Hide and Seek (8 page)

Have I been missing signs, all these years? Has there been some other secret world going on around me, some intrigue in which John Spears has suspected with each growing year that his loving wife, Gillian Spears, is not so loving after all, and actually had an affair with their good friend Max? Who their son now closely resembles? Has our house, always a loving family home to my eyes and ears, actually held bitter hisses and accusing glances, shot over my head for the last thirty-four years?

Or has John Spears been completely ignorant of it all? Innocently going about bringing up ‘his son’, while my mother laughs at him and nurtures a secret love affair with my real father? Can a man be that blind? What if it were Ellie, and our son, little Leo, as he will be? What if he weren’t really mine? I would notice, wouldn’t I? Maybe that is why Ellie is so convinced about Gillian, a little voice in my head says. Maybe her female intuition is nothing but a shared female guilt.

No. I shake my head. I imagine I’m trying to shake those fragments of piano keys from the dream out of my ears, out of my brain. The music has confused me. These are my parents (as Ellie and I will be Leo’s parents). Something has unsettled them, that is all. I get out my phone to call Ellie, to abort the plan, to tell her I trust my parents. But my fingers stop before they unlock the phone. If we don’t see it through, if we don’t read the letter that will undoubtedly be innocent, the idea will be Ellie’s constant refrain, a recurring theme over the years. And so, we will go ahead with the plan. Tonight.

Chapter Thirteen

-Will-

We reach my parents’ house at midnight. I wanted to wait until 2am, but Ellie says they will have been asleep for hours, and if we leave it any later, they’ll probably get up to use the loo. She has a point. She also has a pick and a wrench. So witching hour finds us standing at the end of the drive, looking up, checking the windows are dark. They are. I put a foot out to step on the gravel, but Ellie holds me back.

“Too noisy,” she whispers. “Use the flowerbeds.”

I look at the flowerbeds round the edge of the drive up to the front door. They are full of flowers. And soil.

“You sure?” I ask Ellie. She nods and gives me a little push. I put one foot then the other in the flowerbed and creep towards to the door of the house. It’s a small jump from the flowerbed to the flagstones by the front door. I go first. I land just short of the flagstones, on the gravel. There is a crunch. I hold my breath. No lights go on inside. We are still undetected. I turn back to Ellie and hold out my hand for her to jump towards me. She judges the jump perfectly and lands silently. Critically, she keeps hold of the champagne. It’s our cover story: if caught, we claim we wanted to leave a gift by way of surprise, to say thank you for the crib.

Next, the key in the lock. I have never heard the lock click so loudly. Then comes the moment of truth. They never used to put on the burglar alarm or chain the door when I lived here. If they do either – or worse, both – our mission will fail. We will have to shut the door and run, hoping we can make it back across the gravel before they turn on the light and open the curtains. Hope that the local police will not bother to take footprints from the flowerbed. I push the door open a fraction, then a little more. Thank God. No chain. And no alarm. But I hadn’t realised that the door scraping over the doormat actually makes a sound. I am about to push the door shut behind us, but Ellie stops me. She very gently edges it towards the frame, but leaves it ever so slightly ajar, so there is no sound of it shutting. She takes off a shoe and wedges it by the door. I take my shoes off too, partly to be quiet, partly so as not to tread soil into the house. That’s how I’ve been brought up.

At that thought, I wonder what I’m doing; why am I betraying my upbringing to sneak around my parents’ house in the middle of the night? If I was twelve, I could pretend it was a game of spies. Now, aged thirty-four with my five-months-pregnant wife in tow, that will not wash. I am not convinced the champagne really works as a cover either. But better, we decided, than claiming I needed a document urgently. What need could have arisen between the end of sociable hours today and be required before tomorrow morning? Logically, we have our reasons, but emotionally it does not do. My parents know me. They know I do not creep into houses in the middle of the night delivering Taittinger.

Ellie does not seem to have these concerns, though, because she is ahead of me. On tiptoes, she is heading for our target zone: the study. I follow. The door starts to creak as she opens it. Of course it does; the whole mission is ill-fated. She freezes. I freeze. We look upwards, into the dark of the staircase. Still no lights. Still safe to continue. Ellie manages to slide herself through the gap in the door, with a millimetre to spare – a few weeks later, and we would not be able to do this exercise – and I, thanks to the swimming, make it too, with the champagne.

It is dark, so I switch on the standard lamp. Ellie flicks it straight off again.

“Are you mad?” she asks.

In the darkness, she probably cannot see my expression of incredulity; she has brought me to break into my parents’ house to find out if my dad is my dad, and yet she accuses
me
of being mad?

This is not the time for another argument. “If we’re here to bring champagne, we’d put on the lamp,” I say, instead.

“If we get to having to use the champagne, we’ve failed,” she retorts, flicking on a narrow-beamed torch.

Ellie lights a path over to the desk area. All the objects I’ve grown up seeing in here acquire a new eeriness in the torchlight. Glass paperweights, their millefiori patterns a source of fascination when I was younger, now become desk boulders that could roll and noisily smash if disturbed. The gold carriage clock becomes a time bomb, whose loud ticks could suddenly awaken the household. Wallpaper rolls and samples propped against the wall until they can cover the walls of Mum’s interior design clients could unfurl and trip us. The photo of the three of us, from when I was about six, could slide and break, loudly and irrevocably.

“Hurry up,” I say, as though that will help.

Ellie goes straight to the bureau. She tries to slide up the front, but it is locked. She shoots me a glance, a small smile, as if this is significant. Putting down her handbag, she gets out her tools and kneels next to the bureau.

“Hold the torch for me,” she whispers.

So I do. And whatever she’s learnt on the internet seems to work, because after a minute of fiddling round with the wrench, there are a couple of clicks, she inserts the pick and waggles it around, and then she is sliding up the lid of the bureau. I lean over and kiss her.

“Well done!” I whisper. It should not be sexy that my wife can pick a lock. But it is.

She takes the torch from me and shines it into the bureau.

“No photo album,” she whispers.

She rifles through the little drawers and inlets of the bureau. Quick and efficient, she goes systematically from left to right.

“No letter either, by the looks of it,” she says.

I am about to suggest we should call it off, end the search, crack open the champagne, when there is an intake of breath from Ellie.

“What?” I whisper.

“Keys!” she proclaims. “Maybe to the desk.”

So we scurry over to the desk and insert one of the keys into the lock.

At the same moment, there is a creak from above us, and the sound of footsteps.

“Shit!” I whisper. Ellie glares at me and puts her fingers over her lips. She pulls me below the desk.

“It’s no good,” I say, my lips close to her ear. “Our shoes are by the front door. If whoever it is goes to the top of the stairs, they’ll see.”

We see a dim light around the edges of the door. More footsteps.

“We should just abort,” I tell Ellie, beginning to stand up. “Jump out, hold the champagne.”

Ellie pulls me down again.

“Do you want to know who your father is or not?” she whispers into my ear.

“I know who my father is!”

“Then why are you here?”

Because you talked me into it, I want to say. Because I’m weak. Because Max Reigate’s music haunts my dreams. But then, I haven’t told her about the dream. About the hammers I found there. So I stay silent.

A toilet flushes. Then more footsteps. Then the light disappears. More footsteps and then a creak overhead. Then silence.

We both exhale.

In a moment, Ellie is back on her hands and knees again, facing the desk drawers.

“You’re not carrying on!” I whisper, horrified. “We should get out of here – it’s too risky.”

But the key fits the lock on the top drawer. Ellie slides it open. And the drawers underneath work too. We are in.

I let Ellie rifle because there is only space for one of us – or two of them, including Leo. I shine the torch as she pulls out and replaces endless boring-looking typed papers in their segmented folders. No handwriting, no Max scrawls. I stop watching her, instead just watching the door, lest it start to open – the old horror movie worry of the slowly-turning door handle.

Then Ellie grabs the torch from me. I look to see her shining it right to the back of the drawer.

“There’s something here,” she whispers. “After the files stop.”

She reaches in. Her hand returns with two pieces of paper clipped together. I hear her gasp. She flicks over to the other piece of paper.

Then, “This is it, Will. I love you, remember.”

She hands me the bits of paper. I’m expecting a letter, but I don’t get that. I get my birth certificate. With something else clipped to it.

And I stare. I stare and I stare and I stare. I’m sinking into the floor as I look and then I’m rising, I’m rising, up and up and up the stairs to where the people who claim to be my parents sleep, and as I go I’m hitting the walls with my fists as hard as I can and I’m shouting:

“Lies! Lies! Lies!”

Because it’s true: the whole house, the whole fabric of it is made of lies. And I reach the top and there are lights going on, in the landing, in my brain, and I’m at the threshold of the door of their room and as soon as I see them I shout it:

“I’m adopted? I’m ADOPTED?”

And they’re cowering then beneath the covers as if that will cloak the years of deceit. I think they’re speaking maybe but there are no words that I can hear coming out of their lips because the only thing I can hear is blood rising, hammering in my ears, and the words in my head which I then say:

“I’m thirty-four fucking years old – and you’ve never never told me I’m adopted? That you adopted me when I was four?”

Again, they are moving their lips around and their tongues are doing something like speech but I don’t have to listen because they are not, they are NOT my parents. Neither of them.

“Because apparently my parents are Max Reigate and Sophie Travers.” I thrust the birth certificate in their faces. There will be no more lies now, no more denials. “And you adopted me – you adopted me when I was four. So for the last thirty years when I thought you were looking out for me, taking care of my admin, you have been systematically lying to me!”

And I throw the birth and adoption certificates down onto the bed and this woman, this Gillian, who has claimed to be my mother, who didn’t even have the foresight to have an affair with Max Reigate so that she could still be my mother, so that there could be some piece of truth in this whole horrible horrible house, she, this woman, moves a hand to pick up the certificates. But I snatch back my identity before she can again get her grip around it. Because on these papers is me. I am not in this room, in this house, in this life that has been created to fool me. I am only on these bits of paper: this is all I have. And I have nothing more to do with these two people. This Gillian and this John.

I turn to leave the room. There are hands on my shoulders. People telling me it was for the best, to keep me safe, to protect me.

“You are nothing to me – nothing!” I shout. “You have stolen myself from me. I have no idea who I am! Everything – it’s just gone! And you knew that Ellie knew something and still you wouldn’t tell me!”

I’m trying to move away but they have me caught, trapped. The pair of them are holding my shoulders, turning me round, shaking me. And I’m shouting wordlessly now – this is just rage pure sorrow pure inward disintegration and my brain is full of blood, pulsating louder and louder and louder until I’m sure I must explode.

Then there’s a sting on my face. Someone has slapped me! One of these bastards has dared to slap me! I feel the blood recede but not the anger. The room becomes more real again, words become tangible and so I use them.

“I’ll find myself again,” I shout. “I’ll have my other life, that you’ve kept from me. But you won’t be in it. Do you hear me? You won’t be in it! I’ll find them, my actual parents, my real parents. This Max and this Sophie.”

“Will, darling – ” one of them, Gillian, John, some other liar is saying.

“So if you were scared about me finding out and rejecting you, guess what – this is me rejecting you. But I’m doing it, what, fifteen, twenty years after I was entitled to? If you’d told me, when you’re meant to tell me.”

“Will, listen – ”

“No! I will not listen. I will not listen to one further word that you have to say to me. You’ve had time to tell me what you wanted – or no, sod what you wanted. You’ve had time to tell me the truth. In the fucking stolen time – my time, my real parents’ time. You’ve made me a non-person. And so you get nothing more. Nothing.”

And I run, down, away, one two three steps at a time. I take Ellie’s hand and I drag her with me because she is the one who has brought me the truth. The others they are shouting after me and I try not to hear because they have told me so much rubbish, so much nonsense, so many lies over my whole life now which is not my own.

I slam the door of my fabricated existence. And as we run, Ellie and I, Max’s music plays a tune in my head: Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?

Who am I, now that I’m not who I’ve been for thirty-four years?

Chapter Fourteen