This one is for my Aunty Andrea, with fondest love x
Owen Coburn stared at the bottles lined in neat rows on the mirrored shelves opposite him. He’d never been one to drown his sorrows, but the collection of single malts seemed to whisper a lullaby more seductive than the songs of the mythical siren which the seafront pub had been named after. With more effort than it should’ve taken, he wrenched his eyes from the array of spirits and studied the rest of the busy bar as he waited to be served. Like his bedroom upstairs, the place was spotlessly clean, if a little worn in places.
Black-and-white photographs studded the pale-blue walls, showing scenes of Lavender Bay from times gone past. Ladies in white dresses clutching parasols in one hand, the fingers of the other tucked into the arms of besuited gentlemen as they strolled the promenade. Fishermen sorting their nets in the old harbour, faces leathered from years of exposure to sea and sun.
On the side of the wooden upright beside him a ragged line of young men dressed in their Sunday best beamed out of the past, their expressions a mixture of shy pride and cocky confidence. With their hair neatly slicked and battered suitcases at their feet, not one of them looked older than he was now. Owen wondered if any of them had understood what awaited them on the bloody fields of Europe and how many—if any—had returned. Faint writing at the bottom of the photo caught his eye. Hating the need inside him, Owen scanned the cramped squiggles on the photo. No Blackmores among them.
With a snort of disgust at himself, he turned away. What the hell was he doing chasing shadows? According to the piece of paper burning a hole in his pocket, Deborah Mary Blackmore had been 17 when she’d given up her son for adoption. She’d listed Lavender Bay as her place of birth, but extensive searches had yielded no trace of her. Either his mother was a ghost, or she’d lied about her name.
Requesting his original birth certificate had seemed like a good way of setting the final pieces of his past to rest. After a childhood in care where the kindest thing anyone had ever done was ignore him, compartmentalisation had become his daily survival technique—what hadn’t killed him didn’t make him stronger so much as it got stuffed in a mental box and shoved to the furthest reaches of conscious memory. As a result, he’d managed to convince himself that delving into his origins could be an exercise in intellectual curiosity, nothing more.
Unprepared for it, the emotional tsunami caused by the arrival of the innocuous brown envelope had swept him so far off course he wasn’t sure who he was anymore. With the words ‘father unknown’ thwarting half of his search before he could even get started, finding Deborah had become a near-obsession. He’d joined every online genealogy website he could find, and spent hours trawling through scanned images covered in spidery writing to no avail. After those efforts came up blank, he’d
