Page 5 of The Next Chapter
I lift the flap of the envelope and shiver as I pull the letter out from inside it. There’s another piece of paper, but I ignore that for now, too desperate to hear from Dad again.
I unfold it. His writing is instantly recognisable. Slanty and with the slight dip of someone who was left-handed.
Now that it’s there, I can’t believe I’ve left it this long to read it. My eyes start scanning before I can properly take in what they’re reading.
Lily,
I imagine it’s taken you a while to get to this. However long it’s been, I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you’re not lonely.
I know you have Seb (I’m betting he’s there, hi Seb), but hopefully you’ve broken up with Colin, you can do better (if he’s there too, sorry Colin). And I know you have a lot of friends, but they’re not the same as family.
That’s why you need to go and find her. Find Lola.
She called once. Just after Mum died. I think legally she wasn’t allowed to get in touch until you were eighteen and I don’t know how she got our home phone number, but she did.
I’m so sorry that I never told you, Lily.
She asked if she could speak to you and I was so mad at everything, at the fact that she was alive when your mum wasn’t, I called her a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have done.
I told her that you never wanted to hear from her and that she had to respect that and put the phone down.
I told her that you hated her. I was terrified of losing you.
I’m a coward for telling you this now, I know.
When I got the diagnosis and once I’d Googled it (stage four pancreatic cancer makes for miserable reading), I knew you’d need someone after. I hired a private investigator to look for Lola.
Anyway, I’ve enclosed their report.
I hope you’ll consider finding her, Lily.
If you do go to her, you’re going to find out some other truths I’m not proud of. I’m sorry about that, too. I hope you know that everything we did, it was because we loved you so much. You and your mum are the best thing that ever happened to me and I’m so proud of you.
Know that if I could have stayed, I would have done.
Love always, Dad
My face is wet by the time I read Dad’s letter again. And again. Even Seb produces a tear when I read it out loud.
He gets up and marches to the kitchen, announcing, ‘We need more wine.’
For once, I don’t have the energy to worry about his poor liver. While he’s gone, I unfold the second sheet of paper from the envelope. I had no idea that Dad had hired a private investigator, but now, I’m reading their report.
DALTON AND SONS PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS
Bronx, NY, United States
Case number: 315-426
Account: **7634
Date: 14th May 2022
Status: FINAL REPORT
Summary:
This report details information obtained via inland revenue and electoral registers into the whereabouts of one LOLA STARR . Lola is believed to reside at the address below:
Broadford Hotel and Water Sports Centre
Broadford
Isle of Skye
Scotland
IV49 9AB
After conducting extensive research into several unconfirmed sightings of LOLA STARR in the United States, our investigation concluded that one LOLA STARR has resided at the above address since approximately 16 March 1994, when she first appears on the electoral register of the UNITED KINGDOM under the name Lola Vain.
According to deed polls, Lola Starr became Lola Vain in January 1994.
Lola Vain is the same person as Lola Starr, the former lead singer of the pop punk band Beyond Baton Rouge.
Our investigation concludes that neither Lola Starr, nor Lola Vain are registered as having been married.
Lola Starr has no children beyond one, Lily Brown.
The adoption order for Lily was finalized in March 1994.
As per our client’s request, no contact has been made with the subject of this report. This information was correct as of 14 May 2022.
Please find attached our invoice. Payments can be made via bank transfer or over the telephone.
In something that feels close to complete and utter shock, I search for Lola’s hotel on my phone, pulling up an image of a white building next to a lake.
I can’t believe Lola lives there. Here. This whole time I’d been sure that there was a full-on gigantic ocean between us when she’s been right here the whole time.
‘Shit,’ Seb says, reading over my shoulder. ‘She was way easier to find than I thought she’d be.’
‘I don’t know if she was,’ I tell him. I sound like I’ve been drugged. ‘It says they looked in America first. No one expected her to be in the UK. She was American. Why is she in Scotland?’
I’m just looking between the letter and my phone.
My brain can’t connect the image of Lola in my imagination with a Lola who lives in some secluded spot in Scotland.
It’s there in black and white. Lola was a party girl, a superstar.
Lola in the band had more glamour in her little finger than I have in my entire being.
I look again at the picture of her in the orange dress.
Her hair is blonde and big. Not big in the way that mine gets big, which is entirely of its own violation.
Big in a way that suggests it was meant to be like that.
Her eye make-up is smudged, so I know there was a lot of it.
Her lipstick is bright red. I don’t know if it’s weird to notice your birth mum’s boobs, but she’s wearing the push-up bra to end all push-up bras. We’re just… very obviously different.
And that’s before you even consider that she used to hang out with Bill Clinton.
I silently spiral while Seb sifts through some of the magazine articles that I have in my folder. Being gentle with them.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Let’s sort this shit out. Start at the beginning. Tell me what we know about Lola already.’
I take a deep breath.
I don’t like talking about Lola, but I do know many things about her.
Apparently, it’s a thing when you’re adopted.
They like kids to know about their birth mum because it saves them coming up with their own version of events, or else jumping to conclusions.
Mum and Dad had told me a bit about Lola’s early life, information the adoption agency must have shared with them.
Talking about Lola’s early life feels a lot safer than thinking about that letter.
‘Okay, so you probably know some of this stuff, I mean, it’s on her Wikipedia page. Lola grew up just outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana. That’s where they got the name of the band from, I think. She was really poor, from what Mum and Dad said.’
‘How did she end up in the band, then?’ Seb asks.
‘It’s one of those stories that no one believes could happen in real life, but Jimmy Nickel, you know their manager, he was on holiday there and heard her busking.
She was only seventeen or something, crazy young.
Anyway, he was putting a band together in LA.
The label wanted to tap into the pop punk thing that was big in the nineties, find the next Gwen Stefani.
He invited her to try out, and you know the rest. They were huge.
More so in America, but big over here, too.
It makes sense that she’d go a bit wild, when you think about where she came from. ’
‘He died a few years back, didn’t he?’
‘Jimmy?’ I ask. Seb nods.
‘Yeah, I think so. I haven’t heard much about him for years, but he was like Simon Cowell famous when the band made it big.’
‘So, Lola goes to LA and gets proper famous. What next – where do you come in? You don’t know who your dad is, right?’
Seb must see me flinch.
‘Your birth dad,’ he clarifies.
‘Nope.’ I leaf gently through the stack of papers, pulling out my birth certificate and showing Seb the blank space where a dad’s name should be.
It’s a space that I felt a lot when we did genetics in biology, or a couple of years ago when the GP asked me, ‘any family history of…’ and I had to shrug and admit that I had no idea.
It’s not helpful to be thinking about that right now, though.
‘Mum and Dad suspected her bandmate. The guitar player, Ashton Vain. According to the papers, they were very much on again, off again. I think he was from Scotland, too, so maybe that’s why Lola is here.
I always assumed she was in America. Plus, look.
’ I hold up the investigators’ report. ‘Lola took his name, his surname, I mean. Vain. It must have been him.’
Seb nods. ‘At least he’s still alive. I had a poster of him on my bedroom wall when I was a teenager. How weird is that?’
‘Too weird to think about. He’s been in various bands over the years. Smaller ones. Even now he seems to spend his life permanently on tour.’
‘I didn’t like his solo stuff as much.’
I have another drink and carry on.
‘Lola was twenty-one when she had me. Maybe Ashton just wasn’t interested or whatever, but she was obviously on her own.
I guess she thought that she’d have to quit the band if she kept me and go back to being poor.
Giving me up for adoption was the right thing to do, if you think about it rationally. ’
I try out a smile. Yikes, bad idea. I stare down at the unevenly tiled floor instead.
‘Hard to be rational about being dumped as a baby.’
I roll my eyes. ‘I wasn’t dumped as a baby, it’s not like she left me in the bin. She went through the proper channels, and I got so lucky. You know how great Mum and Dad were.’
Seb raises his glass. ‘To the Browns.’
I cheers, swallowing past the lump in my throat.
Seb looks at the papers I’ve spread across the rusty coffee table trunk.
‘So much of it doesn’t make sense,’ he says, rifling a bit. ‘Why did she leave the band? If, like you say, she put you up for adoption because of the fame thing, why did she quit it a couple of months later? Right after they had their biggest, and best, single. It doesn’t make any sense.’
I shrug. ‘That’s the mystery. No one knows why she quit.’
‘And why would she want to go over it all? Why get someone to ghost-write her memoirs now?’