My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. Annette Sills (free e books to read online txt) 📖

have been a rarity in rural Mayo at that time. I’m also pretty sure the blonde man with James was Tadgh Dempsey, Tess’s brother.”

“Do you really think he’d help steal his sister’s baby and never tell her where he was?”

“For some reason he was desperate to please James’ family. Plus he and Tess had fallen out. Tess never heard from him again as far as I know. She said he ended up living rough on the streets in London.”

Joe scratched his chin. “But how did the nuns get away with it? If they faked your brother’s death, surely they had to have a body to get a death certificate?”

“Or a doctor faked it. The more I’ve delved into all of this, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that the nuns couldn’t have worked alone. Doctors, social workers, solicitors, politicians – they all had to have played a part in the illegal adoptions. There was an organised system at work. It was a well-oiled machine.”

“A well-oiled adoption machine.”

“Yes.”

“James’ family were very wealthy so I’m guessing they paid a lot of money to get Donal back. And Tess would never have known. Before she left the home, she’d have signed consent papers thinking that her baby was going to a good family in America. She’d never have imagined James would return to claim him.”

“Christ. That’s so fucked up.”

Joe pulled me towards him and held me tight. I buried my head in the crook of his neck and he ran the tip of his forefinger along my arm. Then he turned my face to his and searched for my mouth. We kissed for a long time. When we pulled apart, I told him I’d stopped taking the pill. Something had shifted inside me when I was in Mayo. Visiting Julia again and hearing about Tess from Kathleen Slevin had made me feel connected to my family and to my past again. And seeing the bloke from the Irish Club looking so serene with his family in Achill, the place I was happiest as a child, had stirred something in me.

Joe looked at me startled, then his face lit up like a child on Christmas morning.

“Really?”

I nodded and smiled. “I thought about it a lot in Ireland. Let’s go for it.”

He grinned and started to unbutton my nightshirt. His tongue ran down my breastbone with every unfastening. Soon it was circling one nipple then another then his fingers slithered inside me, searching and teasing out the place only he knew existed. When he was inside me I pushed in rhythm with him, slowly at first then faster, reaching together. When he came his face exploded in pain and joy in the blaze of morning light and I was moved.

Chapter 22

In the week that followed I jump-started the search for my brother. I returned to my friend Google for help. Having no surname for James, the baby’s father, I searched for the house outside Tess’s village where his family had lived. It had been turned into a B&B and the current owners were English with no knowledge of an Anglo-Irish family ever living there. I’d need another trip to Mayo to talk to the locals to get the information I needed. A google search for Tadgh Dempsey also came to nothing. It didn’t surprise me. If what Tess had said was true and he’d ended up on the streets, he wasn’t exactly going to have much of a digital footprint.

The following Wednesday I was at home having breakfast when I received an email back from TUSLA, the government family agency in Galway that I’d written to way back at the start of my search. They more or less stated what I’d feared. As the sibling of a former resident in the Tuam Mother and Baby home, I wasn’t legally entitled to access any records. I threw my phone on the sofa in annoyance and paced the room. It was a major setback. How the hell could family members ever find out what had happened to their relatives without access to records? I remembered what Louisa Schulz said about her search for her birth mother, how she’d had so many doors slammed in her face her nose was put out of joint. But she never gave up and neither would I. I’d fallen into a low despairing mood when I found Donal’s name on that list of dead children but now hope had sent me high again. I was back on the emotional roller coaster, aware that the shock of the fall could be waiting around the corner, but as long as there was the tiniest glimpse of hope I would never stop the search for my brother.

I hadn’t seen Joe all week. He’d been working in London. I wouldn’t see him that evening either. I was off to a conference at the university in Liverpool on women in Shakespeare. Afterwards I’d arranged to meet Claire, an old friend from my Oakwood High days. Karen knew her too and I’d texted her to see if she wanted to come along but she said she was busy as usual. Claire had booked us a table at one of the best Italian restaurants on Lark Lane. I hadn’t seen her for months. She was a social worker in the adoption services and lived in a rambling house in Aigburth with her lecturer husband, two cockapoos and three kids under ten. She was hard to pin down and any arrangements to see her had to be made months in advance. Claire’s family were Irish and I was hoping to ask her about the illegal adoptions in the Mother and Baby homes and if she knew of any other possible routes I might try to find Donal. That aside, I was looking forward to her company and catching up.

But before that I needed to get some food in, so I headed out to the local deli for supplies. I used to shop in the