Christian White - The Nowhere Child

As the memory drifted away a heavy sadness remained.

‘All the photos are probably in the garage someplace,’ Amy said. ‘We still haven’t totally unpacked the garage, if you’d believe it. Six months later. It’s Wayne’s job but every time I bring it up he does this big sigh. You know that sigh he does that sounds like a deflating tyre? Like you just asked him for a kidney.’

‘So you have it?’

‘Why do you want it?’

‘This’ll sound strange, but it’s a secret.’

Amy sipped her coffee, searching my face for whatever hidden tell or psychic signal she usually used to catch me out. Then her eyes lit up. ‘Does this have something to do with my birthday? Did Wayne tell you about the photo collages we saw at the shopping centre? Forget it. Don’t tell me. I want it to be a surprise. Follow me.’

The garage smelled of old paint and methylated spirits. Amy found a pull-string in the darkness and a fluorescent light flickered on overhead, revealing a cramped concrete room with a low ceiling.

Several rows of packing boxes occupied the space between the far wall and Amy’s little red Honda Jazz. We spent the next forty minutes carrying out each box, setting it down on the small patch of unused concrete floor and poring through its contents.

Most boxes contained miscellaneous stuff : year-old energy bills, a roll of expired coupons, a tattered apron, a chipped ceramic ashtray with a single English penny sliding around inside, a grocery bag full of magnets that Amy snatched gleefully from my hands saying, ‘I’ve been looking for these.’

One of the boxes was full of my old photography projects, many embarrassingly similar to the ones my students had presented the night before. I found a first-year uni photo-series called Scars : Physical and Emotional . Amy had organised the collection into a binder. I flicked through it, cringing; it was more like a high school project than a university folio.

One photo showed the small nick I got on my pinkie toe while climbing out of a friend’s pool one summer; another showed the grizzly slice running across Amy’s thigh from when she fell off her ten-speed. Here was a nasty burn on my mother’s hand, and the fading ghost of an old housemate’s cleft palate. Next came several photos showing subjects who looked sad or rejected or angry. It was a pretentious, highly unoriginal project designed to force the audience to consider the scars people carry on the inside as well as on the outside.

‘Oh, hey, how’s it going with Frank?’ Amy asked, leafing through an old school report.

‘Eh.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘We stopped seeing each other.’

‘Why?’ Amy said in a high-pitched, whining voice.

‘No one thing. Just, you know. It wasn’t a love connection.’

‘You’re too fussy, Kim. You know that. And you’re running out of time to make babies.’

Amy was aggressively maternal. Reproducing was her sole purpose in life. She and her fiancé Wayne pumped out Lisa as fast as they could and were planning for a second. I, on the other hand, had never once felt the urge to procreate.

We eventually found the family albums in the ninth or tenth box and sat cross-legged on the floor to look through them. Each album was titled with big block letters, written in colours that somehow matched the theme of the photos within. PERTH HOLIDAY ’93 was black and yellow to match the emblem on the state flag. NEW HOME , which chronicled Mum and Dean’s move from their old place on Osborne Avenue to their smaller but much newer pad on Benjamin Street, was written in blue and green: the blue matched the porch steps of Osborne, the green matched the bedroom walls of Benjamin. The humorously named OUR FIRST WEDDING was written in bright orange – the same shade my mother wore on the big day.

It’d be easy to assume that my mother was the one who meticulously matched each colour and labelled each photo, but it was Dean. Even before our mother died he obsessed over photographing, categorising and recording each and every memory for safekeeping.

Amy grabbed the wedding album the second she saw it. With a sad smile she turned the pages, tracing our mother’s face.

At the bottom of the box I found the fat pink baby album, EARLIEST MEMORIES , written in the same shade of purple as my childhood headboard. Inside were photos of birthday parties, holidays, Christmases; all lost to time. There was a picture of me in the old flat we lived in before Amy was born: smiling broadly, framed against the ugly yellow wallpaper that lined every single room. Another showed my first day of kindergarten, my mother holding my hand and grinning.

A third of the way through I came across a bright, pudgy little girl staring at me through the plastic sleeve. She was standing in the shallow end of a hotel pool, dressed in sagging yellow bathers. She looked somehow contemplative and wise. Below the shot, printed in neat black letters was, Kim, age 2 . I had a vague memory of that day in the pool, riding Dean’s shoulders into the deep end.

The remaining pages were blank. There were no baby photos, and nothing else before the age of three. I hadn’t been expecting more. My biological father wasn’t a nice man – that’s how my mother had phrased it on one of the few occasions we discussed him. When she had left him she left in a hurry, a toddler under one arm and an overnight bag slung over the other, with no time and no room for baby pictures. That story sounded worryingly convenient now.

‘Are you okay?’ Amy asked. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

In a way I had. Suddenly the ghost of Sammy Went was haunting each and every childhood photo. Even before I brought up a photo of Sammy on my phone I could see it was more than just a passing resemblance. The deep blue eyes, the dark hair, the tight-lipped smile, the curved chin, the large nose, the small white ears. It wasn’t just uncanny; either Sammy was my exact doppelgänger, or I was looking at photos of the same girl.

Why hadn’t I seen it before? Was it simply that I couldn’t remember what I looked like as a kid, or had I not been ready to see it? Was I ready now?

‘Jesus, Kim, what is it?’

‘Amy, I came here to compare photos from when I was a kid to a little American girl who went missing in the ’90s.’

‘Hold up. So you’re not making me a photo collage for my birthday?’

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and started from the beginning. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the garage, surrounded by packing boxes and the smell of old paint and methylated spirits, I opened up the Sammy Went door and invited Amy inside.

She listened silently with a cool expression that gave nothing away. When I had finished she sat blinking like an owl; buffering. Then she laughed. It wasn’t a chuckle or giggle, but a heavy ha ha . She put one hand against her belly, threw her head back and cackled, guffawed, snorted. ‘So let me get this straight: you think Mum – the woman who bawled her eyes out when the horse died in The Neverending Story – was a kidnapper. And you were the kid she napped? She abducted you from someplace in the States and raised you as her own. And never once, not even on her deathbed, revealed the truth.’

‘I don’t know, I …’

‘Maybe she bought you on the black market. Makes perfect sense when you think about it. Oh, or maybe she lowered herself down to your cot on one of those wire harness things like Tom Cruise or trained a dingo to—’

I showed her my phone. She froze, silenced by the photo of Sammy Went on the screen. She took the phone from me and stared, her smile quickly fading. ‘Shit, Kim.’