That Girl From Nowhere (21 page)

When he said, ‘Who did this?’ I didn’t say anything because I thought Nancy was going to tell how she had stood on her tiptoes to try to get her picture down and had knocked the black pot on to the floor.

‘Clemency did it,’ Nancy said. ‘I told her not to come in here but she did it.’

I looked at Mum, then looked at Uncle Colin. And then Uncle Colin shouted at me. Told me I was evil, and naughty, and I would go to hell because I hadn’t confessed. He said he was glad I wasn’t a real part of his family and he was ashamed that Mum had brought up such a terrible child. He shouted and shouted and didn’t stop until I was crying and shaking. Mum didn’t give me a hug, she just looked sad and unhappy and like she believed Nancy that I did it.

Mum didn’t even say anything when they sent me to Nancy’s room then sent her there because she shouldn’t have followed me into the sitting room. I couldn’t even tell Dad about this because we weren’t supposed to go to Uncle Colin’s house any more after what he said about me when I was little.

‘That wasn’t fair,’ I said to Nancy.

She shrugged again because she didn’t care.

‘One day, my real mum and dad are going to come for me and I’m going to tell them about this and they’ll make you tell the truth.’

Instead of looking scared or worried or upset, Nancy sat up on her bed and smiled at me. She smiled at me like the cat in the
Alice in Wonderland
stories – big and wide and a bit scary. ‘I’m going to tell Auntie Heather you said your real mum and dad are going to come for you. You’re going to be in trouble. You’re going to be in trouble!’

Mum sometimes got upset if people said she wasn’t my real mum, she’d be even more upset if I had said it too.

I sat on the floor of Nancy’s bedroom, wrapped my arms around my stomach and started to cry again. It actually hurt, a real physical pain was inside my stomach, one I’d never felt before. If Nancy told Mum what I said she would be so upset, Mum would cry and that would be my fault. I would have made my mum cry. I wished I could take back what I said. I wished I could go back in time and knock over the pot of Grandma’s ashes instead of Nancy, then everyone would be cross with me for the right reasons and I would never have said something that would break my mum’s heart.

‘Sit with me for a moment,’ my other mother says once we are in the kitchen and have placed the dishes we cleared on the side. The kitchen is another homely space with a comfortable-looking sofa and a large dining table they must have all sat around to eat – I can imagine the noise in here, three children, two parents, grandparents. Them all talking, laughing, sharing, nicking food from each other’s plates, spilling drinks, completing homework. It was like that in our home, too. Just quieter. ‘Sit, sit,’ she says indicating with an open hand to a space at the dining table.

My heart is like a weight inside my chest: too heavy to beat but desperate to escape. We sit at one corner of the table, she is at its head, me on her left.

‘I’m sorry for the way I turned up the other day,’ my mother says. ‘I should have thought through what I was doing to you.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Abimbola says you make jewellery,’ she says. ‘Did you make those rings you are wearing?’

I look down at them: the thick silver one, the copper and silver twisted ones, the copper and silver texturised one, the plain silver one, the linked yellow gold ones, the pleated platinum ones. Those are the ones I made first, my practice rings. The others came later, were made with just as much love and attention but in less time, with more experience with every measurement, cut, heat up, cool down, pickle, shape, file, solder, polish and finish. ‘Yes. I remake old jewellery and make new stuff, too.’

She reaches out and cautiously takes my left hand to get a better look at the rings. ‘I am envious,’ she says. ‘I have always wanted to be able to do something like jewellery or sculpting or even simple moulding. When I see something in my head it is so clear, so vivid, but when I attempt to make it, it does not quite turn out how I expected.’ She laughs. She laughs how I laugh, with her head thrown slightly to one side, her cheeks plumped up and her eyes slightly closed. ‘To say the least.’

‘That’s what drawing and painting are like for me. I think I’m so artistic because in my head the image is so brilliant and perfect. My hands, however, never seem to be able to do that on the page. Luckily it seems to work with jewellery. You can draw, though, so that’s something.’

‘You can make jewellery, which is like sculpture, is it not? You are artistic. Simply not drawing artistic. I am not physically artistic.’ But we are both artistic, she seems to be saying, we have another connection.

‘I suppose that’s true,’ I say. I wish she would laugh again. She reminds me most of the connection between us when she laughs.

‘You were … you were happy?’ she asks.

I can’t be honest with her, not if I don’t want to hurt the feelings of this intimate stranger. She is staring at her hands and at my hands. Yes, I was happy. And I was miserable, too. I was happy, I was miserable, I wanted an escape route, I never wanted to leave home. I laughed so much my body hurt, I cried so hard my eyes ached. I had a mostly normal childhood. ‘I was OK,’ I confirm. ‘I was fine. The Smittsons are good people.’

‘I did not want to give you away,’ she says quietly. She continues to study my hands, her hands, to focus on not looking at the rest of me.

‘Then why?’ I ask.
Why, why, why?
And:
How could you
? And:
What was wrong with me?
And:
Why didn’t you come back for me?
And:
Have you thought about me all these years
? And:
Why, why, why
?

‘I was seventeen. I had no family around me. The Zebilas were worried about what people would say about the unmarried daughter of a friend who lived in their house suddenly being with child. They thought people would believe your grandfather was responsible. He would never have done such a thing but they worried what people would say.

‘Your father … he was still completing his studies and could not financially support us. I battled with myself for many weeks. Mrs Stoner, the foster carer, a nice English lady, let me come and see you almost every day. I was not supposed to, the social worker said, but Mrs Stoner let me. I would hold you, sing to you, feed you … you were so small. She would let me bath you sometimes.’

More whys from what she reveals, not less:
Why didn’t he give up his studies to support us? Why didn’t his parents with their big house and money want to help? Why didn’t anyone think to organise a secret wedding so you could keep me as husband and wife? Why could you hold me and sing to me and bath me and
still
walk away? Why didn’t you look for me?

‘The social worker told me I would forget. She said I should get on with my life, look forwards not back and I would forget. She said you would go to two people who would know how to look after you as only adults can. I couldn’t do that properly, she said. I was too young.’

Why did you believe her? Why didn’t you believe that I was your baby and I would need you, not anyone else?

‘I never forgot. How could I? I have thought about you every day.’

Why didn’t you tell your other children about me? Why didn’t you let my grandmother see me – she might have changed her mind about me then? Why?

The answer was obvious, of course: Why? Because she was seventeen. At seventeen I had slept with about ten different people, trying to make connections with others wherever I could because sometimes the endless abyss of aloneness and being ‘different’ would threaten to swallow me whole. At seventeen I still thought my ‘real’ parents would swoop in and take me away from all the bad things that had meandered through my life like the slow-moving but persistent flow of a river. I remember studying for A levels, listening to Take That and complaining about Dad not letting me straighten my hair while all the white girls around me – including my cousin Nancy – were still slathering on chemicals to curl their hair to look like mine.

If I was in her situation at seventeen – and I so nearly was – I would have kept the baby. It would have broken my parents’ hearts but I would have done it, I would have kept me. I have to remember, though, that I was seventeen in 1995. I was not a teenager in 1978, single, living with a family who obviously didn’t want me around, without a job, without a friend nearby except the man who got me into this situation and who obviously didn’t want anything to do with my child. I know all this but, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. The knowing and understanding doesn’t change the hurting. The hurting is like a furnace inside me sometimes that is fuelled by never feeling good enough, or worthy enough, or lovable enough, to be anyone’s first choice. Except for Mum and Dad, except for Seth. They are the only people I’ve met over my lifetime who have chosen me first every time. If I look at what I’ve done, how I’ve twisted myself into so many difficult shapes to be able to be who someone else wants me to be, I realise that not even I am my own first choice.

‘You look so much like Abimbola,’ she says with a smile. I like her laugh, I don’t like this smile. This smile is the type you use when you are cooing over a baby: maternal, loving, sentimental. It freaks me out. I’m not a baby, but that is clearly who she is seeing. Either Baby Talei or Abi but not me, Clemency the adult.

‘She looks like me,’ I tease. ‘I was here first, remember?’

‘Ah, yes, I’m sorry. She looks so much like you.’ She grins. Then seriousness descends, covers her body and makes it stiff, forces her hands to stop moving. ‘You were really all right?’ she asks again, just to be sure.

I nod. I was mostly all right. Weren’t most people?

‘When are you and Seth going to be having children?’ Dad asked.

‘The twelfth of never, probably,’ I replied offhandedly.

‘Is it you or him?’ Dad asked.

When I did not reply, simply carried on with my search through the on-screen TV guide for something to watch that we’d both like, Dad said, shrewdly, ‘You, is it,
quine
?’

‘Yes,’ I mumbled.

‘Can I ask you why, or will you change the subject?’

‘Can you honestly see me with a baby, Dad?’

‘Yes. You would be a perfect
mither
. If Nancy can do it, and I’ve never had much faith in her abilities, why do you think you can’t?’

I shrugged.

‘You don’t need to know the past to have a future,
quine
. You simply have to have faith that you will do your best.’

‘It’s not the past I don’t know, Dad, though, is it? Please don’t be upset by this, but it’s the things going on with my body that I don’t know about that could do something to my baby because I don’t know anything about where I came from. There could be all sorts of things inherited in my personality that could make me a terrible parent. I don’t know enough about myself to know who I really am.’

‘Ach,
quine
, does anyone? You are thirty-six, you must have some idea of who you are, what you like, what you don’t like. Nobody knows who they are all the time. We surprise ourselves constantly. We scare ourselves even by being capable of doing things we did not know we could do.’ He rested back in his chair, weak suddenly. I was draining him with this talk, I had to stop it.

‘Let’s change the subject, eh?’ I said.

‘No. I need to say this. You are my
bairn
, Clemency Smittson. My Smitty. You were also someone else’s daughter first of all. But ultimately you are who you are. You may talk like someone else, you may look like someone else, you may think you have the same values and beliefs as someone else, but you are you. Any child you have will be the same. They will be who they are, despite you.’

The pictures seem to have loosened everyone up properly. When my mother and I return to the living room they’re chatting and laughing. They are all giggling and chortling at Lily who is doing rather accurate impressions of me from the pictures.

Lily is currently pretending to be me when we came down south to go to the stately home and giant maze at Hampton Court. I know the picture well, it was up in Mum and Dad’s living room until the move. I think it might be in Mum’s room now. I’m about nine and I’m standing in the middle of the maze. I have one hand against the green maze wall, my other hand on my hip, and I’m grinning at Mum who was taking the photo. I have on navy blue jeans with a white stripe down the side and a red, short-sleeve top. Dad had done my hair especially for the occasion in two pigtails, wound round and round like Princess Leia from
Stars Wars
because she was my favourite, and after years of trying, he’d finally managed to make it work.

Lily puts her right hand on the fireplace and her left hand against her hip and dramatically juts that hip out. She purses her lips in an exaggerated pout instead of a smile.

‘You’re a cheeker,’ I say to her as I laugh.

‘These photographs are brilliant!’ Abi says. ‘There are so many of them and, my goodness, did you love to pose!’

‘They are cool,’ Ivor says. This is the first time he’s spoken and his voice is deep, not as deep as his father’s, but rich and soothing, tinged with an East Sussex burr.

I glance at him. He stares at me in response. Since I arrived he has been watching me, probably wondering if I’m ‘real’. If I’m his ‘real’ sister, if I am a ‘real’ Zebila by blood, if my intentions are ‘real’ or if I am there to trick his family out of money. He’s wondering what the ‘real’ reason is I am here. People have been wondering if I’m real all my life, why should he be any different?

‘Child,’ my grandmother says. All of us in the room except Mum look up. She is looking at me, talking to me. ‘Help me to my room.’

Ivor moves forward, arms out, ready to help her up, as does Abi. ‘I asked the— I asked Clemency,’ she says to stop them. ‘My room is down the corridor,’ she says. ‘Help me.’