That Girl From Nowhere by Dorothy Koomson
‘People say that? They actually say that?’
‘All the time. When you’re adopted you’re kind of fair game. There’s a story that plays in people’s heads: either your adoptive parents are saints or you were stolen from your birth parents. There’s never any middle ground. And either way, you have to be grateful and understanding of both sets of parents’ feelings.’
Seth gathered me to him, kissed my neck and held me as close as he could. ‘I hate every single person who has ever made you feel like that. If I ever hear someone say something like that to you, they’ll be surprised by what I say in reply.’
‘It’s not your battle, Seth.’
‘Course it is. We’re a team, Smitty. We’re a family. And families look after each other and stick up for each other.’
‘I suppose they do,’ I replied.
‘And if you want to search for your birth parents, I’ll support you and do whatever I can to help you find them, and if you don’t want to find them, I support you in that, too. Whatever it is, you know I’ll always be by your side.’
I liked the way he said ‘always’. I knew he meant it.
I’ve rung the doorbell.
I wasn’t sure if I should do that or if I should knock. Decisions about doorbells or knocks on wooden, stained-glass-panelled doors shouldn’t be so fraught, I know that, but I wanted to make a good first impression. Or second impression in the case of her. And fourth impression in Abi’s case. (I haven’t told Mum I’ve seen Abi because she told me she would come when I was meeting all of them so there was no need. Obviously that argument would stand up in a court of law; in the Court of Mum I’d be toast.)
The royal blue door flies open and Abi is standing there. Her other brother lives in Montenegro, apparently, so can’t be here today, but our eldest brother will be present. So will her grandmother and her parents.
The air around her froths and foams with the desperation you feel when you’re about to meet the family of the person you love for the first time. I remember the sheer terror I felt when I brought Seth to properly meet my parents – my stomach was in knots and I had to keep getting up to wash my hands they were so slick with anxious perspiration. He’d passed (just). He’d been similarly nervous when I met his folks and I’d passed with flying colours. I hope it’s like that for me today. I hope I pass. I hope they like me.
‘Hi,’ Abi says. She grins at me. We’ve spoken, briefly, every day since we had it in writing that we are sisters. She has been so nervous about arranging this, and on top of what I feel, I truly hope it goes well for her, too.
‘Hi,’ I reply.
Her gaze goes to Mum. I told her I was bringing my mother, and she probably assumed I was doing so for moral support – not because Mum is so anxious about the thought of me ‘defecting’ to another family that she has become like the KGB during the Cold War era – always on the look out for any signs of changing loyalties.
‘This is my mum, Heather Smittson,’ I say. ‘Mum, this is Abimbola, Abi, who I’ve told you about.’
Abi’s face, twenty-four and unblemished and unlined, is momentarily surprised. It never occurred to her in all that time when I said ‘Mum’ that she would be white.
‘Hello, Abi, pleased to meet you,’ Mum says.
‘Oh,’ Abi says, shaking herself out of her surprise. ‘Hello. Great to meet you.’
She’s looking at me now, her gaze is inquisitive, wondering, I suspect, what it was like to grow up with non-black parents, what my experiences of the world were, how it felt to be me. One of the doors off the wide, carpeted corridor opens and a little girl of about five appears. She leans her head out first, staring at us from the other end of the corridor. She takes in the sight of us standing in front of the open door. Whispers drift out of the room, but she ignores them, and the rest of her appears. She is dressed for church – well, how Mum used to dress me for church: knee-length pink dress with a lace, round-neck collar, white socks pulled up to the knees, black patent shoes, pink ribbon bows at the tops and bottoms of her plaits.
She approaches us along the corridor, hesitant but only slightly so. I would never have had the confidence to do this at her age, I would have stayed in the room with the rest of my family, waited until I was told what to do, what to say, how to act. When she arrives at our end of the corridor, she presses herself against Abi’s leg in the way I’ve only ever seen children do with their parents. I have another niece. I call Sienna, my cousin Nancy’s daughter, my niece instead of my second cousin because that’s how she feels, but here is another one. Another niece who, quite strikingly, judging by the way Mum is staring at her with a mixture of shock and recognition, looks exactly like I did at that age.
‘Lily,’ Abi hisses. ‘I told you to wait with Grandma and Grandpa.’
‘Are you my new auntie?’ Lily asks me.
‘Yes,’ I reply before I have thought about how that will make Mum feel.
The little girl nods thoughtfully, considering this. ‘Who are you?’ she asks Mum.
‘That’s my mum,’ I reply.
Lily nods again. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ Mum replies.
‘Everyone’s waiting in the living room,’ she adds. ‘We’re not allowed to talk. We all have to sit there waiting for you. Even Uncle Ivor and he always talks. He talks and talks and talks and talks. I think he likes to hear his own voice.’
Abi seizes her daughter’s shoulders, massages them gently as if she might find a mute button if she presses in the right place. ‘This is Lily-Rose, my daughter,’ she says. Abi slips so easily from being twenty-four, young and naïve, to being twenty-four-year-old, long-suffering mother and highly mature.
‘Nice to meet you, Lily-Rose,’ my mother says before I can say anything.
‘Are you going to meet Grandma and Grandpa now?’ she asks.
I need to get out of here. I need to be away from here and in my bed with the covers pulled up over my head. I need to be in Leeds, in my bed with the covers pulled up over my head, waiting for Seth to come home from work and tell me that all of this has been some twisted dream from that plate of dodgy scallops I ate when we went out for our anniversary the other night. I need to not be here.
‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘That’s good. They’re nice,’ she says.
With my small butterfly box, yesterday, Hove
Light poured into my bedroom. I had the windows partially open and the outside noises filled the room with the chaos of life passing by the flat and the relentless forever of the sea. With that noise as an accompaniment, I didn’t feel so lonely while I did this, even though I needed to do it alone. If things were different, if I was still with Seth, he’d be waiting outside, ready to come in and be with me the moment I told him I needed him.
There were three photographs in total. All black and white. I am wrapped in a blanket, swaddled and unable to move, in the first one. The top of my head is covered with a crotcheted or knitted bonnet, my face is staring up at the camera, unfocused and unsuspecting. On the back, my date of birth is noted, along with: 2.42 p.m. The time of my birth, I guessed. I hate my birthdays. I love other people’s birthdays, I lavish such attention upon them and plan so much, but mine … I, thankfully, didn’t have many friends so there was no need to worry about being annually forced into holding birthday parties and events nor having surprise parties sprung on me.
I closed my eyes, allowed images from earlier birthdays to develop in the darkroom of my mind. For most of my childhood it was the same: I would sit like a statue in front of a delicious-looking cake, candles burning, while Mum and Dad, and quite often my cousin Nancy and her parents, would sing a song that was meant to celebrate my time on Earth. Every time I would make a wish and blow out the candles. I would make the same wish every year: to never have to do this again, to never have to mark another one of my birthdays like this again. Who would want to celebrate one of the worst days of someone else’s life?
&n
I hated birthdays, every single one of them. I hated having to pretend that it was a time of celebration and joy and welcoming me to the world, when it was simply the day I arrived before I was shunted off to be someone else’s problem.
I opened my eyes to look at the next picture. It was of me, not as squashed, my eyes more open, obviously a couple of weeks older. I was in the butterfly box, dressed in white, one arm is reaching out towards the person taking the photo, the other is resting on the side of my face, as if I am thinking very hard. The date on the back confirms what I thought, it is me two weeks later.
In the third photo I am about a month old. The only part of me showing is my face. My eyes are wide and focused, staring at the camera, waiting, it looks like, for something to happen, something to be said. Two weeks later (I know it was two weeks later because that’s another day my parents always marked by taking me out for ice cream and pop) I began my life in the Smittson house. I gained a new name, I gained two parents who wanted me.
As well as the date, it also said: ‘Always in my heart, Precious One’.
The box was a little large for only three photos. I wondered if she took any more. If she kept any more, or these were the only three she had. The ones she kept all these years. Our handwriting was very similar: clear and plain, no elaborate swirls or embellishments, we want to get our points across in a quick, no-nonsense fashion. I stared at the handwriting for longer than I did at the photos. My real connection to her, a real reminder that beyond looks, there was something else we had in common.
The sea began to pour into my brain, the world was loud and magnified, too much of everything filled my senses. I dropped the photos back into their too large box and I stretched out on the floor – there was too much going on around and inside me to move, to get on to the bed, to sleep.
I closed my eyes. At that moment I wanted to make a butterfly using silver wire. I had tried in the past. I fashioned the wings with my fingers instead of pliers, and they had both been that perfect squashed-heart shape, almost perfectly symmetrical. But they’d been fragile, even though I’d used five-millimetre wire; they’d been too fragile for me to add the glittery bead for the head or the wrapped wire shape for the body. It should have worked, I should have been able to make a butterfly, but all I was left with were two wings – flawlessly shaped, infinitely too delicate to be of any use to anyone.
I’m like that, I decided as I lay on the beige carpet of my bedroom. I was too delicate, incomplete and unconnected to be of any use to anyone, least of all the woman who gave birth to me.
I have no idea what is going to happen next. They are all in this room in this house that should look like a museum, should look cold and unloved because it is so large and it looks from the outside that the inhabitants could afford staff to do the hard stuff. But inside it’s similar to the type of home I grew up in: carpets that are worn in patches, coats and jackets hooked over the banister, shoes placed haphazardly on the shoe rack. A helmet resting on the platform of Lily’s green and blue scooter.
This corridor is clean, the floor vacuumed, the skirting boards and paintwork dusted, but it’s also comfortably, ordinarily messy. These are normal people. Normal people who I am related to.
My breath goes in and out at a normal rate. Everything here is normal.
The lounge is bright, two comfortable, beige leather sofas are the centrepieces to the room. One faces the large, ornate fireplace, the other sits to its side, both of them crammed with cushions of various shapes, sizes and colours. There’s a vivid red carpet, there are photos lined up neatly on the mantelpiece, each in gold frames. There is a chandelier, swollen with crystal teardrops, hanging above us. The large window has gold curtains with a red vine pattern.
I want to note the quirks of décor so that if I never come back, I’ll still have memories of the place where I could have grown up. And I need to take in these details to avoid looking at the people in front of the fireplace.
Mum is two steps behind me, and Abi, who was behind Mum, navigates around us and, holding Lily’s hand, moves past the sofa to join the rest of her family who are lined up like Russian dolls in front of the fireplace.
‘Welcome home,’ the man who stands at the centre of the people in the room says. My father. Not my dad, my father, the man who donated half of my genetic code. ‘It’s good to see you at last.’
With that, my mother, the woman who donated the other half of my genetic code, bursts into tears. Abi is not far behind her, and then, shockingly, my father turns his back to me, rests his hand on the mantelpiece and begins, it seems from the shuddering of his shoulders, to cry too. Abi’s grandmother sits in a wheelchair beside Abi’s brother, staring at me, her face wet with tears. Abi’s brother is barely controlled and I know he wants to break down, too. Only Lily looks more confused than moved. I dare not turn to look at Mum in case she’s at it too.
I wasn’t expecting this, I wasn’t braced for crying people; I wasn’t prepared to not cry myself. I’m not crying, am I?
I touch my face and my fingers are dry when I look at them. No, I’m not crying. Is that normal? Am I normal? Why am I not crying? Why? Because this really is no crying matter.
28
Smitty
With Dad & Mum & Nancy’s Mum & Dad, March 1983, Otley
‘If you ever say that about my daughter again, I will put you six feet under!’
I’d never heard Dad’s voice like that: so loud and so cross. When he laughed, my dad made a big noise. People used to look at him and start laughing, too. And when he was happy he used to talk really, really, really fast like no one could ever catch him cos his voice was like Roadrunner. And, sometimes, when he was cross with me he would talk loudly and send me to my room. But he never, not ever, shouted like this.
I didn’t know what Uncle Colin had said to make him shout, but it felt like the windows were shaking when Dad yelled. We’d gone to Uncle Colin and Auntie Marcia’s house for our Sunday dinner and we were all eating and Mum was saying how lovely the roast was and Auntie Marcia was telling Nancy to eat her vegetables like I was. Then Uncle Colin said something really, really quiet and that was when Dad slammed his fist on the table and everything rattled and everyone stopped talking and eating and I couldn’t get to breathe properly.
‘Girls, outside, now!’ Dad said. ‘Now!’
Mum put her hand on Dad’s arm and that didn’t do anything apart from make him look at me and Nancy and repeat, ‘Now!’
Auntie Marcia got up and came over to Nancy who was really scared, her eyes big and wide, and Mum looked at me and nodded quickly, like I should go as well. I got up and realised I was shaking and my eyes were wide like Nancy’s. And then we were sitting outside on the back step, and I could hear lots of loud adult voices and then Dad shouted, ‘If you ever say that about my daughter again, I will put you six feet under!’
What did he say about me? I wanted to ask Nancy. What did he say that would make Dad so angry?
I couldn’t ask Nancy, she had her knees right up to her chest and she had her head on her knees and she had her arms around her legs and she was rocking back and forwards like a Weeble.
What did he say about me? I wanted to ask Mum and Dad. But they were inside and the shouting had stopped. No one was talking inside the house and Nancy wasn’t talking to me outside the house. What did he say about me? I kept asking myself. What did he say?
‘Come on, quine, we’re going,’ Dad said to me, and he bent his big, strong body and scooped me up. Dad didn’t carry me much any more, I was too much of a big girl, but this time, he picked me and held me close. When I hugged him goodnight,
I looked to the door, waiting for Mum to come out. ‘Heather!’ Dad shouted. ‘You come now, or you don’t come at all.’
Mum walked slowly out of the house, very slowly, like she didn’t want to leave. Like she was actually thinking about ‘not coming at all’. I was scared. That scared inside I sometimes felt when I heard the monsters moving in my room at night. When I saw funny shapes on the walls. But this was worse. Much worse. I didn’t know what was happening or what Uncle Colin had said. Or what it was about me that made people say not very nice things all the time. Uncle Colin said not very nice things all the time, so did Nancy. Auntie Marcia said things sometimes. But this was the first time Dad had got so cross. Mum usually said they didn’t mean it how it sounded and not to tell Dad because he wouldn’t understand. She was right. Dad didn’t understand that they didn’t mean it, that’s why he got so cross. He didn’t understand.
‘He didn’t mean it, Dad,’ I whispered, to maybe make him understand. ‘They never mean it.’
Dad looked at me and he seemed a bit surprised. Then he looked at Mum. ‘We have things to discuss,’ Dad said to Mum. ‘At length.’
But he didn’t mean it, I wanted to say again. I didn’t, though. I had a feeling that Dad wouldn’t listen.
It’s calmed down, thankfully. Almost as quickly as it started people stopped themselves from sobbing, pulled themselves together and we all, all, pretended that it hadn’t happened.
Now everyone is sitting, chatting, and I am no longer the centre of attention. I’ve never liked being the centre of attention because I spent so much time as the odd one out, it’s nice to be unnoticed. I am sitting on the sofa with a mother on either side of me. They sit close to me, like they want to hold my hand. Mum has her bag on her lap but she’s poised, prepared to snatch up my hand if the woman on the other side of me goes anywhere near my other hand.