I pull my laptop onto the bed, dim the screen, and log into my work account, scrolling until I find an unopened email that contains a link to my results on The Ancestry Project website. I wait for the page to load as a carousel of sepia photographs fills the screen, each smiling face morphing into one from the generation before. The messaging is clear: ancestry is fun! Or at the very least, an interesting anecdote to recycle at uneventful barbeques. I click through.
My DNA map loads and I see it played out before me once more. A gold line tracks north from my borough, crosses the Scottish border, and angles towards the east coast. When I click on a place called Kilroch, a faceless avatar glows like a hallway light in winter. My half-sister.
Of the 212,857 linked family members listed under my DNA tree, there’s an aunt I already knew about in Peterborough and a bunch of third and fourth cousins scattered across Western Europe and the USA, all decidedly less interesting than Moira.
I click on her avatar. The rough coastline of the Scottish Highlands zooms past jagged peninsulas and land spliced with lochs until a lattice of single roads converge by a harbour. I tap my plastic keyboard and think. If Moira is listed as an immediate relative of mine, does that mean I’ve come up on her list too? I double-check my preferences and am strangely relieved to see the default settings flicked to ‘private’. I’m not quite ready for that.
I’ve never felt deprived growing up as an only child, but I have wondered what it might have been like to know there was someone else around, especially as a kid. Mum and I were so often like bookends, seeing each other at the beginning and end of a day. I spent a lot of time with sticker books under committee tables, crawling out when orange juice and Kit Kats were on offer. Adults liked me, an accolade that ensured other kids didn’t. I convinced myself I didn’t mind because adults made sense to me; I knew what to ask, when to ask it, and they didn’t play made-up games with confusing rules that changed all the time. Mum sometimes arranged sleepovers with the daughters of her friends, but Rory was the only one that stuck. She found me funny for the same reason others found me awkward, like when I laminated the Monopoly rules and founded The Sandwich Club, a lunchtime group that involved tidying school classrooms for fun. For fun.
I bring up another internet tab and Google ‘Kilroch’. An extract from its Wikipedia page says it’s a ‘civil parish in the Highland area with a population size of 319’. Bloody hell. You could house the whole village in our local Wetherspoons and still have a few packets of pork scratchings left over. I drop the orange pin onto a lane called Little Vennel, where a series of squat, whitewashed houses materialise on a hill that tips down towards a broad, steel-coloured bay. In the distance, light reflects off the metallic arm of a crane bent over a series of deconstructed rigs.
Rigs … Mum’s mentioned them before. They’ve got something to do with a pod of dolphins she and the other activists were trying to protect, which makes sense because her dolphin obsession is extreme. Our house is a two-up, two-down but packed into the living room is a dresser full of dolphin memorabilia that Mum has collected over the years: glass-blown dolphins, hand-whittled dolphins, laser-cut crystal dolphins, and, worst of all, a second-hand nail brush shaped like a dolphin. If these are the rigs she spoke about and she was there in the Nineties, my father must have been too.
My stomach flip-flops and my heart races like I’ve mainlined one too many espressos. I snap my laptop shut. Nothing about Kilroch seems wild enough to justify Mum being so coy about it. It feels like a mosquito bite that I’ve tried not to touch, but now that I’ve scratched it, the itch is worse than ever. I don’t want to upset her by bringing it up, but I don’t want to be lied to either.
Roused by the change of activity, Pickles crawls out from under my bed and leaps onto the window sill, knocking a row of books to the floor. I pull a jumper out from the linen basket and throw my arms into it, nudging him with my foot. ‘Go on, go and chase some birds,’ I say, pushing my window open and manhandling Pickles onto the garage roof, where he yawns and stretches in the dwindling autumn sun.
In the bathroom, I squint at the mirror. I need some time to figure out what to do with this new information, but the seed of it has planted in my head and I feel full of energy. I arm myself with a hot flannel and a bottle of micellar water. I look like a Picasso portrait. The foundation used to contour my nose is smudged across my cheek, thick and dark. I lean over the sink to scrub and rinse until the water runs clear.
Back in my room with a mug of tea and a fully charged laptop, I’m settling in for another armchair exploration of Kilroch, but as I flick through pictures of seafront houses flanked by fields and a grubby lighthouse, my pillow vibrates. I pull out my phone. Mum’s picture appears, flashing on the screen. I slide the bar to answer it, my stomach tight. From her end, there are sharp instructions over a background din of jabbed piano keys and the periodic shrieking of children. At some point I’ll have to explain why I need to find a different line of work, something entirely anonymous and preferably remote so I never have a chance to reappear on the homepage of Snooper whilst covered in sick. I try and push this thought to
