My stepdad raised me after my mother died — hours before the end he put a folded piece of paper in my hand and said, “Go there. Now.”
I was four when Gordon married my mother.
She died about a year later and he kept me.
He did not have to. He was thirty-seven, he had known me for fourteen months, and there was nobody making him do anything.
He walked me up the aisle in 2013. He was at the front at Tilly’s christening in 2017 in a suit he had bought for it and would not stop mentioning.
And every so often, into my thirties, he would turn up at my house on a Saturday and make apple pancakes, because they were the thing I liked when I was five.
Gordon Ellard was not my stepfather. He was my dad and I never used the other word once.
He went downhill fast in the August.
On the eleventh of September a consultant told me it was hours.
And at about ten past one in the morning he got hold of my wrist.
He had not said anything coherent in about six hours and then he had my wrist and he was completely there.
“Promise me you’ll listen before you decide to hate me.”
I said I could never hate him.
And his hand went tighter and he said: “I’ve lied to you your whole life. Everything you think about your childhood, and about who I am, is a lie.”
I said something about getting the doctor.
And he shook his head and said: “There’s nothing wrong with my head. You need to know before I go, and somebody begged me to take it with me.”
And then he pushed a folded piece of paper into my hand and closed my fingers on it and pushed my hand away.
“Go there. Now.”
And that was the last thing he said to me.
He died at twenty past four.
I opened it in the corridor.
An address, in biro, in his handwriting. Eleven miles from the house I grew up in.
I drove there at about five in the morning, which is not a thing I can defend and which I did anyway.
Ordinary road. Ordinary house. A car on the drive and a light on at the back.
And I got to that door and I had about four words of an apology ready, and my knuckles touched it and it opened.
And I screamed.
I want to be honest that it was a proper one. A woman two doors down came to her window.
Because there is one photograph of my mother in my house.
One. On the shelf in my front room. Frank — Gordon — only ever had the one and he gave it to me when I was eighteen and I have had it on a shelf in four different houses.
And the woman standing in that doorway at five in the morning was that photograph, thirty-three years older.
And she said: “You’re Cora.”
And then she said: “She isn’t dead.”
Her name is Marta. She is sixty-eight and she is my mother’s sister.
I had never heard of her. Not once. There is no aunt in my childhood, no cards, no name, nothing.
And my mother is alive.
She is sixty-five and she has been at a place called Verrin House in Dunmere since the August of 1993.
Thirty-three years.
The ninth of January, 1993.
My mother was thirty-one. She had a subarachnoid haemorrhage in her own kitchen while I was at nursery.
She survived it.
She was in hospital for nine months. What she came out with is no speech, very limited movement on the right, and — this is the part that matters — profound impairment of recognition and of forming new memory.
She does not know who I am. She has not known who anybody is since the January of 1993.
She is not unhappy. I want that early because I asked it first and I asked it twice.
She is settled, she is comfortable, she is fond of two of the staff in a way they can demonstrate to you, and she has been in the same room for twenty-two years.
But she has never once, in thirty-three years, known who was in it with her.
And there was a window.
Between the February and the end of April of 1993 there was a period — about eleven weeks — when she had some function back. She could follow some things. She could, for a while, write, badly, with her left hand.
And in the March of 1993 my mother wrote four lines on a piece of paper.
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