Girl Unknown(87)

I had not returned to that memory in years. The warm relief of our eventual reconciliation had pushed it down. Two further babies had helped to obliterate it. But now, as I stopped dead by the edge of the sea, with the blunt hardness of those old diamonds pressed between my fingers, the memory ripped through me as fresh and vital and cutting as a new blade of grass spearing the earth.

That night was a punctuation mark in my life, a pause between the love that had been before and the hard road of our parting. It marked the start of a three-year lacuna and, though I hadn’t known it then, from that hole in our history came Zo?.

Out there in the darkness, something moved in the sea. A gurgle of water followed by a faint splash. I didn’t move. Inside I had become very still. It was coming to me from a distance, a disembodied notion, a shimmering thought. A cancer had taken root in our family, a spreading tumour that needed to be cauterized. A reckless thought, but I didn’t feel reckless. I felt very calm.

Surgical, clinical, my hand steady, my heart cold.





24. David


‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, but my apology sounded hollow even to myself.

Zo? regarded me coolly. ‘Aren’t you going to go after her?’ she asked, picking up her cigarettes and tapping one out of the carton. As I watched her lighting up, her demeanour seem to change. She wasn’t upset. Neither did she seem frosty. If anything, she appeared bored. As if the outcome of the disastrous blow-up with my wife was dull and inevitable. She remained untouched by it all. The rancour moved within me.

‘There’s no point,’ I said quietly. What would be the use? I had said what I should not have said: about Linda, her pregnancy, my love for her. I could apologize to Caroline but those words could not be unsaid. I realized that of all the arguments we’d had over the years, all the emotional wounds inflicted, this was perhaps the worst. The one we would not recover from.

Zo? breathed smoke out of the side of her mouth, her eyes narrowing as she watched me. ‘You’re pretty fucked up right now, aren’t you?’

‘I think you’ve said enough,’ I slurred.

On the table, the crumpled letter lay where Caroline had dropped it, ash colouring it grey at the edges. Zo? reached for it, brought the burning tip of her cigarette to one corner. The document started to smoulder.

‘A DNA test,’ I heard her whispering, beneath her breath, with derision. ‘I can’t believe you did that.’

‘I had to be sure,’ I explained. ‘I needed to know for definite.’

She kept her gaze on the letter, a low flame steadily devouring it. As it neared her fingertips, she dropped the burning remains into the sink. She was acting like a whole new person. Confident, mature, but icy with superiority and disdain. I felt, while she held me with her hard stare, that she resented me. More: she disliked me.

‘So what now?’ she asked. ‘Shall we do another one?’

At first, I didn’t know what she meant, but then I saw where the DNA test results had turned to ash in the sink, and my confusion cleared. ‘No, that won’t be necessary.’

‘But how else are you going to be sure?’

I couldn’t tell if she was being serious or if it was more of her mockery. I couldn’t be sure of anything about her. ‘I just don’t think –’

‘To clear up any remaining doubts. Because you must have some little niggling doubts. Right, David?’

Her voice was high and sharp, and I could see how close she was to the brink. All that icy coolness, the bravado of burning the letter – it was a front. Underneath, she was scared.

I should have told her there were no doubts. I should have declared my firm belief that she was my daughter. But instead I wavered. Out of nowhere Gary, her stepfather, had come into my head and with it the remembered emotions of the day I had met him – the disorienting shock at the news of her adoption, the crumbling edifice of the truths she had told me, truths I had believed wholeheartedly because I had loved her mother deeply, and passionately, and it had seemed, in some fucked-up way, that with this daughter coming to me, I was somehow getting a second chance, a chance to redeem myself, a chance to make good my life.

That may have been na?ve, but it had seemed like a bright and shining hope that only grew opaque and cracked with the knowledge that she had lied. Not once or twice, but continuously with an inconsistency and virtuosity that made it impossible to know what was true and what was not. I didn’t know where I was with her. The truth is, I’d been lost from the very beginning.

She saw my hesitation, the doubts announcing themselves in my brief silence, and when I finally spoke up, stammering that there was no need for another DNA test, that I believed I was her father, she gave me a long, measuring look, something angry shoring up behind her eyes.

‘You’re right not to believe me,’ she said, her voice soft and dangerous.

‘Zo?, it’s difficult, okay? I mean, it’s not as if you make it easy. This thing you have with Caroline …’

She laughed, a bark of bitter amusement. ‘God, you’re so predictable, David.’ The way she said it was loaded with scorn. ‘You act all solemn and quiet and thoughtful, like you’re this deep thinker – an independent mind. But scratch the surface and you’re just a frightened little man who will always go running back to his wife.’