I hope you’re well. Me and your father are muddling along. Your father had sciatica last week but it’s easing up now.
Louise and Jack are both in the juniors’ nativity play. Jack is the narrator and Louise is a horse in the stable. Me and your father are looking forward to seeing it.
Your father is looking forward to some days off at Christmas, provided no pipes burst in this cold weather. I hope you’re wrapping up warm.
Can you ring sometime and tell us when you’re coming home for the holidays?
From,
Mum
Still with this persistent feeling of tiredness, Christopher urged himself from his desk and went to the payphone to call Margaret. He had mountains of work to catch up on, he told her. Ignoring her silent disappointment, he added that he planned to be with them on 23 December.
‘But that’s almost Christmas Day,’ she said, and tutted before brightening as best she could. ‘You’ll be with us for Christmas Eve Mass, I suppose. That’s something.’
He did not tell her about his birth certificate, his birth mother, or about the appointment with Samantha Jackson. He told me this was not out of a need for secrecy, nor because he was dishonest. It was because he could not find the words to say it. And it strikes me now, years later, that not finding the words to say what we need to say is one of life’s biggest tragedies.
The day of his second appointment with Samantha Jackson came. A late-December snow flurry threatened the Liverpool train with cancellation, but no, it went ahead, thank goodness. And so, instead of taking the coach to his home in Morecambe on the last day of term, he slid instead through the sleet-slashed Liverpool pavements, to the council offices in Henry Street.
This time in a navy suit with matching navy shoes, Samantha Jackson led him up the stairs to her office.
‘Done your Christmas shopping?’ she asked him.
‘Not yet.’
‘Me neither. Probably do it on Christmas Eve like I always do. Have you many to buy for?’
‘Just my family. My adoptive family, I mean. Just four.’
‘Never know what to get, do you? I don’t anyway. Whole thing is a consumerist farce, really.’
She gestured towards the same chair as the time before. He sat, pressed his back to the chair, then leant forward, flattened his foot to the floor to stop his leg from jiggling.
‘Now,’ Samantha said, pulling out his file and slipping her half-moon spectacles onto her narrow ski-jump nose. She looked up, over the top of her specs. ‘You all right, love? Do you want some water?’
He nodded, coughed. ‘No thank you, I’m fine. A little nervous.’
‘Of course, that’s normal. You will be.’ She pulled out a sheet and scanned it, making little clicking noises with her tongue. ‘So, as I said in the letter, your birth mother did approach NORCAP. March the twelfth… ah, I see, that’s your birthday, so in principle that’s a good sign. She couldn’t have done it any sooner, to be honest, not legally; she’d have had to wait until you were eighteen. It means she desires contact. Sometimes they don’t, and we have to respect that.’ She laid the paper on her lap and fixed Christopher with her clear blue eyes. ‘What we recommend, Christopher, is that you write a letter first of all. In our experience, it’s best to go slowly, try and build a relationship through some correspondence before you arrange to meet, if that’s the way it pans out. Tell her about yourself – ask her about herself. How does that sound?’ She drew the glasses from her nose and held them by the arm. ‘It really is better not to rush these things.’
She had sought him out the moment the law had allowed it! On his very birthday! He wanted to go to her now, now this minute, and take her in his arms and cover her face with kisses and say, Mum, Mummy, it’s me, your son, Martin.
He coughed into his fist. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A letter. It sounds like the right thing to do.’
‘Good. In that case, the next thing is to talk about your expectations. How do you feel about that?’
‘Whatever you think.’
Samantha Jackson spoke for a long time, kindly, looking at him all the while as if checking he were still there. These things could and did sometimes go badly, she told him. Sometimes the child or the parent was not happy – sometimes they could not connect. Was that something he was ready for, should it be the case?
‘Rejection’s a tough thing to deal with,’ she said, ‘in anyone’s book, especially in these circumstances.’
She had said this in their first meeting. Little did she know that he had experienced rejection every day from the moment Jack Junior was born. Nor could she possibly realise that he, Christopher, had an ability to know things before they happened. He almost said, Don’t worry – I already know the meeting will go well. I can feel it the way others can feel a change in the weather. I can feel my mother, her light, inside my chest. But he did not, since that would not have been a normal thing to say.
‘I expect nothing,’ he said once Samantha had finished. ‘She doesn’t know me, after all.’
But she would know him the moment she saw him, and she would take him in her arms and cry sweet tears into his hair. Martin, she would say, my darling Martin, at last I have found you. He knew this.
Samantha was smiling at him. ‘She’s an English teacher, I believe, in a secondary school. She’s got two kids, twin boys, I think.’ She handed him a document, in which details about his mother had been typed. He imagined someone taking notes from her during a phone call. Or perhaps she had presented herself in person. He envied whoever had met her that day – envied the proximity they had enjoyed while she answered their questions, shy, abashed, but determined.
He scanned the document. ‘Her address is in Runcorn. That’s on my birth certificate.’
Samantha took the document from him and held it up against his birth certificate. She frowned and said, ‘Yes, that’s right. Not the same address though. Looks like she settled near her parents. That’s good too, potentially, means they managed to work it out. When it comes to having babies adopted, often these girls don’t have much choice in the matter.’ She frowned at the page. ‘It’s the outskirts of Liverpool, bit further than outskirts actually. Mersey estuary. There’s a big chemical works, ICI – I know someone who works there.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Not making it sound very glamorous, am I? Anyway, when you write, do make sure and put your contact address on your letter; that way she can reply if she wishes to. I know I sound like I’m stating the obvious, but you’d be amazed how many don’t. Is that clear enough?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very clear. Extremely clear. Clear as day! Sorry, yes, thank you. Thank you so much.’
* * *