Before She Was Mine (32 page)

I asked Melody if she’d talked to her mother about these fears and she said no, she didn’t want to. I stressed again how carefully the adoptive parents are vetted, trained and
monitored, and how much they will be looking forward to giving baby Fay a loving home. Melody said that she only wanted the best for her baby, but since she and Fay had been parted she felt as
though she had ‘a big black hole inside her’.

Promised she could have an additional counselling session next week.

Follow-up: contact Maureen Harper about possibly delaying the assessment by the reporting officer for a week or so.

Next visit:
08/5/87

Signed: Diane Kozyra

The brilliant news was that Liv had, that morning, found some hair. She still had five more chemo sessions to go, but they’d changed the drug after the first four and
they did say she might get some re-growth before her final dose. She’d invited me into her bedroom to see. You had to look quite closely; nevertheless it was definitely there, tiny short baby
wisps.

‘I’m still wearing my wig for the autumn fair, though,’ she said. ‘Talking of which, chop-chop because we’ve a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it
in.’

I knew we had to be at the fair, setting up, for nine. The display boards were ready and in the back of the Volvo, but the trickier part was that she also needed a selection of pond life for the
Shropshire Mosses table. Most especially she needed newts, common and great crested, so she could do the whole legally protected species bit. It’s a message she’s always trying to drum
home among the public. Theoretically you can go to prison for interfering with a newt.

So while she fiddled with the wig, I took the bag of wildlife kit plus two nets and a selection of plastic pots down to the pondside and started fishing. Before Liv came out to join me I’d
already bagged a beetle, some unidentified larvae, several snails and about a hundred shrimp-things. ‘The water boatmen keep hopping out,’ I complained.

When I glanced up she was wearing not her wig, but one of Geraint’s green canvas fishing hats. It made her look like one of those eco-protesters you see on TV, the type who live up trees
and weave flowers round the prongs of mechanical diggers.

‘OK, good start. Let’s nab that dragonfly nymph and give it a pot of its own, though. Otherwise it’ll eat everything else.’

I watched her decant the vicious squirming grub into solitary confinement, then picked up my net and swept it again through the weed. This time I brought up a dozen more shrimps and a lone
tadpole.

‘My God, look at that,’ I said, shaking it in with the snails. ‘It should have been a frog by now, but it hasn’t even got back legs.’

She leaned over to check out my freak. ‘No, it’s fine. Tadpoles do occasionally over-winter in that state and develop next spring. Assuming they survive.’

‘Why do they do that?’

‘It varies. Not enough food to go round, colder than average weather. Pollution, in some cases.’

‘Or just general crapness.’

‘Yes, probably that too.’

Below the shadow of my net, pond skaters slid carelessly about, barely even troubling the surface, and for some reason I heard again Joan Steuer’s voice:
I don’t believe
it’s all been as easy as you make out.
Well, perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps I’d been a pond skater in a previous life, or a backward tadpole.

I swished again and got a leech.

‘Ah-ha!’ Liv pulled her net in, grinning. ‘Gotcha.’

That would be a newt. ‘Which species is it?’

‘Only a common one, and only a juvenile. But that’s one down, one to go.’

She turned it out into a fresh container where it shivered and turned and then hung still. It wasn’t even the length of my pinkie finger, stripy brown with delicate splayed feet. I felt
sorry for the morning it was about to have. ‘You’d think they’d be hibernating now.’

‘Yes, it’s amazing, I didn’t think we’d be so lucky. I suppose it’s down to this funny weather we’ve had, long cool summer and now this incredibly warm
autumn. Everything’s been delayed.’ She slid her net down through the weed again, stealthily.

Here we were in sleeveless shirts, enjoying the sun on our arms. The water felt chilly, but otherwise the garden gave no hint of a winter that must only be weeks away. I saw Geraint come up to
the kitchen window, his hand raised to shade his brow against the bright day. Meanwhile Liv swirled the pond into clouds, sent duckweed scattering out across the surface like blasted constellations.

‘No luck?’ I said.

‘Nope. They probably remember me fishing them out last year so they’re staying hidden. They’ll be sunk down at the bottom, pretending to be dead leaves.’

‘I can’t really help, can I?’

She shook her head and dipped the net once more. Even in the field of environmental studies, only certain professionals are allowed to handle GCNs. You have to go on training days with titles
like ‘Working Towards Your Great Crested Newt Licence’, and even then there are loads of rules you have to follow: care in handling and maximum containment time etc. I remembered from
last year a Natural England newsletter headline announcing some firm up in Yorkshire had been fined eleven thousand for trashing a newt-filled pond. Legally, newts rule. And yet there’s this
smudge of a fly lives on the Moss, plain transparent wings and a Latin name I couldn’t pronounce even if I could remember it, and it’s so rare it’s listed in Red Data Book One. In
other words, if it were any rarer, it would be extinct. But no one seems bothered about saving it because it’s dull and midge-shaped. Looks count for so much in this world, when you come down
to it.

I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about Melody.’

‘How her new job’s going? I was wondering that, too. Didn’t Michael tell you last week she’d sold her first painting?’

‘Yeah. It wasn’t that, though. I meant, I was thinking about the baby. Elizabeth.’ I made myself say the name, and at the same moment the sun went behind a cloud and the light
was grey.

Liv pushed the brim of her hat off her forehead. ‘I worry about Melody, too. One of those losses you never fully get over. Her due date was this month, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah. Next Friday. But I had this idea for something I could do to help.’

‘That’s kind of you. What did you have in mind?’

‘Just, we had this leaflet from one of our suppliers at the nursery about memorial topiary. It’s for children, for cemeteries, and they do all animal shapes, dolphins and teddies,
leaping deer, rabbits. The pictures were cool. I thought I could buy her one.’

She put her head on one side, considering. ‘But there’s no grave to mark, is there?’

‘It could live in the backyard. They come in pots with a plaque, although she might want to choose the words for that herself. If the baby – Elizabeth – had a tree in the
garden, then it would be kind of like she was still part of the family.’ I could hear myself, hear how stupid I sounded.

‘You know, that’s a very good thought,’ said Liv. ‘Are they expensive, these animal trees?’

‘You can get a rabbit for about two hundred and fifty. Swans are about three hundred. They’re proper quality Italian plants they use,
Ilex crenata
, not just these moss-packed
chicken wire jobs you can pick up anywhere. As long as Melody looked after it, it would last forever.’

‘Well, how about this. It’s a lot of money for you to come up with, so I’d be happy to help out. It could be from both of us. If you wanted.’

‘I’ve got savings. I’d rather pay for it myself.’

Liv dipped her net again. ‘You go ahead, then. I’m sure she’ll be extremely touched.’

I felt a glow in my chest: a project gone right, a job well done.

There was a flurry of water and Liv swung her net round so it almost struck my shoulder. A line of drops silvered the pond’s surface as she brought the pole in. Under the black slime,
something wriggled and twisted.

She laid the head of the net down on the bank and brought some water to swill the newt clean. What emerged was nearly as dark as the mud that surrounded it: a snaky head with yellow-rimmed eyes,
a ridged back, a skin texture rough and primeval. It was much longer, fatter and angrier than the common newt we’d caught earlier, and lashed its tail from side to side. When Liv coaxed it
into the pot, I saw the poisonous flash of its bright-orange belly.

‘Bingo!’ she said admiringly. ‘What a beauty.’

‘Do we need anything else?’

‘A ramshorn would be nice. Oh, we’ve none of the larger beetles, have we? Let me have another go.’

The sun came back out and, on the far side of next door’s garden, a squirrel ran up and down a branch with a purposeful motion. I like grey squirrels, for all they’re a pest species.
In Liv’s bag I knew there was a pair of binoculars, so I hauled them out and brought him into focus. It’s the stop-start action of squirrels I love to watch, and the way they use their
tails to steer through the air when they make an extra-big leap. This one looked to have something on its mind. It kept pausing as though it was going through some kind of mental checklist; then,
satisfied, romping forward in a lazy run. I watched it spring from a high branch to a low – almost miss – swing by its front paws, tail rotating – then scramble up to pose
perfectly still, the spit of one of those concrete statues we sell at the garden centre. You could tell it was in its element, up there among the twigs. And that’s the cool thing about
nature, how every animal’s so skilled at doing what it does, there’s never any dithering or confusion. Squirrels climb and jump and scrounge off the feeder and make nests and mate and
try to avoid being eaten, and that’s their life and they seem pretty happy on it. And good luck to you, I thought, as it dashed off again, vertically up the main trunk. I tried to track it
but it must have done a sneaky U-turn or nipped into a hole because all of a sudden it wasn’t there any more.

I kept the binoculars to my eyes and scanned about for something else to watch. There were jackdaws on the chimney top, a woodpigeon on the apex of the roof. Sparrows fought in the gutter. I
lowered the bins till I was looking into our kitchen, at Geraint, at his wide, beardy face, the thick glasses, the unruly hair. What
was
he doing just standing staring at us like that? And
then I caught the gleam of moisture under his eyes. I tweaked the focus slightly till I had him. Geraint, frozen, his gaze fixed on Liv, tears running freely down his cheeks.

I lowered the bins at once.

‘Here’s a great diving beetle,’ she said behind me. ‘He can have a pot of his own. Shove that lidded one a bit nearer, will you, so I can get at it? Actually, if you
could be filling another with vegetation, that would be useful.’

I let my hand fall into the water, feeling for a rope of Canadian pondweed. It came up in a great dripping arc and I snapped a length of stalk off and coiled it round my fingers to stuff into
the pot with the snails. Next, with my bare hands I plucked a ramshorn snail off the side of the bridge and added it to the collection, and I also scooped out some of the dead sycamore leaves that
had clumped together round the reeds. Repeatedly I found myself glancing up at Geraint, who remained where he was, mournful kitchen sentry.

I’m sure he knew I was watching him, but he never once moved till Liv began to gather up her equipment.

It always amazes me how many hippies live in our small town. You don’t see more than two or three out and about normally – the woman with the patchwork skirt who
runs the herbalists, the couple with matching leather waistcoats who I think are based out at Steel Heath – but put on a certain type of event and hey presto, they materialise. Anything to do
with folk music brings them out, or wholefoods, any spiritual/alternative/psychic jamboree or environmental bash and there they are.

Standing in the market hall while Liv put the finishing touches to our stand, I was struck, for instance, by how many men here had adopted the Geraint look. Some of them may have been older,
some younger, taller, hairier or thinner (and none of them was wearing a grey-green fluffy jumper that looked as though it had grown from penicillin), but the general outline was the same. If
Geraint wandered off at any point in the morning, we’d have hell on trying to pick him out of the crowd. It would be like a live-action
Where’s Wally
.

The stall on our right was manned by a white witch selling healing crystals laid out on a black velvet cloth; on our left a fairly ordinary couple handed out Fungus Foray leaflets, and next to
them was a stained-glass artist. Across the other side of the building a jaunty band played acoustic guitars and a bodhran. Liv had placed the pots of pond life down on white card so it was easier
for passers-by to see the contents, and she’d provided a magnifying glass on a string, for close study.

My job was to make sure no one dabbled their fingers in the water or tried to poke the livestock. I also had to identify any newt-blessed landowners that we didn’t already have on our
records. Then Liv would swing into action, taking down contact details and grid references, and speaking flatteringly about ‘guardianship’ and ‘stewards of the future’. She
was good at this. I’d seen her enthuse some really resistant people.

Behind us, hidden by display boards, was a food stall; occasionally I’d hear a woman’s voice saying things like, ‘No, no artificial colourings,’ and ‘We only use
local honey.’ I’d glimpsed her when we were setting up, a busty girl in a kurta with hair as vivid as mine, except hers was in long plaits. If I sniffed, I could smell cinnamon, orange,
vanilla, and the scent was cheering and warm. ‘And are they free-range eggs?’ a man asked. The hall was filling up.

I was helping a small boy use the magnifier to spot daphnia when another voice cut in: female, more strident, posh, sneering.

‘I mean, it’s all a big con, isn’t it?’

Liv’s head swung round, but the speaker was at our backs. Neither of us could see anything over the boards.

‘A total bloody con,’ said the voice again, and I found myself picturing a smart elderly woman with a snappish mouth and a tweedy suit.