Adoptions
1
He was a trustworthy friend but dishonest when it came to love, and for some years I had wondered why Luke remained in contact with this person he had known from secondary school, especially when Luke reminded me about a decade ago of a moment that left Luke compromised with one of these girlfriends. This friend, Adam, had a job in television, family money that meant he owned his flat in the West End of Glasgow, and agreeable enough looks that were more than augmented by what some would call charm, and others, intensity. These might seem contrary qualities, with charm suggesting a lightness of mood and intensity the deepening of it. However, this may also have indicated a continuum that Adam knew better than most how to access. It also meant he could take rejection and move swiftly to the next possible conquest, but retain too the interest of someone he had managed to charm.
Adam had many assignations, some of them overlapping, and none lasting for more than several months. That was all his business, Luke wouldn’t deny, and yet Adam made it Luke’s too by often telling him about these encounters, as if he wished to be honest with a friend as he couldn’t be honest with his lovers. Adam admitted he needed confidantes, and when Luke on occasion proposed that surely the woman he was sleeping with ought to be the recipient of such disclosures, Adam said that wouldn’t be possible without creating hurt. How could he tell one woman that he was also seeing two others? To tell Luke this wasn’t a problem, and he shared this knowledge with a couple of other friends as well. Luke proposed that this wouldn’t be so terrible if he would at the very least sleep with one at a time: it didn’t mean he was committing to them forever, yet it did mean he wouldn’t need to hide from them aspects of his life that were surely getting in the way of greater intimacy.
Luke wasn’t wrong, he supposed, but for Adam, honesty was reserved for his male friends and with women, he wanted to play a role that made his life potentially frivolous but also exciting. Luke reckoned his own life wasn’t without excitement; nevertheless, it didn’t consist of cheating on girlfriends and speaking of it to friends. He didn’t wish to sound judgmental, but believed Adam was creating a false dichotomy, one that was unlikely to lead to anything but eventual unhappiness.
2
In those years after they left school, during and after university, Luke was aware of Adam’s behaviour but never quite felt implicated in it, except anecdotally. As none of Adam’s affairs lasted more than a couple of months, Luke never got to know any of these women until Adam returned from nine months in Australia with a girlfriend he met while travelling and who cut short her travels to return with Adam. She was from the States and Adam persuaded her she should see some of the UK rather than bum around a country whose ancient history it intruded upon and whose modern history wasn’t much to talk about. The Sydney Opera House was doing a lot of the cultural heavy lifting, he told her, and there was far more to see in the UK.
Most of Adam’s flings were local as well as brief; they had plenty of friends and Adam never felt obliged to introduce them to any of his. But Amy came to Glasgow knowing nobody, and so while Adam didn’t want to include her too completely in his social circle, he asked his sister to befriend her and asked Luke if he wouldn't mind hanging out with her sometimes. He proposed it to Luke, he admitted, because he had confidence in him more than in anybody else, joking that if Luke’s rectitude served a purpose, it was that he could be trusted. If he did anything with Amy, he would be a terrible hypocrite and far worse than Adam, who was merely a bit of a cad. Adam said this lightly before adding that he thought Luke could be helpful as he knew the States better than anyone else. Luke has been to New York three times when his brother worked there for five years and Amy’s family was from Brooklyn. They would have something in common, and he could alleviate a little her homesickness. She’d already been travelling around Australia for three months when she met Adam.
3
Luke first met Amy with Adam, over a coffee at a place roomy enough to allow people to sit for hours without using coercive methods to move people on. It was warm, offered filtered coffee top-ups, and had available games (chess, draughts, Monopoly, Cluedo and others) that suggested people could stay as long as they liked. That first afternoon, the three of them talked for two hours when Adam said he had to go — he was working in a bar three nights a week; the only job he could immediately find after his return. Amy had no work visa, but she’d put adverts in cafes offering English language teaching to top up her budget. She managed to find work that way in Australia and had, in Glasgow, received a couple of calls from people already without yet a guarantee of employment. Amy and Luke continued talking for another hour or more, and they talked a bit about places they were both familiar with in New York, and about a writer they had both read. The time went smoothly and they left only because the cafe closed at eight. It seemed too much of a gesture to propose they continue somewhere else, but Luke didn’t doubt that Amy would be an easy person to spend time with and proposed they meet again the following week at the same cafe, earlier in the afternoon.
When he next saw Adam at the weekend, Luke spoke of this arrangement and said he was happy to befriend Amy; if he could be any help making her feel less lonely in the city then that wouldn’t be a chore on his part. Adam said he was pleased his little plan worked. Luke seemed puzzled, and Adam said that he chose the place carefully. He wanted to choose a day when he would have to leave promptly, knew that if Amy stayed, that would indicate she enjoyed Luke’s company, and if she remained until the cafe closed, that would prove it.
Luke sardonically proposed that in other circumstances this might be tantamount to matchmaking and he could see in Adam’s face the vaguest of smiles that seemed to indicate that at some stage that could be what he would intend. Luke knew that it was Adam who finished his relationships, often leaving a woman bereft but with a circle of friends in a city they knew and where they would no doubt recover without much difficulty. But I sensed that Adam believed with Amy he had inevitably, geographically, taken on more responsibilities, and may have already been thinking about how he might have to offload them later.
4
If I sometimes wondered why Luke had remained friends with Adam for years it rested on these stories Luke would tell when he would come through to visit me in Edinburgh, and the tone in which they were often delivered. I met Adam over this time Adam only twice, and on both occasions in a large group. Each year, Luke invited me to what he and his friends called Gin Friday. While they were all at university, most Fridays they would meet in a bar in the city centre, a halfway house between Glasgow University in the West End and Strathclyde, and not far from the art college where only one was a student. They continued the tradition after university by reducing it to once a month, and then once a year, usually around the festive season. I attended one when it was once a month, and another when it was a yearly occasion, just after I’d married and before having kids, and both times I talked to Adam only briefly. There wasn’t much of a chance to talk to anyone except in the first stages of the evening. By around 1 in the morning, most were drunk and ready for a club and long before that, offered conversation excitable and enthusiastic but hardly revelatory. Adam seemed to be the one most inclined to push for more drinks, to continue to the next bar, to chat to and chat up whoever he came across, either in the bar or walking along the streets. He had the gift of the gab, others would say to me, and on those two evenings, they goaded him on as though he needed the encouragement even if nothing suggested he did. There were nine of them and only Luke and one of the others would pass for introverts, while everyone else allowed the alcohol to pass for an alibi, allowing for behaviour that reflected their personalities rather than drew out unexpected traits. On both evenings, I talked mainly to Luke and this other quieter friend and was left to observe Adam instead of communicating with him.
5
I sometimes wondered if Luke remained Adam’s friend it rested on an odd type of flattery: Adam saw Luke as one of his confidantes; that Luke would get a quieter, more reflective side than most and saw in it a respect that Adam didn’t always show others, even if the story he told me of the situation with Amy didn’t show much respect towards either Amy or Luke.
Luke met up with Amy usually once a week at the cafe where they had been first introduced. This was during the summer and the cafe was only a ten-minute walk to Kelvingrove Park, and they often walked around this undulating common after the cafe closed, arriving at Amy’s studio flat, though he never went in. It was an attic space in Hyndland that she could now afford after getting a part-time job in a cafe. She was only nibbling into her savings; no longer eating into them. Amy usually proposed the walk and couched it in the need for exercise and a fear of strangers, but Luke wondered if she said this to make clear that she was with Adam and wasn’t likely to cheat on him with one of his best friends. When Luke told me the story, he was single. He admitted to me, though obviously not to Amy, that if circumstances were different he would have been attracted to this young woman who seemed as vulnerable and confused as he was as a young man. But it wasn’t just that she was with his friend that meant a relationship between them couldn’t happen, it was also that he assumed Amy wouldn’t have been attracted to him anyway; that she wished to be with someone with charm and chutzpah, capable of sweeping a woman off her feet and across continents rather than someone trying to comprehend the specificity of a person’s feelings. Adam’s charm, even Adam admitted, rested on his capacity to make women feel special as a gender: he often didn’t care much about how they felt emotionally, but only sexually. Just as he had the gift of the gab he also knew he was good in bed, and that was the thing with Adam, Luke would tell me — you could talk of him in cliches and they fitted. Amy didn’t seem interested in cliches, but she was interested in Adam, and this perhaps stopped Luke projecting feelings onto her, as if those feelings didn’t so much belong to Adam but were generic enough for them to be of little interest to Luke. Was he making excuses? Perhaps, but that would be to address the intricacy of Luke’s emotions, and for the moment what mattered when he told me the story was the intricacy of the situation he found himself in.
After about six months, with Luke and Amy increasingly becoming friends, Adam was increasingly interested in other women. He’d been working in the bar for some time and on occasion women would flirt with him as he served them drinks, ask what he was doing when he knocked off, or would leave him their number — and sometimes all three. He liked Amy, he told Luke, but not quite enough to be faithful to her, and a few weeks earlier, he had slept with someone else, and since then slept with two others. But Adam offered this to Luke not as a confession, but as the precursor to a request. A couple of nights earlier, after a shift, he went back to someone’s place in Dennistoun, the east side of the city, where he knew no one except, now, this person he slept with. Luke knew that Adam was moving between kipping on the couch at a flat in Sauchiehall Street that a couple of friends were renting, sleeping at Amy’s studio, and staying at his parents' house on the Southside. It saved him money and potentially left him open to assignations: one of the other people he’d slept with was on the lads’ fold-away couch in their sitting room. Amy needn’t have been any the wiser: all his movements remained within the cartography of the predictable, which was how Luke wryly offered it. (That third person he slept with lived in a flat along from his friends’ place.)
Adam was over at Amy’s a couple of days after the encounter in Dennistoun and, as he pulled at the legs of his jeans as he was getting out of bed, various things fell out of his pocket - including a lot of change and a bus ticket from the east side of the city. She asked him what he was doing in a part of town where she knew he had no friends, nor any family. Adam told her Luke was there with him: they were out a couple of nights earlier with some of the others in the gang, and Adam was talking to someone who said there was a party in the city’s east end and would they all like to come. She was with a couple of friends, Luke didn’t want to go alone, and the others had work the next day. Adam agreed to tag along. Luke got together with the girl, Adam slept on the couch, and left the next morning. Luke as I knew wasn’t at the time averse to occasional assignations but, if it wasn’t quite in his character to have a one-night stand, it was even less so to insist a friend tag along while he goes to bed with someone and leaves his friend sleeping on the couch, promptly surplus to his requirements. Adam told Luke what he said to Amy, and if she asked him about it would he corroborate?
6
After agreeing with some reluctance to lie for Adam, Luke expected the next time he met up with Amy that she would ask him about this supposed sexual encounter. He had lied for him twice before over women, but he hadn’t really known the women: it was dishonest, but it didn’t quite seem deceitful and he knew that a lie would ruin a friendship with a person he liked, who he knew remained isolated and not a little lonely in the city. They met up a few days after Adam’s story in their usual cafe. They had tried other places over the months but this was always their preferred choice. It allowed for an intimacy that wasn’t pronounced as he could see that in many a cafe to stay for more than a couple of hours could give the impression of a date, while in their regular it was as if designed for extended stays that might consist of a person reading a book, friends playing chess, or people involved in convoluted discussion. It seemed owned or affiliated with the nearby Mosque, and had books by Turkish, Iranian and North African writers on the bookshelves. The floors were sanded and covered in rugs, and they served both Turkish coffee and fresh mint tea. That afternoon, he perhaps felt closest to Amy and also at his most distant, and when she suggested they take a walk through the park after the cafe closed, he was sure she was going to ask him about what happened in Denistoun. Yet instead they continued the discussion they were having in the cafe, about a film she’d seen alone the previous week at the Glasgow Film Theatre, and that he had seen a couple of days later — on the evening he was supposed to have been out with the lads and at the east end party. As he left her to carry on home from the student union, as he turned towards Woodlands, he mused over why she hadn’t brought up his supposed one-night stand. If she believed Adam, there was no need to intrude into his private life but she could still have teased him over it. Maybe she knew Adam was lying and didn’t want to ask him because she suspected he would cover for Adam and then, instead of only a lover lying to her, she would have a friend being dishonest as well. Maybe she accepted Adam’s story and saw Luke a little differently, as a person capable of one-night stands and dragging a friend needlessly across the city as a pointless wingman. But what he most suspected was that Amy believed Adam had used Luke as an alibi without telling him: that Luke wasn’t in a position to lie to her because Adam hadn’t informed him that he was expected to do so.
This would have indicated the low opinion she was beginning to have of Adam but would have underestimated Adam’s high opinion of friendship, however warped. Adam wasn’t likely to risk dropping a friend into a difficult situation without at least warning him of it. Luke spoke to me about Amy three times and a couple of months after this first instance, I instigated the conversation. He was through in Edinburgh and I asked him whether there had been any further developments over the situation with Amy and Adam. He said indeed there had been, and he was now in a conundrum that he had expected to have been in a couple of months earlier. Amy asked to meet up, proposed a different cafe, and so they met in the Tea Rooms facing dully out onto Sauchiehall Street. She said that she was no longer with Adam: she saw him on Ashton Lane with a woman who didn’t look like a friend. They were going to see a film that days earlier she had requested to see it with him. He said he would be too busy. She didn’t say anything as she saw them queuing, and he didn’t see her — but the next day when he came over to hers, his items were in a bin liner, and she said he could take them with him now or she would deposit them herself. He looked like he didn’t know what was wrong with her, as if she’d gone temporarily crazy. She said two words: Ashton Lane. She added another two: the cinema. She didn’t say anything else and neither did he. He picked up the bag and left, perhaps relieved that she hadn’t become tearful and accusatory. He probably was looking to break up for a while, she supposed.
7
As she told Luke this, she added that she no longer expected much from Adam, but she wanted to ask Luke a question. He knew what it was going to be about and, sure enough, she asked him about that night in the east end, and whether he had been there. If she had asked him before, when he expected her to do so, he would have lied — his loyalty was to Adam and he had agreed to lie for him. Now, it wasn’t that Adam was any less of a friend, but that Adam and Amy’s was no longer a relationship. He needn’t protect him, and it was an opportunity to be honest with someone who had become a friend as well. He knew on the spot there were several options. He could say he was in Dennistoun and that Adam had tagged along, improbable as that sounded: Adam never tagged along to anything. He could have said he didn’t know what she was talking about, which would have left Adam obviously lying and himself apparently innocent. But this seemed a greater lie than the first — exposing Adam and protecting himself. What he did say was that Adam asked him to lie if necessary, and if Amy asked him about a trip to the east end, to say he was there and it was he who had the assignation. Amy slapped him, burst into tears and left the cafe. The cafe was almost empty but a couple of people looked across at him as if seeing someone who must have cheated on his girlfriend and, when he went up to pay, the waitress said that she hoped the person with whom he’d fallen out was going to be okay, and in a tone that proposed Luke had treated her badly. He supposed he had, but not for the reasons those in the cafe seemed to think, and he found it hurtfully ironic that while the cheating Adam received no slap when he left the relationship, there he was slapped as Amy ended the friendship.
Luke tried to contact her a couple of times after that, but she didn’t reply to his texts, and his one attempt at a phone call left him with an answering machine he decided best to remain silent in front of. A few days after the slap, Luke met up with Adam and told him what happened, admitted he had explained to Amy that he hadn’t been to Denistoun and it was an excuse Adam had made and one he thought Luke might have to lie to her over. Luke expected Adam would be annoyed with him and was ready to get angry in return by saying that Adam shouldn’t have put him in such a difficult situation. But Adam instead apologised to Luke, saying that he knew it was a terrible abuse of friendship and promised it wouldn’t happen again. I asked about Amy. He rolled his eyes, shrugged his shoulders and then smiled. He said Adam hadn’t been thinking too much about Amy over the last couple of weeks — and told Luke about this psychology student he’d met; the one he supposed that Amy must have seen him with. The department was looking for people to experiment on, Adam said and, after a colleague at work who was studying the subject proposed he could get £20 to do some tests. He went along and was tested by a stern PhD candidate whom he did his best to flirt with, but who resisted his jokes as if a girl in a nightclub were resisting his advances. Luke imagined him showing little respect for the experiments, no respect for boundaries and the woman had the good sense just to do the job and ignore his voracious need to seduce. However, Adam added that a couple of days later she came into the pub with friends, teased him about his disrespect for her work and returned the insult by refusing to respect his. She asked what a grown man like him was doing pulling pints, and he said it was the best opportunity he knew of pulling women; after all, trying it on during a psychology experiment didn’t work. She said it seemed he was an amateur barman and a professional lothario; he said he reckoned he had to be good at something. How good, she asked — he said he could try and prove it. At the end of the evening, she was drunk and her friends dragged her out of the bar before he got a number. But as he cleared away their drinks in the corner, he saw that she’d left a note on the sticky damp table. He could make out in a blur of running ink: ‘How Good? Prove it?’ And with some relief he saw her number where the ink hadn’t run at all.
Adam added that when he texted her, she said there was a film she wanted to see — he could take her to see it. Yet a couple of days earlier, Amy had mentioned it and there he was in a dilemma that didn’t feel to him like much of a dilemma at all. He could go with a girlfriend with whom he was increasingly bored, or with this psychology person he was increasingly fascinated by. He told Amy he was busy — which wasn’t a lie: he was going to be busy with another woman. As Adam told Luke this, he didn’t seem to know Amy had seen him in the queue. All he knew was that when he next went to her place, his stuff was jammed into bags and that Amy was in no mood to entertain excuses or listen to entreaties. She did seem to know that he had been to the cinema with another woman. He had no excuses to offer and was relieved — he could walk away with the minimum fuss and focus on Gerry. While Adam talked, Luke couldn’t but think of Amy and how she would be feeling, but there was nothing in Adam’s conversation that indicated he had thought about Amy at all. There Adam was oblivious to why Amy had so categorically finished their affair, and with no interest it seemed in why the sudden finality. What mattered was that he was a free man to pursue someone else without the hassle of an ex at his heels.
As far as Luke knew, Adam never saw Amy again, and Luke never told him that Amy saw him at the film she had wanted to see, standing in the queue with what would become his new girlfriend; a relationship that lasted a year until they both cheated with each other and broke up not with acrimony but with a smile. They deserved each other but both acknowledged the passion had gone and each wished to feed a new desire. Luke never saw Amy after that cafe conversation, and he supposed she returned to the States and wouldn’t remember Scotland with much fondness. She had made few friends and the one she had made betrayed her, and in a manner that may have seemed even more disheartening than her boyfriend’s — who at least escaped a slap. I knew Luke thought a lot about Amy for months over that slap, and couldn’t get out of his mind the pain she must have felt seeing Adam in that cinema queue, waiting to see a film that he claimed he was too busy to watch. Luke said he saw the film four times and didn’t know whether he did so hoping to see Amy at the screening, or to find out what was in the film that made Amy so want to see it. She liked films but often went because Adam wanted to watch something. When all those years ago Luke told me about Amy, the friendship, her break up with Adam and her distaste towards Luke, I thought he must have been in love with her. Perhaps he was, but that seemed too simple an explanation: as if I wanted the deepest feelings to make sense of the most complex ones.
8
Luke hadn’t talked about Amy for years, and there wasn’t any reason why he should have done so. He could have acted more decisively but it wasn’t as if he acted badly, and that was what I told him when he came to me with the story. When a few weeks ago, he asked me if I remembered Amy it took a prompt from Luke to remind me who she was. I asked if he had seen her again. Luke said no — not quite. He said that it was somehow as if he had. Luke wasn’t given to making anecdotes he offered any more enigmatic than necessary, and so I waited patiently for him to go on. He asked if I remembered him saying about a year and a half ago Adam finally married. I said he might have recalled me asking who was the lucky girl, feeling that after the various stories Luke had told me about Adam, lucky was what she probably wouldn’t be. Luke told me it in passing and for whatever reason, didn’t respond to my sardonic remark, This time told me why he hadn’t. Adam had said to Luke at the stag party the parents Luke had never met before and would meet at the wedding weren’t his biological parents; they were a childless couple who offered whatever love they had to give because they couldn’t themselves reproduce. Adam offered it in a tone that in print might sound like a criticism towards his adopted parents, but came across as more self-lacerating — as if he could only have been loved by the desperate: humanly, he was the last resort.
He told Luke about it because, as the best man, he should know, but he didn’t wish others to know as well, and it was only more recently still that he had told other friends about his adopted status. His parents were in his mid-forties when they adopted him, and at the wedding, the age gap between the two sets of parents, Luke saw, was pronounced. Sure, Adam’s partner Susie was ten years younger than he was but her parents were almost thirty years younger than his. Adam had joked darkly to Luke during the wedding reception that Susie needn’t worry about getting along with her in-laws: they might not be around for too long to judge her. Susie’s would be around for a very long time to judge him. It came as they were sitting, nibbling at cake, and drinking champagne, while Susie was elsewhere and her parents and Adam’s were on the dance floor. Susie’s were still almost youthful, moving smoothly despite their inebriated state. Adam’s parents’ steps were gingerish, though they had hardly drank at all. Luke watched them dance and felt towards them a tenderness that Adam couldn’t seem to share: seeing only two people who had brought him up in the world — but would always be those who hadn’t brought him into it. Luke saw on Adam’s face devastating sadness and wondered if all the love that Susie had to offer him would be able to remove it. She came back and, smiling, asked Adam why the long face. He said it came from looking at his parents’ very long lives, and in that moment Luke knew that he hadn’t told Amy that he’d been adopted.
9
When Luke said he hadn’t commented on my remark at the time, about how unlucky anybody marrying Adam must be, he supposed I was right but he also knew that Adam had never known his parents: he could agree with my assumption about his probable future behaviour, but he couldn’t tell me why Adam would be inclined to be as untrustworthy towards women as he had always been. He supposed Adam didn’t trust unconditional love. How could he when those who should have offered it to him chose for whatever reason to abandon him? Yet as far as Luke knew, Adam hadn’t cheated on Susie at all and three weeks earlier they’d had a baby. It was why he was bringing Adam up again and also why he made reference to Amy. Luke had still to see the baby, but a few days earlier he met Adam for a coffee and Adam seemed different. I have always been suspicious of this notion that people change, often believing that people have moods and dispositions. Moods change all the time, and sometimes this can look like the disposition has changed if the mood is sustained for weeks, months, possibly even years. Love is perhaps the most long-lasting of moods if we accept that oxytocin can stay in the body for well over twelve months. Yet Luke believed that Adam’s womanising ways were now finally over. They were seated outside a corner cafe a few minutes away from Adam and Susie’s flat, a flat bought with money from both sets of parents and with a small mortgage Adam could afford after selling his West End apartment. He was earning a substantial wage as a sports commentator and anybody who watched football in Scotland would know his face.
It was a Sunday late morning and as they looked along the street and across it at runners in lycra, shorts and vests treating themselves to lattes and cappuccinos after their exertions, mums and dads pushing buggies and others holding a baby in their arms while drinking a coffee with their free hand, Adam paraphrased a line from a film, saying “ordinary people, don’t you hate them?” Luke supposed he himself had always aspired to be one of them, but probably hadn’t quite succeeded. Adam admitted he’d become one of them himself; though it was hardly an aspiration — since his adopted parents had told him at eleven that they weren’t his biological mum and dad, he liked to think that normal wasn’t what interested him. But there he was, one of those people often now seen pushing a pram with one hand and balancing a coffee in the other.
However, he also reckoned that within the ordinary, he couldn’t deny the extraordinary, and perhaps felt this moment more than most. Some of the others in the Gin Friday group already had children and a couple of them told Adam that when he would hold the baby in his arms it would overwhelm him; the miracle of a little creature created out of an entanglement of two bodies at a moment of intention or recklessness. He didn’t doubt it be meaningful to him as well but there was a difference. When friends had held a baby in their arms they had been held themselves by mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. When he held his baby daughter, it was the first time he had held a blood relative, and the first time someone with his blood had looked back at him, looking at him with astonishment and need, as he wondered how his biological mother must have felt when she held him. He had never tried to find her. Luke asked him if he would now try and Adam said he didn’t think so and reckoned, when he thought about his life prior to Saska being born, it was more about how he had ill-treated people rather than any ill-treatment he might assume he had suffered by having no biological parents. He mentioned Amy, aware that Luke was unlikely to have forgotten her, maybe aware that this was where he wronged not just a lover but also a friend. Luke said of course, he remembered her, and Adam asked Luke if he ever saw Amy again after the breakup. Apart from when Amy and Luke talked shortly after Adam and Amy’s parting, he said he had never seen her again. He didn’t tell Adam he tried to contact her two or three times.
Adam said he saw her some three months after she’d thrown his stuff into bin bags and him very understandably out of the flat. He saw her on the other side of the city, in Queen’s Park, alone. She was sitting on a bench looking at the ducks and he was passing outside the park, walking along Pollokshaws Rd. He looked through the railings and dawdled for a minute even though he was in a hurry. He didn’t know if he wanted her to notice him or not, but if he could have acted on pure feeling without taking into account the rush he was in, the hurt he’d caused and the awareness that no sooner had he tried to make amends he would have gone off to meet the girlfriend he’d left Amy over, he said he’d have joined her on that bench and held her for as long she needed. He was sure she was so very unhappy. While he didn’t wish to credit himself with any greater importance to her life than the ex who treated her terribly, he knew that part of that maltreatment included incorporating a friend of his who was also a friend of hers — the one friend he knew she had in Glasgow. He looked at Luke and said to him that for years afterwards, he still didn’t treat women quite as well as he could have, would continue being besotted and breaking up with them when he was no longer infatuated, but he never again involved friends. It was as though when he looked at her on the bench, her world had fallen apart, and yet this was no more than an impression — he couldn’t have looked at her for more than forty seconds. Perhaps she was waiting for someone, maybe she was soon to take a book out of her bag and start reading in what he remembered was a day spotted with clouds but warm and sunny. Yet he thought not and that was the memory of Amy which had stayed with him, with all the others of their time in Australia, the first months back in Glasgow, dissolving into this one of devastating solitude. As he spoke, Adam seemed close to tears, and yet Luke would have thought they would more likely have come when he was describing holding his first blood relative; not when commenting on a distant girlfriend who had been one of many.
10
As Luke said this to me he looked as though he were as close to tears as Adam had been when describing the situation to him, though I suspected the emotion he was feeling happened to be quite different. Luke hadn’t been in a relationship for some years and I hadn’t before seen reason enough for it to be linked to Amy, a woman he may have adored as an unrequited love and betrayed as a friend. It was a terrible irony I suppose that over the years Adam carefully differentiated relationships between friends and lovers, offering honesty to the former and passionate concealment with the latter, and there Luke was caught in a conflation between the two that may have eventually left Adam with a baby in his arms and Luke with an image of Amy put into his mind long after he had last seen her, because Adam saw her months later on a park bench.
I said to Luke that only relatively recently did he find out that Adam was an adopted child, but did he perhaps suspect it, and if so, was this why over the years he had shown loyalty to someone who by most people’s reckoning, wouldn’t have deserved such devotion. Luke said he didn’t know, but perhaps in some way he did, and that the two or three others in the Gin Friday group to whom he was closest may have somehow suspected it also. There were the friends he usually expected to cover and lie for him, and Luke supposed he said to them what he had often said to Luke — that friendship mattered and that nothing was unconditional. He would sometimes say that friends can be trusted as lovers cannot - they are founded on agreement and decency, not on passion and blood. Luke certainly, though, never took this as a confession, never suspected that out of such remarks Adam was making clear that he hadn’t had that unconditional love, and the people who brought him up did so out of last-minute desperation to have a child in their home after his adopted mother had failed to secure one that had been in her womb. It was how Adam described it to Luke at the wedding, with a force that resembled statements he had made about love and friendship over the years, but this time with an explicit confession.
I said to Luke it was as if he were telling me all this by way of a decision, as I wondered if most revelatory stories rest on either a disclosure that reveals the past, or to propose an action into the future. It was surely more than about Adam being adopted, and now with a child he could call his own, as his adopted parents could never claim him as anything more than a choice they made in the foster home where they found him. It was another remark Adam made when speaking to Luke the day he got married. Luke then said he would probably end the friendship with Adam, even if now he could see in him someone who could love as unconditionally as anyone else: he didn’t doubt Adam would protect the child as he never protected any of his girlfriends. As Luke said this, it was couched in the language and feeling of a parent willing to release a child into the world over a friend umbraged by a betrayal. I saw in Luke’s face a sense of loss and even despair that had me wondering if losses that we feel and fully understand at forty can resemble those we are subject to that we cannot comprehend at the very beginning of our lives. I might be married with two children of my own but, as Luke talked, I felt almost as if he was putting himself up for adoption, hoping to find in me a friendship that was greater than anything he could ever have found with Adam. I wasn't surprised when he said he'd been offered a job in Edinburgh.
© Tony McKibbin