Hide and Seek by Amy Bird Page B

opening up the CD player, and there they are again, skipping forward to the deliciously delicate and soft bars that start the second movement of Max’s concerto. If I have to find a new me, to fill a new life, then I’m going to need new parents. And one of those parents is here on CD. Together, in here, in the softly lilting darkness, we could be tranquil.
    But no. No we can’t. I don’t know if I can really even call them parents. Because as much as my recently discovered non-parents faked my whole life, these other parents are non-parents too. They are non-parents because they abandoned me. They are not me either. Over the years, their ability to be part of me has drifted away, commensurate with their annual failure to find me, to get in touch, to beg forgiveness and reclaim me as their own. Yet I must have something of them. Something in them that I can recognise of myself. I must see the people who gave me life, even if they then shut me out of their existence. I do at least look like Max. He can’t deny that; Ellie found the proof on the CD case. I can take the CD to him when I meet him. Because I will meet him. And my mother, too. My real, non-mothering, mother. I will demand an explanation. I will demand to know who I really am.
    And although I love the soulful quiet of the middle movement, it’s too slow, too quiet, because it doesn’t drown out the doorbell, or the sound of the letter box flicking, and the sound of ‘Hello, hello, let us in’ from my non-parents. So I have to go back to the first part, with its loud crashing chords building always to a tumultuous crescendo. But even that doesn’t hide the flip-flopping slippered waddling of Ellie to the door, and a fresh clanging of the letterbox as she shouts ‘Go away! He doesn’t want to see you!’ Because she knows you see, Ellie, she knows all these things. She knows I don’t want to see them. And she knew Max was my father, even though she didn’t know my mother wasn’t my mother.
    She has a copy of the protocol. She seems to know that when she comes into the room just to say hello, I must violently hug her, cling to her and keep her here with me because she cannot abandon me, like this other woman in the past, this Sophie Travers, has abandoned me, and this man on the CD, this Max Reigate.
    And Ellie, she’s been reading a guidebook to this strange territory again because she says:
    “You don’t know why you were put up for adoption. Don’t hate her for it. It must have been a difficult decision. Maybe Gillian and John coerced her.”
    Because in her world, I suppose, in the world where she’s about to be a mother, it is the abandonment by the mother that is the key betrayal. Hence her focus on the choices of my mother. But for me, it is the father. This great father, playing this great music, who rejected me.
    “I’ll find him,” I tell Ellie, as though she can read my thoughts. “I’ll find him and I’ll show him he shouldn’t have abandoned me. That I was worth keeping. That I still am. I’m someone worth knowing.”
    And Ellie, she opens her mouth to say something. Then she frowns a little, and closes her mouth again. She just kisses me on the forehead. The kiss that says ‘Of course you will, dear’. But for some reason, doesn’t believe it.

Chapter Sixteen
    -Will-
    Eventually my non-parents go. They drift away from outside our house, and they drift away from my mind. They allow me, at last, some space to think. Some space to dream. Not sleep dream. No, I’m not sleeping yet. To think dream. Of my new parents. I’m listening to him, my father, and as I do, this resentment at the abandonment and the lies start to regroup into excitement. I listen to the music of my father over and over again and I listen to the bit of my soul that says:
    You have a grand, exciting, musical father. A genius – listen, just listen, to that exquisitely shattering music that he not only wrote but composed for his debut album. Think what he