‘If the looks weren’t enough, it was when you tipped your head to the side and smiled. I nearly fell off the sofa, seeing that. Kennedy, my mother, Auntie Polly – all the Swan women do it. I had to come.’
‘I’ve been trying to find you too.’ I sniffed, prising myself away before I got snot on her T-shirt. ‘I mean, not you. All I had was Polly and Clive’s names, and Kennedy’s date of birth and old address. I couldn’t find anything and had no idea where else to search.’
‘Nell really never told you about us?’
I shook my head. ‘Not in any detail, no.’
‘And what she told you wasn’t pretty, I’d imagine. She’d begged her mum and mine to sort themselves out, prove the courts wrong, but they refused, said you’d be better off being adopted by strangers. Nellie was so angry.’
I said nothing, which was answer enough.
‘She was always determined to do better than us.’ Dawn pulled out a wodge of tissues from her shorts pocket and handedme a couple, using the rest to blow her nose and wipe her face. ‘It was so hard to lose her – and you – but she knew it was what Kennedy wanted. She did it for both of you. And clearly did a stellar job of raising you. My niece! I’m Auntie Dawn! As far as I’m concerned, that cancels out every rotten thing she’ll have said. About us, and to us.’
That statement made her start crying again. I’d not stopped yet, so there we both were, weeping all over the place while Blessing handed Owen a free blondie and a coffee, and the last few stragglers from the festival tried to pretend they weren’t gawking as they skirted around us towards the exit.
In the end, my business partner took charge.
‘Look, this has been a lot. Why don’t you swap numbers, and, once you’ve had a bit of time to process things, arrange a proper meet-up, somewhere you can talk?’
After exchanging details with fumbling fingers, Dawn accepted her son’s –my biological cousin’s!– proffered arm, and allowed him to steer her to the exit.
‘Whew, Emmie. That’s a biggie.’ Blessing went to hug me, but, fearing it would cause me to disintegrate into complete mush, I instead took her hand and gave it a quick squeeze.
‘At least I know I’m not the only one in my family capable of expressing emotions,’ I said, followed by a semi-hysterical giggle, which ended up with more crying, and Blessing giving me the hug anyway, seeing as I couldn’t really get any mushier.
We’d planned to celebrate the end of the festival with a takeaway – no more proper cooking for at least a day or two – and a gory thriller that Blessing insisted I would love as much as the others she’d badgered me into watching. I hadn’t especially enjoyed those, to be honest, but felt it was the least I could do after crying on her all through packing up and the drive home.
Instead, my friend insisted on us scouring the Internet for references to Molly, Dawn and Owen Swan.
‘They might have seemed fine for those few minutes, but a court wouldn’t have made your mum disown them without very good reason.’
We found nothing for Molly, or more surprisingly for Owen, but it turned out Dawn was a social media oversharer, and I soon had a family tree sketched out, including Dawn’s three ex-husbands, two of whom definitely seemed to fit Mum’s definition of a ‘Negative Influence’, her twin daughters and their partners plus assorted children. According to their profiles, the twins were a year older than me. There were photos featuring Owen’s twenty-first birthday from seven years earlier, meaning that Dawn had borne three children in two years. There were also posts about another boy who had died from congenital heart disease. I put together more pieces and worked out that Dawn had been a couple of years older than Kennedy. Molly, their mother, had been almost forty when she had her second daughter, accounting for the twenty-year age difference between Kennedy and Nell.
My conclusions from all that research were basic.
I had a family.
They mostly lived in the same Derbyshire town, under an hour’s drive away.
Most of them appeared – on the surface at least – to be respectable members of society. Dawn worked for Victim Support, and one son-in-law was a paramedic.
I couldn’t think of a single good reason not to see Dawn again.
I waited until Monday morning – like someone trying not to seem too keen for a second date – and invited my mum’s cousin,who I still felt strange referring to as my auntie, for lunch at a country pub exactly halfway between us. After a short back-and-forth, we arranged to meet that Thursday. Penny, one of the twins, would join us along with her baby and two-year-old. Layla, her sister, would be working at the Waterstones bookshop in Chesterfield. I felt almost giddy when Dawn mentioned that her daughter was a ‘total bookworm’.
Her initial pronouncement had been playing in my head like a lullaby ever since the festival.
Either way, we’re family.
I had no expectations that the Swans would be perfect.
But I was theirs. They were mine.
I had to hope that getting to know my new family would help me stop obsessing about the other family who’d made me feel as though I belonged.
So far, it was looking optimistic – clicks onto Hawkins and Isle of Siskin accounts had dropped to a mere one squillion per day. Prior to meeting Dawn and Owen, it had been at least twice that.
What I really wanted to do was knock on the farmhouse door and ask for Pip, then walk with him along the cliff-top externally processing my thoughts on how you meet a family for the first time, what you talk about, whether I should feel angry or cautious, or allow myself to feel hopeful and happy. To hear his advice on what degree of ‘lowlife criminal’ I could tolerate in my relatives, or whether I should accept them at face value, and simply enjoy hanging out with people who shared, not only my genes, but also my love of reading, and, judging by the photos, my taste in fashion, food and sappy films.
