I have been in this interview room for a long time on my own. I thought I would be shown to a cell but I have been put in here and a police officer stands in the corner of the room, acting as if I am not here. If I tried to leave, I’m sure he’d notice me then, but as long as I sit in this seat and do not move, he can pretend he is all alone.
My heart almost leaps clean out of my chest when the door opens suddenly. The plain-clothes officer who asked me in for a chat earlier enters the room.
‘There is someone here who claims to be your solicitor and would like to see you,’ he says.
I have a solicitor? Mum probably got one, but so soon? It’s not as if I’ve even been properly arrested, we’re all still pretending I am sitting here waiting for a nice informal chat.
The solicitor who walks in probably didn’t jump at the chance, but I do get to my feet. I can’t help myself. It’s an automatic response to someone who carries themselves with an innate sense of authority; my knee-jerk reaction to being in the presence of my father.
‘All of us know that this man isn’t really your solicitor, but I’m going to let him talk to you if he encourages you to tell us the truth. It’s the best way forward.’ ‘Tell the truth’ to this thin, mean-looking man with his ill-fitting suit and pitifully uncombed hair means ‘confess whether you did it or not’, I’m sure. ‘Unless you’ve got any objections?’ the officer asks me.
I shake my head, quickly.
‘I’ll be back.’
My father extends a hand to encourage me to sit. He seems taller than I remember. Still as stately, imposing. He sits on the police side of the desk when I cautiously lower myself to the seat – the real ordeal will begin the moment I’m properly braced in this chair. The ‘being brought in for questioning’ and my mother’s reaction were nothing compared to being questioned by this man about the death of his mother. From his briefcase he produces a well-used A4 pad of yellow paper. He’s a busy man who makes a lot of notes, the stubs at the top of the page that look like the frayed edges of a badly hemmed dress tell me this. His hand slips into the inside left pocket of his expensive-looking suit and removes his pricey black Montblanc pen.
‘Hello,’ I say. That is how you begin a conversation with someone, whether they’re a stranger or not. No matter what the situation, you should at least greet them. ‘Hello’. The words of the Lionel Richie song unspool in my mind like a long thread of words, woven with a melody to become a symphony, a song that could have been describing parts of my life of late. Hello.
My father, Mr Julius Zebila, seems startled by this. He does not look up from his yellow pad, which is being slowly written upon by the expensive pen as he notes down the name my adoptive parents gave me, but he does stop writing for a moment.
He has paused at the second ‘s’ of Smittson. That’s my name, who I am, but is that how he thinks of me, refers to me now in the private space of his mind, his memory, his heart? Or will I be forever Talei Zebila? Can he divide himself in two like I do sometimes? On the paper he has written my adoptive name, the name I grew up with, but maybe inside he has written Talei, and when he looks at me he sees Talei. Maybe on the outside I am Clemency Smittson, and on the inside, to him, I am Talei Zebila. That’s how it seemed to be with my biological mother.
Maybe I am ascribing thoughts and feelings to him, when in all honesty, to him, I am nobody special. I am Clemency Smittson, a person who was born in Brighton, who grew up in a small house in Otley, who is sitting in a police station accused of a terrible crime committed against someone he actually loved.
When we met last time (the first time), he wouldn’t look at me. He let my mother, my sister, my brother and my grandmother talk, but he said nothing. Like Ivor, he looked in my general direction and stayed silent.
‘Why won’t you look at me?’ I ask him in my head. ‘Am I that much of a disappointment?’
When my first father pauses again, this time while writing the date, I know I’ve said that out loud. He stares at the pad. He’s going to get up and walk out. He’s not going to stand for being questioned, not by me.
‘Mrs Smittson is very upset. She is outside with a young man. They are both very upset. I told them I would make sure that you were not being ill treated. Have the police treated you well?’
So that’s how it works: I talk, he ignores me; he talks, I am expected to answer. ‘Yes, they’ve been fine.’
‘Can you verify where you were seven days ago?’
‘Working.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes, I work alone. I was in my workshop for most of that day and night.’
‘Did anybody see you there?’
‘Maybe, I don’t know. They might have looked in through the shop window and seen a light on in the workshop. Or seen me walk past from one end of the workshop to another. I don’t know what other people saw.’
‘This is a very serious matter.’ Stern. My father is being stern, almost harsh with me. I wonder if he is like this with all of his children or only the ones who are ‘brought in for questioning’.
‘I know it’s serious. And I didn’t do it,’ I reply. ‘I probably can’t prove that I didn’t do it, either. I don’t know how she died so I don’t know what the murder weapon was and if I touched it. I keep trying to remember what I touched when I was in her room so I can work out what it was that did it, then I have to stop that train of thought because I can’t imagine anyone actually doing that to her or any object I might have touched doing that to her. But I can’t stop thinking about it because I need to remember what it was I touched and why that might have the police thinking it was me.’
The man opposite me has the same colour eyes as me; the same kink in his left eyebrow as me, too. We have similar shape noses, but mine is more like my other mother’s. The first time we met, my eyes scoured their faces like a miner panning for the gold pieces of similarity between them and me.
‘They believe she died of a massive overdose of insulin and a combination of other drugs that became a lethal cocktail.’ That was how she wanted me to do it. To sneak into her house when it would be empty and give her the mixture of drugs she’d made me write down. By the time I got home I had memorised them, even though there were so many, and destroyed the piece of paper so that I wouldn’t have those names hanging around, ready for anyone to stumble across.
‘Because of her condition,’ my father continues to say, ‘they know that she did not take them herself. Someone else administered them.’
This is his mother he is talking about. The strain of that shows in the tense lines in the deep, dark brown skin around his glossy, black-brown eyes, in the way he holds his mouth when he is not speaking. He’s only twenty years older than me, my biological mother is only seventeen years older than me. He seems older, though. That’s what losing a parent can do to you.
‘I didn’t do it,’ I state.
‘I am certain you didn’t.’ He still refuses to look at me while he speaks. ‘I would not be here if I believed for one minute you did. No child of mine would commit such a crime.’
In one hurricane-like rush, my breath leaves me as my chest is almost crushed by being legitimised by him. He is my father. I am his child. He accepts me. Really, it shouldn’t matter. I am his daughter, it shouldn’t matter whether he accepts me or not, what he says and what he doesn’t, whether he looks at me or keeps his eyes averted. It shouldn’t matter, but this small crumb of acknowledgement means another part of me has been made real, made here and present. I have another little anchor that says I am from somewhere. I am from here.
‘Would you like me to stay with you while they question you?’ he asks. ‘I can’t step in or act for you legally, but I can stay if you wish me to.’
I nod. I want him, my father, to stay.
The door to the room opens and he stands to come over to my side of the table. Still he doesn’t look at me. My gaze, however, is drawn to him, mesmerised. I am panning for more gold, desperately seeking more similarities while the police officers enter the room.
It shouldn’t matter, I shouldn’t need him to accept me to be able to further define myself, but it does and I do.