‘Sounds like you’ve thought about it.’
‘And dismissed it. Whoever he was, he either never knew that the mentally ill, drug-addicted woman he slept with had given birth to his child, or he didn’t care. I have no desire whatsoever to know more about a man like that.’
‘Fair enough.’
My mind kept drifting back to our conversation as we cleared out the dismantled furniture, wiped down the walls and prepped the room for painting. I kept coming back to the same question.
What’s the worst that can happen if I contact my family?
Once we’d eaten a bowl of pasta while Blessing introduced me to her favourite gruesome crime box set, and then four episodes later said goodnight, leaving me to get comfy on the sofa, I made a rough mental list of the answers.
They might turn out to be as bad as Mum said – in which case, I’ll simply walk away.
They might reject, or dislike, me. But if they don’t want to give me a chance, then that’s their loss, not mine.
I might find out a load of awful things about Mum. Which I can live with. Whoever she was before, the woman she was for her last twenty-four years is what matters to me.
I might love them. And they love me, too. Maybe Mum exaggerated, or perhaps they had a questionable past, but have become great people. In which case, we have to grieve all those lost years.
And the best that could happen?
I’d have a family. A place to belong. People who cared. Who could help me understand Mum better, why she was that way. Why I wasn’t.
I decided that maybe I should do some tentative investigating. I would proceed with caution. Protect myself at every step. Expect nothing.
I’d start soon. Maybe once the decorating was finished, or the new business had got under way.
Was it a little pathetic that when I opened up Instagram, dilly-dallying about whether to start searching for other Browns and Swans, I instead found myself scrolling through Iris’s wedding photos, heart scrunching up as I zoomed in on Pip, the devoted brother sandwiched between four sisters with a huge grin on his face?
And, then –oomph.
There I was, fairy lights glinting off my mussed hair, Aster’s dress swishing flatteringly, eyes dancing as I walked across the grass, Pip’s hand in mine. The photograph had caught us exchanging animated glances. He was laughing, completely at ease, as if we’d strolled together countless times before.
I looked… happy.
Together, we looked like a couple utterly in love.
I put down my phone and watched two more episodes of the crime box set before I calmed down enough to even pretend to try getting to sleep.
34
It was when I moved the creaky old bed away from the wall that I found it. A dusty grey cardboard folder, tucked in the inch-high space between the floor and the divan bed base.
Inside were photographs of a baby who must have been me. In a couple of the pictures, I was alone, in my pram and lying on a picnic blanket. In others, Mum was there, cradling me against her chest or sitting me on her knee in front of a cake with one candle on it. The rest featured other people too – women who all looked like older or younger versions of Nell, and a few small children.
This must be the family Nell refused to have anything to do with. Yet she clearly hadn’t decided that until I was past my first birthday. What had happened?
After soaking up the images, I found the answer in an envelope inside the folder. It contained the court papers granting legal guardianship of Emmaline Swan to Nell Brown, dated a month after my first birthday. Fascinated, I read the statement about how Kennedy Swan had requested that the cousin who had already been caring for her daughter should be given parental responsibility. The formal assessment confirmedwhat Mum had told me, that Kennedy had a lot of problems, as well as two prison sentences behind her, but it was the rest that floored me.
Ms Brown clearly cares deeply for Emmaline. They have formed a strong bond during this first year of Emmaline’s life, and Emmaline sees Ms Brown as her mother. Concerns have been raised about Ms Brown’s ability to raise a child, considering her own family background, but she has worked hard to address these by taking a significant amount of time off work to attend courses and educate herself on healthy parenting. She has also cut back the hours of her business, at considerable financial loss, in order to minimise the need for external childcare. Furthermore, she has abandoned her plans to open a second food outlet, being unwilling to take on the risk when responsible for a child.
Ms Brown has argued vigorously that she is able to protect Emmaline from any safeguarding issues surrounding her family while maintaining those relationships. However, the wider concerns detailed in section 4.2 mean that the guardianship shall only be granted if Emmaline has no ongoing contact with either her maternal grandparents, Ms Brown’s parents, or her aunt and uncle. Ms Brown has therefore agreed to cease all contact with her family in order to preserve the placement’s confidentiality.
And so it went on. There were other questions raised, about how Mum would balance a business and a child as a single parent, what would happen if the kiosk failed. How she would handle any future relationships with men. It was a rigorous grilling, and Mum’s answers were always the same. I was her priority now. Basically, she’d do whatever it took to make it work, and be the best mum that she could be.
Section 4.2 was missing, but that wasn’t what mattered to me. I had always known that Mum made the usual sacrifices that went hand in hand with parenting. Those that, like most children, I’d taken for granted a lot of the time. But reading how she’d chosen to slash her income, abandon her dreams of expansion – to stay single! It also explained why she’d put so much into Parsley’s, into sticking to what worked. She’d sworn to give it her all, so she had.
Above all, only a few years after losing the love of her life, she’d given up her family. For a child who wasn’t even her responsibility.
