My outrage grows. ‘It’s totally unethical. Morally out of order. I’m a doctor, remember?’
My birth father turns me around to face him. ‘I do remember. But finding your mother isn’t going to be straightforward. Every now and again you’re going to need to take shortcuts. Cross lines that make you re-think your moral compass.’ His voice drops. ‘But that’s what we do for the people we love.’
‘I think I’ll have that coffee now, in the garden.’
I’m glad to escape from this room, away from the dilemma he has placed me in and into the fresh air. Maybe Danny has a point. What would I be prepared to do to find my mother? Anything?
We sit at a table on the lawn. Danny is so lucky to have this secluded section of the river all to himself. Boats and swans cruise by; there are children playing in neighbouring gardens and soft music pouring from a house nearby. I relax a little. Then I do what I’ve been meaning to do since I got here. Share with him the photo of the women on my phone.
‘Do you recognise any of them?’ I also tell him their names.
Danny reads between the lines. ‘In other words, do I recognise one of them as Tish?’
I hold my breath, waiting. Danny takes his time examining each. Not being able to see Veronica’s face doesn’t faze him from trying to inspect her photo from different angles.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, hastily adding, ‘I’m not saying your mother isn’t one of these women, it’s just that I’d had rather a lot to drink that evening and it was a long time ago. The strange thing is I recall her wonderful nature much more than her face.’
I smile at Danny, appreciating the wonderful words he has about my mother. I share the image of the Good Knight in the photo. ‘I have got the front half of this. My mother left me the Good Knight part when she gave me away.’
Danny hears the heartbreak I can’t hide. ‘Things must have been bad for her to do that. Most women want to keep their children close to them, watch them grow up.’ Danny turns his gaze away from me. ‘If I’d known—’
‘No.’ The last thing I want is for Danny to experience more guilt than he already does. ‘Things happen. What matters is that we’re both trying to find her now.’
Danny nods. ‘And it might be me that does because, my dear, I think you may need to consider that the women in the photo have nothing to do with you.’
Sipping my mellow, smooth coffee – Danny grinds his own beans – I reply, ‘I hear what you’re saying.’ I find it so easy to open up to my blood father. ‘It’s the strangest thing, Danny, but even if none of these women is my mother I feel compelled to find out what happened to them. Maybe it’s because they are black and I can’t find anything about them in the media . . .’
Danny’s brows jump in surprise. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Four women, gone, just like that.’ The click of his fingers makes me jump. ‘Let’s hope that your mother isn’t one of them because this has got the whiff of weird about it.’
I lay the pad of a finger over my heart. Feel the erratic rhythm of it. ‘If I am right and she is one of the women she was so young then. Just starting out.’
‘And Sugar refuses to tell you who they are?’ At the solemn shake of my head, Danny sharply continues. ‘What kind of father would do that to their child?’
The kind of father who rescued a child from a living hell, I don’t say.
2001
Don’t go in! Don’t go in! Don’t go in!
The warning words screamed in Little Eva’s mind. A care worker had a tight grip on the seven-year-old’s hand as they stood at the entrance to the sick room. This room sent shivers of horror through her. It was filled with things that scared her. The blue folded screen shielding a monster, for example. She had always imagined it came out at night, but what if it came out in the daytime too? Its huge webbed claw with filthy, sharp nails gripping the edge of the screen and slowly, slowly sliding it back, to leap out, leap on her and eat her up. And the skeleton! She didn’t like the way it watched her despite having empty eye sockets.
The one object she did like in the room was the long black couch. Little Eva loved sinking into its softness. Is this what real beds felt like? The type of real beds that real mums and dads gave their children to sleep on? Today the comfort of the examining couch was ruined by the wicked-looking razor, its steel edges glinting. Chest heaving, Little Eva clutched the door frame with her free hand and tried to dig her toes and heels into the ground through her scuffed shoes. Her body bowed backwards in panic. The man with the scissors was waiting for her and Little Eva sensed danger.