But I’m better prepared for it now. I know not to trust those jealousies—like all feelings, they’re just chemicals, just oxygen and glucose flooding different parts of my brain in response to external stimuli. It’s the brain of a mammal trying to avoid pain, trying to avoid the sting of rejection because social rejection meant death when we evolved. It’s a system ten thousand years out of date, a system made for humans on the fringes of survival, and should obviously be ignored now.
And anyway, maybe I’m not frightened, maybe I’m merely possessive, and that’s to be expected.
I have more than voyeurism planned for us today. I want to play with her before the gala, so she can have stripes underneath her gorgeous gown, so that under all her silk and chiffon will be a reddened bottom and a needy cunt, waiting for me to soothe it.
You’re going to have to make her wait for it, I remind myself sternly. You can’t just give it to her the minute she bats those doe eyes at you.
My terrible secret is that there’s an urge in me, as deep as it is unfamiliar, to simply spoil her. All of the time. To pet her hair and play with her tits and kiss her pussy to my heart’s content, and to withhold nothing, even the things it makes me flinch to give. My hunger for her is as bottomless as her eyes. And so I don’t even know who I am anymore when I’m with her. Am I the strict Mistress, demanding perfection? The naughty Domme, spanking her for fun? An insatiable lover, keeping her up into the small hours of the night? A girlfriend, who texts her and cooks her supper and listens to her chatter about her day with photographers and business managers and fashion reps?
Something more?
Because it is something more, isn’t it, when I find myself watching her face as she sleeps, when seeing certain Pantones in a prospectus makes me think of her, when certain ads on the Tube make me think of her, when working, eating, breathing—they all make me think of her.
And so it’s no wonder I’m consumed today, thinking of this evening and my plans. Thinking of tonight, when she’ll be trembling and slick and oh-so-sweet.
But there’s one unpleasant task between me and leaving the office to go fetch her, and there’s no sense in delaying it. I give up on the site plans, deciding I’ll pack them up and work on them after she’s asleep tonight, and I go to close my office door for a semblance of privacy. I feel foolish as I do it, but I’ll feel more foolish if I don’t and someone overhears us.
Not because I’m embarrassed about calling my own mother, but because I am embarrassed of myself; I’m embarrassed of how she makes me behave.
I take a deep breath and dial.
Lydia Quartey picks up the phone on the second ring, answering in English. “Becky.”
She’s the only one who calls me that. I take a deep breath. “Hi, Ma.”
“I was hoping you’d call today,” she says, and I hear paragraphs of meaning in that one sentence alone. I close my eyes a moment. I can do this.
But before I can find an easy pleasantry to lead with, Ma asks me her favorite question. “Have you been going to church?”
“I—” I hate lying, but this is a truth with a heavy cost. “As much as I’m able. I have to travel a lot over the weekends.”
“The Lord says, ‘Honor the Sabbath Day.’ How will you honor the Lord’s day if you’re honoring work more? God must be first in your heart, Becky.”
Tell him he can come first in my heart when his preachers stop preaching that my heart is unnatural and wrong.
I shake my head at myself. I have more control than this.
“I’ll think about making more time to go. How is Ima?” I ask, knowing that turning the conversation to my grandmother will give me a few moments’ respite.
My mother’s words spill into a river of chatter—half English, half Ga, moving seamlessly between the two. Ima’s health is just bad enough to be interesting without being dangerous, and the bad health is just prolonged enough to give my mother a flavor of martyrdom as she talks about all the help she has to give Ima now.
I’m treated to a full account of it all. Then I hear about my aunts, my cousins, my godparents, and my mother’s best friend. By now I’m standing by the window again, staring down onto a lone tree growing from a bare-dirt square in the pavement below. Quartey Workshop is in a cluster of new, shiny things—glassy and open and shamelessly expensive among the still graffitied storefronts and litter-caught kerbs of the neighborhood. There’s neither a park near here, nor grass. The only flowers that exist here are purchased from black buckets and wrapped in cellophane. There’s only this one tree, and it looks as tired as I feel.
I miss Thornchapel like I miss Delphine. Like something vital has been pulled out of my body and blood is pooling in the cavity it left behind.
I close my eyes and think of Thornchapel while Ma talks. I think of the woods there, thick and carpeted with bluebells. I think of the river flashing bright and shallow. I think of my labyrinth, and how it will feel to walk it when it’s finished.
“—and Sheila’s son is in London now, you know. He’s a barrister, and doing very well for himself, I hear.”
She stops then, and I realize too late the trap I’ve wandered into.
“Oh?” I say, pitching my voice as carefully as I can.
“Well, you’re not seeing anyone, and why not a dinner, just to catch up? You haven’t seen each other since you were children, and now you’re both in London, and I think you’d like him, Becky, he’s very good-looking.”
I’m not fooled by all the words she said after; that casual you’re not seeing anyone is a hook, baited and cast into the water, and biting it is the kind of mistake I know better than to make.
Unfortunately, letting it float by without a semblance of an answer is also a mistake.
“I’ll tell Sheila, of course, and make sure Daniel has your number—”
The idea of dinner with Daniel is suddenly so suffocating, so unwelcome, that I actually take a step back, as if I can put more space between myself and my mother, when she’s already in Accra.
“I can’t,” I say. Blurt. And the silence on the other end tells me that I’ve bitten the hook just as she knew I would. Irritation flares, then ebbs. I wish she would just ask the questions she wants to ask. I wish she could bring herself to.
I wish I could just tell her without having to be goaded into it.
“Why can’t you?” she asks, even though she’s already guessed, I’m sure of it.
I shut my eyes. “I’m seeing someone.”
“It must be someone special,” she says slowly. “You haven’t dated since you finished school.”
“It is someone special,” I say, and if I were less tetchy, I’d be surprised at how easily those words come out. Someone special. Just like that.
“She is someone special,” I add, because if I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do this.
“Ah,” my mother says faintly.
I came out as queer to her years ago, and ever since, it’s been like I dug a pit between us. A shallow one, maybe, one that can be easily bridged with planks and flat stones, one that can be navigated—but it must be bridged, it must be circled. It must be talked over or around or ignored.
My mother is modern in many ways, but the rest of her family is not. Her church is not. Daniel’s mother is not. Not when it comes to this.
She doesn’t say anything for a long time, and I wonder if I should just end the call now. Let her stew about her foiled matchmaking, and then try again next week.
Finally, she says, “I want you to be happy. You know I do.”
I do, I do know that. In fact, I know two things for certain: my mother loves me, and I love my mother. Now, if only that were enough to make it easy between us.
“I just worry,” Ma says cautiously, “that you’re missing a . . . chance.”
“A chance,” I say.
“You’re young now, and doing well in your career, and I know it seems like you have all the time in the world to think of things other than t
he workshop, but time moves faster than you think. Don’t you want to get married? Have children? Know that you’ll have a child to take care of you when you’re old?”
I shouldn’t be surprised by this. Why am I surprised?
Before I can answer, Ma goes on. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting . . . what you want,” she says, and I have to close my eyes again. “But if you like boys and girls both, maybe you could . . . choose? To marry someone nice and have children with him? Here at home?”
Here at home.
Where openly loving another woman would be frowned upon and prayed over—at best. And at worst . . . ?
I don’t know my own feelings. I think I might cry, but the hot thrum in my chest is anger, not sadness. “I’m sorry. I have to go,” I say. “I have to go now.”
“Wait! Wait!” Her voice is desperate, and in that desperation, I hear it all. Her loneliness and her need, and also her shame. “I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry. I don’t want to make you upset.”
I give a dry, mean laugh. “Too late.”
“I just want—Becky, I want you home. I want you living here. I want to see you every day, like a mother should.”
“My life is here,” I state. “My work. Everything I’ve done for the Workshop and everything I still want to do. I can’t move back home now.”
“Your father could move the firm here,” she says. “Both of you could come back.”
Guilt gnaws at my anger. She’s lonely. I know she’s lonely. Her husband and only child have lived apart from her for almost two decades.
But.
“I don’t think that will happen,” I tell her. “London is where Daddy and I need to be.”
A pause. “Does he—has he been busy this week? He hasn’t called.”
This is almost worse than the casual bi-erasure, the stepping into the strange whirlpool of my parents’ marriage. At least I don’t have to lie. “He’s been commuting every day for a project in Wiltshire. He’s got a lot on his plate right now.”
“I see,” she says. She doesn’t sound like she sees at all. “And he is good? Healthy? Seeing friends?”
Another baited hook. Again, I’m grateful I don’t have to lie. “He’s healthy. No friends. He works and sleeps—no time for anything else.”
“He should relax more,” Ma murmurs, but I hear the relief in her voice, and suddenly, I’m just really fucking sad. I’m sad that my mother loves my father, and I’m sad that I’m not sure if he loves her back. I’m sad my mother is so lonely, but also that she makes being around her so difficult. I’m sad that I know for a fact that my father was unfaithful at least once, and I’m sad that I saw more raw longing in his eyes for the memory of David Markham than I’ve ever seen him have for his wife.
And I’m sad that while divorce is possible, it would never be easy, at least not for Ma. Her family would not make it easy on her. Hell, even my dad’s family wouldn’t make it easy. My father is giving Ma a gift, in a way, by staying married—economic comfort for her and her family, and freedom from scorn—and so maybe the gift outweighs the price. Who but her can say?
My watch buzzes gently against my wrist. “I have to go, Ma,” I say. “I have an appointment.”
“Tell your father I said hello. And to call me. And Becky?”
“Yes?”
She pauses. “I really am trying, you know. To understand.”
I wish I knew the right way to respond.
I wish I could tell her that if I can’t trust her with who I love, then I don’t know if I can trust her at all.
But I don’t want to fight. And I’m also very conscious that the reason her family and church are this way is the very place I’m standing in now. The country I’m reluctant to leave is the same country that sowed those seeds nearly two centuries ago. Colonizing, stealing, raping, converting—all of that came from here. From this cloudy city, from this damp island, and I don’t know what it means about myself that I’m choosing it anyway. I could say, well, I was born here, raised here, schooled here—but is that really enough?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
I’m supposed to be the smartest person in a family of doctors, lawyers, and architects, and I still don’t have the answer to this.
Anyway, I’m a coward, because I end up saying the easiest thing there is to say. “It’s okay, Ma. I know you love me.”
I don’t know that, actually, that’s the problem, but she seizes on it. “Yes, of course, Becky, of course I do. I love you more than anything, you know that. You and your father.”
I should be relieved when we say goodbye, but relief is very far from me as I start packing plans into my bag. In fact, my hands are shaking as I do it, even though they weren’t shaking on the call itself. Like my nervous system is finally catching up to what happened—there was no bear, no fire, no blizzard, there was only a mother, but here we are all the same, hands shaking, heart thumping, a trembling in my muscles like I’ve run a race.
Deep breaths, I remind myself. It’s not real. Just an outdated brain reacting to stimuli. Just old hardware taking a long time to boot up the new software.
I brace my hands on my desk and force myself to breathe.
I’m safe. No bear. No fire. Safe.
Just my mother. Just some words.
Funny, isn’t it. How words can feel like fire and teeth, and yet they’re nothing at all. Nothing but vibrations hanging in the air.
After a few minutes, the trembling stops. My pulse slows, and my hands steady. My thoughts return, finally, full and functioning, ordered in the way I like. I can lift my hands off the desk and finish packing my bag. I can turn off the lights in my office and make a polite goodbye to Shahil as I leave.
It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.
This is what happens.
I step into my waiting car, settling in for the drive back to my flat, trying to think of the whispering trees at Thornchapel, trying to think of Delphine’s smile, her honest eyes. But my anticipation is brittle, it’s flattened just like the river in my site plan, and all I can think of are my mother’s words, her clinginess and her loneliness. Her own guilt and the guilt she induces in other people.
This is what happens.
This is how people can hurt someone they think they love.
Chapter Twelve
Delphine
The club is called Justine’s, and it’s a meander of richly furnished rooms set into the heart of St. James—leather and wood and books, fireplaces, and small nooks for statues, and rugs so plush my feet sink into them as I stand. The light comes from the fires and sconces and the occasional chandelier; there always seem to be piano notes drifting from some distant room, punctuated with equally musical moans and cries.
Paintings hang from picture rails mounted on jewel-toned walls. Large oil works, small watercolors, portraits and landscapes and slyly erotic scenes, rendered so subtly that one hardly notices the cocks and cunts until one is staring directly at them. In the lobby, a gilt-framed painting stretches nearly from the floor to the ceiling: Cupid wrapped in silk ties and sulking while someone reaches to untie him.
Hope Comforting Love in Bondage, it’s called.
When I walk into the lobby today, I’m greeted by a young man in an impeccably tailored three-piece suit, the leather waistcoat underneath his jacket the only nod to the club’s true nature. He’s fat, with a full face and full body, and even though I wasn’t feeling self-conscious or nervous, I feel something inside my chest ease a little.
It eases even more as I see a woman my size walk through the far doorway and into a hallway. A naked man crawls behind her on hands and knees, his head down and his erect cock bobbing as he goes.
“Mistress Rebecca sends her apologies that she isn’t able to meet you here herself,” the concierge says. He has a puckish face, with an upturned nose and sparkling blue eyes, and a spray of freckles across his cheeks. But despite the Peter Pan look, his bearing is nothing but stillness and grace. “She aske
d me to show you to your room.”
“Yes, of course,” I say with a beam and follow him as he leads me into a hallway. He pulls back the cage on an old-fashioned lift, and then together we go up to the second floor, where I’m led to a room furnished like a study—bookshelves, a desk, a small fireplace with a statue of Pan fucking a goat on the top. The walls are painted in a dark garnet, and there’s a big window teasing a view of St. James’ Park—a glimpse of bright, new green in a world of gray.
But it’s not a study, not truly. A study wouldn’t have racks of paddles and crops set between the bookshelves, a study wouldn’t have a sensible wood floor for easy cleaning. A study wouldn’t have a bed set into the far corner with cuffs already dangling from the bedposts.
A study wouldn’t have leather lingerie waiting for me on the primly made bed.
“She expects you to dress and wait next to the desk. Kneeling, of course. Do you need help dressing?”
I go to the bed and study the lingerie. When I was a teenager, I used to hate the sight of my clothes laid flat because they always looked so much bigger than I thought they would be. I don’t feel that way nearly as often now, but there is a brief moment—an instant, nothing more—when I think: no.
When I think: anything but this.
Because this isn’t truly lingerie, not really. I’ve modeled for plus-size lingerie brands before; I’ve worn my own lingerie to take cute, flirty Insta pictures in. Lace, mesh, silk, cotton so fine one can peek nipples and navels through it—all of that is workable. All of that I can do, and I have done, and I know how to angle my body and twist myself just right for the desired effects.
But the outfit Rebecca’s chosen—it’s nothing but straps. Leather straps, which means there’s no give, no stretch, no forgiveness. It will press into my flesh. It will show all the places where I’m soft. There will be no twisting, no angles, no way to hide that my body is a fat body, and I don’t want to hide that my body is a fat body, because it is and I’m proud of it, but—
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