Chapter 1 #2
It had been late at night and she’d been sitting beside her mum’s bed in the hospital, feeling like she’d been battered by the storm that was raging outside.
She shouldn’t even have been there because it was outside of visiting time, but the nurses overlooked her presence because her mum was in a private room at the end of a corridor and they made exceptions when it came to patients at this stage in their lives.
Yvonne’s eyes were closed, her body still, but Caro wanted to stay, whether Yvonne knew she was there or not.
It was the first night of the October school holiday, so she didn’t have to get up early to be the responsible Miss Anderson for a class of eleven-year-olds the next morning.
Instead, she could just be Caro, sitting there passing the time catching up with Facebook. She only dipped in and out of it every few weeks, caught up with a Carpool Karaoke, the launch of a new book, or maybe a movie trailer.
A promotional link appeared for the new Simple Minds tour, twenty dates around the country, yet another band riding the nostalgic affection for the eighties and nineties.
Before she could stop it, the opening bars of Jim Kerr’s voice belting out ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ flooded her head and she felt the bite of a sharp-toothed memory.
Her dad had been a big fan, their music playing alongside Oasis and Blur on his CD player when he was home or in the car on the few mornings he was around to take her to school, and that had been his favourite song.
The irony in the title didn’t escape her. ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’. If only she could forget he ever existed, then she wouldn’t have to deal with the soul-sucking fury that he wasn’t there.
Agitated, she started to scroll past the post when she noticed the first comment underneath, written by a complete stranger.
‘OMG, my dad will FREAK when he sees this. His fave band!’
Mine too, she’d thought.
Then she noticed the surname of the person who’d posted. Anderson.
Mine too, she’d thought again.
Coincidence. The same surname. Maybe that was why she’d clicked on the photo of the person who’d posted.
She didn’t make a habit of snooping in other people’s lives, but any diversion from reality was welcome and she’d come to realise that in the many long hours she had to fill, curiosity was one way to pass the time.
Click.
This was pointless. Didn’t everyone have rigid privacy settings these days? Wasn’t that what she taught her primary seven kids at school? Privacy. Protection. Common sense.
Apparently not.
Caro saw immediately that the need for privacy had bypassed the gorgeous woman with the expensive blonde highlights and the gleaming white teeth, her head turned so she was looking over her shoulder, pouting at the camera, her slender figure wrapped in a gorgeous white dress, her feet in shoes with red soles.
Click.
Caro was scrolling down the stranger’s Facebook profile now, a vicarious spectator to her life.
Lila Anderson. In a relationship. Works at Radcal Pharmaceuticals. Went to Strathclyde University. A complete stranger, nothing to see here, time to move on… yet Caro couldn’t seem to stop looking at the images and words on the screen.
The stranger at the gym. In a restaurant. In New York, kissing a very handsome man she called her ‘Bae’. Caro knew from listening to the kids spouting today’s slang that ‘Bae’ meant ‘babe’ or ‘lover’. The stranger in a restaurant, with her arm around… her arm around…
Caro pinched two fingers together and then spread them to zoom in.
The stranger with her arm around a man that looked very familiar. Her eyes flicked to the status update at the top of the post. ‘This guy! Happy birthday to my amazing dad! Jack Anderson, you’ve spoiled me for twenty-nine years and now it’s my turn to spoil you. Love you so much!’
The sound of her mum’s laboured breaths beside her made Caro realise that she hadn’t exhaled for several seconds.
The resemblance was uncanny. Incredible. But of course, it wasn’t him. This girl lived in… She checked the tag – The Rogano, Glasgow. Yep, Glasgow. The city that her dad had been working in for decades. A tiny, but persistent, seed of suspicion began to take hold.
Her eyes went back to the man in the photo, the one who bore a startling likeness to the guy she called ‘Dad’ too. But it couldn’t be the same man. It was a ridiculous thought.
The facts and timescales didn’t add up at all.
This Lila person said she was twenty-nine.
Caro was thirty-two. There was no way her dad could have another daughter of almost the same age.
As far as she knew her mum and dad had never had any separations and there had never been a hint of an affair.
Surely there was no way something like that could have been covered up for 29 years?
And anyway, her dad’s birthday was… She scrolled back and looked at the date on the man’s birthday post and the power to exhale was temporarily suspended yet again.
November 1st. Same birthday as her father.
They’d rarely managed to celebrate it on the actual day because he was invariably away working in… Glasgow.
No breath.
Her gaze went to the cake. Fifty-four. Same age as her dad.
Click. Photographs. A lifetime’s worth. Retro pics of Girl With the Same Surname when she was five. Eight. Twelve. Sweet sixteen. Maybe 25. And countless others since then.
Loads of the early pics showed younger versions of the man who had been around when Caro was five, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-five. But not thirty. He’d left by then, a couple of years ago, right after her mum was diagnosed. He didn’t come back.
He’d told her this was ‘his time’.
In all honesty, there had never been a time that wasn’t. Their lives had always orbited around his, fitted in with his schedule, sprang into action when he was around.
Click. Click. Click. This had to be him, but it couldn’t be. This made no sense at all. None. It had to be one of those surreal coincidences. Had to be.
She went through them all again, lifted the phone to call him and then stopped. No point. Last time she’d tried, she’d got an automated message saying his number was no longer in service.
It was probably just as well. What would she say?
Hey Dad, why are you on someone else’s Facebook page?
Why does someone else call you Dad? Where have you been going all these years?
Where are you now? Why did you betray Mum, leave me, cut us off and walk out, you faithless, cold-hearted, arrogant, bastard?
It took a moment for her breathing to return to normal. Hate and fury, both emotions that rarely featured in her personality, had taken root on the day he left and they had grown branches that had wrapped around her and were now squeezing her ribcage.
She despised him. When he walked out, she’d thought she couldn’t hate him more.
Now, looking at these images, she realised there was a whole pool of hate she hadn’t even dipped her toe in yet.
Her mum, here without the man who had promised to love her in sickness and health.
Him, away somewhere playing happy bloody families.
She didn’t want to believe it was true.
It wasn’t.
But if it was, then he’d spent a lifetime lying to her.
Now, for the cost of a seventy-quid ticket, she was going to find out.
This train was taking her to Glasgow, though she had absolutely no idea what she was going to do when she got there.
Thanks to Facebook, and the fact that Stranger With The Same Surname – Lila Anderson – had no privacy settings on her account, she knew what company she worked for.
She knew the bars she liked to drink in.
It wasn’t much to go on, but maybe it was enough.
She always warned the kids that any weirdo could track them down through their social network posts if they disclosed too much information.
Now she’d become the weirdo, following the clues, desperate to find out if her whole life had been a lie, if her father had been in a family-share situation that she’d been blissfully unaware of.
It felt so, so wrong.
She still had time to back out, to forget all of this and just go back to her life, her mother. She could get off at Perth, change tracks, get the first train home.
As if the universe was sensing her hesitation, her phone beeped, bringing the cavalry storming to her aid.
A text message from Todd. Her mum’s sister, Auntie Pearl’s son, so technically her cousin but the closest thing she had to a brother.
Caro knew that everything she’d been through would have been even more devastating if he hadn’t been there to make her laugh and hold her when she cried.
They were the same age, but while she’d chosen teaching, he’d gone into hairdressing, got engaged twice to beautiful women, then surprised everyone by falling in love with Jared, a Canadian colourist, at a styling convention.
Five years later, they were still together. Jared was a lucky guy.
She read the text.
Are you on train? Have you lost the plot yet? Shall I arrange for Davina McCall to meet you to discuss long-lost father?
Smiling, she replied.
Yes. No. Tell Davina to be on standby.
She was doing this. No backing out. No turning around.
The next beep came a few seconds later.
Had to promise her my body, but she agreed to help. Will call you when coffee has restored power of speech. Love you.
Love you back.
She’d just put her phone down when the snack trolley stopped at her side. She bought two cups of tea and two mini packets of shortbread, pushing one towards her travel companion, accepting his thanks with a friendly, ‘You’re very welcome.’
Lovely girl, he thought again. The kind that any dad would be proud to call his daughter.
Lovely man, Caro thought. The kind that any daughter would be proud to call her dad.
The kind of man she would be proud to call her dad.
Because Caro hadn’t had a father for a couple of years now – and she was terrifyingly aware that she might discover she’d never truly had one at all.