“Ok Bobby here goes. Who was Barbara Morrison? Where was she from? How did she end up with… with… that man? Does she have family back wherever she came from? We know nothing about that side your family at all: where they’re from, where they are, if they are anywhere, who your grandparents were, where they are. Your family comes from somewhere, maybe there’s more just waiting to be found the way Ricky found us.”
She drummed her fingers on my chest, a gesture she’d copied, consciously or otherwise, from Ashley, Nicky’s wife when she was thinking or drawing a thread together.
“I tried looking on some of those genealogy websites and there are dozens of Barbara Morrison’s. Even discounting the ones we know can’t be the right one because of the age, there’s still an awful lot of them about the right age, scattered all over the British Isles, but as we don’t know where she was from, or even how old she was, it’s a dead-end, because we just don’t know enough about her.”
She pursed her lips in thought, a cute little moue, one of her more attractive quirks, I always thought.
“We need to find a way to locate her, baby. I think this is important. I think we need to make at least some kind of token effort at the very least, because one day Ayesha and Nick, and baby-bump, and Ricky’s David, and little Leon are going to want to know where they’re from, and we only have half the story.”
At her mention of baby-bump I instinctively ran my hand over the smooth, taut curve of her waist, not yet too obtrusive, but anyone looking at my wife would immediately know she was pregnant. We’d passed on knowing if it was a boy or a girl, if it was a boy, he was going to be James, my middle name, and if it was a girl, Rowena.
I’d have picked David, my adopted father’s name, but that was Ritchie Junior’s real name, we all just called him Ritchie because he wanted to be called by the same name as his daddy.
Shari kissed my neck again as I caressed her baby bump.
“If you don’t object, baby, I’d like to do some digging. Barbara came from somewhere, there has to be some kind of record somewhere. If I only knew her date of birth, but we don’t even have that, and I don’t know where she was married, so I’ll have to figure out somewhere to start. How about all those boxes and boxes of your… of Robert’s papers in the attic? Ricky found us in there, maybe Barbara’s family is hiding somewhere in there too?”
I shrugged, or as much as I could with my gorgeous wife’s arms twined around my neck. I found it telling that even now, so many years after he came into her life, she still wouldn’t call our bastard, murdering father by his real name. His real name is Brian Davis, but she knew and hated him as Robert Davies, that was the name of her personal demon, and that was all he was ever going to be to her.
I grinned wryly, knowing what a mammoth task that would be.
“It’s worth a try, sweetheart, sooner you than me. There are mountains of the stuff up there, it took us days to get all that junk up there and out of the way, and Ricky was rummaging through that stuff for weeks. You’ll be old and grey, with a beard down to your belt-buckle before you get through it all, so good luck with that!”
Shari grinned and rubbed noses with me, but any further canoodling was interrupted by my little girl, Ayesha, six years old going on sixteen running into the office and jumping on both of us.
“It’s Friday, daddy, ice-cream, you promised!” she demanded, while little Nick, holding Yasmin’s hand and grinning like a pumpkin, shouted “I’keem, I’keem, I’keem dada, I’ keem!”
Ricky was fascinated with my baby girl. He couldn’t resist picking her up and sitting her on his lap just so he could gaze in her eyes and finger comb her hair off her face so he could look at her. When he did that, I’d see in his eyes the love and the loss and pain too, and see his lips trembling.
My little girl was the spitting image of her namesake, her grandmother Ayesha, Ricky’s beloved adoptive mother. She was an exact little copy of her grandmother, right down to her rich mahogany hair, her smile, and her bright, light green-hazel eyes that looked like they were lit from behind, so much like her both grandmother Ayesha and her Aunt Yasmin, and Ricky adored her.
Ricky loves his two boys to the ends of the earth and back, but he definitely has a special place in his heart for my little girl. In return, “Unka Wicky” was hands-down Ayesha’s most favourite playmate, babysitter, sleepy-lap, storyteller, and all round chief sucker to go to for guaranteed spoiling, sweets, and treats.
Shari slid off my lap and took the little boy from Yaz, putting him on my on my lap with Ayesha as she smiled at the two clamouring children.
“You hang on to them, and we’ll go get all the kids some ice cream; Ritchie and Nick can smell ice-cream from the other end of town, so they’ll be here any second now. Tomorrow I’ll need you to watch them; I’m going to be busy in the attic most of the day. Keep them busy down here, OK baby?”
*****
Nia:
Mummy sent me to go find Daddy. Lunch was ready and he’d disappeared somewhere hours ago, and she couldn’t raise him, mostly because his cell was ringing happily unanswered where he’d left it on the dining-room table. I searched the house for him but he wasn’t in his usual weekend haunts. On the weekend Daddy would usually be found either somewhere down at the far end of the garden, talking to the compost heap as he stirred it and fed it grass clippings, or trimming the hedge and swapping gardening lies with the neighbours.
His default escape-hatch was the greenhouse, where he’d sit with his feet up and a flask of sweet tea reading seed and geranium catalogues and humming along to Smooth Radio. I looked in all his hideouts and he was nowhere to be found, where could he have been?
On a sudden impulse, I pushed open the garden door into the garage, and there he was, lounging on an old lawn chair, leafing through a photo album.
“Daddy, there you are, Mummy wanted me to tell you lunch is ready… what’s that?”
Daddy looked up and I was a little perturbed to see his eyes bright and shiny.
“What are you looking at, Daddy?” I murmured, and he smiled sadly.
“I found this under a pile of Jamie’s baby stuff; I’d forgotten about it. Look, these are my parents, your nana and granddad Morrison just after they got married.”
I looked at the picture and I was a little taken aback at how much daddy looked like his father, especially the hair and eyes. The big surprise was his mother: Jamie was a dead spit for her. I’d always thought he looked a little like his birth-mother, Laura, mixed with Dad’s features, but now I could clearly see our grandmother in him, the same generous mouth and quirky, lop-sided smile, the same chin and neat ears, and I could even see some of myself in her too, with my black hair and definitely my expression down to a ‘T’.
I would have liked to have stayed and browsed with him, but Mummy had said lunch was ready, and her one rule was that hot meals be eaten hot, no dawdling around and making others wait, so Daddy closed the album and handed it to me while he put the folding chair away.
“Bring that with you, Nugget, we’ll go through it after lunch. Let’s go, we don’t want to keep your mother waiting, life’s too short… ”
*****
After lunch, we cleared away the debris of one of mummy’s usual spectacular feasts and I spotted the photo album, so I grabbed it and plonked down on the sofa next to Daddy.
“Right, Daddy, who’s who? Tell me who these people are… ”
Daddy leafed through the photographs, giving me time to study them and occasionally grin at the clothes or the hair, especially Daddy in the 1980’s; that bouffant George Michael hairstyle did NOT suit him, but it was good for a giggle, and pictures of Daddy as a little boy, with his mum, which clicked something inside me.
I’d never seen any pictures of his mother, my grandmother, or heard him talk about his parents, and now I was wondering why, but what caught my eye were two little girls, a toddler with a shock of black hair and the other, a pretty little blonde in a stroller with the woman who could only be their mother.
“Daddy, who’s that, who are those two girls?”
Daddy sighed, and his eyes sparkled with sudden tears.
“The little girl in the stroller, that’s Barbara, and the baby, that’s Rosa… ”
My interest piqued, I looked closely at the two of them; something about them had upset daddy, and he never gets upset, he’s the most laid-back, evenly-balanced man I know: he’s so calm he makes unflappable Jamie look frantic.
“Daddy, why have I never seen any pictures of your parents?” I asked gently, because it was obvious seeing their pictures had triggered something inside him.
“I’m sorry, Nugget, it’s a long story, and I… I…”
His face worked; this was really upsetting him, so I changed tack, instead pointing at the pictures of the little girls.
“Those little girls; who are they?” I asked gently, because now I had to know.
Daddy sighed, obviously relieved to change the subject, gently tracing their faces with his fingertip.
“Barbara and Rosa, little Rosa-Girl, they’re… they were, my sisters; Rosa was still in her teens when she was… when she passed away. This was before Jamie was born, actually, before I even met Laura. There was a road accident, a complete fluke, the car… one of the cars skidded and smashed into the queue at the bus-stop she was at, on Lewisham High Street, and she was killed.”