Flick
I found out six months ago.
It was just after Mum’s funeral. Colin, my stepdad, asked if I wanted to keep any of her clothes and I was cleaning out her wardrobe, going through her all her clothes and shoes.
Mum was a hoarder. She kept everything. Every birthday card, every childhood drawing of mine, all my old toys .
. . there were boxes and boxes of stuff up in the attic and we’d already gone through a lot of it together.
Looking at old photos. Ones of Mum when she’s a little girl, all knock-knees and gap-toothed smile.
Me when I’m a baby. The three of us pulling silly faces on family days out.
Mum and Colin got married when I was eight years old.
I’ve never met my real dad. Never known who he was or where he lived or even if he was still alive.
My earliest memory is it just being the two of us, me and Mum.
Double Trouble, that’s what she used to call us.
We were so close, almost like sisters. It was only when I got older I realized something was missing.
When I’d go round to friends’ houses and meet both their parents, or see Father’s Day cards in the shops and feel sad I didn’t have one to buy a card for.
Or when I was picked on in the playground for not having a dad.
I never told Mum about the bullying. Never let her see the tears or the bruises from when I used to fight back.
She was a single mum, working three jobs to support us, she had enough on her plate.
I used to push the feelings down inside and retreat into my imagination.
I remember she had some argument with her sister, my Auntie Pam, one year when we went camping.
A vague recollection of them whispering in the corner of the caravan while I played make-believe with my dolls, her looking over at me and saying I should know the truth.
‘Know the truth about what?’ I remember demanding, curiously, only to be fobbed off with some excuse.
Adults do that a lot when you’re a kid. Telling you to go play, pretending like nothing’s going on, but kids always know there’s something going on and I knew it was about my dad.
But Mum would never talk about him. Whenever I’d asked questions she’d always told me he wasn’t ready to be a daddy, but she’d wanted to be my mummy more than anything in the world and that she loved me so much, enough for both of them.
So instead I used to make up fantasies about him.
He was Prince Charming on a horse and he was going to come and rescue us, like in the fairytales.
Or a spy on a secret mission to save the world and one day, when he was done saving the world from disaster, he was going to turn up at school like all the other dads and I’d jump into his arms and he’d swing me around and around and around until I was dizzy.
But he never came to school to swing me around and he never showed up on a horse.
And I grew up and shoved it to the back of my mind.
And then Mum met Colin and got married and I got a brand-new dad.
One that would take me to the fun fair and ride on the dodgems with me, that helped me with my homework and taught me how to drive, and could make Mum laugh, even after she was diagnosed and they were constantly back and forth to the hospital.
Sometimes I’d catch myself looking in the mirror, at my green eyes, and wonder where they came from.
Or my long legs and big feet and thumbs that bend funny.
Mum was small and curvy with dark brown eyes and tiny features.
She always used to clean up in the sales as she only took a size three shoe and they were always the ones left on the rack as no one else could fit into them.
I remember she used to laugh and call herself Cinderella.
I came home after graduation to be close to her.
All my friends were moving to London, getting jobs and getting drunk, starting graduate training schemes, renting rooms in shared houses, being carefree and living life, meeting new people, getting boyfriends.
It’s like they were on this new exciting journey, not looking back, no responsibilities, no worries, no one to think of but themselves.
They were living these fun-filled, messy, chaotic lives, but mine was organized and sensible and I worried all the time.
Their lives got bigger while mine got smaller.
She was good for a while. We thought she’d beaten it, but then it came back and it was everywhere.
I miss her so much. Sometimes I dream about her: I’m little again and lost in a department store and trying to find her, running down the aisles, between the racks of clothes and mannequins, and I’m crying and panicking, and then suddenly I spot her ahead of me, in that red coat she used to love, and I yell, ‘Mum!’ so loud it makes everyone turn around.
And she turns around and smiles and says, ‘There you are,’ and I sob and say, ‘I thought I’d lost you, that I’d never find you again,’ and she just scoops me up and wipes the tears from my face and says, ‘I’d never leave without you, silly; you’ll never lose me, I’ll always be here,’ and I feel a rush of relief.
It’s OK. I’m safe. Nothing bad can happen to me now.
Then I wake up and she’s not here, she’s gone, and all that’s left of her are some of her old clothes, photos, mementos . . . her hairbrush still with a few strands of her hair, a bottle of her favourite perfume, her recipe book stained with her sticky fingerprints.
And then there’s her old diary.
I found it when I was clearing out her wardrobe.
Running my fingers through the clothes like the keys on a piano, inhaling their familiar scent, it was almost like I could touch her again.
She had shoeboxes, stacks of them, filled up with tiny shoes that would never fit me.
Except inside one of them was a bunch of stuff.
Old stubs of cinema tickets. A theatre programme from a play.
A strip of black-and-white photos from a photo booth.
Mum and a man I didn’t recognize. She looked so young.
And a small leather-bound book, tied with two strings of leather.
It was her old diary from before I was born.
In it she wrote about meeting a man called Theodore C.
Stratin and falling madly in love. She loved how distinguished his name was.
She thought he was posh, having an initial.
She called him her soulmate. She was so young, barely twenty, and he totally swept her off her feet.
They met in Leeds, at the hotel where she’d been working behind the bar.
She’d just broken up with her boyfriend and was feeling pretty lonely.
He was a guest at the hotel and one day he’d walked into the bar, ordered a glass of red wine and sat at the counter and started talking to her – and boom, that was it.
In her diary she writes so breathlessly.
All the entries are gushing and excitable, filled with lots of exclamations marks and declarations of love.
She nicknames him Teddy and calls him her Teddy bear, and there are doodles of love hearts and teddy bears in the margin.
She sounds like a giddy schoolgirl with a crush.
I barely recognized her from the person I knew; she was always so strict and no-nonsense.
Especially when it came to me having boyfriends.
She wouldn’t let me go on any dates until I was much older than most of my friends.
I think that’s probably why I stayed with Rory for so long.
Because I knew Mum liked him. She used to say he’d look after me.
When I told her I could look after myself, she used to shake her head and say I’d understand when I got older, when I wanted to have children, that I was too young to understand.
So when I read that diary it all made sense. He told her he wanted to marry her and that they were going to spend the rest of their lives together, but when she fell pregnant accidentally a few months later he tried to persuade her to have an abortion. When she refused, he just disappeared.
Afterwards I went to see my Auntie Pam. I told her about the diary, what I’d read, and asked her to tell me everything.
So she told me . . . about how Mum had gone to her in tears, hysterical, not knowing what to do.
He wouldn’t return her calls or answer his phone.
Soon after, the number stopped working. Apparently even the address he’d given the hotel wasn’t his: it belonged to an old married couple who’d never heard of him.
My Auntie Pam wondered if he’d been married, if he might have been having an affair then gone back to his wife.
She told my mum to forget about him. She called him all kinds of names.
My Auntie Pam always had a temper. Uncle Dave said he’d kill him if he ever saw him again.
Only, they never did.
Mum left the hotel and went to live with my grandparents until after I was born and she could get on her feet.
I don’t think it was a happy arrangement.
Mum never really got on with her parents.
I don’t think they ever really approved of her choices.
They were quite religious. But what Mum never told anyone, but which I read about in her diary, is that the whole time she’d been working at the hotel, she’d been saving up to train to be a midwife.
She’d been working extra shifts, keeping her tips, being careful with every penny.
It wasn’t much but it was everything she had and she kept it in a biscuit tin.
That little, battered old biscuit tin held her future. It held her dreams of a better life.
But when he disappeared so did that biscuit tin.
He took the savings of a pregnant woman.
Left her with nothing. She never told anyone.
Never wanted anyone to know just what a despicable person he was, least of all me.
She never wanted me to feel as abandoned or hurt as she did; she wanted to protect me.
I didn’t tell Colin, my stepdad, about the diary.
I didn’t want to hurt him. He was grieving Mum; I didn’t want to drag up the past. Plus, to be honest, in recent years things have been difficult between us.
Maybe it was Mum’s illness, or maybe it’s because I’d started to wonder about my real dad.
Instead, I went to work and used my journalistic skills to try and hunt him down.
Of course these days, it’s different – we’ve got Google and the internet and social media.
It didn’t take long for something to finally come up on our internal newspaper server.
It was a photo from a local newspaper in Bath.
It was taken last year, at an exhibition at a local art gallery; a local artist had won an award and was exhibiting their paintings and the proceeds were going to charity.
There were a few people in the photo and the caption underneath listed everyone, from left to right, and there was his name: Theo Stratin, and he was standing right next to the owner of the gallery, Maggie Fletcher.
Theodore C. Stratin. Teddy. It was the same person.
I remember sitting at work, staring at that photo for hours.
He looked different, older, but there was no denying it was the same man kissing Mum in the photobooth strip.
The same man who’d abandoned and stolen from her.
The father who’d seen me as a mistake and something to be got rid of, who’d deserted me before I was even born.
There he was, at a gallery opening, a glass of champagne in one hand, his other around the waist of the owner, his fiancée, all smiles for the camera.
Like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. I was so angry, I had all this rage inside, all these feelings I’d shoved down inside of me for so many years – now they came bubbling up, but I didn’t know what to do with them. So for a while I didn’t do anything.
And then one day I was in the pub and I overhead some people talking.
Local town gossip. I don’t usually pay much attention.
I was collecting glasses, helping out; it was a Sunday afternoon and we were short-staffed.
At first, I didn’t pay much attention. They were talking about some posters they’d seen about a missing cat when they’d been out walking their dogs.
The cat belonged to a woman who was living in the top field, up on the Pennines.
Apparently she used to be quite successful but she’d had her life savings stolen, the victim of a romance scammer, and was renting a field off the local farmer and living in a caravan.
At which point my ears pricked up. I’m always on the lookout for a story, one that’s not about Boy Scout fundraisers or missing cats – no offence – so I did a bit of digging around, asked a few questions, found out a name.
Maggie Fletcher.
It sounded familiar. Like I’d heard it somewhere before, but I couldn’t place it.
And then I remembered the photo. The woman he’d had his arm around.
It couldn’t just be a coincidence, so I called up my friend Tariq at the police station, asked if he could do me a favour and look up something on their database.
Of course he told me that information was confidential, police-classified and all that, and so I reminded him who gave him the information that led to the arrest of the gang who broke into the jeweller’s on the high street and won him a regional commendation award.
That’s when I read your statement.
And that’s when I knew for sure.
I’m sorry I wasn’t honest when I called you, when I drove out that day and trampled mud into your caravan; I’m sorry I let you think it was about your cat.
I was scared if I told you the truth, you’d refuse to speak to me – and you were the only person that could help me.
When you told me what happened to you, that’s when I knew I had to find him.
I had to stop him doing to another woman what he did to you and my mum.
And because I need answers to the questions I’ve been asking myself my whole life.
Because if he’s my real dad, who am I?