Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

before I could speak, and I return to that place, speechless.
    Susie was charming, determined, relentless. The poor man was not sure what he could tell us and what he couldn't. There was so much I wanted to know — but the judge had not yet authorised the ‘redacted’ version. I was supposed to sign a few forms in person, go away, and wait for the papers to be sent on later.
    But the file was on the table . . . not later ... let it be now.
    The court manager agreed that he could tell me the name of the adoption society. That was a very useful piece of information. He wrote it on a piece of paper and he photocopied the original in the clerk's handwriting — oh it looks so old. The forms he is holding are yellow and handwritten.
    Is my mother's date of birth there? That would help me to find her. He shakes his head. He can't tell me that.
    All right then, listen, my adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson, always said my birth mother was seventeen. If I knew her age I could start using the ancestry site to find her — but her name is common enough, and although I have narrowed it down to two likely possibilities, I don't know which one to follow. And both could be wrong. This is the forking path. This is where the universe divides. Help me.
    He is sweating. He is looking in the procedure book. Susie tells me to leave the room.
    I bang out through the swing doors onto the pavement with remnants of the youth, some of whom are looking cocky and relieved, some are in despair, they are all smoking and talking at once.
    I wish I wasn't here. I wish I hadn't started this. Why did I start it?
    And I am back to the locked box with the Royal Albert in it, and the papers hidden beneath, and further back the wrong birth certificate, and who was the woman who came to the door and frightened Mrs Winterson into tears and rage?
    When I go back in Susie has extracted a promise from the court manager that he will go and ask the judge in session just what he can or can't tell me from the file. We have to come back in forty—five minutes.
    So we walk away and sit outside a caff that serves big mugs of tea and I realise that this place doing burgers and chips used to be the Palatine, beloved of Mrs W and the beans on toast and the fugged—up windows of my future on the mission fields.
    ‘I had to send you out to shut you up,’ said Susie. I look at her in amazement. I thought I had been completely silent. ‘Don't you remember what you said? It wasn't actually anything. It was just babble, the poor guy!’
    But I don't babble! And my mind is blank — not a bit blank, totally blank — I am obviously going insane again. I should stop this whole thing now. I hate being in Accrington. I don't want to remember any of this.
    I haven't been here since Dad's funeral.
    Throughout my mad time/bad time, I had driven up to Lancashire once a month to visit Dad and he had come to stay with me in the country. He was getting weaker all the time but he loved the visits, and in 2008 he was coming for Christmas.
    I arranged for Dad to be driven down and he sat in front of the fire looking out of the window. He had been advised by the doctor not to travel but he was determined to come and I was determined too, and I had spoken to his doctor who told me that Dad was hardly eating.
    When he arrived I asked him very gently if he wanted to die, and he smiled at me and said, ‘After Christmas.’
    It was and it wasn't a joke. On Christmas night I realised I would never get him into bed and so I made up the cushions in front of the fire and half pulled half pushed him from the chair onto this makeshift but comfortable bed, undressing him as I did so, and getting him into his pyjamas. He fell straight asleep in the dying firelight and I sat with him, talking to him, telling him I wished we could have got it right sooner, but that it was a good thing, a glad thing, that we had got it right at all.
    I went to bed and woke up bolt upright at around 4 a.m. and came downstairs. The cats were lying on Dad's bed, very calm, and Dad was breathing shallowly but he was breathing.
    The sky was full of stars and at that time of day/night they are lower and nearer. I opened the curtains to let in the stars, in case Dad woke, in this world or some other.
    He didn't die that night and two days later Steve from the church came to drive him back to Accrington. As they set off, I realised that in all the fuss of suitcases and mince pies and presents, I hadn't said goodbye, so I