That Girl From Nowhere by Dorothy Koomson
I nod. She’s got me thinking now: I should apply for my adoption papers. See if I can find out what was going on at that time, what was being said, possibly what they were thinking when they packed me up in that butterfly box and sent me to live with someone else.
‘What’s this?’ Melissa asks. She holds what looks like a mini chimney-cleaning brush with gold and black bristles on a thin metal rod.
‘It’s a polishing brush.’ I point to the others that sit in their stand. ‘Each one gives you a different type of finish – that one is for a satin finish, this one will give you a bit more texture. There’s also traditional sandpaper of different gradients that I use to smooth down edges. Plus those files. For me, the finish of a piece is everything – it’s an important part of making jewellery.’
‘Will you teach me?’ Melissa asks. When she says it she seems surprised herself.
‘Teach you?’
‘To make jewellery. Will you teach me how to do it?’
‘I’m not sure I could.’
‘All right, how about you make a ring or something and I come and watch you?’
‘If you want. But I’m sure you’ll find it pretty dull. I don’t because I love what I do, but you might.’
‘I really, really won’t. Tell me what all these tools are for and then another time I’ll come back and watch you work.’
‘Yeah, if you want.’
Melissa beams at me. ‘And if you want me to be with you when you get your adoption papers, I’d be more than happy to do that.’
‘Thank you, thank you so much.’
‘All right.’ She brushes off that moment of intimacy with a brisk tone. ‘Tell me what this is?’ She has picked up the saw that hangs on the hook at the edge of my desk, the thin but sharp filament-type blade only secured in the clamp at one end to make it less dangerous.
‘Come on now, Melissa, you don’t know what that is? And you can’t even guess?’
‘Hey, you! I wouldn’t take the Mick out of someone brandishing a dangerous weapon. I could saw bits of you off.’
I relieve her of my implement. ‘We call it piercing not sawing.’
‘Oh, right. What’s that?’
Piece by piece I take her through the equipment in my workshop, all the while the thought of applying for my adoption papers grows and grows in my mind.
Part 4
24
Smitty
Clem, I’m not sure what’s happened, or why you couldn’t speak, but if you need me I’m always here. Aš tave myliu. I’ve always loved you. I miss you. S x
I’ve read that message over a hundred times – every day I call it up and stare at it and allow the beads of hope to string themselves together until a long and seemingly endless chain of possibility has been spun around my heart. Maybe I should give him another chance. Maybe we can work it out. It’s these messages that make me think about giving him another chance. The desperate, angry, demanding, ‘talk to me’ ones strengthen my resolve, but these ones that remind me that I’m loved by him, how much I love him … they’re the ones that make me want to try again.
There’s a picture in the original butterfly box that lives at the bottom of my wardrobe of Seth and me on our first foreign holiday together, where he learnt that phrase – to write it and to speak it. It was one of those trips that nothing remarkable happened on, but it was so special because we were together and for as long as I could remember that was enough. Being together, talking, messing about, planning his next move at work, were more than enough for us.
With Seth, June 2006, Vilnius (Lithuania)
I sat in the window seat of our room in the very expensive hotel that we stayed in, staring out over the square. It was March, but there was so much sun. The air was soaked with it and I sat wearing Seth’s large Aran jumper and a pair of knickers. I had my camera in my hand and was trying to capture the light, snatch it from the world outside and store it in the photo that would come out of the camera. None of the angles seemed to fit properly, none of them would show how beautiful the light was, the city was. None of them ensnared that brilliant red-orange of the terracotta-coloured bricks of the square, none of them showed the perfect lines of the sandstone town hall building. Through the camera lens, everything seemed flat and ordinary and bland, instead of vibrant and lively and alive.
‘Come back to bed,’ Seth called. He was face down in the soft, white sheets, covered by the thick duvet.
‘Not until I’ve taken the perfect photo of the way the sun hits the town, what it does to it.’
‘Coming back to bed is far more fun. Come here and I’ll prove it to you.’
‘You’ve got nothing over there that interests me, buddy.’
‘Not even a huge lump of amber that I bought when your back was turned yesterday?’
‘Show me, show me, where is it?’ I dashed to the bed, climbed on and bounced up and down. ‘Show me, show me.’
Seth rolled over and grabbed me, tugging me down on to the bed beside him. ‘That was too easy.’
‘Lying about materials for my work.’ I laughed. ‘Are there no depths to which you will not stoop?’
‘Apparently not. Although I did buy you some amber yesterday so I’m not technically lying, but rumours of its size may well have been greatly exaggerated. The man who sold it to me said it was a superior quality so it cost a bit more.’
‘Right,’ I said. I handed Seth the camera as he had a longer arm than me, the distance at which he held it would make a better picture.
‘Click’ went the camera, and it snapped us as we mostly were at that time: dishevelled, together. Seth placed the camera on the bedside table. ‘You don’t sound like you believe me. He was a good bloke was Irmantas,’ he said.
‘I’m sure he was.’
Seth shook his head in despair. ‘Can I get my jumper back?’
‘No, I’m wearing it.’
‘I’m cold.’
‘Well, get back under the covers then.’
‘I can’t. I need to go do something and I need my jumper. The others are all the way across the room.’
‘What, you mean our room that is the size of a postage stamp?’
‘I’m cold,’ he insisted.
‘Oh, for the love of—’ I replied. I struggled out of the jumper and threw it at him. It landed over his head, draped down on to his face. He removed it and underneath the large woollen folds he had a huge grin. I realised a moment before he threw the jumper across the room out of reach that I’d been scammed for the second time in less than a minute.
‘You make it so easy!’ He laughed, his face filled with the mirth and kindness I’d noticed in him the first time we met. He was older, his face more lined than back then, but his smile, his innate pleasure at the life he had, was still there – it ran through him like the barely formed words in rock. Dylan, who dipped in and out of my life at the best of times, had all but dropped me when I got together with Seth. This was his prediction come true and, Dylan claimed, he couldn’t stand to watch us be loved up when we were both still too young to be that settled. Dylan spoke as though me falling out of love with him and in love with Seth way before New Year’s Eve 2003 was somehow done to spite Dylan.
Still laughing, Seth’s eyes greedily ran over my naked body, surveying it as if he wanted to secure mental images of each line and curve to pore over at another date. He hooked his fingers into the top of my knickers. ‘You’re still wearing far too many clothes for my liking,’ he said. The laughter had gone, replaced by a deep throaty lust. He threw my knickers in the same direction as the jumper then immediately pushed apart my legs. His fingers dipped into me and I inhaled sharply. ‘Do you like that?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ I gasped.
He pressed my legs open wider, lowered his head, pushed his tongue—
‘Clemency!’ My mother’s voice snaps me out of remembering and forces me to stand upright from my slouch over the shopping trolley. My face feels hot with guilt and shame, as though sh
She glares at me, at the phone in my hand. ‘Is that another message from that man?’ she asks sternly. That man being Seth, of course. Anyone would think that I had run into him a few times and he wouldn’t leave me alone. Or that I’d revealed to her how badly he treated me. But I hadn’t because he hadn’t. We had to split up because he lied to me and that was extremely shocking to me. Because he’d never been like that, had always been open, honest, trustworthy, the horror of finding out that he was capable of betraying me was far too much for me to stick around. Mum, though … She’d never liked him. She’d never liked any of my boyfriends but she tolerated the others because they never managed to take me away from her. Which Seth did and I don’t think she ever forgave him for that.
‘Yes, it’s a message from Seth,’ I say.
She seems so certain that people can take me away from her: Seth, my birth family. Mum acts like I am fickle with my affections, that anyone who looks in my direction will replace her. Which is ludicrous. I’ve come to a decision, though, and I need to tell her.
I push the trolley down the aisle after her and we turn left, heading for the front of the store into the tinned goods aisle. Mum has a list in her hand and marks off each item with a small, neat flick of her wrist as she leaves a tick. Mum has gone eco-friendly since she got her trike: for the weekly shop she rides to the supermarket, we shop together, and I drive all the bags home while she, safe in her ecological saintliness, cycles home. I almost, almost fell into the trap of explaining to her that getting me to drive was still adding to our carbon emissions, but caught myself just in time. There are some battles not even worth considering, let alone fighting.
‘Mum, I think I’m going to ring Abi, my, erm, my sister. I think I want to see them.’ I say this barely above a mumble because I know she’ll hear. She’s only hard of hearing when it suits her.
She takes the news as well as can be expected: she stops in front of the tins of soup, and treats them to the long, silent glare and rigid expression I should have been receiving.
‘I think I want to meet them. All of them.’ I feel sorry for the soup, the look she is giving it could boil it in its tin. I decide to buy the soup and hide it in my bedroom because it’s taken the visual equivalent of a bullet for me today, so the least I can do is buy it and not eat it. I continue hesitantly: ‘Even if it’s just once, I’d like to find out what they’re like. Maybe get some questions answered.’
‘I understand,’ she says, monotone.
Really? You might want to tell your face that because it’s saying to the soup and me that you don’t understand at all, I think. Instead I say: ‘Thank you. For understanding.’ I almost thanked her for letting me do it but I caught myself. I am thirty-seven, I don’t need her permission. Her blessing would be good; her blessing would silence – or at least quieten – the guilt demons that have been plaguing me, but I do not need her permission to do this.
‘When you go to meet them all, I’ll come with you,’ she says. She smiles then, treats the soup to a beatific grin before she turns it on me. Now she has decided how she can make herself a part of this, can control it to a certain extent, her whole demeanour has unclenched and she radiates the relaxed, swaggery aura of a person who has expertly restrained a wild stallion that had dared to bolt.
Dad. The ache of missing him echoes through every part of me. He would have understood, he would have told her not to get involved. He would have stuck up for me and stopped her. If she still insisted, he would have told me to do it in secret and tell her after the fact. If Dad were here, no way would this be happening according to Mum’s rules.
This isn’t fair. She knows it too. I open my mouth to tell her, to explain that this is something I need to do on my own, for me. I shouldn’t have to consider her feelings in a situation that will already be fraught and emotionally difficult.
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘Good.’ She grins at me, beams at the soup. I take the tins of mulligatawny off the shelves and drop them carefully into the trolley.
‘Excellent idea, Clemency,’ Mum says. ‘We’ll have soup for lunch. That was your father’s favourite. Let’s go and get a crusty loaf as well.’
‘I’m so sorry, soup,’ I whisper.
‘Oh, and if that man keeps sending you messages, you should think about calling the police,’ Mum adds, on a roll now. ‘He needs to understand you want nothing more to do with him.’
I think I’m going to shout at her. Right here, in this supermarket, I think I am going to start screaming at her. First Seth, then my birth family, and now this poor unsuspecting tin of soup. I know I’m being ridiculous about the soup, but sometimes I feel pushed to the edge of sanity by her.
I want to scream at her that if she hadn’t pretty much let my cousin Nancy get her own way about pretty much everything, I would still be with Seth. I would not have moved down here, I would not have met Abi and I would not be about to eat a tin of soup whose sole crime was to take a glare bullet for me.
‘Right,’ I say instead. Because I am a coward. And Seth should have known better.
With me, March 2015, Leeds
I wanted my bed. Having been sent home by Dad and Mum to go see Seth, get some proper sleep, give them some space (although they didn’t say that), what I wanted more than anything was my bed. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Smitty,’ Dad had reassured to get me to leave. ‘I promise you, I’m not going anywhere.’
Seth wasn’t in, although it was one of his days to work at home, but I’d noticed by the sheets and blankets folded neatly on the arm of the sofa that he’d been sleeping in the living room. He did that whenever I wasn’t there because he hated being in our bed without me. I was going to make it up to him, that was the plan. I needed to be with Dad and Mum at that time, but afterwards I would refocus my attention on Seth. But not right then. Right then, I wanted to sleep for a little while and pretend that my world wasn’t crumbling around me. That my dad wasn’t about to leave me.
My fingers pulled back the duvet and a scent – delicate and fleeting – rose up to greet me. It was so momentary, like a trick of light, that it was gone before I properly noticed. I continued to pull back the duvet, certain it was nothing, until I saw what was obviously a long, brown thread, visible against the white sheet. It wasn’t thread, of course, it was a long, straight brown hair. As if the shock of the moment had temporarily wiped my memory, my hand went to my head to check that the hair in the bed didn’t belong to me. Mine was, of course, black, short, tightly curly. Seth had shaved his light brown hair to a grade two again, it wasn’t his.
I dropped the duvet back into place. Someone else had been there, that was obvious. I knew he wouldn’t, though. Seth wouldn’t. Seth would have just had someone over to stay. That was why he was sleeping on the sofa. He hadn’t mentioned the person who was brunette, most likely female, was staying during any of our nightly talks because he didn’t want to upset me. Although why one of our friends staying would upset me was a mystery. Unless it wasn’t a friend. A non-friend with straight, long brown hair.
Shaky, unsteady on my feet, my stomach a tumbling barrel of nausea, I sat on the floor beside the bed. This wasn’t the time to deal with this. Maybe in a month or so, when … I didn’t want to think about that either. There wasn’t much I could deal with and this was one of those moments. On the wall of photographs that I was facing, my eyes were drawn to the ‘With Seth, finally!! January 2004’ picture.
My gaze then moved over to the photo of my family from last Christmas I had tacked on to the wall. On the left-hand side of Seth stood my cousin Nancy. She had her arms looped around her daughter Sienna’s shoulders as she grinned at the camera, but she was also, very noticeably, leaning on Seth. She was very clearly making her physical presence felt. She only needed him to be weak one time, he only neede
This was not the day to deal with it, though. This was not anywhere near the right time to have to deal with it.
25
Abi
To: Jonas Zebila
From: Abi Zebila
Subject: Update
Friday, 26 June 2015
Dear Jonas
I think it’s safe to say that this is a different place now. I thought things were about to get a whole lot worse when Daddy and Gran found out and I wasn’t sure how Ivor would take it, but I don’t know, it’s like someone has thrown all the windows open and a cleansing wind has blown through here and the heavy weight that was hanging over us – this secret our parents have had all these years – has been swept away.
It’s not one big love-in by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels like a more honest house. Ivor took the news pretty badly. When Mummy and Daddy told him, he looked so injured first of all. Like they’d betrayed him by having a child older than him or something. He sat and stared at them for the longest time.
‘Is there anything you want to ask?’ Mummy asked. And he just got up and walked out. Reminded me a bit of Clemency, to be honest. Since then, he’s not talked about it, changes the subject if someone tries to bring it up. It seems he really does feel this was done to spite him.
Now the secret is out, Gran, who seems more stable, just glares at Mummy a lot but doesn’t say anything. I hate to think of her doing this, but it seems like Gran has been using this big secret as a way to control Mummy all these years. Mummy still does everything for her, but it now seems to be on an equal footing. It’s hard to explain because it’s never been a blatant control thing, we all know what Gran is like, but now it’s not there any more it’s plain to see that it was there originally, if you see what I mean?