Twenty Questions for Gloria

by Martyn Bedford

  “You could go a bit easier on her, you know,” she says after a moment.

  I don’t say anything.

  She studies my face. “Your mum’s a cyclist, isn’t she? A good one, from what I hear.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She’s certainly in fantastic shape for, what—forty-four, forty-five?”

  I let DI Ryan know how much time, on average, my mum spends each day on her bike—training, or away at races all over the country.

  “That’s some dedication,” the detective says, entirely missing the point.

  She seems fine with us talking while the machine isn’t running. While Mum isn’t here. Like this conversation is so unimportant it’s no longer part of the interview. I’m gripping the sides of the chair so tightly my knuckles hurt.

  “Then there’s Dad and his acting,” I say.

  DI Ryan frowns. “What?”

  “He’s in the Litchbury Players.”

  “Really? He doesn’t strike me as the type for amateur dram—”

  “Oh, he takes it very seriously. It must’ve been a real wrench for him to skip rehearsals while I was missing. And Mum, her cycling. God, it must’ve been terrible for them.”

  She gives me a hard stare. It’s the first time I’ve got the sense that she doesn’t like me. “You have no idea what your parents went through during those fifteen days.”

  I don’t respond.

  Her stare hardens. “Gloria— It. Ripped. Them. To. Pieces.”

  She looks like she’d enjoy nothing more right now than slapping my face.

  I almost wish she would. I even flinch when she reaches out to hand me a tissue. Which surprises me because, until that moment, I didn’t realize I was crying.

  I thank her. We lapse into silence.

  Mum was wheeling her bike out of the garage when I pitched up at home on that Friday afternoon, after Uman cut Science. She was all Lycra-ed up in yellow. We did the hey-how-was-your-day routine, but I could see she was irritated at being delayed by my arrival.

  “You’re home early.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know.” (For cycling she wears a stopwatch, not a regular watch.)

  “Then how d’you know I’m home early?”

  “I thought you’d be at Tierney’s.”

  I gave her the raised eyebrow. “Yeah, well, I would be, but Tier’s mum suddenly realized I wasn’t her daughter and threw me out. I’m amazed I’ve gotten away with it as long as I have.”

  “Lor, much as I’d like to hear some more of your sarcasm—”

  Mum bit back whatever she was about to say.

  I watched her unhook the helmet from a handlebar and fit it on her head, the bike leaning against her hip. “There’s food in the fridge, if you want to sort yourself out,” she said, fastening the chin strap.

  I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to Mum without her: (a) asking if I’ve eaten; (b) asking what I’d like to eat; or (c) telling me to get something to eat.

  “I’ll probably just have a couple of Pringles,” I said.

  She let that one go. “I’ll be back before dark. Your dad’s going straight to rehearsals after work, so I doubt he’ll be home before me.”

  And off she went. Another typical evening in the Ellis household beckoned.

  I don’t tell DI Ryan any of this.

  We just go on sitting quietly, avoiding eye contact, waiting for Mum to return. When she does, she looks like she’s been crying as well.

  The detective tells her, “We were talking about your cycling, Mrs. Ellis.”

  “My cycling?”

  “D’you mind me saying this, Gloria?” I shrug and DI Ryan addresses Mum again. “It bothered her, the amount of time you were spending away from home on your bike. And Kevin, with his drama.”

  Mum’s face flushes. “What are you, a social worker now as well as a cop?”

  DI Ryan exhales. “I just thought you should know how Gloria felt.”

  “We’re hardly ever at home together, the three of us,” I say. “And when we are, all we do is bicker and snipe at one another.”

  “That’s not true, Lor.”

  It’s been like that for ages, I tell DI Ryan. But it got a lot worse after Ivan left to go to university last September. With my brother in London and me all grown up at fifteen, it was as if Mum and Dad no longer had any responsibilities toward either of us. Like our family had split into four separate individuals, each living his or her own life. As if I’d left home too.

  “Oh, honey, how could you think we—”

  “I actually overheard you on the phone to one of your friends saying, ‘Now that Ivan’s moved out it’s like I’ve got my life back.’ ”

  I see the impact this has on Mum’s expression. On DI Ryan’s too.

  In the hush that follows, Mum looks ready to start crying all over again. Eventually, her voice a little husky, she says, “I had no idea you felt like that.”

  It’s hard to tell if she thinks I’m a selfish bitch or she’s a lousy parent. Or both.

  I should feel relieved to have said all this after shutting it away inside me for so long. But I feel like crap.

  “Let’s get back to you and Uman, shall we?” DI Ryan says.

  The following Monday, Uman was back in school. He sat with Luke again at tutor time and disappeared at morning break, so the first chance I had to speak to him was lunchtime. Even then he took some tracking down. I eventually found him sitting by himself on a strip of grass near the perimeter fence beyond the sports hall.

  For some reason, he had taken off his shoes and socks, making his too-short trousers seem even shorter. His toes were long and thin, more like fingers, and surprisingly pale.

  “Hey,” I said, stopping on the path as if I just happened to be passing. In fact, the path only continued for another ten meters before hitting a dead end.

  “My ankles swell up,” Uman said, indicating his bare feet. The skin was patterned with indentations from the socks he’d removed. Both ankles looked puffy, the insteps too.

  “Your feet are huge.”

  “Size twelve, in their unswollen state. I can’t take any credit for it.”

  “Even my dad’s only a ten.”

  “Your father sounds like a good and wise man.”

  “For having size-ten feet?”

  “Absolutely. It shows an admirable sense of proportion. I lack that,” he added, with a note of regret. “My feet, much like my behavior, have no capacity for self-restraint.”

  With Uman, you never quite knew when he was joking; just as you couldn’t be sure if all those long words were part of the joke or just the way he spoke.

  “D’you think they’re connected?” I asked.

  “My feet?”

  “No, your foot size and your behavior.”

  “Ah. You might be on to something there, Ms. Inexcelsis.”

  I gestured at the grass beside him. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Technically, you already have. What you mean, I think, is can you sit with me.”

  “You’re only ever a nanosecond away from being a total smart-arse, aren’t you?”

  “You see,” he said. “I knew you’d be like this from the moment I saw you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you wouldn’t take any crap from me.”

  “This was when you ‘read’ me, yeah?”

  “Was that skepticism or sarcasm?” Uman asked.

  “Both. But then, you’d know that if you could read me.” I dropped my bag on the ground and sat down next to him, and pulled out my lunch box, which is bright yellow and shaped like a wedge of cheese. It had seemed amusingly tacky when I bought it; just then, it looked childish. “So, your ankles,” I said, fishing out a tuna-mayo wrap. “How come they swell up?”

  “I broke them.”

  “Both of them? How?”

  Uman coughed, twice. I thought it signaled the start of one of his coughing fits but it didn’t. “I jumped from a heig
ht that was incompatible with anklebones remaining intact.” He frowned. “Are they bones or joints? Whatever, they broke. To be accurate, one broke, one dislocated. As a result, they sometimes swell up and, as you’ll have noticed, I walk with a limp.”

  “Why did you—?”

  “It’s a boy thing,” he said dismissively. “We climb tall trees, we ride bikes at breakneck speed, we dare one another to perform death-defying stunts. Inevitably, we hurt ourselves.”

  He didn’t seem the type for all of that—he was the least boyish boy I’d met—but I got the impression his explanation was actually an evasion. The true story of how he’d injured his ankles wasn’t something he wished to reveal.

  “Have you eaten?” I said, after swallowing a mouthful of wrap. Jesus, it was the sort of question my mum would’ve asked.

  “I’m going to have mine in a minute.”

  He had no bag with him. “Do you actually have any lunch?”

  “Not as such.”

  “So…d’you want to share mine? It’s tuna-mayo.” I indicated the wedge-of-cheese lunch box. “Mum always makes way more than I could possibly eat.”

  “That’s very kind, but no. Thank you.”

  I gave a suit yourself shrug and took another bite of wrap. The ground was damp, I realized; moisture was seeping through my skirt. I wondered why Uman had chosen to sit on the grass when there was a bench just a short way back along the path. Why he’d sat so far away from everyone else, for that matter. Outside class Uman played the loner, but in lessons he didn’t mind drawing attention to himself. Made a point of it, in fact. It was another of the things about him that didn’t add up. Before I could suggest we move to the bench, he said,

  “You were following me last week, weren’t you?”

  I laughed. “Was it really that obvious?”

  “What were you hoping to ascertain?”

  “Ascertain. Nice one. You know Tierney calls you Thesaurus Boy?”

  It was his turn to laugh. “I’ve been called worse.”

  “I quite like it. I feel more intelligent when I’m talking to you. I have to think.”

  “Thinking is good,” Uman said. “We like thinking.”

  It was true what I’d said. Whenever I was with him I felt smarter, sharper, wittier. I felt stretched. Our conversations were casual, but there was always something bubbling underneath. “Subtext,” Uman would probably have called it.

  “You never say anything boring or predictable,” I said.

  “ ‘The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn.’ ”

  I stared at him.

  “Jack Kerouac,” he said. “American writer. Very retro.”

  “Say all that again.”

  After he’d repeated the quotation, I turned it over in my mind. Mad to live…desirous of everything. I liked that word: desirous.

  “If you want the truth”—I licked mayo off my thumb—“we followed you because we were hoping to ascertain where you lived.”

  Uman massaged his ankles, the bangles on his wrists jangling and clicking.

  When he didn’t respond, I said, “Is it just the three of you? Where you live, I mean. Or do you have any brothers or sis—?”

  “If you’ll excuse me, Gloria—my lunch has arrived.”

  A guy on a moped had pulled up at the curb just the other side of the gates. He killed the engine and dismounted. “Mr. Padeem?” he called to us, already opening the rear pannier. “One Triple Cheese feast, one garlic bread, one coleslaw, one Diet Coke?”

  —

  “I still can’t believe you did that,” I said, when we’d finished sharing the food.

  “I imagine it’s against the school regulations,” Uman replied.

  “Ordering take-away? Er…yeah.”

  “And you can’t believe I would do something that contravened school regulations?”

  “No, of course I believe you’d do it. I’m just saying it’s unbelievable.”

  Uman frowned. Started to speak, then stopped himself.

  “You were going to say something smart-arse again, weren’t you?”

  “Might’ve been,” he said, mimicking a sulky child.

  I laughed. So did he. “God, I’m full,” I said. We had moved to the bench and were sitting at either end of it. I lay back, resting one hand on my bloated belly and using the other to stop my skirt riding up. “I don’t even like Triple Cheese.”

  “You can rest your feet on my lap, if it’s easier,” Uman said.

  I raised my head far enough to look at him. “Easier for what?”

  “Nothing, really. I just thought it would be nice to have your feet on my lap.”

  “Oh, in that case…” I kicked the empty pizza box against him. Lowered my head again. Gave a mock groan. “I swear I’m going to buuuurst.”

  “Or your head. If you turned the other way, you—”

  “Uman, there is no part of me that’s going to rest on your lap.”

  “You say that, Gloria, but if you did in fact ‘burst’ then it’s altogether probable that some fragments of your body would land there. Potluck as to which parts they might be, of course.”

  I groaned again. “Please, don’t make me laugh. It hurts my tummy.”

  We talked about rules; how you decide which ones to obey and which to break. It was like a class discussion in Citizenship…only, it was nothing like a class discussion in Citizenship.

  “Are you a rule-breaker?” Uman asked.

  “In my head I am, yeah.”

  “But not in practice.”

  “No. Not often, anyway. And nothing on your scale.”

  “Why is that, d’you think?”

  “Don’t know. Fear, probably. Fear of getting in trouble.”

  “And fear of standing out?” Uman suggested. “Fear of not fitting in?”

  “Yeah, that too. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less daring, I guess.”

  He coughed. Just the once. “My father used to have a poster on the wall of his study—a cartoon showing rows and rows of identical gray houses with identical gray roofs, with just one house in the middle with a roof painted in pink-and-purple stripes. Outside, the owner—he’s holding a paint can and brush—is being frog-marched down the street by the police.” Another cough. It took Uman a moment to catch his breath. “As soon as I was old enough to understand that cartoon,” he said, “I swore I would grow up to be a guy with a pink-and-purple roof.”

  I checked the time on my phone to see how long we had left before the end of lunch. Even as we discussed transgression, I was anxious about being late for class.

  “Have you always been the way you are?” I asked. “Only, I can’t believe you haven’t been kicked out of about ten schools by now.” Then, laughing, nudging his arm, “Maybe you have. Maybe that’s your big secret.”

  “I haven’t always been this extreme, no.”

  “So, how come? I mean, why have you become more transgressive?”

  He nudged me back. “We were talking about you,” he said. “How come we’re talking about me again?”

  “Because you’re a stripy roof and I’m just plain old gray.”

  “Not on the inside. On the inside, Gloria, you’re a kaleidoscope of pink and purple.”

  —

  On the way to class at the end of the lunch break, I told Uman that, if he still wanted someone to show him the sights of Litchbury, we could meet up after school.

  “Does this mean we’re friends?” he asked.

  I threw one of his own lines back at him. “It certainly seems that way.”

  QUESTION 6: Did you start to have your suspicions about him?

  DI RYAN:

  Lunch okay?

  GLORIA:

  Yeah, it was all right. Actually, no. It was terrible.

  DI RYAN:

  [laughs] It’s a real perk of the j
ob, the police canteen.

  GLORIA:

  Is this rapport?

  DI RYAN:

  Not really, but it’ll have to do until the rapport turns up.

  GLORIA:

  [no response]

  DI RYAN:

  Okay, so. Good to go again, Gloria?

  GLORIA:

  Uh-huh.

  DI RYAN:

  Interview resumes, 1:33 p.m. Same persons present.

  Now, this is still your story, your words—and it’s all good. Really helpful. But I’d just like to clarify a couple of things before you pick up where you left off when we broke for lunch.

  GLORIA:

  Clarify what?

  DI RYAN:

  So, it’s clear Uman made a strong first impression on you. And, of course, there’s everything that’s happened between you since then, which we haven’t come to yet. Already, though, I’m getting the idea that—how can I put it?—that Uman became, has become, a very…dominant figure for you. Not just back then, at the start, but still. Is that fair to say?

  GLORIA:

  [no response]

  DI RYAN:

  What I want, Gloria—what I need to be sure of—is for you to understand that you’re safe. He can’t get near you, now that you’re home. Now that you’re here. He can’t hurt you.

  GLORIA:

  Why would Uman hurt me?

  DI RYAN:

  Gloria, listen to me, you do understand that, don’t you? Uman has no hold over you anymore.

  GLORIA:

  I’ve always understood that.

  DI RYAN:

  Okay, let me put it this way: did he make any threats toward you?

  GLORIA:

  Threats?

  DI RYAN:

  About what would happen if you talked to the police?

  GLORIA:

  No. Why would he?

  DI RYAN:

  Because— Look, in these situations, a bond can form between the two people involved—an affinity but also a kind of emotional dependency, or what we call “empathetic identification.” But the thing is, Gloria, I don’t know whether you’re trying to protect him out of some false sense of attachment or loyalty…or because you’re still afraid of him.