That Girl From Nowhere (49 page)

‘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.

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.

In here, the devastation had been worse. They’d emptied every box, left the contents on the floor, some knocked over so findings and beads had obviously rolled away, like the ones Lily and Sienna spilt, never to be seen again. I’d felt violated, as if someone had marched into my head and emptied the contents all over the place for me to see how trivial and frivolous my life would seem to some. They had poked and prodded around to make sure they hadn’t missed anything then had withdrawn with nothing.

After the violated feeling I started to think about it – all of it, and realised I needed this. I needed someone to come storming into my work life and shake it up, force me to take stock and consider doing things differently. I had tacked pieces of my old ways of working on to this workshop. It was ordered and staged like the small space I had at Karina’s place up in Leeds and the spare bedroom at my flat. The ideal would have been to rip it all up then start again.

The police had ripped it all up, now I need to start again.

This place needs to be nothing short of what I want. It needs to remind me that I can do something right, I can put down roots and I can create something that grows and becomes successful. I have to stop being so passive in all of this. In my life. If I want to stop being from nowhere, I have to find myself somewhere to be. That somewhere is here.

I revolve slowly on the spot, trying to see the shelves, the cases, the stands, the area where I’ll sit and talk to people about their designs. Glass or wood or Perspex? Blond wood or mahogany? Stainless steel or white? Primary colours or pastels? I need to open the shop, I need to forge ahead, put all the stuff of the last few days behind me and go forwards.

I tip my head back, open my eyes. The ceiling is deceptively high for a shop that is quite small. Maybe I can suspend something up there. Some of my old tools I don’t use any more? Photos of my designs? I lower my head to look at the wall opposite. It is a large blank canvas. My photos. I’ll put my photos there. I will ask those who I make jewellery for if I can put up photos of them and their jewellery there as well as on the internet.

In front of that wall I will put two armchairs and a small table where people can sit while we chat about the jewellery they want made or reloved with the backdrop of others’ pieces behind them, and in front of them in an album.

I turn towards the window. I will display some of the pieces I sell on white velvet trays, in front of photos of people wearing them. I rotate on the spot, look at the wall which currently has heavy, dark wood shelving from one end to the other that reaches high up the wall. I can move them into the back where they’ll be helpful for organising my equipment. I will replace them with a wall of Perspex drawers, so customers can easily see the jewellery.

The floors will be white tiles, even though they’ll need cleaning every day, and the counter can be Perspex, too, but the front will have long thin tubes filled with different coloured beads, standing like test tubes of coloured liquid waiting to be experimented on in a science lab.

I can see it. I can actually see it. The images come to me in a rush, flashes and colours and panels, shades and displays. If I were able to sketch like my mother, I would be putting these images on the page, instead of storing them in my head. When it is finished I’ll have a launch party, I’ll invite all the clients I have down here, I’ll even invite my first family. Surely that won’t be seen as harassment? Surely they will, by then, have decided that I couldn’t possibly have done it and they will accept me back?

I’m deluding myself, I know. But I need hope. I need something to cling on to. I need them to realise that I can be a part of their lives. Not the be all and end all, just a little sliver of it. Just someone they would like to be around every now and again.

Today I am on a double mission. First, to find another out-of-the-way place for Abi and me to meet. Second, to sit down and try to work out who did what I was going to do.

The answer is nearly there, I can feel the fingers of my mind groping for it, nearly clasping it and then having to give up as it twirls itself out of reach. I’m sure, if I come away from everything and everyone, I will work out what happened, who did it and why. What I’ll do with that knowledge I don’t know since the police are hardly likely to believe me and I would have heard by now if they were pursuing anyone else in connection with the death instead of just me.

Also, if they had moved their attentions on from me, Abi and I would not be having to sneak around still. Even though I sorted out a lot of things with my mother, I’m not sure how she would really feel about me meeting Abi. The jealousy and worry won’t have dissipated like dry ice now we’ve talked; conversation can’t erase worries and anxieties and fears, especially irrational, illogical ones. From what Abi said the other night, even though her mum, my other mother, had told her dad, our father, that she’d never forgive him for sending her child away again, she hasn’t outright sanctioned or approved Abi seeing me. Until other people are comfortable with it, we’re going to be having a sibling affair as Abi called it.

This café seems perfect for our purposes because it is one of those out of the way but ‘in plain sight’ places. You can only get there by foot and you have to be pretty determined at that: crossing a concrete lock that I’m convinced wobbles when you walk on it, or driving down to the desolate area of huge, ominous-looking nearby power plant and then getting out to walk the rest of the way once you run out of road.

The café should, with its place right on the water, be a glass and chrome affair but it isn’t. It is made up of low, pebble-dashed buildings that look suspiciously as if they were once outhouses and the outside ambience comes in the shape of white plastic garden tables and green plastic chairs. It would be perfect, though, for illicit meetings with my sister.

I order coffee from the waitress, take out my notebook. At the centre of the page I write the initials SZ (for Soloné Zebila) and draw a circle around them. Inside the circle I cram a question mark next to the initials but away from the curve of the circle. Somebody killed my grandmother, SZ, and I can’t work out who. To do it, they would need access. I scrawl down the people I know who that applies to: AZ (Abi), IZ (Ivor), JZ (Julius) and KZ (Kibibi). To be thorough, I add LZ (Lily), too. Maybe JoZ (Jonas), my other brother who no one talks about. Not even Abi will talk freely about him beyond saying he lives abroad. Whenever I ask about him she glosses over him or outright changes the subject. It doesn’t take a detective – qualified or not – to work out there was some kind of falling out. And with my father issuing decrees to me the other day, it’s likely to be him that Jonas fell out with. Actually, with my grandmother the way she was, how manipulative she was, it could have been her also. I draw lines between JoZ and SZ, JoZ and JZ. Question marks go along those lines.

I have access, well, had – pretty sure my father will have changed the locks by now. I write down CS (Clem). Seth knew I had the key, so his initials, SC, go down too. He didn’t want me to do it and he offered to do it instead. Each of these factors earns him a circle around his name. I have the same number. Who else? Mum? (HS). She knew where they lived, but the access is out. My other mother, she has access (one circle), she and SZ didn’t get on (second circle) and she knew all about the medication (third circle). So did I. (Another circle for me).

I look at the page again. I have the most circles.

‘Here you go.’ The waitress, with her pristine white apron, rolled-up sleeves and peach lipstick, places my coffee beside my notebook then stops to gawp at what I’ve written and a deep frown forms between her unplucked eyebrows. She stares at the initials, the connecting lines, the question marks, the circles. I see them as she sees them: a load of rubbish, fanciful nonsense from a person who has watched one too many cop shows. A wave of embarrassment flows through me. I wonder if she’s guessed what I’ve been trying to do, what I’ve convinced myself I can do. She frowns again, then leaves me to it.

I snap shut my notebook, embarrassed that I seriously thought I could work it all out over a cup of coffee in an out-of-the-way café.

I pick up my coffee, move to take a sip. Except it’s tea. Tea. I don’t drink tea. I pretend to Mum that I do to make her happy, but the reality is, there’s something fundamentally flawed about tea in my mind. It’s flavoured water. Not like coffee, coffee is something
made
with water, it is a real drink.

For a few seconds I toy with the idea of drinking the tea, forgoing the coffee just this once. I can’t, I just can’t.