Page 31

Michael

Michael lay pinned to the ground by two teenage boys, nursing his throbbing head and wondering how everything had gone so horribly wrong.

His throat was parched and he could smell an unpleasant, fishy odor, which he had a horrible suspicion might be coming from his own body. Had he really been here for over a week? It felt like only a few days since he’d fled his mother’s house, three pairs of underpants and a copy of Where the Crawdads Sing hastily stuffed into his bag. And now apparently nine days had passed, and his mum was dead.

Dead. Another wave of grief crashed over him. He thought back to the last time he’d seen her and the bitter words he’d screamed. At the time, Michael had only wanted to hurt his mother, like she’d hurt him. And now she was gone, and he’d never be able to apologize; never be able to tell her how much he loved her. He squeezed his eyes shut and let out a moan of regret.

“Are you all right?”

Michael opened his eyes and squinted up at the teenage boy above his head.

“Not really. Could you please move? I have a bad back and this isn’t helping.”

“No way, you’ll just try and run away again,” the boy said, blowing his long fringe out of his eyes. He looked vaguely familiar, but Michael couldn’t place where he’d seen him before.

“I can’t believe you knocked him over like that,” the taller boy at his feet said. “That was so cool!”

“I don’t know what came over me. I just heard Nova’s shout and the next thing I knew I was down here punching him,” the first boy said. “I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”

“Well, you’re clearly a natural. It’s like when Rey defeated Kylo Ren, even though she’d never used a lightsaber before.”

“I wouldn’t quite compare myself to Rey,” the punching boy said, and when Michael looked up at him, he could see the kid was blushing. My God, were they flirting over the top of him?

“Look, I promise I’m not going to run away. Just let me move before we need to get a chiropractor down here.”

The teenagers discussed it for a moment, and then Michael felt himself being hauled to his feet.

“Ouch! Shit, that hurts,” he winced, as pain shot through his lower back.

“Sit down here,” the taller boy said, and the two of them helped Michael limp to one of the rock seats his father had carved fifty years ago.

Michael lowered himself down and rested his head in his hands. What on earth was Phyllis Hudson doing here? Even back in the very earliest days, before he’d contacted Graham Pierce, it had never occurred to Michael that he might one day have to face her like this. But now not only was she here, but he’d gone and hurt her. Michael had wanted to stop and check she was okay when he saw her fall, but the flight instinct in his body had been so strong that he’d charged out of the room without even looking. My God, this was all such a mess.

He glanced up at the two teenage boys who were deep in conversation, the tall one inspecting the bruised hand of the shorter one, as if he was some kind of war hero. Was that the shy kid from the book club? And Michael had seen the old man who looked like a giant Father Christmas hobbling into the house too. How on earth had they all found him here? Michael closed his eyes again, trying to make sense of it all.

“Michael Watkins, I want a word with you!”

He opened his eyes and then wished he hadn’t. Phyllis was marching out of the house toward him. She didn’t look like she was injured, but the expression on her face was murderous.

“Why did you have a private investigator take photos of me?”

She stopped in front of him, so close he could smell her; a mixture of wool, dog and hair spray.

“It’s not what you think,” he mumbled.

“And what do I think?”

“I don’t know…that this is something sinister. That I want to hurt you.”

Phyllis let out a curt laugh. “You couldn’t hurt me . But you do owe me an explanation.”

There had to be some way to get out of this. Michael glanced toward the cliff path and saw it had all but disappeared, lost into the sea along with the front garden and his mum’s flower beds. Besides, even if the path was still there, he wasn’t sure he could outrun the five humans and one dog who were all staring at him, their eyes full of suspicion and contempt.

Michael looked down at his hands, shaking in his lap. There was nothing for it, he was going to have to tell them the truth. He glanced up at Phyllis and was struck once again by her bright green eyes; the same eyes he’d noticed the first time he saw a photo of her.

“Okay, I’ll explain. But you might want to sit down.”

—

Michael had been an only child. His parents, Eve and Martin, were already in their thirties by the time he was born—our miracle baby, they used to call him—but they had adored him, and his childhood had been a happy one. He’d enjoyed school, gone to Exeter City football matches with his father on the weekends, and every holiday they’d come down to Chy Pysk, their tiny bolt hole by the sea.

At eighteen, Michael had gone to university, where he met Cynthia, and shortly after he graduated, they got married and settled in Bristol. But he’d remained close to his parents, coming to visit them regularly. And so when, last November, his father had suffered a massive stroke, Michael had rushed down and sat by the hospital bed for hours, holding his father’s hand and willing him to wake up. The doctors had said to prepare for the worst, that the damage done to his father’s body was too much for him to survive, but Michael knew something they didn’t: that his father was the strongest man he’d ever met, and this was not how he was going to die.

Sure enough, after forty-six hours, Martin Watkins opened his eyes and looked at his son. Michael had been about to call out to the doctors with the good news, when his father had squeezed his hand, still powerful despite everything that had happened.

“There are things I need to tell you,” he’d said, his words slow and labored.

Michael had shuffled his chair closer to the bed. “What is it, Dad?”

He’d watched his father take a deep, painful breath. “The money’s gone.”

“What—”

“I lost it…Pension…Savings…The house…All gambled away.”

Michael had stared at his father in disbelief. Martin Watkins wasn’t a gambler: he was a sensible, solid man, someone who mowed the lawn every Sunday and never forgot to put the bins out. But the look on his dad’s face—the fear in his eyes—told Michael that he wasn’t lying.

“Look after your mother,” Martin had said, wincing with the effort of the words. “She has no idea…Protect her from the truth. Please, Michael. ”

There had been so many things Michael had wanted to ask his dad: whys and hows and whens. But the look on the old man’s face told Michael he didn’t have time for that now, so instead he’d just nodded. “I’ll take care of her. I promise.”

Martin had let out a sigh of relief in response and closed his eyes, and for a horrible moment, Michael thought his father had taken his last breath. Then he opened his eyes again.

“There’s something else,” he’d wheezed. “You’re adopted.”

It was such a ridiculous statement that Michael’s initial reaction was to laugh. “What?”

“We should have told you…years ago.”

“What are you talking about, Dad? I’m not adopted.”

“Through the church,” Martin said, his words barely more than a slur now. “Reverend Platt at St Piran’s…our miracle baby.”

“But—”

“You were all we ever wanted.” Martin took a deep, gasping breath. “We loved you…so…much.”

“Who was my birth mother?” Michael had asked, the words spilling out of him like water from a broken pipe.

In reply, his father sighed and closed his eyes. He never opened them again.

The next few months were the worst of Michael’s life. Navigating the shock and grief had been one thing, but doing that while trying to unpick the financial mess his father had left behind was quite another. Martin had done an extraordinary job of hiding his gambling addiction from his family, but once Michael peeled back the surface, he discovered debts everywhere he looked. With the fear of loan sharks quite literally turning up on his grieving ninety-one-year-old mother’s doorstep, Michael and Cynthia decided to sell their own house in Bristol and use the money to settle as many of his dad’s debts as they could. Cynthia had been furious at being uprooted from her home, and this had driven yet another wedge into their already crumbling marriage. But it was a price Michael felt he had to pay to honor the promise he’d made to his father. So, when Eve asked why he’d sold his house and moved in with her, Michael told her that he’d made some bad business decisions and lost all his money. When she tutted and told him he should have been more fiscally sensible, like his father, Michael had bitten his lip and stayed silent. And when he lay awake in bed at night, the word adopted swimming round his brain, Michael had tried to ignore it.

But, like an infection incubating in a body, over time the word grew stronger and more dangerous, until it became impossible to fight. Suddenly, little things began to make sense, like the fact Michael had green eyes when his parents’ were blue, or his affinity for math, when neither his mother nor father had the first clue about sums. These things had never bothered him before, but now Michael found himself consumed by them. So much so that one day, six months after his father’s death, Michael sat down at the computer and searched for a local private investigator.

He hadn’t had high expectations when he went to meet Graham Pierce in his cramped, messy office. After all, he had no information to go on apart from the name of a long-dead vicar who his father had said was involved. But Graham had told him that this kind of thing was more common than you might expect; that in the fifties and sixties, lots of private adoptions were arranged through the church and that in many cases the adoptive parents’ details were put on the birth certificate, as had happened with Michael. The investigator hadn’t made any promises but had said he’d do his best to find Michael’s birth mother. After that, they’d agreed a price and Michael had returned to his own life.

He hadn’t heard anything for the next six weeks. And then one day in late June, as he was eating an egg mayonnaise sandwich in the back garden, an e-mail had popped into his inbox. Michael had opened the message and dropped his sandwich on the patio. Because not only was the private investigator claiming to have traced Michael’s birth mother, but the woman’s address was in St. Tredock, less than five miles from where he was sitting at that moment. His hands shook as he clicked on the attachment, and suddenly there were photos of a short, rotund woman with blue-tinted hair and green eyes.

His birth mother.

Phyllis Norma Hudson.