‘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.’