The Same Eyebrows
The policeman’s fingers hooked up my nostrils woke me. My arms flung in the air. He told me to get up - the last station was approaching.
Six days earlier, I’d decided that it was time for me to search for my biological father, or as I called him my spunk dad. On my mothers death bed, she told me the man I knew as my father wasn’t really my father, that she had married another man when she was 17 and this man was actually my father. She showed me one photograph of him and told me his name. Then she passed on. I cried.
The ward manager at the hospital I worked in gave me a week’s compassionate leave. Two days after the funeral, I packed my bag and headed for Paddington Station. I had the photograph of my father, his name, and an address that my great Auntie gave me at the funeral. It was the University of Cardiff. This was where my aunt told me that he last worked.
I arrived at Cardiff Central just over two hours later. The journey was pleasant enough, but I couldn’t help thinking about what he looked like, what colour his hair was, whether I looked anything like him. Was he tall? Was he fat? Was he still alive? Was he well educated? Did I have any half brothers and sisters? The questions chugged along in rhythm with the train.
I was hungry when I left the station; the sky was clear and blue, the air was crisp. I pulled my shades off my head and placed them on my nose, and strode towards the closest coffee shop I could find. I was dying for a skinny soya latte. The caffeine on the train was like drinking hot flat cheap cola. I needed my proper fix. It was just past eleven; maybe I could treat myself to a muffin, or a pain au chocolate. I decided at the lovely coffee number 1, that it was time for me to have
something sweet, something to keep me going. I had been on a diet before my mother died, but when I saw her emaciated figure, I figured what the hell, and I’ll eat what I want to when I want to. So I ordered a full fat latte and had a large double choc chip muffin.
God I miss my mother, even though we fell out during my late twenties. She was always the daughter in the relationship, I was the mother, looking out for her, telling her off, bending over backwards, but what really got me during this period was that she would change roles when it suited her. She would tell me off for drinking and smoking “Your
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