‘You need to pack up your stuff and leave,’ I say to Nancy again.
‘Clemency, love,’ Mum says, ‘I know that bottle meant something to you, but I didn’t think you’d mind sharing it with Nancy when she’d had such good fortune.’ Mum is now by my side and she rubs carefully at my shoulder. ‘You’re just going through a run of bad luck. Things will pick up for you soon, I know for certain they will.’ This is how my mother has reworked the last couple of weeks – a run of bad luck. Not another of my family members dying, not me being investigated for a serious crime, not me being cut off from my other family members on her say-so. Just a run of bad luck.
Nancy, meanwhile, hitches her eyebrow briefly, warns me that she knows too much about me for me to simply throw her out, to even complain when she has robbed me of something so precious.
My gaze rakes over Nancy with her perfect hazelnut hair that tumbles down towards her shoulders, the ‘kooky’ blonde patch at the front she had done when we were fourteen, the unsymmetrical lay of her features that have always denied her the chance to be a model. Her plan from an early age (when she was constantly told by her parents that she was beautiful and her cousin – me – wasn’t) was to be a model. She was going to take the catwalks of the world by storm, and earn buckets of money. That’s why there are so many photos of her on her blog/Twitter/Facebook/Instagram – she wants the world to see what the talent spotters and model agency folk missed: she was a natural model. She is hoping still that someone will ‘spot’ her. She knew she would have been perfect for the catwalks and the magazine covers and shoots. She might not be tall enough, or – to them – have a beguiling enough face, but they were wrong to deny her. She has the body – neat torso, slender limbs, always stylishly, quirkily clothed. She has, too, her most important asset of all – her unwavering sense of being entitled to whatever it is that she wants, whenever she wants it. Life may have dealt her merely a comfortable (instead of rich) upbringing and denied her the career she dreamt of, but she hadn’t let that hold her back. And one of the many ways she gets what she wants is to have things over people, to manipulate them into doing her bidding.
I stare at her as I ask my mother: ‘Do you want to know why I hate Nancy?’
‘You don’t hate her, love. Of course you don’t. You’re like sisters.’
‘We are not like sisters. It’s only ever been you who has thought that. She has been hideous to me most of our lives.’
A shake of the head from my cousin Nancy – I was obviously suffering from false memory syndrome – she had been nothing but delightful to me during our childhood. Nancy’s lip twisted ever so slightly at the corner, reminding me that if I dared to say anything different, she would be doing her own remembering and what she recalled would be things I would not want my mother knowing. No matter how old, independent and adult I am now, there are things no one wants their mother to know.
‘When I was nine Nancy knocked over your mother’s ashes from the mantelpiece at her house and you and Uncle Colin blamed me, remember?’ I say to Mum. ‘I said to her that when I was older my real parents would come for me and make everything OK. I was nine. I didn’t even have a concept of what a “real” parent was except Nancy and her parents had been telling me all my life that I wasn’t real. So, I said it and Nancy held that over me for years – saying she was going to tell you and Dad what I said.’ There you go, Nancy, that’s one thing you’ve got on me gone. ‘When we were ten and those boys kept calling me names at school, she joined in. She said it was all true, and I couldn’t tell you because she’d tell you what I said when I was nine. When we were twelve, she blackmailed me into smoking cannabis and then used that to blackmail me into having no friends and doing whatever she wanted all through our teens because I knew how much it would hurt you that I’d done drugs and had said that thing when I was nine.’ Another one gone, Nancy.
‘When I was fifteen I had sex for the first time with a lad I was seeing at school. Nancy tried it on with him a few days later. When he wasn’t interested she spread rumours at school that I was a slut, that I’d slept with loads of people, and that I’d given him an STD. I got bullied and called names that whole year. But I couldn’t say anything because I didn’t want you to know I was having sex.
‘When I was seventeen I had a pregnancy scare due to a split condom. I don’t know how she found out but I suspect she’d cosied up to my boyfriend and he was just as panicked as me so he told her. She tried to get him to dump me before we could get enough money together to buy a test. When he wouldn’t she said she’d tell Dad, who would beat him up. My boyfriend dumped me, just as she wanted, and I had to go through the stress of the test on my own.’ (I have never told anyone the real result of the test nor what happened two days later when I had a miscarriage, and I wasn’t about to tell these two.)
Mum’s face has grown paler and paler with every word, her features frigid with shock. ‘Oh, I forgot, every time we met someone new, she would tell them that I’d been found in a cardboard box on the steps of an orphanage.’
Mum looks at Nancy then because that’s shocking to her, it seems.
‘And do you know what, Mum? I don’t even hate her for all of that, and I don’t hate her for ruining every single significant event that’s ever happened to me.’
‘That’s not true!’ Nancy states. She has to find her voice now that her three biggest pieces of leverage over me have gone and Mum is starting to look at her with new, un-rose-tinted eyes.
‘Clemency—’
I thought Mum was listening but she isn’t. She is desperately trying to rearrange every word that filters into her brain so that they don’t tell the story of my experiences with Nancy, but instead hold the key to how I have got all of this wrong. ‘Mum,’ I almost scream, ‘just listen to me. Please! For once, just listen. She has ruined almost every single significant event in my life. I wasn’t allowed to celebrate getting ten high-grade GCSEs because Nancy only got five low-grade ones.’
‘Her father was awful to her about that, she felt so terrible,’ Mum says, patently not listening. But I don’t care and plough on. It’s liberating getting all of this out there, off my chest.
‘The same thing with my A levels – she does badly because she didn’t bother to work hard, I’m not allowed to celebrate. And my graduation – you almost didn’t come because she turned up the night before having broken up with her boyfriend and you were suddenly the only person in the whole world she could turn to. You do realise, don’t you, Mum, that the only reason you came was because Dad put his foot down and said he’d never speak to you again if you missed it?’
Mum’s face draws in on itself, her body tenses, she’s been remembering it differently all these years, obviously.
‘Every time something good happened to me, Nancy was there to ruin it.’
I think Mum is still back at being reminded of those conversations around my graduation with Dad. I heard him asking her if she wasn’t glad she made the right choice in the end. ‘How could you have even thought of missing that, quine, for Nancy of all people?’ he’d whispered when they thought I was asleep in the back of the car.
‘Nancy even ruined my engagement party by pretending to be mugged on the way there by a gang who were prowling the area because the thought of me being the centre of attention for once in my life was too much for her.
‘Like I said, I don’t hate her for any of it. And I don’t hate her for the fact Seth and I had to get married in secret last year because I knew, no matter how small the ceremony, she’d have somehow made the occasion all about her.’
A small, shocked, distressed gasp from my mother. She covers her lips with her hand, and immediately her eyes are laden with tears. It is now such a part of mine and Seth’s background, the tapestry of who we are as a couple, I forget how significant it is to your family, to your parents, when you get married. I am so used to doing things in secret that to me it isn’t the big deal it is to have gone off and done it alone and not tol
d anyone about it afterwards.
Mum’s pale blue eyes look at the rings on my fingers, trying to work out which one it is. When we got married, I stopped wearing the rings I’d made on my hands and wore them on my chain necklace, except my amber engagement ring and my silver wedding ring. I wore my engagement ring on the fourth finger of my left hand – as everyone expected – and my wedding ring on the fourth finger of my right hand. When we split, I swapped: the engagement and wedding rings went on to the chain and my other rings returned to my hands. Seth still wears his wedding ring. I remove the rings, nestling under my top on the chain I wear as well as my butterfly pendant, and show them to Mum.
‘This is my wedding ring. I made it and I made one for Seth and we got married in Leeds Registry Office and we advertised on the internet for two people to come and be our witnesses. About twenty people turned up.’ I sound defiant, and I don’t mean to. I want to sound calm and rational. Plus, I need to not get sidetracked by Mum’s reaction: the hurt on her face reveals I have torn a strip off her heart, that I have denied her something she was looking forward to.
‘I can see you’re upset and shocked, Mum,’ I say. ‘And I should be upset for you, but I know pretty soon your upset is going to turn into annoyance at me. Everything I’ve said will become part of my imagination, the way everything does when it comes to Nancy. Because, let’s be honest, Mum, she’s the daughter you’ve always wanted, isn’t she? She’s the one who looks like you, and who’s got so much in common with you. And that’s all fine.’
‘That is not true!’ Mum cuts in. She is more horrified by that than the time I told her how racist she was being about my dating Tyler. ‘You must never say that, not ever!’
‘OK, it’s not true,’ I concede. I don’t want to get into this with Mum. It’s not about the things I’ve said and done, it’s about Nancy and how Mum needs the chance to see her for who she really is. ‘But what is true is that I dislike Nancy for all she’s done to me in my life, but I hate her for using the last few weeks of Dad’s life and his illness … to … to first of all make a move on my husband.’ Mum slowly revolves to face Nancy again. ‘That’s why Seth and I split up. She kept going over there, pretending to offer comfort when all she wanted was to sleep with him and get information. She even got into our bed naked. Worse than that, though, is that she was using Seth to get information about Dad’s illness, his final weeks and days, so she could write about it.
‘She pretended to the whole world that she was living it, that she was helping and suffering just like we were. She took something private and personal, something we were barely struggling through, and made it public. That’s what her award nomination will be for, because she convincingly used our pain to make a name for herself and to make money. I’m sure the only reason she’s here now is to get more material for her blog.’ The guilt that crosses Nancy’s face tells me I’m right. ‘That’s why she’s taken the last thing that Dad ever bought me. And that’s why she needs to go. She has everything she’s ever wanted now. She’s taken everything from me, there is nothing left about my life that is special that she can ruin, so she has to go.’
Mum’s body is rigid: her arms are at her sides and her fingers are spread and held so tight that they are trembling. For a moment I think she’s going to throw back her head and roar, she looks so incensed; fit to burst with a rage I’ve never seen in her before. Instead, she orders: ‘Leave us.’
Nancy moves, relieved that she’s got away with it. Again.
‘Don’t you move,’ Mum snarls so viciously I’m not surprised Nancy freezes. She looks as terrified as I was the time Mum started screaming at me in my workshop. ‘Clemency, leave us.’
I collect my bag from its place in the corridor and leave as instructed. It doesn’t matter. A few tears, a few hollow apologies, and Mum will be back to loving Nancy like the daughter she is to her. It won’t be long before the real issues that need discussing will be me not telling her I got married, me having sex at fifteen, me doing a pregnancy test at seventeen, me saying one time in my life when I was very young that they weren’t my ‘real’ parents. All of this will be used to take me apart while telling me I should be kind and understanding to Nancy. That’s how these situations always pan out.
Outside the building, I stand beside Lottie and then lean against her, propped up by my biggest reloved project. Exhaustion is pulsing through my body. Journeying through the shittiest parts of my childhood has taken all the spirit out of me. If all of those memories were laid like beads on the bench in my workshop, waiting to be strung together, I wouldn’t know where to start. It would make a hideous piece with its dangerously sharp edges and blinding snatches of bright-white pain – no amount of reloving and redesigning would change that.
But my life hadn’t been all like that. No way near like that. The sharp-edged moments were interspersed with so many smooth, well-rounded, luscious, warm-coloured beads of moments and memories. I had a good childhood. My teenage years were as fraught and desperate and fun as any of the other people’s around me. Like I told my mother, my biological mother, I had been OK. Mostly.
It’s the reliving all the awful bits in such a short space of time that has drained me. Thrown me, too. Was it really that bad? Even though I can call up some of the best moments without too much trouble, they don’t seem as tangible and real as the bad bits did.
I need to forget. I need something that will put all of that right, right, right at the back of my mind so I can concentrate on something else.
I take my phone out of my pocket.
The person on the other end picks up on the second ring. I was expecting it to take longer.
‘Are you free right now? Do you want to meet up and maybe go for a drink or something? My treat.’
I should feel guilty when I hang up the phone after we’ve planned where to meet and where to go so we aren’t seen, but I don’t. It’s far too late for feelings of guilt. Like everyone else, I’m going to do whatever I want, simply because that is what I want to do.
As I head off to my meeting, I can’t help thinking: somebody killed my grandmother and they’re trying to lay the blame on me.
62
Abi
To: Jonas Zebila
From: Abi Zebila
Subject: Hello
Saturday, 22 August 2015
Dear J,
Thank you for saying you don’t hate me and that I did nothing wrong. I really wish it hadn’t taken me so long to see it. Now that you’ve started replying to my emails, I’m hoping that you’ll move on from a few words.
Clemency called me out of the blue earlier and I went to see her. Daddy asked me where I was going and I said that I was seeing Declan. I know, right? Suddenly him thinking I’m seeing the man responsible for me not finishing uni is better than seeing Clemency. I only lied because Declan hasn’t found us a new place yet.
She told me everything. She was open and honest, told me that Gran had asked her to help her die but Clemency didn’t do it even though she agreed to. I believe her. I think she was actually quite brave to agree to help Gran like that. It was like all the stuff I was telling you about what Gran actually wanted. What she wanted was for it to be over. I can’t think about that though. The thought of going into nothingness completely terrifies me and I have to think about something else. As Clemency said, though, if she didn’t do it, then who did?
That’s the most terrifying thought of all. Someone did this to Gran, or someone helped her. And we have no idea who.
Right, it’s late, I need to sleep.
Love,
Abi
xxxx
63
Smitty
Thankfully, the flat is in darkness when I return. I took the time to walk as far as possible around the building to see if any lights were on. They were all out so it was safe to come inside. I don’t really call it home – I had started to, then all sorts started pitching up to stay and it became ‘the flat’. Opening the front door, I see th
ey’ve turned off the corridor light, which we usually leave on for Sienna.
I pause for a moment after shutting the door behind me, trying to make out shapes in our entrance hallway so I can map out where the potential obstacles are in the dark.
If I can creep in, not turn on any lights, I can probably slide quietly into bed, and I won’t have to deal with trying to erase guilt from my face about who I’ve been with, nor explain to Seth what had been said earlier.
‘I’ve been waiting up for you,’ Mum says in a whisper, at the exact moment my eyes decipher through the darkness that there is a human-type form at the end of the corridor. My heart spirals into my throat with fright, and I have to clamp my hands over my mouth to stop myself swearing or crying out in shock.
Who does that? Who stands in the dark, waiting for someone? I almost ask her if she’s literally been standing in the dark corridor all night waiting for me, but I’m not sure I could handle her answering yes to that question.
‘Hi,’ I eventually manage, and flick on the light.
She is dressed for bed in her pink silk dressing gown and her tartan slippers. I was always surprised Dad allowed her to wear those slippers since fake tartan enraged him like very little else did.
I’ve reached that part of the exhaustion spectrum where it hurts to breathe, it’s painful to blink, and I know I can’t withstand a barrage of explanations, questions and recriminations. Although the questioning has already begun: when Mum says ‘I’ve been waiting up for you’ she actually means, ‘Where have you been?’
‘It’s very late,’ she whispers. ‘Why didn’t you call me and ask permission to stay out so late?’ she means.
‘I know,’ I say.
‘You look tired,’ she continues in a whisper. ‘Have you been with that man? In his bed? Is that why you look so tired?’
‘I am tired.’
‘I was getting worried.’ ‘You have no right to do this to me.’