My relationship with Allie had blossomed over the years; because I was her big brother, she’d come to me with the things she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her dad, and leave me to work it out for her, while she and Lena huddled together and watched hormone movies and cried a lot.
Lizzie was bemused by it all, but glad that Allie was hanging with us and getting some positive mature-male influence; Allie’s dad lived too far away for her to see him more than a few times a year, and his new family occupied much of his time. Still, we must have been doing her good, as she was doing well at school, heading for straight ‘A’s across the board.
As had become her routine since she was a little girl, Allie still spent most of her weekends with us, playing with the children and going shopping with Lena, she and Lena looking more like sisters than aunt and niece, and working on Lena to ask me for a recommendation to endorse her application to study medicine, which I would have given in a heartbeat. Yes, my kid sister wanted to follow her hero, me, which flattered me inordinately until Lena observed that she was a lot smarter than I was, and medical school should be a breeze for her, not the hard slog it had been for me. Sometimes I wonder about my wife…
Eventually, I resigned myself to having that conversation with Emma, one I really didn’t want to have but had been dreading all along; perhaps it was time to start searching through the Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths, emphasis on the ‘Deaths’. I didn’t want to bring it up, but we were getting nowhere, and it was looking more and more likely that those two kids had disappeared years ago.
*
JULIE:
As the summer progressed, work and family life once more took up our time, filling our days and occupying our nights, but my mind kept going back to that conversation I’d had with Mark, about the possibility we had an unknown relative, and the almost-argument it had sparked off. While I knew it was probably just wishful thinking, I couldn’t let go of that thought, that perhaps we still had family out there somewhere, family we didn’t know, and who didn’t know about us.
Mark almost certainly had family, half-siblings (like me!) somewhere; his father had still been a young man when he and mum split-up, and from the pictures of him we’d found in mum’s things, he was a bit of a looker, too; he’d have had no problem starting over again. Mark wasn’t interested in finding out, though; he’d abandoned him, left us both at the mercy of that mad bitch, and as far as Mark was concerned, Lawrence Jameson was dead, buried and forgotten. I knew my biological father had died before I was born, but we’d never been able to find out anything about him, other than he was Lawrence’s younger brother and he’d had an affair with mum, which is where I came from.
I spent a lot of time that summer wondering about our past; I didn’t know where mum and her family were from; I didn’t even know what mum’s maiden name had been; there were no papers or anything that were of any use to us that we had found when we cleared mum’s house; in the last extremities of her dementia, before she was finally put away, she’d thrown away so much; photograph albums, her marriage certificate, divorce Decree Absolute, all sorts of records, Mark and my birth certificates, stuff that would have been priceless should we ever have wanted to find out who we really were; all were irretrievably lost.
With that avenue closed, all I knew was this mysterious ‘South Mead’ place mum was born. Eventually, it occurred to me to look it up on the internet, and that was where I struck gold; there was no such place, but one reference that kept jumping out at me was ‘Southmead Hospital’, in Bristol. I sat back in shock; mum was born in Southmead, not ‘South Mead’, in Bristol. Mark kept getting mistaken for someone called ‘Darryl’ again in Bristol, where he travelled frequently; apparently this ‘Darryl’ looked just like Mark, so the question occupying me was: did we have a relative in Bristol, the place where mum was born? The odds were stacking-up in favour of just that.
Maybe I needed to travel down with Mark the next time and have a snoop myself. I knew mum’s date of birth only because her driving license was returned to us after she was committed to the Care Home, but perhaps that was enough to trawl through the records in Bristol; with her date of birth at Southmead Hospital, maybe I could find a birth record giving her family name. It was a long-shot, but it was worth taking, I felt.
Mark came in soon after that, to find me cooking dinner, but no children. I grinned at his quizzical look.
“Jamie and Nia took them to the ‘It’s A Kid’s Thing’ play-centre over by Garrett Lane this afternoon and tired them out, and I didn’t have the heart to wake them up and bring them home, so Mummy’s looking after them tonight; that means we have the house to ourselves. Fancy fooling around a little?”
His eyes lit up, but kept straying to the oven; I’d made him a lasagna, one of the things he’ll fight werewolves barehanded for, and I had to suppress a grin at the conflict in him; me or lasagna. Poor Mark had grown up eating out of tins, or sandwiches; proper hot meals had been a rarity in our house; now I loved cooking for him, and watching him eat.
Eventually lasagna won out. I’ve said it before; like Jamie, he’s a walking stomach. When Jamie and Nia come over I have to make three, one for each of those bottomless pits, and another one so Nia, the kids, and I actually get to eat something.
While he washed-up, I went and changed; I wanted him on edge all through dinner, so I made a special effort, and when I brought in the food, his eyes popped out. I was wearing one of my old school shirts, which barely fitted, and was tight in all the right places, with a black, lacy push-up bra underneath; after having had two children, my once barely noticeable ‘bee-sting’ boobs were now a respectable handful each, and wearing an ‘Agent Provocateur’ bra turned them from nice handfuls into a pair of jutting tits to make an underwear model proud. I’d bought an extremely short plaid skirt, and together with knee-socks, slutty black platform shoes, and my hair in bunches, I looked like his own personal school-slut, if the sudden bulge in his slacks was anything to go by.
“Jesus, Tink, you look… incredible!” he gulped out as I sat opposite him, sticking out the ‘girls’ as I smiled seductively (I hoped!).
“What, these old things?” I preened, modestly, falsely, turning slightly to show them in profile, watching his eyes track my tits.
“Eat your dinner, Lost Boy,” I grinned, then winked at him, “dessert’s not far behind!”