Chapter 19 Zoe Spring 2025
Zoe
Sitting opposite Steph in the Indian restaurant in the village that evening, they seem to have so little to say.
Or maybe there’s too much to say and it’s impossible to know where to start.
Perhaps just being in one another’s company is enough for now.
They say that if you can sit in silence with someone then that’s the sign of a good relationship.
But this isn’t a comfortable silence, it’s heavy. Expectant.
The waiter slides two beers on to the table and Zoe immediately takes a sip, grateful for something to do with her hands.
‘Why did Mum do what she did?’ She wasn’t planning to say anything. Wanted to wait to see what Steph did. But it comes out without her knowing.
Steph’s head looks up from the menu. She taps her fingernails on the laminate. The buzz from the curry house recedes into the background.
Zoe can hear the whine in her own voice, as if she’s the sixteen-year-old. ‘It was 1990, for God’s sake, not 1950. There were loads of single mums.’
Steph sighs deeply. ‘Single mums were still vilified in 1990. Thatcher was in power when I had you—’
They catch each other’s eye. Zoe wonders if she’ll ever get used to hearing Steph saying she is her mum.
‘Thatcher was always attacking young single girls who she said deliberately became pregnant to jump the housing queue and get benefits. It wasn’t until later, under New Labour, that that changed.
Maybe it would have been different if I’d been born later.
’ Steph sighs. ‘Mum did it for me but also for you. I can see that now.’
Zoe stares at Steph, waiting for her to continue.
Steph lines up the cutlery against the place mat.
There’s some kind of mandala on it. ‘She didn’t want me scarred by having a baby so young.
I hadn’t sat any school exams and she was worried about what that would mean for my future and what bringing up a baby would do to me.
For you, she didn’t want you scarred by being the child of a single mum.
Yes, it was the nineties, but she was a forties child, when having a baby outside of marriage was a scandal. And she didn’t approve of Patrick.’
Patrick. In all the shock of discovering Steph was her biological mother, she barely thought about Dad not being her father.
It feels so disloyal even thinking it. Dad was always a great father to her.
Especially once the others had left home and it was just the three of them.
It is impossible to imagine he’s not her actual father.
‘What was he like?’ She hates herself for asking the question, it feels disloyal to Dad, but she needs to know.
‘He was complicated. He’d been brought up in care after his mum threw him out – children’s homes mainly – and he was very hard, traumatised.
But he found the animal-rights movement and it brought out the best in him.
It gave him purpose.’ She pauses and looks far away.
‘I think in the animals he saw himself – someone who had been abused by the system and needed rescuing. He was a brilliant activist at a time when it was incredibly hard. He’s included in several books about animal activism in the eighties and nineties. ’
‘Is that how you met?’ asks Zoe.
Steph nods. ‘We met on an operation to free some goldfish from a fairground.’ There’s a memory of a smile on her face. ‘When I was thirteen.’
‘And from what you said, he knew about me, you were together?’
‘Yes, he was with me when you were born. He loved you very much. He’d been desperate to be a father. A good father.’
‘Explain to me properly – why wasn’t he able to stay with you, be my dad?’
Steph picks up her beer and takes a sip.
She settles it down, arranging it carefully back in the same wet ring on the table.
‘Just after you were born, we were part of an operation against an animal-testing lab in Sussex. Not that far from Highdown. I messed up, I was supposed to call someone at the lab and warn them about the devices we’d planted.
But I dialled the wrong number. So the site wasn’t evacuated and the bomb went off when there were people still on site. ’
Zoe gasps. Patrick killed someone?
‘No one was hurt,’ Steph continues. Zoe feels herself relax. ‘But Pat was caught on camera and an arrest warrant was put out for him. Which is why we went on the run and were living in the woods with you.’
Steph takes a sip of her drink. ‘When I came back here, he followed me to beg me to let him see you. I’d never not wanted him to see you, I just couldn’t face living rough anymore.
’ She shivered. ‘Dad called the police when he came to the house. They came to Highdown and caught him and he was sentenced for all sorts of things. Intent to endanger life, possessing explosives, criminal damage, arson, escaping custody. He’d had a few past convictions because of his animal-liberation work and they basically threw the book at him.
They treated him like a terrorist.’ Steph looks down and sighs.
‘It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t be involved in your life. ’
‘But I never heard from him, he never made any effort to contact me, to tell me the truth,’ says Zoe. She knows it’s the shock and rejection speaking but can’t help herself.
‘He was inside for a long time. They wanted to make an example of him.’
‘What does he look like?’ asks Zoe. ‘Have you got a photo?’
Steph takes out her phone and does a quick internet search. ‘Here,’ she says, holding out the phone to Zoe. ‘This is him. Patrick Head.’
‘Oh my God! I recognise him,’ says Zoe, her mouth open. ‘He’s come to a couple of public meetings I’ve led.’
‘What?’ says Steph. ‘So he’s still about? Local to Highdown?’
Zoe rubs her forehead. ‘Yes. I think so. I think he lives not that far away. In the farm by the chalk pits. I went out there once.’
Steph nods. ‘I remember that place. So what’s he doing?’
‘He does stuff with XR and animal-welfare causes.’
‘That sounds like Pat,’ murmurs Steph. ‘He’d never give up that cause.’ She looks into the distance. ‘So after he was released from prison, he came back to be close to you, to see you.’
‘To be close to you too,’ says Zoe.
‘To be close to you,’ says Steph. ‘Ours was no great love affair, or at least not on his side. I was in love with him, I worshipped him. But I don’t think he felt the same about me.
’ She swallows. ‘Until it turned out I was pregnant and then he couldn’t do enough for me.
He loved being a father – it was all he ever wanted. ’
Zoe looks at her. A mother who ran an animal-rescue centre, a father who was an animal-rights activist. Maybe it explains how she ended up being a climate activist. It was in her blood all along.
‘And you’ve not been in touch with him since?’
Steph shakes her head. ‘No, I haven’t spoken to him since the day he came here and the police took him away.
We didn’t have phones or anything. And then I went away to boarding school anyway and life took a different path.
I wrote to him many times, through different people, but he never responded.
He obviously knows who you are. I’m sure he’d want to meet you properly, as his daughter, if you wanted to. ’
Zoe presses her lips together. How odd that last week she thought she’d lost both her parents and now she finds out that they’re both alive. She’s not even sure how she feels about it.
The waiter appears with a plate of poppadoms and bowls of chutneys.
‘Mum always said she called me Zoe because it was Greek for “life”,’ says Zoe. ‘I guess that makes sense now, that you would call me that.’
Steph puts down the piece of poppadom she’s broken off. ‘I didn’t call you Zoe,’ she says. ‘That was Mum’s choice.’
Zoe stares at her.
‘I mean, it’s a beautiful name and I think it suits you much better.’ Two spots of colour highlight Steph’s cheeks.
‘Than what? What did you call me?’
‘It was a silly name, really. But then I was just a kid.’
Zoe sits with her hands folded in her lap, watching Steph.
‘I called you Kylie,’ she says finally, her tongue catching on the name.
‘Kylie. Wow. After Kylie Minogue?’ Kylie rings a bell in her head. Where has she heard that name recently?
Steph nods. ‘I loved her at the time, listened to all her music and did the dance routines. Sorry it’s a naff name, I just really liked her.’
‘I like Kylie, it’s a sweet name,’ says Zoe eventually.
‘But how weird to think that I had a different name.’ Kylie doesn’t really suit her, she thinks.
She’s not a Kylie. Zoe sounds more serious, a proper name.
Maybe Mum had the right idea. Or maybe the name you’re given influences the person you become.
Would she have been a different person if she’d been Kylie all her life?
Would she have been a different person if Steph had raised her?
‘Thank you,’ says Steph, picking up her beer glass. She slops some of the liquid on to the tablecloth and then dabs at it with her paper napkin.
Didn’t Mum mention Kylie in one of her letters to her mother?
They eat the poppadoms in silence and the main course arrives. They chat about Fiona and Sara for a bit and watch an awkward first date at the next table.
Then she remembers. There was the letter from Granny to Mum about a Kylie and Kai. She’s Kylie so who is Kai?
‘Is that everything?’ Zoe asks. ‘No other secrets?’
Steph looks down and tears a piece from a chapati, stuffing it into her mouth.
Zoe watches her methodically chew. ‘Steph?’ It’s the first time she’s used her name since she found out. She wonders if she will ever call her Mum, or ever think of her as her mum. But there’s something wrong. She’s ignoring her. She looks flustered. ‘Steph? Steph, what is it?’
‘There is something else,’ she says, a tiny piece of the bread flicking on to the table in front of Zoe, who stares at it, waiting, dread filling every pore. ‘It’s linked to the key you found.’