That Girl From Nowhere (17 page)

Still laughing, Seth’s eyes greedily ran over my naked body, surveying it as if he wanted to secure mental images of each line and curve to pore over at another date. He hooked his fingers into the top of my knickers. ‘You’re still wearing far too many clothes for my liking,’ he said. The laughter had gone, replaced by a deep throaty lust. He threw my knickers in the same direction as the jumper then immediately pushed apart my legs. His fingers dipped into me and I inhaled sharply. ‘Do you like that?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ I gasped.

He pressed my legs open wider, lowered his head, pushed his tongue—

‘Clemency!’ My mother’s voice snaps me out of remembering and forces me to stand upright from my slouch over the shopping trolley. My face feels hot with guilt and shame, as though she knew what I’d been thinking about when she barked my name. She marches down the aisle with a huge bottle of cream soda – nightmares of Christmases and New Years past – in each hand.

She glares at me, at the phone in my hand. ‘Is that another message from that man?’ she asks sternly.
That man
being Seth, of course. Anyone would think that I had run into him a few times and he wouldn’t leave me alone. Or that I’d revealed to her how badly he treated me. But I hadn’t because he hadn’t. We had to split up because he lied to me and that was extremely shocking to me. Because he’d never been like that, had always been open, honest, trustworthy, the horror of finding out that he was capable of betraying me was far too much for me to stick around. Mum, though … She’d never liked him. She’d never liked any of my boyfriends but she tolerated the others because they never managed to take me away from her. Which Seth did and I don’t think she ever forgave him for that.

‘Yes, it’s a message from Seth,’ I say.

She seems so certain that people can take me away from her: Seth, my birth family. Mum acts like I am fickle with my affections, that anyone who looks in my direction will replace her. Which is ludicrous. I’ve come to a decision, though, and I need to tell her.

I push the trolley down the aisle after her and we turn left, heading for the front of the store into the tinned goods aisle. Mum has a list in her hand and marks off each item with a small, neat flick of her wrist as she leaves a tick. Mum has gone eco-friendly since she got her trike: for the weekly shop she rides to the supermarket, we shop together, and I drive all the bags home while she, safe in her ecological saintliness, cycles home. I almost,
almost
fell into the trap of explaining to her that getting me to drive was still adding to our carbon emissions, but caught myself just in time. There are some battles not even worth considering, let alone fighting.

‘Mum, I think I’m going to ring Abi, my, erm, my sister. I think I want to see them.’ I say this barely above a mumble because I know she’ll hear. She’s only hard of hearing when it suits her.

She takes the news as well as can be expected: she stops in front of the tins of soup, and treats them to the long, silent glare and rigid expression I should have been receiving.

‘I think I want to meet them. All of them.’ I feel sorry for the soup, the look she is giving it could boil it in its tin. I decide to buy the soup and hide it in my bedroom because it’s taken the visual equivalent of a bullet for me today, so the least I can do is buy it and not eat it. I continue hesitantly: ‘Even if it’s just once, I’d like to find out what they’re like. Maybe get some questions answered.’

‘I understand,’ she says, monotone.

Really? You might want to tell your face that because it’s saying to the soup and me that you don’t understand at all
, I think. Instead I say: ‘Thank you. For understanding.’ I almost thanked her for letting me do it but I caught myself. I am thirty-seven, I don’t need her permission. Her blessing would be good; her blessing would silence – or at least quieten – the guilt demons that have been plaguing me, but I do not need her permission to do this.

‘When you go to meet them all, I’ll come with you,’ she says. She smiles then, treats the soup to a beatific grin before she turns it on me. Now she has decided how she can make herself a part of this, can control it to a certain extent, her whole demeanour has unclenched and she radiates the relaxed, swaggery aura of a person who has expertly restrained a wild stallion that had dared to bolt.

Dad
. The ache of missing him echoes through every part of me. He would have understood, he would have told her not to get involved. He would have stuck up for me and stopped her. If she still insisted, he would have told me to do it in secret and tell her after the fact. If Dad were here, no way would this be happening according to Mum’s rules.

This isn’t fair. She knows it too. I open my mouth to tell her, to explain that this is something I need to do on my own, for me. I shouldn’t have to consider her feelings in a situation that will already be fraught and emotionally difficult.

‘Fine,’ I say.

‘Good.’ She grins at me, beams at the soup. I take the tins of mulligatawny off the shelves and drop them carefully into the trolley.

‘Excellent idea, Clemency,’ Mum says. ‘We’ll have soup for lunch. That was your father’s favourite. Let’s go and get a crusty loaf as well.’

‘I’m so sorry, soup,’ I whisper.

‘Oh, and if that man keeps sending you messages, you should think about calling the police,’ Mum adds, on a roll now. ‘He needs to understand you want nothing more to do with him.’

I think I’m going to shout at her. Right here, in this supermarket, I think I am going to start screaming at her. First Seth, then my birth family, and now this poor unsuspecting tin of soup. I know I’m being ridiculous about the soup, but sometimes I feel pushed to the edge of sanity by her.

I want to scream at her that if she hadn’t pretty much let my cousin Nancy get her own way about pretty much everything, I would still be with Seth. I would not have moved down here, I would not have met Abi and I would not be about to eat a tin of soup whose sole crime was to take a glare bullet for me.

‘Right,’ I say instead. Because I am a coward. And Seth should have known better.

I wanted my bed. Having been sent home by Dad and Mum to go see Seth, get some proper sleep, give them some space (although they didn’t say that), what I wanted more than anything was my bed. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Smitty,’ Dad had reassured to get me to leave. ‘I promise you, I’m not going anywhere.’

Seth wasn’t in, although it was one of his days to work at home, but I’d noticed by the sheets and blankets folded neatly on the arm of the sofa that he’d been sleeping in the living room. He did that whenever I wasn’t there because he hated being in our bed without me. I was going to make it up to him, that was the plan. I needed to be with Dad and Mum at that time, but afterwards I would refocus my attention on Seth. But not right then. Right then, I wanted to sleep for a little while and pretend that my world wasn’t crumbling around me. That my dad wasn’t about to leave me.

My fingers pulled back the duvet and a scent – delicate and fleeting – rose up to greet me. It was so momentary, like a trick of light, that it was gone before I properly noticed. I continued to pull back the duvet, certain it was nothing, until I saw what was obviously a long, brown thread, visible against the white sheet. It wasn’t thread, of course, it was a long, straight brown hair. As if the shock of the moment had temporarily wiped my memory, my hand went to my head to check that the hair in the bed didn’t belong to me. Mine was, of course, black, short, tightly curly. Seth had shaved his light brown hair to a grade two again, it wasn’t his.

I dropped the duvet back into place. Someone else had been there, that was obvious. I knew he wouldn’t, though. Seth wouldn’t. Seth would have just had someone over to stay. That was why he was sleeping on the sofa. He hadn’t mentioned the person who was brunette, most likely female, was staying during any of our nightly talks because he didn’t want to upset me. Although why one of our friends staying would upset me was a mystery. Unless it wasn’t a friend. A non-friend with straight, long brown hair.

Shaky, unsteady on my feet, my stomach a tumbling barrel of nausea, I sat on the floor beside the bed. This wasn’t the time to deal with this. Maybe in a month or so, when … I didn’t want to think about that either. There wasn’t much I could deal with and this was one of those moments. On the wall of photographs that I was facing, my eyes were drawn to the ‘
With Seth, finally!! January 2004
’ picture.

My gaze then moved over to the photo of my family from last Christmas I had tacked on to the wall. On the left-hand side of Seth stood my cousin Nancy. She had her arms looped around her daughter Sienna’s shoulders as she grinned at the camera, but she was also, very noticeably, leaning on Seth. She was very clearly making her physical presence felt. She only needed him to be weak one time, he only needed to let his guard down for a moment, and we would be here: I would be finding a long brown hair in my bed.

This was not the day to deal with it, though. This was not anywhere near the right time to have to deal with it.

To: Jonas Zebila

From: Abi Zebila

Subject: Update

Friday, 26 June 2015

Dear Jonas

I think it’s safe to say that this is a different place now. I thought things were about to get a whole lot worse when Daddy and Gran found out and I wasn’t sure how Ivor would take it, but I don’t know, it’s like someone has thrown all the windows open and a cleansing wind has blown through here and the heavy weight that was hanging over us – this secret our parents have had all these years – has been swept away.

It’s not one big love-in by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels like a more honest house. Ivor took the news pretty badly. When Mummy and Daddy told him, he looked so
injured
first of all. Like they’d betrayed him by having a child older than him or something. He sat and stared at them for the longest time.

‘Is there anything you want to ask?’ Mummy asked. And he just got up and walked out. Reminded me a bit of Clemency, to be honest. Since then, he’s not talked about it, changes the subject if someone tries to bring it up. It seems he really does feel this was done to spite him.

Now the secret is out, Gran, who seems more stable, just glares at Mummy a lot but doesn’t say anything. I hate to think of her doing this, but it seems like Gran has been using this big secret as a way to control Mummy all these years. Mummy still does everything for her, but it now seems to be on an equal footing. It’s hard to explain because it’s never been a blatant control thing, we all know what Gran is like, but now it’s not there any more it’s plain to see that it was there originally, if you see what I mean?

I can’t tell what’s going on with Daddy. He seems a bit shell-shocked but also a little relieved, almost. Maybe he hasn’t liked lying all these years and he’s pleased the truth is finally out. Him and Mummy haven’t rowed about it since the other night, not within my hearing anyway. They’ve stopped talking altogether, it seems. I mean, not in a nasty way, they seem to just stare at each other a lot and not find the right words. I think neither of them wants to be the one who starts that conversation about what they did all those years ago.

After Ivor walked out, I went over and hugged Mummy and she put her arms around me and held me so close. I don’t even remember the last time we did that. I also told Lily-Rose. I don’t think it’s fair that the adults know something so big and she doesn’t. Despite Mummy and Daddy’s rubbish example of being parents, I’m not going to do that. I want to be as honest as possible with my kids. I told her I had a sister that I had only just met and she said, ‘Does that mean she’s my sister?’

‘No, she’s your aunt, you’re her niece.’

‘Will she come to our house for her tea?’ she asked.

‘I hope so,’ I said. That was as honest as I could be. I’ve decided to leave it up to Clemency to get in touch and that decision is like a mild form of torture. I want so much to see her again. Just like I want you to get in touch.

You know what, though? Even if Clemency doesn’t get in touch, I got to hug Mummy for the longest time so, for that alone, I’ll be eternally grateful to Clemency.

Get in touch, please. Even if it’s a three-word email to tell me you’re alive, that would be enough.

I love you.

Abi

xxxx

There’s a plain white envelope labelled

Clemency Smittson

between us on the wall we’re sitting on.

It’s been between us, weighted down by a large pebble, on this wall that bisects the promenade and beach in Worthing for more than half an hour, since we collected it. Neither of us wants to be the one to pick it up. Both of us have been attempting conversation but it dries up almost straight away because we know the envelope has to be opened.

Abi is dressed for work because that’s where she was this morning. She went into work as normal, then I met her a little walk away so that I could drive us here to Worthing, somewhere no one we know is likely to see us. We were here two days ago – another sneaky half-day holiday for Abi. She suggested in one of her earlier texts that we get a DNA test so we both know where we stand and I thought that was a good idea.

‘Do you want me to do your hair for you?’ Abi asks me. I knew from the way she kept picking at her nails and sucking in her cheeks and nodding slowly to herself that she’d been psyching herself up to saying something, but I didn’t realise it would be this.

She’s being kind, I know. Judging from the look of her and the look of her mother, she’s probably thinking any further meetings will be smoother, will have them more accepting of me, if I sort out my hair. I get that, a lot. My hair is a mass of shiny, midnight-black squiggly lines, fat ringlets, wavy curls and tight frizz that hangs down to my cheeks. It’s not that bad, I don’t think, it’s a part of who I am, but for other people, the white ones who say if they were black they’d have an Afro, and the ones who spend hundreds of pounds a month on getting their hair perfect and can’t understand why I don’t comb it or straighten it, my hair must mock them because the only category it fits into is ‘Liked by Clemency Smittson’.