Christine returned later. She was working as an assistant director on The Navigator, the Vincent Ward film. She described her long days as frantic, awe-inspiring and exhausting. The girls climbed all over her the minute she arrived. In quick time we had become lifelong friends. I’d even visited a lawyer to make her their legal guardian if anything happened to me.
As soon as the girls were in bed, I went to the bathroom. I wanted to submerge myself in water. But all we had was a line of toilet cubicles and a makeshift shower that leaked. I sat against the wall, listening to the tap dripping, and began to bang my head on the cold tiles. I wanted a singular pain, specific and sharp enough to overcome the nebulous other. I had no right to grieve the loss of my unknown father. His death belonged to his wife and sons. Just as my mother’s death belonged to her husband and daughters.
Christine came in and stood over me. She wiped away a smear of blood from the tiles with toilet paper and led me to the sofa the film company had left behind. She opened a bottle of wine and put a blanket over our knees. I had no words to explain my nameless rage.
‘You have a right to be angry,’ she said in a way that gave me quiet comfort. ‘You can’t change what happened when you were born, but to also miss the chance of a reunion. That’s painful. And sad.’
She talked about her father. Of his love and his emotional distance. Her mother died when she was eleven and her life split in two. ‘We’re all fucked,’ she said, and we toasted the mess of our lives.
I sat curled up on that sofa thinking about the parents I’d grown up with. They were not bad people. I had taken their lives as my own, their siblings as my aunts, their parents as my grandparents. But no matter the words used, they had not considered me as one of their own.
We finished the bottle of wine. ‘Let’s dance,’ Christine said. She put in a mixtape someone had given her and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who By Fire’ came on.
‘Spooky,’ Christine said as we listened to the music.
Cohen had taken the lyrics from the liturgy of the Day of Atonement. The fate of the unrepentant sinner sealed, his existence blotted from the book of life. And I thought of the mother and father I would never meet. All right then, I thought, I’m sort of an orphan. Pull yourself together, what choice do you have?
The girls woke up and we exchanged Leonard Cohen for Madonna. ‘Into the Groove’. We lifted the children in turn, twirling them by their hands. We cranked up the music and spun around the converted office, around our joys and the pain that drove us. Dancing for today. Tomorrow I would have to find a new place to live, or they would take my children.
19
Your phantom baby
The women from Social Welfare came back the next month. I’d viewed multiple houses. One was infested with mice. Another had mould-speckled ceilings, and yet another had slipped sideways from its foundations. None was affordable. The women smiled their professional smiles. The smaller one suggested I needed to look harder. The other implied if I could not afford to keep my kids I should send them back to their father. They would allow me another two weeks.
Not long after, a television company moved in next door. The producer was a woman, the same age my mother would have been. I felt a pull towards her. She wore business clothes with flair, and statement earrings. Her name was Catherine Saunders. Every day I invented reasons to place myself in her path in our shared foyer until she came to tea.
I showed her around.
‘You’ve turned this into a lovely home,’ she said, and I wanted to cry. I knew how precarious my life was. I woke up most mornings with vertigo, my toes curled around a gaping edge. Christine had gone back to Canada to work on a new film. Mavis and Max were silent. I had so little money, three children, no family and no friends. I felt a humiliating desire to throw my arms around Catherine’s waist and hold on.
When Jeannie had run her hand through her hair in the park, I’d wanted to do the same. I’d yearned to touch her hair, to smell her skin, to feel the safety of her arms.
I often wonder about touch. I remember the feel of each of my babies and their absolute softness. The little dip at the back of Bonnie’s neck. Rachel’s warm cheek, and the smattering of freckles down Ruth’s spine. And later, when Lili was born, that tiny fold behind her ears.
Each of them sought me out instinctually, turning towards my voice, their eyes widening at the smell of breast milk. Their fingers moving in the air as freely as dust motes.
I try to imagine Mavis holding me at ten days old. Her new mother nerves and the stranger child. Did she clasp me tight or hold me away from her body? When the matron of the Salvation Army home handed me over, was Mavis’s phantom child nearby? The one she’d lost when Max drove their car over a bank. The miscarriage that was enough to take away all her future babies.
In her heartrending poem ‘Phantom Child’, Emily Long says, ‘I don’t know what she looks like, but I see her everywhere.’ She describes all the ways she is haunted by her stillborn child. ‘She walks with me, every day, this child of mine who never took a breath in this life with me.’19
Today they would say I’d failed to bond with Mavis. Or she with me. I know she tried. I am sure she followed
