A Proper Family Christmas (14 page)

So I gave you up and my heart was broken. And then your dad, Dave, and me got back together ten years later. We got married and had two more little girls, Veronica (everyone calls her Ronnie) and Chelsea, your sisters. You’ve got a niece and a nephew. Sophie’s fifteen and Jack is six. Your dad’s dad Granddad Bill is still with us too. He’s eighty-six this year and a right character. You’re going to love him.

We can’t wait to meet you and tell you more about your family. You can phone or email us any time you like and when you let us know where you live, we’ll come and see you as soon as we can.

I promise you, Daisy / Annabel we have never stopped thinking about you. You were meant to come back to us!

All our love,

Jacqui and Dave Benson

The familiarity and the friendliness of the letter made Annabel slightly queasy. At least in the view of these people she had never met, Annabel Buchanan was Daisy Benson Ross once again.

She told Richard over supper.

‘They’ve got back in touch,’ she said. She didn’t even need to say who ‘they’ were. ‘They say they’re willing to meet up. They’re still together. Can you believe it? My mother and my father. They got married ten years after I was born.’

‘Well, that’s great. It means we don’t have to go searching for two separate people.’

‘I know. But it’s weird, isn’t it? It’s like I was part of a trial run that didn’t work out. They’ve got two more daughters now. Grandchildren as well.’

‘Even better. One of them is bound to be a match. The more the merrier.’

‘But what if they’re awful?’

Richard told Annabel she should not worry about whether or not she liked the woman who had written that letter. All she had to worry about was whether there was someone in her family who would be a suitable donor for Izzy. And for that reason, she should get on with organising a first meeting without delay. Annabel agreed. Of course she did. But she still couldn’t help feeling a twinge of relief when she called the number written in large childish letters and found her call put straight through to an answering machine, having hidden her own number first.

She didn’t leave a message. That would have been too strange. Too ghostly, was the idea that came into her head. Annabel decided instead that she would make the necessary arrangements via text and email. People were never without Internet access these days. In all probability, Jacqui Benson would check her email before she checked the messages on her landline answering machine. That’s certainly how it was in the Buchanans’ house. No one ever called their landline any more except salespeople.

In a PS to her letter, Jacqui had also suggested that Annabel ‘friend’ her on Facebook.

You’ll be able to see lots of pictures of the whole family on there. Your middle sister Ronnie is a Facebook nut and she’s always tagging me and your dad. We can hardly sneeze without her posting the news in her status.

Needless to say, Annabel was not a Facebook nut. She didn’t think she had been on the site in the best part of a year. But this was the way people communicated with each other now. And perhaps seeing some pictures would help calm her fears about what they might be getting into.

‘We’ve got to look on Facebook right now,’ said Izzy when Annabel visited her in hospital the next morning.

Annabel sat on the edge of the bed while Izzy fired up her laptop. Facebook had once been one of Izzy’s favourite sites. She and her friends did other things now but she still kept her old account. Annabel couldn’t keep up with the new social media. Richard had once complained that for Izzy’s generation, all life happened online. They attended parties only to have something to tweet about.

‘Nobody tweets, Dad,’ Izzy had told him. ‘That’s for old people.’

Richard had thought he was quite with it, signing up to Twitter so that he could follow the news as it happened.

Anyway, Izzy made Annabel turn away while she inputted her Facebook password and then made her promise not to turn back towards the screen until Izzy was certain there was nothing on there that would make Annabel freak out.

‘You shouldn’t have to worry about me being freaked out by anything you put on Facebook,’ Annabel automatically started to reiterate the lecture she felt she trotted out ten times a month. If not ten times a week. ‘You should make sure there is nothing on your profile at all that you would not be happy for a future employer to see.’

‘Yeah, yeah …’ Izzy made yapping mouths of her hands. ‘It’s all right, Mum. I’ve taken down the nude selfies.’

‘Don’t even joke about it,’ Annabel warned her.

‘It’s all clear. OK. Remind me what we’re looking for.’

‘Jacqui Benson.’

‘With a k?’

‘With a “qu”.’

‘Fancy,’ Izzy joked.

There were hundreds of people called Jacqui Benson. Putting in Coventry narrowed it down a little.

Annabel peered at the faces. ‘Do any of these people look like me?’

‘How about that one?’

Izzy pointed out a profile illustrated with a photograph of a female bodybuilder in one of those improbable poses.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Annabel. ‘Or if it is, I definitely haven’t inherited those muscles.’

‘This one?’ Izzy pointed out a woman half her mother’s age.

‘Very funny.’

‘We could be looking all day. What’s her email address?’

Jacqui had included it in the letter of course. Izzy plugged it in to the search box.

‘It’s this one,’ she said. The cursor hovered over a small photograph of a smiling woman holding a baby. The baby, who looked like a boy, was dressed in a tiny Coventry City FC shirt. Izzy clicked to enlarge the image. ‘This is a picture of your mother.’

Annabel stared. It was incredible to think that she was seeing her birth mother for the first time on Facebook. And, if she was honest, it was an enormous anticlimax. Annabel had always secretly hoped there was a seriously juicy story behind her adoption. But the woman she was looking at now was just so very ordinary. She looked like any number of women you passed in the street every day. She was slightly overweight and dressed in a voluminous tunic top that did nothing to flatter her figure. Her hair was grey and cut too short for her face. Annabel winced at her unflattering make-up. She’d plucked her eyebrows much too thin at some point.

‘She’s got zero account security,’ Izzy tutted, as she clicked her way into Jacqui’s numerous photograph albums. ‘Some people are just clueless. Anybody could be looking.’

Annabel wasn’t sure she had very much security on her Facebook account either. She didn’t really think about it from month to month. She’d only opened one because Izzy had wanted a Facebook account when she was just twelve and the ability of Annabel to monitor it was one of her conditions for allowing Izzy to break the Facebook age limit.

Izzy opened a file that said ‘Grandpa Bill’s 80th birthday.’ She enlarged the tiny thumbprints and started scrolling through them.

‘Who are these people?’ she asked out loud.

Her words were a direct echo of Annabel’s own feelings.

Who were these people? The family that Annabel saw in those albums was definitely not the family of her dreams. That was for sure. They were the kind of family who came to look at the Great House when it was open to the public during the village fete. The men all wore football shirts. The women all so badly dressed and pictured drinking straight from bottles of Bacardi Breezer as they sat around on garden chairs indoors.

‘Are you sure that’s my grandma?’ Izzy asked.

Annabel looked at another photo of Jacqui. In the picture, she was bending over a disposable barbecue, looking back towards the photographer with an expression of indignation as he focused on her backside in a pair of tight black leggings.

‘Seriously. That can’t be your mum,’ said Izzy. ‘Does that mean …? Have I got those genes too? There must have been a mistake.’

Annabel shook her head. She probably should have reprimanded her daughter for being so judgemental, but the truth was that Annabel was just as horrified at what she was seeing. The Bensons obviously lived a very different life from the one she was used to. They seemed to barbecue more often than they changed their clothes. Together with her daughter, she peered closely at every single one of the photos.

‘That must be one of my sisters,’ said Annabel. ‘Your aunt.’

Annabel pointed at a woman who was oddly familiar and not just because of any possible genetic resemblance. Maybe the Bensons
had
been to a Little Bissingden fete.

‘I cannot be related to that!’ said Izzy, as she recoiled from a photograph of her aunt giving the photographer the finger, her jaw set like a bulldog’s. She could have illustrated a
Daily Mail
article on broken Britain. Just as Liz Hurley has a default pose for the paps – one hip angled forward to make her look slimmer – so Annabel’s newly found sister seemed never to be photographed without one digit extended in anger.

‘We’ve got nothing in common with them,’ Izzy wailed.

‘But we need them,’ Annabel reminded her and instantly wished that she hadn’t. Izzy’s face crumpled. Up until then, she had seemed on good form. Just that morning, Dr Devon had suggested that Izzy might soon be able to leave the hospital and dialyse at home. They could start to get back to normal.

‘I hate it,’ Izzy sobbed. ‘I hate it that we’ve got to know these people at all.’

Annabel held her daughter close and felt more than a little ashamed that she had raised her child to find the idea of ordinary so frightening.

‘They could be lovely people,’ she said soothingly. ‘One of my new sisters has got a daughter your age. You might get on really well.’

‘She’ll be like those girls down the village,’ Izzy countered, referring to the rough-looking bunch who hung around in front of the Spar shop. Jeering the smartly dressed girls coming home from the private school seemed to be the highlight of their day. One particularly awful evening, one of the rough kids had pulled Izzy’s hair and challenged her to a fight.

‘She won’t be like that,’ Annabel promised, wondering how she could possibly know. And there, in the next photograph, was the girl Annabel assumed must be her niece, dressed all in black and posing like her mother, giving the finger to the world.

Annabel felt like giving the world the finger too.

With so much in turmoil, Chelsea found herself talking to her sister every day. Several times a day. On the Thursday after the Benson family got back from Lanzarote, while Chelsea was at work, Ronnie called from her own office, at a funeral director’s, to tell Chelsea Annabel’s full name, which she had just emailed to Jacqui.

‘Annabel Buchanan. How posh is that? We need to check this woman out.’

‘Our
sister
out. You mean you haven’t already?’

Chelsea tapped Annabel’s full name into Google.

‘Bloody Internet’s been down since we got back from holiday,’ said Ronnie. ‘And I can’t get online at work. Looking at Facebook is disrespectful to the corpses. I need you to do it.’

‘Well, I think I’m looking at her right now.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Brown hair. Shoulder length.’

‘Is she thin?’

‘Quite thin, yes.’

Ronnie sucked her teeth.

‘There are a couple of pictures of her. In one of them she looks like she’s opening a school fete or something.’

‘What does she do?’

‘Sits on a lot of committees by the look of things. Can’t see any actual job so far.’

‘A yummy mummy.’

‘That’s what I’m starting to think. But she looks friendly enough, Ronnie. That’s got to be a good sign. She looks a bit like you.’

‘Only thin.’

‘She’s not that much thinner than you. She might not be thinner at all. These pictures might have been taken years ago. Not that it matters.’

All the talk about weight was making Chelsea uncomfortable. It was hard not to join in but Chelsea’s recovery relied on her breaking the habit. She couldn’t let her first thoughts about her sister be weight related.

‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ said Ronnie as she had been saying every day since the letter from the intermediary arrived.

‘Don’t keep saying that,’ said Chelsea. ‘I don’t think there’s any need. At least from these pictures, I’m pretty sure that she’s not going to be coming to us for money. We could possibly tap
her
up for a bob or two, though.’

Ronnie attempted a laugh.

‘Will you come up to Coventry as soon as you can? When can you come? How about Saturday morning?’

‘Um, Saturday …’

‘What’s more important than coming up here on Saturday?’

‘Well.’ Chelsea took a deep breath. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve got a date.’

‘Who with?’ Ronnie asked.

‘I wish you didn’t sound so incredulous. With Adam. The guy from Lanzarote.’

Ronnie whooped.

‘You go girl! That is amazing. You haven’t had a date in what? Nearly a year? When did you break up with that Colin bloke? You’re practically a virgin.’

‘Thanks a bundle,’ Chelsea sighed. ‘As it happens, I’ve been on plenty of dates since I broke up with Colin. It’s just that none of them were anywhere near as promising as this one. Look, I’ve got to go. I’m at work here.’

‘Bring Adam with you on Saturday. He knows us. I’m sure his little girl would love to see Jack again.’

‘And I’d quite like to see Adam on his own first,’ said Chelsea. ‘I’ll come up to yours on Sunday, like I’ve been saying I would. Can you pick me up from the station?’ Ronnie agreed.

As promised, Chelsea caught the train up to Coventry first thing on Sunday morning, having stayed in London on Saturday night for her first proper date with Adam. The date had gone fantastically well. Adam left Lily, his daughter, with her paternal grandparents for the evening while he and Chelsea met for drinks and dinner in Soho. It was strange to be seeing each other in London, having begun their relationship in the Canaries. But Chelsea was not disappointed. Adam looked every bit as delicious in the context of the capital city and they were both grateful for a choice of proper wine, rather than the rotgut they’d had to drink at the Hotel Volcan.