Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [70]
I want to say that I don’t think identity or sexual identity is fixed in this way, but I think it makes sense to factor in what happened to me – especially as Mrs Winterson must have had enough confusion for both of us.
She was always lamenting that I would not be parted from my shorts – but who put them on me in the first place?
I felt freed by the new information but I was no nearer to finding my mother.
I was lucky because a friend of mine has a cryptic crossword kind of mind, and he loves computers. He was determined to find me a family tree, and spent hours logged onto the ancestry site looking for clues. He targeted male relatives because men don’t change their surnames.
Eventually he made a direct hit – an uncle of mine. He used the Electoral Register to find the address. Then he tracked the phone number. For three weeks I rehearsed the call. I had to have a cover story.
One Saturday morning, heart beating like a dying bird, I called. A man answered.
I said, ‘Hello – you don’t know me but your sister and my mother were very close at one time.’
Well, that was true, wasn’t it?
‘Which sister?’ he said. ‘Ann or Linda?’
‘Ann.’
‘Oh Ann. What did you say your name was? Are you trying to get in touch with her?’
My mother was alive.
My feelings as I put down the phone were a mixture of elation and fear. Mrs Winterson had lied; my mother wasn’t dead. But that meant I had a mother. And my whole identity was built around being an orphan – and an only child. But now I had a selection of uncles and aunts … and who knew how many bits of brothers and sisters?
I decided to write a letter to Ann and to send it care of the uncle.
About a week later there was a text on my phone from an unidentified number. It was headed ‘Darling Girl’. I thought it was from a Russian escort agency and was about to delete it. A work colleague had had their computer stolen and ever since I had been receiving mad messages from Baltic lovelies looking for husbands.
Susie grabbed the phone. ‘Suppose it’s from Ann?’
‘Of course it’s not from Ann!’ I opened it – the trouble is that the Baltic lovelies all began with things like ‘Can’t believe it’s you …’ and so did this.
‘Do you want me to ring the number?’ said Susie.
Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes.
Susie went downstairs with my phone and I did what I always do when I am overwhelmed – I went straight to sleep.
Susie came back upstairs to find me snoring. She shook me awake. ‘That was your mother.’
And a few days later, a letter arrived, with a photo of me at three weeks old – looking pretty worried I think. But Susie says that all babies look worried – and who can blame us?
The letter tells me how she was sixteen when she got pregnant – my father had jet-black hair. How she looked after me for six weeks in a mother and baby home before she gave me up. ‘That was so hard. But I had no money and nowhere to go.’
She tells me I was never a secret – me – who thought via Mrs Winterson that everything had to be secret – books and lovers, real names, real lives.
And then she wrote, ‘You were always wanted.’
Do you understand that, Jeanette? You were always wanted.
14
Strange Meeting
… my mother came running down the street after me. Look at her, like an angel, like a light-beam, running alongside the pram. I lifted up my hands to catch her, and the light was there, the outline of her, but like angels and light she vanished.
Is that her, at the end of the street, smaller and smaller, like a light-years-away star?
I always believed I would see her again.
The Stone Gods (2007)
I WAS TALKING to my friend the film director Beeban Kidron. She directed Oranges for TV, and we have known each other a long time. We have both been volatile and difficult people – with each other as well as with many others – but we have both arrived at some sort of settlement with life; not a compromise, a settlement.
We were laughing about Mrs Winterson