Page 62 of Days You Were Mine

‘Just a hunch Elizabeth had. Probably nothing.’

‘Answer me this. Am I just being jealous and needy and insecure? Or do I have a point?’

Ben stands up.

‘More whisky needed, I think. And yes. You have a point.’

It’s almost six when our session breaks up; I remember nothing of the ride home, London blurring past. All I can think about, all I can feel, is a sort of disaffected rage, a venomous self-pity for my confused identity, my lone wolf-ness. Probably not the right state of mind in which to meet my birth mother, and it doesn’t help that I can’t get my key in the door. After a few minutes of scraping and scratching and rattling, the door opens and I lurch through it, almost toppling into Alice and my small son.

Oops.

‘Goodness,’ Alice says. ‘Are you OK?’

‘S’fine,’ I slur. ‘Sorr’m late.’

I reach out to take Samuel, and Alice actually backs away from me. What I see is the way she curves her arms protectively around him as if he is her child, not mine.

‘Why don’t you have a lie-down,’ she says. ‘I’ll wait here until Hannah gets back.’

‘Gimme m’son,’ I say, or at least I try to. I’m blind drunk, I realise now, without the fallback of Ben, who was so pissed himself we could communicate perfectly, a contrapuntal wave of sound unintelligible to all but us.

Alice shakes her head. ‘It’s not safe. You might drop him. I’m not judging you, don’t think that, just trying to make sure Samuel’s OK. Hannah will be home soon.’

And now I am inflamed with rage, hurt, disappointment, self-loathing, of course, and it makes me vicious.

‘Is my child, not yours. You gave yours away, remember?’

I am crying as I haul myself up the stairs, clinging to the banister, step by step, until I reach the bedroom and throw myselfon the bed, and mercifully my world soon turns black. But in the countdown to unconsciousness, in those final seconds, I am sure I see Alice’s face at the door. My mother standing there, my child in her arms, silently watching.

Then

Alice

It seems unfathomable to me now, four days into Jake’s drinking binge, that there could have been a time when I didn’t know him this way. We are living separate lives. In the mornings he is too deeply asleep to hear me leave for college, and I go straight to the Slade, forgoing my morning cappuccino, for I cannot bear to be in Bar Italia without him. In the evenings he is never at home and I have learned to go to bed, forcing myself into sleep if I can, waiting for the slide and scrape as he attempts to fit his key in the lock if I can’t.

He is lost to me, but I understand he is drowning in torment. I know this from the notes I come home to, the desperate scrawls in a page ripped from his notebook.

Alice. Forgive me. I’m so sorry. I hate myself. This will stop, I promise.

But it doesn’t stop. Four days turns into five. I ring Eddie and he suggests meeting for lunch. We go to a caff near college and he orders a full English: undercooked bacon, pallid sausages, beans, fried egg, tinned tomatoes and a rack of white toast. It makes me nauseous to look at it. I drink a cup of tea and try to eat my hot buttered toast, but I can’t manage more than a couple of bites.

‘You must be going out of your mind,’ Eddie says.

‘Pretty much.’

‘He does this sometimes, Alice, when it all gets on top of him.’

‘I don’t understand why it has to carry on. He made the decision not to go the funeral, why isn’t that the end of it?’

‘It’s not about the funeral any more. This is Jake’s depression. It’s a self-hate thing. A self-perpetuating thing. You might not understand this, but Jake is punishing himself.’

‘But why?’

‘Goes back to his grandparents. Jake still hears the things they said to him as a child. He still believes them.’

‘It’s like he’s avoiding me.’

‘He is avoiding you. He’s ashamed. He doesn’t want you to see him like this.’

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