That Girl From Nowhere (23 page)

There are so many, so many that need to be put up. Each time I pick one up, the memory it holds diffuses into my fingertips, blooms through my blood, until I am remembering all those times.

The last photo I reach for I had not looked at properly when I took it out of the butterfly box until my fingers were almost upon it:
Dad with Seth, February 2013, Engagement Party Time!

Even though the party never happened, I didn’t add a sad face or mention of its cancellation to this picture because it is such a perfect image. Dad, in his navy blue suit, has his arm around Seth while Seth in his tight, navy blue suit that complemented my silver dress, has his arm around Dad. The pair of them could not look happier, more prepared for a night of
birling
(a big night of drinking) and celebrating. I did not want to taint the image by adding any sadness, any of the misery that came next. Should I put up this photo? I’m not sure it has a place among all these other images when I am trying to move on from Seth.

If I touch it, too, I’ll only properly remember. I’ll only be reminded how much I miss them both. I can do something about how keenly I feel the loss of one of those people, the absence of the other is beyond my control.

And that woman,
that woman
wanted me to help her end her life. I grab the photo, any memory no matter how tainted is better than the thought of what
that woman
wants me to do.

Seth unhooked his arm from Dad’s shoulder after having a picture taken with him, and wandered across the hall to me. I stood in the centre of the large space, spinning and looking in every direction, desperate to take in every last inch of the place. Seth had made it perfect.

The thirty or so tables that ringed the dance floor where I stood were draped with white paper tablecloths, printed all over with a design Seth had come up with that linked the ‘S’ of his name with the ‘C’ of my mine into a pretty monogram. The tables were scattered with silver and gold champagne flute-shaped confetti and each table had an empty wine bucket waiting for the ice cubes and accompanying Prosecco bottle.

The room was awash with silver and gold balloons with the same ‘SC’ design emblazoned on them, and the disco lights swung this way and that, to make the place dance with pretty, multi-coloured lights. In the corner, Seth had set up his mixing table and I had practically got down on my knees to beg him not to play hard-core rap all night (no one needed to see either set of parents attempting to dance to that) and to let a couple of his friends have a go so we could spend a bit of time together.

In the large entrance area outside the hall, Dad was now helping Jorge and Max, a couple of Seth’s mates from work, to set up the bar. Mum was making a huge fuss about not very much and I didn’t even mind. Dylan was meant to be coming but I knew he wouldn’t because he still,
still
felt we were rubbing his face in the fact we’d got together.

‘You like?’ Seth asked. He took my hand and twirled me around. The soft, satiny folds of my silver, knee-length dress flared out while he spun me. Bubbles of happiness fizzed and popped in my veins, I was giddy in a way I hadn’t been before. I’d been dubious about this, but he’d persuaded me into it because we weren’t going to get married for a while and he wanted to make a public declaration about our love for each other. I’d agreed because I loved Seth and I wanted everyone to be in no doubt how I felt about this man who twirled me, whose fingers mine easily slotted between, whose body I constantly missed like a physical ache deep inside, who was the first person I went to when anything happened.

We had different tastes in music, different ideas about what made a good read, we often fell out over stupid things, I worried all the time when he went out on his motorbike especially in the rain, he often got annoyed that all my jewellery-making tools and equipment were all over the flat instead of tidied away in one of the five yellow toolboxes he had bought me, but we were intertwined. Like the initials he had linked together on the tablecloths, balloons and napkins, we were interlinked and I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been with him. I had made my engagement ring from that piece of amber he had bought in Lithuania and everyone was going to see it tonight.

‘I LOVE!’ I said to my fiancé. ‘I love, love, love.’

In one move he tugged me into his arms. He was clean-shaven, his hair clipped short, and he smouldered with such deliciousness I wanted to lick him like he was a lollipop.

‘I love, love,
love
that dress you’re wearing,’ he murmured into my ear. His hand ran salaciously over my bum. ‘I can’t wait to have you in it.’ He drew me even closer to him. ‘And I can’t wait to take it off you and have you all over again.’

‘Clemency!’ Like an expert surgeon’s knife, my mother’s voice cut cleanly and precisely through Barry White’s ‘My First, My Last, My Everything’ and the fug of lust we’d slipped into. Seth and I shot apart, as we always did when my mother had that voice on her.

‘Yes, Mum?’ I asked.

‘Where are the extra—’

Mum was cut short by the doors to the hall being thrown dramatically back. In came Dad, heavily supporting a dishevelled, limping Nancy.

I couldn’t move, stood and watched as Dad helped her in. With a look to me, Seth went to help Dad place Nancy in a chair.

Her black mascara, something I’d
never
seen her wear before tonight, streaked down towards her cheeks like desperate fingers reaching out for help. Her usually flawless skin was blotchy, her neck was flushed a vivid red-pink colour.

‘Oh, Nancy, love, what’s happened?’ Mum rushed over to her, crouched down beside her chair. ‘Are you all right?’

Between gasping, sobbing breaths she told them what had happened: she had been on her way over, having got Sienna settled early with Uncle Colin and Auntie Marcia (who were babysitting instead of attending), so she could help. On her way she must have taken a wrong turn or something because suddenly she was lost and then she noticed she was being followed and
then
they stole her handbag and watch and thankfully that was all they wanted but she’d twisted her ankle trying to run away in case that wasn’t all they wanted. But she was worried because they seemed to be hanging around, looking for people to mug. Maybe they knew there was a party going on and thought they’d pick off the guests who were alone.

She was telling this to her assembled audience of Mum and Dad, Jorge and Max, because I knew from the second I saw her it was all fake; a ridiculous fabrication from a woman who was too jealous to let me have even this moment to myself.

‘
They’re always telling you how special you are because you were chosen. They don’t think you’re that special now, do they? I bet they’re wishing they never chose you at all
,’ Nancy had said to me when we were nine and she had blamed me for something she had done. Over twenty-four years later she was trying again to stop me being special as she always did.

‘Thank goodness you got away,’ Mum gushed. ‘Thank goodness you’re all right.’

She’s definitely all right now
, I thought.

‘I think I’d better call the police,’ I said. Her reply would confirm my suspicions, or would show me to be a spiteful cow who couldn’t even cut my cousin some slack after a terrifying experience.

Nancy sat up a little straighter in her seat and vigorously shook her head. ‘No, no, don’t worry about it. I’m sure they’re long gone.’

‘But you said you thought they were hanging around,’ I said.

‘Well, maybe, but since I got away, they probably won’t hang around in case I tell anyone.’

It was all a lie. Of course it was. Dad peered at me for a long few seconds before his gaze moved on to Seth, then returned to watching me. I wasn’t sure if he knew or simply suspected, but he hadn’t taken her at face value, hadn’t automatically believed her like Mum had. Like Jorge and Max had because they had no clue what she was like.

Seth and I locked eyes. We knew what would be expected of us, we were both well versed in the protocol of Nancy. I didn’t even give a hint of the ‘I told you so’ I would have been justified in firing at him. But we couldn’t. Not over such a blatant lie. No one believed it, surely?

‘I think we should cancel the party,’ Mum said in the silence when neither Seth nor I said it. ‘We can’t have anyone else put in danger for a party. It’s a good thing it’s early enough to do that.’

‘But everything’s set up,’ Dad said. ‘We’ll just send a message to people to be careful, to travel in pairs, and if they can’t do that, we’ll come out and meet them.’

‘Clemency will never forgive herself if something happens to someone on the way here, Don,’ Mum replied. She was talking for me, telling other people what I felt. Dad looked at me, then at Seth.

‘You’ll be all right, won’t you, Nancy?’ Dad asked her.

Nancy gave a brave, silent sob and swallowed hard. ‘I–I think so,’ she said to Dad, while turning her beseeching eyes on Mum. ‘I–I’ll be all right.’

‘No!’ Mum said firmly, and hugged Nancy closer. ‘No, we can’t have anyone else ending up in this state just for a party. You understand, don’t you, Clemency?’

I stared at Mum, unable to reply.

‘I’d better start calling and texting people to let them know the party is off.’ Seth’s voice was a frustrated monotone. He said it to save me from answering Mum. That was why I loved him: he always had my back, as they said in the movies.

‘I think that would be for the best,’ Mum agreed.

‘Yeah,’ Seth stated flatly. ‘For the best.’ Anyone else would think the timing was suspiciously perfect to give us enough time to cancel the party before most people had set off, but not Mum. Dad was watching me again, probably understanding how terrible I felt, but he didn’t say anything else. He’d tried, but when it came to Nancy, no one could tell Mum anything.

I put the photo down. I can’t put it up. I pick it up again. I have to put it up. It’s not about me and Seth, it’s about Dad. It’s about this photo being taken right before it all started going wrong. Right before Mum and Dad sat me down and told me again. Except there was no firmness, no certainty when he stated how fine he was going to be. It was simply the act of telling me what was happening next in his life. This was one of the best photos I had of him before the changes started.

We started measuring our time together in the stages of his not being able to do things. He was fine, so fine for so long I’d allowed myself to forget. We were all, I think, lulled into that suspended animation of nothing changing, so that translated into the equivalent of everything being fine.

Until the tests that showed something had altered. And then the moments when the first steps on that path to the other end began. Tentative, slow and fearful but necessary and inevitable. My heart beat as though it was coated and smothered in a thick, viscous treacle that made it agony to exist, knowing what Dad was about to go through. I didn’t truly know, of course, I could only guess and imagine and hope that it was not as awful as I thought it would be.

Then our calendar changed, our clocks changed. It stopped being about seasons and months and the countdown to Christmas, it was replaced by the times of the required daily dosage of medication; it was slowly but definitively about when he stopped being able to do things. First it was not being able to make it to the doctor’s surgery for his appointments.

‘You know,
quine
, I’ll never see the outside of this house again,’ he said to me while Mum showed the doctor out after his first home visit. I stared at Dad, mute with the horror of what he’d just told me. It was going to happen, soon. I would have to be without him, soon. He smiled at me, his tiredness and what was happening to him not able to dim the essence of who he was. My dad. One of my best friends, but first and foremost my dad.

I don’t know if he told Mum the same thing, but the next change was when it became clear that he couldn’t manage the stairs so Mum and I moved the chest of drawers out into the landing and replaced it with his favourite chair from downstairs. He gave me the same smile as he settled into his chair with his paper, glasses perched on his nose. ‘
I’ll never see the downstairs of this house again
, quine,’ he said with that smile. And, ah, I smiled back because I understood him, and, ah, the agony from my chest coated and smothered in treacle, made every breath hard and laboured. I semi-moved in to give Mum a hand, I went part-time at work, tried to take on as little private work as I could and resolved to make it up to Seth as soon as I could.

When it wasn’t as long between not being able to leave the house and not being able to go downstairs and him having to have a catheter installed, I knew it was time to move in properly.

Mum and I would take it in turns, sit by his bed and read. He slept a lot, and when he wasn’t asleep he would try to talk to us. But he couldn’t. It was hard, the pain would make him mute sometimes, and he would try to hide it. His face, so noble and strong, would be grey with the agony, each line drawn taut as the pain ripped slowly through him. And when there wasn’t pain, there were the hallucinations, seeing what wasn’t there, having conversations with people long since gone. He kept seeing his grandmother, asking her when she would take him to the beach, wondering why she didn’t reply. Crying and shouting when she wouldn’t reply.

I wanted to hold his hand and keep holding it as long as I could. He’d always been there during my beginning and middle; he’d held my hand so many times during the hard bits, he’d made those difficult times easier, bearable, and I wanted to be with him for every last minute. I wanted to help him at his end. I could never think about it, though, even when he told me. It was something I didn’t contemplate – him not being around was unthinkable. Then, when it was probable, likely, I still clung to the idea that there would be a cure. Something would happen that would change everything and he’d be around to hold the baby Seth and I had agreed to have, to come with me to see the films no one else would even entertain watching, to call for a quick chat.