Page 57 of Days You Were Mine

‘Alice, let’s have a coffee. I feel like we should talk.’

In the kitchen, I set Samuel down on the floor and he begins his exhausting new semi-crawl: face-plant, press-up, chest forwards, face-plant. Alice spreads the blue rug out across the floor and relocates Samuel to its soft woollen stripes.

‘The floor is too slippy, little bird,’ she says.

The kettle is reaching boiling point, thunderously loud it seems to me as I strain to catch the tone of her voice. How quickly the bear has become symbolic of the wrong we cannot right. Alice giving me away, me being taken from Alice, is a pie chart without an intersection, two spheres that cannot be blended, just like the worlds we inhabited. Separated, that’s the word they should use for adoptees. A separated child. A separated mother.

I bring a cafetière of coffee and two mugs to the table, milk from the fridge. My hands are shaking. I abhor confrontation of any kind.

We sit down opposite each other and it’s an effort for me to look up into Alice’s face. But when I do, I find that, as usual, she is calmer than me, assuming her role of adult.

I watch her bring her mug to her mouth, setting it down without taking a sip. Perhaps it’s too hot. Perhaps she’s just thinking.

‘You loved that bear,’ she says, and each word lands on me like ointment. ‘Rick gave it to you, and from about two weeks old you used to sleep with a fist curled around an arm or a leg. You were too young for me to worry about glass eyes, or perhaps I was too young to understand about them. After you’d gone, I kept the bear with me. For years I slept with him on my pillow, and then I relegated him to a shelf, a reminder but nothing more. I told myself that was progress.’

It’s the most she has ever said to me about the past.

Samuel is making small moans that will soon evolve into full-blown tears, a little ‘he-he’ noise that is hard to ignore. Alice gets up from the table and stoops down to collect him.

‘Come on up, my friend,’ she says, and she settles him on her lap, finds him the salt and pepper pots to play with, kisses the side of his face.

‘What was I like?’

She looks at me, surprised.

‘You were just like him. Happy. Always smiling. And laughing.’

Happy. Always smiling. I think of the way Christina often describes my first weeks – ‘you cried and cried, you wouldn’t stop’ – and it cracks my heart a little bit more.

‘Alice?’

Her face, lovely as ever, is impassive.

‘You call Samuel Charlie sometimes. Did you know?’

‘Oh, that. Yes, I can’t help it. He’s so similar to you at that age, I get confused.’

I’m nodding my head, too many times, trying to find the right words.

‘I’m beginning to feel as if we’ve got this the wrong way around. You looking after Samuel instead of getting to know me. It was our fault for suggesting it in the first place, but I really think it’s churning us up. Well, me anyway. I’m not sure it’s very healthy.’

‘It’s about as healthy as you can get. We’re family. Isn’t that better than farming out your child to someone you don’t know?’

I nod again, unconvinced. Suddenly, for the first time, I am really quite concerned by the depth of her love for my child. And the thing is, I don’t know Alice. Not really.

‘You don’t want me to stop looking after him?’

There’s anxiety in her face now. Burning eyes. I can’t look at them for long.

‘I know I don’t talk to you enough about those weeks when we were together. I know you mind. Sometimes I try to talk about it, but there’s just this great big block, memories I still can’t cope with all this time later.’

‘You can’t imagine how much I want to hear about it. The circumstances of my birth seem so mysterious.’

‘I remember you being born as if it was yesterday. It was very quick for a first baby, just a few hours.’

‘What did we do together? I know it’s about sleeping and eating in the first weeks, but is there anything you can remember apart from that?’

Alice smiles. ‘Actually, you loved swimming. Well, not swimming exactly, but lying on a little blow-up boat. You liked the sensation of floating, I think, and the sound of the waves.’

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