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saw her heel was filled with blood.
    ‘Oh, God, lift your foot up.’ I squatted down and
gently eased off the shoe.
    ‘That’s not my blood,’ she said immediately.
    ‘Well, who the hell’s is it?’ I didn’t mean to shout so
loudly.
    ‘Eeh, you’re nowt. I know what’s up wi’ you. What you
want is another baby.’
    ‘Jesus, Mum. You are so wrong. What would I want
with a baby when I’ve got you, eh?’
    In the end it was only a scab she’d knocked on her
ankle and nothing like as bad as it first looked. But pulling
her shoe on again I thought, Why am I doing this for you?
Who are you, anyway? And when I went back to the
post, there it was; my birth certificate. And she was right.
I’m not her daughter. I’m Sharon Anne Pilkington, from
London, from limbo.

    So my mother – real mother, birth mother, whatever
you call it – is from round here. What I was doing popping
out in London, God only knows. She must have run away.
I can understand that. Only it’s funny I ended up back in
the north. Perhaps it was policy then. Maybe they thought
babies with northern genes needed weaning on cow heel
and parkin. Or maybe they didn’t want me polluting
southern stock.
    I’d like to say I still can’t believe it, except that’s not
true. It kind of confirms a feeling I’ve always had, that
I never fitted in. When I was little and Dad was still alive,
on winter evenings we used to draw the curtains and all
sit round watching rubbish: Wheeltappers and Shunters , or Bullseye (super-smashing-great!). Mum’s favourite was The Golden Shot . I’d have a bottle of pop and a big bag
of toffees to pass round, and there’d be this crackly telephone
voice droning on: left, left, stop, right a bit, down, stop,
up a bit, up a bit, fire! Silence, groans or the rattle of coins
and cheers. Once Dad dropped his coconut mushrooms in
the excitement and there were white flakes in the rug for
weeks.
    Happy times, sort of, but even then I used to feel I
didn’t really belong. Somewhere out there was a Beatrix
Potter sort of a childhood that wasn’t like mine, dandelion
and burdock and Jim Bowen. I can remember thinking,
Is this all there is? So perhaps I should have stayed in
London. With my mother .
    I imagine her looking like Julie Christie, swinging her
bag and wearing a short belted mac and black eyeliner.
I bet she sat in cafes and looked soulful when she was
pregnant, with the rain lashing down outside and people hurrying past. Everyone’s always in a hurry in London.
Or maybe that’s just an image from some film I’ve seen. It
seems like a real memory, now I know the truth. Can you
do that, tune into other people’s memories?
    The next step, apparently is to contact the Adoption
Register. It’s a list of people who want to trace each other,
so if Jessie Pilkington wants to find me, she can.
    I’m sure she’ll want to. I can hardly wait.

    *

    People were moving as if they were under water,
ponderously. The air was thick and warm, you could tell
it had just been in someone else’s lungs. The beat of the
music pummelled your chest, and then the strobe started
up making everything look jerkily surreal. I closed my
eyes but the light cut straight through the lids.
    Fifty-five minutes to go till closing.
    I was in Krystal’s Nite Club in Wigan, and it was one
of those times where you think, I should have stayed in.
    Gilly Banks’ birthday and at least half the lower sixth
were there, maybe all of us; I hadn’t exchanged two words
with her since the beginning of term and I’d got an invite,
so she wasn’t being particularly discriminating with her
guest list. ‘+ friend ’ it had said on the gold-coloured
card, but I was on my own because I’d had a row with
mine.
    ‘Do you think we ought to try summat different?’ Paul
had said after the last session. When his hair’s all ruffled
from sex he looks almost too pretty, like something out
of a Boy Band. That