Page 19 of Statistically Speaking
I sit, and I wait. Eventually, their cloud of activity is gone. The school is far from empty; there are other clubs being held, after-school lessons, meetings, music rehearsals, sports practices. I know Karim will be out there on the field, in his tracksuit uniform, refereeing football or coaching rugby. I’ve only seen him briefly today, on purpose, coming in later than usual and avoiding the staff room. I don’t have space in the sectored brain for anything extra today, and promise myself I will talk to him properly tomorrow.
But here, now, in my quiet room, there is only me. Me and a suitcase full of wishes—I wish that I didn’t have to find out. I wish that I didn’t know that Katie was adopted. I wish that I knew more, and that I knew less. I wish that she could be mine, even while telling myself that she never can be—she will always be Erin’s daughter, no matter what biology might say.
I pick up the phone and dial the extension for the school office staff. I make small talk with Cheryl, who looks after our information management system—an almighty affair that records details of the students’ achievements, targets, personal circumstances, and shoe size. That last one isn’t true, by the way.
I explain that I need to know Katie Bell’s date of birth for a project I’m planning. Another lie, and completely unnecessary as well—I’m hardly asking for state secrets here. I could have just asked Katie, but I couldn’t bear the thought of putting her in that position, because I don’t know how I am going to react, whichever way this goes.
“Ooh,” exclaims Cheryl after a few moments of tapping away on her keyboard, “she’s got a birthday soon! The third of October.”
I already know that the year is right. Now I know that the day is right: October 3.
The day that everything changed.
I somehow manage to finish the conversation in a reasonable way, or at least I think I do, and I put the phone down. It has only taken around ninety seconds to turn my world upside down.
I lean back in my chair, and I bite my lip so hard it bleeds. I don’t even feel the pain, just taste the metallic tang of blood. I realize my whole body is numb, like I’m in shock.
She was born on the same day as my baby. She couldbemy baby. It is too huge to process properly, and I am frozen in place.
I shake my head, as though that will help, and start to rearrange my pens. I start to rearrange a lot—internally and externally.
I tell myself that this isn’t proof. That this doesn’t mean that Katie is my daughter. I remind myself yet again that around one thousand nine hundred babies were born that day, and decide it would be useful to know the statistical probability of them being redheads. My fingers are too fat and slow to work my phone, and maybe that’s a good thing. There is a rabbit hole out there with my name on it.
I wipe the blood from the lip that I am still chewing and wonder what to do next. I have to pack up, drive home, see Margie. I have to walk Bill, and cook dinner, and prepare for tomorrow’s department meeting. I have to vacuum the bedroom carpets and I have to watchThe Bridgeand I have to reply to Karim’s messages.
I have to do all these things, but right now I am incapable even of moving. I am rooted to my chair, my mind well and truly blown, a river of emotions bursting through carefully erected dams.
For the first time in many years, I simply don’t know what to do. Should I talk to Erin? Should I try to find out more about where my adopted child went? There is a register you can sign up to, I know, where you can leave your details, and if they come looking for you, they can find you once they are over eighteen.
I have never signed up to that, for many reasons. Eighteen has always seemed a long way off, and I have never been sure that I am strong enough to confront my own past. I am strong enough to suppress it, to ignore it, to function despite it—or at least I used to be.
Now I feel small and weak and scared and elated. I need a plan, but right now I cannot formulate one.
I am vaguely aware of the real world around me, the familiar sights and smells and sounds of this room, of this building—but I feel apart from it as well. I am inhabiting my own strange space and am taken aback when I hear a voice. At first it seems to come from a distance, a whisper or an echo, irrelevant and temporary.
Then it becomes more insistent, and I look up to see her. Katie Bell. Born on October 3. Standing before me, looking worried.
“Miss, are you all right?” she says in a tone that implies it is not the first time of asking. I gaze up at her, drinking in the deep red plaits and the multiple ear studs and the history nerd T-shirt. I drink it all in like I have just emerged from a desert and into an oasis.
“Yes!” I say eventually, a delayed reaction that does nothing to erase her frown. “Yes, I’m fine, Katie—sorry, I was just in a world of my own.”
My hands go automatically to the pen parade, pushing them fractionally to make them all touch.
“Okay. I know that feeling,” she replies, noticing my movements, noticing the bitten lip, noticing my emotionally disheveled state. This isn’t fair, I tell myself—she is innocent in all of this, regardless of who she is or who she isn’t. She is still a seventeen-year-old girl watching an authority figure dwindle into a pile of scattered sticks. I pull myself together, sit up straighter, reconnect to reality, and force a smile.
“Did you forget something, Katie? Can I help you with anything?”
A look flickers across her face that I read as “It doesn’t look like you can help anyone with much at all right now,” but shereplies: “Yeah, sorry. My mum asked me to tell you to text her. She accidentally deleted your number, which isn’t a surprise to anyone who knows her because her technological expertise seems to have ended at vinyl. She wondered if you wanted to come round to ours for dinner or something. By ‘something’ she probably means margaritas, and by ‘dinner’ she probably means a takeaway, I warn you.”
I blink and feed the words through the processor that is my mind.
“Right, I will. But would that be okay with you?” I ask. “I mean, would it be a bit weird having one of your teachers in the house? It might be, and I wouldn’t be offended if you said so. I could just meet your mum for a drink instead.”
“Nah, it’s cool. It’s not like you’re my math teacher from year eleven or anything. I hated him. Anyway, it’s nice for my mum to make friends her own age.”
The way she says that last part makes me laugh inside—she sounds more like the parent than the child. I have an image of the teeny-tiny dynamo that is Erin, hanging around with teenagers drinking cider on the beach.
“What, you mean complete geriatrics?”
