That Girl From Nowhere (7 page)

I look over at the cup sitting beside my green, many-pocketed bag. I’m not enjoying this very much if it’s a cappuccino kind of day. Shame really, as Tyler the coffee man’s cappuccino is very good.

I bring myself back to my mother and to what she wants me to do. ‘I promise, Mum,’ I state. Well, what else am I going to say to the woman who gave me everything, especially now that I have no one else but her.

‘I’m so sorry about your dad,’ Seth said.

He’d been saying this repeatedly. I guessed it was his way of trying to make himself believe it – if he kept saying it, it might, in one of the repetitions, become a fact in his mind. Seth and Dad were similar kinds of people: laidback, fiercely protective, generous with their time and affection.

We moved through the darkness in our flat, both heading for the bedroom to strip off our funeral clothes, get into something else, anything else but these black garments.

I’d offered to stay with Mum, of course, but after the wake, she wanted to be alone. We stayed to clean up, loitering and tidying as much as possible because we were both reluctant to go home. When I left I knew that would be it. I would be admitting my time there with Dad had come to an end and I couldn’t bear for that to be true right then.

Instead of taking my clothes off, I collapsed on to the bed, flat on my back, a starfish out of water, staring up at the ceiling. It reminded me of the picture of Seth from when we’d first moved in here. He’d starfished on the bed and I had taken a snap of him. Then we’d lain together on the bed and Seth had held the camera up to take a photo of us together: two loved-up starfish in their new home.

Seth sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off his shoes, which we’d never normally wear in the house, let alone into the bedroom. I felt the motion of him loosening his tie, releasing his top button. ‘Shall I make a coffee?’ he asked. ‘Or do you want something stronger? I think there’s some port left.’

‘No, stay here a minute.’ Maybe longer. Maybe for ever. Maybe if we stayed where we were for ever, nothing would change. Everything had to change now Dad was … now we’d reached this stage. Maybe if we stayed here, though, maybe if I didn’t let Seth out of my sight, nothing else would have to change.

He stretched his long body beside me, stroked his fingers down my face, tucked my hair behind my ear. We hadn’t been together properly for the last four months. We’d spoken, had kissed briefly in the times I’d come back home, but not this. I touched his face, resting my hand on his cheek, and he came towards me. Our lips met and we both closed our eyes, connecting ourselves together. I pushed his jacket over his shoulders. I was aware of the thick silk of his tie as I tugged at it until it was undone. The small, matte-black buttons of his shirt came apart easily until he was bare-chested, the paleness of his skin visible in the half-light of the room. He pushed my ankle-length dress up, over my thighs, around my waist, to my chest until he gently tugged it over my head and discarded it beside the bed. My fingers went to his trousers, slipped the shiny, black tongue of his slim belt though its loop, out of its buckle until it was free, then I moved on to his button, pushing down the top of his trousers. His fingers unhooked the small metal clasps of my bra, slipped it off, before they moved on to removing my knickers, plain and black, as you’d expect for a funeral.

A gasp, a deep cry escaped from my throat as he entered me. A new sensation; in all the time of being with him, I’d never felt such a perfect mingling of agony and pleasure as he pushed himself into my body.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he murmured beside my ear. ‘It feels so good to be inside you again.’

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ I whispered back. I dug my fingers into him, urging him to go deeper, to completely fill me up. He responded, pushing harder, slower but harder. The pleasure came from being together again, having each other back, reminding ourselves of what we shared. The pain came from knowing why we’d been apart for so long. The orgasms – loud, urgent, ecstatically raw – came from that blending of desolation and joyful reunion.

Seth lay on his front, his head in profile on the pillow while his fingers played with my hair, coiling curls around his fingers. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling again.

‘We could have made a baby,’ he eventually said.

He’d put words to the panic that was amassing inside. We could have. No contraception, not even withdrawal. I’d felt when he was about to, but I hadn’t wanted him to, I’d clung on to him, keeping him with me until it was too late to change the outcome.
Have unprotected sex
…
and end up paying for it for the rest of your life
, started to flash in my head.

‘That’d be pretty amazing, though, wouldn’t it?’ he said. ‘I know we put those plans on hold these last few months but it’d be incredible if we did it now.’

A baby. Me. I loved children. Playing with them was never a chore. Sienna, my cousin Nancy’s daughter, had once stayed with us for three months while Nancy was off finding herself, and I’d loved that. I had loved taking care of Sienna’s every need, waking up with her in our flat, going to sleep with her in our flat, being with her.

But … But … A
baby
.
Me?
How would I know how to care for it? Would I really want to keep it? And even after all the discussions, it still scared me that I knew nothing of the potential anomalies in my DNA; disorders unknown to me because I couldn’t just ask my mother or father about any medical conditions that might run in the bloodline, in the family.

A
baby
?
Me?
What about the father, too? How could I trust him to stick around when my biological father hadn’t and had made it necessary for my biological mother to give me away or ‘place me for adoption’, as I was meant to say and think.

In all the dreams and fantasises I had about how I came to be adopted, the ones I could never tell anyone, I knew this one was the truest. This was the one that would fit most comfortably with reality. My mother, who was probably young, told my father she was pregnant and he in turn rejected her. Probably called her names, and questioned who else she’d been with. Then he went incommunicado because he wanted nothing to do with her or the child she was carrying. She tried to get him to change his mind, but then she found out he was seeing someone else – had been all along – and she knew it was hopeless. And when she told her parents they were so disappointed, they didn’t have the money or the means to bring up another child. The shame would have killed them, too. She had nowhere to turn, so she did the best she could. She found a box and she decorated it in butterflies, the most beautiful creatures in nature, and she made it comfortable for me to sleep in. And she cried and cried when she had to hand me over, but she made sure I got the box because it was something no one else had. It was all she could afford to give me, but it was something completely unique and completely invaluable. Like the jewellery I made for people – it may have been inspired by other pieces but everything I made for others was made with that person in mind. That person was one of a kind, so was the jewellery I made for them.

No one else had a butterfly box like mine. I used it to store all my precious photographs, and even though it had been bashed about over time because of the many moves I’d been through, the times I hadn’t been as careful as I should have been with it, I still had that box and I still treasured it.

I couldn’t have a baby if I couldn’t trust its father. I turned to Seth, carefully considered him. I hadn’t grown used to his features over the years, I was always surprised by how attractive he was to me every time I looked at him. I had spent years looking at him, but until that New Year’s Eve when we’d first had sex, I hadn’t seen him. When I finally ‘saw’ him that night, I could never be used to those features again. Each time seeing him gave me a tiny thrill in the bottom of my heart.

‘Seth …’ I began. I had planned to wait, leave it for a bit until I did this, but now I’d been reckless and stupid, now I’d given in to the flashing neon sign in my brain about unprotected sex with a virtual stranger, I had to do this now. I had to ask him. The very fact I had to ask set us back twenty-odd years and made him a virtual stranger again. And the fact that I knew what he was going to say, how he was going to answer, meant not only was he going to stay a stranger, but also that I would have to go through with my plan. I wanted to be wrong. Desperately. But I knew what the answer was going to be.

‘Seth, do you have something you need to tell me?’

His sudden flash of panic that I might know was almost physical as it scattered through him like the fallen beads from a snapped necklace. He caught himself, though, reasoned that I couldn’t possibly know, and gathered up those panic-broken beads, strung them back together. Calm and composed, he replied, ‘No, not that I know of.’

I shut my eyes.
Wrong answer
. The reply I was expecting, but had been hoping I wouldn’t get. I had prayed, actually prayed, to a God I only partially believed in, that Seth wouldn’t do this to me or to us. ‘Seth,
please
. I need you to be completely honest with me, no matter what it is, just tell me.
Please
, forget about what’s happened with my dad, and the fact we haven’t seen each other properly in weeks, please, you can tell me anything.
Anything
.’

‘No, Smitty, there’s nothing.’

Disappointment drifted through me like a cold, creeping gust of wind. He wasn’t the person I thought he was. It’s the big moments that test you, push you, encourage you to be better in every way that you can. It’s the small, intimate, seemingly insignificant moments where the choice you make alters who you are at a fundamental level.

‘I can’t be with you any more, Seth,’ I told him. I could ignore it, pretend, bury it deep so I could forget. Or I could do what needed to be done so I could sleep at night. ‘We have to split up.’

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‘One coffee for the lady with the notebook and camera.’ Tyler, the barista from Beached Heads, my favourite coffee shop in the whole of Brighton, places the coffee cup – the one decorated with yellow and white daisies that I love most – in front of me without so much as a rattle of the cup on its matching saucer. I’ve been in here a lot, have managed to grab the more private sofa at the back like I planned, and have basically been able to drink my body weight in coffee every working day without ever having to make it. Win-win-win.

‘Thank you,’ I reply. I have to keep my eyes on the coffee cup and not raise them anywhere in his direction because I’ve developed the most embarrassing crush on him. After my late-teenage Dylan crush I didn’t think I could be like this about someone – no matter how good-looking he was. I thought age, experience, plus a long-term relationship, had acted like weedkiller on that particular type of emotion. However, that weed was clearly lying dormant, waiting for the right combination of circumstance and person to fertilise it and make it shoot up. Tyler, the apron-wearing, sous-chef-hat-donning owner of Beached Heads, is my new crush.

With horror I realise he has pulled out the chair opposite me and is sitting himself down. When it isn’t seven in the morning, the place is usually busy, alive with the hum and thrum of people who have stopped off for a drink and a stare at the sea. ‘I’ve got to ask, what is it that you do exactly?’ he asks me.

‘Exactly?’

‘Or even vaguely,’ he says. ‘You’ve been coming in here for nearly two weeks now, meeting different people, taking photos of their jewellery, of them, making notes. What is it that you do?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘If it was, I wouldn’t be asking. Also, I need to get confirmation before I decide whether or not I’m going to turf you out for conducting business on my premises.’

‘I’m a jewellery maker.’

‘Right. Right.’ He nods slowly. ‘How come you don’t actually make jewellery, then? Why are you always hanging around my place?’

I look up at him. He’s sitting back in the circular, leather armchair, his arms folded across his chest and his head on one side. He waits for my answer with an affected puzzled look. I have to smile. I just have to. ‘I like it here,’ I say.

‘More than you like making enough money to pay your mortgage?’

‘I don’t have a mortgage. I have a flat I rent with my mother. And a shop that I haven’t quite got around to opening yet. My, erm, landlord is not going to be happy with me, but in between meeting clients here and making the pieces they commission, the shop has taken a bit of a back seat.’

‘What’s your name, Nowhere Girl?’

‘Clemency Smittson. My friends call me Smitty.’

‘Do you want me to help you set up your shop?’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Because I want to.’

‘Fair enough. I’d love you to help, but I’m not going to let you.’

‘Pray tell why not?’

‘Because the real reason why I haven’t done it is I’m not ready to. With most things, if I don’t do them even when I should, it’s because I’m not ready to or it’s because I really don’t want to. I can’t see how it’s going to look up here yet.’ I tap my right temple with my right index finger. ‘Until I can see it, there’s no point in trying to make it a reality.’

‘I do that,’ he says. Another grin. This one would quicken even the most uninterested person’s heart. ‘I’m not sure I approve of you taking advantage of my good nature by using my shop because you can’t be bothered to fix up yours.’