Page 2 of Days You Were Mine

Our friendship goes back to prep school; two misfits in a blur of dull entitlement.

‘This is Hannah,’ he said. ‘She works forThe Times. She does have a proper job.’

‘What about you?’ Hannah asked me. ‘Artist or proper job?’

‘Oh, I prefer to feed off other people’s talent.’

‘Luke’s an A&R man,’ Ben said, with the note of pride that is always there when he tells people about my job. ‘He was running his own record label at twenty-five.’

‘Now you’ve mademesound like a dick,’ I said, and Hannah laughed.

Ben’s parents came over then and we were swept up in a plan to go out for dinner.

‘There’s a lovely little Italian around the corner, we’ve booked a couple of tables,’ Ben’s father said, and Ben hissed, low-voiced, ‘Don’t worry, they’re paying.’

I liked Ben’s parents, they were good, kind people who invited me on holiday to France with them every year, but without saying anything Hannah and I dropped back, slowing our pace until soon we lost sight of Ben’s entourage altogether.

‘We’re right next to Chinatown,’ Hannah said, and I didn’t hesitate. Within minutes we were sitting opposite each other in a booth in one of my favourite restaurants.

I liked her impeccable rolling of pancakes: two slivers of spring onion laid head to toe alongside a neat stripe of hoisin sauce, modest slices of duck that she took time to select, no fat, no skin. While we ate, she told me about growing up in north Cornwall in a house by the sea.

‘Our house is on the path to the beach. When the tide’s coming in you can be swimming in the sea in three minutes flat. We used to time it. I was surfing by the age of eight. And when I was older I spent every summer working as a lifeguard.’

She told me about warm nights spent on the beach, sleeping out in the open, first with her parents, then with friends. They’dgather mussels and cook them over a campfire, drinking hot chocolate from a thermos.

‘On Midsummer’s Eve the whole village goes down to the beach and builds a big bonfire. People bring food and tell stories and everyone is there, young and old. I miss it sometimes. When I’m late for work and shoving my way onto the Tube without bothering to apologise, I wonder what the hell has happened to me.’

She laughed as she said this, but all I could think was: you’re perfect. That’s what’s happened to you. I’ve always been greedy for information about other people’s families, but I’d never felt like this, as if not just my mind but my whole body was attuned to every word she spoke.

‘You’re very good at not talking about yourself,’ Hannah said. ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

‘That’s because I’ve nothing to tell. I had a nice, safe, comfortable childhood in Yorkshire with parents who were quite a bit older. I’m an only child. They adopted me when I was just a few weeks old.’

‘You’re adopted?’ Hannah said, now vehemently interested, a reaction I find peculiarly female. Men basically don’t give a shit how you came into the world. ‘I love a mystery,’ she said.

And that was the first time she asked me about my birth mother.

‘So this is Hannah?’

Alice has laid out the photographs I brought with me like a hand of solitaire and she examines them one by one. She’s looking at my favourite photo of Hannah. In it, she’s behind the wheel of a tiny little phut-phut boat we hired on a whim one afternoon in Falmouth. It had a top speed of about ten miles an hour, this boat, and Hannah, who has a powerboat licence,who surfs and sails and could probably skipper a hundred-foot yacht if you asked her to, found it hilarious. She’s laughing so hard in this picture you can see both rows of teeth, her eyes are scrunched and her head is tipped right back. It makes my heart ache a little just to look at her and to remember that most perfect afternoon. Just this – I would be lost without her.

‘She looks like a good person to have on your side.’

Alice’s astuteness is a chest thump to the heart. As though this woman, this stranger, who once carried me in her womb, is still so connected to me she can read my innermost thoughts.

‘That’s me on my seventh birthday,’ I say, pointing to an image of me and three other friends holding sausages on sticks ready to cook on the barbecue. My birthday falls in May and I can still remember the scorch from that day. We had home-made lemonade that was too bitter for my friends and a cake in the shape of the Tardis.

‘And here I am at school playing rugby.’ I point to the adjacent photo.

‘You went to boarding school? How old?’

‘Eight.’

‘That’s far too young,’ Alice says, before softening it, ‘in my opinion.’

I wonder if I should tell her about the tearful departures, the utter desolation of the Sunday-night drive back to school. The first time my parents dropped me off I was too shocked and excited to cry much. The second time I knew what was coming and I clung to the car door handle and ran halfway down the drive with them before my father accelerated away.

I’d hesitated before including the photograph of Christmas lunch, me aged twelve, sitting at the table with my parents and grandparents. My father is standing up to carve the turkey, my mother is handing me a plate crammed with meat andvegetables. We are all wearing paper crowns and there is cracker debris scattered across the table. When I look at this photo, I think: quiet, lonely, bored. To me it is glaringly obvious that I didn’t fit in. But Alice sees something different. She sees the way my mother is smiling at me as she hands me my plate. She sees tenderness. Familiarity. Ownership.

---