When he woke, it was six thirty and he was late for his run. A dream was still fresh in his mind. He had dreamed of the house in Brampton. The walls of the house had been open, like a model nativity scene or a doll’s house. The animals had walked freely inside and out. Daniel was grown in the dream, but still living there, caring for the animals. Minnie was outside somewhere, but he couldn’t see or hear her.
In her kitchen, he had found a lamb: asleep, breathing audible contented snores, its abdomen rising and falling, and a gentle smile on its lips. Daniel had bent and carried the lamb outside, where bright sunshine was splitting the trees.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Daniel could still remember the tangible weight of the lamb in his hands and the warmth of its thin fleece.
After breakfast he checked his emails, then returned Cunningham’s call and agreed that the farm could be sold. Daniel spoke very quietly when he said the words, in case he changed his mind. It was time to sell the house, he decided. He needed to move on. Perhaps when the house was gone, he would be free of regret. He would think about her no more.
26
Minnie had wanted to drive him to university, but Daniel knew that she was anxious about it. In the end he got the train to Sheffield, allowing her to drive him only as far as Carlisle. Blitz had whimpered all the way in the car, and then Minnie’s eyes glassed over with tears when they reached the platform.
‘Mam, I’ll be back in ten weeks. Christmas is in ten weeks.’
‘I know, love,’ she’d said, reaching up to hold his face in both hands. ‘It seems like such a long time, and the time I’ve had with you now seems too short. I can’t quite believe it.’
It was a warm day. Blitz was straining on his lead, turning to the sounds of people and trains. Daniel smelled the diesel and felt a brief frightened thrill at the thought of leaving Brampton and living in a city again. He watched Minnie putting a knuckle to her eye.
‘Are you going to be OK?’ he asked.
She heaved a sigh and beamed at him, her cheeks pink. ‘I’ll be just grand. You make sure and enjoy yourself. Call me once in a while so I know you’re alive and not taken to drink or drugs.’ She laughed, but Daniel could see the sheen come to her eyes again.
‘Will you call me?’ he asked.
‘Try and stop me.’
He smiled, chin down to his chest. He wanted to leave now, but it was a few minutes until his train. Leaving her was harder than he had imagined and now he wished that he had said goodbye at the farm. Part of him worried that she would be lonely, part of him was filled with apprehension for himself. Some childish part of him did not want to go. He didn’t know anyone who had been to university: he didn’t know what to expect.
‘And don’t start thinking you’re not worthy,’ she said, as if she had been reading his mind again. Her eyes split with mirth and wisdom. ‘All you needed was this one chance. Take it and show them all just what you’re made of.’
He held her, bending down to squeeze her, feeling her body yield to him. Blitz yelped and jumped on them, trying to break them up.
‘You’re nothing but a jealous fool,’ she derided Blitz, roughly patting his head.
It was time. Daniel had smiled, kissed her wet cheek, stroked Blitz’s wary ear, and then he was gone.
At Sheffield University, although most of the students he became friends with were a year older than he was, having had gap years abroad, Daniel still felt strangely older than they were. He joined the football team and also a running club and would go out drinking with friends from both. Carol-Ann stayed in Brampton and he saw her occasionally during term and during the holidays when he went back to the farm, but he slept with other girls at university and said nothing to Carol-Ann, who knew him well enough not to ask.
One of the girls he slept with got pregnant and then had an abortion, early in his second year. He was living in a shared flat on the Ecclesall Road at the time, and had gone along with her to Danum Lodge in Doncaster to get the procedure done. They had both been frightened and afterwards she had bled and been in pain. He had taken care of her but after a few weeks it was as if it had never happened.
Daniel was not sure if it was this which caused him to begin thinking about his mother again – his real mother – but shortly before his second-year law exams, he called Newcastle Social Work Department and asked to speak to Tricia. He was told that she had left the department in 1989.
Daniel remembered being told that he would have the right to trace his mother when he was eighteen. Although she was dead, he still wanted to know how she died and if there was a memorial. He decided he would visit Newcastle again, to see what he could find out about his mother’s death. Some part of him wanted to return. He didn’t tell Minnie what he was doing – knowing that it would upset her too much. He didn’t want to hurt Minnie, but away from Brampton he felt more able to make the call. He called social services back three times, before he managed to speak to someone who could help him.
‘Daniel Hunter, did you say?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And your birth mother was Samantha. You were adopted in 1988 to Minnie Florence Flynn?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
The social worker was called Margaret Bentley. She sounded exhausted, as if the very words she spoke cost her precious energy.
‘All I can find on your mother is notes from the drugs team, but nothing recent … ’
‘It’s all right, I know she’s dead. I just want to know how she died, ’n’ maybe find out if there’s a memorial. I know she was cremated.’
‘I’m sorry, we don’t keep that information, but you could ask at the register office in Newcastle. They’d have her death certificate. The council would tell you where she was cremated and if there’s a memorial … ’
‘Well … the last report from the drugs team, was it bad?’
‘We’re not really supposed to give out that kind of information.’
‘You’re not tellin’ me anything I don’t know, like,’ Daniel said. ‘I knew me mam took drugs. It’s just … ’
‘Well, this last report was very good. She was clean.’
‘Really, when was that?’
‘1988, same year you were adopted.’
‘Thank you,’ said Daniel and hung up.
He thought about his last meeting with his mother; the way she had struggled to face what was happening. He wondered if she had tried to get clean for him; if losing him had scared her away from the drugs. But if she hadn’t overdosed, Daniel wondered why she had died so young. He thought of the men in her life and pressed his teeth together.
He had revision to do, but he got up the next morning and took the train to Newcastle. Returning was a strange joy. As the train pulled in, he looked north towards the Cowgate estates. The city still seemed to be under his fingernails and in between his toes. He walked differently when he was here: he kept his head down and his hands in his pockets, but he knew instinctively where to go. He had not been in Newcastle since the day that Minnie adopted him. He felt a delicious, conflicted thrill, as if he was trespassing, but at home.
He didn’t know where the register office was, but he asked at the central library. It was on Surrey Street and he went straight there. He had written down his mother’s full name and date of birth as he remembered it.
The register office was a Victorian building of pale, unblasted sandstone. It seemed to have shouldered the grime of decades with appropriate resignation. The hallways were institutional, civic, minimally clean. Daniel felt slightly inhibited as he walked to the desk. It reminded him of his first visit to the university library; his first tutorial, before he learned that he did know enough and had a right to be there. He was wearing a long-sleeved football shirt and jeans. He stopped on the steps to smooth back his hair, which was getting long at the front and starting to fall into his eyes. Inside he went to the gents, where he tucked in then untucked his shirt. While he waited in line, he wondered at the source of his anxiety: whether it was because he was about to query the dead, or because he had been abandoned by the dead.