Wednesday May 18th 2005.
It was something to do with the piano man. Don’t ask me why there was a connection in my mind between a man with no memory found wet, speechless and stumbling along a beach in Kent and my lost daughter or how it came about. Some things are far too deep to go fishing on the best day of the year. That was it of course, the date. May 18th. For one thing, it is officially the most wonderful, day of any year in the northern hemisphere. There is a mathematical formula to prove this fact and it’s a long one that should be written in chalk on a proper blackboard for geniuses to argue over. A day when we are filled with hope and the belief that all our new projects will really work. Apparently, this is the exact moment in calendar terms to give up smoking and you will magically stay stopped for longer or even forever. Perhaps you could lie in wait for your cherished one, the lover who might doubt your sanity and fill the house with flowers and candles up the stairway without any fire risk or the awful realisation that one day both of you will be old and all your passion will be like a smutty joke. What would the equivalent of today be in New Zealand I wonder? Probably our worst day here – mathematically speaking – which is January 24th. Stay in bed on that day if you live in Europe or America, failing that, buy a plane ticket for Asia or the Antipodes. But scientists, like holy men, are not always right, however pure their motives.
If you haven’t heard of the piano man, this is his story. A few weeks ago, he was found wet and well-dressed wandering about in a way which caused concern. What I love about his discovery is the way it points towards society as a place that can really show a duty of care. Here was a man who refused to speak, wasn’t bothering anybody, had cut all the labels out of his clothes, did not have possession of any ID and must have shown some signs of distress. He was soaking wet, under forty and he was rescued. You could say that he didn’t need to be rescued and taken in. If he had been allowed to continue walking and thinking and playing music in his head, eventually, in the cold of the dawn, all the pain that took his memory away might have begun to subside. Nevertheless, once he was inside the mental institution, warm and dry, he drew a grand piano. After that, they let him play on the hospital piano which is in the chapel and not in the patients’ area, due, I suppose, to problems with violence towards musical instruments. The silent man played well enough for some people to conclude that he may have been a professional pianist. But still, no one knows who he is. This is the thing. No one knows who my daughter is - not her or me or my other two children or anyone else. She's twenty-three and this is all a big secret. We stumble about in the rain until someone finds us. I want to find her - and if she doesn't want to know me, then that's fine. I have already been through that realisation when she turned eighteen and wasn't knocking my door down. Just because I want to see her, does not mean that she feels the same way. I know all that.
It's weird writing this, for anyone to see, because I don't talk about her much to strangers, and over the years it has become less and less because I don’t drink as much as I used to and also the spontaneous crying has all but dried up. If I did say anything, I always explained that I lost her. This is not because she is dead, or even really lost. But for all I know, she could be. I have a missing person’s file in my life and she is the one on it and you don’t need more than that to make it the most powerful list in your life. There are many stories of men who find out, later on in life, that they have children they never knew they had. They have had no time to think about their child in the intervening years, and so the impact must be largely surprise – leveled with fear, love or even loathing. It’s impossible to gauge what effects the ripples of the adult offspring’s appearance might make in their pond.
But this is never going to happen to a woman. A woman can’t have children without knowing it unless she is in a coma, and after that, when she wakes up, people will tell her what happened. We are at the height of awareness all the way through to every moment of pregnancy and childbirth. Must be nature’s way of making sure we take care to remember it all. I remember the snuffling of my little girl at my nipples until she was six months old. When I tried to breast-feed my subsequent children, I could not. It was as though my milk had dried up with grief. That might sound sentimental but then, maybe you never lost a child.
I did not willingly ‘give her away’ to another, better family. Nor was she ‘taken from me’ in any forced sense of the word. I did not ‘put her up for adoption’ as of I’d placed her on a shelf for some other passing woman to pick up. There were plenty of people who wanted me to do what I did, but that didn’t make it a noble or beautiful gesture. Something about the messy chaos of my life as a twenty-one year old loser meant that I was predisposed to losing things. Photographs, friends, dignity, sanity, home and a daughter. In that order. Was it post-natal depression? In 1982 I don’t think anyone would have given a second thought to that idea. I knew someone who suffered from that particular diagnosis in 1988 when they were presumably more enlightened about these things and they fried her brains with electricity until she couldn’t remember things properly so maybe I got off lightly.
After an initial three hour search on the web, I found out that it is still hard to trace an adoptive person – even if they are adult – and despite the fact that I thought the law had been changed. I can see the need for protection. Personal privacy, psychopathic parents (I know at least two), more separation and distance from the past for the adoptive parents. But on the other hand, surely every mother has a right to know what name their child now has, even if she is not allowed any access to them.
