That Girl From Nowhere (51 page)

‘Was she, my grandmother, was she …’ ‘
OK
’ or ‘
all right
’ seem inappropriate considering the outcome, but was it still what she wanted, is what I want to know.

My father, who I look a lot like, understands what I am trying to say. ‘It was what she wanted and how she wanted it to happen. It was one last act under her control, as the person she used to be. She was …’ ‘
Fine
’ seems the wrong word for him, too. He nods, conveying his understanding of my question and the answer I wanted. ‘She was.’

‘We are going to tell the rest of our families before we go to the police,’ my father says.

Mum is looking at me. That’s nothing new, though. She’s always done it. From the earliest age I can remember her staring at me – the multiple photos she used to take were just an extension of that, I suppose. I used to look at her, a lot, too, especially when I realised that apparently, according to other people, the liquid that flowed in our veins was water because the connection between us was meant to be weak. I was always desperately trying to do as Dad had told me back when I was four, to focus on the things that made us similar, to find a point of contact that made water and blood and their thickness irrelevant. Our greatest similarity is each other, I’ve come to realise. We love the other so much, we’re willing to do anything for them.

My father is looking at me, too. I had been upset and more than a little curious as to why he didn’t look at me before, didn’t seem to see me even when his gaze did stray in my direction. Our eyes meet over the table.

He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out an envelope and places it on the table in front of me. ‘These are for you. I was going to give them to Mrs Smittson to give to you, but now I can give them to you.’

It is an unassuming brown A5 envelope and on the front he has written
For you.
When I reach inside, my fingers feel photographs. I pull them out and place them on top of the envelope. The first picture is a strip of four black-and-white photo-booth pictures. In them, a man holds a baby. He has a small neat Afro and he is so incredibly handsome. The baby in his arms is wearing a light-coloured bonnet and a white towelling Babygro. The baby looks nonplussed, obviously enjoying being held by the man in the photo but not sure what’s going on. I turn another photo over – it is a professional colour photo, the man sits on a chair, holding the baby in a swaddle of blankets, the same bonnet in place. The other four photos are colour, too, but faded from age. They are of the baby on her own in the butterfly box, without her bonnet. And in each picture she is a little older than the last, and each time her face is confused but delighted to have this man around.

I stop staring at the photos of myself and my father, and look at him. ‘Mrs Stoner, your foster carer, let me take you out a few times. I didn’t want to forget what you looked like. I had never seen a baby so beautiful. I wanted to take so many photos of you. Every time I saw you, you had changed. Kibibi never knew that I came to see you. She still does not know. I wanted … I wanted to be a better man but I could not.’

‘I don’t want you to go to prison,’ I say suddenly. ‘Either of you. I want you to stay with me. It feels like I’m only just getting to know both of you and now you might be taken away from me.’ I can’t stop the avalanche of emotions that cascade down my face. ‘This isn’t fair. None of this is fair.’

They each take a hand, my ‘Mum’ and my ‘father’. Then they tell me as many times as they can in the time they have left that it’s all going to turn out for the best.

To: Jonas Zebila

From: Abi Zebila

Subject: S.O.S

Thursday, 27 August 2015

Jonas,

I need you to call me. Please, just call me. I know Daddy’s been trying to get in touch with you and you haven’t replied, but it’s really important you call me. Mummy and I have spent the last few hours sobbing and if you lived near enough, you’d probably see Daddy and Clemency’s adoptive mother on the local news.

They’re probably in the police station right now. Telling their story, starting the process to see what will happen to them for what they did. They’ve each been home, have told the people who need to know and now they are telling the authorities so that they can find out what comes next. Mum wanted to tell Nancy and Seth on her own and she didn’t want me anywhere near the police station in case I was asked to have an informal ‘chat’ before they have told the police everything and given them their evidence. I didn’t even bother asking my father if I could come with him because I knew what his answer would be.

They did it for me.

I have walked the length of the beach – from Portslade to Brighton Pier – repeatedly since I left them. I have been bashed and buffeted by the wind, nearly run over by idiot cyclists who think they have a right to ride on the main promenade, and sworn at by people I’ve accidentally bumped into. Now I am sitting on a bench, where my body has finally collapsed from the exhaustion of trying to walk off my anger, being lashed by the rain.

I am angry. I’m not supposed to be, but I am. I am so incredibly angry I could explode. They did it for me, to stop me from doing it. They have probably sacrificed their freedom for me, but my God, it’s like the adoption all over again.

It’s someone making decisions that fundamentally impact me and not bothering to consult me. When I was a baby they couldn’t consult me, but I am an adult. When are any of my parents going to start seeing me as an adult? As someone capable of being talked to, reasoned with, considered,
consulted.
Is this what being a parent is about, or is that what being
my
parent is all about? At every stage, my parents – all three of the ones I have alive – make decisions that impact me as though I am still that baby in the butterfly box. When do I get to make a decision in the open and have it stick?

‘You’re getting wet,’ he says. I am too numb to jump out of my skin at the sudden sound of his voice. From the fat drops of summer rain, from the events and revelations of the last few hours, from walking about sixteen miles back and forth, my body is too shut off to feel much more. ‘I’ve been watching you walk back and forth all afternoon. At first I flattered myself that you might be working up to coming in to see me, then I realised you were just walking,
then
I noticed you had stopped on this bench. And
then
I noticed, after locking up and everything, that you were still on this bench even though you’re getting very wet.’

Suddenly I am no longer being showered upon. I look up to find I am being sheltered and covered by Tyler’s large, blue golf umbrella.

‘Did it occur to you that I might like getting wet?’ I say. ‘That I am adult who has made the decision to become soaked by the rain, and should therefore be allowed to live with that decision and all its attendant consequences?’

He sits beside me on the bench, which is equidistant from his café and my home. From the sound of him as he moves, I guess he’s wearing a rainmac as well. ‘Don’t be like that,’ he says.

‘Like what? What am I being like? Someone who has had people make decisions for her all her life, who has reached her limit? Is that what I’m being like?’

‘Yes, I suppose that is how you’re being.’ He waits a few seconds before daring to speak again. He may have worked out I’m not feeling particularly rational right now. ‘Come back to the café, get dry or not if you like being wet, have a coffee and we can talk.’

‘Not a good idea.’

‘It’s a great idea.’

‘Tyler, if we go back to your café, with the level of emotion rampaging through me right now, I will probably make a pass at you. Right there in the middle of the café.’ I steal a glance at him from the corner of my eye. ‘And we both know that would be a bad idea. And possibly unhygienic if you respond in the way I hope.’

‘You can’t stay here.’

‘I can. And I’m going to.’
There’s no place I’d rather be, actually
, I decide. It’s one of those decisions you make when you’re so drunk you know that you won’t mind sleeping on a park bench; in fact, it’s the best place you’ve ever slept, and if someone tries to stop you sleeping there you will take very big issue with them. I am not drunk, I am simply making a decision like a drunk person. Like an adult who wants to be allowed her choices, no matter how rubbish they may be.

Tyler’s response to my confession is a silence that extends and expands, grows and magnifies, until it starts to feel so wide it could cover the sea in front of us. I guess he is struggling with himself. He doesn’t want me to make a pass at him, but he does want me to come out of the rain.

He wants to talk, to be friends as we should have been all along. I wish we had stayed friends. If we had, though, I wouldn’t have had those giggly, wobbly moments on the white roller skates with the red wheels that he bought me. We wouldn’t have shared those wonderful kisses. ‘I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable, Tyler. Anything to do with me is so messed up right now and I’m still married, too, so I’m not sure being around me is a good idea.’

‘Come back to the café,’ he eventually says. ‘And if you make a pass at me, I’ll decide how to deal with it if and when it happens.’

In his office, which is up a set of wide stairs, Tyler ‘deals with it’ by kissing me back. He deals with it by allowing me to start to take off his clothes before he responds by removing my wet clothes while covering my neck in long, sensual kisses. He handles it by guiding me to the sofa, letting me sit astride him while I roll a condom on him, tugging me on top of him until I am filled by him and he is groaning with every move I make. He copes with it by seeming to enjoy every moment from the first kiss to the last orgasmic thrust.

Right now, I’m not thinking about him even though we’re reclined together afterwards on the sofa under a picnic blanket he has magicked up from somewhere. I’m thinking about where my life will go from here. The map of my life seems to have left Nowhere and navigated us to Thiswhere. In this Thiswhere I am a sister to a sister, a sister to brothers, a daughter to a mother and father couple who are both alive. I am a sibling and a daughter to people who look like me.

It’s all gone, now, of course. My brothers and sister and mother will hate me. If my father goes to prison they will blame me for coming into their lives, for bringing Mum into their lives, who made him talk to his mother, which made him decide to do that thing I was going to do.

‘Coffee for your thoughts?’ Tyler asks.

‘There isn’t enough coffee in the whole of Brighton and Hove, let alone this café, to know my thoughts right now,’ I say.

‘We’re not going to talk about what’s going on with you, then?’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t, not at the moment.’
Maybe never
.

‘You know this sofa on which we recline is actually a sofa bed,’ Tyler says, expertly changing the subject.

‘Are … are you,
like
, asking me to sleep over?’

‘I,
like
, totally am.’

‘But,
like
, what about your mom and pop?’

‘Oh, they’re,
like
, totally cool with me having my GF stay over.’

‘So, I’m,
like
, your GF now, am I?’

‘Stay,’ he says, seriously, quietly. ‘We may even get around to talking like we were meant to.’

Stay. It seems like the easy, natural thing to do when you’re naked with a good-looking man who you like in so many ways.

‘We can worry about all that other stuff tomorrow.’ My husband, Seth, is what Tyler means. He has no idea about the rest of it, about the reason I was walking back and forth along Brighton seafront, about why I almost threw my phone into the sea earlier to stop the ringing because even though it was off, I could still hear it ringing, vibrating with people who wanted to talk to me.

‘Please don’t call Seth “other stuff”. He’s a person. It’s not comfortable to talk about him, especially when we’ve just … but please don’t dismiss him like that. People did that to me so many times over the years because I was adopted and I didn’t know who my “real” parents were. Being negated and dismissed even unintentionally is horrible. Please don’t do that about Seth.’

‘Sorry. Stay over. We’ll talk about where we are with you and me and you and your …’

‘Ex. He’s my ex.’

‘We’ll discuss the situation with your ex tomorrow.’ His hand moves over my waist, slides down until it rests on my bare bum and he brings me closer to his body. He trails his fingers over my hip, moving them slowly until they brush the hair between my legs. ‘And if you’re not going to talk to me …’ He slips two of his fingers deep inside me, enough to make me gasp and arch my body towards him, aching for more, wanting the feel of him inside me again. His lips cover my nipple, his tongue teasing at it. When I gasp again, he moves to kiss me.

‘I suppose my clothes
are
probably still wet.’ I didn’t notice earlier how good it felt to kiss him with his warm, naked skin next to mine. My mind had been too focused on escaping the other part of the day, not on enjoying these moments with Tyler. Now, I concentrate on him. I gasp louder against his lips from what his fingers are doing to me. I shove everything else out of my mind and concentrate on getting to know Tyler without talking to him.

Tyler hands me a cup of hot black coffee – made from the jar of instant he keeps beside the kettle in his office – and returns to his place on the other side of the sofabed.

‘You are such a fraud,’ I say. He’s put in four sugars, even though I didn’t ask for them. ‘I cannot believe you drink instant coffee when you spend all day pushing the good stuff on others.’

‘You think a Michelin-starred chef doesn’t eat takeaway burgers?’ he replies.

‘Michelin-starred chef? OK then,’ I say with a laugh.

‘Hey! What are you saying?’