Hide and Seek by Amy Bird Page A

has been living on your CD player for weeks? That your mother is a non-mother, and that your real mother abandoned you? That your whole life, you have unknowingly been lying to all your friends, and that all your ‘relatives’ have been lying to you? Think of all the people I’ve introduced Gillian and John to as my parents. Think of all the conversations where people have said ‘Do you take after your mum or your dad?’ And maybe, rather than just accepting the nonsense they spun me that my chin is like my mother’s and my toes like my father’s, I should just have looked in the mirror and at my feet and realised that the only resemblance is what you expect in any human being. Or maybe if I’d looked closer I’d have realised that John’s feet were as cloven as the devil’s, and Gillian’s chin just a hiding place for her forked tongue. Think of the conversations with their relatives! Was there one of my aunts, maybe Clare, worthy, stable, Clare, who always gave me a pound coin when I met her, right up until I was eighteen, who in hushed whispers insisted they ought to tell me? Had Uncle Gavin, that jolly lover of magic tricks, been making my parents squirm when he’d quipped ‘It’s amazing what you can suddenly pull out of a hat?’. Or had Gillian and John lied to all of them as well – stayed hidden for years, then suddenly produced a child as their own: ‘Here’s one we made earlier, in Dartington’?
    Because if there is a fucking protocol, nobody has fucking showed it to me. I’m inventing it as I go along. Inventing, or re-inventing, myself as I go along. And my best bet for how you conduct yourself in these circumstances, whoever ‘yourself’ actually is now, is that you stay in the house and sometimes you sit and sometimes you stand, or you pace or you cry but always you remember. You remember back over the years and try to find something real. Was my childhood bedroom at home real? My own private sanctuary – or again, a false construction? I think of the walls with the posters of Coldplay, CSI, Batman. I genuinely liked those. That is real. Although taste is a mix of nature and nurture. Maybe the nurture element would have been different had I been with my real parents. Then beneath those posters, the X-files, Pulp, Judge Dredd. Still further, there are Thundercats, Dangermouse, Spiderman. In my mind, I rip and I rip and I rip through the layers and the years until I am there at the original pirates wallpaper that ‘Mum’ chose and ‘Dad’ hung to conceal the walls beneath. The wallpaper that provoked a phase of ‘Shiver my timbers!’ and ‘Walk the plank!’ uttered by me happily gleefully trustingly to the people who were supposed to be my parents. That provoked pirate-themed birthday parties where they continued the charade for all my childhood friends, spreading the conspiracy. No. None of that is real.
    Ellie is real. Soon Leo will be real. They are mine, my choices, my creations. I must cling to them. Just like my non-parents are clinging to me.
    Because the non-parents, the lying parents, they are encamped outside your house. Look at them there, now, sitting in their Audi. Look at them staring in at you, as you contemplate each other in silence. Look at them drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. I mean, why are they even thinking of coffee? How, on any protocol, could they have decided ‘We have been lying to our son – who isn’t our son – for thirty years, fabricating his existence, keeping him from his real family. So let’s have a cappuccino!’. Because I tell you, I am not having a cappuccino. I am nil by mouth. Or maybe I’m not. Maybe Ellie brings me food. Maybe I eat it. Maybe I chew, maybe I swallow, maybe I don’t. But I don’t go to fucking Starbucks!
    And so whatever the protocol does or doesn’t allow you to do, I’m crossing the room to the window and I’m pulling the curtains shut tight, blocking out the non-parents and the too-fierce sun. And I’m