When it was over, J took a short-term contract in London. I wanted to go too, and Mavis and Max agreed to come and take care of the girls. I didn’t mention my half-sisters in Spain. They were grown now. Rebecca lived in Madrid and worked for a film company. She’d sent her phone number a couple of years earlier, but I’d never summoned the courage to call her.
I called Christine. It had been ten years since I’d seen her. ‘Meet me in Barcelona?’ I asked.
She was at El Prat Airport when I arrived. We stayed in a small hotel on las Ramblas. We drank too much and wandered the busy streets late into the night and laughed as if we were still in our teens.
‘What time are we meeting your sister?’ Christine asked a couple of days later, on the train to Madrid.
I confessed I’d not called her. Christine gazed out at the conical haystacks dotting the sloping fields.
I knew my lack of action was inexplicable, mad even. We were on our way to Madrid, the city my mother had called home. I had flown across the world with a two-year-old phone number on a slip of paper.
‘But why?’ she asked.
The adoption narrative says would-be parents long for and often pray for their child. They tell their adopted children they chose them. That this choice makes them special. That being chosen changes everything.
But, even back in a time of an abundant supply of babies, adopters had to prove they were suitable parents. Then and now they have to forge relationships with the fertility gatekeepers. With doctors and hospital matrons, with priests and ministers, and nurses. They have to open their lives and homes to the scrutiny of social workers. They must prove their parenting fitness.
It is your adopters who are the chosen ones. You were the next baby on the adoption industry conveyer belt. You could be any baby, from anywhere.
We use the word chosen to cover the entirely random nature of adoption. To brush over the reality that your legal parents are two people who did not know you when you were born. The only qualification you needed for adoption was your mother’s circumstances.
I once brought up the idea with Mavis, that adopted people feel rejection at their very core.
She shook her head. ‘You have no reason to feel that. We chose you. We wanted you.’ It was as if her desire to build a family with another woman’s child was her fundamental human right.
And yet a profound sense of rejection is implicit within many adopted people. Every baby separated from its mother suffers biological, neurological and psychological damage. Even those of us who appear to have no problem with it at all.
Dr Catherine Lynch, who runs the Australian Adoptee Rights Action Group, believes the compliant, well-adjusted adoptee has repressed their infant trauma. ‘They have learned to negotiate and secure their relationships within their adoptive families.’ They do this, she says, to avoid repeating their initiating experience of abandonment and rejection.21
I am not a ‘well-adjusted adoptee’. In some fog-bound way, I knew I was so afraid of rejection I had not called my sister ahead. It would be easier to not find her than to reach out and suffer another rejection.
The train arrived and we started walking. I was in Madrid. The city my mother chose as her own. It was as sunny and dry as in my dreams.
We soon found a sign in a dusty window. HabitaciÓnes una noche, semanal o mensual.
‘We’ll stay here,’ Christine said.
La Dueña was large and short of breath. She sat in a small cubicle in front of a grainy television. She counted our money, grunted and pointed down a dark corridor. The bathroom was at the far end. Our room was in the middle. It looked out on a blackened brick wall. There was no phone in the room. I sat on the sagging bed we were to share and felt my chest constrict.
‘There’s a phone in her office,’ Christine said. ‘I’ll call.’
I retrieved the folded scrap of paper from my bag and knew I had to do it.
I went to the cubicle and pantomimed holding a phone, and the old woman nodded and turned away. She did not turn down her television.
The phone rang and rang with no answer.
Christine stood beside me. ‘Perhaps she’s at work. Let’s try later.’
We walked along cobbled side streets and drank coffee and ate tapas at a bar. Men tried to speak to us. One put his arm around Christine’s shoulder and in halting English asked her to marry him. We laughed along with them. I felt the pull of the telephone, so we headed back to the hostel. The woman had not moved. Her cubicle was thick with cigarette smoke. She did not even look as I picked up the phone.
The woman who answered was out of breath. ‘Sí,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ I said in English. ‘I’m looking for Rebecca.’
‘This is she.’ Her accent was hard to place. English boarding school, I thought later.
‘This is Barbara.’ I felt sick. She did not reply. A game show on the television filled the cubicle. I wanted to smash it to the ground. ‘Hello?’ I said. My chest hurt.
Christine leaned against the wall. After a silent minute, she took the phone from me. ‘Hi, I’m Barbara’s best friend. She’s your sister.’
I watched as Christine nodded and laughed. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Amazing.’ Within a minute she’d arranged a meeting.
She hung up and hugged me. ‘We’ve found her,’ she said. ‘We’re meeting her at a restaurant on the top floor of a department store. Tomorrow afternoon.’
I started to cry, and the old woman looked up and shook her head as if all tears were pointless. Christine took my arm as we went back to our room.
‘But here’s the weird thing,’ she said. ‘She hasn’t lived at that number for over a year. She’d gone there to pick up her mail. We caught her at the exact
