In Search of Adam. Caroline Smailes

They penetrated to my soul.

       At night.

       As I closed my eyes in the cold darkness of my room.

       My mother appeared and her eyes warmed me.

       I longed for my mother. My precious mother.

       As I closed my eyes.

       In my darkness.

       My mother.

       Behind her a signpost.

       Pointing.

       Four different directions.

       All leading to Adam.

       All searching for Adam.

      Her bag of secrets.

      Her bag of her. Still buried. Untouched. Waiting. Waiting for her return.

      In the year that followed my mother’s death, my father entertained many women. I would be sent to my room, as he played his records, smoked his cigarettes and drank from cold tin cans. Lionel Ritchie would float through my floorboards. He would dance around my room. I hated his voice. I hated my father’s music. I hated those women who giggled and groaned in my mother’s front room.

      The women came and went. Good riddance.

      But. But then one woman started coming around more and more and more. It was in December 1980. Just over eight months after my mother went away. I didn’t take much notice at first. Thought she’d be replaced. Like the others. My father liked to have a different woman to visit. A different woman every night. Then. Then she started coming back. More and more. She was in my mother’s house every day. Every night. Her voice was squeakier and her groans were louder than the rest. She called my father babe and she slept in my mother’s bed. She slept under my mother’s purple duvet. She slept on my mother’s sheets.

      She was introduced to me.

      She was called Rita. Jude pet, come and say hello te Miss North East 1981. Jude meet Reta. I didn’t understand my father’s words. He was smiling. He was excited. Rita’s hair was bleached white and she wore short skirts. Her thighs were really fat and dimply. She wore blue mascara. It clogged on her lashes. Her lips were ruby red and her skin was orange.

       She was a monster.

      She talked of sunbeds, fake tan and keep-fit videos. She was fat and ugly. She wasn’t like my mother.

      My father liked Rita. She kept her toothbrush in our bathroom and within the year after my mother’s death, Rita would walk around my mother’s house without any clothes on. Her breasts were saggy and her nipples were huge. She was hairy. Black hairy. She was scary. She wibble wobbled about. Her fat wibble wobbled about. She smoked cigarettes. Between twenty and twenty-four a day. She drank out of tin beer cans. One two three four five. Sometimes she would wake me in the night. She’d be giggling. Cackling. Squealing. Falling downstairs. Or. Coming into my room. I didn’t like her coming into my room. She banged the door. She cackled. She breathed her nasty smell into my room. Onto my things. I didn’t like Rita. She didn’t smell very nice and her eyes didn’t sparkle.

      I missed my mother. As I curled up in bed. I covered my ears so that I couldn’t hear them. I thought of my mother’s ocean eyes. I longed to be with her. Maybe. Maybe one morning I wouldn’t wake up. I’d just go away. I’d go off looking for an Adam too. If I was really lucky. If I wished and wished and wished. Then just maybe I’d wake up in my mother’s arms. She’d have come back for me. If my mother wrapped her thin arms around me. If she pulled me tightly to her. Then. Then I’d be safe and nothing else would matter.

      I could sleep. I looked forward to bed. It was the waking that destroyed me.

       1981

      Two years, six months and twenty-one days before I was born, my parents moved to New Lymouth. From a block of flats that were as high as a giant. My mother’s house was brand new. It was shiny. Spick and span. There were two new estates being built in New Lymouth. The housing estate that I was to live on and another one. They each had four parallel streets and formed a perfect square on either side of the main road.

      On this Coast Road, there were The Shops. Dewstep Butchers was also New Lymouth Post Office and displayed a smiling pig’s head in the window. New Lymouth Primary School. My primary school. Was a perfect E-shaped grey building with a flat roof. Mrs Hodgson (Number 2) told Rita that many cuckoos were put in nests on that roof. I didn’t understand. New Lymouth Library was on the Coast Road too. It was a rectangle. Like a shoe box. Inside the library there were eighty-seven Mills and Boon novels and three Roald Dahl books. There were signs everywhere. ‘Absolute silence at all times’. The grumpy librarian liked to read her Introducing Machine Knitting magazine. I read the first chapter of Danny Champion of the World twenty-seven times. I read all of Matilda and The Twits. Thirteen times each.

      Brian’s Newsagents stretched across 127-135 Coast Road. Inside the shop I heard gossip being tittled and tattled, as I stood looking at the jars of delicious sweets.

      Rhubarb and Custard. Chocolate Raisins. White Gems. Aniseed balls. Coconut Mushrooms. Brown Gems. Cola Cubes. Pear drops. Cherry Lips. Licorice Comfits. Toffee Bonbons. Jelly Beans. Edinburgh Rock. Pontefract Cakes. Pineapple Chunks. Sweet Peanuts. Scented Satins. Sherbet Pips. Midget Gems. Sweet Tobacco. Chocolate Peanuts. Toasted Teacakes. Rainbow Crystals. Sour Apples. Lemon Bonbons.

      Unable to decide. I wished that I had the courage to ask for one from every one of the twenty-five jars.

      On the other side of the Coast Road there were five really big houses. My class teacher Mrs Ellis and Mrs Hughes the local librarian lived in two of them. I didn’t know who else lived there. The children in those houses didn’t go to New Lymouth Primary School with me. The children in those houses didn’t play foxes and hounds around the estate with us local bairns. I walked down that road on my way to school. I peered into those large houses. I stopped walking to stare in. I tried to look past the fresh flowers in the window and I thought about all the nice smelling things that would live inside.

      The Coast Road ran a slope from New Lymouth down to the Lymouth seaside. The estate that I lived on was at the top of the hill. As the road continued up, it travelled through a number of similar estates and villages. Signs warned drivers when they were leaving one village and arriving in another. My father said that the nearer yee lived to the coast, then the richer yee were. We lived about a ten-minute walk from the coast. I’m not quite sure what that made us. All I know is that when my mother was alive, my father talked about one day living on the sea front. The houses there were enormous. Five stories tall. They went up and up and up to the sky. You could stand on the roof and your head would be in the clouds. I thought that really important people lived in those kinds of houses. People like the Queen could live there. A hacky lad in my class at school lived in one, with about twenty other children. His mother and father hadn’t wanted him. They, the twenty other children and the hacky lad, lived in their mansion that looked out over the beautiful Lymouth cove. They were very very lucky. They must have been very very rich. They must have been the richest people in England.

      Lymouth Bay was shaped like a banana. There was a pier at each end and three caves lived in the cliff. Just over the left pier. Sat tall on a throne of rocks. There was a lighthouse. The most beautiful. The most elegant. A white lighthouse. Legend had it, that hundreds and thousands of small green men with orange hair lived in it. I never saw them. But. Paul Hodgson (Number 2) had seen one buying a quarter of toasted teacakes in Brian’s Newsagents.

      There were one hundred and