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Jessica Manley's office was on the second floor of St. Catherine's House.

     At noon, Enoch took the Circle Line from Sloane Square near his hotel - busy even in November with European and other visitors - to Temple on the Victoria embankment. It was overcast, mizzly. Enoch walked in haste along the Kingsway.

     Puddles, taxis, pigeons.

     Off London's Thames and around the stately edifices of Australia House and India House, a chill wind seeped through his flimsy, alpaca jacket and made him shiver. Pedestrians' faces were averted against the cold, umbrellas tilted defiantly, office workers and Inns-of-Court barristers on lunch-hour dodged traffic to reach their pubs. Shoppers queued at bus stops. Enoch was too restless to do anything but ensure St Catherine's House really stood where the letterhead indicated.

     It did: 10, Kingsway. Mrs. Manley's room safely inside. His appointment in five hours' time. Birth mother-news getting closer. Enoch stepped into the lobby to check office numbers. Nothing must go wrong at five o'clock. "Search Rooms" off to one side were jammed with people. Notepads and pencils in their hands, researchers of every stripe wandered the library stacks. CRAMP territory - Council for the Reunion of Adoptees and their Missing Parents.

     At scruffy, careworn tables, readers pored over giant, Alice-in-Wonderland-sized volumes. Enormous, smallprint lists in massive records, names and dates and serial numbers on the searchers' own paper scraps and in their eyes. But no one - not even Dickens's Mr. Pickwick or Uriah Heep - seemed to be discovering anything. The air was heavy with imaginings - turn of one page after another. A sense that other occupations might be worth the time.

     Enoch returned to the street. Walked. Hunched against the rain.

     Over a year ago - before his moonlight flit to Barcelona - he had lived for a few months above Riaz Mansour's Cable Street fish-and-chip-shop in Whitechapel. Enoch had never ventured very far from work, other than to Spitalfields Market, Petticoat Lane at weekends, the Blind Beggar for a Saturday night pint with Riaz. His boss called it the "poofter palace" because one of the Kray twins, Ronnie, had killed a mobster on its premises for calling him a faggot. Riaz hated fags.

     Not often, Enoch would hit the West End or walk by the Tower of London and the river - let a bloke or two pull him. Mostly he stayed local, even read the novels Chubbsy mailed from Enoch's former halfway house in Brighton: E.M.Forster's Passage to India, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Charles Dickens's Bleak House. More grim Sassoon. It was a life. Enoch thought it bearable - but not his lot. Then the Spain courier-errand came up. How he hoped Riaz would not eat out today, or that Major Chubb were in town. They must have felt deeply betrayed by his absconding - and with all their dreams and architectural drawings, bestowed on some dumper in Barcelona's Gothic quarter.

     Nostalgia, self-recrimination would not do this afternoon, however. Time for new turf. Enoch looked around the corner. This corner, at his feet. Where was he? He was in Holborn. He would explore Holborn. No sooner had he turned into Lincoln's Inn Fields - a world of law as remote as his detention centre on the Blanchland moors - voices returned, indignant at his treatment of men, women, children, who had cared about him. Voices barely held at bay for the hours they rattled him. Where was he going? Neglecting them so?

     The streets were becoming gloomier, buildings inhospitable. Enoch turned from the Inns of Court where Margaret Thatcher had studied to steps beside the London School of Economics. In front of him was a board listing LSE's famous alumni. One of the Rolling Stones was amongst them! Enoch gaped at the poster. How could Jagger do that? Go to a university all about money? Do I know anything about England? How come I didn't know about Inns of Court and LSE? Obviously, everyone else does.

     Voice. Voices.

     As five o'clock drew closer, the talking in his head became louder and more combative. More recrimination. Collywobbles. Enoch hoped that Barcelona, Mireia, the Mediterranean had not softened him. Not since Blanchland House and Chubbsy's Sassoon Lodge had he dealt with Social Services. Tear gas, but not counsellors. All he wanted to do was pass the "I'm not going to butcher my birth-ma" screening. That was what the interview was about. Someone's theoretical model needed airing. It was worse than politics.

     Enoch felt panic. He leaned against the wall outside Room 208, St. Catherine's House, as though walking against traffic in Picadilly Circus. Please, stop speaking to me. Please. "Enoch Jones?"

     STOP.

     Five o'clock in the afternoon.

     STOP.

     Enoch quietened in an instant at Jessica Manley's welcome. Her mellifluous voice did it, and the way she so nonchalantly held an astonishing FUCK YOU I'M BLACK mug of coffee, warming her hands prayerfully under the institutional lights.

     Requisitely marginalised as an English-Jamaican of colour, Jessica Manley exchanged looks with expatriate trailer-trash. How cosy and philanthropic she seemed. Her beige cardigan and woollen skirt made him think of country walks and spaniels; her beads: ganja, peace, and winter cruises. She seemed kindly. Composed. Surely not the effects of an adolescence spent on LSD? Wise, all-seeing. Middle-age triumphantly bluffing death.

     Give it up, Enoch.

     He felt utterly at her mercy. She had in her possession everything he wanted. Jessica was an icon. He couldn't fuck up, couldn't let her detect his temperament. Would he get his pilot's licence? She observed him while appearing not to. Enoch had met the technique before, caught many an interrogator watching at all the wrong-right moments - when you needed to choke something back or conjure up an acceptable retort to some deeply personal trauma. They studied you - pieced x with y whenever you blinked - and waited for Atlantis to rise from the mucky seabed.

     "No-nonsense mug," quipped Enoch, trying to soothe his nerves.

     "Thank you," she replied, in a comradely way. People must notice the logo every time - cute 101 tool for bringing nervous clients down to earth. "From Woodstock."

     "The Woodstock?" he replied. "You're American?"

     "My mother is. Father's British."

     Lordy, lordy. "A response to the white man who screwed your people first?"

     "Good, isn't it?" She smiled, therapeutically. Patient was relaxin'. Mug worked. "The irony is I take milk in my freshly ground."

     Humour. Engagement. The fireworks could begin.

     For a moment, he wondered what Catalan social workers drank out of. FUCK YOU I GAROTTE NOT? Was there any way of comparing? He felt like one of Dr. Who's robotic Daleks from childhood television. Was Barcelona worse than Longbridge? I COULD LINE INNOCENT PEOPLE UP AGAINST A WALL AND SHOOT THEM mug? SPEAK MY OWN LANGUAGE? MAKE PEOPLE DISAPPEAR? You'd need more than one mug for Spain.

     "Enoch," she said abruptly. Not quite clicking her fingers. "Down to brass tacks: you want to find your birth mother."

     Even the way she said his name. With that lilting Caribbean accent that spoke of knowledge he did not own; journeys taken and to come. Enoch felt his knees trembling.

     "First let me congratulate you for arriving at this decision to find out your beginnings - and the name of your birth mother. It's your right. But it must have been difficult making up your mind to search?"

     She paused for the tease and tweak. As client, you're supposed to pour forth in these gaps. But it was always far more telling if you let the counsellor pour first. Anything to derail the script, find stronger branches to cling to.

     "Was it, Enoch?"

     Jessica was on a production line, though. Enoch was reasonably safe. "Appointments knee-high," he had heard her say to a colleague, after inviting him in. He'd get what he wanted. She wasn't at home. Not really.

     "No," was the best answer. Enoch confided that he wished only to meet his mother. That was all. His adoptive mother - Vera Jones - was not comfortable about the tracing but had accepted. Enoch dressed himself in un-avenging weeds with un-axeman-like gestures. His birth mother would be safe with him.

     In her Home Counties hippy turn, Jessica reminded Enoch that in 1955 his mother would have been told that adopted children would never be able to find their original names.

     "I understand."

     Jessica leaning forward a little. This means serious bit. Maybe his eyes had been shooting all over her office, just like those of Mike Malin, his phys. ed. instructor at Blanchland House. She was shooting for the basketball hoop. "There are many reasons why your mother may not wish to meet you, Enoch. No one in her family may know of your existence, for example - she would have to tell them, and her husband if he does not know. If he does know, it will have been a taboo subject. That's our usual finding."

     Jessica sipped her coffee, eyes up like a frog. But he was ready, nodding so very sanely. How well-balanced and mature. Sound in mind and body. On the coach trip from Barcelona, he had prepared intelligent, even-handed, though he felt neither of those. He was hiding ruthless, though certain he did not feel that either - yet. Desperation he'd successfully hidden from himself until this moment. Anger at his mothers, fathers - anger that would have the decency to remain submerged for a while longer. At least until he had left Jessica's office. Enoch allowed his eyes to blink slowly.

     Frog to frog.

     "Sometimes birth mothers think compensation is a factor in reunions. For them or for the child. But Enoch, in your letters you tell me this isn't so?"

     "Right. Just meet and that's it. Let her see I'm okay. I get to look at someone I resemble."

     "Yes," said Jessica, hesitating with due compassion. There were lines still to get out: "Your mother may be jittery about who needs to know about the adoption - and who may find out. Moreover, you will likely remind your mother of your father, her lover; this man is not her current husband. Feelings will run high."

     "Her husband might belt me one, you mean?"

     "Or her. Or both of you. Have you thought how you might react if your birth mother declines to see you, Enoch?"

     Enoch stared at Jessica. It was the question. Truth was he'd track her down, stalk her, and at least get a look. Maybe ask her for a light. Just to smell. Get near. See her face and clothes. Eyes. Nose. Ears. Probably that would be enough. But you don't tell a social worker that. Ensuing therapy would take months. Jessica Manley might not put out.

     "Be disappointed. But continue my life," he said. "Consoling myself that I'd made the attempt to find her."

     Jessica nodded again. Liar, was she thinking?

     "Maybe this is not a good idea, after all," said Enoch. "Is that your point?"

     "Not at all, Enoch," she replied. "Of course you want to find your mother. These are simply matters to bear in mind when you do so. Not every mother wishes to be reminded of the son she gave up, does she? Let's see what information we do have, though; that will fill you in on who you are."

     Let's. He felt sick to his shoes.

     From her overloaded desk, she picked up a legal-size envelope and slid out a thin wad of documents.

     "I have to go and photocopy some other papers for you, Enoch. But while I'm gone, why not read these first?"

     She sifted through the pages, careful not to hand them over quite yet.

     "There are the Children's Visitor Reports from May 16th 1955 to July 15th, when you first went to Vera and Frank Jones's home in Bloxwich in the Black Country. The visitor Frances Cunningham reviews your new environment and, together with a Birmingham guardian ad litem who also makes visits, she supervises your adoption until the Juvenile Court approves it. In your case, this happened in August 1955. The adoption was arranged by Lichfield Diocesan Association for Moral Welfare. That's at Rickerscote House in Staffordshire. The court hearing for some reason was in Henley-in-Arden, on the other side of Birmingham. Backlogs, I suppose. Your case went where there was availability."

     Jessica placed the handwritten documents on the table next to him - and quietly left the room. Enoch looked upon the papers, reaching down into the ink:

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Jones live in a full size caravan on this Bloxwich site, properly planned in a field behind Natsfield Farm, midway between the Wyrley-Essington canal and Bealeys Lane. Enoch has been very good on the whole and is on Ostermilk II. He was in the pram outside the caravan. Nicely dressed. Blankets clean and tidy. Vera Jones is a pleasant, homely woman. She has never had a child of her own and is very delighted that they have been able to adopt...

     Enoch was unaware of just how long Jessica's photocopying had taken. But as he completed a third reading of the reports, she re-entered the room. He could not look up, but now guessed there had been no copying.

     He hid his face.

Enoch is now 15lbs. In the shade of a big tree fast asleep. He obviously receives good care and affection.

     Tears were spilling down Enoch's flushed cheeks.

Enoch now weighs over 17lbs, is firm and looks contented and healthy. Mrs. Jones obviously takes great pride in him. They have postponed their summer holiday until September 3rd, after the court date. Mrs. Jones has lavished love and attention on Enoch but has not spoilt or coddled him. She seems so delighted to have a baby to care for.

     Without missing a beat, Jessica came to Enoch's side and placed her hand upon his back. His body shook. The game up. Together, they looked in silence at the four pages of Visitor Reports. His eyes stung. Frances Cunningham's neatly levelled penmanship. The ink ebony black, as though written yesterday.

Enoch now weighs over 18lbs and is a big, rather fat baby. He sleeps well, has started cereals which he enjoys. Strong and active. Mrs. Jones was out for the morning and her mother was in charge of the baby. The guardian ad litem has visited. An adoption hearing has been set for August 31st at Henley Juvenile Court. Garden plot is well tended.

     How careful Jessica was. How helpless he felt.

     "Big news, isn't it?" she said, returning to her desk and sitting down. "I know it's difficult, Enoch. Really I do. But wonderful news."

     "Thanks," he replied, wiping his face.

     "The rest, I'm afraid, is disappointing."

     Enoch nodded. Still feeling as though he had let himself down, sobbing in front of a social worker. So exposed. He had not imagined he would weep.

     "You know that I cannot give you your original birth document but here is the information. With it you'll be able to pick up the certificate downstairs on your way out. We've extended Search Room hours. These are the details."

     Again, she witheld the handing over of paper. "As you saw on the Visitor Reports, your original name was Enoch Joseph Smith."

     "Vera Jones my adoptive mother didn't give me those first names?"

     Jessica paused. "The name recorded on your original birth certificate - which no-one, including yourself, has ever seen, is 'Enoch Joseph Smith.' Nancy Smith, your birth mother chose both your names." She paused again. "Vera Jones, told you otherwise?"

     Enoch could not speak. In this, Vera had also misled him.

     "It's not uncommon for an adoptive mother to protect the birth mother, Enoch. Vera could well have been simply trying to uphold the spirit of the law: that an adopted child would never have access to identifying information. Why torment you? That may have been her reasoning."

     Enoch bowed his head again, let the moment pass.

     "Your natural mother was Nancy Hannah Smith. Her address is given as 37, Paddock Lane, Walsall. Your father's name is not mentioned. This too is very usual. You were born at New Cross Hospital, Wolverhampton, on March 31st, 1955."

     "Wolverhampton?"

     "Nancy Smith was probably a very young teenager, Enoch. In those days, her Walsall family - a foster one, I believe - would not have wanted the pregnancy or childbirth known to their local community."

     "Stigma."

     "Families didn't move house much, at that time. 1955. Nancy's reputation would have lasted a lifetime. My guess is that for the latter part of her confinement and for the actual delivery, she was taken to a different part of the Black Country for reasons of propriety. Wolverhampton was a popular choice for girls in your mother's situation - or Birmingham - provided of course their families did not reside there."

     The back had fallen off Enoch's history. He could see himself prior to Vera Jones and Frank Jones. Prior to Graham Dagg, Vera's second man. At last. The missing pieces. Before Christ, not After Death.

     Jessica passed the typed sheet to Enoch. There was a Wolverhampton address for Nancy Smith's mother: 'H. Smith. North Road.'

     His heart skipped.

     "Look here!" said Enoch. "48, North Road."

     "I know. That's what's so disappointing, Enoch," she said. "I checked with Wolverhampton, Walsall and Birmingham Central library archives. "North Road was demolished years ago. It's a bypass now. Chances are it wasn't Nancy Smith's mother's home anyway. 48, North Road was more likely part of the Adoption Society as 37, Paddock Lane probably was: Mother and Baby hospices were numerous. There is little chance that either Nancy or her mother would have had their actual places of residence recorded on any official document."

     Enoch's voices chattered excitedly. He must have looked downcast by the commotion.

     "I know I sound discouraging, Enoch. But I've been in this occupation for a long time, and there are distinct patterns to the treatment of pregnant girls in the 1950s. Nevertheless, there are 1954-5 Electoral Registers for Paddock Lane and for North Road. You could start looking in those of course. New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton may still have admissions records."

     "I've got her name, and mine," said Enoch - as though Jessica might take them away again. "That's fantastic. Thank you."

     "Our office checked with Staffordshire and Wolverhampton Social Services, which house the records of the now defunct Lichfield Diocesan Association for Moral Welfare. Nothing came up. I wasn't surprised; the adoption agencies had to keep records for only fifteen years. Henley-in-Arden Juvenile Court no longer exists - and there were no records at Birmingham, Solihull or Stratford courts."

     "So I give up?"

     "Oh no. This is all quite usual. CRAMP can help you. You've heard of that organisation, you told me in one of your letters. Council for the Reunion of Adoptees and their Missing Parents? They offer support, research assistance, intermediaries and so on. Also, here is a list of Post-Adoption Societies in England and Wales, should you think you've located Nancy Smith. Who, by the way, will have a different surname if she has married."

     Jessica glanced at the twilit drizzle of the courtyard. A sadness came over her as though she had suddenly felt weary of hide-and-seek mothers, as indistinct as the grey, wet London beyond her window. "You'll need an intermediary, should you think you've found Nancy - and the Post-Adoption Society in her area will help you, and try to arrange a meeting."

     "What if she's in Scotland?"

     "Use the Yellow Pages, Enoch," she said curtly, her hand dismissive. "The Scots are a law unto themselves. I never understand..."

     General Franco would agree. Separatists, breaking away and looking to themselves. Always trouble.

     "You now have names to go on. It won't be easy finding your birth mother but it's certainly more feasible now. Nevertheless, I should tell you that there is a likelihood that no further information exists about Nancy or yourself. You are twenty years old, Enoch - an adult. Think seriously about ever tracking her down, won't you? That these names might be sufficient knowledge?"

     "Okay."

     Jessica was right. Nancy was another person in the world. No matter what. Wouldn't that be enough?

     Hello, Nancy Smith. I'm Enoch. Remember me?

     Jessica smiled and shook Enoch's hand. Tonight was clearly overtime - her next client already seated outside the door. A shy and harried Asian woman with an expensive-looking raincoat. Struggling to remove an LHR airline baggage tag from her briefcase, she studied Enoch as you might the menu on a first date.

     "Don't forget to collect the certificate," Jessica said, pointing to the floor directory near the lift. "It's what you came for, remember?"

     Social workers were a lost tribe. But they worked on you like a soapy bath and Ovaltine. Enoch pressed "Ground," watching as Jessica disappeared into her office followed by the rainspotted woman who, for some reason, tossed the LHR tag onto the floor. Maybe he would change his view of the social work profession - its theories and practice - after today. About time. You just wondered what they were like with people. Outside in a downpour. Or on a London tube.

     Maybe it didn't matter.

     You dress up, you dance.