Finding Fathers; Dangerous world

3rd January 1992

Should I attempt a review of last year’s highs and lows?
Highs; Moving out
Greece
Norman
Getting through school
Meeting Jean
Lows; Jim and all things connected
Loneliness
School
Family.

New Year’s Eve backed away from all kissers. Steve was quite persistent but I couldn’t give in. He’s not my type anyway. Been to Emma’s a lot. Last Tuesday went to N and R’s. Bathed, had tea, felt comfortable.

4th January 1992

Today (If we’re getting back to the mundane daily diary routine) I got up (dragged myself up) late. I’d intended to go to town and do my Sean O Casey essay but did neither. I went to the village gift shop to get something for Norman’s birthday. I was looking for something with a fox on it to leap out at me and saw a porcelain wall plate with a cute fox cub. It should brighten up his office wall. £9.25! Money situation isn’t good. Now I’m having to have the heater on at night and Christmas wasn’t cheap. It’ll be sad when the decorations come down.


It’s strange to see the exact price of Norman’s present immortalised in my diary. I got free school dinners and queued at the village post office every Wednesday lunchtime to get my £31.40 income support, feeling out of place among the pensioners in headscarves and dole claimants in jeans. I also got about £200 a term education maintenance allowance for being in the sixth form and in some ways felt like I was quite well off. I’d done jobs like paper rounds and working in a butchers since I was fourteen to earn money for clothes and chocolate bars and bus fares so the weekly giro actually felt like free money and my disorganisation around budgeting probably stopped me feeling the worry that I should have done as I saved pound coins to go into the metal electric meter that whirred away on the wall in my room as my heater blew out hot air.

Being in the shop had reminded me of the Flaming Katie mission. I wasn’t thinking about what I could afford, I was aiming for something that would be just right. I’d gasped when I saw the white plate propped up on a high shelf and asked the man in the shop to lift it down. I looked into the liquid brown eyes of the fox cub, its head cocked to one side as it sat on a patch of grass. It looked a bit quizzical and a bit sad and I felt like it wouldn’t be able to help reminding Norman of me.

**

The plate is in my room in it’s box waiting to be wrapped.
I am in that phonebox again, to arrange when I’m next visiting.
Breath frosting on the glass.
Rosemary saying Norman’s been taken into hospital. Bradford Royal Infirmary- B.R.I where I was born. He’s in intensive care she says. It’s like something’s stopped my heart for a second. But her voice, though a bit shaky, is calm and reassuring. She says I should get the bus across tonight and come to the hospital with her. I put the receiver down, feel a rush of tears, give into them for a second, then swallow them straight back, the familiar reflex. My hands are shaking.

I get two buses, one into town and then one from outside what used to be Brown Muff’s Department store up to Pullan Avenue. “He’s going to die” in my head. “He can’t die yet” in my head. Up the hill, along grey streets, scanning the houses for the bus stop nearest their house. Rosemary hugs me as she lets me in the back door. Makes me a Martini with lemonade and a slice of lemon while she has a sherry. Making jokes, being chatty and telling me how she’d rung the doctor when Norman’s cold got worse. He’d said it could be pneumonia and called an ambulance. At B.R.I they’d put him straight on a ventilator in intensive care. The machine was breathing for him at the moment. I picture a machine, grey and chrome maybe, breathing, it’s wires heaving up and down. Rosemary makes a chicken casserole while I lay the table. Thick green cloth underneath then the white cotton top cloth, the rectangular crème mats with floral patterns, knives, forks, spoons round the mats, a terracotta stand for the tea pot. All the reassuring order of this domesticity helping slow my racing heart. Everything seems normal; apart from the refrain of “he’s going to die” in my head, and the strange emptiness in the house with only me and Rosemary in it.

We set off to the hospital as dusk is falling. The first time I’ve been driven by Rosemary. She is surprisingly assured at the wheel of the Rover I think. Says she’s always liked driving. Still so many things about her and Norman to discover I think. Don’t let him die.

Following signs in the hospital reminds me of an airport, unfamiliar words and phrases leading you off down corridors where your feet squeak on the floor. Paediatrics, oncology, renal, haematology. Hospitals and airports. Neither somewhere people choose as destinations. Both limbo-places en route to somewhere else. Me, my brothers and sisters, my Mum, used to trail after my stepfather in Terminal 2 at Heathrow and someone always said on the way in the car “will you be having an argument in the airport Dad?” after long experience of every holiday starting with a shouted row between him and airport staff over queues or delays. Here, me and Rosemary followed the signs together. I.C.U. Clacking down linoleum corridors with the smell of disinfectant in our nostrils. It’s lighter and airier than the rest of the hospital to my surprise and has it’s own reception. Rosemary gives Norman’s name and a white coated nurse leads us through some Perspex sheets that seem to be there instead of doors. I see him straight away and try not to look shocked. Machines and wires protruding everywhere over a high bed with bars at the sides. Electronic beeps coming from somewhere. It’s like a scene from Casualty. He’s small and vulnerable at the centre of it all. Green hospital gown, open at the chest where white monitor pads are attached. Eyes open, bright and amused, a white plastic tube in his mouth. He’s still alive.

The nurse is explaining that he can’t speak because of the tube, that they’d given him paper and pens, he’d been covering sheets with writing all afternoon. “He’s a real character” she said, which I liked because it meant that even in a situation like this the specialness I saw in him was still there, but which also made me bridle as the sort of patronising thing you’d say about a toddler who’s managed to draw a picture. “He runs his own business you know” I think, but am disarmed when the same nurse says to me “Are you the daughter he’s just met? He’s obviously so excited about it, he’s very proud of you”. The first time there’s been a chance for him to acknowledge me in public. How ironic that it is here, in a situation like this where the social norms and niceties have to be swept aside. There was an affair, there was a separation, a reunion. Social convention overturned. Like it is when you’re in a hospital gown as monitors beep next to you and you etch out sentences with a blue pencil to smiling white coated nurses while a tube stops your mouth where somewhere down a corridor seventeen years earlier, your twins were born. “He’s very proud of you”. It feels like his opinion is the only one that matters. Don’t die.

Me and Rosemary are taking it in turns to speak now we’ve reached his bed. Banter, jokes, light, we know how to do this we’re from Yorkshire. The county that makes a fuss about not making a fuss. “Donald says this is an extreme way of not paying for a round!”, “I thought I obviously hadn’t had quite enough drama in my life in the last year so thanks for keeping things interesting!”.

Rosemary is stood at the side of the bed, reaches her hand towards his and his curls round hers over the starched white bed sheet. I’m at the bottom of the bed, resting my hands on the metal bedstead.

Then, a loud beeping. He struggles with the tube in his mouth. Rosemary and I both flinch. A nurse strides over with an efficient smile, detaches the tube from his mouth, motions me to stand back as a yellow-white spume of fluid fountains into the air landing with a splatter on the floor. “Better out than in” she says cheerfully, as Norman looks on resigned and Rosemary and me try and look casual. This happens all the time apparently when fluid from the lungs builds up in the tube. Twice more that visit it happens and doesn’t seem at all abnormal by the third time. It’s amazing what people can get used to.

A bit later when Rosemary is at the desk talking to the nurses I feel like I have to say the words “I love you”. He’s going to die. The words had come into my head before when I was talking to him in his house, in the pub, just a whisper or an echo that I felt I couldn’t voice. Now, even though I didn’t know whether I had a right , I felt like I had to say them to him before it was too late.

“Don’t let him see you’re upset” Rosemary had said before we went in. “Keep cheerful for your Dad” one of the nurses had offered, almost as an advance warning. So I felt like I was breaking a rule as I stood at the side of his bed and held his hand and stammered out the sentence I was determined to get to the end of. “I just-wanted-to tell you that-“ I swallowed, my chest having surprised me by constricting so much it felt like an iron cage. “that- I love you”. The words feeling like a foreign language I was reading from a phrase book, but releasing a trigger in me that had been holding back tears that I hadn’t realised could come. Guiltily feeling I was holding back a sudden tidal wave as tears streamed down my cheeks. I wiped them away with quick, angry strokes as Norman squeezed my hand, his eyes watery and nodded as if to say “I know”.

And this is where memory can be cruel. Because there is only a blank where I want to be able to write that Norman said the words back. Except he couldn’t speak so would have had to write them down. Did he scribble “I love you” on the A4 pad? Did his look tell me what I already knew?

At the end of one series of Dr Who last year, the Doctor and his assistant Rose meet for the last time on a Norwegian beach. She has travelled through the night for this farewell after hearing his voice in her head. She’s followed the voice to this windswept beach. The Doctor appears and she runs over to him. Reaches out. “No, you can’t touch me” he says sadly “I’m in the Tardis. Can’t generate enough energy to be here physically. I’m burning up a million suns just to say goodbye”. Tears are running down her face, he’s looking at her intensely. They both know that they’re stuck in parallel universes now and won’t ever be able to see each other again. “How long have you got?” she asks. “About two minutes” he says apologetically and then asks her how her life’s going now. They talk about what she’s doing and what he’s doing, all the time a foot apart but not touching and then, after a couple of minutes must have gone by, she looks up at him, her eyes brimming and takes a deep breath and says, with a rueful smile “I l-I love you”. They stare at each other. “Rose” he says firmly, then opens his mouth again and breathes in to speak.

Then the energy in the Tardis must run out at that exact moment and suddenly he disappears before he can say the words. Rose is left staring at the space where he had been, wind whipping her hair, the tears still running down her cheeks. Watching that, at the point where the Doctor disappeared, sixteen years after I stood in the hospital ward at the side of Norman’s bed, my tears turned into great heaving sobs, She didn’t get to hear him say it and I cried like I had never cried before. Great wracking sobs from the very bottom of my stomach that left me exhausted that night and the twice more I watched the episode that week. The pain and the despair felt like it had been dammed up for all those years, although it isn’t until writing this now that I really see the parallel. I realise now why that interrupted declaration of love had once again released that trigger that first gave way when I managed to say the words I knew I had to say to Norman. The voice of the intensive care nurse echoes in my head again Better out than in.
 
Andrew comes and picks me up at lunchtime from school. His red salesman’s car in the carpark. We smile and laugh our way to the hospital. His honest, teasing manner is a breath of fresh air. Shooting sideways glances as we drive I study his face properly for the first time. Narcissist again, it’s not me I see there. My twin brother in the prominent nose, the undefined lips, the fair, sensitive skin. Norman in the eyes and hairline and light hair.

In intensive care, Norman has a new A4 pad. Just as many tubes. Smiles at Andrew’s teasing. Of him and me. It feels like we really are brother and sister visiting our father. That this is normal. The nurses say they’re going to be trying him off the ventilator the next day “then you can breathe on your own again can’t you?” as if he’d temporarily chosen not to. The fountain of white goo from the tube happens a couple more times. “I’ll just talk about anything then” I say as Andrew talks to the matron. I go into a comic monologue about a schoolfriend’s tangled love life. Norman smiles. Rosemary says later how pleased he was to see me and Andrew getting on so well. He might live.

I had the fox plate ready to take with me for his birthday. “Just leave it here” says Rosemary the next day when we visit. “He can have it when he gets home”. He might live.

I’m to get the bus straight to the hospital on the Saturday. When I speak to Rosemary on the phone she says it’s good news, he’s off the machine, he’s in a normal ward. I arrive at ward 9 on my own. It’s not light and airy like Intensive Care. There are people sleeping on mattresses on the floor in small rooms on the approach to it (visiting families of patients it turns out, but it gives the place the air of a makeshift shelter in the aftermath of some emergency). The walls are dingy green, and I’m shocked to realise that it’s a mixed ward. Bewildered looking old women in beds, distressed looking men with dishevelled pyjamas. This feels like a vision of hell. And Norman is here in a bed halfway down. In blue pyjamas now rather than a gown. “Hello” he croaks softly and smiles. The tube has left him with a sore, painful throat, hardly any voice. But a voice. I remember he tells me that my hair suits me up. “Hmmph, it’s messy though” I mumble, pleased. I remember…a more important thing. Rosemary hasn’t arrived yet. I feel I need to run this past him while we’re on our own.

I’m thinking of changing my surname I say. I’d been thinking of it for months, not feeling that my stepfather’s surname belongs to me. I’d written possible ones on a piece of paper. Mostly variations on Eyre, as in Jane Eyre. “Air-Ayre-Aire?”.
Then finding Norman made Reynard a possibility. “Except it’s in the second half of the alphabet” was the reason I ridiculously told myself meant I couldn’t consider that. Really, I didn’t think I was entitled to it. Even though part of me now saw myself as a Reynard. Norman had said so. But I didn’t think Jackie would welcome me sharing her surname. That hers was legitimised by marriage but mine would only be because I’d decided it. Stolen it. I thought of fox though. Fred the soft toy fox Norman had given me. The fox cub plate that was waiting for him to come home so he could unwrap it. A name in the first half of the alphabet. Fox. “I was thinking I could change it by deed poll and go to university with it as my surname to save confusion now” I said. Looking at him, with my eye brows raised and feeling some trepidation. He smiled. “Kate Fox” he said, as if he was trying out how the name sounded out loud. “My little Fox”. Tenderness was still too new to me for it to feel anything but unexpected. But welcome. He had said the name. In saying it, he made a statement not a question. This was going to be me.

Another visit with Rosemary. There’d been a set back, Norman was back in intensive care. He hadn’t been able to keep breathing without the machine. Back to the pads and pens. Maybe this was a blip.

Then Ward Four. Worse than Ward 9. Other patients just wandering around. Dressings on Norman’s wrists with old dried blood on them. “The nurses said they were coming” said Norman looking helpless. “How long has it been since you’ve had these on?” asks Rosemary. Time is blurring into hospital minutes and lunches and jugs of water and catheter changes. I was staying the night at Pullan Avenue now when I visited. Sleeping under layers of sheets in their guest bedroom. Rosemary driving me across to school in the morning. “The nurses said he was ranting and raving in the night, trying to get out of bed, saying he wanted to come home, the blood on his wrists was where he tried to pull the tubes out”. “That’s not Norman, it was the lack of oxygen”. That’s not Norman. What his family said when he left Rosemary. Now he was losing himself in hospital nights. Just wanting to get home.

Intensive care again. The doctors saying that it didn’t look like he could breathe without the machine. Another blurred night. Trying to get out of bed, tearing the tubes from his wrists. They wanted Rosemary to let them write DNR on his records. Do Not Resucitate. He’s going to die. Rosemary and Andrew discussing it. Doctors know best. Somewhere inside me, I’m protesting. I’m shouting That’s just giving up. I’m angry with the hospital. Not changing his dressings, letting people be ill in dirty, dingy mixed wards. Probably seeing them as a nuisance when they’re frightened. He can’t breathe for himself, it’s his own fault. We can’t be bothered to resuscitate. Just another old man. He’s not just another old man. Keep trying. Don’t give up. Even managing one more day. I’ve only known him fifty. If his lungs can be re inflated just once more…He’s going to die.

Friday night. 23rd January. I dream it. He falls out of bed. He’s gone. That morning I’m still in bed when there’s a loud knock on the door of my bedsit. I leap up. I don’t have a dressing gown. I feel the cold on my legs in my knee length Minnie Mouse nightshirt. Warily I pull open the door. Andrew and Jackie are stood there. My heart drops. I know there’s going to be before this moment and after this moment. “Is he-?” I say, “This morning” Andrew says heavily. “The doctors said they couldn’t do anything else”. They step into the bedsit. I think I say “No”. Andrew hugs me awkwardly. I cry. I stop myself. Jackie hugs me. “We’ll wait in the car while you get dressed” Andrew says. It’s taken as read that I’m coming to Pullan Avenue. I grab some clothes, walk down the corridor and brush my teeth. In the back of the car I lean my head against the glass of the window. Swallow tears again at moments. They bubble up suddenly like water in a geyser. “I dreamt that” I say flatly when Andrew says Norman had fallen out of bed at about four that morning and been pronounced dead shortly afterwards. He says Rosemary is doing alright, “as well as can be expected”. I’m nervous about seeing her. It’s felt like we’ve been in Norman’s illness together. Teas at the table, going to bed after the 10 o clock news, alarm set for 7.20 to get across to school on time. A routine unfolding. But she lost Norman once before. And she got him back. Now he’s gone forever.

As Andrew pushes open the back door, Rosemary comes forward to meet us. She starts crying. Hugs me and Jackie at the same time. Chokes “I just want you to know that I love you both”. I didn’t expect that. But it felt right. I couldn’t say it back. But held onto her tightly. That night Andrew ordered us all a meal from the Chinese takeaway. I remember lots of laughter. Andrew or Rosemary or both more than once saying with exasperated affection, “Of all the times to go and die just as Kate’s got in touch!” I remember wanting to be back at my bedsit and I remember thinking about Norman in the hospital on his own. I’d asked where his body was. “In the mortuary I think” Andrew had said. The others didn’t seem to have the same feeling. That it was wrong that Norman was still on his own there. I wanted to sit with him in the hospital. I couldn’t stop thinking that he’d only wanted to come home from that horrible place. He knew he was going to die. Later Rosemary brought down a box from his office. I’d forgotten. The fox plate. I didn’t feel like I could open it. That it wasn’t mine because it was a present. “We thought he’d be home to open it” Rosemary said sadly and took the plate out of the box. There was a little stand with it and she propped it up on the sideboard in the living room. The first birthday present I’d got him and he’d never seen it. The fox cub sitting on it’s own with it’s plaintive, sad eyes. My little fox.
 
Kate....

I just had to say your words bought a lump to my throat. So poignant, you write so beautifully.
 
i've been reading this from the start, but unsure what to say if i posted, so didn't, but today i have tears running down my face.
just sending some hugs
xx
 
Thank you all so much for your kind words and empathy. It feels like I have people with me now, when I didn't then xx
 
I left a message with the school secretary on the Monday and stayed at Rosemary’s for the rest of the week. I slept until late each morning, had endless cups of tea, read the morning and evening papers sat in Norman's chair and laid the table every night for a meal that Rosemary cooked. Meat and potato pie or chicken chasseur or lamb chops. I both felt comfortable and couldn’t wait to be back on my own in my bedsit. I sat in the living room with Rosemary while the funeral director came to make the arrangements for the following Friday. The death notice in the local paper would say only; “Norman Reynard leaves a wife Rosemary and a son, Andrew”. Rosemary apologising “So many people still don’t know. All the friends we made after everything had happened. If only he’d lived a few more weeks you’d have met them but we can’t suddenly spring it on people now”. Reading the notice in the Wednesday evening’s Telegraph and Argus I had the strange feeling of being close to the heart of a drama, but a completely invisible player in it. Maybe it was partly in reaction to that invisibility that I tried to make myself responsible for everything, out of fear of being responsible for nothing. I felt powerless so I over-compensated by wanting to be all powerful. I said that I felt like Norman’s death was my fault. After the news at ten, sipping milky coffee that Rosemary had made by boiling water on the hob, I started haltingly;

“As soon as I turned up Norman got poorlier and then he went into hospital. What if…what if he wouldn’t have died if it wasn't for the stress of-”

Rosemary replying as I knew she would, as I hoped she would;

“No Kate, he was a very poorly man, he had been for years. He kept going for years so people didn’t realise but the doctor said his lungs were riddled, just riddled with tar. He’d have been on an oxygen mask if he’d come home and there’s no way he’d have wanted that.”

I sat tense in my chair. Almost knowing I didn’t believe what I was saying but unable to stop myself saying it anyway. Feeling guilty in a masochistic sort of way.

“Don’t think it was your fault Kate” she said softly.

She gave me a goodnight kiss and cried softly as she did most nights as I hugged her goodnight. I held myself in and back. Eventually on my own in bed I would choke back sobs quietly. It was as if I allowed myself just that one restrained release of emotion a day.

Rosemary dropped me off at the working men’s club room three evenings after tea that week where I was rehearsing for a pantomime with an amateur dramatics group. I was Sleeping Beauty’s nurse Cecilia Beauchamp Smythe in “Sleeping Beauty”. Putting on a comedy posh voice and singing and dancing badly through a duet of “You were made for me” and the big cast numbers. The show was on in a fortnight so I wouldn’t even have thought of skipping any more rehearsals apart from the one on the Saturday afternoon Norman had died. “We’ve thought about you all the time” said one middle aged chorus member on the first night. I didn’t understand how, since she didn’t know me very well. I hadn’t learned about the instinctive sympathy people could feel, because I was so used to living in situations that people couldn’t connect with. With a teenager’s selfishness I didn’t realise that it was possible for people to really empathise. I didn’t realise the whole company knew I’d just tracked my father down and now he’d died and were sad on my behalf and didn’t know what to say to me. I just carried on as usual, trying to remember my words now that we were doing whole run throughs without the script.

One of the songs in the show was “Someone to Watch over me” and I had a lump in my throat as the whole company sang it. I think it spoke to the double sorrow I was feeling for me and, out of guilt or identification, on behalf of my mother. My Mum who I knew didn’t even know Norman had died. Some of the lines made me think of her situation, or her situation as I’d idealised it;

“He's the big affair
I cannot forget.
Only man I ever
think of with regret”

Then, other lines spoke to the really young child in me who feared the death of her father more than anything else;


“Tell me, where is the shepherd for this lost
lamb?
I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood.
I know I could always be good
to one who'll watch over me”.

I had no idea at all then how powerful the fearful four year old girl in me was. Where some of my pessimism and dread comes from, even as another Pollyanna part of me says “it’ll be reet” to everything. Where He’s going to die came from before I had grounds to know if he was.

For that I’d need to travel. Back, back again, down the rabbit hole into the past. 1979;

It is dark. There is noise, the outside door banging, men’s voices. Mum hissing “It’s alright, go back to sleep” as I stand in my nightie at the top of the stairs. The next morning, as we come down to our breakfast, Weetabix and milk at the counter in the kitchen, Dad isn’t there. Mum says he got some grapefruit juice in his eye last night, that the ambulance men came and took him into hospital, that he’s going to be alright.
Later he’s at home. Clouds of smoke in the living room as he and mum have their cigarettes. Now we hear the word heart attack. “Are you going to die Dad?”, Richard, my twin brother saying what we’re both wondering. A heart attack sounds like a very, very bad thing. The heart keeps you alive, tick, tick, boom, boom. That’s the noise it makes and without it you’re dead. If it’s been attacked you could die. “No!” Dad laughs his big honking laugh, crosses his arms over his large chest.
“Arterial defibrilliations” is written on a piece of paper by the Doctor and sits in the kitchen at home. The special name for what Dad has. Bottles of heart tablets in the bathroom. I would read the names, liking the sound of the words. “Se-len-i-um” sounded like a type of shampoo I thought. Dying. That would be like getting sent to bed in the middle of the day like happened to us if we were naughty. “Right! Bed now, B-E-D” Mum would shout and your middle would sink. People still carrying on being happy, playing out, eating biscuits while you’re all alone. But dying would be like that and all alone forever. Dad with a heart attack. He’s going to die. Me if I died, it would be like that. In the blackness of my room my heart pounds, I feel the terror of nothing at all forever and ever and ever. I swallow and gasp for breath. All alone forever. You’re going to die.

My body remembers this. The suffocating panic. My mind doesn’t. But each time my parents have an argument, shouting at the top of their lungs, each time my Dad eats ten chocolate bars in a row when he’s on a break from his constant diets, each time your Mum says “your Dad’s heart”, my body remembers the panic. He’s going to die. When he moves to the family holiday home with our sister while me and my brother do our last year of GCSEs, my head says “that’s a bit weird, must be something to do with money”, my body says He’s going to die. When I find out a year later that he’s not actually my Dad my head says “It doesn’t matter anyway, he’s been horrible to me for months and I’ve just found out he makes my Mum sleep with other men so that he can record it, he’s nothing to me”, my body says You’re going to die.

I have fast forwarded from that point in the story before and I’m going to fast forward from there again. But somehow something in my body is freeze framed in the feeling of dreading the loss of a father. And it is still paused there now at Norman’s funeral.
Tension in the muscles around my chest, tightness in my neck, a clenching in my skull. Inside I am a stop motion cartoon stuck on a still frame of fear. Outside I am a seventeen year old girl in a roll neck grey jumper which swamps me and comes down to the hips of the long black pleated skirt I first wore to meet Norman in.

Andrew and Jackie had come to Pullan Avenue that morning. They were going to be travelling with Rosemary in the funeral director’s car. Rosemary had arranged for Norman’s best friend, also called Norman, and his wife Doreen, to come to the house at the same time and pick me up. I would be with them during the service. Norman James as Rosemary always called him, came into the house in a cloud of pipe smoke. A big, reliable-feeling man with a loud voice who looked like he propped up bars in golf clubs and organised rotary club dinners, flanked by Doreen who had an immaculate helmet of coiffed white hair, kind eyes and big glasses that gave her the look of a retired university lecturer. I felt safe with them straight away. Rosemary and Andrew both hugged me before they got in the black car. It felt like this was the backstage farewell before a performance where we were going to have to pretend not to know each other. The last week was real, this next bit wasn’t going to be real. On the way to the service I sat in the back of the car and Norman James talked about how he’d known Norman since they were at school together. They and another friend would stroll round Peel Park together, just walking and talking for hours and hours. “Both turned out very clever blokes, did very well for themselves” said Norman James of the other Norman and their friend Donald, almost proudly “and he was always whistling and humming was Norman, so we called him Hap, for Happy”.I remembered Norman telling me that the first time we met. Only sixty days ago.

Lots of cars in the car park at the crematorium. Lots of people in black who I don’t recognise. Some will know who I am, some of Norman’s family and friends. Lots don’t. I seem to remember Norman James saying something about not crying. But I know that might have been my instruction to myself. I stay at their side as we walk into the small chapel. Norman’s favourite brass band music is playing. My throat tightens. I had been there when the funeral director asked Rosemary if she wanted any music playing on the way in. I knew what happened backstage so I do exist I think. But I’m not supposed to be here, so I’m like a ghost at this funeral and I’m not here. I focus on the coffin, piled with flowers at the back of the room. Norman, in there. Not on his own any more like he was in the hospital. He is here, so I am here. He knew I existed. “Blood’s thicker than custom”. I stare at the small door at the back of the room. I’ve never been to a funeral, let alone a cremation and had imagined the dark furnace opening, flames leaping out as the coffin dramatically slid in, but Norman James said that would happen later, not while we were actually there. Rosemary and Andrew in the front row, turning round, smiling and waving reassuringly. The rows around us filling up. Norman and Doreen shaking hands, kissing people. I am studying the order of service. Looking down at it, my hands gripping the white sheet. There is coughing and clearing of throats. Music starts up, a vicar has made his way to the front, announces that we’ll sing “The Lord is My Shepherd”. It echoes the “I’m a little lamb who’s lost in a wood” of “Someone who’ll watch over me” and as the melancholy verses go on, my voice wavers. Then we all sit down. More coughing, throat clearing, orders of service rustling. The vicar talks about Norman. He and Rosemary only went to church at Christmas, but she’d spoken to him about the eulogy. I don’t remember the vicar visiting Pullan Avenue, maybe I went out for a walk. Even though I’m not religious, maybe it had felt harder to pretend not to exist to someone from the church. Norman’s success in business, his down to earthness, his liking for a pint, his sense of humour are mentioned. His forty year marriage to Rosemary, his son Andrew who’d recently married Jackie and had been about to follow him into business as a textile agent are mentioned. Me and Richard, my mother and the time everything nearly came crashing down, are not mentioned.

Internally I wince when the vicar talks about him having one son. “Two sons and a daughter!” I am shouting in my head. I feel angry with the vicar for erasing us from history. Even though he didn’t know, and it would have been like a bad sitcom to suddenly announce our existence to the congregation at his funeral. Part of me also accepted the fact that officially we didn’t exist. I had no right to be acknowledged. Was that was Norman would have wanted? I didn’t think so and I felt frustrated at how time had stolen our voices. Him with his breathing tube and his pad and his pen, not able to acknowledge he was going to die and to plan ahead so I didn’t feel like a ghost at his funeral. Me who had turned up too early, or too late to be acknowledged as part of his life. “I was important to him!” I shout internally, but in the absence of confirmation, can only follow a statement of existence like that with a question “Wasn’t I?”.

The Brass band music starts up again to play us out, and I swallow hard and then feel a wetness in my nose. Surprised I pinch it and see blood on my fingers. I haven’t had a nose bleed since I was four or five. “Are you alright?” Norman James asks and reaches into his pocket for a hanky. It’s white and I’m apologetic as it gets soaked in blood as we walk down the aisle. I can feel pressure at the sides of my skull. I look back towards the coffin. Goodbye Norman. But I feel like the proper goodbye has either already happened or is still to come.

Rosemary and Andrew and Jackie are lined up on the way out, shaking people’s hands. “Are you alright?” Rosemary’s saying. “Yes, are you?”. Stage whispers while the show goes on. Outside in the car park, a man in horn rimmed glasses and a badly fitting jacket comes over. “You’re Kate aren’t you? I’m Eric, Norman’s brother. How are you?” he asks with real concern in his eyes. In the years afterwards, people who knew him will be surprised. Eric was known as the feckless one in the family. The spoiled younger son who couldn’t keep hold of money and always resented Norman for being the sorted one that everyone looked up to. But that day at the funeral I always remembered his kindness. The way he grasped and held onto my hand as he said hello, the way he held my gaze, his eyes filled with emotion and seeming to pick up and reflect how lost I felt.

There is a buffet and drinks afterwards at Apperley Manor, a hotel a few minutes away from the Crematorium. I mainly remember people laughing and bantering and realising how a whole generation of people in their fifties and sixties still drink-drove judging by the numbers of them who were planning to get themselves home that evening. I speak to Eric’s daughter a lot, a cheery RAF nurse called Joanne with cropped dyed red hair and an easy honesty. “You look like Norman” she says “Especially round your hairline and your nose”. I'm not introduced to Norman’s older sister Marion or her children and later find out that Marion thinks Rosemary shouldn’t have anything to do with me because of the circumstances of my birth. In later years Rosemary would often say of the funeral “You should have been in the front row with us, with me and Andrew and Jackie, it was wrong that you weren’t”. But, there were so many people to negotiate and Norman had only been dead six days. Without him I felt like I had lost the only person who could speak up for me. It was going to be a long, long journey until I realised that I could come out of the shadows, stop being a ghost and start speaking up for myself.
 
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omg kate sooooo emotional xxxxxx
 
Thanks so much for hanging in there everyone. What a relief to have written that.
I'm going to change gear now and go backwards in time. I started this thread way back last November by jumpcutting from the point in 1991 where I discovered my parents wedding certificate and hence found out that my Dad was actually my stepfather. That summer then became severely strange! I've already written some of the narrative of how I lost my virginity to Jim, but aren't going to go into that gory detail here. I am however going to work forwards from then until I ran away with him six weeks later. All I can say is that it was a very, very strange time. Two swingers and a gunrunner are an explosive an unfortunate mix to be around when you're quite an ordinary, if introspective girl who's just got into her first relationship. This might read like a thriller sometimes, and also a dysfunctional family story that will make you go "tsk"- at me and at the other protagonists. It's stranger but sometimes lighter than the Norman quest. I'll start by re-pasting the first bit;

****

I might have been melodramatic but remember what it was like when you were sixteen and hormones were racing and Bryan Adams' "Everything I do, I Do It for You" had been in the charts for sixteen weeks that long, hot summer of 1991.

You didn't want anything to do with your family. Especially not your Dad who spent his days shouting at people over nothing and telling you you were fat and to leave the room when adults came in, and your Mum who spent her days sunbathing topless in the garden, unless she was sitting topless in the kitchen while a parade of people, from your slow fifteen year old neighbour from up the road getting his biology lessons in the flesh, to slightly bemused members of the Ex-pat community, pretend unsuccessfully not to notice.

My parents had always had a separate living room from their three children, and things that weren't for children's ears. When you grow up in a house of secrets, then that's what you think is normal.

How do you overturn that?

You need someone who likes to break secrets apart. To dig underneath what's hidden, to explode it, reveal it. Not because they want to save the world, a family or themselves, because then they'd be too invested in what they might uncover, but someone who'll do it just for the hell of it. Someone who likes to shatter what's whole, make order into chaos, turn things inside out, just because they can.

Oops. Melodrama again. But sometimes, situations that are so deeply repressed and held in, which trap lost feelings and facts underneath them like layers of earth gradually grinding matter into coal, or diamonds, have a way of attracting powerful forces to release them.

Catalysts. Earthmovers, Chaos merchants.

Enter Jim. A 46 year old self- described "ageing adventurer". His father had been a professional gambler, so he knew a thing or two about how to try and control chance and chaos, and how the house always wins in the end, but that needn't stop you enjoying the game.

He sounds like a character in a book. But, I was sixteen and loved books more than life, so someone who sounded like he should be in one, was definitely going to get my vote and move my earth.

How we ended up in my parents bedroom on the 9th of August 1991, looking for "things that might explain some of their secrets" is another story. But there we are.

Picture us there in the sparsely furnished, stone walled, French farmhouse bedroom. Me, wearing shorts and t shirt, tanned, shoulder length brown hair, no idea at all that I'm actually quite an attractive teenager. Jim, all firm lines and strength and definition, though his cropped black hair and beard, and beige t shirt and shorts don't disguise his 46 years. We're opening drawers and cupboards and Jim says as we pass their video camera "That's the key to alot of your parent's secrets" and then; "Do you know your Dad's got a secret camera system wired up in your house in England?" and I'm saying I thought it was just an intercom put in between his office and their bedroom for a joke, when I open a maroon suitcase with metal buckles and see a pair of handcuffs and lots of little dictaphone tapes with writing on, and photographs with some confusing arrangements of limbs on, and I shut the case and stare at Jim. He matter of factly comes back over and reopens it. Says, very nonchalantly "Your Mum and Dad have advertised in the English language newspaper you know for men to sleep with your Mum. I wonder if they're blackmailing them".

Picture me now. Unfortunately I'm not having a dramatically visible reaction though. I probably look just the same as I did two minutes earlier, but my eyes are a bit blanker. I've honed the art of the non-reaction by being the calm one in my parents epic rows. The calm centre of the storm that my brother and sister would shelter near. And I suddenly remember a row when I was maybe seven or eight. My Mum saying over and over again, "Shall I tell them?...Shall I tell them what we're arguing about?". In the same way she might say "Shall I throw your pudding away if you don't want your dinner?" and you knew the answer was meant to be "no." But Dad had said he wasn't bothered, she could tell us, and my Mum had choked out "Your Dad wants me to sleep with other men while he watches", and somehow we'd all then entered a collective family amnesia about it for the next eight years or so. And now the pill had worn off, I was like one of those patients in that film about people who'd been asleep for thirty years and suddenly woke up. Or is that a simile too far? Especially since I was looking more dazed than anything. "You look like a bubble's burst" said Jim, and that was before I'd even found their marriage certificate...
In itself it wasn't very earthshattering. My parent's names, the date of their wedding anniversary...and the year. Not 1973, as they'd always said, two years before me and my twin brother were born. A nice, respectable leeway suggesting a planned family with time to make a home and embark on their new life.

No, not that year, but 1978. Three years after we were born. Maybe if it had been a year out, I'd have thought it was a simple mistake. But a whole five years? I knew instantly that my parents hadn't even met when me and my twin brother were born. Which meant that "Dad" wasn't my Dad.

It's amazing how quickly brains can work. Flicking through mine at this point are some pictures and memories. Freeze frame, flashbulb, stop motion moments;

Me and my brother in pyjamas, tentatively making our way down the stairs in the terraced house, knowing we weren't allowed down, somehow having bypassed the baby-gate. Being surprised that Mum beckoned us down, Dad being sat at the table. Him being there, a surprise somehow.

(Click; First meeting)

A visit to a flat that smelled of Dad's aftershave and had an avocado bathroom suite like the one in the new house we were about to move into.

(Click; Moving in as a family)

Being sat in a room that was all wood panelled, facing a row of men in suits.

(Click; The adoption hearing)

And now, thirteen years later, stood here, in my parent's bedroom, realising that a big part of their epic rows over the years was about the power battle they were having over their sex lives, played out in the photos I'd just shut back in the suitcase, and that a big part of the air of unsaid things that permeated our lives was that so much that we'd been told was a lie.

Click.
Click.
Click.

That day, I'm still the Queen of the non-reaction.
Dad's not my Dad anymore? Good. I'm glad I'm not related to him.
Everything's a lie. Good, I don't feel as bad about the lies I'm telling by having a relationship with Jim.

Oops. Layer upon layer, the other illusions that I'm building up to separate me from painful reality, are being smeared across the mirror that might eventually tell me who I am.

Our parents are often our earliest mirror. I'd always known that what they reflected back to me was distorted. Now I was going to smash that glass altogether-

but an "ageing adventurer" who would eventually tell me that I was cold and reserved and "of the same soul" as him, wasn't going to be a very accurate replacement mirror. But he was the only one I had.

When we haven't got mirrors, we have to rely on how we feel inside.
Inside? If you asked me then what I was feeling, I'd have given you a thought not a feeling every time. Except hunger. I could usually identify that one...
 
In the diary I wrote three months later I said of the aftermath of that discovery in their bedroom "I am shattered. Jim is too jaded to be sympathetic".

We went back downstairs then into the grey stone living room of the small house in the French hamlet. Furnished simply with just a settee and a television. Midday sun is beating down through the windows, no one walks past at the hottest part of the day, they're all inside sleeping. Jim says he'll ring his friend Andrew in England and ask him about how to get hold of adoption and birth certificates.

The phone is on the windowsill in the living room. He dials a number and instructs without preamble as if the person is used to receiving random instructions;

"Yes, could you get some information on how people can get hold of their own birth certificates and if they are obliged to say the fathers name on them? Yeah, call me back when you can on this number".

He hangs up. Later, back in my room, Jim had taken my tshirt off, but then, as my body stiffened (though I tried to be pliant, to be soft, to flow) said I was too tense for sex. We sat on my single bed, able to see out of the floor level window overlooking the grassy path through the hamlet, and talked.

Suddenly he said, with the air of someone making an announcement; "I've decided something".

"What?"

"I like your company".

A swell of pleasure rose in me. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. Well, except my best friend Alex when I was eleven who said she liked staying overnight at my house because we never argued. "I'm pleased and flattered" I replied. We were side by side on the bed now, legs touching. He asked what I wanted from him. I paused. Shifted my legs. My mind went blank. It wasn't like an array of options came into my head. Everything already felt unreal as it was.

"I'll settle for what I can get". Me, who wasn't used to asking for what I wanted and being given it. Or even to being asked what I wanted to start with. If I made no demands nobody could disappoint me.

The phone rang, echoing shrilly through the house with it's tiled floors and thin internal walls. My heart speeded up as I looked at Jim and ran to get it, hoping it wasn't my parents who were away for the weekend with my twin brother and younger sister. "It's Andrew, for you" I said, passed the receiver over to him. He listened and nodded and said when he put the phone down that you could get your birth certificate from a registry office, and that it did give fathers names on certificates, or they were left blank if it wasn't known. I imagined a name there that I hadn't seen before. I imagined a blank space. I hoped for a name.

Jim had arrived in a white Shogun jeep that I had "no way" to say I'd seen, and now left saying something about going to Belgium "for a job". I was getting used to his vagueness and didn't ask him to elaborate. Having only just discovered what lay behind the gaps in my family life, I didn't feel like I had a right to have jigsaws all filled in. The rest of that Friday I read, walked the dogs and wandered about in a sort of haze trying to process what we had seen.

Strangely there is a blank in my memory about whether I went back into my parents bedroom then and started looking through the maroon briefcase and my diary doesn't mention.

Things Jim had said fired through my mind;

"...they put adverts in the english language papers saying your Mum'll sleep with men...your Dad just watches...he asked me if I knew where he could get a snuff movie once...I think they blackmail people they've slept with.."

It would come into my head and almost float straight out again, unable to be held there.
Dad.
He wasn't my Dad.
He's not my Dad resonating in my head over and over.
I look in the mirror in the bathroom. I am brown after six weeks of being in the sun most days. I see Dad's face. Small eyes, small nose, thin lips. The opposite of my big eyes, long nose, full lips. But my Mum has them. I've always looked like my Mum.
Richard is my twin. Doesn't he look more like Dad? Blonde where Dad's hair is nearly black we sometimes joke. Long nose, full lips but-
Our younger sister Helen. I remember her being born. Us going to see her in the hospital, we were four. Richard's slip up, calling the incubator an incinerator being repeated in the family for years. Her Dad must be her Dad. But he's not our Dad.

This means something. But what it means is obscured by darker images.
Not faces. My mother, men bearing down on her. There were chains in the suitcase. Cameras, laughing, sneering. My Dad's face-he's not my Dad- twisted in anger. He is always angry. "Come and clear this mess up!" top volume shouts for anything. Mum saying, despairingly "He's so irrational".

The Christmas before this one, me and my Dad walking in Peel Park, holding hands before dinner. The squirming feeling as my sister sniggered "You look like you're married". This Christmas, the man who isn't my Dad greeted me after not seeing me for three months saying "Your face looks fat". Him and my sister living in this holiday house, he makes her tea every night when she gets in from school, their only leisure going for walks with the dogs, all this year until the rest of us were to move down.
My Mum shaking her head "I don't know what's up with him" as he twists his face in fury. "I'm not coming to your play!" and doesn't come to the play where I'm a thirteen year old girl in a wheelchair or the play where I'm a teenage girl who runs away from home.
He is dark, angry, a wall of sound and sudden changes. "I've had two heart attacks". He is always on the edge of a volcano. Shouting that could kill him or food that could kill him or sex that could kill him. I was on the edge of the volcano with him when he shouted, saliva flecking his lips and his eyes going hard. He pushed me away, and away and away and I still wanted to get back. Now, his name is not on my birth certificate. Into what might be a blank space, I am erasing myself quietly.

Step away from the volcano. He's not my Dad.

My stomach is contracted, tight. It's been this way for weeks.
Car wheels outside the following night. My heart leaps. Through the window, Jim's usual car, a white Citroen with a D sticker for Germany. He hugs me. I make coffee at the table using the kettle on the hob, hands shaking slightly as I light the gas. He says he might get Gill, his partner (who he said he's separating from) to invite me over for lunch the next day. I think that's strange and that he must be joking. He says he has to get home, kisses me quickly on the lips. How typical of me that it's only sixteen years later writing this that I realise his day trip to Belgium from the middle of France must have been to get rid of the white jeep. Stolen the night before probably. That's why he came back in his usual car.

Sunday morning the phone rings. It's Gill, inviting me to lunch.
 
Well actually she'd invited me to go swimming with her and her daughter Evie but I didn't have a swimming costume so she suggested lunch instead.
Slightly odd that I'd gone away with at least two months of a summer in a hot part of France near a river with no costume, but pretty indicative of my self consciousness.
Although this situation felt like it was going to test my self consciousness even further. I couldn't quite understand why Jim had thought it was a good idea for me to spend time with him and his partner and their daughter, whether they were on the verge of separating or not. When I'd told him the night before I felt apprehensive at the idea he said "Gill thinks you're the best of the lot", out of my family he meant. Given that I was still sent out of the room by my Mum and Dad when Jim and Gill came round for coffee, this felt like a further (and satisfying) reversal. Since yesterday's discovery it felt like the tables had turned. As if my parents were the wayward kids up to no good and I was the adult seeing how dangerous things really were.

So it was unusual but liberating to talk to Gill as an adult that morning in their comfortable, plainly furnished French farmhouse. She was small, pretty and blonde, late thirties, an almost Felicity Kendal twinkly thing going on but earthier and with the remnants of a Birmingham accent. We drank coffee, I remember she played Leonard Cohen, and it was the first time I'd heard his music. "Jim's really liking Leonard Cohen at the moment" she said. There was an edge of Bohemianism in the house I wasn't used to. Embrodiered throws, incense possibly, things Dad would have referred to as "arty farty". I was guarded in so far as I was obviously careful not to let slip anything about me and Jim. But at the same time it was refreshing to have a proper conversation. She talked about it being nice to be in France and liking the house as they'd moved around alot in the past. She was just as vague on anything that suggested their means of income as Jim. I didn't really get the impression from her that they were on the verge of splitting up, but in my naivety didn't take that to mean that they weren't. It was just another one of those gaps that adults had in conversation. Like the ones I was keeping carefully hidden. I remember Jim being in and out of the kitchen a couple of times while we talked. He would come in and say something funny or provocative and then retreat. I wrote in my diary of him that afternoon "Jim was childish I thought but in a strange mood". The subject of his health came up in our chat. I don't know whether Gill brought it up or I did. But she said how going to the doctors in France had been a strange experience, that she hoped Jim would go and get treatment for his tumour in England but he didn't like doctors. She seemed matter of fact rather than tragic. I heard him in my head again saying "I'm going to die my way". I didn't make the connection between any of this and my long held, long buried fears about my Dad dying from a heart attack. But it meant it was never far from my mind. He's dying.

We ate lunch of bread and cheese and ham at their dark wood kitchen table with their daughter Evie. She was at the same school in France as my sister and was known there as "Evil Evie" for her tantrums and hitting other kids and telling tales. She was a perfectly angelic looking eleven year old though with white blonde hair and eyes that were the same unnerving transparent, cold blue as Jim's. I looked from her to him. Even though something about their lives here seemed thrown together, and the connections between things weren't clear (I wasn't even sure that Gill was Evie's mother) there was no doubting that Evie was Jim's daughter. He caught my eye more than once at lunch, just like in my house when my parents were there. A flicker between us, a collusiveness. I know you we said in those glances and my stomach would flip. But really we didn't even know ourselves.

After lunch we went to the house of some English friends from theirs, a rural, being renovated farmhouse set up that all the ex pats were in. Whether I helped it happen because I was so used to the role, or whether it was a natural consequence of our ages, but it felt like Evie and I were there as the accompanying children and I felt uncomfortable when she pressed me to go with her to collect white eggs that the chickens had laid in the yard. I let her boss me about though, sinking into my default passive mode and we walked back up the field with them cradled in our skirts. Jim looking vaguely amused as their friend directed us to put them in a basket.

Later Jim and Gill came into our house for a drink when they dropped me off. English ex-pats measuring out our lives in coffee spoons. "Thanks for having me and for lunch" I said politely to Gill. "It's been a pleasure, it was really nice to get to know you better, do come round any time" she said sincerely. I waved them off from the door. Man and wife in the white Citroen. Another vagueness. My Dad had always referred to them as married in the months he'd known them down here as ex-pat neighbours. Jim had told me they weren't actually married. Nothing was what it seemed to be.

Later in the dark living room where I'm reading one of the novels that Jim has lent me from a carrier bag full of historical novels and westerns and family sagas, the phone rings.

"It's me" he says, "In a few minutes, ring up and say there's been a power cut."

"Okay" I say. Heart leaping at the prospect of seeing him, but less keen on the idea of lying. Nonetheless, I leave it a few minutes and dial their number. Gill answers as he must have known she would.

"Hi Gill, sorry to bother you" I say, "There's been a power cut down here, is there any chance Jim would be able to sort it out?"

"Oh no" she says sympathetically "yes, I'll tell him, he'll be over in half an hour or so".

I brush my hair, brush my teeth, check myself in the mirror again and again. Slightly flushed cheeks. No make up, Mum's said I'm not allowed to wear it yet so I don't own any. We haven't exactly battled over those elements of growing up. They've just been vetoed. It was Dad who bought my first tampons. I now bought all my clothes with my pocket money, she'd never mentioned a bra or suggested I buy one, she'd said no to make up and would sometimes tut and say why didn't I look after myself more. She went to designer clothes shops and was always immaculately groomed and turned out when she went into her office. Here in France she was mainly topless in the day, no matter what visitors were around and got dressed up if they went out to the bar where English people gathered at night. Some strange things were going on with her relationship to her femininity and to mine. But as ever in our family they were about what wasn't said rather than what was. And my Mum's place in my life was defined more by her absence from it than her presence.

I hear tyres, a knock at the door. When I let him in Jim takes my hand and without saying anything leads me through the glass doors in the kitchen to the settee in the living room where we make love. Afterwards, as we sit side by side I clear my throat. I know what I want to say, but I don't know how to make the words flow. Typical of the disconnection between my heart and head and body I have to rehearse a spontaneous moment of affection. I try the words out in my head for ages before I manage to say "I've lost my heart to you". I don't think I'm expecting a particular response, but he just smiles at me and says that that would be a stupid thing to do. Too late I think. "I wish we could just be on an island away from all this" he says, slightly more encouragingly. "Just you and me". He was still talking about his leaving as if it was definite. Said that he was going to get a new identity to go with his new life. He talked as if a new identity was just something you could go and pick off a shelf.

At this point for me, it was as if some sort of chip in my brain that allowed me to imagine futures had been taken out. Even though I had just told him I'd lost my heart to him, I didn't immediately picture us together. Or not yet. I was seeing some further point where we might be. Where I'd do A-levels and go to him wherever he was. A levels were my absolute fixed point. I'd had to battle both my parents over the last few months to hold to that. They'd said it didn't matter if I stayed at my sixth form in Bradford or did A levels by correspondence course. "You could do them by correspondence course if we bought a gite" Dad had said "You could help out with the business and then do your school work as well". I couldn't think of anything less I wanted than to be cooped up with only my dysfunctional family for miles around in France attempting to make sense of lessons sent through the post. I'd spent the last weeks of my GCSEs mentally saying goodbye to school and friends but hoping for some sort of reprieve. Since Mum and Dad still hadn't bought a gite to do up or a Bed and Breakfast there was still hope. Over this summer they'd been saying that I could perhaps stay with an elderly couple who were AA friends of Dad's in Bradford and carry on at school. I fantasised about going on the bus up to the village, having my own peace and life. No shouting around me, no tension or underlying strangeness. There were only three weeks to go until the start of term though and nothing had been decided. I was looking through a telescope at possible futures. They were like the lands rotating at the top of Enid Blyton's Magic Faraway tree. I didn't have any control over which one would be at the top even after I'd climbed it.
 
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Just jumping back in time again.
This is how we ended up in the house in France that summer when I was 16.
This next section just seemed to come out in the voice of my (naive) fourteen year old self and hints at some of the undercurrents in my family.
Stuff was already odd back then in a disturbing way- or is it just me with the benefit of hindsight?

*********


Me and Dad found the house when I was fourteen, the March half term I started my periods. Typical me, starting them on a cross channel ferry. I hated the smell of the boat, cigarette smoke, chips, burgers in the big rooms with fixed down metal chairs and sticky red and yellow swirly pattern carpets and the sound of slot machines beeping and buzzing. I felt sick and headachey and had a pain in my lower back. Then when I swayed my way to the metal bowl that served as a toilet and sat down, splaying one hand on the side of the cubicle for balance, I saw the blood on my knickers. “I’m a woman now” I think in an ironic sort of way. I don’t feel like a woman. Even though just me and Dad have come down to France to find a holiday home, even though I understand every word on Radio Four which is what we listen to all the time when we drive- from the Today programme to Letter to America to the Shipping Forecast, the World at One, P.M and Weekending. Dad still calls it the wireless.

Me and Dad drive a lot. We’ve been on, I think three or four trips away together, just us. They’re trips for the business which Mum can’t come on because she stays at home to look after Richard and Helen. I am his secretary on our trips like Mum was his secretary when they first met. I have to write down the addresses of buildings we see that their firm might repair. Mum taught me the right abbreviations to use. Like C/P I/W means clean and paint ironwork. L/C means lightening conductor. We’ve been to the North of Scotland and to Wales and I navigate using the big red atlas. On holiday Mum and Dad always have at least one big argument, quite often about where we’re driving to or where we’ll stay, but that’s one thing me and Dad don’t have arguments about.We always stay in the same hotel room in twin beds. Dad will send me out of the room when he talks to Mum on the phone at night. I’m used to that. There’s always some things I don’t hear but I suppose that’s what husbands and wives are like. We used to stop for lunches at Little Chefs and Dad would make me have the child menu and I hated that. When I got to thirteen I said I shouldn’t have to have the child menu any more but Dad said it was cheaper. I don’t have to now that I’m fourteen though so that’s better although Dad always counts the cost of everything that we buy. I have to tell him about my period and his face changes and he looks concerned and gives me money to buy tampons. I get them in the shop on the boat and go back and try put one in. I don’t know if I’ve done it right because it’s really hurting but I don’t say anything. It was embarrassing telling Dad, but it would have been even more embarrassing telling Mum in a way because we don’t talk about things like that at all. Sometimes Dad says I’m a Daddy’s girl but we argue a lot as well. I remember once we had an argument about God while we were driving along and he stopped the car and made me get out and pointed at the grass and said “who do you think made that?”. On our trips away we do get on, although I don’t tell him but really I get bored. He always says at the end “We had a lovely time didn’t we? We had a lovely time” and I feel like I have to say yes but it’s a relief to be able to read what I want and play on the computer and see my friends.

It’s nice being in France though, even though the petrol smell in the car means make feel a bit sick all the time and I can feel my tampon hurting. We go on a road that you have to pay to go on called a peage and it’s wide and quieter than British motorways and we drive all the way down until it’s night and I look for a big town on the map where we could stop and we find a hotel that looks a bit like the motels in America called a Hotel Ibis in a town called Angers. As usual Dad sends me out of the room that night while he rings Mum and I go walk round the reception of the hotel and pick up some French magazines and then Dad comes down and he says the meal in the hotel is too expensive so we go and find a café that sells burgers and chips.

The next day we keep driving and then Dad says we should stop at a town where there might be an estate agent so we end up in a place called Mansle. It’s quite similar to where we lived in Cumbria. A village with a big bridge and a river and one quiet street with grey brick houses and shops. When we walk down it, one has an estate agent with an English woman’s name so Dad says we should go into that one. The English woman Sylvia is in there and she and Dad are soon laughing away and she’s saying she knows some houses that sound just right as holiday homes. She’s wearing a jumper and cardigan in the same material which I hadn’t realised til I asked Dad later is a twinset, with a pearl necklace. We go in her car to see some houses which are mainly run down with lots of land like the house in Cumbria and then because it’s getting dark she says she’ll take us to a hotel in Mansle and we could go and see more properties the next day.

Me and Dad share twin room 222 in the Beau Rivage. A view of the river from the window, small bathroom with one of those French baths where there’s a ledge so you can’t actually sit down and dark wood walls. I go downstairs again while he talks to Mum on the phone. Later we go for a walk round the town’s racecourse and both have an icecream cone. He tells me that he mentioned to Sylvia about me starting my period and that if I have any questions about it, I could talk to her the next day when she’s showing us round. I think of her, in her twinset and pearls and posh voice, and despite the fact I still haven’t managed to insert a tampon without being in pain, I know that I will not be raising this with her tomorrow. In the dark of the hotel room, Dad snores. Sometimes I hold my breath in the silence and hope I won’t hear any other sounds from his bed in the darkness, though I don’t know exactly what sounds I don’t want to hear.

The next day we see a house in a little hamlet called Chez le Coq with views from the windows into the woods and over a river like in Cumbria and Sylvia thinks it’s just right for us and Dad thinks so too. I think that it’s very small compared to the big house in Bradford where there’s an attic with three rooms and then an upstairs with three bedrooms and three living rooms and an office downstairs. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in just one living room and two bedrooms but Dad’s talking about what the workmen can do and says Mum’ll have to see pictures of it but he thinks this might be perfect.

On the way back we stay in a hotel near Le Mans which I’ve heard of because it used to be one of the courses you could choose to do on the Formula One game me and Mum used to like on the Amstrad 464 computer. That’s when I’ve got on best with Mum really. Both spending hours in front of the screen, one hand controlling the joystick, that plastic click, clicking noise it makes as you wrench it from side to side, tapping in our names next to the high scores on the keyboard at the end. Mum 56586, Kate 57890. We joke about it. Like when I got the high score on Chucky Egg and came into the kitchen and said “I’ve got to the fifth level” and she went straight upstairs and got onto the sixth level on her next try. Richard and Helen go on the games sometimes, Dad doesn’t ever really. But it’s mostly me and Mum.

In the hotel that night Dad’s flicking through the channels like he always does. It’s so annoying when he’s got the remote in his hand, just when you start watching something he changes it over. French adverts are embarrassing though. Even just the ones for shower gel show completely nude women with all soft music and them looking unnecessarily ecstatic at what Radox can do for them. I don’t want to catch Dad’s eye when they come on. I can’t help looking out of the corner of my eye though to see if he looks different. But he doesn’t. Just sat there in his dressing gown, drinking from his millionth can of Diet Coke of the day.

Then he flicks onto a porn film. I’ve never seen one before, but the way the woman is just stood there in stockings and suspenders moaning is a clue. I think Dad’ll flick it straight over but he keeps it on. I’m just trying to look casual, as if I’m just watching Coronation Street. There’s a man with a dodgy moustache behind a desk giving her instructions. Looks like she was his secretary or something. Then he’s taking his clothes off. I’m half wanting to watch more. It’s fascinating. Naked bodies, what men and women do. It was only a year ago that I thought that to have sex with someone you literally had to sleep with them afterwards. But at school we’ve all read “Forever” by Judy Blume (particularly pages 89 and 118) and I get “More” magazine and we laugh at Position of the Fortnight and wonder what it would be like to do it with someone. Even though the woman in the library said I was too young when I was thirteen, I sneaked some in among Jeffrey Archer books and eventually she didn’t say anything anyway when I was getting Mills and Boon books, and Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins. Harold Robbins ones have the most sex bits in. I haven’t even kissed anyone in real life though and I think it’ll be a long time before I do because I don’t fancy boys, only teachers. Stephen Ellis got me a big Valentine card with a big heart drawn in kisses which said in his rubbish handwriting; “I love you, you don’t know how much” and even the thought of kissing him with his young face and his school uniform and thin arms made me feel embarrassed and horrible so I showed the card to everyone in class and I saw him going out of Mrs Hamer’s class all red in the face, probably feeling embarrassed and horrible as well.

The man’s walking towards the woman now on telly and you can see his penis, and how he’s got an erection. I don’t really imagine things in that much detail when I think about sleeping with any of the teachers I fancy. Well, the right phrase is “have a crush on” I suppose. I usually imagine big long scenes that are like films in my head that I can pause and stop until I have time to think properly. The scenes usually start with me meeting the teacher somewhere outside the school by accident, then rescuing them in some way. Like maybe their car breaks down so I come past and take them to safety, and we end up in their house on our own and then have a meal and we’re talking and getting on and suddenly they kiss me and say they’ve always loved me really and that they know I’m grown up in my head even though I’m just at school. Sometimes I can pause and rewind the same fantasy for a week with more detail each time. It’s nice to have it to escape to in my head when Mum’s shouting at me for eating chocolate or not doing my jobs, or when I’m bored in lessons.

I don’t want to get the nice feeling inside that I do when I read bits of a Harold Robbins novel now though and I hope Dad’s going to turn it over soon but he’s just watching it like it’s normal. I still flick my eyes to the side but it’s alright, he still just looks exactly the same. I think my cheeks are a bit red though and then to my relief he starts flicking across the channels again. I swallow and say in a really normal voice something about what time we have to go down to breakfast and that’s that.

The next day we go to the hypermarche in Boulogne before we go home. Dad has to get cheap cigarettes for Mum and bottles of Harveys Bristol Cream that cost less here. He puts a French maid outfit in the trolley as well which must just be for a joke for a Mum and also a poster of a nude man and woman kissing which he says should go in the office as a joke. That’s a bit like the sign saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me” which used to be in their ensuite bathroom when we lived in Cumbria but is in Dad’s office now. Or the other joke thing, the intercom system that he has where you can hear what’s going on in their bedroom from the office via this little black box.

That night when we get back home after the drive from Dover listening to Radio 4 and Dad’s classical music cassette, I’m in my room lying on my bed. It’s been so nice to be back on my own in my room, with all my books around me and no noise or anybody in my head. There’s a knock on the door. It’s Mum. “Come in” I say and she pops her head round and says in a much nicer way than she normally says things, but quite hesitantly as if she’s embarrassed, that Dad told her I started my period and had I managed alright? We’d never talked about anything like this, it was my Nan who’d told me about periods when she babysat once for us in Cumbria and we went on a walk round the castle. I remembered she’d said that tampons were better to use than towels because they were less messy which is why I’d bought them in the shop on the ferry. I’d finally managed to get my tampon all the way in so it wasn’t painful anymore so I just said “it’s been alright, thanks though” and my Mum said “okay” and shut the door. She never mentioned anything about buying tampons and I would always get them myself with the money from my job in the deli on Thursday nights and Sundays. Dad was full of the house in France and wanted Mum to go down and see it with him as soon as possible because he’d put an offer in and I suppose none of us knew then how much else was going to change.












 
Hey kate... still reading xxx

On some levels I read this as if its fiction and then my mind clicks back to reality and I realise its not and I just feel so very sad for you and your childhood.

You truly are an amazing person to have come out the other end of this such a fantastic human being

lots of love xxxxx
 
Aww..thanks Gen. But I feel like any dysfunctional family survivor has had the same. I'm lucky that I can write about it as a way of both processing it and doing something I enjoy. I was hoping to add in a section about being 15 here but am stuck on it, so am carrying on from the story from where I'd just discovered about my parental secrets with Jim

*******

Mum, Dad, Richard and Helen came back from La Rochelle in a flurry of bags and dogs barking and “Have you taken them for walks?”.

I hardly looked at them or spoke to them. My stomach churning. Whether at the thought of what they were or weren’t or because of the flickers of fear and anger that played under the surface of my usual quiet obedience and frequent exits from rooms.

“Kate for goodness sake you’re like a tart in a trance, will you lay the table?”, “Kate can you not leave your books in the living room in a mess”.

Me and Jim only managed one meeting the next week. I walked through the yellow fields, the tracks to where we would meet disappearing over the horizon. Following him to somewhere that I couldn’t see. I felt like I was only myself with him.

Mine and Richard’s GCSE results arrived through the post. Identical long brown envelopes. Stood in the kitchen I looked through the different photocopied, typewritten papers with the logos of the various exam boards on them. Telling myself I wasn’t nervous but seeing the telltale shaking of my hands. I was astonished to see only six letter As and four letter Bs on the thin squares of paper. I gasped. I remembered the blankness in my head in maths, how equations had gone out of my head in science, the tracts of geography I should have revised but didn’t, the Russian where I could barely do more than order a cup of tea in my oral. Once again my good memory and writing must have carried me through somehow.

Richard was pleased-he’d managed enough Cs and Ds to get onto a catering course if he wanted. The same age but our school experiences might as well have taken place in different countries. His hampered by what I think was undiagnosed dyslexia. Letters and numbers jumbling on the page in front of him, turning red faced with frustration at homework he worked at but couldn’t do.

Me never having got used to making an effort as I ate up words like food and churned them out again without thinking. Ask Richard any fact about sport and he could tell you names, dates, results. But “I’m thick” he would say. As if to even up the contrast Mum and Dad would tell me I was “too clever”. For all their failures as parents, this division was probably an impossible Solomon’s dilemma.

“Well done lad” to Richard from Dad. Mum saying scathingly to me “A “B” in drama. Well, you shouldn’t bother carrying on going to drama club if you do go back next term. You’re obviously not as good as you think you are”.

My stomach clenched in anger. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t expect a well done, but it felt like anything that I had that was a pleasure like drama club somehow irritated both my parents. Not that he’s my Dad I reminded myself, his opinion didn’t matter anyway.

I think it was that same night that meeting Jim in our new place in the woods he said that because things were so difficult at home I could always stay with Julie, Gill’s sister who lived in Spain. I was taken aback. How would that mean that we could keep on seeing each other? what did I mean to him?

These were strange days. His friend Andrew came back to stay with them and was soon enlisted by Dad to fix up shutters on our house. His status as a heroin addict was openly joked about. “I told him not to bring anything through customs” said Jim, as Mum and Dad listened and laughed, seeming to be titillated by the brush with another marginal person. The attitude of amused tolerance mingled with slight disbelief they held towards Jim was extended to Andrew, a tall, open faced man in his mid twenties. He seemed far too healthy looking, solid and almost geeky with his sensible hair and glasses to be a junkie. Jim described his constant presence at our house as “spying”. Somehow I didn’t question how unhealthily entwined this dynamic was.

Mum and Dad now went to visit a big house in a village a few miles away and came back talking about renovating it, converting barns into gites and having us all work there. The process would take a while so “You and your Mum and Richard can go back to England while it happens. You could do your A levels and Richard can go to catering college. Another dizzying change of plan. Taking me away from France. Away from Jim. We were going to go back to England on the last day in August in time for the school term starting two days later.

My stomach spasmed when another of the ex-pats Brenda came to the house one day and I overheard her telling Mum and Dad over coffee and laughter that Jim had slipped a disc. “I’m having to give him an injection in his bottom every day” she boomed, “Because Gill’s too squeamish”. “Is he well hung?” my Mum laughed, with what sounded like genuine curiosity. I both cringed, and felt a strange surge of triumph at the question. Here I was, banished upstairs as usual while adult visitors were over, and I knew the answer to the question. Well, strictly speaking I had no idea, having hardly looked at Jim’s body during our beach mat fumblings and having nothing to compare it with anyway even if I had. But still, I knew that I was the last person they would expect to have any insight into the issue.

Brenda was a jovial, practical woman in her late forties who lived in a cottage with her petite Dutch partner Yvonne. She was happy to joke about the unsubtle nickname that Dad had given her of “Big Butch Brenda”, although there was another moment of the world being turned on it’s head when Jim told me that she had laughed to him about my mother making a pass at her. Even in this new world of imagining my Mum with a random succession of men, I couldn’t really get my head round her initiating something with a woman, never mind one who seemed the polar opposite of her with her regularly permed, highlighted coiffure and her high heels and Betty Barclay suits.
“Are you sure?” I said. “Yes” he said “In the bar. Brenda thought it was hilarious but she doesn’t fancy your Mum. Neither does Andrew, no matter how much she walks around topless in front of him”.

In the heat, and the absence of anything else to do, it felt like everybody’s boundaries were blurring.

It was around now that our cat Topsy went missing. The black and white cat had been a rescue cat we’d had for about five years and, along with the dogs, was the only thing that made my Mum’s face go soft. She’d feed her “Good Girl” choc drops and tut affectionately when she had to dispose of mouse carcasses she brought as presents and say sadly “she never learned to play” when Topsy yet again turned her nose up at some toy with a bell in it, in favour of curling up on the windowsill in her new home in France. Although Benjy, our bouncy yellow Labrador had been there with Dad and Helen for the previous year, it had been a big thing for Mum to bring Topsy down, knowing that she would face six months quarantine to be able to go back. We were all dispatched to go out to the fields and shout “Topsy” at the top of our voices in the hope that she would change the habit of a lifetime and come when we called. But listening through the wind blowing through the trees, and crickets chirruping in the yellow grass, there was no sound from Topsy.

I thought that with Jim being injured with what I previously had only heard of happening to old people and sincerely hoped wasn’t the result of our activities that we might not be able to see each other before I went. But then, using the failsafe method of taking the dogs for a walk just as he left the house after “popping round for a coffee” and ribbing about being injected in the bottom by Brenda, we arranged a meet “come down to the second bridge at 4 o clock”. There he was, in a Mitsubishi Pajero Jeep, motioning me to get in.

We drove along the grey ribbons of roads through the sunflower fields, sun in our eyes, me scanning the road ahead for cars, hoping we wouldn’t pass anyone we knew. After a few minutes he turned off onto a path shaded by trees. I was ready for this routine now. Some kissing. Him taking down my shorts, moving inside me. Pleasure nearly building, not quite. But glad to feel his weight on me. As he’d stroked my shoulders he said “why don’t you wear a bra?”, “Well, I suppose I don’t need to” I said a bit defensively. “My Mum doesn’t all the time”. “No, we know your Mum doesn’t all the time” he smirked “She wants everyone else to know it too. Andrew was getting quite worried”. Was it this meeting that he showed me his gun? I remember it was one of the times we met in his jeep. I’d like to think I might have made a pun about him getting his weapon out but I’m not sure I did. It had been under the seat in the back though, where we had both clambered over to be more comfortable and where I sat with his arm round me. I remember it was in a drawstring green bag that reminded me of the bags I would keep my gym kit in at primary school. It was a machine pistol he said, which I’d never heard of before. Machine gun or pistol yes, but I didn’t know that there was something that combined the two. He assembled it, putting smooth grey tubes inside more grey tubes so it had the look at the end of a model kit gun. Seeing it assembled in front of me made it somehow less real not more real. Somehow it was as if death was where everything led that summer but was also completely unreal. Jim with the cancer he wouldn’t get treatment for and the gun he assembled himself. My Dad with his heart attacks and his asking Jim if he could get hold of sex films where people died. It seemed like death wasn’t very real to them either.

On the way back to drop me off later Jim was talking about leaving to go to Turkey, said “time was of the essence” and said that we would make a good team. Pictures in my head of us in a white house by the sea. But how could I possibly just leave? “Do I have to make a choice then?” I asked, feeling queasiness rising in my throat. “Not yet” he said, changing gear, steering us down the path to the second bridge where he would drop me off. “I love you” he suddenly said. I glanced quickly at him. It felt like it had come from nowhere. He means it, I think. Unable to grasp that someone would say something they didn’t mean. Coming from the house of certain statements and Dad perpetually saying “I do not lie”. I wasn’t programmed to disbelieve the words that people spoke. I couldn’t understand why he would say it though. Could only think it was something that had come and hit him from nowhere. “I..I..I…” I stuttered. Jim stopped the car in the middle of the track. Looked at me expectantly. Patiently waiting for me to stop stuttering. Those ice blue eyes unwavering. “I…I…can’t say it!” I burst out with a big exhale of breath. I didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t say it because I didn’t mean it. Didn’t know what love meant or could feel like. It felt more as if I was failing to channel this truth that Jim had suddenly stumbled on. The words refusing to form in my mouth. I imagined the declaration being spoiled by my Yorkshire accent. By the words being uttered by me at all. What value would they have if I said them? But Jim stopped again by the stone bridge across the river where he was going to drop me off. Waiting for the declaration. Asking me for what he wanted me to give. This was like me following him along those endless field tracks we have walked along into a horizon I can’t see. Something in me realises that in saying this I’m saying “I’ll follow your lead” and, as we look at each other, sun glaring off the windscreen, wind rustling the trees back and forth, I eventually say “I love you” and my eyes meet his then dart straight away and he laughs and kisses me, and says “good”.
 
Despite efforts by me and my sister to find out and reconstruct it, I still don't really know the truth behind much of what went on from the end of August 1991 until I left home a few weeks later. That makes this next bit quite hard to make sense of. Both as a writer and possibly as a reader. Do let me know if anything leaps out as particularly out of order or glaringly obvious that I'm missing out or maybe not seeing.

*************

One of the books in the bag that Jim had lent me was called “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. I found it quite heavy going compared to the other ones which were mostly family sagas. Big doorstops of paperbacks about wrangles over a sheep farm in Australia or the doings of a Cornish dynasty with lots of women in flouncey skirts drowning themselves. This woman was putting a philosophy across at the same time as telling a story, so there were sections where there was no action, just her thoughts about how people’s minds are the most important tool that they have and they have a duty to use their free will. How capitalism is the best thing that people can do, because then they’re being individuals not sheep. Sounded like Margaret Thatcher, Dad’s heroine. She kept saying that freedom of choice is the most important thing. It made me think what would it mean to be free of this family? How do I know if it’s the right thing to do?;

“From the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.”.

Well, I got that. I was always being told that I was clever (or too clever) and I thought my brain was all I had going for me. Rand also said; “In order to be able to say “I love you” we must first be able to say the “I”. So if I was my brain, then if my brain said something, it must be true mustn’t it? My body could be anyone’s and didn’t seem much use to me. My brain was definitely mine.

I knew Jim thought like that as well. I saw him as a good example of someone who was just free. He had said that “friends are liabilities” and I knew he only did things he wanted to do. Things that other people would think were wrong but that he thought were right. Mum and Dad weren’t free really. They argued and argued about where to live and changed their minds all the time, trapping each other in a spiral of conflicting wants.

This went round and round in my head. I was getting ready to replace one set of beliefs and attitudes with another. It wasn’t that I couldn’t think for myself, I could do that all too well. That was almost the trouble. I couldn’t feel for myself, that was the problem, I only knew that Jim made me feel less alone.

We lie side by side on the beach mat, his arm under my head after we have made love. I look up at wisps of white cloud scudding across the sky. “I will go away with you” I say. He doesn’t look surprised. I can hear the stream gurgling behind us. Smell his aftershave. I am calm. Outside myself. He says “Wait three months from now, until you’re sure. We’ve only got one more day until you go back. I’m going to try get away to see you tomorrow. But we’ll be able to be in touch.”. As we part at the bridge he gets a square of white paper out of his pocket. I look at it. “Oh”. On it in his jagged handwriting is; “Poste Restante, Mansle, 16230”. I knew from French lessons that poste restante meant post to collect, where you can pick letters up from the post office rather than have them sent to your house. “I’ll check the post every couple of days” he says. “Okay. I’m good at letters” I say lightly. But I am surprised that he knew that he was going to be staying here after all. He’d talked in the last few weeks as if he might leave at any minute.

The next day me, Richard and my Mum are getting ready to set off back to England first thing the following morning. I stroke the dogs, Benjy, the yellow Labrador whose whole body wiggles from nose to tail with pleasure when I bend down and make a fuss of him, and Cocoa the Border Terrier who had always been quiet and quick to growl after a massive beating Dad gave him when he was a puppy. Dad is barely speaking to me now, just “Move your books off the table” or “Get out of the way” and Richard and Helen are picking up on the way he is and being the same. Helen manages a “You stink” when I come in from walking the dogs and Richard is mostly transfixed in front of Blackadder videos on the television amidst obsessively checking his skin for spots and applying Valderma cream. He has some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder going on, but amongst all the other strangenesses in the house it goes unnoticed.

Somehow that final day I got to see Jim three times. He’d come down to the house to drop Andrew off and pick him up after he’d done a few more hours of painting the shutters, and we managed to meet down in the field. Just walking and talking. Then, he said he could get away and meet me at the bridge later. Dusk was falling as I walked to the Jeep he’d parked down by the river. It comes slowly in that part of France in August. Almost apologetically, streaking the sky with fingers of bright blue and red and yellow first as if in compensation for taking over the day. Sex felt urgent this time, and I got closer to really feeling the pleasure of it, my hands gripping his back, wanting him deeper inside. When we both sat back in the front Jim reached into the glove compartment and handed me a small hardback book with a fading green cover. “I’ve had this for years” he said. “I thought you might like it”. I exclaimed with surprise as I opened it. Poems by John Donne. There was a small printed label on the inside cover “Haigh and Hochland Books, Manchester”. It struck me as strange, but it wasn’t until later that I realised why. Jim had mentioned he’d lived in Manchester, but not for over twenty years. I had imagined that his life of moving around meant he wouldn’t hold onto anything for that long. No time to be packing things into tea chests and taping up furniture in boxes. Living free and unfettered by people or things. It was going to turn out that that was my dream not his. He hugged me goodbye and I surprised myself as tears sprang. I wiped them away quickly. “Be good” he said. “Be careful” I answered, “I always am” he grinned. Knowing we both knew that wasn’t true or we wouldn’t be here together. I felt a deep ache in my chest as I walked away and waved until his Jeep was a dot on the horizon. I didn't know when I would see him again.

Me, Mum and Richard in the Fiat driving up the French toll roads the next day. More relaxed with Mum than Dad generally. She’s got less of a hair trigger temper. She hums along to her Dolly Parton cassettes in the car. There’d still been no sign of Topsy the cat as we left and Mum had looked red eyed at not being able to say goodbye to her, but there was a sense of all of us getting away from something. Me and Richard were quite fair about taking turns in the front of the car after stops. I was rewinding scenes from me and Jim’s last meetings in my head. Trying not to think about Mum and the other men. It always felt like she was her best self when men weren’t around, including Dad. Chattier and funnier and making jokes about her thing for Rod Stewart. After we crossed on the ferry the next night we were heading to our Godmother, her friend Jackie’s house in Surrey before making the drive up to Bradford. We were used to stopping at Auntie Jackie’s on our way to Heathrow airport before holidays. There’d been a variety of houses over the years, getting into leafier and leafier suburbs of Surrey with brighter and brighter laminate flooring and bigger, shinier kitchens. In this one, it was a sunny day and we all sat outside in the garden on cane chairs. Wine for Mum, lemonade for us. Auntie Jackie is a petite, smiley woman in her mid forties with a mop of dark curly hair, a soft voice and a tendency to nod while she’s speaking. She is normal, brings out the normal side of Mum. Just two women who used to work together, chatting in the garden at the end of summer, about their kids, Coronation Street and the price of garden furniture.

Then the phone rang. Auntie Jackie came through from the kitchen, her face in a slight frown of concern. “It’s Jeff”. Mum quickly got up from her chair and went through to take the phone. My stomach went cold. We all looked at each other, confused. We could hear her voice rising and falling. Mum came back through, red eyed, looking confused, her voice breaking as she said “Your Dad says he wants to move back to England now. He’s getting the dogs and he and Helen are coming up straight away”. “Why?” said Jackie. “Everything was fine when you left wasn’t it?”
“Yes” said Mum, emphatically and shaking her head. “I don’t understand”. This felt even worse because it was the first time a family thing had leaked out into another world. Here it was in Jackie’s white, shiny house. Breaking the mask of “everything’s fine” that we usually held at all costs. I didn’t understand what Dad’s sudden turnaround meant. It could have been that he’d suddenly realised how lonely he would be staying down in France after the previous year of just him and Helen on their own there. But this was an incredibly sudden impulse. Just a day after we’d left. I couldn’t examine his behaviour too much though. Everything was now bracketed under “weird things Dad, who isn’t my Dad anyway, does”. After tea both me and Richard separately went for a walk into the town where Jackie lived. It was a relief to be in my own space. Back in shops with English magazines and newspapers. Able to buy English sweets. Not that I was eating much yet, my stomach still permanently churning. I was dismayed that Dad was coming back. It would have been much better to be back at home with just Mum and Richard and now we only had another day before he’d be there as well.

The three of us had the air of crisis survivors as we drove back up the M1 to Bradford. Each trapped in our own separate worlds. Richard trying to control his by memorising football statistics, compulsively checking light switches were off before he left rooms and obsessively putting Valderma cream on spots he didn’t even have. My Mum, gripping the steering wheel and obliterating anything she didn’t want to think about from conversations. And me. Reliving the clandestine meetings of the last few weeks with Jim and hoping he would be my escape route.
 
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Only one day later, the new term has started. I am wearing a black and grey striped T shirt I bought from Mark One with my Deli wages and a black knee length skirt my Mum had given me a tenner towards. Fulfilling the sixth form dress code we’d looked forward to all through fifth year of “smart casual”. Friends greet me with surprise as I walk into the sixth form common room. “Thought you might not be coming back?”. Only one, Amanda knows anything at all about the strange summer. I’ve sent her letters on squared French exercise book paper hinting about the odd things that have gone on. I see her sitting on her own on one of the long, threadbare orange sofas and say hello with relief. She looks different now. Ugly duckling into swan I can’t help thinking, hating the cliché. Glasses have been replaced with contact lenses revealing her unusual aquamarine eyes. Her skin’s clearer, her bad perm has grown out and is cut into a sharp chin length crop. I don’t realise it but I’ve had a similar level of transformation. The constant anxiety has meant I’ve hardly eaten and lost a good couple of stone. I’m tanned, and although my hair could do with a good cut and tidy up, I look a lot healthier than the pasty fifth former who did her GCSEs only two months ago. A lifetime ago. I know I can trust Amanda to keep secrets. She’s not a gossip and she speaks so quietly and so little that I had got used to speaking for her sometimes. She’d come out with killer one liners that only I could hear and I’d replay them to the group like an amplifier “Amanda just said…”. But I didn’t want her to amplify this. She looked shocked but took my quick sketch of what I’d found out and how I intended to leave with Jim eventually in her stride although she did say “What about your A levels?” “I’ll still do them by correspondence course wherever I live” I said, “Which I could have ended up doing if my parents changed their minds again and move back to France anyway”. She agreed to come with me into town that after school. I’d told Mum I was going to look for a part time job, which was true. I hadn’t told her that I was going to go to the registry office and get a copy of my birth certificate.

So me and Amanda are standing in a dusty office in a Victorian building up one of Bradford’s sandblasted streets. It turns out it will cost me £15 and take some time to have my certificate posted to me. I ask the clerk behind the counter if they can at least tell me if there’s a father’s name on my birth certificate. I’m talking as if I’m blasé about this. I am blasé about it. Something in me has cut off now and I can’t feel anything except the now customary lightness in my stomach. So when the clerk comes back and says “The mother’s name is Jennifer Gaunt and there’s no father’s name” I just feel like I’m being told something I already know. There is no father’s name. I had imagined there was a proper classification called “Father unknown” though, not just a blank and asked “So what does that mean?”. The woman patiently explained that it could mean the father wasn’t known or that the father wasn’t married to the mother and hadn’t accompanied her to register the birth. “Oh” I said, thinking I was no further on. “It says “adopted”” on the certificate, she added, “So I can’t just give you it. There’s a process you have to go through to get the adoption certificate”. I hadn’t expected this. Some official procedure had been gone through to make Jeff our Dad. Papers had been signed, boxes had been ticked, but no one had ever told us as part of the process. I get a clear vision then of a dark panelled court room with plush red seats, somewhere in Keighley where we lived from being three. That memory which had always been an anomaly, now made sense. It must have been the adoption procedure. 1978. When we were three. The year Mum and Jeff got married. In my head, until I can start calling him something else to other people, he is still Dad. I resent how the title now feels like a lie that I’m being forced to hold onto. Being in my family now feels like crouching in the middle of a see saw. But I’m not going to tip things either way before I leave. I’m too afraid. I’ll just leap off the see saw from the middle and no one will see me go.
 
Help!

I know people are still reading, thank you.
You might have read the father story and wanted to know the end.

Now I feel like I'm ploughing through the weird bit of a story that really is the middle section of the misery memoir" type book I'm writing. Trouble is- August/September was not so much about misery as just confusion and oddness. I don't know if I should speed it up and get to when I left home and was arrested (!).

Be honest-
are you wondering what happens next?
is it reading like a misery memoir?
Or is it harder to be gripped at this point when the people involved are so odd.
How does it compare now as a read to the bits about tracking down my father?

It's really hard to go on at the moment but posting here does help the writing process generally I think. I have 60 000 words of the book now and plan to send it to agents in a couple of weeks-
once I get this pesky build up to leaving home and the ten days away with Jim out of the way.
 
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