Chapter 20 The Fifth-Ever Brandy and One Cunning Plan
Karim is determined to remain positive and refuses to agree with any conviction that we should believe my mother is dead on the say-so of a chain-smoking stranger.
He is undoubtedly right to take this approach, and I am grateful to him for his support—but I am also exhausted by it all. Going back there—to that nonhome—has shaken me so much more than I thought it would. The news about my mum has numbed me, and I am struggling to keep my engagement levels up. The dark side of me is calling, and I would dearly love to be alone.
We are now standing outside the hospital where I gave birth. It is only a ten-minute walk away from where we were, and near to a tube stop, so I’d gone along with his logic.
“If she died, someone would have told you,” he insists. “She would have had that card you sent. Maybe an address book?”
I laugh out loud at that one. The thought of my mum being organized enough or bothered enough to keep an address book is the most amusing thing I have heard all day—though admittedly there hasn’t exactly been stiff competition.
“Perhaps,” I say, when I see his crestfallen expression. He is trying, so very hard, to keep hold of me. It’s as though he can see me slipping away from him, sense that I am dissolving from the inside out.
“Who else would know?” he’d asked as we’d walked away from the estate and onto busy roads lined with kebab shops and Subways and nail salons.
“I don’t have a clue. I don’t know which doctor she was with, if she even was. I could probably search for a death certificate with the records people, but I don’t have any dates or know what address she was at or . . . I don’t know. Maybe her social worker, if she still had one?”
He doesn’t understand how chaotic she was, of course. He doesn’t know that she had a loose relationship with reality, that she missed appointments, that she imagined people were against her and went on huge rants about them before dropping out of the system. She was hard to keep hold of too—maybe I’m more like her than I’ve ever admitted to myself.
So now we are here. Outside a monolithic building that has crawled along since the 1960s, growing and expanding in ever-uglier incarnations. Ambulances come and go; cars zoom to the new parking garage; staff trail, exhausted, to the bus stop. It is, as all hospitals are, constantly in motion, a busy landscape of life and death and everything in between.
We are near to the automatic doors, running the gauntlet of illicit smokers. Every time Karim moves, he sets off the sensors and the doors whoosh apart.
“He might still work here, you know—it’s not that long ago.”
“It’s eighteen years, Karim,” I say, too tired to put up much of a fight. I am screwing up my sore eyes, the memories of the last time I was here whooshing open just like the automatic doors.
It was the day after she was born. I’d had a long labor, but a straightforward one, and I was declared well enough to leave the next morning.
I remember standing outside the maternity unit, just around the corner, the school bag I’d taken with me clutched to my still-flabby belly. A belly that was now empty, lifeless, useless. My boobs were sore, and I was bleeding into a sanitary towel they’d given me, and I still felt in shock.
I stood there for so long, leaning against the wall, watching other women arrive, other women leave. Women with parents, with partners, with people who loved them. Women with husbands who carried car seats containing their precious cargo, heading to their new lives. Women who weren’t me.
I was sixteen, and I was alone. Geoff with a G had said he’d arrange a taxi back to Audrey’s for me. That he’d meet me there if I could wait for him until the afternoon.
I couldn’t. I had to get out. I had to escape the smells and the babies and the other people and the all-consuming sense of loss.
In the end, I got the bus. I sat there, pale and shaking, school bag on my knees, every swerve and every stop jolting my sore body. I spoke to nobody. I heard nothing. I told myself that eventually this would all seem like a bad dream. That one day I’d look back on it from a better place.
And now here I am. In my so-called better place. Looking for a kind man who was part of my world a lifetime ago, in case he can help me find my mother through her social-work records.
I follow Karim into the lobby, past the small shop with its chocolates and newspapers, past the café. He heads for the information desk and starts to chat to the woman behind the counter. She looks about twelve years old—but maybe that’s just because I feel about a hundred.
“What was his surname, Gemma?” he asks over his shoulder.
“Wainwright,” I reply, “and it was Geoff with a G.” The receptionist pulls a face and says she doesn’t think there’s anybody called that working there, but is helpful enough to check the staff directory for us.
“No, sorry—though it could be he’s only here part-time, or he’s down as a guest instead? I do know most of the social-work staff, though, and I don’t think there’s a Geoff. With or without a G.”
“That’s fine, thanks for looking,” I answer, managing a polite smile as I tug Karim away. He looks more disappointed than I do.
We go back outside, and I sit down on a bright yellow metal bench. He sits next to me, puts his arm around my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Gem,” he says, dropping a kiss on my head. “I thought I was helping, but you look wiped out. I wish we were at home so we could just climb under the covers.”
“So do I. And I suppose we’ll be back there soon enough. But I don’t think I’m good for much else now, to be honest. I need to sit still, and maybe have a drink, and then we should get back to the hostel. I’ll be all right in a bit. I’m just . . . running on empty, you know?”
“I know. I just wanted to help. And now we’ve stopped for a minute, I’m sorry. I think maybe I’m a bit more sensitive about dead mothers than most people are, and I didn’t want it to be true for you, and that’s not your fault. There’s a pub near the hostel—maybe I should ply you with your fifth-ever brandy?”
“Aah, you remembered—how sweet!”
“I remember everything about you, Gemma Jones. I’ve always thought you were pretty amazing, but seeing all of this today—well, you’re even more amazing.”
“Yup. That’s me. Gemma the Amazing. That sounds like my magician name . . .”
I am feeling a bit spaced out, and I’m aware that I’m talking nonsense. Karim wisely realizes this as well, and manages to flag down a black cab after it drops someone off. He helps me inside, and fastens my seat belt for me, and is the very model of loveliness.
This time, at least, I tell myself, I am not leaving the hospital alone. I am leaving with someone who cares about me. I can’t quite rejoice in that now—my senses have been ambushed by the past, by the news about my mother. I am shell-shocked by it all. But I lock it away, a small, happy note in a gray day, to look at later.
The pub is Victorian, called something to do with a horse, and is draped with fading flowering baskets outside. We find a small spot in a corner, and Karim gets drinks at the bar. I look around, at the dark wood and the heavy red-velvet curtains, and realize I am automatically scanning the room for any stray students. I don’t see any, so I assume those of pub age have at least been savvy enough to sneak into one that isn’t right by our home base and where angsty teachers might also be taking a medicinal snifter or two.
Karim returns with the drinks and his usual selection of snack products. For a PE teacher, he puts away a lot of junk food.
“Okay,” he says, sitting down next to me, “I have just one more thing to suggest for today.”
“Unless it’s a shower and sleep, I’m not sure I’m up for it,” I reply.
Sleep, I know, might be hard to come by tonight—and not only because of the day I’ve had. The students are going to need some supervision, and it seems unlikely that I’ll get through the whole evening without being disturbed by someone or something. Entirely possible it will be Lucy climbing out of the window so she can have a night on the tiles.
“Well, Geoff with a G, as you always call him, sounds like he was a great bloke.”
“He was. One of the few.”
“And you lost touch with him as well?”
I pull a face and nod. “I did—but I think that was the right thing to do, really. I mean, he was a great bloke, like you say, but he was just doing his job. Admittedly doing it well, and definitely doing more than he needed to, but it’s not like he was my friend or anything. He was ancient—or at least he seemed it at the time. I invited him to my graduation, as a kind of thank-you, really, and after that—well, I had his work phone number, but that was it. I knew he was there if I needed him, but I didn’t.”
I shrug, wondering if this sounds harsh. It didn’t feel it at the time, and I was sure Geoff had lots of other people to help. We just both seemed to know that it was time to let go, to drift out of each other’s orbit.
“And what about the woman you lived with? Audrey, was it?”
“Now, she did die, I know for certain. I googled her for some reason a few years back—one of my rare idle moments—and found a local newspaper article about it. She’d fostered over a hundred kids, apparently. I sent a card to her husband, but that’s a—”
I pause, wrinkling my nose.
“You want to say ‘dead end’ but think it’s in poor taste, don’t you?” he responds, smiling.
“Yes! And Audrey was good to me, in her own way. She wasn’t one of those touchy-feely mumsy types—she was quite professional and strict with us all—but I actually appreciated that. She gave me a lot of stability at least. So. What’s your cunning plan?”
“It’s not exactly cunning. I’m not sure it’s even a plan. But his name isn’t that common, so I thought maybe we could find him online? I had a quick look while I was at the bar, and there are some on Facebook that look about the right age.”
He gets out his phone and leans close as he shows me the screen. I flick through them, cursing the ones with avatars and pictures of motorbikes as their profiles, and finally come across one that could very well be Geoff with a G.
I get my own phone out instead, and find the right page. He has the privacy settings on so I can’t see posts, but I can see a photo and a brief “about” section that describes him as “Dad, granddad, fan of fishing, retired social worker.”
I enlarge the picture and stare at it as I sip my fifth-ever brandy.
Obviously, he looks older. He has different glasses. Less hair on his head, more on his face—but the same kind smile that I first saw when I was sixteen, sitting across from him in his cubbyhole office at the hospital, determined not to like him or to admit that I needed anyone.
“I think it’s him,” I say quietly. “But I’m not quite sure how you think it will help?”
“I think, my darling girl, that it will help in a few ways. First of all, he might know more about what happened to your mum—I presume he met her, knew about her situation? Maybe even liaised with her caseworker or whatever?”
I nod. All of that is true.
“So, social workers are like teachers—they talk to each other. They swap stories. They stay in touch. So he could be able to fill in some of the gaps for you. But also—well, maybe it’d just be nice? To say hello to him? I bet he’d be so proud of what you’ve made of your life.”
I look away from the phone and into Karim’s eyes. I make a promise to myself that I will never take this for granted—this support, this encouragement, this strange belief he has in me. If only I could always see myself through his eyes—sometimes I think he perceives a totally different Gemma than me.
“You’re kind of cool,” I say. “Do you know that?”
“I do,” he replies, shrugging. “Just comes naturally, what can I say? Now send the man a message!”
I nod, send off a friend request, and type a message.
“He probably won’t even remember me,” I say as I tap the keyboard, a few bland lines reintroducing myself and saying I hope he’s the right Geoff and if not, to ignore me.
I finish off, put the phone down, and drink the brandy. I feel strangely better—maybe it’s simply getting away from the place I grew up. Or actually doing something that feels proactive.
Now, of course, I have to wait—in the same way that I am still waiting to hear from my daughter. My whole life seems to consist of waiting.
In this case, the wait is considerably shorter—a notification pings within a minute. Karim and I look at each other, eyes wide, and he gestures for me to check it.
I see that my friend request has been accepted and there is already a message. I read it out loud for him.
Gemma, how lovely to hear from you—and of course I remember you! I would love to catch up and hear how you are. I always expected great things from you. Would you mind doing it by email instead? I always find these messages a bit fiddly! Hope to hear from you soon, Geoff.
“Wow,” says Karim, grinning. “He doesn’t actually call himself Geoff with a G?”
“I don’t suppose he needs to when it’s in writing, does he, because you can actually see there’s a G. Only when he’s talking.”
“Fair point, Lieutenant Logic—so, will you email him?”
I nod and reply, “I will. I want to, for all the reasons some hot PE teacher guy gave me. But not now—now, we probably need to go back over the road and deal with a bunch of hungry and hormonal teenagers.”
He glances out of the window and pulls a face. I guess some of the hungry and hormonal teenagers are lurking outside.
“You’re not wrong,” he says.