Nurse just came. She stands over me while I take my meds.

‘There you go, my darling,’ she says. She is Irish, middle-aged, a no-nonsense type. That’s what you become, I suppose, if you’re dealing with broken people all day long. Can’t waste your time getting sentimental – where’s the use in that?

‘What’s that you’re writing there?’ she asks. ‘A book, is it?’

I shrug.

‘Well now.’ She eases the little plastic dish from my hand. ‘I’ll leave you to your book.’

Part of me is sorry when she goes, sorry that I didn’t extend the basic courtesy of talking to her. Writing, not talking, is preferable. I don’t want to hear the words coming out of my mouth. And if I write it, I can burn it without ever having uttered a syllable.

I’d always known. That’s where I’ll start today. I asked him once what he meant by that. He’d taken me to the pub – he had a thing about pubs. It was the Traveller’s Rest on the hill, as I recall, and we sat in the little side room with the log fire. It was late afternoon and we were the only ones in.

‘What I mean is…’ I added when he didn’t respond. I was worried I’d pressed on a nerve, that I’d upset him. ‘Do you think that feeling came from actual concrete events, or was it something… I don’t know… more of a sixth sense?’

He picked up his glass and, without taking a drink, placed it back on its coaster. He picked up another coaster and tore off the corner.

‘I think it started with my brother,’ he said, tearing off a second corner. ‘When my mum was in hospital having him. She was away for ten days. That’s an eternity to a child, and I began to feel distressed.’ Christopher talks like that – quite formal in his way of expressing himself. ‘Towards the end of that period, I actually began to believe that she’d died and no one was telling me.’ He sipped his bitter and licked the froth off his lip. ‘She wasn’t dead, of course, but the feeling never went away. Was it concrete? No, but I could breathe it in the air. It was a secret, but it wasn’t a secret because a secret is something one person knows or maybe two or three. It was the opposite of a secret. It was something everyone knew but no one said anything about.’ All four corners of the coaster torn away, he began to worry it between his thumbs and forefingers.

‘But surely that’s paranoia?’ I said.

‘Paranoia, yes.’ He shrugged. ‘I came and went on that for years. But later, I knew it wasn’t, and it wasn’t one single event either. It was a multitude of little things – chance remarks, sudden silences if I came into a room, glances exchanged between my relatives. And I don’t know exactly when I knew it absolutely – maybe only when they told me – but I’d felt it long before.’ He stared at me, his eyes shiny and dark as treacle.

‘I can remember Margaret coming home with my brother,’ he said. ‘She told me to go and say hello to him. He was in a basket on the living-room floor by the fire.

‘I crossed the carpet in pin-steps. I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck. I looked at our Jack, little Jack Junior. He was all red, snarling even though he was asleep, with tight fists raised above his head like an angry little boxer. I didn’t know how I was supposed to say hello to a baby, so I reached over and prodded his forehead with my finger. He started crying.

‘ “Careful, Christopher!” Margaret shouted.’

He had mimicked her and now stopped to laugh, though not happily. ‘Margaret could never keep the irritation out of her voice,’ he went on. ‘But she always spoke to me that way, so I was used to it. “You have to be gentle with babies, Christopher,” she said.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked him.

‘I ran out into the yard. There was a spider’s web I’d been watching for days and it was still intact, stretching across from the roof overhang down to the drainpipe. The spider was a big one; it had a body the size of a raisin – you know, one of those spiders that have knees. I’d shown it to my friend Roger the day before and he’d said it was a whopper. So then I ran my finger down the edge of the web and pulled the whole thing away.’

‘And the spider?’

‘Went scuttling – but not fast enough. I caught it. I could feel its little body frantic in my hand.’ Seeing the horror cross my face, he laughed. ‘It was only a spider! Anyway, I crouched down and let it out onto the patio stones and… and I crushed it with my foot.’

He picked up his glass and drank. I said nothing.

‘A week or two later,’ he continued, ‘Margaret told me off for nearly suffocating Jack. I told her I’d been trying to tuck him into his blankets, but I hadn’t. I’d pushed the blankets over his face and held them there.’

‘Why?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I can’t say I wanted him dead. It wasn’t as clear as that. I just wanted to hold the covers over his face and…’

‘But you were just a kid.’

He shook his head – no. ‘There were other things too, when I was older. When I was fourteen, they gave him my Scalextric set. They didn’t ask me, they just gave it to him. I wasn’t playing with it by then, but that’s not the point. It was mine.’ His voice had hardened; he had become agitated. He bit down on his bottom lip then drank. On the tabletop, the coaster lay in frayed pieces. ‘So later, when no one was looking, I took his teddy bear from his room and put it in the compost heap. I dug down and put it in with all the smelly rotten vegetable peelings, and I covered it over and thought: there, take that.’

He raised his eyebrows and smiled, as if to say: See? I’m not as nice as you think. But it didn’t change my opinion of him. As I said, I loved him.

---

But I digress. Christopher was on his way to Leeds, wasn’t he, after his parents had told him the truth of his origins. He recalled nothing of that journey, could not remember how he got from the train station to Devonshire halls of residence. That was the shock, I think, erasing his thoughts, or refusing even to form them in that moment of pure suspended animation. His world had stopped on its axis. And now that very world was waiting for presence of mind to return so it could go on spinning. The next memory he had was sitting on his bed in the room he shared with Adam, although of course he didn’t know Adam yet.

He was sitting on his bed staring at his open hands, he said. He was studying the way the creases arched across his palms, tracing, some believed, his destiny. He had seen a palm reader once, he told me, on Morecambe pier. He’d have been around sixteen, had gone in for a dare. An old gypsy woman, with a headscarf with thin silver coins sewn into the hem, had held his hand and studied it.

‘Here, that’s a shock,’ she’d said after a few moments, pushing her forefinger to the middle of his hand. The thick black kohl under her eyes had smudged, crumbed in the corners of her bloodshot eyes. ‘It’s coming soon. It will change your destiny.’

He’d dismissed her words within seconds of leaving the booth, but they came back to him now, dissolving, re-forming as another damn sense, yet more invisible particles floating in the air. He was not, no longer at least, the simple, shy eighteen-year-old history student he had anticipated being. That much was certain. Rather, he was a trembling boy scout, no older than twelve, who had been given a penny and a candle and told to get from Land’s End to John O’Groats. He could almost feel the chill wind on some distant hilltop blowing into his face. He was not equal to the task. He was but a child.

It was a daydream from which he knew he had to wake up, and that this waking up had something to do with being or becoming the man he had now to be. Man. For a couple of years now, people had been referring to him that way. He had left home, which was what men did, but the rite of passage had been marked by a revelation too big to hold in his aching head. And the rope? The rope was still there. Only now he had a diagnosis, and the diagnosis cast a shadow as astonishing as a superpower. Footsteps rang louder on the pavements, strangers’ clothes separated into threads before his eyes, and on the station platform, on the train, on the university campus, people everywhere seemed to stare only at him, as if to ask: Are you family? Are you blood?

Somehow, in that terrible trance, he had made his way to this twin room, sat down on this worn bed and stared at his open hands.

‘Well, well, well!’

Christopher looked up to see a smiling ginger-haired man bounding into the room. He swung his suitcase onto the other bed, put his hands on his hips and, seeing Christopher, threw back his head. ‘I say, shall we go in search of a hostelry, my good man?’ Northern vowels infiltrated his attempt at a Home Counties accent. He laughed and gave in to them. ‘Just kidding, man. I’m Adam. First man on earth. Never touch apples.’ With two long strides, he was in front of Christopher, one arm out, apparently intent on shaking hands. ‘Pleased to meet you. Hey, do you like T. Rex, man?’

He wore tight blue flared jeans, a black polo-neck sweater and a black leather jacket with square pockets. He was studying electronic engineering. He was from Newcastle. Outskirts. (That explained his accent.) His mother was Irish. He had family in Liverpool – his auntie on his mother’s side. He liked women. He loved women! He liked T. Rex – did he already say that? Fleetwood Mac, ELO and Queen. Hated ABBA. They were crap, but his sister liked them. His sister was eight – a mistake; his mother had thought it was the menopause. She got on his nerves – his sister, not his mother. His second name was Wells. He couldn’t wait to get stuck in. To what Christopher didn’t ask.

‘Thought we could take a wander,’ Adam continued, ‘see if there’s a pub sells beer? See if we can find ourselves a couple of birds? We should stick together, I reckon. Us grammar lads. What do you think, man?’

Christopher saw his belongings through Adam’s eyes. His peeling case tied with rope, his donkey jacket. No gold-monogrammed luggage where he came from, no woollen coat, no tweed.

‘I need to unpack,’ he said.

‘You can unpack tomorrow.’ Adam pushed out his bottom lip. ‘You’ve just got out of jail free. Live a little, man.’ He leant in closer and patted the pocket at his hip. ‘Besides, I’ve got some fine weed.’

A flare of panic. Weed? That meant marijuana, Christopher was pretty sure.

‘Don’t freak, man,’ said Adam. ‘It’s not purple hearts, only a bit of grass.’

Christopher feigned the best laugh he could manage. ‘N-No, really,’ he stammered. ‘You go on. I’m fine. Next time.’

‘Suit yourself.’ Adam shrugged, turned away and loped towards the door, leaving his bed with his luggage still closed upon it. ‘See you later then.’ He left, whistling his way along the corridor. A door hinge squeaked and squeaked again, the whistling faded; his carrot-topped room-mate was no more.

Before Christopher had time to think about anything else, more chatter echoed in the corridor – two or three boys, he thought, maybe four – arriving to other rooms. One of them could be his brother. His twin, why not? The one his birth mother had kept, perhaps, or given to another family. Was that it? Was that his story? A twin, a brother, who would look like him and like the same things and have his mannerisms even though they’d never met. What a thought.

Back in Morecambe, on the way to the station, he had stayed silent in the back seat of his parents’ car and all the while they’d waited for the train. Now they were gone, he was full of questions. He had not asked his birth mother’s name. He had not asked his birth father’s name. He had not, come to think of it, asked his own name.

But he could not. Not now, not ever. The subject had been opened like a library vault, only long enough to retrieve this lone and dusty book before being closed and locked forever. Jack and Margaret would never, could never, speak of it again.

Out in the corridor, more doors whined open, slammed shut. The smell of floor cleaner, of damp, of sheets washed in different detergent. He lay back on his knitted hands and stared at the ceiling.

‘Karen,’ he whispered, to try it. He liked the feel of that name, the shape his mouth made when he said it. ‘Where can I find you?’ he asked of the ceiling. ‘Or are you Denise? Julie? Barbara? Valerie?’

He did not imagine names for his father. But there, where there had been only air thick with doubt, was now the shadowy shape of a woman. The shadow needed detail, features he could recognise: a broad nose like his, perhaps, or his brown eyes or black hair. If he could only see her, clear the fog – meet her eyes with his. He should register with the adoption agency, or bureau, or whatever it was called. Perhaps the local council was his best bet. Lancashire. No, Liverpool. The letter had said Railton, so it would most likely be Liverpool City Council, wouldn’t it? There was only one way to find out.

The way he told it, that was the moment he leapt up from his bed, scooped the loose change from his overcoat pocket and headed out. The university rep who had given him his key changed a pound note and pointed him in the direction of the phone, and after several false starts and a few wasted two-pence pieces, Christopher reached the Adoption Records Office in Liverpool.

After going round the houses, he said, he spoke to a woman called Mrs Jackson, who took his name. After a few more questions, she asked, ‘How does two o’clock a week this Friday sound?’

‘Two o’clock next Friday,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there.’

He took the stairs two at a time, his heart thudding against his ribs. Mrs Jackson had spoken to him kindly, yet as he entered his room, it occurred to him that she had given him no hope. Her only assurance, thinking about it properly now, was that they would meet soon and get the process under way. What the process would deliver had been left unsaid. She had promised nothing.

He threw himself once more onto his bed. No matter what Mrs Jackson had said, he, Christopher Harris, had started upon a journey that would lead him to his mother, and no amount of polite obfuscation could prevent this… this knowledge. He would find her. The certainty quickened the blood in his veins. Blood she shared! Through her he would locate himself in the world. She would tell him his name. She might already have left her details with the relevant officials. She might be waiting for him to get in touch right at this moment. She wouldn’t know him as Christopher, of course, but by the name she herself had given him. His jaw tightened at the thought.

But then he shouldn’t get his hopes up. His birth mother might not have made any attempt to find him. She might not be expecting him to search for her, might not want him to. Oh, but if he could meet her, he could tell her that everything was all right. He could go to her like Jesus, and say, I forgive you. No, that was too grand. Who was he to forgive anyone? But he could at least make sure she was well, happy, settled. He wouldn’t even have to tell her who he was. He could just… watch her.