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near Christos while she was with Gareth. She was happy to play second fiddle to Polly’s lead – indeed, she carried on seeing her almost every day until they moved to Karpathos – but she couldn’t bear the idea that she would ever consider Gareth to be second best, when in so many ways he was so perfect for her.
     
    Shortly after they got together he had taken her to the private view for his and Christos’s MA Group degree show at Goldsmiths. Gareth’s piece, entitled BloodLine , was just that: a white box of a room with a thick red horizontal line around it which he had drawn at the level of his heart, using his own blood. At his eye-level, he had gaffa-taped letters and documents connected with his search for his birth mother. At the middle of one of the walls, near the door that swung shut as you entered the room, closing you in, was an original photograph of his mother – the only one in his possession, Gareth said – with holes where the eyes were.
     
    Rose had stood in the middle of the room in a flowered chiffon mini-dress, clutching her wine and weeping, as Gareth told her how Pam and John, the people he had grown up believing to be his parents, had kept the fact of his adoption from him until he was eighteen. When they told him, he raged for a month. He wanted to kill them. He wanted to kill his birth mother, the woman who had abandoned him.
     
    ‘But weren’t you grateful for the life you had? It was a good life, wasn’t it?’ Rose searched his eyes, desperate for some sort of release from the tension she felt in that enclosed, blinding space.
     
    ‘No,’ Gareth said, resting his finger on the red line. ‘My anger obliterated all those years. Why hadn’t they told me? Why had she abandoned me? No one could give me answers that satisfied me. And then, by the time I found out who my real mother was, she was dead. Killed herself in Buffalo, New York. And I thought: Good .’
     
    Rose gasped and looked away.
     
    ‘So I came over to England, away from the lot of them. And now my bloodline starts and ends here,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘In this room.’
     
    ‘And how are you with them now, Pam and John?’ she asked gently.
     
    ‘They’re deceased. They were too old. It’s too late.’
     
    Rose took him by the hand and led him through the swinging white door, back into the bar area, where Christos and Polly were holding court with a group of earnest-looking undergraduates. She knew that, in Gareth, she had found her man. She was going to take his bloodline forward, out of that clinical, angry space, and out into the world. And in doing so, she was going to make her own reparation as well as taking on the son of that poor, eyeless woman in the photograph.
     
    Christos ran out of red dots for his own exhibition that night, but BloodLine didn’t sell, and no one expressed any interest in Gareth, beyond a general muttering about health and safety and imitations of Marc Quinn. But for Gareth, and, to some extent for Rose too, the work represented a catharsis that allowed both of them to move on together, united on the surface, at least.
     
    ‘Don’t look so worried.’ Polly reached across in the rain and took Rose’s hand, waking her up out of her dream. ‘I want you to know that I am going to be so good, that you are only going to be thankful that I am there. I promise that.’
     
    ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Rose smiled.
     
    Polly sat back and smoked for a while, her eyes darting around the car park as if she were searching for something.
     
    ‘What do you remember of Christos?’ she asked.
     
    ‘I don’t know if—’
     
    ‘No, go on, I want to know.’
     
    ‘OK, well, let me see. He was always going on. He was always talking, drawing, smoking, drinking, eating. Touching you; making food; clearing up. I never, ever saw him sitting still. Not even when he slept. You always felt you could do, say, eat and drink whatever you wanted when you were with him. He was – I