The Cuckoo's Child (14 page)

“The bomb that had done for the warehouse up the road had shaken loose some of the big facing stones over the doorway, and they'd crashed down. They're lying there, and so's a young woman. And beside her sat a toddler, crying her heart out.

“There was nothing to be done for the poor girl. One of those big stones must have hit her head, smashed it. Not even her own mother would have recognized her face. I felt for a pulse in her wrist, just in case, but nothing. She was a goner, poor thing, though her hand was still warm. I reckon she'd put the baby as far back by the door as she could when she was caught out in the air raid and tried to shield her with her own body. That way she was right underneath the stones when they fell, but they missed the kiddie. I reckoned she had to be a stranger; nobody who lived round there would have been out at that time of night with a child.

“And what were we going to do about
her
? She sits there, howling, louder than ever now that we're there. Her face is scarlet and her nose is running, and as I look, she holds up her little arms to be picked up. Before I can do anything, Mum stoops down and lays Olivia beside the dead woman and picks up the other baby. She drags a hankie from her pocket and wipes her nose and face. Then she turns and walks down the steps.

“I tell you, it was like a dream. One of those dreams where you can't move, or you open your mouth and no sounds come out when you talk. There's my wife walking away up the street with somebody else's baby, and I freeze. I can't do a thing to stop her. It's almost as if I don't
want
to stop her. There's this little voice inside my head saying,
What difference does it make? Your baby's dead, and this little girl's mother is dead, it won't matter to them. The little girl needs a home and you've got one, and maybe it will be just the thing for Mavis.
God help me, it even whispered that I couldn't afford a funeral, and this way I wouldn't have to, somebody else would find the bodies soon and deal with them and we could just go on the way we always had. And what if Mavis
had
done something, what would happen to her, to us?

“I'm not making excuses for myself. I know it was wrong. I should have stopped her right then, when she put Olivia down, made her go to the hospital and face the truth, I know I should. But can you understand? By the time I'd got myself moving and followed Mum down the road, it was too late. She was going back home and I just fell in step beside her. She said, ‘It's too late for Olivia to be up. She needs to be in her bed,' and I nodded and that was that.”

There was a muffled sob. We'd forgotten all about Mum. She was sitting on the floor, leaning against the doorframe, tears streaming down her face. Dad got up and crouched awkwardly beside her, murmuring comfort and rubbing her back as if she were a baby suffering indigestion.

And how did I react? I think it's true to say I didn't. I couldn't. I was completely numb. Like a butterfly in that vulnerable moment when it splits open the chrysalis and struggles soft and damp and crumpled into the world, I stayed quite still. I could feel my skin losing its exquisite sensitivity as it hardened in the air, the folds smoothing out, the colours sharp and new. Underneath the exoskeleton, blood banged along its pathways, all the systems ticked over, gurgling and replicating, air wafted in and out, neurons fired, but all unattended. In my head, there was a great calm. The fact was there, installed and taking up all the room, but all I could see was the image of that small child, who was me, crying in the dark, and holding up her arms in supplication, and the still figure, who was my mother, lying crushed and faceless by her side.

“I wonder who that poor girl was?” mused Holly.

And that, of course, was the question.

With the shock of revelation past, the others turned to ways of dealing with the discomfort. Holly went off to make tea and check on the children. You and Neil helped Mum and Dad off the floor and settled them into their chairs, made up the fire that had burned low, fetched boxes of tissues, and supplied yourselves with beer. There was an air of bustle, the normal busyness of life starting up again all round me, while I crouched in my carapace, where sound was muffled and distant, and the heat of the burning wood did not reach.

Mum's tear-stained face was beseeching. “I'm sorry,” she snuffled. “I'm so sorry. My mother always told me my sins would find me out. Well, they have, but I never meant to hurt you.”

Dad looked at me sheepishly, and I realized they were waiting for a response. Forgiveness? Exoneration? Was I supposed to say, Oh well, never mind, it doesn't really change anything, does it? But there was a chill coming over my heart too, and the words that would have made their anxious faces relax stuck in my throat like kipper bones. As if she could sense this, Mum spoke again, sadly.

“I'm sorry,” she repeated. “I don't know what came over me. I thought it would be all right, but it never has been, has it?”

Dad broke in then. “I hoped you'd be a little more understanding,” he said reproachfully. “After all, you of all people should know what it's like to lose a child. You go a bit mad, don't you?”

I stared at him in disbelief, the anger that had been swelling just under the surface erupting into a full rolling boil. I jumped to my feet.

“Somebody
took
Daniel,” I shouted, “just like
you
took
me
! Is that what you'd say to my real family? Don't you think
they'd
find it hard to make excuses for what you've done? How do you think they felt when they lost my mother and me? We belonged somewhere, you know!”

As I ran from the room, I had the satisfaction of seeing their faces flatten with shock.

Outside it was very cold. It had stopped raining, and the clouds, apart from a few stray rags, had cleared. The stars were pitiless, and the moon rode high among them. Everything glittered in the strange blue light, and I could see that all the trees and shrubs, which still carried most of their leaves, were bent under the weight of the ice that had coated every surface. The air was full of noises: tinklings, like thousands of tiny wind chimes, slitherings, creakings as branches strained and sighed, followed sometimes by loud reports almost like gunshots as the branches snapped off, thudding unseen to the ground with a rush and a distant shattering of glass.

I stood there hugging myself until a fine tremor shook me uncontrollably. My mind groped about. The question lit up a billboard somewhere in the frontal lobes, relentless flashing neon, as impossible to ignore as a strip joint in an elementary school.
WHO AM I? WHO AM I? WHO AM I?

I was really in danger, I felt, of disappearing. The ecstatic sensation that had swept over me on top of the hill in Cache Creek now seemed mere fantasy, idiotic and ugly when there was a real chance of having to recreate myself. I didn't completely lose touch with reality. I knew I couldn't wash out the relationship with you, that love, simply because it was founded on a lie. Nor, in fact, could I ignore my upbringing, angry though I was. I was still Neil's wife. But how, I wondered, would Neil see me now? Even with the best will in the world, thinking to yourself, it doesn't matter, it makes no difference, would it really be possible to carry on as if nothing whatsoever had happened? Wouldn't there have to be a little recoil, instinctive as the snail's horn, from contact with the unexpected and bizarre?

As for me, I felt bereft. What is a mother without her son? What is a daughter without parents? A sister without a brother? What is a person without a name? The only thing left, it seemed, was Neil, and the suffering we had shared that bound us together tighter than joy.

An arm descended on my shoulder, and I was suddenly aware that my body was shaking without any help from me and wouldn't stop.

“Come inside,” said Neil, “we don't want a case of hypothermia on top of everything else.”

“How about a case of mistaken identity?”

“Ah,” he replied, “some people will do anything to be interesting. Just adds to your mysterious allure.”

We were a quiet bunch at the breakfast table next morning. Mum moved about softly, filling cups and cutting bread, dark circles under her eyes. Dad gazed out of the window, the bristles on his chin clearly visible, a grey-and-silver stubble that lent him a down-at-heel look, as if he had fallen on hard times overnight. Even the children were subdued, and Holly soon swept them off to pack up their things ready for the trip back to Prince George. By mid-morning the roads had cleared enough to drive safely. You drew me aside just before leaving.

“Don't be too hard on them,” you said. “So you can't be Wonder Woman for me this time—you bought me some good years before. And you'll always be my big sister, doesn't matter who you are, and don't forget it.”

I tried to remember the first part of your instructions when I went to say goodbye to Mum. She looked at me appealingly, waiting to see what my lead would be before she spoke. I could hardly bear her need.

“It's been a shock,” I said at last, then added what she wanted to hear. “But I'll get over it. It'll be all right.”

Dad had disappeared. I tracked him to his workshop. He was sitting on a stool beside a vise holding a half-constructed bird feeder. The familiar clean smell of sawdust and wood stain hung on the air. On the bench in front of him lay a small square bag with a strap, rather like an old-fashioned box camera. He pushed it toward me as I stood there waiting for him to say something.

“You should have this,” he said. “I've kept it all these years. Maybe it'll tell you something.”

I opened the catch. Inside was a child's Mickey Mouse gas mask. I laid the grotesque thing on the bench. On the inside of the strap that would have gone around the head, someone had written
R. Goodman
in purplish pencil. A search of the carrying case yielded two other treasures. One was a scrap of lined paper that seemed to have been torn from an address book; it read,
Sarah Murphy, 14, Morocco St., London SE1
. The other was a tiny manila envelope. It contained a few seeds with feathery plumes. The outside of the envelope, worn now to the softness of old flannel, bore a very faint inscription, written a long time ago in pencil. I could just make out
Stephanotis
and
—scot —ark
. What the first letters were, I couldn't determine. Squinting at it made it even fuzzier.

“That was round your neck when we . . . found you,” said Dad. “We didn't think to leave it behind.”

“Good job you didn't!”

The reply came out more energetically than I'd intended. Fact is, I'd just realized that these few objects were all I had of my other self. Valuable in themselves for that reason, but if I was going to recreate myself, they were also the strands of the thread I was going to pull on until I unravelled the whole mystery and finally looked into the face of the person holding on to the other end.

When does wish become obsession, Stephen? At what point does a faint desire, the thought that always begins, “If only . . .” turn into need? The morning after the great revelation, when Neil and I drove down the driveway through the tunnel formed by the sagging branches of the willows on either side, I was prepared to be philosophical, to accept what had happened so long ago and move on, somewhat shaken but unbowed. Above all, the morning light encouraged reason. I told myself firmly I had not changed in any way, I was still the sum of my parts as I had always been, and the awkward truth that some stranger had brought me into the world should make little difference to me or anyone else.

But I carried the shabby little case on my lap, and its pathetic contents, though mute, were eloquent.

In the weeks that followed I was drawn to them more and more. When sleep evaded me, I would sit at the kitchen table with the companionable hum of the fridge in the background and spread them out in a line, willing them to give up their secrets. I would finger the strap of the rubber mask and imagine myself as a tiny child compelled to wear it—I, who panic when I get stuck taking off a sweater, convinced I will stifle before I can tear the fabric away from my face. How would I have endured its clinging, smelly rubber embrace? Was I R. Goodman? Rosemary? Rebecca? Roberta? Ruth? I fancied Ruth. I would say the name out loud, testing its feel on my tongue, experimenting with the way my lips had to push out to say the first two syllables, utterly different from the tongue behind the teeth, wide smiling mouth of the name I had used for years. I tried writing it on scraps of paper, taking pleasure in the sinuous R, infinitely preferable to my angle-iron L, but disliking the row of circles in the surname, lying there like runty peas in a pod.

And who, I wondered, was Sarah Murphy? A friend? But if a friend, why had her name and address had to be torn from someone else's address book? The “M” tab was still attached to the scrap of paper. If the book had belonged to my mother, surely she would have brought the whole thing with her, not ruined it by tearing out a page. Was it a relative, then? The surname was different, so an aunt, perhaps? A grandmother? A married sister? The dimensions of the scrap showed that the address book had been very small, one of those that used to come with a short slim pencil to slide down the spine. It was blank on the reverse too, suggesting that the owner of the book knew very few people whose name began with M, or perhaps very few people, period.

From Sheila, whose parents still lived near London, I borrowed an old
A–Z
. Morocco Street was easy to find. It curved off Bermondsey Street, and there was the Leather Market and Leathermarket Street and Leather Court and Tanner Street, and I had a sudden olfactory memory of the dreadful stench of a tanning factory. But why? And then I saw it. Just a little higher up on the map. Magdalen Street. And what had my father said? They'd turned down Bermondsey Street and run under the railway bridges because Mum was scared of them, and there they were, black lines leading straight to a big square marked London Bridge, and then they'd turned right into St. Thomas Street—yes, and there was the massive block of Guy's Hospital straight ahead—but they'd been diverted into Fenning Street, that little narrow street just on the left, there, when they'd heard my cry. So my mother, if that was my mother, had been making her way to a street just a few blocks south of where Mum and Dad and Olivia lived when she was caught in the open by the air raid and died in the doorway of the warehouse. Was Sarah Murphy expecting her? I wondered. Did she worry when the sirens went off and the bombers droned overhead, and fret even more when the All Clear sounded but nobody came to the door?