In here, the devastation had been worse. They’d emptied every box, left the contents on the floor, some knocked over so findings and beads had obviously rolled away, like the ones Lily and Sienna spilt, never to be seen again. I’d felt violated, as if someone had marched into my head and emptied the contents all over the place for me to see how trivial and frivolous my life would seem to some. They had poked and prodded around to make sure they hadn’t missed anything then had withdrawn with nothing.
After the violated feeling I started to think about it – all of it, and realised I needed this. I needed someone to come storming into my work life and shake it up, force me to take stock and consider doing things differently. I had tacked pieces of my old ways of working on to this workshop. It was ordered and staged like the small space I had at Karina’s place up in Leeds and the spare bedroom at my flat. The ideal would have been to rip it all up then start again.
The police had ripped it all up, now I need to start again.
This place needs to be nothing short of what I want. It needs to remind me that I can do something right, I can put down roots and I can create something that grows and becomes successful. I have to stop being so passive in all of this. In my life. If I want to stop being from nowhere, I have to find myself somewhere to be. That somewhere is here.
I revolve slowly on the spot, trying to see the shelves, the cases, the stands, the area where I’ll sit and talk to people about their designs. Glass or wood or Perspex? Blond wood or mahogany? Stainless steel or white? Primary colours or pastels? I need to open the shop, I need to forge ahead, put all the stuff of the last few days behind me and go forwards.
I tip my head back, open my eyes. The ceiling is deceptively high for a shop that is quite small. Maybe I can suspend something up there. Some of my old tools I don’t use any more? Photos of my designs? I lower my head to look at the wall opposite. It is a large blank canvas. My photos. I’ll put my photos there. I will ask those who I make jewellery for if I can put up photos of them and their jewellery there as well as on the internet.
In front of that wall I will put two armchairs and a small table where people can sit while we chat about the jewellery they want made or reloved with the backdrop of others’ pieces behind them, and in front of them in an album.
I turn towards the window. I will display some of the pieces I sell on white velvet trays, in front of photos of people wearing them. I rotate on the spot, look at the wall which currently has heavy, dark wood shelving from one end to the other that reaches high up the wall. I can move them into the back where they’ll be helpful for organising my equipment. I will replace them with a wall of Perspex drawers, so customers can easily see the jewellery.
The floors will be white tiles, even though they’ll need cleaning every day, and the counter can be Perspex, too, but the front will have long thin tubes filled with different coloured beads, standing like test tubes of coloured liquid waiting to be experimented on in a science lab.
I can see it. I can actually see it. The images come to me in a rush, flashes and colours and panels, shades and displays. If I were able to sketch like my mother, I would be putting these images on the page, instead of storing them in my head. When it is finished I’ll have a launch party, I’ll invite all the clients I have down here, I’ll even invite my first family. Surely that won’t be seen as harassment? Surely they will, by then, have decided that I couldn’t possibly have done it and they will accept me back?
I’m deluding myself, I know. But I need hope. I need something to cling on to. I need them to realise that I can be a part of their lives. Not the be all and end all, just a little sliver of it. Just someone they would like to be around every now and again.
Part 9
66
Smitty
Today I am on a double mission. First, to find another out-of-the-way place for Abi and me to meet. Second, to sit down and try to work out who did what I was going to do.
The answer is nearly there, I can feel the fingers of my mind groping for it, nearly clasping it and then having to give up as it twirls itself out of reach. I’m sure, if I come away from everything and everyone, I will work out what happened, who did it and why. What I’ll do with that knowledge I don’t know since the police are hardly likely to believe me and I would have heard by now if they were pursuing anyone else in connection with the death instead of just me.
Also, if they had moved their attentions on from me, Abi and I would not be having to sneak around still. Even though I sorted out a lot of things with my mother, I’m not sure how she would really feel about me meeting Abi. The jealousy and worry won’t have dissipated like dry ice now we’ve talked; conversation can’t erase worries and anxieties and fears, especially irrational, illogical ones. From what Abi said the other night, even though her mum, my other mother, had told her dad, our father, that she’d never forgive him for sending her child away again, she hasn’t outright sanctioned or approved Abi seeing me. Until other people are comfortable with it, we’re going to be having a sibling affair as Abi called it.
This café seems perfect for our purposes because it is one of those out of the way but ‘in plain sight’ places. You can only get there by foot and you have to be pretty determined at that: crossing a concrete lock that I’m convinced wobbles when you walk on it, or driving down to the desolate area of huge, ominous-looking nearby power plant and then getting out to walk the rest of the way once you run out of road.
The café should, with its place right on the water, be a glass and chrome affair but it isn’t. It is made up of low, pebble-dashed buildings that look suspiciously as if they were once outhouses and the outside ambience comes in the shape of white plastic garden tables and green plastic chairs. It would be perfect, though, for illicit meetings with my sister.
I order coffee from the waitress, take out my notebook. At the centre of the page I write the initials SZ (for Soloné Zebila) and draw a circle around them. Inside the circle I cram a question mark next to the initials but away from the curve of the circle. Somebody killed my grandmother, SZ, and I can’t work out who. To do it, they would need access. I scrawl down the people I know who that applies to: AZ (Abi), IZ (Ivor), JZ (Julius) and KZ (Kibibi). To be thorough, I add LZ (Lily), too. Maybe JoZ (Jonas), my other brother who no one talks about. Not even Abi will talk freely about him beyond saying he lives abroad. Whenever I ask about him she glosses over him or outright changes the subject. It doesn’t take a detective – qualified or not – to work out there was some kind of falling out. And with my father issuing decrees to me the other day, it’s likely to be him that Jonas fell out with. Actually, with my grandmother the way she was, how manipulative she was, it could have been her also. I draw lines between JoZ and SZ, JoZ and JZ. Question marks go along those lines.
I have access, well, had – pretty sure my father will have changed the locks by now. I write down CS (Clem). Seth knew I had the key, so his initials, SC, go down too. He didn’t want me to do it and he offered to do it instead. Each of these factors earns him a circle around his name. I have the same number. Who else? Mum? (HS). She knew where they lived, but the access is out. My other mother, she has access (one circle), she and SZ didn’t get on (second circle) and she knew all about the medication (third circle). So did I. (Another circle for me).
I look at the page again. I have the most circles.
‘Here you go.’ The waitress, with her pristine white apron, rolled-up sleeves and peach lipstick, places my coffee beside my notebook then stops to gawp at what I’ve written and a deep frown forms between her unplucked eyebrows. She stares at the initials, the connecting lines, the question marks, the circles. I see them as she sees them: a load of rubbish, fanciful nonsense from a person who has watched one too many cop shows. A wave of embarrassment flows through me. I wonder if she’s guessed what I’ve been trying to do, what I’ve convinced myself I can do. She frowns again, then leaves me to it.
I snap shut my notebook, embarrassed that I
seriously thought I could work it all out over a cup of coffee in an out-of-the-way café.
I pick up my coffee, move to take a sip. Except it’s tea. Tea. I don’t drink tea. I pretend to Mum that I do to make her happy, but the reality is, there’s something fundamentally flawed about tea in my mind. It’s flavoured water. Not like coffee, coffee is something made with water, it is a real drink.
For a few seconds I toy with the idea of drinking the tea, forgoing the coffee just this once. I can’t, I just can’t.
I hook my bag over my shoulder, pick up my notebook and pencil and stand to return the tea that should be coffee. In the café there is a queue for service even though it hadn’t looked that busy outside. I stand behind a tall, wide man who wears clothes that are too small for him. The teacup clatters because my bag wants to slip off my shoulder, and I can’t quite get the correct angle with the notebook and pencil in one hand and the cup in the other, so I am playing a sort of balancing act that rattles the cup and saucer.
I should put the whole lot down at the nearest unoccupied table and reorganise myself so that I’m not in imminent danger of dropping something. I shouldn’t be looking around the café, scanning as I always do, for a face I recognise in the crowd. In the time before I met my biological family, I used to do this all the time. I used to look at people to see if I knew them, if they looked like me, if I looked like them, if they were that familiar stranger I was connected to by blood. I still do it. A habit of a lifetime cannot be broken in a few short months, after all.
I spot it. I see a face that I recognise. And another. I see two faces I recognise, sitting right at the back of the café, in that hidden, private nook all the best cafés have. Those are the areas where I conduct my business with new clients who don’t invite me into their homes, the places Abi and I would probably sit so we won’t be easily seen as we conduct our sibling affair. This pair, this couple, obviously do not want to be seen. They have come here, to this secret café, and they have taken up a private space. And they are sitting with their heads close together as they make their plans, probably discussing how they’re going to tell me about their relationship. Or maybe they’re chatting about how much longer they’re going to keep me and everyone else in the dark about them. The jangling of the crockery in my hand is now out of control – I’m going to shake the cup off the saucer altogether at this rate because I am so horrified by who I have seen together.
My eyes dart around looking for a clear surface, but my gaze keeps returning to the couple in the corner because if I look away for too long, they might disappear, I might realise I have imagined it, imagined them. I choose the table in front of me to set down my burden. It’s occupied by two people who probably mind having a half-full teacup and tea-flooded saucer placed in front of them, but would probably concede it’s better than it being dropped beside them.
I stare at the couple at the back. I can’t believe what I am seeing. My Paddington Hard Stare is so firm, immovably fixed, one half of the pair glances up in my direction, looks away then immediately swings back when they register that they’ve seen me. The other one notices their companion is staring and looks in that direction too. That half of the couple is more openly horrified at being caught.
‘You should have drunk the tea,’ I tell myself. ‘If you had, none of this would be happening.’
Without noticing them properly, fully, I move around the other people and tables in the café until I am in front of the couple in the back, waiting for one of them to speak. They stay silent. They sit and watch me: one is wide-eyed with alarm, the other impassive; the only clue as to their shock is the way their eyes keep darting to the door, waiting to see who else will arrive and catch them together.
I look first at Mum, I look second at Julius, my father. The pair of them together, so close they’re … Surely not.
‘We have to tell her, anyway,’ says Mum when the silence has gone on long enough for them to know I won’t be speaking first.
‘But—’ begins my father.
‘Just tell me,’ I say.
One remains mute, the other fixes me with their pale blue eyes, eyes that are used to hypnotising me, making me stand still while I’m about to be told off or insulted.
‘We did it,’ Mum says. ‘We’re the ones who helped your grandmother to die.’
67
Julius & Heather
Julius with Heather, two weeks ago, Brighton
He opened the door to the woman who looked, frankly, deranged. She had seemed demure and respectable when he met her, a woman who had class and a certain amount of breeding.
‘We need to talk,’ the woman said loudly, dispelling all thoughts about her being the type of person she appeared to be. Even her accent was different from when they first spoke. The woman walked straight past him and into the house as though she belonged there.
‘Kitchen that way, is it?’ she asked.
He was working at home because he was waiting on some very important documents and it would be quieter to work there. Kibibi had taken Lily-Rose out so he could get some work done in peace. Kibibi had even prepared and administered his mother’s medication to ensure he would not be disturbed.
In the kitchen, the woman looked around, examining their home as if she didn’t think they were good enough. ‘Who do you people think you are?’ she said. ‘How can you even think of doing that to my girl? Who do you people think you are?’
‘Why are you here?’ Julius asked sternly. He had no time for this woman. He was grateful that she and her husband brought up the girl, turned her into a polite young woman, but he had no time for this woman. The girl … Seeing her again had been a reminder of a part of himself he did not like to admit existed. He had been ashamed for most of his life. Back then, in 1978, he had been scared of what doing the right thing might entail, what hardships they would all have to endure. When his mother made the call, made the decision, he had been relieved. He could show Kibibi how hard he was fighting, but ultimately, his mother, his father, they would have their own way. They always had their own way. He was ashamed of not being man enough at the time to take responsibility for his mistake. Seeing the girl in the present had brought that mortification back to the front of his mind.
‘How dare that woman ask my daughter to do that?’ the woman in front of him repeated.
‘What woman? What are you talking about?’ She is my daughter, in all actuality, he thought. He wanted to remind her of that. She was his daughter even though he did the wrong thing back then.
‘That woman! She wants my daughter to help end her suffering. What about my daughter’s suffering? She’s in bits, trying to work out how to do it. And she will do it. Because Clemency will do anything for someone who is family. How dare she do this to Clemency.’
‘I do not know what you are talking about. I might understand if you calm yourself down and explain to me what you are trying to say.’
The woman’s nostrils flared like an untamed horse’s, her body was like that of an animal ready to pounce.
‘Sit, sit. Sit. Tell me.’
‘Your mother,’ she said when she was seated. ‘Asking my Clemency to help her to do that.’
‘Help her to do what? What suffering?’ He didn’t fully understand, although he feared that he did and was too cowardly to face it.
‘I knew it. I knew she wouldn’t be brave enough to ask one of you, it would be my daughter because she sees her as second best.’
‘Mrs Smittson …’
‘Don’t you dare Mrs Smittson me. Don’t you dare! She wants Clemency to help her to die. She is suffering and she wants Clemency to help her. What about Clemency’s suffering? Just because she didn’t grow up in this big house with all these expensive things, and didn’t go to private school, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t know right from wrong. It doesn’t mean she would do that.’
‘You think she would ask Clemency to … I don’t think so. My mother is very religious, she knows killing is wrong.’
‘She has spoken to Clemency twice as far as I know. No one would ask someone they have spoken to twice to do such a thing. Certainly not my mother. You must be mistaken.’
‘She’s the one who is mistaken if she thinks I would let my daughter do that.’
‘Maybe Clemency misunderstood when my mother was discussing the pain she feels with her conditions.’
The woman’s eyes became wide and staring, fuelled by anger and outrage. ‘Let’s ask her, shall we? Then we will all be in a better position to understand what is going on.’
‘We talked to my mother,’ he says. ‘As she talked, explained as best she could what she’d asked and why, slowly I began to understand. I had left the care of my mother to Kibibi because I could not stand to see her like that.
‘I did not want to accept the reality of what was happening to her. I had been hiding from the truth. This disease, it had altered who she was. I wish you – both of you – had known her before. She was a formidable woman. Not always right, and she did some terrible things, but she was also remarkable and capable of such generosity.
‘Talking to her, I realised she was no longer the woman she used to be. She was always so strong and in charge. These diseases – the Parkinson’s, the diabetes, the heart problems … they made her feel weak. She could not care for herself, she could not be who she was, and it was going to get worse. She could not do the most basic things and the humiliation of that was more than she could bear.
‘I began to understand, for the first time, what her condition actually meant. I have lived alongside her for years, but I had not taken the time to speak to her, to find out what she wanted. Kibibi had been telling me for years to talk to her. I had been too afraid. I did not want to face what was happening to her. I did not want to accept that her mental pain was as acute as her physical pain.’
That Girl From Nowhere Page 39