Killing Karoline. Sara-Jayne King
enough to be put around the dining table and for years everyone declares what a wonderful job she’s done fixing something most people would have just left to rot in the undergrowth.
According to my mother, I showed absolutely no sign of distress at being parted from Kris. But while that may have seemed to be the case when I was a baby, years later the distress would rise to the surface in the form of an uncontrollable fear of abandonment, crippling self-doubt, relationship problems and pityingly low self-worth. And these feelings would, in turn, come to manifest in a number of self-destructive behaviours.
People often ask me when I found out I was adopted. They want to know how my parents told me. The question always makes me feel like a curiosity. I know what they’re hoping for – something worthy of a soap opera, a story involving some theatrical revelation, but I don’t have one. To my parents’ credit, I don’t ever remember being told. I just feel as though I’ve always known. The same way I know that fire is hot and that one’s brain is in one’s head and not one’s feet. Interestingly, I often wonder whether they hadn’t told me at such a young age, when I would have worked out for myself that I couldn’t logically be my parents’ biological child. When I was little, ‘adopted’ was never a dirty word in our house. It wasn’t an anything word. It was just a word. We didn’t celebrate it, we didn’t revere it, we didn’t have a special adoption song or a sanctimonious spiel that we trotted out every time it was mentioned. Adopted just meant that because Mummy couldn’t grow a baby, that I didn’t grow in her tummy, I grew in another lady’s tummy and when I was a baby she gave me to Mummy and Daddy. It really was very simple. Plus, I had a book that told me all about it which I read over and over. I could read by the age of three, thanks largely to Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Grover and the other residents of Sesame Street.
On Sesame Street, there are a couple of kids whose skin is brown like mine. They talk to a scary creature who lives in a dustbin. I close my eyes when he comes on the TV. It is, in part, thanks to Jim Henson and his strange band of Muppet friends that I love to read and one of my favourite books is Jane is Adopted. Because I know I am adopted and because Jane is my middle name, I think it has been written for me. In the book, Jane’s skin is not the same colour as mine and the mummy doesn’t look quite right, but I am prepared to overlook this.
The pictures in Jane is Adopted show me how it works. A lady with red hair and a smiley face has a big tummy. Then on the next page she is holding a baby. Then she gives the baby to a lady in a green dress and a man with a moustache like Daddy’s. They are smiling too. At the end, there is a little girl sitting on the lap of the lady with the green dress; she is smiling too. Adoption just means lots of smiles and everyone is happy. When I am much, much older, I will write to the author of Jane is Adopted and tell her how much her book meant to me as a child. She will sign a copy and send it back to me, but by then I will know the truth about adoption.
CHAPTER 5
Unhappy birthday
1 August 1982
‘Am two today!’ I awkwardly hold up two pudgy fingers. ‘That’s this many!’
The mummy at the door, who is not mine, looks amused. I don’t understand why.
Because I’m two, other small people – assumed, by virtue of our similar ages, to be my friends – have been invited to my birthday party at our house in the tiny, green-belt village of Tandridge in the South of England. People are here to see me being two and, best of all, give me things. Presents. I have presence of my own already, holding court at the front door, welcoming my guests and their tag-along grown-ups.
It is summer and my brown skin, browner than usual, having been touched by the sun, is the colour of moderately strong coffee and makes my cherubic arms and legs even more biteable than usual. I am the only brown little girl at my nursery school – in fact the only brown child. Adam is the only brown boy at his school of seventy-five pupils. We both stand out a lot. We say ‘brown’ because that’s what colour our skin is. We say ‘half-caste’ because that is what other people say. We also say ‘gollywog’ because Robertson’s says it on their jam jars and we don’t know any better.
My hair is a short, but unruly mass of what, according to some, looks like wire wool. I have on a blue summer dress, covered with delicate white-and-yellow stitching that is supposed to look like little daisies. The dress has been made, by hand, by Granny from a pattern she found in a magazine. She does that a lot, Granny. She makes me clothes, because she is from the war and in the war you had to make do and sometimes there weren’t even bananas. The pictures in the magazine show you how to make your own dress, where to cut and where to sew, using your own material. Making your own is better, because then whatever you are making will fit perfectly. Fitting is important. Sometimes things fit. They are snug and comfortable; they become a part of us. But sometimes even things that are new do not mould to us and they occupy an awkward space. In us, they do not find a home or footrest. They twitch uneasily, arching their backs against our outstretched arms and open chests. When things don’t fit, we panic. Terrified of consequences, unfinished pictures, spilling over the edges and blurred lines.
But when things do fit, it is a moment of deliverance as each atom clicks into its pre-ordained position, finding its way effortlessly, gently, like fingers along a collarbone, like a journey back home. Ultimately, we decide whether something fits or not. We cannot force or manipulate, but we can stroke, encourage, exhale and make space. Sometimes, clothes that you see in the shop, clothes made by someone else, don’t fit properly and they make you uncomfortable. Although the end result is the same, it’s still better to make your own from scratch, rather than taking something off the rack that you might not like as much.
Because my birthday falls in August, often the hottest month of the year in England, I spend most of my life under the logical impression that I was born in the summer. It becomes a fundamental belief, something I hold on to as a type of validation of who I am, who I always was and who I will always be. The concept grounds me somehow, providing a context for my existence where none, save for a few scribbled notes on a social worker’s pad, exists. In my child’s imagination I create a make-believe memory of my biological mother in the last few weeks of her pregnancy, heavy and sweating, constantly fanning herself against the punishing sun and standing in a garden on a sticky summer evening, belly swollen, desperate for respite from the heat. It is not until I am approaching my thirty-third birthday, and have returned to live in South Africa, the country of my birth, that it strikes me that I am not in fact a summer baby. August, in South Africa, signals the beginning of the end of winter. The realisation hits me one frigid Johannesburg morning in July while preparing to leave for work, wrapping myself up against the crisp pre-dawn bite and watching my breath create misty ghosts in the morning air. Suddenly, something I have held on to my whole life is torn asunder. Although it is not the first time I am forced to reframe my beliefs of how I came to be in the world, it unseats and unsettles me for a long time. Adoption, I have found, is like that. It creates gaps for assumptions, false imaginings and, ultimately, disappointments.
As a child, my birthday becomes synonymous with end of the school summer term, coordinating my birthday party around friends’ family holidays and being able to swim in Granny’s pool again. I come to equate other things with my birthday too. The annual return of three glorious hours of children’s television programming every morning for two months during the summer. Why Don’t You? is a real favourite. ‘Why don’t you switch off your TV set and do something less boring instead!’ A strange choice of lyrics for the theme tune to a children’s TV show, but we stay glued to the box nonetheless, often for hours afterwards until, one day in complete exasperation at our continued inertia, my mother removes the fuse from the television plug, locks it away in her bedroom and drives off to work, leaving us staring and mute at a purely ornamental television set. My brother Adam becomes my absolute hero that day when he deftly removes the fuse from the kitchen kettle, inserts it in the TV plug and lights up the fool’s lantern again before my mother has even made it out of the driveway.
Other things that signal the advent of my birthday are getting all sweaty and sticky when strawberry picking (although the magic is taken out of it somewhat the day I realise we must pay for what we have picked, and that we are not simply the beneficiaries