That Girl From Nowhere (46 page)

Mum’s face draws in on itself, her body tenses, she’s been remembering it differently all these years, obviously.

‘Every time something good happened to me, Nancy was there to ruin it.’

I think Mum is still back at being reminded of those conversations around my graduation with Dad. I heard him asking her if she wasn’t glad she made the right choice in the end. ‘
How could you have even thought of missing that
, quine,
for Nancy of all people
?’ he’d whispered when they thought I was asleep in the back of the car.

‘Nancy even ruined my engagement party by pretending to be mugged on the way there by a gang who were prowling the area because the thought of me being the centre of attention for once in my life was too much for her.

‘Like I said, I don’t hate her for any of it. And I don’t hate her for the fact Seth and I had to get married in secret last year because I knew, no matter how small the ceremony, she’d have somehow made the occasion all about her.’

A small, shocked, distressed gasp from my mother. She covers her lips with her hand, and immediately her eyes are laden with tears. It is now such a part of mine and Seth’s background, the tapestry of who we are as a couple, I forget how significant it is to your family, to your parents, when you get married. I am so used to doing things in secret that to me it isn’t the big deal it is to have gone off and done it alone and not told anyone about it afterwards.

Mum’s pale blue eyes look at the rings on my fingers, trying to work out which one it is. When we got married, I stopped wearing the rings I’d made on my hands and wore them on my chain necklace, except my amber engagement ring and my silver wedding ring. I wore my engagement ring on the fourth finger of my left hand – as everyone expected – and my wedding ring on the fourth finger of my right hand. When we split, I swapped: the engagement and wedding rings went on to the chain and my other rings returned to my hands. Seth still wears his wedding ring. I remove the rings, nestling under my top on the chain I wear as well as my butterfly pendant, and show them to Mum.

‘This is my wedding ring. I made it and I made one for Seth and we got married in Leeds Registry Office and we advertised on the internet for two people to come and be our witnesses. About twenty people turned up.’ I sound defiant, and I don’t mean to. I want to sound calm and rational. Plus, I need to not get sidetracked by Mum’s reaction: the hurt on her face reveals I have torn a strip off her heart, that I have denied her something she was looking forward to.

‘I can see you’re upset and shocked, Mum,’ I say. ‘And I should be upset for you, but I know pretty soon your upset is going to turn into annoyance at me. Everything I’ve said will become part of my imagination, the way everything does when it comes to Nancy. Because, let’s be honest, Mum, she’s the daughter you’ve always wanted, isn’t she? She’s the one who looks like you, and who’s got so much in common with you. And that’s all fine.’

‘
That is not true!
’ Mum cuts in. She is more horrified by that than the time I told her how racist she was being about my dating Tyler. ‘
You must never say that, not ever!
’

‘OK, it’s not true,’ I concede. I don’t want to get into this with Mum. It’s not about the things I’ve said and done, it’s about Nancy and how Mum needs the chance to see her for who she really is. ‘But what is true is that I dislike Nancy for all she’s done to me in my life, but I
hate
her for using the last few weeks of Dad’s life and his illness … to … to first of all make a move on my husband.’ Mum slowly revolves to face Nancy again. ‘That’s why Seth and I split up. She kept going over there, pretending to offer comfort when all she wanted was to sleep with him and get information. She even got into our bed naked. Worse than that, though, is that she was using Seth to get information about Dad’s illness, his final weeks and days, so she could write about it.

‘She pretended to the whole world that she was living it, that she was helping and suffering just like we were. She took something private and personal, something we were barely struggling through, and made it public. That’s what her award nomination will be for, because she convincingly used our pain to make a name for herself and to make money. I’m sure the only reason she’s here now is to get more material for her blog.’ The guilt that crosses Nancy’s face tells me I’m right. ‘That’s why she’s taken the last thing that Dad ever bought me. And that’s why she needs to go. She has everything she’s ever wanted now. She’s taken everything from me, there is nothing left about my life that is special that she can ruin, so she has to go.’

Mum’s body is rigid: her arms are at her sides and her fingers are spread and held so tight that they are trembling. For a moment I think she’s going to throw back her head and roar, she looks so incensed; fit to burst with a rage I’ve never seen in her before. Instead, she orders: ‘Leave us.’

Nancy moves, relieved that she’s got away with it. Again.

‘
Don’t you move
,’ Mum snarls so viciously I’m not surprised Nancy freezes. She looks as terrified as I was the time Mum started screaming at me in my workshop. ‘
Clemency
, leave us.’

I collect my bag from its place in the corridor and leave as instructed. It doesn’t matter. A few tears, a few hollow apologies, and Mum will be back to loving Nancy like the daughter she is to her. It won’t be long before the real issues that need discussing will be me not telling her I got married, me having sex at fifteen, me doing a pregnancy test at seventeen, me saying one time in my life when I was very young that they weren’t my ‘real’ parents. All of this will be used to take me apart while telling me I should be kind and understanding to Nancy. That’s how these situations always pan out.

Outside the building, I stand beside Lottie and then lean against her, propped up by my biggest reloved project. Exhaustion is pulsing through my body. Journeying through the shittiest parts of my childhood has taken all the spirit out of me. If all of those memories were laid like beads on the bench in my workshop, waiting to be strung together, I wouldn’t know where to start. It would make a hideous piece with its dangerously sharp edges and blinding snatches of bright-white pain – no amount of reloving and redesigning would change that.

But my life hadn’t been all like that. No way near like that. The sharp-edged moments were interspersed with so many smooth, well-rounded, luscious, warm-coloured beads of moments and memories. I had a good childhood. My teenage years were as fraught and desperate and fun as any of the other people’s around me. Like I told my mother, my biological mother, I had been OK. Mostly.

It’s the reliving all the awful bits in such a short space of time that has drained me. Thrown me, too. Was it really that bad? Even though I can call up some of the best moments without too much trouble, they don’t seem as tangible and real as the bad bits did.

I need to forget. I need something that will put all of that right, right,
right
at the back of my mind so I can concentrate on something else.

I take my phone out of my pocket.

The person on the other end picks up on the second ring. I was expecting it to take longer.

‘Are you free right now? Do you want to meet up and maybe go for a drink or something? My treat.’

I should feel guilty when I hang up the phone after we’ve planned where to meet and where to go so we aren’t seen, but I don’t. It’s far too late for feelings of guilt. Like everyone else, I’m going to do whatever I want, simply because that is what I want to do.

As I head off to my meeting, I can’t help thinking: somebody killed my grandmother and they’re trying to lay the blame on me.

To: Jonas Zebila

From: Abi Zebila

Subject: Hello

Saturday, 22 August 2015

Dear J,

Thank you for saying you don’t hate me and that I did nothing wrong. I really wish it hadn’t taken me so long to see it. Now that you’ve started replying to my emails, I’m hoping that you’ll move on from a few words.

Clemency called me out of the blue earlier and I went to see her. Daddy asked me where I was going and I said that I was seeing Declan. I know, right? Suddenly him thinking I’m seeing the man responsible for me not finishing uni is better than seeing Clemency. I only lied because Declan hasn’t found us a new place yet.

She told me everything. She was open and honest, told me that Gran had asked her to help her die but Clemency didn’t do it even though she agreed to. I believe her. I think she was actually quite brave to agree to help Gran like that. It was like all the stuff I was telling you about what Gran actually wanted. What she wanted was for it to be over. I can’t think about that though. The thought of going into nothingness completely terrifies me and I have to think about something else. As Clemency said, though, if she didn’t do it, then who did?

That’s the most terrifying thought of all. Someone did this to Gran, or someone helped her. And we have no idea who.

Right, it’s late, I need to sleep.

Love,

Abi

xxxx

Thankfully, the flat is in darkness when I return. I took the time to walk as far as possible around the building to see if any lights were on. They were all out so it was safe to come inside. I don’t really call it home – I had started to, then all sorts started pitching up to stay and it became ‘the flat’. Opening the front door, I see they’ve turned off the corridor light, which we usually leave on for Sienna.

I pause for a moment after shutting the door behind me, trying to make out shapes in our entrance hallway so I can map out where the potential obstacles are in the dark.

If I can creep in, not turn on any lights, I can probably slide quietly into bed, and I won’t have to deal with trying to erase guilt from my face about who I’ve been with, nor explain to Seth what had been said earlier.

‘I’ve been waiting up for you,’ Mum says in a whisper, at the exact moment my eyes decipher through the darkness that there is a human-type form at the end of the corridor. My heart spirals into my throat with fright, and I have to clamp my hands over my mouth to stop myself swearing or crying out in shock.

Who does that? Who stands in the dark, waiting for someone?
I almost ask her if she’s literally been standing in the dark corridor all night waiting for me, but I’m not sure I could handle her answering yes to that question.

‘Hi,’ I eventually manage, and flick on the light.

She is dressed for bed in her pink silk dressing gown and her tartan slippers. I was always surprised Dad allowed her to wear those slippers since fake tartan enraged him like very little else did.

I’ve reached that part of the exhaustion spectrum where it hurts to breathe, it’s painful to blink, and I know I can’t withstand a barrage of explanations, questions and recriminations. Although the questioning has already begun: when Mum says ‘I’ve been waiting up for you’ she actually means,
‘Where have you been?’

‘It’s very late,’ she whispers. ‘
Why didn’t you call me and ask permission to stay out so late?
’ she means.

‘I know,’ I say.

‘You look tired,’ she continues in a whisper. ‘
Have you been with that man? In his bed? Is that why you look so tired?
’

‘I am tired.’

‘I was getting worried.’ ‘
You have no right to do this to me.
’

‘Mum, can we do this tomorrow? I need to sleep.’

‘I need to talk to you. Come into the kitchen, I’ll make us both a cup of tea.’

‘
I don’t want tea, I do want my bed,
’ is what the me who I am in my head, the person she got a glimpse of earlier, says. ‘Fine,’ the person I am most of the time says.

In the kitchen I pull out a chair, trying to avoid scraping the legs against the black slate tiles, and sit where I always sit – with my back to the window, to the sea and the promenade. I didn’t even realise until this moment that my seat in the flat has become the worst one since Nancy and Sienna moved in. The first few weeks, when it was Mum and me, I used to love sitting in here, a cup of coffee on the go, the radio on low, watching, through the multiple panes of the kitchen window, the world outside shake off the night, open its eyes, and carefully stretch itself awake.

Mum flicks on the lights under the wall units, casting a quietening glow over the kitchen. Once the lights are on, she moves to shut the kitchen door before returning to the chrome kettle. Beside it she has placed her favourite emerald green mug and my white ‘Jewellers Do It With Links’ mug. I stare at that mug. I’d had to put it right to the back of the cupboard when she moved in with me – she glared at it with such passionate hatred I feared it’d crack under the weight of her disapproval. Once, when she was out, I’d gone to look for it and found she’d moved it right to the back of one of the lower cupboards where the tinned black beans and peaches lived, in other words, somewhere I wouldn’t be finding it in a hurry. Its resurrection tells me she feels guilty about something.

I close my eyes when I realise that it’s probably because Nancy has been forgiven, welcomed back to the bosom of my mother after what must have been, for Nancy, a scary minute or two out in the cold. If I’m honest, I knew nothing was going to change. I knew in that place in my heart where knowledge comes from that Nancy was going to get away with it. Her type always …

Mum is sitting opposite me when I open my eyes. There are two cups on the table, both have steam rising from them. The taste in my mouth and the heaviness in my eyes, the stiffness of my neck, the tingling in my arm upon which I rest my head, tell me I was asleep for longer than it took Mum to boil the kettle and make tea.

‘You fell asleep,’ she says.

‘How long for?’ I ask.

‘About an hour,’ she replies.

‘An hour? And you sat here watching me for an hour?’