Twenty Questions for Gloria

by Martyn Bedford

  “Shall we go to my room?” Uman said.

  “That sounds like a good idea.” I tried not to look too relieved.

  He spoke to his grandmother in Turkish again but she flapped a hand at him. Can’t you see I’m trying to watch TV? her gesture said.

  Just then, the Jack Russell—who had been curled up on the rug by the old woman’s feet—trotted over to the sofa and butted my knee with her hard snout.

  “Hah!” Uman said. “Fatima likes you.”

  —

  When he’d suggested we go to his room, I assumed he meant upstairs. But he led me across the lounge and into a cramped kitchen at the back of the house (quickly shutting the door to stop Fatima following us); then we carried on through to the back garden.

  “Here we are.” Uman nodded toward a tent, in camouflage brown and green, pitched on a short, narrow lawn. “My room.”

  “You sleep in your grandmother’s garden? In a tent?”

  “Yes, I do. And yes, I do.”

  “Isn’t there a second bedroom?” I asked, indicating the house.

  “I can’t sleep indoors,” Uman said matter-of-factly.

  “Why not?”

  “In case of fire.”

  I let out a laugh. “How many times have you been asleep in a house that burned down?”

  “Once is enough,” he said. Before I could think how to respond, he caught hold of my hand and led me toward the tent. “Come on, we can talk inside. Like the bedouin.”

  We sat at either end of the rubber mat that served as Uman’s bed. Even though we’d positioned ourselves beneath the apex, the top of my head brushed the canvas and Uman had to sit with a stoop. No wonder my tiny room hadn’t bothered him. A sleeping bag, inside its stuff-sack, lay in a corner along with one of those inflatable pillows people use on planes, a heavy-duty flashlight, a pack of playing cards, two paperbacks, and a National Geographic magazine. In another corner: a half-empty liter bottle of Pepsi, a Tupperware tub of crackers, a plastic knife, and a jar of Nutella. Uman set the food down between us and we munched as we talked.

  “I thought you were posh,” I said, spitting crumbs. “I thought your parents were rich. I thought you had a tennis court in your garden?”

  “I am. They were. I did.”

  Were. Did. “Your mum and dad—”

  “Are dead. That’s right.” He took the knife from me and slathered another cracker with chocolate spread. “Hence the grandmaternal residence scenario.”

  “When did they…When was it?”

  He spoke through a mouthful of food. “Few months ago.”

  “Jesus, Uman.” I started to say how sorry I was, but he cut across me.

  “Don’t, please. I’m allergic to sympathy. It brings me out in a rash of self-pity.”

  I watched him finish the cracker. We’d left the flap open, but it was still stuffy in there, and gloomy. The light had a greenish tinge and the tent smelled faintly of dog. Uman looked more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him—literally, what with having to sit hunched up, but ill at ease, too. Like he’d rather talk about anything else. He wouldn’t make eye contact. He always made eye contact—I’d never known anyone to hold my gaze so directly.

  “We can change the subject if you’d like,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You deserve to know what you’re getting into here. Who you’re getting into, I should say.”

  I smiled. “In our embryonic relationship?”

  “Precisely.”

  Uman reached for the Pepsi, took a swig, then passed the bottle to me. The drink was warm and flat, but I was thirsty enough not to mind.

  A thought occurred to me. “So if it was a few months ago—”

  “Why did I only move in with my grandmother very recently?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s interesting,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “You haven’t asked how they died. I thought you would’ve by now.”

  I hesitated. “I guess I thought you’d tell me when you were ready to.” That wasn’t true. I’d been on the point of asking him but had lost my nerve.

  “Is that right?” Uman looked skeptical but also amused.

  “No,” I admitted. “I was afraid to.”

  “Afraid? Of what? Of me—of upsetting me?”

  “Actually, no—I’m afraid it’s something horrible. Something really awful.”

  It was. More awful than I could’ve imagined. His father wasn’t a hotshot lawyer, Uman told me; he was—had been—a businessman. An electronics entrepreneur. Over the years he’d made millions. But then the business went belly-up; whatever it was they made, someone else started making it cheaper and better. On top of that, he was being investigated for tax fraud. He was facing bankruptcy and a few years in jail.

  “My father was due in court the morning after,” Uman said.

  The morning after the night he set fire to the house while his wife and sons were asleep; then, while they burned in their beds, he hanged himself in the garage.

  “Sons?” I asked.

  “I had a brother. Faisal. Eighteen months older. We were both home for half-term.”

  A brother. I studied him in the greenish light of the tent. “That’s why you got upset that time in the park, when I talked about Ivan?”

  “We despised each other, actually,” Uman said. Then, with a shrug, “But, you know, he was my brother.” He took another drink from the Pepsi bottle, although I got the impression it was to distract himself, to stop himself from getting upset in front of me. “It was the smoke that killed them—Faisal and my mother. Asphyxiation. They weren’t burned alive.”

  I didn’t speak. Just watched his face, half turned away from mine, like he’d spotted the bedding and reading materials in the corner of the tent and was puzzling out who it belonged to.

  “At the inquest, the pathologist said they never woke up. They were still in their beds—what was left of them, after the fire was extinguished. He said my father had drugged them.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Whatever he gave us, I must have had less of it—or it didn’t affect me as strongly.”

  I remembered the broken ankles. “You jumped out the window,” I said.

  “The bedroom door was locked. He’d locked all of them.”

  Uman’s room was on the top floor, in a converted attic, he explained. The worst of the fire hadn’t reached it at that point, and he managed to escape before being overcome by the smoke. He’d had to stand on a chair to scramble through the skylight, slide down the roof, and let himself drop from the guttering.

  By the time the fire crews and police had arrived, Uman—unable to stand or walk—had crawled around the house to the steps up to the front door.

  “I was trying to get back inside—to save my mother and brother. My father, too—I had no idea he was dangling from a roof beam in the garage.” Uman’s voice was steady, emotionless. I sensed it was a story he’d told before. “Of course, the front door would’ve been locked. And anyone still in the house was already dead by then.”

  They were his family, not mine, but I was the one with tears in my eyes.

  “So, there you are,” he said. “Now you know how I got my limp—and how my lungs got wrecked.” Uman coughed, as if to demonstrate, triggering a choking fit.

  I also knew why the teachers at Litchbury High had cut him so much slack. Trailing this tragedy behind him, Uman was more or less untouchable.

  “The X-rays are spectacular,” he croaked, once he’d eased his throat with Pepsi and was able to speak again. “The radiographer said I have the lungs of an eighty-year-old lifelong smoker.”

  He finished the story. With his home destroyed and his immediate family wiped out, he returned to the boarding school once he was well enough to be discharged from the hospital. But a couple of months later, the next installment of Uman’s school fees was blocked by his father’s bank. All his accounts and assets had been frozen by the fraud investigat
ion and whatever money remained would be used to pay off his tax and other debts. Uman had nothing except for a few hundred pounds in a savings account in his own name.

  “The headmaster was very apologetic, very sympathetic—if only there was something they could do to enable me to continue my education with them…blah, blah very blah.”

  “Jesus, after what happened—they threw you out?”

  “That would be an alternative interpretation, yes.”

  —

  DI Ryan breaks in. “Is that what he told you, Gloria?”

  I look up, puzzled to see her there, to find myself in a police interview suite. I’ve been so wrapped up in that visit to Uman’s grandmother’s house. I nod. “That’s what he told me.”

  “You know that wasn’t why he left the school, don’t you?”

  “I do now, yeah.”

  “They offered him a scholarship—on compassionate grounds,” DI Ryan says. “Uman could have stayed at that school till he was eighteen, if—”

  “I know. I know all of that.”

  “So he lied to you.”

  I don’t respond, just look at her. She looks right back at me.

  “Why do you think he lied to you, Gloria?”

  “Is it possible,” I say, layering on the sarcasm as thickly as Uman spread Nutella on those crackers, “that he lied to me because he didn’t want me to know the truth?”

  QUESTION 9: If you could have one wish, what would it be?

  We hung out at Uman’s grandmother’s place for the rest of that day. Most of the time, we kept to the tent—talking, or listening to music on my iPod, or playing card games with bizarre rules that Uman changed whenever he was losing. We took Fatima for a walk around the streets and I helped Uman make a meal. Omelettes, as it happens. The old woman ate hers off a tray on her lap in front of the TV (BMX racing; she enjoys the crashes, apparently) while we had ours at a picnic table on the tiny patio, with the dog lurking underneath for scraps. Fatima no longer bit me. Instead, she rested her chin on my knee and gazed up into my eyes.

  Uman’s grandmother was his only relation in this country, he told me. Given a choice of guardians, he’d picked her. “It was either this or live abroad with my dad’s brother.”

  “Is she…I mean, she’s…the way she is.” I laughed. “God, I sound like Mr. Brunt.”

  “Is she a fit and proper person to be a fifteen-year-old boy’s guardian?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what I was trying to say.”

  “To be frank,” Uman said, “I’m not entirely confident she realizes I’m living here.”

  We tried not to find that funny.

  “Who looked after her before you moved in?” I asked.

  “I don’t, really—look after her, I mean. A home help comes once a day, and the couple next door do the garden and get my grandmother’s shopping for her.”

  I thought about that. “How come she lives like this when your parents were so rich?”

  “She wouldn’t touch their money,” Uman said. “She hated my father—it didn’t help that he wasn’t Turkish, but she hated him anyway. My grandparents opposed the marriage, and when my mother went ahead with the wedding, they pretty much cut off contact. Before this, I’d only met my grandmother once—at my grandfather’s funeral.”

  —

  It might’ve been Uman’s idea, or mine; I really can’t remember. But in the evening, I messaged Mum to tell her I was still at Tierney’s and would it be okay if I stayed for a sleepover.

  Have you eaten? she replied.

  Yes.

  That was it: my first night in a tent since our one and only family camping holiday—when Ivan and I were still at primary school, and we all ended up in a B&B for the rest of the week after the campsite flooded on the third day.

  —

  Mum cuts in. “You shared a sleeping bag with him?”

  “No,” I tell her. “He fetched some blankets from the house.”

  After I’ve answered, I realize the oddness of her question: that the sleeping arrangements for that one night need explaining, when Uman and I were “missing” together for fifteen days.

  —

  It was about one a.m. before we were tired enough to sleep. A breeze pressed gently on the sides of the tent and I heard music, faint and floaty, from a house along the street. I was starting to drift off when Uman asked a question. His breath was warm on the back of my neck.

  “If you could have one wish,” he whispered, “what would it be?”

  I smiled into the darkness. “Can I really have one? Please tell me you’re an actual genie.”

  “Is that your wish—you wish I was a genie?”

  “Anyway, shouldn’t it be three wishes?”

  “One wish, that’s the deal. My tent, my rules.”

  “Okay, let me think.” Eventually, I said, “I wish I could travel into the future to see how my life is going to turn out.”

  “Done. When we wake up in the morning it’ll be eighty years into the future and you can find your ninety-five-year-old self and ask her what your life has been like. That is, her life.”

  “That would be so cool.”

  “Would it?” Uman asked. “If you knew everything in your life before it happened, there would never be any surprises.”

  “Isn’t my wish supposed to be your command? Since when do genies quibble?”

  “And what about free will?”

  “What about free will?” I said.

  “There might be thousands of future versions of Gloria Jade Ellis, each one turning out differently, depending on the choices you make during your life.”

  That stalled me for a moment. “Right, in which case I wish I could travel into the future to meet the oldest, happiest version of myself and ask what choices I should make to end up like her—oh, and could she please keep some stuff back so my life isn’t entirely devoid of surprises.”

  “Good answer.”

  “Thank you.”

  “One problem, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s your one wish used up,” Uman said. “So you’re now stranded in the future with no way back to live the life that made this old-woman version of you so happy.”

  I laughed. “Dammit, there’s always a catch.”

  “It’s what makes my job as a genie so interesting.”

  I rolled over beneath my blankets to face Uman. It was way too dark to see him properly—just a shadowy gray-black shape in the shadowy gray-black—but his breath was right there. A wheeze from his smoke-damaged lungs, a faint scent of egg, onion, and toothpaste. His bangles clicked as he reached out to stroke my hair.

  “What?” he asked. He sounded like he was smiling.

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked. “That we can make thousands of different lives for ourselves.”

  “Yeah, of course. Don’t you?”

  Was he still smiling? I couldn’t tell. I pictured his face: the lopsided grin, the girly brown eyes, the too-big nose. Tierney is always telling me I think too much but, when I was with Uman, I felt like I’d never be able to think enough. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I’m not sure how to make one life for myself, let alone a thousand.”

  —

  “So, that was the Saturday,” DI Ryan says. “Then you went off with him the next day.”

  “We went together.”

  “His idea? Or yours?”

  “Our idea.”

  “It’s actually quite difficult for two people to have the same idea simultaneously.”

  I don’t bother to reply to that.

  “Gloria, this is important.”

  “It might be important to you. But it isn’t to me.”

  I can see all the things DI Ryan would like to say written on her face. But she leaves them unsaid. Instead, she says, “All right, let’s try this—tell me what happened on that Sunday morning. Tell me how and why you and Uman went off together.”

  “You don’t like me very much, do you?
”

  Mum chips in. “Can you blame her, the way you’re acting? You might think you’re all grown up now, but—”

  “Look, we’re all getting a bit tired and tetchy,” DI Ryan says. “Shall we call a time-out?”

  I tell her that sounds like a brilliant idea.

  “And, Gloria, it’s not a matter of liking or disliking. I’m just trying to establish the facts, and sometimes that means asking you to talk about things you’d rather not.” She pauses. “As it happens, though, I do like you. I wish I’d had your strength of character when I was fifteen.”

  I try to imagine what she was like when she was my age.

  I can’t, though. Any more than I could look at a picture of myself when I was a baby and find signs of the girl I have become.

  Strength of character. Is that what I have? Uman thought so, and so does DI Ryan. But they’ve only seen what happens on the surface—the things I do, the things I say—and that’s not where your character is. Uman knew me—knows me—better than anyone ever has, but even he never set foot inside my head or my heart. Never thought my thoughts or felt what I felt.

  “Anyway, let’s take a break,” DI Ryan says. “Interview suspended, 3:47 p.m.”

  —

  When we resume, I tell her about that Sunday morning.

  I woke up happy. Most of the night I’d been cold and uncomfortable, and I’d had about four hours less sleep than I’m used to. But I loved it. They have no idea how much, I say. And before they ask—because I know they’re dying to, both of them—I make it clear that nothing “happened” between me and Uman that night. He stayed in his sleeping bag and I stayed under my blankets. Fully dressed. We didn’t even kiss.

  “We have to do this again sometime,” I said to Uman.

  “What, wake up?”

  “No, spend the night in a tent. Well, and wake up afterward, obviously.”

  “Oh, okay.” He yawned, stretched—flinging one arm across my face so that I had to nip his elbow to make him shift it. “How about tonight, then?” he said.

  “Like I’d be allowed a sleepover on a school night. Even if they thought I was at Tier’s.”