Replica Boy

Replica Boy

When my parents died, one shortly after the other, in the early 1990s, I was fifty three years old and pretty content with my life up to then. They’d retired after selling their string of pharmacies so, as sole beneficiary to their wealth, I doubled the already sizable fortune I had accrued from my writing. After the second funeral I had the family accountant sort out the house and effects as I'd been too busy with the deadline for a film script to take time off. He was to collect and file all the documentation he might find, for my later examination. Then he called me.

“Eddy,” he said, “There’s some personal stuff I found in a locked drawer you might want to look at sooner rather than later.” His tone suggested a drama and he brought the dossier over that evening. It was a whole sheaf of scrawled pages  together with some official documentation, inside a transparent, zipped bag. A label had been stuck on the outside with the words Eddy Stuff written on it.

Glancing through it produced an emotional turmoil in me so severe that I vomited in the toilet. It appeared my parents had had a son who died in an accident while they were on holiday in the wilds of Mexico. So isolated was the location of the child’s death that they had been able to keep it quiet. It was never registered in the UK, only with a local coroner. My parents were extraordinary forces of nature who bent fate to their needs. They were highly secretive, even with me. A medical note revealed that my mother could not have another child after her first, Edward. 

But Mr and Mrs Drake always got what they wanted. I appeared in their lives about a year after the tragedy. It seemed that, in the midst of their terrible loss, they hatched a truly ghastly plan to find a replica to replace Edward. One they might be forced to abduct. Me. 

As I said, it was devastating news. My life was a lie.

I must add, before I go on, that I loved them. They were both wonderful parents, if somewhat secretive. They created an enviable family bubble in which I lacked for nothing. Never did I for one moment suspect that they were not my parents.

The dossier was a bomb. I didn’t tell my wife and children. I wanted to keep the fall-out to myself alone and not allow it to spill into their lives. This was why I engaged a top notch psychotherapist who combined LSD and a swinging pendulum to unearth repressed memories in trauma victims. What might she recover from the first five years of my existence before I was taken? And, of course, would there be clues as to who my real parents might be. There was nothing obvious relating to them in the dossier.

In our final session she at last extracted the single, vividly detailed traumatic experience I had hoped for. I listened afterwards to the recording of the session. It was freakish hearing my voice relate the story. My voice was  rather child-like. Of course I have embellished the story in the way a writer does. I see it as a sort of autobiographical legacy. Something my children may want to read, as adults. Forgive me if it sounds a bit hyperbolic at times.

It happened when I was five years old on a day trip, by coach, to a mystery destination. A bus full of children were accompanied by four adults in loco parentis, including my father, though I did not picture him.

        “Oh where are we going,” I asked, staring at the back of the driver's head

“Far, far away,” came his wicked response.

“Will there be sweeties?” I asked.

“Everything you always wanted. And more than that. Just settle down and don’t ask questions.” 

The doors closed and the vehicle grunted into life and left the village empty of its young, silent save for the call of birds and the bleating, snorting and cackling of farmyard beasts. It was the one day in the year that tranquillity enfolded our unsuspecting mothers, while far below the rumbling tyres of the coach, fathers hacked away at black rock, helmet lamps piercing the gloom, a life-saving canary warbling dismally in a swinging cage.

The shiny red bus bounced along; out through the meadows and small, golden, cereal-waving fields, under the green gloom of interlaced branches and past the short ribbons of back to back housing. There was a swelling chorus of “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountains” with screeches of laughter and a gasping red-faced halt at the verse, “She’ll be wearing smelly knickers.” Notes were passed among the cargo, not one of whom was under five or over ten. I was the youngest. “Will you be my boyfriend?” “Bruce wants to go out with you.”  “Jenny says you stink.”

Then, after hillocks and mounds, gorse and broom, the conveyance topped a final rise to a crescendo of screams, “I can see the sea.” There was a lurching halt in a potholed car park and everyone was made to sit still for a moment. “Make sure you have got everything with you.” The adults and the driver watched us beadily as we jostled down the aisle, lovingly prepared carrier bags of picnic food, towels and costumes clutched to our bosoms. The straggly, jigging line of five to ten year olds made its way down steps and onto the sand. 

I had no notion of where we were. But it was immaterial. This was the Miners’ Mystery Trip, an annual treat in the late 1940s and right through the 50s.  In my memory my Dad insisted I take off my specs in case I lost them paddling. A little later, confused, stumbling back from the water’s edge and finding I was lost, I started crying. There were blurred faces gathering all round. A geyser of tears erupted from my eyes. I sobbed wildly, “I want my Dad!” and someone took my hand and led me across the sand to the lost children’s hut. Inside were several children, becalmed. The only sound was the noise of placatory toffees being worked by teeth and tongue into fudgy balls. The silence, the gravity and the shock of being lost rushed through me again and I burst into more tears. The hut erupted as all the seated occupants started bawling in sympathy and it remained like that until a grown-up came to claim me and pluck me away from the purgatory.

I was so relieved to be firmly clasped in a strong hand. A new towel, big and soft, engulfed me. The car park tarmac under my feet was reassuringly solid. It was only when the car door opened and I was half-lifted, half-pushed inside, that the tiny, grown-up part of me erupted in fear. But everything was a filmy fuzz. A hand covered my mouth and I was pinned against the shiny leather. The hand had long fingers, soft, not in the least like my mother’s coarse, hard skin. A silver ring carried a big red stone. There was a smell of flowers, sweet and strange. 

I eventually stopped sobbing and she took her hand away as we drove. I looked up at her. From my near blind perspective it did not feel as though she would hurt me.

        “Can we go back?” I asked, trying to be steady-voiced.

        “Sorry Eddy. No can do,” she said, gently enough.

        “But I left my glasses on the beach.”

        “What was that he said?” came a man’s deep voice from the front.

        “Can you see me?” asked the woman. I shook my head. She came closer and closer until her face was about six inches away from mine. Then I nodded.

        “Eddy's short sighted,” she said.

        “Yeah, I know. We’ll sort that out on the way. We’ll go to an optician’s that will make him a pair in a week.”

        “Are we going home?” I asked.

        “Yes Eddy. But a much nicer one with us. Much better.”

This was difficult for me to understand. Better? Better? Did it mean I would be having home visits but living with them? And why did she call me Eddy?

The thrust of the memory more or less ended there. Reading between my abductor-father’s lines implied that, appallingly, by using his access to benzedrine as a pharmacist, he had kept me partially drugged for months until my five years of memories had been erased. This, combined with a very full, well-to-do, totally indulged life, slowly erased from my conscious thought any sense of pain and trauma I might have had.

*

What I did following the hypnosis was what anyone would do. I scoured the national newspapers for abductions of a miner's son, around when I was five. 

The weekend afterwards saw me driving to the north-east of England and a village called Boldon Colliery. The address of the family had been included in the newspaper article. But the infamous event took place 48 years before. Would there be anyone still at that address?

I knocked on the door of the Edwardian terraced cottage, trying to remain calm. One of my parents might still be alive. Inside.

A woman roughly my age opened it. Life had not been kind to her. She looked careworn and downtrodden. I gently informed her of my reason for being there. She stared disbelievingly at my clothes and the Range Rover parked behind me.

        “Come in brother John, pleased to meet you.” We shook hands awkwardly. She added, “I'm Julie.”

We sat sipping tea at the kitchen table, blood strangers. In brief this is what she told me. The family was fated. Nothing good had happened to anyone in it. I had three brothers and two sisters. The other four were scattered far and wide. All had been fostered at some point in their lives. Two went through borstal. One was in prison. My mother was alive in a nursing home with severe dementia. My father had abandoned the family just after I went missing. Everyone assumed because of the pain of the abduction.

But then Julie delivered the coup de grace, the horrific final twist to my tale. She went to a drawer and took out a yellowing envelope with John Drake Senior written on it and handed it to me. I recognised the handwriting. It was from the man I had always believed was my father. It was addressed to the man who really was my father. Inside was an unheaded note. It said, simply:  

        “The five thousand will be where we agreed. We will take John during the Miners Welfare outing, as planned. Once it is done, pick up the money and let there be no further communication between us.”

       My sister said, “I only found that letter when Mam went into the home. She must have discovered it when Dad buggered off but she kept it to herself all her life. Our Dad sold you and then ran off with the money.”