Shannon and I dutifully place our bags and coats in the plastic trays as if we’re going through airport security, except that this time they are stored in lockers instead of given back to us. Suddenly relieved of my outerwear, I feel bizarrely like I’m going to a party or a social function and have checked my coat in at the door. But then we are searched and patted and questioned, and then questioned again for over half an hour, and we fill in form after form and it no longer feels like a party but the worst journey ever, assailed by bureaucracy every step of the way, and a building sense of menace with every fresh signature.
Finally we are escorted down newly painted corridors with soft magnolia walls and pale-green doors. We could be in any respectable but anonymous motel. Except that from far away I can hear the desolate sound of a man crying. Shannon takes my hand. Presses it tightly, as if it is me who needs bolstering. I am shocked by the miracle of her. This strong, courageous woman. My daughter.
We are ushered into a visiting room. It has a low coffee table, four comfortable chairs and opaque blinds at the window that shut off the outside world.
‘Ewan will be along shortly,’ says our escort, a short, bearded man with thin greying hair greased back from his face, and eyes so close together they seem almost to be touching. He makes it sound as if we have just popped in for a cup of tea.
‘Oh God, I’m so nervous,’ says Shannon when the man has left us alone. ‘What if he hates me? He has every right to. I’m part of the reason he’s ended up here.’
‘Shannon, you were four years old,’ I remind her.
We’ve had this conversation so many times I dream about it in my sleep. Since making her momentous discovery five months ago, Shannon has read everything she can get her hands on about her family background, trying to understand. To my amazement and vast relief she has never blamed me for not telling her the full truth. She now admits that she always knew there was something very dark crouching in her past but she preferred not to confront it. She says she used to resent the way I encouraged her to talk about everything, the constant question, ‘How did that make you feel?’ Yet now she realizes why I did it. She remembers how, as a child, she used to have what she calls ‘blanks’. When something was too confusing or scary to cope with, she’d just check out of her own head and allow her body to go on to autopilot. By forcing her to relive those moments, analysing what was happening at the time, and why she was reacting the way she was, she gradually learned to anticipate the triggers and deal with them in a way that, she’s convinced, her little brother couldn’t.
‘He was frightened of everything when he first arrived,’ Sheila, Ewan’s adoptive mother, told us when we visited them yesterday morning at their neat, ordinary house on the outskirts of Coventry.
‘At first we worried that we’d taken on too much with him. I mean, we knew he’d had a difficult past. We knew there’d been abuse and neglect. We were prepared for that, or at least we thought we were. But we didn’t expect him to be scared of us. That came as a shock.’
‘So how long did it take him to settle in?’ Shannon asked and I knew she was itching to get to the bit where David was finally allowed to be happy.
‘It was a few weeks, I think, wasn’t it, love?’ Sheila turned to her husband, Neil, a heavyset man with a drinker’s deep-purple cheeks, who studied his hands the whole time we were visiting, as if he might find written there the answers he needed to know.
‘That’s right, a few weeks,’ he agreed, without looking up. ‘He was such a sad little scrap at first. Didn’t say anything, just followed you around the room with those big eyes. And then one day Sheila had been out somewhere, I forget where, the shops or something, and she came into the kitchen and he said “Mummy”. And he smiled. And that was that, really.’
‘I’ll never forget it,’ said Sheila, and her pale-blue eyes, which had been shot through with pink when we arrived, as if she’d just been crying, now filled once again with tears.
‘People are saying he’s a monster, but he isn’t. What he did . . . what they say he did . . . Ewan just wouldn’t. Not to a woman. He was so protective of me, wasn’t he, love?’
Neil didn’t reply, just nodded and breathed a deep sigh.
Sheila was perched on a leather footstool as there wasn’t enough space in the cramped living room for anything more than the three-seater sofa where Shannon and I sat and the armchair in which Neil was slumped. You’d think I’d be the one who’d know how to deal with tears, right? I’m the professional, after all. But it was Shannon who got up and knelt down on the dusty pink carpet next to the grief-stricken woman and put an arm around her heaving shoulders and said the things a woman in Sheila’s position wanted to hear. ‘You did a good job’, ‘He wasn’t himself’, ‘It’s clear how much you loved him’.