That Girl From Nowhere (52 page)

‘Nothing, nothing.’

Our ‘morning after’ silence returns, full of sharp, awkward edges that jut like angry elbows into what had been tender moments between us, leaving huge, unsightly bruises.

‘I’ll need to be opening the café soon,’ he says. ‘Thankfully there’s a shower here, you’re welcome to use it, too.’

‘Thanks, I suppose I had better be making a move as well.’

‘All right, since you’re clearly not going to bring it up, where do we go from here, Girl From Nowhere?’

Tyler settles his cup on the floor on his side of the sofabed. He climbs up on the bed until he is close to me.

‘This sofabed was quite comfortable as sofabeds go,’ I say. ‘I only dislocated one of my shoulders on that metal frame.’

He says nothing, waits for a non-evasive response. I place my cup on the floor, sit up to face him properly. ‘I’ve behaved badly,’ I say.

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, you were quite good actually,’ Tyler replies.

‘Oi, you!’ I go to tickle him and he catches my wrist, pulls me towards him. His physicality is intoxicating as we tumble down on to the bed.

‘What I’m asking is: is this a one-night thing for you?’

‘I’m guessing by the fact you’re asking that it’d be a problem if it was,’ I say.

‘Yes, it would be. I like you, I think you like me, but I’m not interested in anything casual. Laidback, yes, but “just sex” is not my thing.’ He strokes his thumb over my cheek. ‘Is it just sex you want, Smitty?’

‘No. I don’t know. I just know I like you a lot. Even more so after last night. I’m really confused, I suppose, about you and lots of other things.’

Tyler’s beautiful eyes with their long eyelashes regard me for several elongated seconds. Frustration and disappointment emanate from him. ‘You need to be honest with yourself, Smitty. Ask yourself what you really want. I’ve been stupid, I’ve let you stampede all over my boundaries because I like you. Last night shouldn’t have happened. It was great,
really great
, but this isn’t my thing at all. So, you know what, I’m putting an end to this in all its forms. When you’re sure of what you want, when you’ve been brutally honest with yourself, maybe we can talk.’

He’s right, of course. I need to be honest with myself about what I want from him. What I want from Seth. What I want from my parents, my family, life, but most of all, what I want from myself. I keep ducking out of that – being honest about what I truly want from myself. ‘So, there’s no chance of a quickie before I head off, then?’ I say with a smirk.

His laugh ripples through me and he tickles me as we giggle. His hand works its way inside my stiff, radiator-dried clothes, and rubs seductively over my nipple, while his lips brush against mine in a soft, brief kiss. ‘Not a chance in hell,’ he says. He kisses me again – longer and slower, but with his hands outside my clothes.

It’s a goodbye kiss, no doubt about it, but it’s wonderful all the same.

We’ve been waiting out here for what seems like forever.

After leaving Tyler’s I decided to go to work, to forget about everything and get on with the commissions that had been backing up. The workshop is a different place – it is complete and whole, how I want it to be. I have found a space for everything and the shelves from the shop have been perfect for creating room for everything to be labelled and easily accessible.

The shop is still ‘coming soon’ but there is progress that I am happy with. I need to fine-tune the images in my head, but the basic outlines are there, I simply need to sketch them in and make them real. I reached the shop and stood outside, unable to unlock the doors and enter.

I had to deal with what had happened the day before. The walking, the sitting in the rain, being with Tyler, were all delaying tactics from having to face what my parents had done.

Seth was already there, sitting in Lottie. We didn’t speak when I opened the side door and sat down, watching the building. He sat in the driver’s seat, I sat on the side watching. Waiting.

My other mother arrives soon afterwards. She stands outside the building, trying to decide if she should go in or not. She decides not to enter, then sees me sitting in Lottie, walks across the road and sits down next to me. She doesn’t speak to me, she sits down next to me, on the floor of my campervan, watching. Waiting. Abi arrives next. She doesn’t have Lily with her, but she does have a noticeable bump because she’s not wearing baggy clothes. I wonder if she’s told them or if they’ve noticed. She comes to us and lowers herself between us. Her space is between our mother and me. Unusually for her, I suspect, she doesn’t speak, she simply sits. Watching. Waiting.

The four of us sit and watch and wait for what seems like hours. Eventually, after what feels like the whole city has entered and exited the building, the glass doors slide back and Mum steps out first. She stands very still, wearing yesterday’s clothes, looking around as if she is surprised it is daytime, and that she is out there at all. We all move, drawn towards her across the road that is now lousy with closely parked cars and vehicles. She sees us coming and does nothing. As we reach the bottom step, the doors slide back again and my father steps out.

He stands a little way away from Mum, marvelling, too, that he is out, he is free. No one speaks, we all simply reach for each other. I go for Mum, but find my other mother there, too, nestled in the crook of my left arm. In my other mother’s other arm is her stiff-backed, uncomfortable husband, and in his other arm is his daughter Abi, in Abi’s other arm is her sister’s mother, Mum. We pull together, closing the gap between us until we are together properly, creating the strangest group hug I’ve ever been a part of. While we hug, I realise that someone is missing. Someone who should be there with us has kept himself apart, even though he is part of the family.

‘I think I’m going to drive around,’ Seth says. ‘Clear my head.’

We dropped the others at their place and then he has driven us back home. We’ve all barely spoken, but instead communicated with our silence how bonded we were. This thing had tied us together and it was too huge to chatter about, too incredible to speak of.

‘Thank you, Seth, for the lift last night and the lift home,’ Mum says to him.

‘No problem, Mrs Smittson,’ he replies.

‘You must call me Heather,’ she says.

He can’t help his side eye to me, wondering what’s got into her – after more than ten years he’s finally being initiated into First Name Basis with Mum. ‘I’ll try,’ he says. ‘But it’s not that easy to call people older than me by their first names.’

‘You make me sound ancient! Just how much older than you do you think I am?’ Mum retorts.

She giggles at the way alarm widens his eyes. ‘She’s messing with you,’ I tell him. I’m not sure when Mum started messing in general, especially with Seth, but that’s what she’s doing. Maybe it’s another way of making sure I have someone if she does end up in prison.

‘I will see you later,’ she says. With ease she climbs down from her place beside Seth in the front and makes her way into the building.

‘I’ll see you later,’ I say to him.

‘Yes, I’ll see you later.’ He can’t look at me because he’s probably worked out where I was when I didn’t come home last night. I look at him though: clean-shaven again. Back to being the man I married, the man I lived with, the man I fell in love with, the man I met all that time ago. Except is he? He’s changed, I’ve changed. We all of us only vaguely look the same, we’re probably only vaguely the same people on the inside.

I watch and wait until my red campervan, driven by my husband, my ex, disappears from sight when it blends into the traffic heading along the road into Brighton. He was the one missing from the group hug. He is part of my family.

Nancy, who by all accounts didn’t handle what Mum told her very well, has taken Sienna to London for a few days to stay with friends and the flat seems empty without Sienna. Mum has spent most of the afternoon asleep in her bedroom. She doesn’t want to talk and I don’t blame her. We will have to talk properly, comprehensively, at some point; we’ll have to get her a solicitor and brace ourselves for what comes next, which includes the very real possibility of prison. The little she has said about what the police told her has been enough for me to know that it’s likely to go to court; at the very least it will come before the Crown Prosecution Service for consideration for trial. If convicted they could get up to fourteen years. She knew this, but she was still willing to help a relative stranger die to stop me doing it. After our brief chat, Mum disappeared into her bedroom and hasn’t emerged since.

When Seth returns to the flat he tries the kitchen first, then the living room and then my bedroom. ‘There you are,’ he says. ‘The door was shut which is why I didn’t try in here first.’

I have been sitting on the floor, waiting for him. He comes in and manages about three steps across the room before he stops, halted by the wall in front of him. The wall, which had felt so empty, has been refilled with images of him again. That’s what I’ve spent the past few hours doing. My wall is now
With Seth, With Seth, With Seth, With Seth, With Seth
again. He’s a huge part of my family, whether we’re a couple or not.

‘Come sit down, please,’ I say to him.

Cautious and confused, unable to completely take his eyes off the wall, he comes to sit opposite me, attempts to cross his long legs, thinks better of it and sits side on instead.

Between us on the floor is
that
picture, it used to be his favourite one of me.

‘I wanted to thank you for all you’ve done for me,’ I say. I sound formal and I don’t mean to. ‘Remember this?’ My fingers slide the photo towards him. He nods contemplatively.
With Seth. (Finally!!!)
‘I don’t just mean the photo, I mean those few days. Do you remember them?’

He looks like he did earlier: agonised. He went out to clear his head, to process the fact I’d been with someone else, and all I’m doing is dredging it up again, raking his feelings over the red-hot coals of our separation and the drift between us. But it’s necessary. We have to look at all of it before we can move on, together or apart.

‘I remember those few days, yes,’ he says flatly.

‘It felt like nothing could touch us. I never wanted those four days to end, I just wanted us to stay together without the rest of the world barging in,’ I confess. ‘I was trying to telepathically get you to ask me to move in with you so I’d never have to leave you.’

‘I didn’t want you to leave, either. I didn’t want you to leave the first time you stayed with me, and after those few days I wanted you to stay for ever.’

‘I look at this photo and I can’t work out what went wrong.’

‘Neither can I,’ he replies sombrely.

‘Then I look at that photo,’ I point to
Seth With Dad, February 2013
, ‘and I have a clue.’

Seth is confused.

‘I’m sorry, Seth,’ I say to him. ‘I’m sorry for shutting you out when Dad was dying. I was so mired in it, I didn’t even notice. I just didn’t think.’

I did a terrible thing to him. It didn’t even cross my mind that he’d need to be there. I just focused on what I needed to do because Mum needed me, Dad needed me, I didn’t think that Seth needed to be a part of it too. I remember how he sounded, how he would talk to me when I couldn’t speak, how he would listen when I could talk, how utterly broken he sounded every time I told him what was happening next. I didn’t notice that a lot of his pain was because he wasn’t there, too. It wasn’t intentional, cutting him out, but I did it. In all our years together, whenever we stayed over at my parents’ place, Dad and Seth would go round the corner for a few drinks in the pub, then more often than not, Seth and Dad would sit up into the small hours talking with a bottle of whisky while Mum and I would be in our beds.

We were a family, a close family, and I didn’t even notice that Seth, one of our members, wasn’t there when he needed to be. No wonder he turned to Nancy, someone he thought had been cut out in the same way.

‘You and Dad were good friends but I didn’t think you might need to be there, too. Part of me was trying to spare you the pain of seeing him like that because it was awful, and part of it was selfish – not thinking of anything or anyone else except how to get through each day, even though each day was bringing us closer and closer to the end. You must have been so hurt. And so
angry
with me. I’m so sorry.’

‘I wasn’t angry with you. I was scared and hurt. But not angry. That came later.’

‘Are you still angry with me?’ I ask.

‘No. Not at all. I was angry with myself, too, for not saying something. For not talking to you and letting you know I wanted to be there. I should have known you were too preoccupied to take my feelings into account.’ He picks up the photo. He grins at Clemency circa 2004. ‘I remember I wanted you so much, then and in the years leading up to that night,’ he says. ‘I’ve told you this, but that’s why I came to talk to you and Dylan that day. I was never sure what it was about you, but I remember looking at you across the bar and just wanting to be with you. That New Year’s Eve, I thought I’d made a mistake inviting you over because my feelings were out of control. Everything you did drove me crazy with lust. I kept telling myself that the feelings would pass – all I had to do was get through the night and I could go back to being your friend. Thankfully it didn’t quite work out like that … Are you still angry with me about Nancy?’

‘No. I’m still a little hurt that you lied to me when I asked you about her, but that will pass.’

Seth continues to grin at the photo of my younger self. ‘Listen,’ he looks up at me, ‘I know you’re angry with Heather and Julius for what they did, how they took over.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know you – twenty-odd years of sharing secrets, remember?’ His grin is genuine but fleeting. ‘Don’t be angry with them. You never would have done it.’