Motherlove (11 page)

He came through from the conservatory, a wet towel round his shoulders.

‘Explain about Kelly's car,' ordered Mandy.

He smiled and held up placatory hands. ‘It's at Darnley's garage, Kelly. I arranged for them to come and take it. Urgent repairs.'

‘But I can't afford—'

‘Don't worry about that. I'm dealing with it. Be honest, Kelly, it's not safe, is it? How you got here without killing yourself, God knows. I didn't want to see you driving off in it. The garage is going sort out the major problems. Can't guarantee they'll fix every rattle, but—'

‘How long are they going to be? I need it. It's all right really. I know how to keep it going.'

‘I'm not letting you loose in it, the way it is. Don't worry, we're not holding you prisoner. The garage can work on it while you're gone, and it will be ready when you come back to pick your mother up. And in the meantime, you can take Mandy's Corsa.'

‘No.'

‘Yes,' insisted Roger, with Mandy nodding enthusiastic approval.

She would have refused if it hadn't been too late. But the Astra was gone, probably already disembowelled over some pit and she couldn't wait forever. Joe couldn't be left in charge of Carregwen indefinitely. A few days and then she'd need to order more feed. And she had two jobs to get back to.

She stayed for breakfast in the conservatory, and reassured herself that Roz had slept well and that Mandy knew exactly what to do with all the medications and the dietary instructions, then she let Roger escort her to the double garage where her new chariot awaited her. Electric windows, air conditioning, a CD player and Sat Nav. It felt like sitting at the controls of a spaceship. She hadn't been in a car like this since taking her test.

‘Don't worry about a thing,' Roger assured her, tapping on the sunroof as she started the engine and waited for the growls, grinding and whines that she associated with internal combustion. They didn't come. It felt like cheating, letting the car roll softly out onto the gravel. Not real driving at all – nothing to fight. She manoeuvred it onto the drive, just to convince Roger she could handle it, then she stopped to say goodbye.

‘You know how everything works? Lights there. Windscreen wiper. Sat Nav.' Roger leaned in to adjust it. ‘It's on. Do you want me to show you how to use it?'

Kelly laughed. ‘I'll manage. I usually get there in the end.'

‘You always will, Kelly. Look, phone charger; you'll keep in touch, won't you?'

‘Of course. Every day. Not that I don't trust you.'

He grinned. ‘Don't worry, we'll mind her like our own.'

She waved, he waved. She headed down the drive, then sat back and began to get the feel of the ridiculously well-appointed car.

It was the Sat Nav that did it. Kelly navigated by instinct and memory; it had always worked in the past. But the Sat Nav on the Corsa's dashboard kept showing her the world that lay before her, the junctions, the forks, the crossroads. Constant temptations. She was heading north for the M4, and there on the map was the motorway running west for home. And running east. East to the M25 and the home counties, a world she knew nothing about but that was, in a sense, her birthright.

She pulled into a lay-by before the motorway and sat gazing at the map, zooming in, zooming out. East to London, the M25 and the satellite towns that clustered round the capital. Lyford. Turn off at that junction, the Sat Nav invited her; drive the twenty odd miles to Lyford and Stapledon General Hospital where, according to her birth certificate, she had been born. The hospital where labels had been switched.

Kelly nibbled the houmous and sun-dried tomato ciabatta that Mandy had given her. Maybe Joe could manage for another day or two. And she was owed some leave. They'd understand at work. Her mother was ill, after all. She looked again at the map, spreading its motorway tentacles out to her, as she sat in a car that would happily cruise anywhere, without being kicked or tickled into obedience. Fate, surely. How could she refuse?

She drove to the M4 and turned east.

Lyford. An urban sprawl, too big to be a mere town, but too formless, too lacking in identity to be a city. Too close to London to have any regional significance, and just too far out to share the capital's glamour. High rise blocks and concrete fly-overs superimposed on defunct car plants and forgotten gas works. Mushrooming housing estates and small-scale industrial complexes spilling out from a civic centre that had once had delusions of Art Deco style and that now nursed its pedestrian zoning under the shadow of a vast shopping centre and multi-storey car park. Kelly noticed narrow Victorian lanes and a gracious Medieval church as she strolled round the shopping precinct, wondering what it would have been like to have been brought up here. This was her place of birth but she felt no link to it. She'd been a couple of weeks old when she had left it behind.

Kelly had no affinity with towns, but she wasn't intimidated by them either. They were, to her, rather sad. Studying the well-stocked contents of the shops, reading the police notices seeking witnesses to a murder outside the Crown and Anchor, and chatting with the sellers of
The
Big Issue
, she thought that, all things considered, fate had dealt kindly with her by taking her from here.

She asked in one shop for directions to the hospital and was sent to WHSmith's for a street map, but as that seemed a waste of money she returned to the car park where she had left the Corsa and tried the Sat Nav. So easy. Just follow the fly-over, then take the Stapledon link road past the football ground.

Lyford and Stapledon General Hospital. 1960s panelling in an ocean of tarmac. Busy, busy, busy. The sort of place where everyone was so rushed, the workload so heavy that surely mistakes could happen. Labels could accidentally be switched.

Kelly walked in through the glass sliding doors into the foyer milling with elderly hobblers, pregnant women looking hopefully for vacant seats, wan-faced children kicking concrete pillars, legs in plaster protruding from wheelchairs like battering rams, reluctant visitors buying flowers and magazines.

A man and two women staffed the reception desk, directing, snapping, pointing, furiously entering data into keyboards like a champion team at an advanced level of Space Invaders. Kelly mingled with others waiting for attention – there was no queue, just a mêlée of anxiety and irritation. She let others squeeze in before her. She had no urgent illness. Finally, she was face-to-face with one of the women at the desk, with sharp, pinched lips, determined not to give an inch to the barbarians. Her badge said Julie. She didn't look like a Julie. A Cynthia or a Selina maybe. Something serpentine.

‘Any chance you can help me? I was born here, in 1990, and I want to speak to someone about it. Do you keep the records? Is there someone I can talk to?'

Julie stared at her as if she could see the bulge of a suicide belt under Kelly's jacket. ‘What do you mean, records? You want your birth certificate?'

‘No, I've got that.' Whatever paperwork Roz had started with had long ago been lost, but there had been some reason, later, why she had had to apply for a copy. After leaving Luke; one of Roz's first steps alone into the world of adult responsibility. Kelly could still remember her mother opening the envelope, expecting some sort of official reprimand, and then laughing with relief as the certificate emerged. Date, name, mother's name. No father's name, but that had never been an issue. Place: Lyford and Stapledon Hospital.

‘There were problems when I was born,' she continued, watching Julie's eyes skirt past her towards the crowd behind.

‘I don't understand. What do you mean by problems?'

‘Stuff, you know. Do you keep records that far back? I just want to ask someone what happened exactly.'

A slight ripple of relief. This was outside reception business; a problem Julie could legitimately pass on to someone else. She spun round in her swivel chair and picked up a phone. ‘I have someone here wanting to speak…' Her voice sank to a discreet whisper, drowned out by the crowds. Kelly could hear, ‘Birth… problems… issues.'

Julie swivelled round again, picked up a pen and wrote quickly on a pad. ‘Down the corridor, take the lifts to the second floor, first left and ask at the desk for Mr. Manderville. Thank you.' She brushed Kelly aside.

Kelly looked at the paper in her hand. Manderville. Right. That was a start.

Mr Manderville was an administrator. Jowly and unsmiling. He wore a suit, an aura of impatience, and an expression of extreme wariness. ‘Miss Sheldon, is it? Yes. You have a query, I gather, about old records? I'm not sure that we can be of any help to you. Records are, of course highly confidential, although if they pertain to yourself, the Freedom of Information Act may allow—'

‘Oh sure, it's just about me,' said Kelly, looking round his office which was plush, any sign of activity organised into neat clipped piles. ‘I'll tell you what it is. I was born here. I've got the certificate – March 13th, 1990. But it turns out that something went wrong.'

Before she could say more, she could sense a visor coming down, the wagons circling. ‘I can assure you, Miss Sheldon, that if any problems arose during a birth, they would have been dealt with in an entirely professional manner. Complications can and do arise, of course, but the hospital cannot be held liable in any way without serious proof of malpractice. Do you have any reason to believe that the medical staff attending your mother were remiss in any way?'

‘No, no. Nothing like that. Nothing wrong with the birth. Mum said the staff were very kind.' She felt his defences wobbling, so she added, ‘Very professional.'

He sank back in his chair, fingers pressed together, nodding and frowning gently to show that he was willing to listen. For a couple of minutes at least.

‘No, it's not about the birth, exactly,' she went on. ‘It's just that Mum says a nurse told her labels had been mixed up. Labels on the babies. Wrong babies with the wrong mums.'

That floored him. He sat up again, shoulders broadening before her eyes, ready to charge. ‘Absolutely impossible, Miss Sheldon. Your mother must have misunderstood. Believe me, there is no possibility that such a mistake could have occurred. We take the utmost care—'

‘This was twenty-two years ago,' she reminded him. ‘I don't suppose you were working here then. Things could have been different.'

‘You're quite right, Miss Sheldon, I was not employed at the hospital twenty-one years ago and not in any way responsible for any mistakes even if they had occurred. But I assure you the hospital would not have allowed such mistakes to happen even then. Procedures were in place. Errors, however improbable, would have been noticed and rectified immediately. Whatever your mother believes she heard, I assure you no nurse would have told her any such thing.' A twitch, resembling a smile, appeared at the corner of his mouth. He was sure here. Not confident about the switching of labels maybe, but confident that no nurse would have been fool enough to confess the mistake to a mother on the ward. His smile broadened. Perhaps he thought he was looking avuncular and reassuring. ‘I believe that nursing mothers can be a little sensitive. Nervous. Quite understandable of course. Bearing a child for all those months and then the trauma of the birth itself. Very easy for the imagination to run riot. We find that many mothers suspect terrible illnesses, deformities, all manner of horrors. Our nurses do a fine job in reassuring them.' He didn't know what he was talking about, Kelly could tell, but he was an expert at talking without meaning.

There were few people that Kelly truly disliked, but she suspected Mr Manderville was going to be one of them. He was verbally hustling her aside, and she hadn't come all this way to be hustled.

‘Yes, well, the thing is, it's all true,' she said. ‘We've had tests done, DNA and all that, and they prove I really am not my mother's daughter. Not genetically. So that is why I want to see the hospital records and find out how the babies came to be swapped. She's sick, you see, my mum. Diabetes and now kidney trouble, and it turns out I can't give her a kidney because I'm not genetically related. But someone else is, and I want to know who. All you need to do is give me the names of other babies, girls anyway, born at the same time, in the same ward, and then we can figure out who got mixed up with who.' She smiled brightly at him, watching his jowls quiver. ‘That's all.'

‘Quite impossible, Miss Sheldon,' he replied, a thin reedy note entering his voice. ‘Such mistakes…unthinkable. There will be another explanation. Lyford and Stapledon General cannot be held in any way responsible…'

Kelly stood under the cantilevered canopy at the hospital entrance, watching grey clouds build up over the equally grey roofs of Lyford. The hospital and its management, terrified of any hint of legal culpability and compensation pay-outs, had slammed down the shutters, and pulled up the drawbridge, ready to man the battlements to the bitter end. In other words, they were not going to raise a little finger to help her. Well then.

Kelly was a tolerant girl, not easily provoked, but when she felt she had a just cause, she could be a terrier sinking her teeth in. If the hospital refused to give her the information she needed, she would find it by other means, and she knew just how to do it.