Dad isn’t one for swearing, an occasional bloody if Mum isn’t around. So when Christopher tells me what bugger and prat mean it sounds implausible. The only time with Dad is once in the car when he crashes the gears. We’re alone. I am 14. Old enough to hear him say fuck.
All change. We cannot find your mother but we have found your sister Lesley and your father, the care worker tells me (this use of ‘care’ in ‘children in care’ a Goebbels-like lie). Things are drifting dangerously at home, Christopher is unhappy in the army. I am away at boarding school. Dad has sold Herons Reach to Lilian’s nephew, who wants a bolt hole from Kuwait. Gone the river, gone the field, broken the sense of security. Dudley is clearing the decks.
I am wanting to know more about Alan Jenkins. Mum and Dad are probably resentful, though they have never said so. It is as though it is a matter of poor manners and ingratitude, not identity. Asking is discouraged throughout the system. It is wrong, the ‘right to know’. I am searching for an escape plan. If one door closes, can another open? But if Lilian and Dudley don’t want us, why would anyone?
A photo strip arrives at school of a skinhead girl grinning into the camera. I pore over it. Can I see a likeness? It will be a first for me (Christopher and I are never alike in looks or temperament, though tightly bound together like corn). Most families share the same eyes, smile, same mouth. They swim in a sea of recognition, reassured of where they belong. I think I have always been longing for a face that could be connected to me.
My sister and I exchange excited messages. Lesley writes of her life in Basildon, a new town in Essex, with her – ‘our’ – dad. I show off from my posh Devon school.
I cannot discuss it at home, the wheels are coming off. But I pine for Lesley’s letters, like adolescent love.
I have long wanted a sister, someone soft. Perhaps finding a dad is less important because Dudley has filled that space. A mum, though, is different, a primeval pull. It isn’t anyone’s fault, just how it is. Maybe, as we get older and more male, Lilian still mourns the baby girl she never had.
I worry why she isn’t more affectionate. Kisses, quick cuddles are for when I am sick. I had divined early on that it was because she was too thin, her breasts couldn’t carry enough chemicals for love. Other boys’ mums are more curved, more tactile, invite you in, feed you, sit on the same sofa as their sons. I am envious of friends who are held. It has been a long time. I am in need of mothering.
There isn’t, though, a mother to be found, the care worker says. For now, a sister and a father will do. Letters are exchanged from our twin alien worlds. Lesley’s handwriting is neat and loopy, sometimes comes in green ink.
For the first time, the end of the summer term means a train on my own to London and not a short Devon drive. I am at Paddington Station and my name is called over the Tannoy. Will I come to the station manager’s office. I am sick, a little scared. We would have had counselling for it now, this seismic shift in who we are. The tidal pull of blood and belonging.
Suddenly we are in the same room, family parted 10 years before. Lesley with her Prince of Wales pattern skirt and long, green nails, her Essex accent and smile. With my dad, Ray, it is different, something is wrong, though not from his side. He isn’t the man I expected to see, the one I’ve been waiting for. I rationalise it later: how could anyone live up to the hope, the longing I have buried? I had Hollywooded the moment: the glamorous sailor back from the sea, the white fence with Mum and me waiting. Ray is taking me home, what more could I want?
Basildon is impossible. A New Town, an east London overspill, surrounded by a ring of factories: Ford, Ski yoghurt, Carreras cigarettes. Lesley, my sister, is called after Dad, Leslie Ray. I am a village kid from Devon, who has nearly been to London once on a long day trip to Heathrow Airport with Sunday school (people used to do that, a glimpse of the future and the rest of the planet through pilots and ‘aeroplanes’). Otherwise my world is limited to a twice-yearly trip to Plymouth, once in summer to buy shoes and again before Christmas to buy the Norwegian sweater (mine in blue, Christopher’s in red) that is always our present. We have lunch in the department-store restaurant, maybe a film if there is something suitable.
Basildon is bewildering. Identical estates laid on an identical grid, but I stay for the summer holidays, hanging around the record store to listen to music in booths or at the swimming pool by Ray and Lesley’s flat, if I don’t get lost (I am always lost). I am fascinated by Lesley, the way she speaks, the way she’s dressed, her taste in skinhead music, her feather-cut friends, the soap operas she watches. My relationship with Ray is more complicated. He won’t talk about my mother, show me photos, even tell me her name. He refuses to speak about his life with her or his wedding. ‘You must never ask me, it is better you never know!’ It feels odd to hit a wall so soon.
Ray is a cook but also a Pentecostal evangelist to be seen proclaiming the name of the Lord in Basildon town centre every Saturday. It is like living in a soap series I have never watched but Lesley does, Crossroads or Coronation Street. The connection to the past I have pined for still feels far away. I finally have sex, though, with a girl from the swimming pool on a piece of waste ground outside town. She is older, has more body hair, but it is a bit boring. Another disappointment, another longing unresolved.
1987. I am in need of a birth certificate for a new passport but it seems I don’t exist. Alan Jenkins born on my birthday isn’t to be found. I am confused, so ask at the enquiries desk. Search the adoption register, the man says, if you are not there, your birthdate is wrong. Most of my life I have carried the understanding of caste, that although they had changed my name, had played our parents, the Drabbles didn’t adopt us. I was never sure why we hadn’t made the grade. I was proud to bear the mark of foster child but adoption is another level of belonging, gossamer close to never having to worry about being sent back, no longer on sufferance. A family of your own. A place to stay.
I search the adoption register. And immediately there it is in black and white. All this time, my history mouldering, smouldering, in this London room. Alan Jenkins’s certificate. Adopted by Leslie Ray Jenkins, it says, at 12 months old. I am lost. I had wanted a passport, a long-haul holiday, not the fabric of who I am to lie threadbare in my lunch break.
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