KATHERINE and JULIET

I first was presented with Katie when I was sixteen. I’d seen her all my life, watched her grow, but we’d never been introduced properly. I didn’t know who she was and it never mattered to me to find out. Why should it? I was as self-absorbed as any other sixteen year old, an only child, spoiled rotten and not a little full of my own self importance.
      I knew who I was — I was Juliet Newman — and the future was mine. I used to think things like that too.
      I don’t think that our meeting was planned. Not in the great-plan-of-the-ages tradition of things. I suspect that circumstances had simply had enough of keeping us apart and conspired against us; I turned a corner in my life and there she was. It was one of those chance conversations, one of those what-ifs that got a bit out of control. I made an off-hand remark and Mum responded.
      Some things are better remembered, clearer. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why my mother selected that particular moment or did the moment pick her? It obviously made some sort of sense to her at the time or, even if it didn’t make sense exactly, I suppose it felt like the right thing to do; it can get confusing.

      “I wish you weren’t my mum!” God, I could be so venomous back then. I fairly spat the words at her. Even when I’m at my angriest now — usually when my kids push me to that point and beyond — I just can’t seem to let rip the way I used to.
      “Would it make a difference if I was wasn’t?” Mum snapped back, a little too quickly but, of course it was too late by then — she was committed: “Couldn’t we be friends then rather than mother and child and stop trying to compete with each other all the time?”

      I didn’t think we did. Well, actually, yes, but I didn’t think it was something we did. I accepted it as who we were. It was how things were. It seemed to be how they had always been, the norm. We squabbled constantly and we were in many ways as bad as each other. But we still loved each other. That was taken as read. I never questioned that she might have been a bad mother. I never seriously considered that someone else might be able to fill her shoes better. They were her shoes and that was the end of it, frumpy and sensible. And smaller than mine. I could never get it. How come I have a mother who has feet smaller than mine?
      The world is round — more or less — Paris is in France most of the time, when it’s not in Texas and your mum’s your mum even when she’s disowning you for destroying some item of cherished clothing. That’s the law.

      “What do you mean, Mum?”
      “I mean what I said, Julie. Would we get on any better if we were friends, if I could just snap my fingers and stop being your mum?”
      “Don’t talk rubbish.”
      “It’s not rubbish.”
      And, the next thing, she’d snapped her fingers.

      I read a short story once — or maybe it was a Twilight Zone episode, I’m not sure — about this teenage kid who gets sat down one day and informed that he’s an alien, that his parents are both aliens too. Now they’ve been recalled. He discovers that the next day he has to leave who he thought he was behind along with the Earth, all his friends, his so-called-life, his goals and ambitions such as they were. Even his dog. They’ve been transferred to Alpha Centauri or some other god-forsaken place that won’t take pets. So, he says good-bye to his sweetheart without being able to tell her why he has to leave and he’s predictably bitter but he does what he’s told. After all, they may no longer be human, but they’re still his parents. Anyway, it all works out for the best because he meets up with his girl the next day on the spaceship — it seems she’s also an alien — and they all live happily ever after or whatever.

      “Who’s Katherine Millar, Mum? And why do you have her birth certificate?”
      “You are, Julie. You’re Katherine Millar. Look at the date of birth.”
      “I’m adopted?”
      “You’re adopted.”

      I might just as well have been looking at a spaceship in the basement. It made as much sense.

      In the bathroom later, after the tears — I really can’t remember why I was crying — I looked in the mirror and, for the first time in my life, saw Katie and was seen by her. God, she had red eyes.
      I’ve heard about identical twins, separated at birth, who meet as adults and, apart from looking alike — obviously — they find themselves working at the same kind of job, living in the same sort of house, married to similar-looking partners and with the self same dislike for mashed potatoes and mushy peas. If I hadn’t been me, who would I have been?
      Needless to say I had an onslaught of questions ready for… Mum. She’d been crying too — and every bit as badly as me. See what I mean about us always being in competition? I wonder if she knew any better than I what the tears were all about? I wanted to feel strange around her but I didn’t. That puzzled me. It was like the day I turned thirteen. Now here I was — a teenager — and I didn’t feel any different. It was just like having a sticky label peeled off and another stuck on in its place.

      She actually knew far less than I thought she might. She had never met my biological mother or father. She — so she said — had asked next to nothing about my background and little was volunteered. There was nothing really to tell.

      It was years later I decided to find out about my real mother. By this time I had made something of a life for myself. I had a job, a steady boyfriend I had no real intentions of marrying, a flat of my own and an ancient Mini Clubman that had seen better days. Don’t ask me why. I woke up one Saturday with a mother and father of a hangover and started pawing through the phone book for some agency to call.

      “Why did you change my name, Mum? Didn’t I look like a Kate?”
      “It wasn’t that. Your dad and I had tried for a baby many times before we decided to look into adoption. Juliet was the only name we’d ever agreed on for a girl. If you’d been a boy it was taken for granted that you’d be named after Dad so much so that the three times I did get pregnant we simply referred to the bump as Julie-Bob. You knew that much. I… we just needed some way to think of you as ours. It helped, Julie.”
      I’m sure it did. A name is more than simply a label — Brand X — it’s… it’s something to live up to, something to become. When you think of Kafka or Van Gogh or Mozart, the name says everything.

      Afterwards, I started looking at women in the street and thinking, You could be my real Mum, and men, actors, singers. Maybe I was a long-lost daughter of Elvis or something. I kept seeing my nose on other people, my eyes, my smile on faces where it didn’t belong.

      There is a small, meretricious museum in Prague whose singular claim to fame is that it has the head of Franz Kafka on display. When you go in there’s this case with two skulls in it, one large, one small, sharing a label, "Franz Kafka". Once questioned about the smaller skull, the curator replied, in a rather surprised tone, “Why, it's the skull of Kafka as a child.” It’s a joke — or sorts — but, after I found out I wasn’t who I thought I was, it somehow started to make a sense all of its own, the kind of point you could only get if you were an adoptee — or an alien or something.

      Actually, I was quite grateful to Mum for telling me, even if she didn’t mean to, not like it happened, because it immediately gave me a class to belong to. I was no longer a minority of one. I liked that. Before I went looking for my b-mum I sought out those like me. Now that was an experience and a half.
      It’s strange how learning something like this affects how you look at the rest of the world. Gradually I became aware of a seeping suspiciousness about everything. If my adopted parents had lied to me about this for so long and so well then who was to say that they hadn’t fibbed about other things? And who was to say that there weren’t other people lying to me too? It doesn’t sound very rational I know but where’s the rationale in giving up your baby daughter I wonder?

      I confessed all to Jeremy one drunken night after the end of our first year at uni. I told him I was adopted and he told me he was gay. It was an interesting moment. Actually I said I was ‘adapted’ but he said he knew what I meant.
      “I know exactly what you must feel like,” he said.

      “No way.”
      “Way.”
      “In what way?”
      “Well, I went on a march once, a couple of years back or maybe last summer, and I’m in the middle of everything surrounded by gays on all sides waving their banners and shouting when it struck me..?”
      “What? A brick?”
      “No. Be serious. It dawned on me that the only thing I had in common to the guy next to me and the guy next to him was my sexuality and that was it.” I didn’t get the point. So he explained: “You’ve been going along to all these groups and talking to others ‘like you’ but you’re not happy with any of it are you?”
      “No.”
      “Kinda frustrated?”
      “Kinda.”
      “Because you’re you. You’re not an adoptee any less or more than you’re a woman, a Virgo, a socialist, a Joni Mitchell fan and a right royal pain in the arse most of the time.”
      I got the point.

      I miss Jeremy. I wish he hadn’t killed himself. I know the coroner said it was “death by misadventure” but I know. Too wise for his own good. Too wise by far.

      I’ve never actually found my birth mother. I know I was born in Liverpool and I know she was called Phyllis Millar. It’s an unusual name — the first name at least — but I decided I’d let things lie until I could think of a good reason for finding her. I stopped off there once and expected it to feel like I’d come home but it was just a big empty city full of women in their forties who all resembled me. Actually, I think it was the internet that finally did my head in, all those saccharine letters to imaginary mums. (Why do the dads never get a look in?) I tried to write one — two or three times.
      I never could. So I stopped trying. Maybe I’ll get inspired one of these days.

      I always thought an identity was something secret. Everyone knows that Clark Kent was Superman’s secret identity but he wasn’t Clark Kent. He was Kal-El, or, at least he should’ve been. Sometimes I tell people my name’s Katie — or Kate, depending on my mood (I can be a right moody bitch) — and that’s who I am when I’m with them.
      I can even do a passable Cilla Black when I’ve had a couple. I now it sounds schizo but there’s actually something quite comfortable about there being another possible me to be.

      What do they say? “There, but for the grace of God…”
      Yeah right.