Strange Sally Diamond

Thomas Diamond wasn’t my real dad. I was nine years old when he first told me. I didn’t even know what my real name was, but he and my mum, who was also not my mum, told me that they had found me in a forest when I was a baby.

At first, I was upset. In the stories I had read, babies found in forests were changelings who wreaked havoc on the families they invaded. I do have an imagination, despite what Dad often said. But Mum took me on to her knee and assured me that those stories were made-up fairy tales. I hated sitting on Mum’s knee, or on Dad’s knee, so I wrestled myself away from her and asked for a biscuit. I got two. I believed in Santa Claus right up until I was twelve years old and Dad sat me down and told me the sorry truth.

‘But why would you make up such a thing?’ I asked.

‘It’s a fun thing for children to believe, but you’re not a little girl any more.’

And that was true. I had begun to bleed. The pain of the periods replaced the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, and Mum and Dad began to explain other things. ‘If Santa Claus doesn’t exist, does God, or the devil?’ Mum looked to Dad and he said, ‘Nobody knows.’ I found that concept difficult. If they knew for a fact that Santa Claus didn’t exist, why didn’t they know for sure about God?

My childhood was replaced by duller, less colourful teenage years. Mum explained that boys might take an interest in me, that they might try to kiss me. They never did, except one time when I was fourteen and an old man tried to force his mouth on to mine and crept his hand up my skirt at a bus shelter. I punched him in the face, kicked him to the ground and stamped on his head. Then the bus came and I got on, and was annoyed by the delay as the bus driver got off to help the old man. I watched him rise slowly to his feet, blood trickling from his head. The driver asked me what had happened, but I stayed silent and pretended that I couldn’t hear him. I got home twenty minutes late and missed the start of Blue Peter.

When I was fifteen, I heard a girl in my class telling two others that I had been a feral child, found on the side of a mountain and then adopted by the Diamonds. She said this in the toilets. I was sitting on the cistern, my feet on the lid of the toilet in a cubicle, eating my lunch. ‘You can’t tell anyone,’ she said. ‘My ma heard it through a friend of hers who used to work for Dr Diamond when it happened. That’s why she’s so weird.’

The other girls did not keep it a secret. For a few weeks, they tried talking to me, asking me if I liked mountain climbing and if I ate grass. Stella Coughlan told them all to leave me alone, that it was none of their business. I ignored them all. I didn’t ask Mum and Dad about it. I already knew I was adopted and I also knew that babies can’t survive on mountains and that stupid girls make up things to be spiteful.

Mum died the year after I left school. We had been fighting a lot. She had wanted me to go to university. She had filled out my university application forms against my wishes. She thought I should study Music or the sciences. I love music and playing the piano is probably my favourite thing to do. Mum had a teacher come to the house to give me lessons when I was nine. I liked Mrs Mooney. She said I was a gifted pianist. She died when I was in my teens and I didn’t want another teacher, so I taught myself to get better at it. I didn’t want to take any exams. I just liked playing.

Mum said there were many options open to me. But I did not want to meet strangers and I did not want to leave our new home. Dad said I could do an Open University degree, but Mum said I needed to be ‘socialized’ because I would never leave the house or get a job if I wasn’t pushed. I said I didn’t want to leave the house, and she was angry.

The week after that argument, she had a stroke, while working in her GP practice in the village, and died in hospital. The funeral was in Dublin because that’s where all her family and old friends lived. She had always visited them regularly. On the few occasions her sister, Christine, had visited us, I had followed her around like a dog. She was like a glamorous version of Mum. Dad would stay in his study when she visited. Mum said that Dad made Aunt Christine feel unwelcome. After Mum died, she stopped visiting but always sent me birthday cards with money in them.

Dad asked me with wet eyes if I would come to Mum’s funeral, but I declined. I needed to sort out Mum’s clothes and see which could fit me and which would go to the charity shop. I asked Dad to bring back a recipe book from Dublin because Mum had done most of the cooking and, while I was excellent at helping her peel vegetables, I wasn’t so adept at pulling together a full meal. But I knew I could learn from books.