I turned the box over to inspect the damage. A small compartment had been concealed beneath the wooden base. My fingers crept into the underside and felt around. It was a shallow slot, covered in aged velveteen. As I touched it something flimsy dropped out: a piece of paper, folded over so it was only about two inches square. Very old and fragile, I unfolded it with great care. It was a document, roughly A5 in size.
In the darkness I was unable to make out what it said. So I took it over to the door. The eco-bulb there wasn’t particularly brilliant but I could see what it was. The bluey-black ink was faded and powdery in the folds but I could clearly make out the words.
As I read them I felt my knees buckle. I grabbed on to the doorframe for support, first confused then as it sank in, stupefied with shock.
In my hands I held a birth certificate. From 1977. November 15th.
My birthday.
It chronicled the birth of a girl. But it wasn’t my name that was scrawled there. That baby was called Mercy Walker.
Blood was throbbing in my ears as I looked down to see the Name and Surname of the mother – Rose Walker. Beneath it I read, with increasing disbelief, the place of birth: Hemel Hempstead. Hertfordshire.
Then finally my eyes caught the ‘Father’ section. There was only one word recorded in the slanting black hand. I read it with anguish.
‘Unknown’.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The problem with being blown out of your mind is that, when you return to it, you find large chunks have been burnt out. I suspect that it’s a survival technique the human species has developed to prevent the paralysis of trauma. But it is irritating in cases like this, when I’m trying to give the full picture, to find that I only have a frazzled and fragmented rag of coherent recall.
I’m not sure what happened in the immediate hours post-discovery, so I won’t guess. This is what I do know: for a while I sat in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom, endlessly turning the note over, reading and re-reading the words until they made no sense. Eventually, I don’t know when, but probably sometime before midnight, I noticed on the back an indistinct scrawl, some kind of annotation in my mother’s hand: South East, F8. I don’t think I gave it much thought. I was too busy sifting through my childhood, exploring the holes. But like I said, it’s all a bit of a blur now.
I can remember the following day, I got myself together and went to see the man I thought of as my father in the Suffolk pub he partly owned.
I remember that he was late.
More than ten minutes late, and I was boiling myself into a fury. So that when he did finally turn up, striding into his realm, greeting some of the regulars he knew so well, I had to grip on to the table to prevent myself flying at him.
He saw me sitting over by the window in the furthest, most private part of the pub, but even then didn’t come straight over. He stopped, had a word with the manager then sauntered across the lounge, greeting me with a ‘Mercedes, darling. Are you okay? I got your message. You sounded …’
He bent over to give me a kiss, but I squirmed away from his touch.
‘Don’t,’ I said, though I was bursting to say more.
Dad took a step back. ‘You okay? I’m sorry I’m late. It was Lucy’s assembly and afterwards there were coffees and you know how these things go …’
It was the wrong line to take. Though he didn’t realise it, the last thing I wanted to hear was that he’d made me wait because he was spending time with his real child. His blood relative.
I leant forwards and snarled, ‘Who are you?’
Dad’s mouth dropped open. His eyebrows soared skywards, little bumps of wrinkled skin gathered above them; then, as a faint glimmer of understanding seemed to appear on the horizon of his mental landscape, they narrowed and slid down his forehead. His eyes made intense small movements, darting from side to side. Apart from that his face was impassive, petrified into a familiar non-expression that I had seen so many times in my life. At last I perceived it for what it was – a mask that hid many contradictions and conflicting emotions. Though, from an early age I had presumed it to be