My Best Friend's Girl

by Dorothy Koomson

  I pointed to the expanse of cream-white on the chimney breast. “OK, so what are we going to do there?” I asked, having fortified my voice with false courage. Neither of us had started to cry so we had to press on, wait until we were ready to let some of our feelings out.

  Tegan shrugged her bony shoulders, crossed one leg over the other and sat down on the floor beside the paint pots.

  “Ah, come on, you can do better than that,” I coaxed, sitting down beside her. How was I supposed to explain to Tegan that it was all right to be happy sometimes when I was struggling with that concept myself?

  Her big royal blue eyes glistened in her pale, heart-shaped face as she stared up at me. The corners of the mouth that had been pointed upward in a grin seconds ago were turned down.

  “How about a sun?” I said. Her eyes stared back at me.

  “A big yellow sun. And maybe a house?” She shook her head. “OK, a big yellow sun. How about some hills? Some green hills.” She nodded. “OK, a big yellow sun, some green hills. Anything else?”

  “A tree,” she whispered.

  “OK, trees. I think I can paint trees. What else?”

  “Chocolate flowers.”

  “OK. So we’ve got a big yellow sun, green hills, trees and chocolate. Do you mind if I make the flowers into those red and white swirly sweets instead? We won’t have enough brown paint after the trees.”

  She stared at the wall for a few seconds, then returned her gaze to me as she nodded in agreement.

  “I think your mummy would have liked the sun and the hills and the trees and the flowers that are really sweets,” I said. We couldn’t just pretend Del didn’t exist. We had to find a way to talk about her, no matter how painful. “She’d be able to paint them a lot better than me,” I added.

  Tegan’s damp, inquisitive eyes stared at me for a long, quiet minute. “My mummy drawed lots of pictures,” she eventually said.

  “Yup, she certainly did. And she was very good. Come on, then,” I said, getting to my feet. “Once we’ve done this, we’ll go buy you a bed.”

  “Is this really my room?” Tegan asked from the doorway. I stood behind her, watching as she slowly turned her head, careful not to miss anything. It’d taken us another week to get ourselves sorted out, for Tegan’s single bed to be delivered, for Betsy, the woman I shared an office with at work, to send her brother, Brad—a sulky fifteen-year-old who for some reason did whatever Betsy ordered him to do—to come around and help me shift furniture. The cream sofa was moved into the dining end of the kitchen, and sat with its back beside the doorway. My beanbag was placed in the corner at the bottom of the alcove, where I’d built in bookshelves. Brad helped me move the twenty-eight-inch TV into the kitchen too. It sat opposite the sofa. Betsy was the grateful recipient of the large glass table that had sat at the dining end of the kitchen. It’d cost a fortune, even with the staff discount I got from Angeles. There was no way I could keep it; instead I got a small, wood table that separated the living area from the kitchen.

  The computer, printer and other paraphernalia had been relegated to my bedroom. The real problem had been my books. I had over five hundred of them on three sets of white shelves in the living room. It’d taken me nearly eighteen months to get around to buying those shelves and putting my books on display. I was loath to give it all up so quickly. In the end, what didn’t fit onto the bookshelves in the alcove was piled up on the floor beside the TV, a leaning tower of books. On the other side of the TV, my pile of videos and DVDs. The only other storage I had were five cupboards that were flush to the wall in my corridor, but half of them were now filled with Adele’s boxes. The small TV that had been in the kitchen was now in Tegan’s room.

  The room she stood staring at. Her bed was made up with a single duvet that had a light blue sky and clouds on one side and came with matching pillows. Beside the window stood a light wood wardrobe. Under the window sat a matching drawer unit for her undies, socks and foldable clothes. I’d used carpet tape to fix two large red and white rugs—one under the TV stand and another under the bed—to the laminate floor.

  On the other side of the fireplace sat a large toy box. She also had a shelf for the books I knew she loved to read and have read to her. To finish off I’d spelled out “Tegan” on the door in brightly colored letters.

  “Yup, it’s all yours. You can do anything you like in here,” I replied, deciding that the “within reason” was implicit.

  “Really and truly?” She still hadn’t moved from the doorway.

  “Absolutely. Are you going to go in?”

  She took tentative steps into the room, then sat on the bed.

  “Now I thought you might like to try sleeping in your own bed tonight, but if you want to still sleep in with me, that’s fine too.”

  “I like this bed,” she proclaimed. “It’s big enough for Tegan.”

  “Cool. Now, I’m going to make a cup of something to drink. Why don’t you try out your television and video?”

  Tegan nodded eagerly and jumped off the bed then scuttled across the room to the small television that sat with a new video player I’d shelled out for.

  Shelling out was something I’d been doing a lot of recently and it was scaring me how expensive everything was. I hadn’t been the most sensible person when it came to money. I paid my mortgage on time, I mostly paid my bills on time, and I spent far too much on going out. But, despite my job title, I wasn’t raking it in. I’d always lived with an overdraft and a credit card. (Nate had been the sensible one when it came to money, but few of his frugal ways had rubbed off on me.) Now that I had two mouths to feed, clothe and take care of, I was struggling.

  Del, much as I loved her, had been appalling with money. It took her dying for me to realize how careless she was. And, I admit it, how irresponsible. Irresponsible. There, I’d thought it. Del was irresponsible. She loved her daughter, there was no doubt about it, but she hadn’t provided for her in any way. They’d lived in the flat Del and I had rented when we first moved to London. And they’d given up that flat, when Del’s condition became chronic, to move in with her father and his wife.

  She had no savings—just a great clothes collection. She’d been freelance most of her working life because she needed to be flexible when it came to childcare, so she had no life insurance or any other kind of financial backup plan for this eventuality. The one sensible thing she did was to take out insurance on her credit cards so they were paid off when I sent the companies her death certificate.

  I suppose, like me, she thought she had all the time in the world to start being a financial adult.

  I took my time making the drinks, giving Tegan the chance to familiarize herself with her new space, and by the time I returned she’d tucked Meg up in the bed, and had arranged all the books on her shelf into height order.

  “I like this room,” she informed me as she took the cup from my hand and sat on the floor in the middle of the room. I sat opposite her and looked around. This room wasn’t as grand as the room she’d had in Guildford, but it was hers, no bad memories attached.

  “I’m glad you like the room, Tiga,” I said. “I’ve got something for you.”

  “A present?” Her eyes lit up.

  “Sort of,” I said. I jumped up and went to the kitchen to retrieve the memento I’d dug out when Tegan was asleep last night.

  “I know this might make you sad at first, but I think you should have it up anyway.” I held out the picture of Adele and Tegan that Del had kept on her bedside stand in the hospital. The pair of them had their heads pressed close together, Tegan’s arms wrapped around her mum’s neck, the two of them beaming out from behind the plain glass frame.

  Tegan hesitated, her eyes wide and scared as she stared at the photo in my hand. Eventually, she set down the cup and took it from me. She held it in both hands, her loose hair almost hiding her face as she gazed down at it, but I could still see her lips were turned down.

  “Your mum was very pretty, wasn�
��t she?” I ventured.

  She nodded without looking up.

  “You don’t have to put it up, sweetheart,” I said to her, frightened that I’d pushed her too far too soon. “I’ll put it to one side if you want.”

  What had I been thinking? I didn’t want to look at pictures of Adele all day, why would she?

  Tegan stood, went to the television and placed her picture on top of it. “I think it should be there. Is that OK, Mummy Ryn?”

  I nodded and smiled. “That’s perfect, sweetheart.”

  chapter 15

  Rustle, flick went the papers as the headmistress leafed through them. Tegan was still and silent in the comfy chair beside me.

  The headmistress, oblivious to our nervous gazes, stopped at one page, squinted down at it even though her glasses were on her face, then raised her head and graced me with a full-on look. I felt my face stiffen with worry and she fired me a professional, practiced smile that widened her oblong face, then she dipped her head and resumed study of the file in front of her. My heartbeat increased a fraction as I followed her gaze as she read from the pages encased in a beige folder. How had they gotten so many papers, so much information, when I hadn’t provided it? Nor filled in any forms. In fact, when I’d called the school to find out how I went about registering a child for the next term, they had said I had to give them my child’s name, former address and the name of her former school—but I didn’t need to fill in any forms.

  “None at all?” I said.

  “No,” came the reply.

  “But doesn’t that mean anyone can show up at any time and say, ‘I’ve got a child and I want them to go to this school?’”

  “They need to live in the district and, of course, there needs to be room,” the school secretary replied.

  “So anyone who lives in the district can show up at any time and say, ‘I’ve got a child and I want them to go to this school’?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “That doesn’t seem right,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s harder to join a supermarket loyalty card scheme. What if an impostor shows up?”

  “An impostor child?”

  When she said it like that, it sounded like I was being mad, but fundamentally, it seemed wrong. I had been raised finding it difficult to join any kind of group—Girl Scouts, student union, bank jobs—there were always forms to fill in, information to dole out, pieces of yourself to distribute to the world at large. This should be harder. As a result, I’d asked to meet the head teacher because I needed to make life difficult for myself. And also because I didn’t want to launch Tegan into a new environment, one that would become a huge part of her world, without seeing it for myself first. I wanted to visualize where she was talking about when she told me about her day, I wanted to check that all the things I’d read about the school being decent and safe were true, that there weren’t in fact open manholes, and water running down the walls. My request had been made a week ago, when I had still believed that I needed to check if the school met my standards. As the days passed that feeling dissipated and I’d started to worry about the possibility of rejection. Of me doing something, appearing to be something that would make them decide they didn’t want Tegan after all. That fear had grown until it solidified in my mind as not just a possibility, but a certainty. This morning I’d made us change our clothes two, maybe ten times, finally settling on a black skirt suit with a white top for me and a red denim dress with a white T-shirt underneath for Tegan. I’d used straighteners to defrizz my hair, and combed it with a side parting into my usual bob. Tegan’s hair I’d combed back into a ponytail tied with a red ribbon.

  I’d had to keep letting go of Tegan’s hand to dry sweat off my hands as we walked from our flat to the primary school. I couldn’t remember approaching any kind of meeting with this amount of trepidation, but a mulelike kick in my stomach as we were shown into the headmistress’s office had confirmed that I was capable of feeling even more fear.

  Mrs. Hollaby, the headmistress, wore her gray-white hair looped up into a low bun. Her clothes, however—a white T-shirt with a bright, paint-splatter print of the school’s name, and stonewashed, elastic-waisted jeans—clashed with her looks. They also made me feel inadequate and overdressed.

  I straightened up in my seat, forcing myself to exude the confidence that had convinced the board of managing directors at Angeles to green light my magazine idea. My eyes probably gave me away, though, and revealed that I was fretting over where she got that file and what was disclosed in those pages. Did it tell about Adele’s death? Did it confess who Tegan’s father was? Did it explain the woman who was once down as next of kin had abandoned them?

  “Mrs. Matika,” Mrs. Hollaby began as she raised her head to me.

  “It’s Ms. Matika,” I said.

  “Ms.?” she replied, the slight inflection in her voice questioning my marital status. Was I divorced or one of those liberal women.

  “Ms., Miss, they’re so interchangeable,” I replied. “I was never married but I never wanted people to know that. It’s none of their business. I mean, men don’t have to advertise their marital status, do they?” I added a nervous laugh that rang hollow and flat around the room and confirmed that I was unbalanced.

  “I see,” she stated.

  “Call me Kamryn.”

  Her face creased into another of her professional, practiced smiles. “Kamryn.” She made my name sound like a statement. “It’s a shame your partner wasn’t able to come along.”

  “I don’t have a partner,” I replied quietly.

  Mrs. Hollaby frowned. “You are, then, Tegan’s parent?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Her only parent?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Rustle, rustle, flick, flick went the papers, trying to explain why Tegan with her white skin and blond hair had brown-skinned, raven-haired Kamryn for a parent.

  I watched her hunting for that kernel of information and wondered for a moment if I should leave her blundering around in the darkness of this situation. I couldn’t, of course. I had to enlighten her; those in charge had to know what had happened for Tegan’s sake.

  “I’m Tegan’s legal guardian,” I stated clearly and precisely, making it known that I didn’t want to discuss this in front of Tegan. To reinforce my point, I glanced at Tegan. She sat in the center of the chair, her arms folded around Meg in a hug, while her eyes intently watched the headmistress as though she were a new species she had discovered.

  Mrs. Hollaby understood my reticence and reached out her long hand for the phone receiver. I watched her fingers tap in a number, then she asked for someone to come into her office. A few minutes later a young woman who wore the same bright school T-shirt and blue jeans entered the room. After a short conversation with Mrs. Hollaby, she bobbed down in front of Tegan and introduced herself as Maya. She asked Tegan if she wanted to come and meet some other children at the playgroup.

  Tegan’s head snapped around to look at me, her eyes widened in what appeared to be alarm.

  “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” I reassured.

  Her eyes widened a fraction more, but in the royal blue of her irises her black pupils were still large, which meant she wasn’t scared, she wanted to go but wasn’t confident enough to say so in front of two strangers.

  “You’re allowed to if you want. Do you want to?” I smiled encouragingly.

  She nodded.

  “Go on, then,” I said. “I’ll come find you later, OK?”

  Her lips moved up into a smile. “OK,” she replied before she slid off the chair. Holding Maya’s hand she left the room.

  I watched them go, another kick of fear almost winding me: what if I never saw her again? I didn’t know anything about this Maya person, what if she wandered out of the school with Tegan?

  “She’ll be fine,” Mrs. Hollaby said to the back of my head.

  I resettled myself in the chair, f
aced her. “I know. I just worry.” From a place deep inside me I sighed, breathed out all the air in my lungs as I resigned myself to this. To letting a complete stranger into my life. Since Nate and Adele, I hadn’t opened up to people. Ted had known a bit about me, but I was careful not to reveal too much. Share too much and someone could hurt you. “I’m Tegan’s legal guardian,” I began. “Her mother, my best friend, died recently. I’ve inherited Tegan. I’m going to adopt her because that’s what I promised her mother I’d do.” No one else knew that. Everyone thought that I was taking care of her, no one knew that I was going to make her a Matika.

  “This must be very difficult for you,” she said.

  “Am I that obvious?” All bravado in my voice was ruined with a quiver of emotion. This was more difficult than I thought it would be.

  Her eyebrows knitted together in concern and a sympathetic smile sat on her lips. I looked away, to protect myself from her sympathy. Sympathy was the one thing I could live without—I would have no strength when faced with the kindness of strangers.