With no other relatives on hand – neither of her parents had had any brothers or sisters – it had been down to Katie to arrange the funeral and to deal with the subsequent formalities. Her decision to leave London and move into her mother’s house and commute to work from Brighton had surprised her friends, particularly Tess. But it had made sense. Rather than leave the house empty whilst waiting for probate to be sorted out, it was better for it to be occupied. Also, Tess and her boyfriend, Ben, were getting more serious about their relationship, and Katie had known that it was only a matter of time before they would want to find somewhere to live together. With Katie happy to move out, Ben could then move in. It was the ideal arrangement.
It was late one evening when travelling back to Brighton on the train from Victoria that Katie had met Ian. He’d been in the seat next to her, and after apologizing for knocking his foot against hers they’d got talking. She had recognized him as a regular commuter, and the next morning she’d spotted him on the platform. He came over and chatted and they got on the train together. Things just naturally progressed. A drink. A meal. A film. A night spent together. A weekend spent together. It was all very easy. All very comfortable. It was what Katie had needed in the aftermath of losing her mother. Nothing too dramatic, just the warmth and security of someone who cared. Someone who was happy to be there when she needed a sure and steady shoulder to lean on now and then. Five years older than her, he was reliably dependable; he knew how to fix a leaky tap or how to coax the boiler into working when she couldn’t.
But recently Ian had started talking about them following Tess and Ben’s example and moving in together, and since she had the larger house, it made sense, as he had pointed out, for him to move in with her. After all, as he had also pointed out, he already spent more time in her place than his own.
Not for the first time, Katie had to admit that too often she drifted into relationships that she then found difficult to get out of. Another thing that she did, quite unconsciously, was to adopt the likes and dislikes of a boyfriend. It was as if with each new partner she became a different person. For instance Ian was a big U2 fan. Katie had never liked the band or their music. She especially disliked their constant save-the-planet posturing. Couldn’t they do it quietly? Couldn’t they save the planet without banging on about it? She should have told Ian this the very first time he had played one of their CDs. But because she hadn’t, because she’d been too polite ten months ago when they’d met to be honest with him, he now believed her to be as big a fan as he was.
Honesty. It was the bedrock of a relationship. Of any relationship.
So why the hell hadn’t her parents been honest with her? Why the deceit? Between them they’d made a mockery of her life. How could they do that? She let out a cry of frustration and blinked back hot stinging tears as the jumble of bewildered hurt and anger that had been mounting inside her sparked and flared. How could her mother have done this to her? How could one of the people she had trusted most in the world ambush her like this and rob her of everything she had thought was true? The contents of that awful letter had taken away her past. Her identity, too. She had nothing left that mattered. Nothing.
She suddenly felt achingly alone.
What happens next is up to you, Katie
, her mother had written.
It was Saturday morning, not yet twenty-four hours since the world had changed for ever for her, and what exactly was she supposed to do next? For now, all she wanted to do was pull the duvet up over her head and stay there until her wish came true: that yesterday had never happened, that she still had her job and her parents were still the people they’d always been.
She had spent most of the night trying to sleep, and when she did manage to drop off she’d dozed fitfully, tormented with dreams that had her hunting the house for things she couldn’t find or driving a car that had no brake pedal and a windscreen she couldn’t see through. She had also dreamt she was back at school, as an adult, but having to sit her GCSE maths exam. No prizes for guessing the obvious, that she was seriously rattled.
So come on, Mum, she thought as she lay in bed staring through the gap in the curtains at the blue sky beyond and listening to the screech of seagulls, just what am I supposed to do next? How did you imagine the scenario would play out?
Downstairs in the kitchen, and stuffed in a drawer where she couldn’t see it – out of sight, out of mind supposedly – was an envelope that Howard Clifford had given her. It contained the address of a firm of solicitors who could make contact with her biological father if she so wished. She hadn’t opened the envelope and didn’t know when she would be able to do so. Or if she ever would. What was to be gained from it? Only more confusion. Only more betrayal. Because apart from her own feelings, what of the feelings of his family? If he had children of his own, how would they react to her showing up out of the blue? And his wife – if he had one – what if she had no idea that he’d fathered another child? What if Katie had been conceived while he’d been married?
Now she did pull the duvet up over her head. It was all too awful to contemplate. She felt angry with her mother for putting her in this position. Why couldn’t she have kept quiet? Why had she felt the need to mess things up for the rest of Katie’s life? For that was what she had done. Much as Katie would like to pretend that envelope in the kitchen drawer didn’t exist, she couldn’t. It was going to taunt her for ever. It already was.
Open me
, it was whispering to her.
Open me and take the next step
.
The telephone by the side of the bed rang. Katie briefly considered letting the answering machine deal with it, but with her mobile still switched off and knowing that it was probably Tess wondering why on earth she hadn’t returned her calls, she picked up the receiver.
‘So you are still alive!’ Tess exclaimed. ‘I’ve been worried sick. Why’ve you switched your mobile off?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And so you should be. I was about to call the police. Just think how embarrassing that would have been if they’d turned up at your door with a battering ram and burst in on you.’ Tess was laughing now, and her lightness cheered Katie. ‘So what’s going on? Why the Greta Garbo routine?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘You’re not beating yourself up over being made redundant, are you? And don’t think I’m trivializing it, but you mustn’t take it personally. It’s about numbers, that’s all. You’ll find a much better job, just you see.’
‘It’s nothing to do with that. It’s something far worse.’
‘Worse? You’re not having a relationship emergency, are you? What’s Ian done? Because I’ll tell you now, if he’s—’
‘Tess, hit the off switch and give me a chance to speak, will you?’ She explained about her visit to Howard Clifford and her mother’s letter.
When she’d finished, and with uncharacteristic restraint, Tess said, ‘Oh my God, you must be in bits. Is Ian there with you?’
‘He doesn’t know anything about it. He’s on his way to Dubai. Though by now he’s probably there.’
‘OK, here’s what we do. I come down there and spend the weekend with you. You can’t be on your own with this whirring around inside your head. You need to do something to take your mind off it.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m fine.’
‘Yeah, right, that’s why you’ve been incommunicado, sitting there all on your own fretting yourself silly. Now look, I’m not going to take no for an answer, I’m coming down. And before you whinge about Ben, he’s busy working on some big project that should have been finished days ago, so he won’t even notice that I’m not here.’
‘Tess, listen to me: I’m fine. I just need to think it through on my own. I don’t want to make a massive drama out of it.’
‘But it is a big drama. You’ve just discovered that your father wasn’t your father.’
It took a while to convince her friend not to come rushing down from London to hold her hand, that she had a million and one things to keep her busy, including an appointment at the hairdresser’s, and after she came off the phone Katie felt exhausted. She dragged herself out of bed, showered, dressed and went downstairs. Realizing that her hair appointment was in fifteen minutes, she grabbed an apple for her breakfast and flew out of the house.
For the last ten years there had only been one person who she’d trusted to cut her hair. His name was Zac and she’d followed him from salon to salon when he’d been in London. He now owned his own place in Brighton. He’d made a good name for himself in the two years since he’d moved here, and his clients included a growing number of A-list London refugees. He also just happened to be Tess’s older brother.
Waiting for him to finish blow-drying the hair of a majorly funky-looking man who was displaying more leather about his person than a Bank Holiday DFS sofa sale, Katie sipped the skimmed latte one of the Saturday girls had brought her from the coffee shop next door and stared at her reflection in the mirror in front of her.
She had hated the colour of her hair when she’d been a child; it had earned her a clutch of clichéd nicknames, such as Ginger Nut, Carrot Top and Annie, as in Orphan Annie. When she was sixteen her parents allowed her to alter it, and after a couple of disastrous attempts with DIY kits in the bathroom, she reinvented herself as a strawberry blonde. When she was twenty and Zac started cutting her hair, he persuaded her to do away with colouring it and to embrace not only the true vibrant colour mother nature had given her, but its natural curl and wave. Ever since that day she had grown to love the rich chestnut of her hair, and trusted Zac’s judgement and opinion implicitly.
She continued to scrutinize her reflection, taking in the paleness of her complexion, the bluey-grey, almost violet, of her eyes and the wide set of her cheekbones. Her hair was loose and stopped halfway down her back. She had always been told that she’d inherited her colouring from her mother’s great-grandmother – a woman Katie had never met; nor had she ever seen a photograph of her. Now she couldn’t help but think that that had been a lie, and that maybe her colouring came from her biological father.
She put down her coffee and leant forward to look at her reflection more closely, as if she would suddenly spot something that had always been there but which she’d never noticed before. She felt that if she stared hard enough, something would leap out at her and make her realize the blindingly obvious, that she wasn’t the person she’d always believed herself to be. On the outside she looked the same, but as irrational as it sounded, on the inside she already felt very different.
She scooped up her hair in her hands, pulled it tight to the back of her head and slowly turned her face to the right, then to the left. She repeated the movement. Then did it again and came to a decision. A big, symbolic decision.
Zac was horrified. ‘I’ll do no such thing for you, darling!’
‘It’s
my
hair,’ Katie asserted.
‘It’s more than just hair, it’s your crowning glory, and I’ll play no part in destroying it.’
Katie frowned. ‘Oh brilliant! Trust a gay man to give a master class in how to overreact.’
He pouted and put his hands on his hips. ‘Trust a gay man to give a master class in common sense, more like it!’
‘But you won’t be destroying it, you’ll be restyling me. Come on, Zac, I’m stuck in a time warp here. I’ve had this look for years; it’s time for a change.’
‘If it ain’t broke, don’t try fixing it is my maxim. What’s more, it’s a classic look you have. It’s your signature feature. Audrey had her eyebrows, Marilyn had her luscious curves and you, Katie Lavender, have your heavenly hair.’ He ran his fingers through it as though this would convince her he was right.
‘It’s only hair,’ she muttered.
Zac shuddered and rolled his eyes. ‘Only hair,’ he repeated, a hand now pressed against the ruffles of his white open-necked shirt – although technically it was probably a blouson. ‘Only freakin’ hair. Look about you, Katie. Is this the kind of establishment where we treat hair as being
only
hair? I’m shocked at you, darling. You’ll be saying next oh, what the heck, it’ll grow back.’
For the first time since yesterday, Katie laughed. ‘Are you telling me it won’t?’
‘But something as dramatic as you’re suggesting, going from long to pixie-short like Emma Watson – damn that girl! – can sometimes induce such a shock in the structure of the hair, it might never be the same again.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Katie said darkly.
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, leaning down so that his head was level with hers and he was meeting her gaze in the mirror, ‘you need to think about this some more. I’ll get the style books and Mandy will fetch you another coffee and maybe a slice of carrot cake, and you can see if there’s a less drastic style that takes your fancy.’
‘But drastic is what I want. I feel like living dangerously. I want to be edgy.’
‘Edgy?’ He straightened up and laughed. ‘Darling Katie, you’re as edgy as an After Eight mint. And who wants to be edgy when they can be as sweet and adorable as you? What does Tess say about this? And dear old Ian for that matter? Though I suspect he wouldn’t notice if you grew an extra head.’
‘What do Ian or Tess have to do with me changing my hair?’ she snapped with exasperation and suddenly feeling stupidly close to tears. ‘It’s my hair, I’ll do what I want with it.’
Zac sucked in his cheeks and raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘And pray tell, which side of the royal bed did Princess Touchy get out of this morning?’
‘I could always go to another salon,’ she murmured.
He gasped. ‘Bitch! Traitorous bitch!’
‘Who’s a bitch?’
They both turned. ‘Tess!’ they exclaimed together. ‘What are you doing here?’
Tess kissed her brother on the cheek, dumped a large bag on the floor, sat in the chair next to Katie and grinned. ‘Sorry, Katie,’ she said. ‘I know you told me not to come down, but I was already on the train when I phoned. Call it a sixth sense or something, but I was worried when I couldn’t get hold of you. You’re not cross, are you?’