Down London Road - Young Samantha (читать книги онлайн регистрации .TXT) 📗

‘You need to talk to someone. Out in the hall, that was because you’ve been bottling up God knows what for months … years? Jo, please talk to me.’

Instead I took a sip of water, my fingers trembling – from adrenaline or my emotional fear of Cam, I couldn’t tell you.

‘Fine.’ Movement from Cam drew my gaze back to him and he was leaning forward in his chair, his expression seeming more open than I’d ever seen it. ‘Maybe it’ll help if you get to know me a bit better.’

My response was a humourless snort. ‘What? Were you a therapist in another life?’

Cam made a face. ‘I’ve never been accused of that before. You know, usually it’s the woman asking me to open up to her? The first one I’m actually interested in hearing about and she’s shutting me down. Not good for my ego.’ He gave me a coaxing smile and I remembered the night I’d first seen him, watching him give Becca that smile and thinking I’d do anything that smile asked of me.

Funny how a couple of weeks could change it all.

Cam saw my eyes darken and his expression fell. ‘Okay, Jo, ask me anything. Anything you want to know.’

I raised an eyebrow. Anything? So he was serious about wanting to help, was he? Well, I knew one way of finding out. My eyes fell to the tattoo on his arm, the one with the black script that read BE CALEDONIA. Becca’s lilting voice echoed in my head …

‘… don’t bother asking him what the hell that means, because he won’t tell you.’

‘Jo?’

I looked up from the tattoo to his rugged face. ‘What does the ink mean? “Be Caledonia”?’

The left side of his mouth tilted up as his eyes glittered at me. ‘Well played.’

I was already braced for disappointment. There was no way Cam cared enough about me to divulge the secret behind his tattoo. My question would prove that his interest was mere curiosity and then I could go back to hating that he knew more about my life than he should.

So when he relaxed back into his armchair, his eyes never leaving mine, I was more than taken aback when he replied, ‘It’s something my dad said to me.’

‘Your dad?’ I asked a little breathlessly, still astonished that he’d offered up an answer. What did that mean?

Cam nodded, taking on a faraway look that told me he was back somewhere in his memories. ‘I grew up in Longniddry with a doting mum and a caring dad. I’ve never met two people who loved each other more, or who loved their kid more than they loved me. Not to mention that my dad’s brother, my uncle I once told you about, was like a second father to me. He was always there for me. We were a close-knit group. When I hit my teens, though, I went through what everybody goes through. You’re trying to find out who you are and you’re struggling to stay true to that person when the people around you seem so different from you. You’re asking yourself, is it me? Puberty makes you a really moody fucker, but for me it was only exacerbated when my parents sat me down when I was sixteen and told me I was adopted.’

That I had not been expecting. My mouth dropped open, ‘Cam …’ I muttered sympathetically, drawing his sharp gaze.

He gave me a small shake of his head, as if to say, ‘I’m fine now.’

‘It messed me up then. Suddenly, there were two people in the world who had abandoned me, who for whatever reason, didn’t love me enough to want to keep me. And who were they? What were they like? If Mum and Dad weren’t my real parents, then who the fuck was I? The way I laughed had nothing to do with Dad like I thought it did … Their dreams, their talents … the possibility of all their kindness, intelligence and passions passing on to me was gone. Who was I?’ He gave me a sad smirk. ‘You don’t realize how important it is to feel like you belong somewhere, that you’re part of a family legacy, until you don’t have it. It’s a huge part of your identity growing up. It’s just a huge part of your identity full stop, and I guess I was in quite a bit of pain for a while after I found out the truth.

‘I acted like a dick – skipped school, got high, almost destroyed my chances of graduating with the qualifications I needed to get into the College of Art at Edinburgh Uni to do graphic design. I insulted my mum, ignored my dad. I constantly thought about finding my birth parents. I couldn’t think of anything else, and in the interim I seemed intent on destroying everything I had been, in the hopes of finding who I reckoned I was supposed to be.

‘A few months later I took my dad’s car for a joyride. Luckily, the police didn’t catch me, but a wall did. I totalled the car and my dad had to come out and get me. I was drunk. Shaken up. And once my dad finished verbally annihilating me for putting my life and everyone else on the road’s life in danger, he took me for a walk on the beach. And what he said to me that day changed my life.’

‘Be Caledonia,’ I replied softly.

‘Be Caledonia.’ Cam grinned, love in his eyes for the man who was his dad. ‘He said that Caledonia wasn’t a name we’d given to our land, to Scotland, but the name the Romans had. I was used to him spouting off random stuff about history, so I thought I was in for some boring lecture. But what he said that day changed everything for me – he put it all in perspective.

‘You know, the world will always try to make you into who it wants you to be. People, time, events, they’ll all try to carve away at you and make you think you don’t know who you are. But it doesn’t matter who they try to make you, or what name they try to give you. If you stay true, you can chip off all their machinations and you’re still you underneath it all. Be Caledonia. It might be the name someone else gave the land, but it didn’t change the land. Better yet, we embraced the name, keeping it but never changing for it. Be Caledonia. I had it inked on my arm when I was eighteen to remind me every day of what he said.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘If I’d known how many people were going to ask me what it meant, I wouldn’t have put it somewhere so bloody visible.’

My eyes had welled up again as I watched Cam’s face relaxed with humour. My chest ached with a fullness I’d only ever rarely felt, and I realized that it was gladness. I was glad for him. I was glad he had that kind of love in his life. ‘He sounds like a great dad.’ I knew if I’d had that kind of love in my life I would have turned out so differently.

Cam nodded, his eyes lifting to smile into mine. ‘I have a wonderful mum and dad.’ His gaze drifted upward to the ceiling, and even at that angle I could see it darken. ‘Sometimes it takes days like today to remind me of that.’

‘You’re going to phone them as soon as I leave, aren’t you?’

He threw me a shy grin, and my chest squeezed at the little splotch of colour high on his cheeks. ‘Probably,’ he muttered.

‘I’m happy for you, Cam.’ I nervously straightened the dress I was still wearing from last night’s dinner. ‘I can’t imagine what it’s like to wonder who your real parents are. But to a certain extent I understand feeling abandoned by the two people in the whole world who are supposed to want me. It’s not the best feeling, is it? I would have swapped what I had for what you had in a second.’

Cam’s eyes pinned me to the couch again. ‘And what exactly did you have?’

My hands trembled as I smoothed my dress over my legs again. ‘You know, the only person who knows anything real about my life is Joss.’

‘Not Malcolm? Not Ellie?’

‘No. Just Joss. I don’t want anyone else to know.’

‘That is a helluva lot to be carrying around by yourself.’

‘Cam.’ I leaned forward, my watery eyes searching his face, my pulse speeding as I struggled to come to a decision on whether to trust him or not. ‘I …’

‘Jo.’ He leaned forward too and my whole body tensed under his sober regard. ‘What I just told you, about the adoption and about the tattoo – only a handful of people in this world know about them. Mum, Dad, Peetie and Nate. And now you. You and I are starting over today. I’m not some asshole who has judged you over and over again and got you wrong every single time. Trust me. Please.’