That Girl From Nowhere

by Dorothy Koomson

  ‘Oh, Mum.’

  ‘I did as I was told, I went to the home for girls like me, and I cried and cried every time they took him from my arms. I called him Aaron. Every day, Clemency, I think about him. He was a beautiful boy and they took him away to live in America and I’ll never find out what happened to him.’

  ‘You should have told me about him, Mum. I would have been supportive. I freaked out the other day because you seem so dead set against me having anything to do with my birth family and yet you knew how it must have felt for them. Well, for my birth mother at least.’

  ‘I knew how she must have felt and I was jealous. Because if he came back into my life, I would never want him to leave. Of course I wouldn’t. I’d want to hold on to him and I’d want him to stay with me and forget about the other people who brought him up, so I was jealous and scared that all my years with you would mean nothing. And my first child has never contacted me or even tried. I was so envious of Kibibi and Julius. I was also worried what would happen if they rejected you. After losing your father, breaking up with Seth, I wasn’t sure how much more you could take.’

  ‘I wish you’d just told me all this. I would have understood.’

  ‘I know. But there’s a part of every parent that never stops thinking of their child as a child. All these things are for adults to talk about. I sometimes forget you’re an adult with adult choices to make.’

  ‘I’m sorry I kept things from you,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not surprised you did. You learnt it from the expert.’ She grins at me, conspiratorially. ‘After they took him away, I could never get pregnant again. The doctors didn’t know why, there was nothing physically wrong with me or your father. I thought it was my punishment for the sin I had committed. Then, when the social worker showed me your picture, I knew why I could never get pregnant.’ She smiles at me again. ‘It was so I could have you. You’re the daughter I always wanted and the child I was meant to have. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry for how I am sometimes, I’m sorry I have hurt you so many times. And I am sorry for not being a better mother.’

  ‘You’re a great mum,’ I say automatically. It’s true, she is. She has her moments, she needs to address her fears about how different I am to her and stop driving me crazy with how she is, but she is a fantastic mum. She’s my fantastic mum.

  ‘Kibibi is, too,’ she says. She is challenging me now. Does she want me to agree, to confirm that I do prefer her, or is she just making conversation? I’m not sure and probably look terrified at the thought of what I’m meant to say. ‘I’m not trying to trick you,’ she says. ‘Kibibi is a good mother. Apart from that one time when she turned up unannounced, she has let you set the pace, has she not?’

  I nod.

  ‘When I saw her she was desperate to be with you, it was clear in her eyes, in everything she said and did. But she’s not pushy like me. She has held back and let you decide everything.’

  ‘Apart from when my grandmother died and she didn’t want to see me.’

  ‘When your father died, did you want to see anyone? Did you want anyone near you or around you? Even the people you loved, let alone someone you are desperate to get to know.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘She made a difficult choice in difficult circumstances. Was it the right one? We’ll never know, but think of the decisions you made when you were seventeen. Think about what was going through your head when you took that pregnancy test at that age.’ Another thing about me that Mum now knows. ‘She was barely finished with childhood and she made a choice that she’s lived with every day.’

  ‘Like you,’ I state.

  ‘Like me.’ Mum looks at the large kitchen clock. ‘Clemency Smittson, I can’t believe how late it is! Where have you been all this time?’ It’s incredible how quickly she can become ‘Mum’ again. She doesn’t want to talk any more, and I suppose there’s not much left to say. We have no answers for each other, only the hope that the other will do the best they can.

  I shrug. ‘Out.’ It’s just as incredible how I can become ‘Child’ again in a flash.

  ‘That’s no answer. Now you get to bed.’

  ‘I’m thirty-seven, Mum,’ I say.

  ‘Does thirty-seven mean you don’t need sleep?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then, get to bed.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m going to sit here and think for a little while longer,’ she says. ‘I have a puzzle I need to work out.’

  ‘Tyler likes puzzles,’ I tell her, in the hope that she’ll see that he and she do have something in common. Not that it’ll matter since he won’t be coming near me again. I just want her to consider that beyond what he looks like, he may share common ground with her.

  She looks me up and down then says, ‘I’m not at all surprised he does.’

  It’s not until I’m creeping into bed that I realise she actually meant me. I was the puzzle that she wasn’t surprised he liked.

  64

  Smitty

  The last thing that Mum told me before I went to bed was that Nancy was going home in the morning. She’d already started to pack, and they’d be gone by lunchtime. I’d nodded my head and hadn’t said, ‘I’ll believe that when I see it.’

  Here she sits, curled up in the corner of the sofa, still in her dressing gown, hair hooked behind her ears, picking at her nails like a smoker who is desperate for a cigarette. My cousin doesn’t seem like someone who is leaving in less than six hours.

  I watch her for long minutes from the doorway of the living room before she even notices that I’m there. When she sees me, she sits up straighter, rubs the tears from her pale face, pretends she wasn’t staring into space.

  Nancy has been such a nemesis in my life for so long, I’m not sure if they are real tears of regret and worry or fake ones of manipulation. If they are fake, then she’s wasting her time; if they are real I don’t know why she’s bothering – we both know that she’s going nowhere. The poisonous bond between us is broken now. She has nothing on me, I have no reason to speak to her again – not even to tell her to go, so if she stays, no one will challenge her.

  ‘Can I talk to you?’ she asks quietly.

  ‘No, I can’t face it,’ I reply. I shouldn’t really be talking to her. After last night, the emotional toll that having an open conversation with my mother took on me, I should conserve every last drop of energy I have. I won’t be getting much more sleep today, and I need to sit down and work out who it was that killed my grandmother.

  ‘I just want—’

  ‘That’s the problem, Nancy, it’s always, always about what you want. I can’t face it.’

  Miserable, dejected, she rests her head on her hand and starts to cry again. I can’t, I just can’t. My keys are in my bag in my bedroom, which is a no-go zone because I’ll wake Seth if I go back in. I need to get out of here. I need fresh air, and I need to be away from the woman crying on my sofa. Since moving here, out of the city, I like to be outside. No matter the weather, unless it is torrential rain, I like the air on my skin, the sounds of the world filling my ears. Walking along to Beached Heads was one of my favourite parts of the day before I ruined that experience.

  In the corridor, I slide my feet into my trainers and let myself out of the house as quietly as possible. Nancy’s face is worming its way into my head, the tears, the quick, quick wiping motion she made to hide them. I try to shove away her tears, her sorrow, because I’ve cared enough about her over the years. At some point, surely, I am allowed to not automatically worry whether her tears are real or not.

  Of course I want her to be all right, she is Sienna’s mother after all, if she isn’t well, then Sienna will be impacted. However, there comes a time when a person has to say no more. She has to put on her shoes, and leave her flat with no means of getting back in without pressing the buzzer, wearing her blue fleece pyjamas with the white stars, that she’s taken to wearing since she started sleeping beside her husband
again.

  Outside, I start to relax, unclench, unwind. Outside is a big expanse and it becomes my space when I exit the gate and shut it carefully behind me. I need to escape, to get out of this place, and here I am, doing just that. I could walk along to Beached Heads, sit outside and wait for Tyler to arrive. Beg him to serve me coffee and explain why I left him after he kissed me.

  ‘You have to listen to me.’ Nancy. She’s had the audacity to follow me and speak to me and make me jump out of my skin.

  She’s wearing her thigh-length nightshirt and has replaced her dressing gown with my chunky-knit cardie that she’d unhooked from the coat rack by the door, and my favourite red ballet pumps. She wants to talk to me and because of the way Nancy sees the world, I will jolly well listen.

  I take off, racing away from her towards the promenade. I don’t look back, not even as I turn the corner on to the seafront proper, but I’d imagine her face is a picture of disbelief and incredulity. ‘Oh, no, you don’t!’ I hear her shout at me before the wind whips her words away.

  My feet pound the uneven black tarmac, every stone, pebble and uneven surface, shaking my bones through my thin trainers. ‘COME BACK!’ she roars at me. She’s chasing me. I don’t look back but she is pursuing me as though I owe her my time, my listening ear, my anything.

  ‘Come back!’ she shouts. Her words reach me then are whisked away by the strong breeze that twirls the sea into angry-looking peaks.

  ‘I only want to talk to you!’

  No. I keep that word in my head as I run. Each step of my run coils a tight length of high-tension rubber around my already tight chest, my side is agony – as though a poker is prodding at it – and my feet and legs complain and ache. But, no. Not this time. She doesn’t get what she wants. No! No! No! No! No! No!

  The poker finds its mark, the soft, vulnerable bit below my ribs, and spears itself into me. My body halts. My mind is still running, still screaming ‘No’ inside but my body can’t go on. It has to stop.

  I am doubled over, clutching the stitch in my side, willing my body to move, to keep me away from hearing what she has to say.

  ‘I only want to talk to you!’ she screams when she reaches me.

  I clamp the hand not pressed over my stitch on to its corresponding ear and push my shoulder up to the other ear. ‘LALALA! NOT LISTENING!’ I shout in reply.

  Frustrated, angry, probably also embarrassed, Nancy shoves me. I stumble. My stitch is suddenly forgotten, cured by my outrage that she’s laid hands on me. I stand upright.

  ‘Don’t you touch me!’ I shout at her. ‘Don’t you ever touch me!’

  ‘Listen to me, then!’ she yells back. She moves to do it again but I have my hands up and shove her back. Her bony body is no match for my push and she staggers backwards, too.

  ‘Don’t push me!’ she shouts, affronted. Shove. She’s done it to me again.

  ‘You started it!’ Push. I return the move to her.

  ‘I only want to talk to you!’ she bellows.

  ‘I don’t want to hear it!’

  ‘I only want to say sorry!’ she cries. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s a great way to say sorry: shove someone about and then shout at them.’ I rest my hands on my knees, winded again. ‘I bet everyone loves being apologised to by you.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  I eye her up. ‘You look ridiculous. And your apology is even more ridiculous.’

  ‘Why am I even bothering?’

  ‘I don’t know, Nancy, I really don’t. You don’t mean it, so why bother?’

  Her hair has been thrashed about by the wind and she uses both of her hands to smooth it down. She’s shocked. Not an emotion I’ve seen much in Nancy before. No, there was one time. After she had been off for three months, leaving Sienna with Seth and me, not caring how we were going to fit work and our lives around this new, unexpected responsibility, Nancy waltzed back in expecting a warm reception.

  Seth and I had been positive, excited and supportive to Sienna about Nancy’s return, as we had been the whole time she was away – following a band on tour (and screwing their drummer) for her blog – so that Sienna wouldn’t feel abandoned. When Nancy had walked in Sienna looked her up and down in disgust and had gone right back to playing. Nancy had been deeply shaken. She’d looked wide-eyed from me to Seth then back to me again, shocked that Sienna hadn’t been interested in her. It took three days to convince Sienna to go home to her mother. That was the first and last time Nancy had ever been shocked because it was the first time anyone had held up the mirror of consequences to her behaviour and had refused to be taken in by Nancy’s reluctance to accept what sort of person she truly was.

  ‘I … I mean it,’ she stammers, her brow furrowed. I’m sure I read something on the Guide to Femininity that said pulling fun faces at the camera was feminine and desirable because it showed your kooky side, but frowning was forbidden as it gave you wrinkles in uninteresting places.

  ‘Do you bollocks mean it. You’ve never meant anything that wouldn’t benefit you directly in your whole life.’

  ‘I … I …’ she begins, completely thrown.

  ‘Oh, poor Nancy, isn’t this going the way you expected? Aren’t I accepting enough of your bullshit apology?’

  ‘It’s not bullshit.’ Nancy trembles. Probably from the cold, maybe from shock at her apology not being accepted. Her shaking reminds me suddenly of my grandmother in her better moments. Who did it? Wisps across my mind again. Who did what I was going to do?

  ‘I didn’t realise until you were telling Auntie Heather about it how much I had done to you over the years.’

  ‘Right, you didn’t realise you’ve bullied me and been a complete bitch to me pretty much our whole lives?’

  ‘I … I mean, I knew, but I didn’t realise it was so much.’

  ‘Bullshit, Nancy. Bull. Shit.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to hurt you.’

  ‘You just did, without trying.’

  ‘I didn’t … Everything comes so easily to you. And, growing up, it—’

  ‘I DON’T CARE!’ I yell at her. ‘Haven’t you got that yet? Haven’t you worked that out by the fact I’ve barely spoken to you since you pitched up here? I don’t care about you and what you do or what you say. None of it. I don’t care if you apologise or if you don’t. You’re nothing to me. I care about Sienna but not you. It’s that simple.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘I didn’t always think like that, if it makes you feel any better. There were so many times I was desperate for you to be my friend again, to treat me like a cousin, like a sister, as we used to be. Later on, I wanted you to apologise, to say sorry so we could move on and maybe try to be friends. Then I realised that nothing you could say would make it any better. It would mean nothing because the damage was done, the hurt was caused, I couldn’t get any of the things you ruined back so why hang around for an apology that would be disingenuous at best. And do you know what? The second I did that, the moment I accepted that my life wouldn’t be transformed by an apology from you, things got magically better.’ I wave my hands about to illustrate my point. ‘I was set free by realising I didn’t need you or your bullshit apology. So there, no apology needed.’

  She is petrified by what I’ve said, unable to move because this has never happened to her before.

  ‘You don’t have to go home today,’ I tell her. ‘You and Sienna can stay as long as you like because truly, I don’t care what you do, say or think.’ I take a huge puff of salty air into my lungs, slowly release it. I feel so much lighter, freer. ‘Now, please leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to you any more.’

  We return to the flat, Nancy about ten paces behind me. Seth answers the door to us.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ I say to him and his quizzical look as I march in wearing my pyjamas and Nancy closely follows in her nightshirt.

  ‘OK, I won’t,’ Seth says, although I’m sure he’s dying to.

  65<
br />
  Smitty

  Light comes through the whited-out windows and I stand in the middle of the shop with my eyes closed. I am trying to visualise what the shop should look like. The outside is olde worlde, with teal-coloured panels and triple-bevelled frames. The door has a brass bell and the wood is sombre, ancient. When I first saw it, especially with the wonderful workshop space that could have been made for me, I knew I had to have it.

  Now, I realise it is too old-fashioned for me, for what I want this place to be. I want to do something different, new, not play it too safe. That is what I have done throughout my life: I have played it safe, done what others want and expect me to do, while trying to do what I want to do. I have tried for so long to fit myself around the shapes of other people’s desires, I am not sure who I am, what I want, what I need most of the time. Then, when what the person asked of me turns out to be wrong, I feel slighted and hurt; bereft and unwanted.

  I need to stop that. Now.

  When the police went through here and the workshop and the flat, they left a trail of disorder. They took apart everything I had built up in the last few months. I’d sat in the wheelie chair in my workshop, gawping at the mess they had made: every drawer – over a hundred in different shapes and sizes – had been emptied on to my bench and then, when there was no room, on to my chair and the floor. Every folder and box file, sample board and notebook, had been removed from the shelves and left scattered and open on the benches and floor. They had taken the protective oiled cloth off the rollers, they’d opened each pickling jar, they’d taken the lids off my pickling warmers. They’d even emptied the barrel polisher, which is packed with ball bearings, on to the sink’s draining board, and several of the small, metal balls which give an extremely shiny finish to textured metal that can’t be filed have rolled down into the plughole. Every shelf and wall cupboard had been cleared in the kitchenette and the contents left on my worktop or floor. Everything under the sink had been pulled out and left in the middle of the kitchenette floor.