? Did that mean I was somehow guilty too? What if they had done it to me? What if I had known about it all, and had blanked it out, and what if the memory came back to me suddenly one day, how would I cope? Or worse, what if it was true, what the papers were saying about me? What if I was possessed, cursed, or worse?

My real memories – the ones that I am sure belong to me – all take place in the world of the parents I know now. I spent hours searching for those lost years but there was nothing there. I asked Georgina, my counsellor, about recovering them once, but she said that it was not worth it, that therapies claiming to recover lost memories were unreliable. I have always wondered if she knew something I didn’t, if she was trying to protect me from something.

Sometimes, I try to imagine the children I would have shared my earliest years with, but every time I think I’m getting close, the images become blurry and uncertain. I try to think of what their names could have been, but they blend together: Michelle, Michael, Michaela, Johnson, Thompson, Stone. I can’t remember any of them. Sometimes I wondered if I had met some of them, later, in university perhaps, when my name had been changed, and I had been moved to another city. I would always find out where the people I met had grown up, and if they had grown up anywhere near the town where the day-care centre was, I would stay away from them.

I spent a year with my new adoptive parents before I began preschool. It was sort of like an intensive parent–child relationship course that aimed to cover three years of attachment in just one. Having spent all my time until then at the day-care centre, I was intellectually adequate for my age, and I suspect that the year away from other children was to let the dust settle, rather than for my emotional or educational well-being.

My life had been fairly normal since I was adopted. I had no memory of what had happened. When I found out about my past, it was all I could think about. But it seemed abstract, as if it had happened to someone else.

s

People are always afraid, and if there is nothing to fear, they find something. The fear of any one individual is silly and shameful – no one cares if you are afraid of the dark – but a shared fear, a national fear, is binding, a cause against which we can all unite. Sometimes these fears trigger wars, but more often they form the beginning of something much subtler, something that rises up through the mainstream until it becomes so entrenched in our society that its object can only become real. And when we look everywhere for threats to our normal existence, we inevitably find them.

I never knew the children who made the accusations; their names were never released publicly. It seems likely now that they were simply trying to please when they said they saw my birth parents fly, when they said they were threatened with twelve-inch blades, that they saw babies slaughtered and human blood slurped down like vast, red milkshakes. It seems ludicrous now that anyone listened, but what else can we do for a child in pain except believe them? It was the early 1990s, in the wake of several high-profile cases of so-called Satanic Ritual Abuse in childcare settings around the world. ‘Believe the Children’ had become a mantra for many who wanted to protect children from unthinkable abuse. It was a few years until anyone would suggest – loudly enough to be heard, at least – that the methods that had been used to interview those children had been suggestive, that the families of those initial accusers had been vulnerable, that media outrage around a heightened fear of cults, violent video games and an onslaught of pop psychology had produced a moral panic on which we could blame all the wrongs in the world. For did it not make more sense for the people who abused children to be possessed by sheer evil? Was it not comforting, in some way, to find a reason for the intolerable; an enemy we could fight with love and purity and God, not guns and nuclear weapons?

When I asked my mum that day if they did it, I wasn’t sure which part I was asking about. When she said no, she meant that, in the end, there had been no evidence that any of the children had been abused or neglected, and certainly no evidence of satanic rituals. It was not reported that the majority of the children I spent those early years with had sent loving letters of support to my birth parents, how the accusers withdrew their accusations, how the most vocal parents faded quickly from the public eye. But by the time the panic had died down, it was too late. My birth mother – her name was Amanda – overdosed on sleeping pills shortly after she was released. In the photos of her, I can see my own thin lips and blotchy freckles. My birth father, Ellis, from whom I seemed to have inherited my mousy hair and straight nose, changed his name and disappeared. He needed no reminders of this tragedy. He could not bear to look at me. I never heard from him again.

It was a tragedy; this is how I tried to think of it. My family were victims of a media frenzy. The tabloids had said I was cursed, that I should be exorcised, that I was a carrier of evil. Of course, it was ridiculous, but I couldn’t help but be nervous of the occult after I found out. I couldn’t stop myself from wondering sometimes if there was any truth to it. If they weren’t guilty, why did they never come back for me? Was there some evil in me just waiting to come out?

I never told Owen any of this, because I didn’t want him to think I was crazier than I already was.