The Cuckoo's Child - Softcover

Thompson, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1927366291 ISBN 13: 9781927366295

Publisher: Brindle & Glass, 2014

Synopsis

In her forties, Livvy Alvarsson hopes to be a bone marrow donor for her much-loved younger brother, Stephen. Instead, she discovers she has no idea who she is. This is the second great loss she has suffered, for eleven years earlier, her four-year-old son Daniel disappeared. Armed with a few clues from war-time England, she embarks on a search for her birth family. The narrative takes the reader from small-town British Columbia to London and the English countryside and back. It is a story about loss and grief, about secrets and guilt, but it is also about restoration and balance. As Livvy confides her story to her dying brother, she reveals not only an identity enriched by experience, but also the transcendent importance of family and love.

The Cuckoo’s Child is a compelling and remarkable evocation of loss and longing and one woman’s search for her family history.

About this title

About the Author:

Margaret Thompson is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction and was the recipient of the BC 2000 Book Award. She sits on the editorial board of the Federation of BC Writers’ quarterly journal, WordWorks. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Cuckoo’s Child
Chapter One

Every night watchman must find a way to fill the darkness, Stephen, and I am no exception. The monitors beside your bed spell out their hidden story in green light: blips and digits and spiked lines that tell everything and nothing, certainly not what it feels like to be dying. I, too, have a tale to tell. It has been a long time in the making, so many sinkholes and rockfalls fouling the way that any sort of happy ending seemed illusory at best. And just when there could be better times to share, you are slipping away, out of my reach.

The room is very quiet. I think you’re sleeping, but perhaps you’re even further away than that. I can’t tell. Your face is closed off, almost stern, and quite calm. If I lay my head beside yours on the pillow, like this, will you hear how much I want to talk to you, want to listen to your voice telling me that everything is unfolding as it should? Will I pick up your whisper, like I used to do when we went camping years ago, that breathy, insistent Sis, Sis, you awake?” in the smelly blackness of the tent, and know that you’re my brother still, in the only sense that matters, and nothing can take that away, no matter what.

It’s a relief to rest my head. It’s too heavy, too full. I’m tired of sitting up as if I’m in command of myself, being calm. Soothing. Worrying about Holly and the kids. Mum and Dad. (Did you notice that? That little hesitation? The familiar even now feels awkward, ever so slightly false.) Neil saw of course how much I needed to be left to myself and you for a while. He’s persuaded them to go for a meal and a few hours’ much-needed sleep in their own beds.

Do you good,” he said to them, have a breath of air and a bite,” and when they hesitated, You’ve got room for a hamburger, haven’t you, Jason?” he asked our nephew.

The boy’s nodding head gave the others permission, and they glanced at one another and stirred on the uncomfortable chairs round the bed where you lie, being remote.

Livvy’ll be here, won’t you?” Neil said and got them all to their feet, shuffling through the door with apologetic glances as if they felt crass to long for escape, talk, food, all the things that would reaffirm their hold on life while you were so intent on letting it go.

Neil understands how exhausting a wait can be. Both of us, past masters at the art. This one, at least, will end soon. I think I knew it would, right from the start, when I first found out I could be no use to you. Did you realize, Stephen, just what you set in motion for me with that discovery? Will I have enough time to lay it all out, make it plain for you, before you cut the waiting short and go?

Where to start?

Maybe here? On a cold night at Thanksgiving, memorable for most because of a freakish rainstorm that congealed instantly on every power line, every traffic signal, every roof, every branch and twig until they tottered under the weight of ice, I discovered I had no idea who I was.

That sounds so melodramatic! Yet it was true, and no words could possibly convey the panic as the bedrock of my life fell away beneath my feet and I gazed on everything familiar as a stranger.

I wanted to look in the mirror to see if I had changed as much as I felt I must have, but of course, the revelation changed nothing about me at all. Friends would still have expected a response if they called me Livvy and invited me to lunch. Neil would not have stared at me, bewildered, and wondered where the person he thought usually dished up the spaghetti or dented the pillow next to his had gone. My students, too, despite their almost feral capacity for sensing weakness, like dogs smelling fear, would have noticed nothing worth paying attention to, just the old bag stewing over something, no big deal. Rita and Molly at the post office would have gone on stuffing mail addressed to Mrs. Olivia Alvarsson into our mailbox with every expectation that I would turn up with the appropriate key and remove it.

My question had been simple enough. All it needed was an equally simple answer, yet Dad would not meet my gaze and shifted from side to side as if his chair had suddenly become uncomfortably warm. He cleared his throat, ran a finger over his moustache as if to assure himself it was still there, looking just like Dr. Crippen, another meek little man hiding secrets.

Rage flooded my head, red hot. How like him to squirm and temporize! I wanted to pin him down, nail him, stop his wriggling, in spite of the pleading in Mum’s eyes and the concern in yours. So I persisted and forced an answer.
Ah, well, mmm,” he ventured. You could say that. In a manner of speaking.”
And as I stared at him, dumbfounded, the lights dimmed and surged twice, then went out altogether. And while Dad seized the chance of escape and delay, fetching propane lamps and candles and a tiny camping stove from the basement, I sat, extinguished, plunged into a darkness as absolute and chilly as any experienced that night under the remorseless accumulation of ice.

But knowing what I know now, Stephen, and haven’t had the chance to discuss with you, maybe the beginning lies much farther back. Maybe the dream isn’t just a dream but a fragment of the start of things, just a glimpse of one of the bottom layers of the palimpsest. In a manner of speaking. For as long as I can remember, it has insinuated itself into my sleep, sometimes uncoiling like a film, which almost has a storyline, but more often like a collage, disjointed images drifting past.

I hover above a moonlit path. In the strange blue light that leaches away all colour, the path wavers across a garden. To my left, tall flowers with huge round faces, open as clocks, and wiry vines, covered with motionless butterflies. To the right, plants are lower and line up neatly. There is a feathery row and a mounded grave for a long, long man.

I know all this without knowing, just as I follow the path without walking, drifting like smoke toward the garden’s end. A no man’s land. Then, trees. I swim through the moonlight until a piercing cry squeezes my heart into my throat. Again it sounds Help! Help!” somewhere above my head, and a luminous bird wearing a crown and a bridal veil watches me intently from the branch of a tree with smooth ghostly bark. Then it swells and shivers and vanishes.

A single white feather drifts to the ground, but it is in my hand too, like a wand.

I have no sense of destination, but I know that I am approaching the place. The way is steep now; tree roots snake across it like veins on the backs of old hands and jolt me off course.

And there it is: a tiny house against the sky. No walls. A lake below. No sound, except for lonely night noises. There I wait, for this is a waiting place. When it comes, this anticipated thing, it will be at once foreseen and unlikely. A rescue, perhaps. Or a portent. I wait for the wonderful to appear, anchored there in the possibility, but it fails me, always. I wake disappointed, every time.

But one day, I know, the waiting must come to an end.

Chapter Two

Now that was a red herring. If I’m that easy to distract, how will I ever make sense of everything? I can just hear Neil. I thought this was a story,” he’s muttering. Why don’t you just plunge in?”

That would be rich coming from him, though. Neil is an artist, after all, quite used to false starts. If I close my eyes, I can see the hut at the bottom of our garden. It’s just an old storage shed, really, but a bit of plumbing and carpentry and it turned into a studio. He spends a lot of time in there alone, working. Making image after image. Realistic yet not. Beautiful but disturbing.
Over the years Neil has moulded his studio to his own requirements, much as an animal will press its bedding to its own comfortable shape and construct its private place with its own unmistakeable scent. Neil has much of Badger about him, such an old bachelor fug, such a rumbling reclusiveness at times and Lord knows, that’s easy enough to explain that our marriage seems incongruous even to us at times and downright unlikely to our friends. Yet it has the ease of a favourite old sweater with just enough rasp to the wool that you don’t forget you’re wearing it. Whatever else, it’s not boring. Neil is too honest.

I can remember my first encounter with his directness. I was still a student at the University of British Columbia, working hard at a BSC. Remember how baffled Mum and Dad were about that? They wanted me to get a nice job in a bank or an insurance firm something safe and anonymous too, now that I come to think about it. I wanted to be a biologist. I wanted to be Rachel Carson. I wanted to be Charles Darwin. What I became, of course, is a high school teacher, but the glow of that passion has never quite faded.

Neil, on the other hand, was already an artist. Another student, a nice, dull fellow in my genetics class, introduced us in a casual encounter on Robson Street, just outside the old law courts.

Livvy,” he said, meet Neil Alvarsson. He’s an artist,” tossing the word like a live grenade into my Peter Pan collared life. First impression of this explosive device? It was housed in a rangy body that stooped a little, as if it were trying to accommodate itself to a world just slightly too small. A long, narrow head, crowned with straight blond hair, and very pale blue eyes that bored fiercely into everything, like a hungry eagle. His grip as we shook hands was dry and abrupt. I could feel the bumps of his finger joints. The nail on the index finger of his right hand was coated in yellow paint. He was wearing black black turtleneck sweater, black jeans ragged at the hem where they scuffed the ground, a black jacket long since divorced from the rest of the suit. He had no socks.

He was everything unorthodox my conventional soul longed for.

Here’s a confession.

I was in those days given to sudden passions for men glimpsed in stores, on the other side of movie theatres, going in the opposite direction on buses. So strong were these sometimes that I would abandon all maidenly modesty, break off what I was doing, and go in pursuit. I would scour the vague general area where I had seen them, in the hope of running into them again and triggering a flash of recognition that might lead, well, somewhere. This was only on my more desperate days, you understand, when I was oppressed by my failure to measure up to the success of all those contemporaries sporting tiny diamonds on the third fingers of their left hands. I felt the pressure of advancing years eroding my chances in the marriage market that seemed, if the magazines and Mum were anything to go by, to be the only goal I should be pursuing. Don’t forget, I was twenty-one, and feminism had not yet become militant.

I ran Neil to earth, though. I shucked off the friend who had introduced us with a shameless lie about suddenly remembering another appointment, not caring whether he believed me or not. I left him staring after me, reproachfully. I can’t remember even his first name now.

Neil had ducked into a small hole-in-the-wall café on Granville Street. I don’t think it’s there any more. I saw his light hair floating in a disembodied way in front of the coffee machine and went in. All it took was to angle myself behind him at the counter and pretend to be studying the specials written up on the chalkboard over the hatch as he turned away with his cup of coffee.
Hello again,” he said. Following me?”

This was uncomfortable. The best course seemed to be to choke back the overemphatic denial that was springing to my lips and smile enigmatically instead.

Want to share a table?”

Mutely, I nodded. My stomach was trembling. When I drew out the chair opposite his, I wrenched the table out of position with hideous sound effects, forcing him to snatch up his cup to avoid a mess.

There was a silence. I felt compelled to fill it.

I was just looking the place over,”I lied. They’re advertising for help.”
Neil looked at my cup. Most of my coffee was slopping about the saucer. He handed me a napkin from the dispenser.

Word of advice,” he said. Don’t ever go for a job as a waitress.”

Neil always was good at advice, you know. Handing it out, at least. Perhaps it’s the result of shaking himself free of convention, of standing outside looking in for so long. Perhaps it’s the discipline of the artist, always observing the familiar from a different vantage point. Both qualities overpowered me, but it was the oblique implication of his remark that impressed me most at the time. I don’t take anything at face value, he was saying, you will never put one over on me.

So when, a few months later, he asked me to sit for a small portrait, I was filled with trepidation. Didn’t tell you about that, did I? I was flattered, of course, but there was a nervous thrill attached. Perhaps I already recognized him as uncompromisingly honest and certain; what he might see and unflinchingly reveal scared me. He abandoned his usual abstraction a relief, really, because I couldn’t understand how he could convey anything about me in those huge, swooping shapes and wild colours and seemed to offer a view of me that exactly coincided with my own chocolate box image of myself.

He is a formidable draughtsman. It was the kind of portrait Mum would sigh over, saying, Isn’t it wonderful how real it looks, you feel you could just reach out and touch that hair.” He had painted me with my head turned to look out of the frame as if someone had just called my name. The background was shadowed, indeterminate, with a hint of vertical folds. I was wearing a very simple high-necked white blouse under a dark sweater the ones you said made me look like a Lutheran bishop and my pale face and auburn hair glowed against the sombreness. I was surprised, and said so. He smiled.

Not finished yet,” he said.

When it was, he showed it to me, watching my face carefully as he did.
It was a shock. At first I couldn’t make out what he had done. Then I saw that he had taken the original portrait and cut it into narrow strips vertically. These had been attached to another canvas, leaving gaps between the strips that he had filled with a wild miscellany of objects and paint. There were torn pages that I recognized as pieces of a text on DNA, bits of lace, white ankle socks, meticulously labelled diagrams of dissected frogs together with paintings of the same animals alive, feathers, butterfly wings, hair from a lurex wig braided and curled around the white bones of some small mammal, a weasel perhaps, candy wrappers, seed packets from my attempts to grow my own herbs, labels from 48s, scraps of cotton and wool, hair pins, a Barbie doll’s decapitated head, a periodic table, the perfect rosy babies from old Pears soap adverts, even a tiny moss-lined bird’s nest containing a few splinters of eggshell, all tumbling across the canvas, interwoven, sprawling and spilling in a tangled, intricate chaos. My fragmented self peered through it like a wary animal in a thicket of saplings. I had to say something.

I’m not sure I like it,” I said.

He snorted. What does that matter?”

It doesn’t even look like me now,” I objected.

Are you sure? Things are not always what they look like.”

There was a gentle scorn in his voice for my simplicity. In that moment, I believe, dawned a realization that has coloured all my observations since. I stared bleakly at the muddles and contradictions that he saw milling about behind my unremarkable face and sensed the complexities of existence, paths crossing, wheels meshing, the tumult just beneath the surface as cause a...

About this edition

• Publisher: Brindle & Glass
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1927366291
• ISBN 13: 9781927366295
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264