The Sacrificial Man (32 page)

I cried and cried. I wouldn’t stop until Dad came to collect me. I was never invited to a sleepover party again.

“There. That’s my secret. I’m scared of the axe man at the window.”

Lee kisses me as tenderly as if I was a child. “No,” she says, “you’re scared of finding the final piece to the puzzle.”

Lee’s weight is on me, along me, the tight muscle of her thigh tense on my hip. Her fingers move inside me. She is expert at my body, opening me wide, eyes never leaving mine, as her sweat salts my mouth. “Make some noise,” she says. A sound in my throat like air rising, her hands, her thrust urging me on. “Keep going,” she says, and I do, I do. She bites my shoulder, and my mouth gapes, then the noise comes, my sound, and she replies, a yell and call from animal urges, and I’m with her, not in my head, but in my flesh, with her hands, while she is rising and pushing and I know, I know… and I’m rising, above, with her, with her, and the noise is there, and there, and there, and her weight, and eyes, and hands, I fall, and fall, and fall.

We are still. But not silent. And she smiles. I smile back, our bodies bound together like poetry.

I can feel myself slipping into Lee’s world, into her hopes. She wants me, wants to be with me, and I’m getting used to that. There’s warmth between us, and skin, only that. And I think that I was wrong. It was never Smith, after all. It was Lee. She was always waiting. Isn’t orgasm a sort of death?
To cease upon the
midnight with no pain…

I had a choice, between Smith and Lee. Two lovers, offering different things. I chose Smith. But all along the person I really wanted was Mummy.

1994

Alice was seventeen when she decided to find her father. She had lost Mummy but she had at least known her. Loved her. The gap, the aching hole in her heart, she put down to the absence of her father. Who was he? Where was he? How old? Hell, he could even be dead. She knew nothing about him. She had no-one to condemn or reject, to try to forgive. Nothing but a space. She felt the absence in her soul. She sat before her mirror and examined her heritage, the genetic evidence of the past: the ash blonde hair, she knew, was like Mummy’s. The eyes too, green like a cat. And Mummy’s mouth, pink and full, a perfect cupid’s bow. She remembered that. She remembered the smart lady in the bedsit, offering Mummy the money. Making her cry. Alice had inherited her grandmother’s mouth. But what else? She was tall – Mummy had been average height, she supposed, or even shorter. Next to Mr Wilding she looked tiny. Alice smoothed her fingertips over her forehead – domed and smooth, a rounded profile. Romanesque. Mummy had lacked that, had a shallow forehead, a sharper chin. So, this must be her father’s legacy. His contribution to her gene pool.

She allowed her head to fall into her upturned hands and wondered what her father may or may not be like. The blank on her birth certificate was filled with shadow, a ghost that she tried to conjure like a medium. Please, oh please, reveal yourself.

She stared hard at her reflection until her features distorted and she saw a man, staring back at her. The face mutated, grotesque, and she blinked with a start. She’d stared too long and scared herself. The man was gone – it was just her own face, so familiar, staring back.

She longed to see her father, however horrible he looked.

Since the appointment with Dr Murray her adoptive mother had been pleading with her to go back for ‘therapy’. Alice didn’t need therapy, she needed the truth. Or so she believed.

She knew she’d another family somewhere. She knew she was adopted because Mummy was dead. She could never forget that. It was the image she held in her heart, the scene that filled the hole. When she wasn’t thinking of Mummy the hole gaped.

But there was a man, out there in the world, who shared her blood. Every child had a father. She began to fantasise that he held the key to her happiness. Maybe her father had no idea that she was adopted. Maybe he knew and was searching, unable to trace her. She wanted to find him, wanted to be with someone who understood. Someone else who’d loved Mummy.

Alice had grown away from her adopted family, knowing them to be unlike her. It was the summer and she was working at the old people’s home in the night, sleeping a lot in the day, avoiding her mother’s tearful gaze and pleading: “Please, Alice, go and see Dr Murray. He can help you.” She avoided Lee and her puppy-dog devotion. No wonder she wanted to break free. To catch the piece of her that had been lost and make herself whole again. She felt like she’d been in pieces for years.

Her mother was a hoarder, and Alice knew she had a box in which she kept special documents. It was somewhere she never let Alice look and Alice guessed that she must have the details of her adoption in that box, maybe the address of the team that had dealt with it. It was hard to snoop with her mother always at home, and always so neat. She was bound to notice anything not returned to exactly the same place. But Alice was determined, and waited until she was in the kitchen, bleaching the floor. That always took at least two hours.

When Alice heard her mother’s plastic shoe-covers on the kitchen lino she went to the bedroom, slowly opened the door into the stuffy boudoir of pink-valanced pillowcases, china girls in bonnets and lace doilies on every surface. She knelt down by the melamine dressing table and slid open the lower drawer, the one that held tights and slips. The box Alice sought was navy and had once contained a man’s shirt. It held documents her mother considered important, like report cards and the first pictures she’d drawn at school. She hoped it was where she would find the map to her real father.

She didn’t rummage in the drawer, but lifted out skin-coloured underwear, nylon nighties, piling them neatly on the carpet, until she had the box. She wanted to snatch it and disappear to her room but knew that would be foolish. She should just look, and leave everything as she found it.

Sitting on the chintzy carpet she lifted the lid, slowly, and slid out a few papers. There were recent letters from the doctor’s surgery acknowledging the ‘assessment’ appointment with Dr Murray. A burst of anger erupted, and she felt justified in what she was doing. Everything in this box was about her.

She found her birth certificate, showing her adopted name, Dunn. The original would be stored somewhere, locked in a filing cabinet which Alice could only access when she was eighteen. It made her so mad. She didn’t even know what her real surname was.

Under the papers, her hand touched plastic. She pulled the bag free, an old supermarket carrier. It was light and thin and warmth spread over Alice’s heart. She slid her fingers into the box and touched the wool, fingers tingling with a blissful sensation like coming home.

She felt a stinging behind her eyes as she gently lifted out the lilac cardigan. The scrappy, badly knitted woollen cardigan that she knew so well. It had been her favourite. It was what she had worn, thrown on over a nightshirt, when she found Mummy in Mr Wilding’s room. That must be why it was there: the precious cardigan had arrived with Alice. She brought it to her face, nuzzling the wool, which bobbled and caught under her lips. It had been in the box for twelve years, yet it still smelled the same. It smelt of Mummy, of the bedsit they had shared.

She unfolded it on her lap, and then held it to her chest. The sleeves came to the crook of her elbow, and the cardigan stopped just below her bust. That was how small she’d been once. She studied the clumsy knitting, the dropped stitch that had grown into a hole, and knew that Mummy had loved her. She undid the one pearlised button and opened the cardigan, feeling the texture and remembering wearing it. Then she saw a white label, stitched at only one end and hanging loose. A name tag. Because Mummy had knitted this cardigan for her to wear to pre-school, and all clothes had to be named. Her heart leapt.

The name tag wasn’t printed, but homemade. It was the only time she’d seen Mummy’s handwriting. It said Alice Mariani.

She knew who she was. She had a name: Mariani.

Alice had forgotten her name, only remembered that Mummy was called Matty. She was too young to remember her surname, but she liked it. It sounded Italian and sophisticated. ‘Mariani’ was so much more glamorous than ‘Dunn’, which she’d been saddled with for twelve years, a heavy name that made you think of farms and labourers.

Alice put the reports and pictures back in the box, but not the cardigan. It was hers. It should never have been taken from her. She didn’t waste a second. Hadn’t she waited long enough? After hiding the cardigan in her bedroom, at the back of her wardrobe, Alice went to the hallway. From the low seat of the telephone table in the hall she could see into the kitchen. Her mother was mopping the last part of the floor, backing herself into a corner. Her face was wet with sweat.

There was no Mariani in the local telephone directory. But she didn’t give up. She knew that the local library had directories for the whole country and would have checked them all if necessary, but she found what she sought in the sixth directory, the one for Norwich. A listing for Mariani. It even gave an address.

And it was that easy. She had a name, an address. She had a phone number and was just one meeting away from finding out who she was.

That telephone call was the hardest she’d ever made, but it was brief. Businesslike. As though her grandmother had been expecting her call, waiting for it.

Mrs Mariani agreed to meet Alice.

Alice’s grandmother was nothing and everything like she expected. She was younger, and Alice’s memory of her in the bedsit fit like a missing jigsaw piece when she saw her fur coat, the expensive leather gloves. Her grandmother’s face held Mummy’s mouth. She wanted to kiss it.

There was no kissing. Her grandmother peered at her, perhaps seeing beyond the teenager to the dead woman she so resembled, and then nipped in her mouth. Her skin was tight across her brow and towards her ears, wrinkle free. She was smart and attractive and as unreadable as granite. Alice wished she would smile.

Her grandmother was dressed in black, tailored fabrics over a solid frame. Her impossibly dark hair was cut straight across her forehead, a fashionable but severe style, and any softness her face might have had been obliterated by sharp kohl and violent rouge. Harsh artist, she had erased any flaws that would have made her approachable.

Alice wanted so much, but most of all she wanted to know about her parents. Her memories were old. She wanted pretty tales to add to her scant store of love.

Her grandmother gave her nothing. Her words were cold and distinct. Her eyes quite dry as she spoke of her dead daughter: “Matilde was ridiculously young to have a child. By the time I found out it was impossible to do anything about it.”

Me, thought Alice. Not it. To do anything about me.

“She was nearly seven months pregnant by the time we saw the doctor. We’d planned for an adoption. It would have all been so simple, she just had to go through with the delivery. But she got this notion in her head that she had to keep it.”

Alice looked at her hands, which were pale and shaking. She felt invisible.

“She was in a home for teenage mothers, and I suppose she saw all the other girls keeping their babies, getting council flats, and she got this crazy idea that she would do the same. It was out of my hands then.”

“You came to the bedsit. I remember you.”

“Of course I came. A daughter of mine in those squalid conditions! I came to try and talk her out of keeping the baby. But she was always so surly, so pig-headed. Just like her father.” She had the grace to look at Alice. “Of course, they would have found you a respectable family. But Matilde was determined, and would not be told what was best for all concerned.” Her voice cracked like a dropped glass. “She was so clever. She could have gone to university.”

“I want to go to university. I start my A levels next term.” Her grandmother appraised her with new interest, then fought it down and looked away.

“I suppose you’ve got your brains from her. They certainly didn’t come from me.” Her grandmother ordered a second espresso. All Alice could stomach was water. Today she would discover who she was. “I have a cheque for you, Alice. I want you to take it and make something of your life. It is all I can offer you.”

On the circular table was a silver pot of cubed sugar, and the older woman propped an envelope against it. Alice took it, peered into the open flap and saw the amount the cheque was made for. Her mouth went slack at such a huge amount. “Are you rich, then? You and my grandfather?”