Now Luke
Now
Luke
As expected, Alice has a mini nervous breakdown when she sees the bear. I’m standing at the sitting-room window, Samuel in my arms, waiting for her to arrive. Samuel is holding the bear, face outwards, with ugly new eyes on show – Hannah did her best, but essentially it’s cut-price plastic surgery. A bear with caring black and amber eyes made of glass now has the flat, cold glare of cross-stitch.
As soon as I hear Alice’s knock, I bring Samuel to the door with me, our daily ritual. She makes her funny face, he laughs and reaches out for her, and then I’m off in a swirl of anxiety about the day ahead. This time, though, she spots the bear immediately and cries out.
‘What did you do?’
Samuel is rolling his R’s like a gift, but Alice ignores him.
‘This, you mean?’ I point at the bear, acting casual, ignoring the dramatic plunge of my heart. ‘Hannah has a thing about glass eyes. She’s thinks they’re a choking hazard.’
But the words come out like sawdust. Dry to me and to her. I understand the cruelty of the crime.
‘The bear was yours, Luke. It means a lot to me. Perhaps it was wrong of me to give it to … Samuel.’
Her hesitation is enough.
‘Alice, let’s have a coffee. I feel like we should talk.’
In the kitchen, I set Samuel down on the floor and he begins his exhausting new semi-crawl: face-plant, press-up, chest forwards, face-plant. Alice spreads the blue rug out across the floor and relocates Samuel to its soft woollen stripes.
‘The floor is too slippy, little bird,’ she says.
The kettle is reaching boiling point, thunderously loud it seems to me as I strain to catch the tone of her voice. How quickly the bear has become symbolic of the wrong we cannot right. Alice giving me away, me being taken from Alice, is a pie chart without an intersection, two spheres that cannot be blended, just like the worlds we inhabited. Separated, that’s the word they should use for adoptees. A separated child. A separated mother.
I bring a cafetière of coffee and two mugs to the table, milk from the fridge. My hands are shaking. I abhor confrontation of any kind.
We sit down opposite each other and it’s an effort for me to look up into Alice’s face. But when I do, I find that, as usual, she is calmer than me, assuming her role of adult.
I watch her bring her mug to her mouth, setting it down without taking a sip. Perhaps it’s too hot. Perhaps she’s just thinking.
‘You loved that bear,’ she says, and each word lands on me like ointment. ‘Rick gave it to you, and from about two weeks old you used to sleep with a fist curled around an arm or a leg. You were too young for me to worry about glass eyes, or perhaps I was too young to understand about them. After you’d gone, I kept the bear with me. For years I slept with him on my pillow, and then I relegated him to a shelf, a reminder but nothing more. I told myself that was progress.’
It’s the most she has ever said to me about the past.
Samuel is making small moans that will soon evolve into full-blown tears, a little ‘he-he’ noise that is hard to ignore. Alice gets up from the table and stoops down to collect him.
‘Come on up, my friend,’ she says, and she settles him on her lap, finds him the salt and pepper pots to play with, kisses the side of his face.
‘What was I like?’
She looks at me, surprised.
‘You were just like him. Happy. Always smiling. And laughing.’
Happy. Always smiling. I think of the way Christina often describes my first weeks – ‘you cried and cried, you wouldn’t stop’ – and it cracks my heart a little bit more.
‘Alice?’
Her face, lovely as ever, is impassive.
‘You call Samuel Charlie sometimes. Did you know?’
‘Oh, that. Yes, I can’t help it. He’s so similar to you at that age, I get confused.’
I’m nodding my head, too many times, trying to find the right words.
‘I’m beginning to feel as if we’ve got this the wrong way around. You looking after Samuel instead of getting to know me. It was our fault for suggesting it in the first place, but I really think it’s churning us up. Well, me anyway. I’m not sure it’s very healthy.’
‘It’s about as healthy as you can get. We’re family. Isn’t that better than farming out your child to someone you don’t know?’
I nod again, unconvinced. Suddenly, for the first time, I am really quite concerned by the depth of her love for my child. And the thing is, I don’t know Alice. Not really.
‘You don’t want me to stop looking after him?’
There’s anxiety in her face now. Burning eyes. I can’t look at them for long.
‘I know I don’t talk to you enough about those weeks when we were together. I know you mind. Sometimes I try to talk about it, but there’s just this great big block, memories I still can’t cope with all this time later.’
‘You can’t imagine how much I want to hear about it. The circumstances of my birth seem so mysterious.’
‘I remember you being born as if it was yesterday. It was very quick for a first baby, just a few hours.’
‘What did we do together? I know it’s about sleeping and eating in the first weeks, but is there anything you can remember apart from that?’
Alice smiles. ‘Actually, you loved swimming. Well, not swimming exactly, but lying on a little blow-up boat. You liked the sensation of floating, I think, and the sound of the waves.’
‘Waves? Surely we weren’t in the sea?’
There’s something here, a slight nervousness that I pick up on but cannot understand.
‘I meant the sound of lapping water. Sometime I’d like to take Samuel swimming. I think he would love it.’
‘I feel embarrassed to say this, but sometimes I’m jealous of Samuel. Because he gets to spend time with you and I don’t.’
‘Oh Luke.’ Alice reaches out and squeezes my hand, just for a second. ‘How could you be jealous of this little thing? But I do understand. The whole situation is a little strange, isn’t it?’
Samuel starts trilling like a bird and we both laugh; it lightens the atmosphere.
‘Yes, you are very clever,’ Alice says.
When the phone rings, I leave the answering machine to pick up, not for one second expecting my other mother to call.
‘Hello, darling. I called your office and they said you weren’t in. Just ringing to make sure you’re not ill. Kiss that beautiful boy for me and say hello to Alice.’
We regard each other, Alice and I, when the machine clicks off, me wretched at the duplicity.
‘It’s a bit like having an affair,’ I say, ‘only much, much worse.’
Alice smiles.
‘Maybe you should tell her?’
‘Not sure I can. The lie just gets bigger the longer it goes on.’
I look at the kitchen clock; it’s 10.30.
‘I should get going, I’m already late. I hope it was OK having this talk?’
‘More than OK. We needed it. Luke?’
Alice’s eyes are her strongest feature. A deep black-brown, framed with thick, long lashes, cartoonish eyes.
‘I am churned up. Same as you. But this helps.’ She drops a kiss onto Samuel’s head. ‘Being with him helps. Thank you for inviting me into your family. It was very generous of you.’
I’m trying to process this as I walk to the Tube station, trying to understand why these final words of hers slither in the base of my stomach with the dull ache of unease.