That Girl From Nowhere

by Dorothy Koomson

  I can’t tell what’s going on with Daddy. He seems a bit shell-shocked but also a little relieved, almost. Maybe he hasn’t liked lying all these years and he’s pleased the truth is finally out. Him and Mummy haven’t rowed about it since the other night, not within my hearing anyway. They’ve stopped talking altogether, it seems. I mean, not in a nasty way, they seem to just stare at each other a lot and not find the right words. I think neither of them wants to be the one who starts that conversation about what they did all those years ago.

  After Ivor walked out, I went over and hugged Mummy and she put her arms around me and held me so close. I don’t even remember the last time we did that. I also told Lily-Rose. I don’t think it’s fair that the adults know something so big and she doesn’t. Despite Mummy and Daddy’s rubbish example of being parents, I’m not going to do that. I want to be as honest as possible with my kids. I told her I had a sister that I had only just met and she said, ‘Does that mean she’s my sister?’

  ‘No, she’s your aunt, you’re her niece.’

  ‘Will she come to our house for her tea?’ she asked.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. That was as honest as I could be. I’ve decided to leave it up to Clemency to get in touch and that decision is like a mild form of torture. I want so much to see her again. Just like I want you to get in touch.

  You know what, though? Even if Clemency doesn’t get in touch, I got to hug Mummy for the longest time so, for that alone, I’ll be eternally grateful to Clemency.

  Get in touch, please. Even if it’s a three-word email to tell me you’re alive, that would be enough.

  I love you.

  Abi

  xxxx

  26

  Smitty

  There’s a plain white envelope labelled

  Clemency Smittson

  between us on the wall we’re sitting on.

  It’s been between us, weighted down by a large pebble, on this wall that bisects the promenade and beach in Worthing for more than half an hour, since we collected it. Neither of us wants to be the one to pick it up. Both of us have been attempting conversation but it dries up almost straight away because we know the envelope has to be opened.

  Abi is dressed for work because that’s where she was this morning. She went into work as normal, then I met her a little walk away so that I could drive us here to Worthing, somewhere no one we know is likely to see us. We were here two days ago – another sneaky half-day holiday for Abi. She suggested in one of her earlier texts that we get a DNA test so we both know where we stand and I thought that was a good idea.

  ‘Do you want me to do your hair for you?’ Abi asks me. I knew from the way she kept picking at her nails and sucking in her cheeks and nodding slowly to herself that she’d been psyching herself up to saying something, but I didn’t realise it would be this.

  She’s being kind, I know. Judging from the look of her and the look of her mother, she’s probably thinking any further meetings will be smoother, will have them more accepting of me, if I sort out my hair. I get that, a lot. My hair is a mass of shiny, midnight-black squiggly lines, fat ringlets, wavy curls and tight frizz that hangs down to my cheeks. It’s not that bad, I don’t think, it’s a part of who I am, but for other people, the white ones who say if they were black they’d have an Afro, and the ones who spend hundreds of pounds a month on getting their hair perfect and can’t understand why I don’t comb it or straighten it, my hair must mock them because the only category it fits into is ‘Liked by Clemency Smittson’.

  With Dad, September 1985, Chapeltown (Leeds)

  ‘Excuse me, I need your help.’ Dad’s voice was so loud and different amongst the chatter of these women. They were so pretty and glamorous and had dark skin just like me. Dad was the odd one out for once. Usually it was me who was the odd one out, but here everyone looked like me and no one looked like Dad. Or sounded like him.

  ‘You all right, love?’ one of the ladies asked. She was probably the prettiest, she had big, big hair, all shiny and black. I liked her eyelashes best. They were super, super long – when she blinked they touched her cheeks and I could see the gold fairy dust on her eyelids.

  ‘Aye, I need your help with my daughter’s hair,’ Dad said.

  All the women stopped talking and laughing and chatting and reading their magazines, to look at me. The only sounds in there were the droning blowing of the big dryers and the reggae music playing on the radio. I stepped closer to Dad, held his hand a bit tighter. I didn’t like everyone looking at me. People were always looking at me because I was the odd one out and I didn’t like it. At all.

  ‘Is this your daughter, love?’ the lady with the fairy-dust eyelids asked. She put down the hairdryer in her hand but kept hold of the hairbrush with black bristles that looked like a microphone as she came towards me. She was as tall as my dad because she had gold shoes with high, high heels.

  ‘Aye, yes. Say hello, Clemency,’ Dad said.

  ‘Clemency, that’s a right pretty name.’ The woman was crouching down, she smelled of bubblegum.

  ‘Can you help me? I need to learn how to plait her hair. Without making her cry. She cries if I try to do anything to it.’

  The lady stood up again. ‘Where’s your wife, love?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Dad said. Mum wouldn’t have liked him bringing me here. It was like the time I asked her why I didn’t look like her and it nearly made her cry – Dad bringing me here would make her cry. ‘Suffice to say, it’s me that has to learn to do this. Can you help me? I’ll pay.’

  ‘No, it’s OK, love. You’ll have to wait, but I’ll teach you what I can between customers. If you want, you can come back next week with a proper appointment and I’ll teach you how to wash her hair properly.’

  ‘That would be good,’ Dad said. ‘Wouldn’t it, Clemency?’

  I nodded.

  ‘We’ll be back next week,’ Dad said when we were about to go home.

  ‘She’s a lovely girl,’ the pretty lady said. ‘So good.’

  ‘She is that,’ he said. ‘Are you sure I can’t give you any money for your time?’

  ‘No, it’s nice to see a father taking care of his daughter. I hope your wife appreciates it.’

  ‘We both appreciate each other,’ Dad said. ‘You get no prizes for bringing up your children properly – and so you shouldn’t.’

  Mum never said a word about my hair, not ever, not once. She used to cry sometimes when she tried to comb my hair and I would cry because it hurt so much. She would look at my hair on a Saturday afternoon when Dad took me out to get us out from under her feet, and I would come back with a new hairstyle and smelling of the dark green Dax the woman taught Dad to slick on the partings between the plaits. She would say nothing on Mondays and Thursdays when Dad would sit on the sofa and I would sit on the pancake-flat green velvet cushion on the floor in front of him while Dad greased (that’s what the woman called it) my hair and redid the plaits. Mum never mentioned my hair at all when Dad started to do it – like a lot of things, she just pretended it wasn’t happening.

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ I say to Abi about whether I’d like her to help me with my hair. I suppose I should be offended, but I’m not. It really doesn’t bother me what other people think about my hair nowadays.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I just thought if you wanted some tips …’

  ‘I’m not at all offended. It’s sweet of you to ask, but I like my hair like this.’

  ‘Really?’ She’s openly horrified.

  ‘Yes. You could sound a little bit more disgusted by the idea I might like the way I look, though. I won’t be at all upset.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Sorry, sorry. Mouth running away from brain, there.’

  ‘No worries,’ I say with a laugh.

  ‘Have you ever had your hair straightened?’ Abi asks. When I raise an eyebrow at her, she lifts her hands in surrender. ‘Just asking, out of curiosity. Not pushing it as a lifestyle or hairstyle o
ption.’

  ‘No. My dad wouldn’t let me for years. He even had a stand-up row with a hairdresser once who wanted to put relaxer on my hair.’

  ‘Why? Not that my mum or dad ever let me get a relaxer. It wasn’t till I went to America to stay with my aunt that I got one. Daddy was so mad.’

  I have an aunt in America. Interesting.

  ‘The hairdresser was teaching Dad how to look after my hair from about the age of eight, and when I was thirteen she said she was going to put a relaxer on it and Dad said no, I was too young. The hairdresser didn’t think so and they had a huge row about it. Right there in the shop in front of everyone.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘They were like two prize fighters going toe to toe. She kept saying that it would be easier to care for my hair and Dad kept saying he didn’t want easy if it meant putting strong chemicals on my head. And she was saying how lots of girls my age had it done. And he was saying he didn’t want me looking like everyone else if it meant doing that and I’d be able to decide for myself when I was eighteen. You have never seen the likes of it. Everyone just sat there with their mouths open.’

  ‘Your dad sounds really cool.’

  ‘He is. He was. Still is, I suppose. All those things he did in the past that made him cool happened, so he is cool. He seemed to “get” me, if you know what I mean? Even from an early age if I asked him a question he’d answer it. Age appropriate as they say, but he didn’t like to keep secrets and stuff from me. Drove Mum up the wall – she’s one of those “don’t talk about it and it’s not happening” types.’

  ‘Yeah, my mum’s like that,’ Abi says.

  I smile to myself, training my eyes on the envelope.

  ‘I meant our mum, our mother,’ Abi says. ‘Oh, I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to say.’ She stares at the envelope, too. ‘Do you want to open that thing and then we can decide what to do next.’

  ‘Bossy, aren’t you, for a younger sibling?’ I say.

  ‘If you don’t boss, you don’t get heard.’

  ‘OK. But I’m not opening it.’ I didn’t need to open the envelope because, just like I didn’t need to look at the pregnancy test result I threw away in Leeds, I knew what they were going to say.

  Abi’s face creases with incomprehension. ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘I have no need to. I know what the results are but I’m guessing your family are needing some extra reassurance, which is why you suggested the test.’

  ‘No, that’s not why I suggested it. I did it … Never mind. I’ll open it then.’

  We have similar fingers, square at the end rather than tapered. Dad had the same shaped fingers, too. My dad, that is, not her father, our father. I can understand why she was frustrated before, it’s hard to keep track; to know what to say without causing offence. But I’ve been thinking of it as Mr Zebila fathered me, Mr Smittson ‘dadded’ me. Mrs Zebila is my mother, Mrs Smittson is my mum. I wonder what they’d think if I said that to them? If any of them would take offence at how they’ve been categorised.

  The sound of the envelope being ripped open is magnified, incredibly loud above the sound of the people and the surf and the doom that is about to befall us rolling in the distance.

  The sound of reading is quite loud, too. I can almost hear her eyes moving back and forth over the lines on the page. And then she gasps.

  I turn to look at her. ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no!’ she says dramatically. Her eyes are wide, the lines of her face are taut with shock and horror.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask again.

  ‘I can’t tell you. I don’t think you’re going to want to hear it,’ she says gravely.

  ‘Just tell me. I don’t care what it is, just tell me.’

  She shakes her head. ‘It says …’ her voice peters out. She sighs, then swallows hard. ‘It says something horrible. It says I’ve got a big sister who keeps running away, who makes jewellery for a living and is probably going to have a serious sense of humour failure in about two minutes.’

  I blink at her a few times. ‘Really?’ I say. Maybe I wasn’t as sure of the results as I thought I was.

  ‘Yes. You and me, baby, we’re sisters. And there ain’t nothing you can do about it!’

  ‘And, hey! You cheeky cow, what were you saying about the results being something horrible and me running away?’

  She waves her right forefinger at me. ‘Sense of humour failure!’ she sing-songs at me.

  I grin at her. Then needle her in the side with my forefinger. She yelps, dodges away from me and laughs. She seems so happy that I am her sister. Watching her laugh, unbridled joy gushing out of her, I realise that the emotion branching through me like a fast-growing tree is happiness, too. I am lucky. I have a sister. And it is the woman next to me. Laughing like nothing bad could ever happen now that we’ve found each other.

  Part 5

  27

  Smitty

  Their house is absolutely massive – you could probably fit about five of Mum and Dad’s house in here. Without moving my head, I glance sideways at Mum. She is staring at the orange-brick house with double-glazed sash windows and black-and-white tiled path, and probably wishing she hadn’t come now. Or rather, that I hadn’t come, which is what necessitated her pitching up with me.

  It’s odd seeing it finally, the house where I could have grown up. Abi says they’ve lived here since her parents got together and she’s moved back in during the last few years. It is grand and imperious, all of Mum’s nightmares come true. She had tried to insist that we meet somewhere in Brighton, at a café or restaurant, but I had to gently tell her:

  a) ‘This meeting isn’t about where you would feel most comfortable, but where I would feel most at home.’ (Absolute wrong choice of word that raised a high red colour in her cheeks and elicited the bullet glare.)

  b) ‘I wanted to meet all of them in one go to get it out of the way and Abi’s grandmother is housebound so she rarely leaves the house.’

  Mum had continued to insist on ‘neutral ground’ so we were all on ‘an equal footing’ until I said, ‘Fine, if that’s what you want you can simply not come and we’ll go for a “neutral ground” meeting at another date.’ After that, meeting at their house was acceptable after all.

  We stand outside the house, fifteen minutes early, having already walked three times round the large oblong-shaped block as we were very early. I didn’t want traffic or, more importantly – Mum’s sudden need to do ‘stuff’ (like dust behind the radiators in all the rooms and de-junk the hair-clogged shower) right before it was time to leave, to make us late. She was nervous in Lottie, now she is creeping closer to a full-on anxiety breakdown.

  It would have been better if this house, their home, was a hovel or even the same size as the one we lived in for most of our lives. When we lived down in Lewes our house was large – not as large as this, judging from the pictures I’ve seen – but it was nice and in a well-to-do area. I’m not sure Mum ever got over the fact we had to move up to Otley because Dad lost his job in the recession of the early eighties and we had to live in a small, two-bed cottage. I loved the cottage, it was my home, but I sometimes saw the way Mum looked with envious eyes at her brother Colin’s house, and knew it hurt her that we had been so ‘reduced’.

  I place my hand on her shoulder and she almost leaps out of her skin. ‘It’ll be fine, Mum,’ I reassure. I’m not used to seeing her so nervous and unsure of herself. She’s always been so confident and self-possessed. ‘I’m sure they’ll be nothing but grateful towards you.’

  She nods.

  ‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ I say. It’s partly to comfort her, it’s also to allow myself the chance to hear that out loud. If I hear it spoken, which makes it sound possible and true, maybe I’ll believe I don’t have to do this. Maybe I can change my mind and walk away and not open myself up to the chance of another rejection of who I am.

  With Seth, March 2006, Le
eds

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever want to trace your biological parents?’ Seth asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘What, not at all?’

  ‘All right, I admit, sometimes when Nancy’s over and she’s joking around with Mum and Dad, I do feel like I don’t fit into the picture of the three of them together. Like they’re the family and I’m the one watching from the outside. It’s only sometimes, but at those times I do wonder what it’d be like to be surrounded by people who I look like.’

  ‘Being surrounded by people who you look like can be overrated,’ he replied.

  ‘Yes, but at least you’ve had the chance to find that out for yourself. I have to take your word for it. It’s not an issue if you don’t get on with your parents. I’m not allowed that. If I dare say anything about the way Mum is sometimes … I get put in my place pretty quick.’

  ‘Put in your place by who? Have they met her? Do they know she can be a bit … much sometimes?’

  My body bristled with loyalty and protectiveness. No one, not even Seth, was allowed to pick up on my mother’s ‘quirks’. I loved her and she drove me crazy, but I bore the brunt of it so I got to comment.

  ‘Don’t get upset, I’m not saying she’s a terrible person, and God knows she hates me with a passion, I’ve just seen the effect she has on you. I’m asking who puts you in your place if you mention how … much your mum can be?’

  ‘It’s hard to describe, but over the years, if I’ve ever broken ranks and had a moan, I’m almost always met with an attitude that I should be grateful I wasn’t left to rot in a children’s home or that I wasn’t aborted, that Mum rescued me.’