A troubled man’s search for his unknown father reveals the truth of his parents’ relationship.
Max Langstone, thirty-three, fixates on his tough background, sure he’s been dealt a dud hand. When his estranged mother dies and the tragic truth about his parents’ short, poignant, relationship unfolds, he’s saddened, but resolves to find his unknown father. By chance, his old lover reappears and helps him, but both try to deny their smouldering love affair.
The beginning
Prologue
When I reached the age of thirty-one, my mother married for the first time, and it was then that I realised the opinions and views I had of my parents that I’d had to that time were plain wrong. To understand how I reached such incorrect beliefs, I thought I’d try to recall and write down the times and events in my past that influenced my previous conclusions. At first, I did this as an exercise to answer my own persistent questions and ease my mental anguish, but as I progressed and my life started to unfold in a way I had never expected, I continued to chronicle the disturbing and uplifting events I’d experienced. This is not a biography, that would be boring, but a recollection of the significant life-changing episodes in my life.
Max Langstone
My early memories
I can never be sure when my indifference to my mother started. In an irrational mood, I blame it on my birth. A bad forceps delivery, I’m told, that left me with birthmarks for the rest of my life, or so my vanity tells me. It wasn’t Mum’s fault, of that I’m sure, but somewhere, lodged deep in the temporal lobe of my brain is a negative, illogical memory that kicked in whenever I thought of her.
It’s not that I didn’t love her, or that I thought she didn’t love me, only that from when I could first remember, she wasn’t much around. She’d dress me, give me breakfast, then rush out of the small apartment we lived in to go to work at the local supermarket, leaving me in the care of Sally, who I’ll always remember as being kind and fun. Mum came home to give me my tea, tuck me up in bed, and dash back to the supermarket, where she’d fill shelves while I slept, watched over by a babysitter.
There were days when we had only bread and water to eat and drink, days when it was so bitterly cold, we walked around our flat wearing coats, scarves, gloves and with several layers of clothing underneath. Days when our breath almost froze in front of us. ‘It doesn’t work,’ Mum would say when I asked why we had no heating. Later, I realised we were poor, and she didn’t have enough money to turn the heating on.
I was under ten at the time – about twenty-two years ago – and most of my memories of that time are vague and hazy. But I remember those cold days and the hungry days, and the days when Mum would sit on one of the three rickety wooden chairs in the kitchen with a pile of bills on the table in front of her and cry. It could have been tiredness, the cold, hunger, or the miserable flat we lived in: a dismal dwelling above a corner shop in Hammersmith, London. But I guess it was money or lack of it, that’d made her break down and cry. She worked so hard to make ends meet; those times when the pot was empty brought her to her knees...
