Page 88 of Days You Were Mine

‘Good luck, darling,’ she calls as I get out of the car, as if I’m going for a job interview or about to sit my physics GCSE.

The first thing I notice as I am taken on a tour of the facilities – ping-pong tables and instant coffee, just like a sixth-form common room – is the friendliness of all the other patients. On every turn there’s another unasked-for greeting, ‘Hi there,’ a smiling face, an infrared beam of reassurance, the unified, silent message: ‘Come let us help you over the start line.’ It’s a bit like joining the Moonies, I’d imagine.

My first session of the day is group therapy, the terminology alone enough to trigger queasiness in days gone by. But I am too tired, too forlorn, to bother with cynicism.

Our group of eight, seated in a semicircle of comfortable chairs, is led by Marion, who introduces me – ‘Everyone, this is Luke’ – to resounding support. It is too much to respond; their kindness, their congeniality, coupled with the reality of my being here, brings me to tears. I nod my greeting instead and they seem to understand.

‘Before we get started,’ Marion says, ‘I thought it might be useful to tell Luke what we gain from these group sessions. How helpful the act of talking can be.’

A dark-haired girl around my own age says, ‘The brilliant thing about group therapy is that you bring your fears and anxieties into the open and you find out that other people feel exactly the same way. And that makes them less frightening. It makes you feel less alone.’

The session gets under way and I tune in and out while those around me speak of mortification and self-sabotage with thesame insouciance I once reserved for planning our Sainsbury’s shop. There’s a tea break halfway through and I am besieged with new friends. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate their efforts to make me feel at home, but it makes me want to cry. Everyone is so goddamn tactful. No one asks me why I’m here; they know through experience how to steer a safe conversation. Dark-haired girl tells me she has the same pair of Reebok trainers as mine at home, only hers are the grey version. A woman called Kate jokes that the instant coffee is a brilliant way to break a Starbucks habit: ‘We’ll save ourselves a fortune when we get out of here.’

After the break, Marion asks me if I feel ready to share a detail about myself with the group.

‘Don’t feel you need to tell us why you’re here just yet. We would love to learn even one thing about you.’

‘I don’t much like being looked at,’ I say, scorching in the intensified heat of eight pairs of eyes.

‘Very few people do,’ says Marion. ‘But in these sessions the first rule is to assume support. When we look at you, we’re supporting you.’

The dark-haired girl, whose name I discover is Lisa, says, ‘My first day I started with a list of things I liked. I could only find one and it was dark chocolate.’

‘Music,’ I say. ‘My job is in music. I listen to it all day. Sometimes I think I can only express my feelings through other people’s music. Like I can only connect to emotions other people have had first.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Marion says. ‘What kind of music do you like?’

‘David Bowie. The Rolling Stones. The Doors. The seventies is my era, I don’t know why. Bob Dylan. Led Zeppelin. The Who.’

Pink Floyd are my undoing. I remember Alice telling me how she’d been to see them on theirDark Side of the Moontour. I realise that Jacob must have been with her, and I am flattened by a vision of the two of them in their cheesecloth and flares, high on beer and marijuana and the saturation of new love.

Here’s a thing I didn’t know about group work. If you wobble, no one jumps up to comfort you, no one says a thing. They want you to have your moment, and how quickly we have come to mine.

‘My father was a musician.’ I gasp it out. ‘My real father. He killed himself a few days before I was born.’

Crying without consolation, a new experience for me. The rest of the group observe me quietly, without interruption; even Marion takes her time to speak.

‘You must wish you’d known him.’

‘I wish that more than anything. I have this sense he was like me and he would have understood me. Because I’m adopted and I feel …’

A pause while I struggle to say the words that make sense of my entire life.

‘I feel that I’ve never fitted in anywhere.’

Then

Alice

I am always left alone during the 3 a.m. feed. This is Charlie’s hungriest time; he’ll suckle for forty-five minutes, first one breast, then the other. The nurses tried him on a bottle the moment I’d signed the adoption papers, despite my protests, but he wouldn’t take it.

‘Here’s your crosspatch,’ says the night nurse, lowering a screaming Charlie into my arms. ‘I’ll leave you two in peace.’

I detect the pity in her voice. Everyone knows that later on this morning is our big goodbye.

The moment she has gone, I manoeuvre myself out of the bed, one arm held beneath Charlie as he continues to feed. The slightest disturbance and he’ll yell out his fury and wake the whole ward. I’m barefoot, according to the plan, and dressed only in a nightdress, but I do swaddle him in the green cashmere shawl Rick brought for me.

In the darkness, at first glance, the baby is obscured. I’m just a girl finding her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I stand behind the curtain for a moment, gathering my strength, while my heart slams against my ribs and Charlie continues to suck in his emerald cocoon.

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