Page 66 of All Our Missing Pieces

It reminded Beatrice of nothing so much as the library where Neil worked, except instead of the rainbow profusion of books that filled the shelves there, here the books were in only three colours: red, green and black. They were stacked neatly, each colour together.

‘I guess we go over there,’ Neil whispered, pointing towards a window on the far wall marked ‘Reception’.

Behind it stood a middle-aged woman in an olive-green cardigan that looked hand-knitted. Her greying hair was held back from her face by a tortoiseshell Alice band and she wore steel-framed glasses. She looked like a picture of a librarian in a children’s book.

‘May I help you?’ she asked.

Beatrice felt suddenly furtive and ashamed, as if she was doing something that wasn’t allowed.

‘I’m adopted,’ she began. ‘I was hoping to⁠—’

‘Speak up, please,’ the woman said, but her smile was friendly.

‘Sorry.’ Beatrice felt herself blushing. ‘I wanted – I’m trying to find my birth records. I was adopted, and I⁠—’

‘Right.’ The woman moved away from the window, pushed open a door next to it and stepped out. ‘Come on, let me show you.’

She led them over to the shelves of books. Now, Beatrice could see that the red ones were marked ‘Births’, the green ‘Marriages’ and the black ‘Deaths’.

‘Do you know the year when you were born?’ the woman asked.

Beatrice nodded. ‘1983.’

‘And the date?’

‘February the twenty-seventh.’

‘That’s a good start,’ the woman said. ‘Entries are categorised by when they’re registered, you see. December birthdays are tricky, because they’re often entered in the following year’s volume. And do you know the name you were given at birth?’

‘Aisling.’

‘All right, so…’ The woman reached out to a shelf of volumes, running a finger over their spines. ‘Here we are. 1983.’

Beatrice looked at the volumes. There were four of them, each about the thickness of a telephone directory. In gold lettering on their spines were printed A–DOOL, DOON–KENT, KENZ–ODEA, ODEI–Z.

The woman took down the first volume and placed it on a table, opening it at random. Beatrice could see columns of clear upper-case printing, not quite black against the not-quite-white paper. Centred at the top of the page, Beatrice read ‘Index to Births’.

‘Now, here’s where you begin.’ The woman pointed towards the fifth column, marked ‘Date of Birth’. ‘The index is alphabetical, so you’ll need to go through each page until you find a date of birth that matches yours. There were about two hundred babies born each day in Ireland, so across these four volumes, that’s roughly how many matches you’ll find.’

‘Gotcha,’ Neil said.

The woman glanced at him, smiling, as if she was noticing him for the first time.

‘It’s good you’re here to help,’ she said. ‘It can take a day or more to go through it all, especially if you’re unlucky enough to have a mother whose name was Murphy, say. Or of course if…’

‘If what?’ Beatrice asked.

‘Sometimes, the records aren’t accurate. Sometimes it’s just clerical error, but occasionally… well, they were difficult times. But we’ll not worry about that just yet, will we?’

Mutely, Beatrice shook her head. The record of her birth would be there. It would be accurate. It had to be. She couldn’t have come all this way to leave disappointed.

‘Now, the next thing you’ll do is you’ll look in the third column.’ Her accent made it sound like ‘tird’. ‘There it says M or F, see? So you get to eliminate about half the results right away, because you’re not looking for a boy.’

‘I see,’ Beatrice said.

‘Then,’ the woman continued, with the patience of a teacher explaining fractions for the thousandth time, ‘you look at the first column – “Surname” – and the fourth – “Mother’s Maiden Name”. If those two are the same, that means the baby wasn’t registered with the father’s surname, which means the parents weren’t married, which almost certainly means an adoption.’

‘Okay.’ Beatrice managed to speak. Now that the scale of the task ahead was clear, her nerves had dissipated and she felt only a steely determination. ‘So when we find a record that looks like an adoption, then we check the name.’