Chapter 14
It was a Tuesday night in the middle of June and Gemma was sitting at the kitchen table researching old coins on her laptop. The previous weekend she’d found a coin that was worn so smooth from years of use and friction from the swirls of the riverbed, that she couldn’t make out much of its detail.
As she held up the coin to the computer screen to compare it to pictures of similar ones online, her phone buzzed with a message.
She glanced at the text. It was from Adam.
With her new distraction of The Mudlarkers’ Club, she’d been more easily able to push him from her thoughts.
It was foolhardy to freeze herself in the present, she knew, but it was proving to be a helpful coping mechanism.
Her phone sounded again. She sighed and read it.
Hi, Gemma, I’m really sorry to have to tell you like this, but I didn’t want you finding out from anybody else …
That was all Gemma could see without clicking on it. She put down the coin and opened her messages.
We’ve only just found out ourselves and I would have called you, but I wasn’t sure if you’d want to talk and Mia is … well, she’s not much fussed on the two of us talking anyway …
For goodness’ sake, Adam, get to the point. Gemma didn’t have to read on much further to see what his point was.
We’re pregnant.
Gemma’s dinner somersaulted.
I know this isn’t what you want to hear.
You’re right about that.
We weren’t planning it, I promise.
Really.
I’m sorry you have to find out like this.
Gemma turned the phone over so that it was face down.
Her mouth had gone dry and her heart was racing so fast that she put a hand to her chest to try and stop it.
Hadn’t he hurt her enough? And now this, in a text?
A text! Of all the ways he could have communicated it with her.
Of all the things he could have announced.
Now, he was expecting, and she was expecting nothing with no one.
And to think that he’d been the one in their relationship who hadn’t wanted to rush into having children.
She’d raised it with him in the past about how conceiving wasn’t always straightforward, as experienced by her parents.
Yet he hadn’t seemed bothered, as if arrogantly assuming he’d be fine.
And then he was! El cabrón. This felt like another deception and an intimation at the spuriousness of their marriage.
What’s more, she was reminded, yet again, of how her future was one big question mark, scarily blank and void.
Would she marry again? Would she ever be a mother?
How could things that had seemed certain suddenly vanish in an instant?
With those two words Adam had uttered – I’m leaving – her whole world had upended completely and irrevocably.
She didn’t want to start crying – she’d done enough of that already – but it was impossible to stay composed.
Another text message came through. She wouldn’t read it. But, of course, how could she not? She wiped the tears from her cheeks. Adam continued.
It’d also be good to talk sometime – properly – about getting a divorce.
She knew this was coming but she hadn’t wanted to fully entertain the idea.
It was so final and the act of it, so clinical.
As if with each of their signatures they could erase their vows to one another and the life they’d shared, every moment of happiness reduced to mere memory and replaced by sadness and anger, on her part at least. And what of Adam?
He’d had who knows how long to consider divorce and was, it seems, not only accepting of it, but relieved and in a rush for it to happen.
For her, it felt like a bombshell, she was still getting used to the idea of being separated.
Not only did she dislike the term divorcee, she didn’t want to be labelled one.
It smacked of failure and bitterness, and a sense of pride that had been in a hit-and-run.
The idea of picking over their life together like a vulture scavenging a corpse was upsetting and painful, and she knew that nothing, apart from time, would make those feelings go away.
Did they really have to talk about divorce already?
She considered not replying. Then again, she didn’t want him thinking that she couldn’t take the news, even if she was now reduced to tears. A simple, I know and congratulations would suffice.
She got up to check the tidal chart. The photo of her and her mother that she’d stuck to the fridge door jumped out at her and made her pause.
She felt even more drawn to it than she had before.
Surely, her history was the one thing she could latch on to and claim as her own, even if it meant having to research it?
How ironic that, with a few online searches, she’d easily and quickly be able to find out so much more about the small coin she’d unearthed than her own past.
Somewhere, she had an album of childhood photos, but she couldn’t remember where. She left the kitchen and went searching. Eventually, she found it in the chest of drawers in her bedroom, wedged under a couple of jumpers.
She pulled it out and sat on the bed. The front cover was dented and faded and the pages inside were no longer sticky.
The clear plastic sheets that were meant to be protecting the photos flapped loosely.
Gemma peeled off the photo on the front page.
It was the first one ever taken of her parents with Gemma as a baby.
She was dressed in a white baby suit covered with tiny lemons.
Her eyes were closed, her bottom lip sucked in ever so slightly.
She looked peaceful. Her parents were smiling in disbelief and joy.
For Gemma – and perhaps her parents, too – this picture represented her beginning.
Yet she wanted to delve deeper. To find out about the circumstances that had led to it, about what happened to her birth parents, why they hadn’t wanted her, and if they ever wondered about the daughter they gave away.
Rich knew everything about his squashed-face pedigree cat that liked filing its claws on the furniture, yet Gemma had no idea about her own heritage.
Suddenly, and with unequivocal clarity, she yearned to know about her past.
It was time to call her mother.