In Her Mothers' Shoes (41 page)

She had more than enough for a short item for local news and for a longer piece for the weekend arts programme. As he answered her questions, cracked jokes and continually put himself down, she had a feeling she’d met him before.

‘How are rehearsals going?’

‘Gangbusters,’ Jeff said.

‘Terrible,’ Rick said at the same time.

Jeff laughed. ‘You’re way too sensitive for your own good.’

‘It’s no fun watching your lines disappear. You spend hours thinking them up and getting them down on paper and – phht! – Jeff dispenses with them at the stroke of a cheap Biro.’ Rick was looking pained. ‘I know a lot of writers who’ve died in the aisle when their play goes into its first rehearsal.’

‘You’ll thank me for it on opening night. Less is more, you know.’

‘At the rate you’re going, Jeff, there won’t be any lines left.’

‘Then we can mime it. The critics will love it.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Rick pulled a face. ‘I’m taking that red pen off you tomorrow.’

~   ~  ~

Back at the station, Kate quickly edited the tape and wrote the intro, filed it and started on the next story for the day. But she couldn’t take her mind off the visit to the specialist’s. She got up from her desk, crossed the newsroom to the corridor and headed for the tearoom. It was empty. Taking her time over the tea, lost in thought, she felt her tummy, wondering where the baby would be exactly, hidden away in there. She smiled for a moment. She was pleased, of course she was. But she was also terrified that it would happen again. Did miscarriage run in her genes? What else was she harbouring in her veins, what else was pumping through her heart and brain that could affect her babies’ lives?

Perhaps it was time she found out. Perhaps it was time she started another search – an official and entirely legal search this time – for her birth mother. What if she were prone to heart attacks, high blood pressure, varicose veins? Could her children inherit cancer genes, diabetes, arthritis? Maybe there was a thinness gene hidden away there if only she could release it.

She’d often wondered about her origins; she’d often tried to find out who she really was, where she came from. But because it was illegal to know the name of your birth parents, because it was a dark secret and anybody who wanted to unlock that secret was made to feel guilty, criminal even, she recalled resorting to almost criminal means.

She had just turned seventeen. Fuelled by an intense unhappiness of being constantly at war with her mother, she’d left home, got a job, gone flatting and gone to university all at the same time. Perpetually broke, she’d spent almost every waking minute working – at university or at her job – and failed miserably at both.

The job was a grinding thirty-seven-and-a-half hours a week at the Social Security Department, a forbidding, old, dirty cream stone building in Hereford Street. It was the only job she could find that allowed up to eight hours a week off to nip down the road to university for lectures.

After just a few months, she’d discovered that the Social Security Department, which was responsible for paying unemployment and sickness benefits to people who were mostly unemployable (in an age when unemployment was one per cent), held a whole basement full of records that would most probably include information on the origins of her birth.

She smiled at the memory of the callow fellow - a whole grade higher than her on the public service scale – she’d fallen for, unrequitedly, who unwittingly showed her how to gain access to the basement files. As protocol demanded, she’d filed a requisition for permission to descend into the bowels of the building to conduct a search for some specific information. Permission was granted.

The ancient lift only went so far, jolting to a stop with a rebound so fierce she thought they’d hit the basement floor. Around the corner from the lift well, steep narrow concrete steps took her down to a long corridor, lit by three dim bunker lights housed in wire cages, as if they might try to escape and take the light with them.

Pulling the key out of her pocket, expecting a policeman to jump out any minute and arrest her for illegal entry, she cautiously approached the steel door, hesitating for a moment, thinking perhaps she should go back before she was found out.

She pushed the key in. It didn’t fit.

She’d been set up.

Then she noticed another key hanging lower down on the chain. She tried it in the lock. It fitted. She turned it, twisting it hard until she heard a click and the door swung open, its hinges creaking eerily, as if she were in a Zombie movie. The undead would be behind the door waiting to attack.

She could feel her blood pumping, could hear it rushing to her head. She froze: could move neither forward into the vault nor back up the stairs where the fusty departmental air was a lot easier to breathe.

Ahead were row upon row of steel-braced wooden shelving units containing stack upon stack of brown card-covered files, each with a number and a code.

Could she do it? Where to begin?

To the left, high up near the ceiling, a shaft of light was pouring through a tiny opaque window. To Kate, it was a beacon, pulling her forward, granting her entry. She stumbled forward, unsure of herself, puzzled by the codes on the files. John, the man she fancied, the man who’d revealed the secret of the departmental tomb, hadn’t told her the codes were this obscure.

She walked along the rows, checking the numbers, looking for something alphabetical, something with the year of her birth, something she might realise.

She hadn’t counted on the system being smarter than she was.

If her birth records were there, they weren’t in any recognisable format and there was no possibility of searching all the files – there were thousands and thousands of them.

She retrieved the file she had the code to then took off, her heart still thumping, hurriedly locking the door and returning to the stairs, riding the clanking scary lift to her floor, stopping by the toilets on the way to recover, to stand for a moment behind the locked door then to wash her hands, her face, get rid of the dust and the subterfuge that had held so much hope.

A day or two later, her supervisor called her into his office and asked what she thought she was doing down in the records where she had no need to be. The requisition, he said, had bypassed him, which was entirely against the rules. The file she’d used as a pretence for entry was superfluous to requirements.

Cornered, she’d confessed.

She’d been so embarrassed she couldn’t remember what happened next; the following day she received a memo to say she’d received ‘a note’ on her employment file and warning her not to try anything like that again.

Within six months, she’d left for the illustrations department of The Press where the files were almost as dusty and inaccessible as in the public service and where she was still allowed time off for lectures.

Chapter 2.

Wellington. Mid-1988

Kate strode along the Oriental Bay promenade trying to walk off the remains of the Ansett omelette anchored in her tummy like a paperweight. She was in no state to contemplate lunch. Yet she wanted to make a good impression. How pernickety would she look if she refused anything to eat? She could see her mother feeling obliged to pick away at her lunch, embarrassed to be eating when her daughter wasn’t; or worse, her mother would feel she should go without too. And what sort of a lunch would that be?

Poor Mum. She’d made it perfectly clear that she didn’t want Kate to see her birth mother; that she was scared of losing her, that was what had happened to other adoptive mothers she knew. Better to wait until the meeting was over, see how it went and maybe then tell her. Or maybe not.

She watched two seagulls fighting over a piece of bread, screeching at each other as if their life depended on it. Would she be caught in the middle like that? Tugged at by two women who didn’t know each other, probably never would, each claiming sole right to her affections? The fat seagull won. The smaller one ran to the water’s edge and pecked at a piece of seaweed as if he didn’t care then ruffled his feathers. The sun glinted off the water behind him, making Kate shade her eyes.

Her mobile phone rang loudly in her bag. Dragging it out by its stiff little aerial, she lifted it to her ear, stretching her hands to reach around its girth and looking up and down the esplanade, hoping not to draw attention to herself. She hadn’t quite become used to it yet, it was so obtrusive, shouting ‘Look at me’ to anyone in the vicinity, but it had cost her boss $5000 and he’d given her a list of instructions to look after it and ensure nobody tried to run off with it.

‘I’m only giving it to you so you can track down those MAF scientists you need to film,’ Larry had said. Larry was the producer on
Science Express
, the TVNZ programme Kate was reporting for. ‘It’s been like herding cats to sort out who’s who there. I don’t want you to miss out. But don’t you dare lose it.’

How anyone could lose something so big and heavy she didn’t know, but she was as conscious of the programme’s budget as Larry was, and so she treated the new-fangled gadget with the respect such an expensive high-tech brick deserved.

The call was from David.

‘How did it go with your mother?’ he asked after they said hello.

‘I haven’t met her yet. I’m just about to go into the café now.’

‘Oh, sorry, I thought you were meeting at twelve.’

‘No, one.’ Of course David would forget the meeting time; he was lucky to remember what day it was sometimes. Just like Dad. He was so wrapped up in his job at
National Business Review
chasing people he called ‘commercial hazards’.

‘Did James go off to day-care without kicking up a fuss today?’

‘Yes. Like a lamb.’

She laughed. ‘Typical. It’s only me he plays up for.’

‘I’ll have to work on that. We don’t want him to become a Mummy’s boy.’

‘Not much chance of that.’ She laughed. ‘Look, I’d better go. These calls cost a fortune and the battery runs out in no time.’

‘I bet you feel as cool as Madonna with such a fancy piece of technology to play with.’

‘I feel like a dick, actually. People are staring at me. I’ve got to go.’

Kate took one last look at the waterfront – across to the tall concrete buildings climbing from the harbour up the hill, around past the port to the big white ferry docked at its berth and back again to the stony beach, the sentinel Norfolk pines, the row of houses and cafes along Oriental Parade. Nerves were making her heart race.

Now or never.

She plunged across the road, ducking traffic, and entered the café before she could change her mind. It was she who’d asked for this meeting, who’d written the first letter, who’d been crying out to meet her mother. And now she was tempted to run back out the door and forget about the whole thing.

There was nobody in the café matching her mother’s description of herself: short, wavy brown hair, not exactly slim, wearing a navy jacket and a cornflower blue scarf. Her own looks, her favourite colours.