Why didn’t you tell your other children about me? Why didn’t you let my grandmother see me – she might have changed her mind about me then? Why?
The answer was obvious, of course: Why? Because she was seventeen. At seventeen I had slept with about ten different people, trying to make connections with others wherever I could because sometimes the endless abyss of aloneness and being ‘different’ would threaten to swallow me whole. At seventeen I still thought my ‘real’ parents would swoop in and take me away from all the bad things that had meandered through my life like the slow-moving but persistent flow of a river. I remember studying for A levels, listening to Take That and complaining about Dad not letting me straighten my hair while all the white girls around me – including my cousin Nancy – were still slathering on chemicals to curl their hair to look like mine.
If I was in her situation at seventeen – and I so nearly was – I would have kept the baby. It would have broken my parents’ hearts but I would have done it, I would have kept me. I have to remember, though, that I was seventeen in 1995. I was not a teenager in 1978, single, living with a family who obviously didn’t want me around, without a job, without a friend nearby except the man who got me into this situation and who obviously didn’t want anything to do with my child. I know all this but, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. The knowing and understanding doesn’t change the hurting. The hurting is like a furnace inside me sometimes that is fuelled by never feeling good enough, or worthy enough, or lovable enough, to be anyone’s first choice. Except for Mum and Dad, except for Seth. They are the only people I’ve met over my lifetime who have chosen me first every time. If I look at what I’ve done, how I’ve twisted myself into so many difficult shapes to be able to be who someone else wants me to be, I realise that not even I am my own first choice.
‘You look so much like Abimbola,’ she says with a smile. I like her laugh, I don’t like this smile. This smile is the type you use when you are cooing over a baby: maternal, loving, sentimental. It freaks me out. I’m not a baby, but that is clearly who she is seeing. Either Baby Talei or Abi but not me, Clemency the adult.
‘She looks like me,’ I tease. ‘I was here first, remember?’
‘Ah, yes, I’m sorry. She looks so much like you.’ She grins. Then seriousness descends, covers her body and makes it stiff, forces her hands to stop moving. ‘You were really all right?’ she asks again, just to be sure.
I nod. I was mostly all right. Weren’t most people?
29
Smitty
With Dad, August 2014, Otley
‘When are you and Seth going to be having children?’ Dad asked.
‘The twelfth of never, probably,’ I replied offhandedly.
‘Is it you or him?’ Dad asked.
When I did not reply, simply carried on with my search through the on-screen TV guide for something to watch that we’d both like, Dad said, shrewdly, ‘You, is it, quine?’
‘Yes,’ I mumbled.
‘Can I ask you why, or will you change the subject?’
‘Can you honestly see me with a baby, Dad?’
‘Yes. You would be a perfect mither. If Nancy can do it, and I’ve never had much faith in her abilities, why do you think you can’t?’
I shrugged.
‘You don’t need to know the past to have a future, quine. You simply have to have faith that you will do your best.’
‘It’s not the past I don’t know, Dad, though, is it? Please don’t be upset by this, but it’s the things going on with my body that I don’t know about that could do something to my baby because I don’t know anything about where I came from. There could be all sorts of things inherited in my personality that could make me a terrible parent. I don’t know enough about myself to know who I really am.’
‘Ach, quine, does anyone? You are thirty-six, you must have some idea of who you are, what you like, what you don’t like. Nobody knows who they are all the time. We surprise ourselves constantly. We scare ourselves even by being capable of doing things we did not know we could do.’ He rested back in his chair, weak suddenly. I was draining him with this talk, I had to stop it.
‘Let’s change the subject, eh?’ I said.
‘No. I need to say this. You are my bairn, Clemency Smittson. My Smitty. You were also someone else’s daughter first of all. But ultimately you are who you are. You may talk like someone else, you may look like someone else, you may think you have the same values and beliefs as someone else, but you are you. Any child you have will be the same. They will be who they are, despite you.’
The pictures seem to have loosened everyone up properly. When my mother and I return to the living room they’re chatting and laughing. They are all giggling and chortling at Lily who is doing rather accurate impressions of me from the pictures.
Lily is currently pretending to be me when we came down south to go to the stately home and giant maze at Hampton Court. I know the picture well, it was up in Mum and Dad’s living room until the move. I think it might be in Mum’s room now. I’m about nine and I’m standing in the middle of the maze. I have one hand against the green maze wall, my other hand on my hip, and I’m grinning at Mum who was taking the photo. I have on navy blue jeans with a white stripe down the side and a red, short-sleeve top. Dad had done my hair especially for the occasion in two pigtails, wound round and round like Princess Leia from Stars Wars because she was my favourite, and after years of trying, he’d finally managed to make it work.
Lily puts her right hand on the fireplace and her left hand against her hip and dramatically juts that hip out. She purses her lips in an exaggerated pout instead of a smile.
‘You’re a cheeker,’ I say to her as I laugh.
‘These photographs are brilliant!’ Abi says. ‘There are so many of them and, my goodness, did you love to pose!’
‘They are cool,’ Ivor says. This is the first time he’s spoken and his voice is deep, not as deep as his father’s, but rich and soothing, tinged with an East Sussex burr.
I glance at him. He stares at me in response. Since I arrived he has been watching me, probably wondering if I’m ‘real’. If I’m his ‘real’ sister, if I am a ‘real’ Zebila by blood, if my intentions are ‘real’ or if I am there to trick his family out of money. He’s wondering what the ‘real’ reason is I am here. People have been wondering if I’m real all my life, why should he be any different?
‘Child,’ my grandmother says. All of us in the room except Mum look up. She is looking at me, talking to me. ‘Help me to my room.’
Ivor moves forward, arms out, ready to help her up, as does Abi. ‘I asked the— I asked Clemency,’ she says to stop them. ‘My room is down the corridor,’ she says. ‘Help me.’
It must be fun living in this house with two people vying for control all the time: my mother had ten minutes alone with me in the kitchen, now my grandmother needs to get her share, too. They’re probably like this the majority of the time, having refined the subtleties of the game over years and years of living together. I love my parents, I adore Seth’s parents, but the thought of living with them for pretty much all of my adult life would drive me more than slightly insane, let alone doing it.
My grandmother rests heavily on my arm, and her weight causes me to miss a step. We move slowly and carefully across the room, every piece of furniture an obstacle, every slightly unlevel piece of carpet a hazard. ‘See you later, Gran,’ Ivor says.
‘See you later, Gran,’ Abi and Lily echo. Will I be expected to do that? Call her ‘Gran’ when I leave her. Because that will not be happening. I still haven’t properly labelled her that in the privacy of my own mind, it’ll take even longer for whatever that label is to come out of my mouth.
Her room is the other living room in the house. She obviously can’t manage stairs, and after she has pointed me in the right direction, I edge along at her pace until we reach a white, six-panelled door. I’m expecting, I think, a room that is dark, dingy, that smells of inaction
and age and confinement. I’m expecting flock wallpaper, heavy, closed drapes. Instead, the white, opaque blinds are open, and like the lounge the room is filled with light. The window is also open, and a breeze has been through the room, clearing away any hint of fustiness.
There is a large bed at the far end and along its side are metal rails like the ones you’d find in a hospital, obviously to stop her falling out. On the pillow is a leather-bound book, the words Holy Bible embossed in gold on the cover. Pushed up against the wall beside the bed is a large chest of drawers which is topped with dozens of square white boxes, and even more small amber medicine bottles, most with their white, printed labels facing out. There are two large, comfortable-looking easy chairs in the room, positioned near the window; between them is a bookcase filled with books with cracked spines.
‘There,’ she says. My grandmother points to the chair beside the window and nearest the bed. She lands heavily in her seat, rests back and stares at me again. She has been doing that a lot. My father hasn’t looked at me since he welcomed me ‘home’ and all she has done is look at me. I thought, at first, it was her seeking out any similarities, but it’s more than that. Maybe it’s that ‘real’ thing. Or maybe it isn’t. But there is definitely something.
‘Sit, sit,’ she says.
Cautiously I lower myself into the other seat. Something has changed: in the atmosphere of the room, in the dynamics between us. Maybe it’s because we’re alone, but I am suddenly on edge, nervous, unsure.
‘God has brought you back to me,’ she says. ‘He is wise and He is good. Just when I need Him, He has answered by bringing you back to me. You are … You are going to help me. I need you to help me,’ she says. ‘I was not sure what I wanted to do was the right thing until I saw that God has sent you back to me.’
I wish she would stop saying that. I believe in God in many ways, but the way she says it, uses it, makes me defensive. It makes me question whether I truly have a faith or if it is something I have because Mum and Dad took me to church every week. I like to keep my religion to myself, to say prayers when I need and want to, to take comfort in knowing that sometimes I can feel connected to something bigger than myself that is ‘out there’. Maybe God, maybe The Universe, maybe simply the sky that covers us all. Whatever it is I believe, I don’t force it on to others and I like it better, I like people better, when they don’t do it to me. Everyone can believe what they like, all the more so when they don’t push it on to me.
I press my lips together to stop myself speaking. To stop myself from saying that I’d rather she left Him out of it if she could.
She begins to shake, and shame blossoms in my chest. I’m being too hard on her. I take my comfort in a divine being when I need to, maybe she is the same. When you are ill, too, like she obviously is, you may need to take that comfort more constantly. I shouldn’t judge her for that.
‘You will help me, won’t you?’ she asks.
‘If I can,’ I reply. I wonder what she thinks someone she has just met will be able to help her do when she has a whole family down the hall in the living room who are at her beck and call. ‘What is it you want help with?’
This woman, my grandmother, who has only really been in my life for the past hour, fixes me with a gaze that is determined and a little frightening, woven through with strands of defiance. Maybe I was mistaken; maybe those outside this room aren’t as devoted and loving as I thought. Whatever it is that she wants to do is clearly something they’re unlikely to agree to. She says nothing for a time, and the longer she stares at me with her brown eyes, the colour dimmed by age, the more a feeling of dread meanders outwards from the pit of my stomach. I should not be sitting here having this conversation with this woman. I should have brought her back here and left her to it. The longer I sit here, the longer things are going to go wrong for me.
Eventually, so eventually I thought she was planning on remaining silent, she speaks. Cautiously, haltingly, she says: ‘My time has come. I am too old … too sick … too tired to carry on in this world.’ She pauses but her eyes continue to drill into me. ‘My time has come. I want … I want to leave this Earth. I need you to help me.’
There’s a ringing in my ears, in my head, and I know it’s because I’m imagining things, hallucinating, probably dreaming. And the ringing is my alarm clock trying to get me to wake up from this dream that has slid quietly and unknowingly into a nightmare. I need to wake up. I do not want to be speaking to someone who has asked me to …
‘Did you just ask me to help you to die?’ I ask. I’m not asleep. The ringing in my ears isn’t an alarm clock, it’s the sound of sheer disbelief as it moves through my body.
‘Yes.’
I wrinkle my face at her. This must be some kind of test. A test for what I don’t know, but it must be. Or some kind of joke, which is unfunny and has no punchline that would ever make it funny. Any minute now she’s going to laugh, she’s going to tell me not to take everything so seriously and that it was all just a joke. Not funny. But then, the things that some people find hilarious – hideous, mean-spirited, unpleasant stuff – have never appealed to me. ‘I think I’d better go,’ I say to her. I stand up. The longer I sit here and no ‘Only joking!’ is forthcoming, the more sick I feel.
‘You will help me,’ she says. This is not a question, a request from a virtual stranger, it is a prediction. She seems to know something I don’t.
‘I don’t think so,’ I say. I’m not used to being so direct and firm with someone older than me, it goes against the respect for elders that I’ve had instilled in me since I was tiny. This isn’t an ordinary situation, though. This needs to be knocked on the head right away.
‘You will, Clemency … This is the reason … why you met Abimbola … as you did … My family was not complete without you … Now it is. And it is … because you were brought back to help me.’ Her certainty, her conviction about what is going to happen, what I’m going to do, is enough to shake me. Not simply upset me, but make me question whether that is why all of this has happened in the way it has happened. Maybe this is what I’m meant to do. Maybe I am meant to help this woman die.
‘No,’ I say to her sternly. I’m saying it to myself as well, of course. Because it’s the most ridiculous idea that I would have been brought back into their lives for this. ‘No. I am not going to do it. So please stop asking. I’m going to go now. It was nice to meet you but now I’m going to go. Goodbye.’
‘I will see you again,’ she says. Another prediction wrapped up like a present in the folds of an unsubtle threat. ‘I will see you again. You will help me.’
30
Abi
To: Jonas Zebila
From: Abi Zebila
Subject: Update
Thursday 2 July 2015
Jonas, my brother,
They’ve just left – Clemency and her mother have been for a visit and it went well. I didn’t want to say anything until it’d actually happened – I half expected her to cancel at the last second, but she didn’t. Like I say, I think it went well.
She sent me a message almost straight away saying:
‘Thank you for arranging today. I feel so lucky to have you in my life. Clemency x’
So that’s something? She didn’t run away, although when everyone started crying I wouldn’t have blamed her. Yes, dear brother, you read that right, everyone started crying. Proper, full-on sobbing – even Daddy, even Ivor. It was a mess. If I was her, standing there watching a bunch of virtual strangers crying because I’d walked into a room, I would have run for it. Ironic, huh, that the one time I’d have expected her to hit the road, she stood there and took it.
She brought her adoptive mother with her. Clemency calls her ‘Mum’. She’s white, by the way. So was her adoptive father. It never occurred to me that either of them would be, let alone both of them. Her mum, I suppose I need to call her, is so nice, she brought a photo album. It was so strange, seeing all those pictures of Clemency growing up an
d looking exactly like me. She seemed happy in the photos – she was always smiling.
Gran asked Clem (I don’t think she’ll mind if I call her that) to help her to her room. She was gone for ages, and when Clem came back she definitely had the look of someone who’d been Gran’d. I don’t know what Gran said or did, but Clemency had that expression on her face that everyone has after spending time with Gran. I hope Gran didn’t put her off.
Everyone’s being really quiet now, it’s only Lily-Rose who’s talking at all and she wants to keep going through the photos. Mummy is clearing up and looking off into the distance like she’s reliving her life again or something, and Daddy has looked through the photos several times with Lily-Rose. Ivor’s gone out to wherever Ivor goes. He seems embarrassed that he cried, too, and also, I don’t know, angry isn’t the right word. He seems put out, maybe scared about what Clemency will mean for him and his position in the family. I really can’t think what else it would be.
Brother, it’s at times like this that I miss you. You were noticeably absent today. You would have loved Clemency, she would have loved you. Aren’t you just tempted to break the silence to find out about her? Not even a little?
Love you. Miss you.
Your sister,
Abi
xxxxxxx
31
Smitty
With Mum & Dad, September 2005, Otley
I watched Mum try to control herself. She did a great job: she managed to control her face, her tears, her voice, but she couldn’t control her hands from shaking.
Their living room felt so small, so hot, so claustrophobic. I looked down at my hands and they were trembling. I was shaking, too.
‘It’ll be fine, quine, I promise you,’ Dad said. ‘I’m fine. I’ll be fine. We caught it early. We’ll all be fine.’
I nodded at Dad. He didn’t lie to me. Mum had no problem with it, she always did what she thought was best even if it meant twisting the facts to suit the reality she wanted to paint. But Dad? He never did that. Even if it was something he knew, I didn’t want to hear he would find the words to tell me the truth. He was telling me the truth right at that moment, but I also knew at any given moment that truth could become a lie.