The Moment You Were Gone (18 page)

Gaby watched her. She was wearing a buttoned blue T-shirt under her apron; her shoulders were thin, her collarbones sharp, but her breasts were soft and round and her neck smooth. For a moment, Gaby was reminded of Ethan, with his lanky, effortless grace. Her hair was damp from the rain, and drops still sparkled in its blackness, so dark it was almost blue. She had a straight nose, and her brows were thick and dark over Nancy's eyes. She handed the cappuccino across to the customer, and
Gaby saw her bony wrists and long fingers, with their bitten nails.

‘What can I get for you? Here – take some of these paper towels, you're soaked through.'

‘That's kind. A hot chocolate, I think.'

‘Coming up.'

‘With cream.'

‘And marshmallows?'

‘No – oh, why not?'

‘Good for you.' Suddenly Sonia smiled at her across the counter, a broad smile showing even white teeth. Her triangular face lit up and she was nearly beautiful.

‘And some of that carrot cake, please.'

‘OK.'

‘Can I buy you some hot chocolate too? You look as though you got caught in the rain as well.'

‘That's very kind, but I'll have something later.'

She turned away to make Gaby's drink and Gaby put her elbows on the counter and propped her chin in her hands, watching her from behind.

‘Here.'

‘Blimey, that looks bad for me,' Gaby said, as she slid over the money.

She sipped the foaming creation, feeling its creamy richness slide down her throat, then picked at the carrot cake. The girl wasn't paying her any attention, but drying espresso cups and putting them back on the shelf. Maybe it wasn't even her, after all, and she was reading significance into something that had none. She waited until she had handed another customer his spinach-stuffed croissant, then leant forward. ‘My name's Gaby,' she said.
It came out louder than she had intended, nearer a shout than a murmur.

‘Oh. Well – hi.'

Gaby felt like a middle-aged man trying to pick up the nubile waitress. She slurped her drink once more to hide her embarrassment and wiped away the chocolate moustache, then said, ‘You're supposed to tell me your name now.'

‘My name?'

‘Unless you don't want to.'

The girl stared at her, frowning, biting her lower lip anxiously.

‘Sonia,' she said.

‘Sonia? Ah.'

‘Yes. What is it? Why do you ask?'

‘Nothing. Just – nothing. It's a nice name, that's all.'

This time the look Sonia gave her was one of panic, as if Gaby might be mad and dangerous. Gaby saw herself through the young girl's eyes – a middle-aged woman in damp clothes, desperate for company – and felt a flush spread over her face, her whole body, but she persisted. She was waiting to see Stefan in the girl. Anything would do, just a glimpse, a gesture, a certain way of smiling. Then she would know.

‘And have you worked here long, Sonia?'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘I was asking, have you worked –'

‘I heard what you said. I just didn't know why you said it. Sorry, that sounds rude. I'm tired today, distracted. No, not long. I'm still at school – this is my half-term. I'm saving up for my gap year.'

‘Where do you want to go?'

‘Where?' Sonia pulled her ear-lobe and her face brightened with the anticipation of the year ahead, making her look younger, a child still. ‘Well, all over really, but first of all …'

She started to say something about Africa, Botswana, a project with HIV women that she'd already signed up for, but Gaby wasn't listening. The words slid in and out of her consciousness. The café blurred and quivered; she blinked hard but it remained queasily without edges, and she thought for a moment that she would faint. Her whole body was tingling, as if she had pins and needles over every inch of her skin; her forehead was clammy; inside, she felt bubbling hot and liquid, as if everything that was solid about her had dissolved into a rushing deluge. Only her heart remained, swollen and huge, thumping away like a hydraulic pump. The hands on the counter: they were her hands, but they looked and felt like the hands of a stranger. She put two fingers against her lips; it was her mouth, but it felt numb and rubbery and she was sure that if she tried to speak, only gibberish would come out, in a voice that no longer belonged to her. She stared at the floor beneath her feet and it seemed impossibly far away. If she fell, she would crash to it and break into a dozen pieces.

‘Are you all right?'

‘Hnnn,' she managed, and felt herself trying to smile; her face buckled with the effort. Sonia stared at her, her face a Cubist painting, everything familiar rearranged into strangeness.

‘Are you ill? You've gone all pale.'

‘I don't –'

‘Do you want to lie down? Or can I give you some water?'

Water. Gaby thought of a well, a stream, cool clear depths. She gripped the edge of the counter and pressed hard. Her breath came in ragged gasps. Then, suddenly, the world steadied and she was herself once more, surrounded by sights and sounds that she could touch and name. This was a knife, this a plate, this a cup. The girl opposite her was Sonia. Everything was distilled into that one gesture: the glimpse she had been looking for and now would always see, the little flash of knowing that, for a pulse-beat, had thrown a wild light over her entire world, making the tame landscape seem suddenly sinister and full of dark, guttering shadows. She stared at the concerned young face, into the pale, long-lashed eyes.

‘Sonia,' she said.

‘Can I call someone?'

‘No. Just a funny turn.'

Sonia laid a slim, cool hand over hers; her bangle pressed against Gaby's skin. ‘But you –'

‘No, I said!'

Gaby jerked away her hand and stood up, stumbling, waiting beside her stool, one hand holding the counter, until she was sure she could walk steadily to where her jacket hung on the coat-stand. It was still damp, but she had only been in there for a few minutes. She thought how strange it was that a few minutes could be like a crack running through your life; the point at which you break. She thought of one of her friends, Helena, whose second child had been run over by a bus: for months
after it had happened, she had talked obsessively about how a single second had changed everything, as if by talking about it she could alter it, wind back the clock to that place and that time and place a hand on her boy's shoulder, keeping him by her side. The bus would rumble past. One second earlier or later, she had said, and nothing would have happened. After a little shudder of dread at what might have been, life would have continued as before.

But it wasn't chance that had made the crack in Gaby's life; it was Gaby herself who, with the persistence of the zealous cop, had refused to let old secrets hide in the deep corners of the past. She had found Nancy's child and now she wondered if she had known all along, not with her head but in her blood and in her bones and where the nerves meet and where the gates of pain opened.

All these thoughts shimmered in her, like points of light glancing off the surface of the sea, before she reached the door of the café. Through the glass she saw that the people walking past, umbrellas up, huddled into themselves, were blurred by threads of rain so that they looked unreal. She stepped out on to the pavement and tipped her head back to feel the cool drops on her cheeks, on her eyelids, running down her neck and soaking into her layers of clothes. The weariness that she sometimes felt at having to be herself overcame her, and for several minutes she simply stood in the downpour with her eyes shut, thinking of nothing but being wet.

24 October

I wonder if I will stop writing this once I've met you. I'm only writing to you because you're still no one, everyone, a blank page, my inner thoughts, my ideal, the woman I love, the woman I hate, the woman who's me, the woman who made me and lost me and whom I've thought about ever since I knew about her. If I'm honest, there are times when I want you to hurt when you see me. I want you to realize what you lost when you gave me away.

I'm pretty nervous about our meeting – are you? – and I keep trying to work out what it is that I fear so much, that makes me wake up night after night in a sweat. What if I hate you, or just find you boring and irritating, someone I don't want to know? What if you're fat and greasy-haired and slack-jawed and stupid, some kind of lowlife? Or one of those dried-up, prudish, priggish, beady-eyed women who sometimes come into the café and look at me as if I'm Jezebel because I'm wearing a short skirt or a stud in my nose or something? All that sounds cruel or shallow, I know, but I'm only writing this to you – that is, to me – so I'm trying to say what I really think, not what I ought to think. Or what if you're all glamorous and glossy and hard, and you've pushed everything you've ever suffered and felt and believed behind that painted crust and I can't get beyond it? What if you're right-wing? Or racist? Or really religious, so all the things I love, you think are
sinful, and all the things I want to talk about are out of bounds? If you were my real mother – I mean, like Mum is, even though she isn't, if you see what I mean – then I'd have grown up with what you were like and then I'd probably just accept those things. Or at least, not accept them but not see and judge them in the same way. But if I see you and think you're dull and ugly or just not very nice, then what does that say about me? I've come from you, after all. You made me. You've been coded into me.

But there's something that disturbs me even more than disliking you. What if you're tormented about losing me and in some way or other want me back in your life, want me to be family? What will I feel then? And what if I like you – really, really like you? What if you're similar to me and I sense an immediate connection with you – what will that mean? I don't want to feel you're my real mother because I've already got a real mother and she's loved me for all of my life. Every second that she's known me she's loved me and cared for me and never abandoned me. She's been unconditional.

That's what mothers are supposed to be, isn't it? Unconditional. I've thrown everything at her – maybe more than I would have if she'd been my biological mother – because I continually wanted her to prove to me that she loved me just as much. I had tantrums; I had adolescent storms; I can be rude and sulky and secretive. And she's never wavered. I love that word, ‘unwavering'. It makes me feel a bit weepy, and I think it's because I've so badly needed someone to be unwavering for me. You didn't love me, you didn't want me, you gave me away when I was a few hours old, you weren't even conditional. You weren't anything except an absence, a powerful, powerful absence, like God. But she was there. She was always
patient, always present, never asking for anything in return, never even asking for my gratitude or my love. I think it is only now that I'm about to meet you that I understand what she's done. So now, if I meet you and I feel you're my ‘true' mother, if I recognize myself in you, what does that make me feel about my ‘real' mother? Will I lose her in some way?

A woman came into the café the other day and I thought she might be you, because she acted so strange and she kept asking me questions. Of course, as soon as I thought about it, I knew she couldn't be because I didn't think you'd be so stupid as to sit in front of me and say you were somebody else just before meeting me properly. That wouldn't make sense. But for a few moments I did wonder, and I was looking at her and thinking, Is this my mother? She was rather lovely in an odd kind of way, quite a bit younger than Mum is, but not as young as I'd imagined you would be (I always thought you were probably just a teenager when you had me, maybe even fourteen or something like that), and a bit wild and romantic and haphazard. She had this smile that made her whole face crinkle up. I found myself thinking that I'd quite like her to be my mother, partly because I liked the way she looked and partly because she wasn't anything like me, but almost my opposite.

I keep trying to work out the questions I want to ask you when we do eventually meet. Ever since I can remember I've been asking them in my head, and I don't want to let them slip away just because I'm nervous. I don't want to not ask you things that I really want and need to know. And I want to know even if the answers are painful.

Why did you give me away?

How old were you?

Was it difficult to decide?

Did you mind? (Did you cry? Did you want to keep me? When I was born, no longer an idea but your child, did you love me? Or maybe you hated me because of what I'd done to your life.)

Are there things I should know about you? (Like: have you got any inheritable diseases or disorders? Are there any mental-health problems in the family? Are there any suicides or things like that? Are you particularly clever or talented in any area, or particularly bad? Are there odd behavioural traits you have that I may have too? Stuff like that.)

Have you thought about me? How much? Do you feel guilty? Do you have regrets? (I don't know if I want to ask that question.)

Am I like you?

And then there is this whole other category of questions that kind of go together. What are my grandparents like? Do I have brothers or sisters? Do they know about me, and if they do, do they mind and do they want to meet me – or do they dread meeting me? Who else knows about me? Am I real in other people's lives, known about and talked about and cared for, or am I forgotten and hidden away like a dirty secret? The Unmentionable Me.

And OK, then, there's the big question, and perhaps you don't know the answer or it's like a multiple choice and you aren't sure. Who is my father? (Then, of course, all the above questions begin again, asked of him this time.) I've always thought about you, not him, but suddenly, now that I know I'll meet you, he's in my life at last. It's as if you've been standing directly in front of him all this time, blocking him from my view, and now you've moved forward and he's half visible at last.

There are other things I want to ask, things I never will, though, because if I did you couldn't answer, and if you did answer I'd hate you because you don't have the right. Like: am I pretty? Am I clever? Have I done well? Will I be all right? Do I make you proud?

I'm going to end this now because it's late and I'm tired and I have to get up early tomorrow to work in the café.

26 October

A few hours ago I told Mum and Dad. I should have told them ages ago. The trouble was that the longer I waited the harder it became to say anything. I'd never even said to them that I wanted to meet you one day. They probably knew. I think, looking back, that they've kept on making openings for me to say it but I felt I couldn't, as if it was a kind of betrayal. It's so odd. I've always known I was adopted. I never found out; there was no point at which I discovered. They probably told me on the first day, when I was a prune-faced baby, and never left off telling me. And yet we haven't ever talked about it properly, and nor have I talked to my friends. They know, of course. I've never hidden it; the opposite, really. I mention it when I first meet someone, as if it's something I have to get out of the way. I kind of blurt it out. When Alex asked me out, I said, ‘I'm adopted, you know,' before I said yes – as if he might think of me differently once he knew. But, then, we don't really discuss it. I don't know why. Probably my parents are waiting for me to bring it up, if I want to, and I'm waiting for them.

So I told them. We were having supper. Cauliflower cheese – I made it. I'm practising my cooking skills for when I leave home; I'm good at things with white sauce, and pasta, and different kinds of eggs, and I've started doing lots of marinades
to go with chicken breasts, like lime and chilli and garlic and ginger. Anyway, I told them. I did what I always do when I'm nervous about saying things. I just dropped it like a bomb into the conversation and waited for it to go off. We were talking about what I was doing at the weekend and I said, ‘By the way, I've been in touch with my birth mother.' Birth mother: it sounded so official. There was a silence. Dad put this huge forkful of cauliflower cheese into his mouth, then stared at me without chewing, cheeks like a hamster's.

But Mum stood up and came round the table to me. It seemed to take ages, and she had to push the chair back with a loud scrape and her feet clipped on the lino. Her face was calm and smiling, and I realized that she'd been waiting for this moment for ages and had practised in her head how she was going to deal with it. She'd washed her hair but not dried it, so it was plastered to her skull and she wasn't wearing any makeup or earrings or anything, just this old red pullover she's had for as long as I can remember and a pair of grey cords that have gone saggy. She looked plain and worn and familiar, and when she reached me she put her arms round me and her pullover itched against my skin and her wet hair made my cheek damp. And I burst into tears and then she did too, and we hugged each other, crying and then giggling like we haven't done for ages, while Dad went on looking at us with his bulging cheeks and bulging eyes.

You know, they suddenly seemed so old and defeated, and I felt so young and strong and powerful. It was horrible.

We didn't talk about it after that. We blew our noses and dried our eyes and grimaced at each other sheepishly. Dad made us all a pot of tea and we drank it and dunked Digestives and scooped out the bits that dropped in with a teaspoon.
And we played cards for ages: rummy and racing demon and three-person whist, all our old favourites, things we've played since I was little. It made me remember camping holidays and caravan holidays and eighteen years of Christmases and rainy Sundays. No one wanted to go to bed. It was dark and gusty outside; we could hear the wind in the trees and rain pattering against the window-panes. But inside it was cosy, sitting round our kitchen table with mugs of tea and the dishwasher chugging away and Dad pretending to be worse at cards than he is (which is bad enough anyway), and Mum's watery smile and pink eyes. I looked at everything as if I was looking at it for the last time: the stained old mugs, the peeling lino, the biscuit tin with roses on it, the wooden table with scratches from all our meals together, the photograph of me on my first day at school. George was under the table, his head on my foot, whimpering and shifting in his sleep. The clock ticked on the wall, seven minutes ahead of time as usual. I wished I was a little child again, when everything was simple and everything was safe; when if anything went wrong, I had known my parents could make it better. I wished you didn't exist.