That Girl From Nowhere (50 page)

I hook my bag over my shoulder, pick up my notebook and pencil and stand to return the tea that should be coffee. In the café there is a queue for service even though it hadn’t looked that busy outside. I stand behind a tall, wide man who wears clothes that are too small for him. The teacup clatters because my bag wants to slip off my shoulder, and I can’t quite get the correct angle with the notebook and pencil in one hand and the cup in the other, so I am playing a sort of balancing act that rattles the cup and saucer.

I should put the whole lot down at the nearest unoccupied table and reorganise myself so that I’m not in imminent danger of dropping something. I shouldn’t be looking around the café, scanning as I always do, for a face I recognise in the crowd. In the time before I met my biological family, I used to do this all the time. I used to look at people to see if I knew them, if they looked like me, if I looked like them, if
they
were that familiar stranger I was connected to by blood. I still do it. A habit of a lifetime cannot be broken in a few short months, after all.

I spot it. I see a face that I recognise. And another. I see two faces I recognise, sitting right at the back of the café, in that hidden, private nook all the best cafés have. Those are the areas where I conduct my business with new clients who don’t invite me into their homes, the places Abi and I would probably sit so we won’t be easily seen as we conduct our sibling affair. This pair, this couple, obviously do not want to be seen. They have come here, to this secret café, and they have taken up a private space. And they are sitting with their heads close together as they make their plans, probably discussing how they’re going to tell me about their relationship. Or maybe they’re chatting about how much longer they’re going to keep me and everyone else in the dark about them. The jangling of the crockery in my hand is now out of control – I’m going to shake the cup off the saucer altogether at this rate because I am so horrified by who I have seen together.

My eyes dart around looking for a clear surface, but my gaze keeps returning to the couple in the corner because if I look away for too long, they might disappear, I might realise I have imagined it, imagined them. I choose the table in front of me to set down my burden. It’s occupied by two people who probably mind having a half-full teacup and tea-flooded saucer placed in front of them, but would probably concede it’s better than it being dropped beside them.

I stare at the couple at the back. I can’t believe what I am seeing. My Paddington Hard Stare is so firm, immovably fixed, one half of the pair glances up in my direction, looks away then immediately swings back when they register that they’ve seen me. The other one notices their companion is staring and looks in that direction too. That half of the couple is more openly horrified at being caught.

‘
You should have drunk the tea
,’ I tell myself.
‘If you had, none of this would be happening.’

Without noticing them properly, fully, I move around the other people and tables in the café until I am in front of the couple in the back, waiting for one of them to speak. They stay silent. They sit and watch me: one is wide-eyed with alarm, the other impassive; the only clue as to their shock is the way their eyes keep darting to the door, waiting to see who else will arrive and catch them together.

I look first at Mum, I look second at Julius, my father. The pair of them together, so close they’re …
Surely not
.

‘We have to tell her, anyway,’ says Mum when the silence has gone on long enough for them to know I won’t be speaking first.

‘But—’ begins my father.

‘Just tell me,’ I say.

One remains mute, the other fixes me with their pale blue eyes, eyes that are used to hypnotising me, making me stand still while I’m about to be told off or insulted.

‘We did it,’ Mum says. ‘We’re the ones who helped your grandmother to die.’

He opened the door to the woman who looked, frankly, deranged. She had seemed demure and respectable when he met her, a woman who had class and a certain amount of breeding.

‘We need to talk,’ the woman said loudly, dispelling all thoughts about her being the type of person she appeared to be. Even her accent was different from when they first spoke. The woman walked straight past him and into the house as though she belonged there.

‘Kitchen that way, is it?’ she asked.

He was working at home because he was waiting on some very important documents and it would be quieter to work there. Kibibi had taken Lily-Rose out so he could get some work done in peace. Kibibi had even prepared and administered his mother’s medication to ensure he would not be disturbed.

In the kitchen, the woman looked around, examining their home as if she didn’t think they were good enough. ‘Who do you people think you are?’ she said. ‘How can you even think of doing that to my girl? Who do you people think you are?’

‘Why are you here?’ Julius asked sternly. He had no time for this woman. He was grateful that she and her husband brought up the girl, turned her into a polite young woman, but he had no time for this woman. The girl … Seeing her again had been a reminder of a part of himself he did not like to admit existed. He had been ashamed for most of his life. Back then, in 1978, he had been scared of what doing the right thing might entail, what hardships they would all have to endure. When his mother made the call, made the decision, he had been relieved. He could show Kibibi how hard he was fighting, but ultimately, his mother, his father, they would have their own way. They always had their own way. He was ashamed of not being man enough at the time to take responsibility for his mistake. Seeing the girl in the present had brought that mortification back to the front of his mind.

‘How dare that woman ask my daughter to do that?’ the woman in front of him repeated.

‘What woman? What are you talking about?’
She is my daughter, in all actuality
, he thought. He wanted to remind her of that. She was his daughter even though he did the wrong thing back then.

‘That woman! She wants my daughter to help end her suffering. What about my daughter’s suffering? She’s in bits, trying to work out how to do it. And she will do it. Because Clemency will do anything for someone who is family. How dare
she
do this to Clemency.’

‘I do not know what you are talking about. I might understand if you calm yourself down and explain to me what you are trying to say.’

The woman’s nostrils flared like an untamed horse’s, her body was like that of an animal ready to pounce.

‘Sit, sit. Sit. Tell me.’

‘Your mother,’ she said when she was seated. ‘Asking my Clemency to help her to do
that
.’

‘Help her to do what? What suffering?’ He didn’t fully understand, although he feared that he did and was too cowardly to face it.

‘I knew it. I knew she wouldn’t be brave enough to ask one of you, it would be my daughter because she sees her as second best.’

‘Mrs Smittson …’

‘Don’t you dare Mrs Smittson me. Don’t you dare! She wants Clemency to help her to die. She is suffering and she wants Clemency to help her. What about Clemency’s suffering? Just because she didn’t grow up in this big house with all these expensive things, and didn’t go to private school, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t know right from wrong. It doesn’t mean she would do that.’

‘You think she would ask Clemency to … I don’t think so. My mother is very religious, she knows killing is wrong.’

‘And yet she has still asked Clemency to do it.’

‘She has spoken to Clemency twice as far as I know. No one would ask someone they have spoken to twice to do such a thing. Certainly not my mother. You must be mistaken.’

‘She’s the one who is mistaken if she thinks I would let my daughter do that.’

‘Maybe Clemency misunderstood when my mother was discussing the pain she feels with her conditions.’

The woman’s eyes became wide and staring, fuelled by anger and outrage. ‘Let’s ask her, shall we? Then we will all be in a better position to understand what is going on.’

‘We talked to my mother,’ he says. ‘As she talked, explained as best she could what she’d asked and why, slowly I began to understand. I had left the care of my mother to Kibibi because I could not stand to see her like that.

‘I did not want to accept the reality of what was happening to her. I had been hiding from the truth. This disease, it had altered who she was. I wish you – both of you – had known her before. She was a formidable woman. Not always right, and she did some terrible things, but she was also remarkable and capable of such generosity.

‘Talking to her, I realised she was no longer the woman she used to be. She was always so strong and in charge. These diseases – the Parkinson’s, the diabetes, the heart problems … they made her feel weak. She could not care for herself, she could not be who she was, and it was going to get worse. She could not do the most basic things and the humiliation of that was more than she could bear.

‘I began to understand, for the first time, what her condition actually meant. I have lived alongside her for years, but I had not taken the time to speak to her, to find out what she wanted. Kibibi had been telling me for years to talk to her. I had been too afraid. I did not want to face what was happening to her. I did not want to accept that her mental pain was as acute as her physical pain.’

‘I could not ask one of you,’ his mother explained. ‘You are too close. Too much has happened. A virtual stranger might be able to. She might not have the emotional attachment of you others, especially you, Julius.’

‘Mamma, you should have asked me. This isn’t something for a stranger to do. You should not have done that to my daughter. What we did to her all that time ago was wrong. What you did to her now is wrong too. You should have asked me.’

‘You do not have the strength, Julius. That is why I had to take control all those years ago. You have never had the strength to do what you must do.’

‘She was underestimating me, of course. She always has done. She has done outlandish things to protect me. None of them have been necessary but she has done them regardless. I could not watch her suffer now that she had explained.’

‘Clemency is not doing this.’

‘No, she isn’t. I will,’ he said.

‘It has to be a stranger.’

‘You do not think I am a stranger to her? That by not engaging with her all these years, I have not lost all idea of who she is? I am her child, I am the one who should do this.’

‘I won’t let you do this alone. We can both be there. Anything to stop Clemency from doing it.’

‘Yes, anything to stop her having to be the one.’

‘We talked to her. Discussed the options, came up with a plan,’ my father says.

‘Did that plan happen to include me getting practically arrested?’ I ask.

‘I told the police it was me,’ Mum says. ‘I told them. They wouldn’t believe me. Even when we got to the police station. I told them again but they thought I was just trying to protect you. That’s why we’re going to confess.’

‘Oh, right,
after
I was “brought in for questioning”?’ I turn on my father. ‘And you just sat there next to me and let them accuse me when you knew it was you all along.’

‘I was in shock – I did not realise how far along the process you were. That you had been to my house so many times to see her and how close you came to carrying out her plan. I could not confess, either, until I knew what Mrs Smittson was going to say. I did not want her to get into any trouble when this was my task to complete and she merely stayed to hold both our hands.’ He pauses, waits to see if I have understood. ‘I told you to keep away so that you would not be further implicated.’

‘This is the first chance we’ve had to meet. And Mr Zebila has been trying to contact his other son, heal the rift caused by your grandmother before he potentially goes to prison.’

Mum’s last sentence clarifies for me what my mind has been grasping for: the other night she was talking like someone who was mending fences before they left. ‘Is that why you tried to convince me that Kibibi was a good mother?’ I say. ‘You thought she’d be able to take over from you if you go to prison?’

‘No, Clemency. I simply wanted you to remember that even though she doesn’t know you, she loves you, like a mother or father should.’

‘How did you even know?’

Mum is unusually abashed all of a sudden.

‘You might as well tell me now you’ve told me everything else,’ I say.

‘Little things all pointed to it: the look on your face when we left their house that first time. The question you asked about your father and if he felt he was a burden. What you said reminded me of the look on your face the day you met your grandmother and how I felt when your father asked me the same thing. Telling me she’d been in hospital …’ Mum seems incredibly uncomfortable and even squirms in her seat a little as though being interrogated. ‘I got confirmation from eavesdropping on your conversations with Seth. To be fair,’ she adds quickly, ‘I thought you might be pregnant because of the way you two were suddenly so close and were off whispering all the time.’

I blink at her because I don’t understand why she thinks this is such a heinous thing to have done, considering she’s been doing that most of my life, and considering what she actually did do with my biological father.

‘Mrs Smittson was a great comfort to me,’ my father says. There’s a strange formality between them considering what they did together. I would have thought that would have made them incredibly intimate, closer than friends. ‘She cycled over to the house on the day my mother had chosen. Kibibi was out early with Lily-Rose, Abimbola and Ivor were at work. I left the house to go to work as usual, and when they had gone, I returned. We sat with my mother, we held her hands and we talked with her the whole time while the medication took effect and afterwards when she slipped into a coma.’ A wisp of a smile haunts my father’s face. ‘I had not held my mother’s hand since I was a small boy.’