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Nicky said, ‘Aunt Esther thought it would be better. She didn’t want it to be hanging over us, or
herself either. She thought people would judge us, that they’d say it was a shameful thing. Luckily, for
us anyway, the Falklands War started four days later, so that article was all the press attention our
little family story got. The papers were full of battleships and submarines after that. Better to be safe
than sorry, though, Esther said, and social services approved the idea of having new names. I chose
them, you know! I renamed us!’
She forced a sarcastic enthusiasm into her voice but there was nothing in her expression to suggest
that this fact actually gave her any pleasure.
I picked up the article and studied the photograph. I’d never seen an image of myself as a baby
before. I was chubby-faced with a curl in my hair that I never knew I’d had. I was balanced on my
father’s knee, with fat little arms protruding from my dress. My hands were blurry, as though I might
have been clapping. My sister stood beside my mother in the photograph. She wore shorts and a T-
shirt and her hand rested casually on my mother’s shoulder. Her feet were bare and she had the skinny
coltish legs of a prepubescent child. She was smiling widely. When I studied the faces of my parents I
felt a new emotion: a stab of betrayal. They’d been willing to leave me. Whether I was healthy or ill,
they’d relinquished care of me at just one year old. They weren’t taken from me by chance. They’d
abandoned me and they’d abandoned Nicky too, in the most final way possible.
I swallowed and just that small physical reflex felt like an effort. I felt as if the blood had drained
from me, just as it had from my sister minutes earlier, and with it any strength that I might have had
left, any fight. I was a husk, robbed of all the things that had made me who I am, all the things that had
made me vital.
‘Am I Alice or Katy?’ I asked.
‘Katy.’ It was a whisper and Nicky’s face contorted tearfully around it, mirroring mine.
In the photo, my parents’ expressions were impossible to read. They were both smiling for the
camera and I tried in vain to imagine what was actually going through their minds. I looked at my
brother. He sat in the centre, cocooned by their bodies: a terminally ill little boy who was never going
to get to live a proper life. I wondered whether they’d had the diagnosis before this photograph was
taken, or were they just worried about his eyesight at this stage, thinking that was bad enough and
having no idea what horrors lay just around the corner for their little boy. A boy who looked just like
Ben.
I said to Clemo, ‘Why are you telling me this now?’
He addressed Nicky. ‘We spoke to your sister’s ex-husband this morning.’
She looked at him warily and raised her chin slightly, with a touch of defiance. She let go of my
hand. The light in the room fluctuated, growing darker and more riddled with shadows as the clouds
lowered outside.
‘I know what you’re going to say, and it’s bullshit,’ she said.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I know what you’re trying to do, but you’re wrong.’
‘What am I trying to do?’
‘I don’t have to listen to this.’
‘I think we both know that you do.’
She crossed her arms, stared down at the table.
I sat in a state of pure, simple shock. I knew well enough by now that you could lose your child in
just a few minutes, but I was shocked into silence by the new knowledge that in a similar space of
time you could also gain and lose a brother who was the image of that child, and parents who were