Free Hide and Seek by Amy Bird Page A

lips. She pulls me below the desk.
    “It’s no good,” I say, my lips close to her ear. “Our shoes are by the front door. If whoever it is goes to the top of the stairs, they’ll see.”
    We see a dim light around the edges of the door. More footsteps.
    “We should just abort,” I tell Ellie, beginning to stand up. “Jump out, hold the champagne.”
    Ellie pulls me down again.
    “Do you want to know who your father is or not?” she whispers into my ear.
    “I know who my father is!”
    “Then why are you here?”
    Because you talked me into it, I want to say. Because I’m weak. Because Max Reigate’s music haunts my dreams. But then, I haven’t told her about the dream. About the hammers I found there. So I stay silent.
    A toilet flushes. Then more footsteps. Then the light disappears. More footsteps and then a creak overhead. Then silence.
    We both exhale.
    In a moment, Ellie is back on her hands and knees again, facing the desk drawers.
    “You’re not carrying on!” I whisper, horrified. “We should get out of here – it’s too risky.”
    But the key fits the lock on the top drawer. Ellie slides it open. And the drawers underneath work too. We are in.
    I let Ellie rifle because there is only space for one of us – or two of them, including Leo. I shine the torch as she pulls out and replaces endless boring-looking typed papers in their segmented folders. No handwriting, no Max scrawls. I stop watching her, instead just watching the door, lest it start to open – the old horror movie worry of the slowly-turning door handle.
    Then Ellie grabs the torch from me. I look to see her shining it right to the back of the drawer.
    “There’s something here,” she whispers. “After the files stop.”
    She reaches in. Her hand returns with two pieces of paper clipped together. I hear her gasp. She flicks over to the other piece of paper.
    Then, “This is it, Will. I love you, remember.”
    She hands me the bits of paper. I’m expecting a letter, but I don’t get that. I get my birth certificate. With something else clipped to it.
    And I stare. I stare and I stare and I stare. I’m sinking into the floor as I look and then I’m rising, I’m rising, up and up and up the stairs to where the people who claim to be my parents sleep, and as I go I’m hitting the walls with my fists as hard as I can and I’m shouting:
    “Lies! Lies! Lies!”
    Because it’s true: the whole house, the whole fabric of it is made of lies. And I reach the top and there are lights going on, in the landing, in my brain, and I’m at the threshold of the door of their room and as soon as I see them I shout it:
    “I’m adopted? I’m ADOPTED?”
    And they’re cowering then beneath the covers as if that will cloak the years of deceit. I think they’re speaking maybe but there are no words that I can hear coming out of their lips because the only thing I can hear is blood rising, hammering in my ears, and the words in my head which I then say:
    “I’m thirty-four fucking years old – and you’ve never never told me I’m adopted? That you adopted me when I was four?”
    Again, they are moving their lips around and their tongues are doing something like speech but I don’t have to listen because they are not, they are NOT my parents. Neither of them.
    “Because apparently my parents are Max Reigate and Sophie Travers.” I thrust the birth certificate in their faces. There will be no more lies now, no more denials. “And you adopted me – you adopted me when I was four. So for the last thirty years when I thought you were looking out for me, taking care of my admin, you have been systematically lying to me!”
    And I throw the birth and adoption certificates down onto the bed and this woman, this Gillian, who has claimed to be my mother, who didn’t even have the foresight to have an affair with Max Reigate so that she could still be my mother, so that there could be some piece of truth in this whole horrible horrible