Today I am on a double mission. First, to find another out-of-the-way place for Abi and me to meet. Second, to sit down and try to work out who did what I was going to do.
The answer is nearly there, I can feel the fingers of my mind groping for it, nearly clasping it and then having to give up as it twirls itself out of reach. I’m sure, if I come away from everything and everyone, I will work out what happened, who did it and why. What I’ll do with that knowledge I don’t know since the police are hardly likely to believe me and I would have heard by now if they were pursuing anyone else in connection with the death instead of just me.
Also, if they had moved their attentions on from me, Abi and I would not be having to sneak around still. Even though I sorted out a lot of things with my mother, I’m not sure how she would really feel about me meeting Abi. The jealousy and worry won’t have dissipated like dry ice now we’ve talked; conversation can’t erase worries and anxieties and fears, especially irrational, illogical ones. From what Abi said the other night, even though her mum, my other mother, had told her dad, our father, that she’d never forgive him for sending her child away again, she hasn’t outright sanctioned or approved Abi seeing me. Until other people are comfortable with it, we’re going to be having a sibling affair as Abi called it.
This café seems perfect for our purposes because it is one of those out of the way but ‘in plain sight’ places. You can only get there by foot and you have to be pretty determined at that: crossing a concrete lock that I’m convinced wobbles when you walk on it, or driving down to the desolate area of huge, ominous-looking nearby power plant and then getting out to walk the rest of the way once you run out of road.
The café should, with its place right on the water, be a glass and chrome affair but it isn’t. It is made up of low, pebble-dashed buildings that look suspiciously as if they were once outhouses and the outside ambience comes in the shape of white plastic garden tables and green plastic chairs. It would be perfect, though, for illicit meetings with my sister.
I order coffee from the waitress, take out my notebook. At the centre of the page I write the initials SZ (for Soloné Zebila) and draw a circle around them. Inside the circle I cram a question mark next to the initials but away from the curve of the circle. Somebody killed my grandmother, SZ, and I can’t work out who. To do it, they would need access. I scrawl down the people I know who that applies to: AZ (Abi), IZ (Ivor), JZ (Julius) and KZ (Kibibi). To be thorough, I add LZ (Lily), too. Maybe JoZ (Jonas), my other brother who no one talks about. Not even Abi will talk freely about him beyond saying he lives abroad. Whenever I ask about him she glosses over him or outright changes the subject. It doesn’t take a detective – qualified or not – to work out there was some kind of falling out. And with my father issuing decrees to me the other day, it’s likely to be him that Jonas fell out with. Actually, with my grandmother the way she was, how manipulative she was, it could have been her also. I draw lines between JoZ and SZ, JoZ and JZ. Question marks go along those lines.
I have access, well, had – pretty sure my father will have changed the locks by now. I write down CS (Clem). Seth knew I had the key, so his initials, SC, go down too. He didn’t want me to do it and he offered to do it instead. Each of these factors earns him a circle around his name. I have the same number. Who else? Mum? (HS). She knew where they lived, but the access is out. My other mother, she has access (one circle), she and SZ didn’t get on (second circle) and she knew all about the medication (third circle). So did I. (Another circle for me).
I look at the page again. I have the most circles.
‘Here you go.’ The waitress, with her pristine white apron, rolled-up sleeves and peach lipstick, places my coffee beside my notebook then stops to gawp at what I’ve written and a deep frown forms between her unplucked eyebrows. She stares at the initials, the connecting lines, the question marks, the circles. I see them as she sees them: a load of rubbish, fanciful nonsense from a person who has watched one too many cop shows. A wave of embarrassment flows through me. I wonder if she’s guessed what I’ve been trying to do, what I’ve convinced myself I can do. She frowns again, then leaves me to it.
I snap shut my notebook, embarrassed that I seriously thought I could work it all out over a cup of coffee in an out-of-the-way café.
I pick up my coffee, move to take a sip. Except it’s tea. Tea. I don’t drink tea. I pretend to Mum that I do to make her happy, but the reality is, there’s something fundamentally flawed about tea in my mind. It’s flavoured water. Not like coffee, coffee is something made with water, it is a real drink.
For a few seconds I toy with the idea of drinking the tea, forgoing the coffee just this once. I can’t, I just can’t.
I hook my bag over my shoulder, pick up my notebook and pencil and stand to return the tea that should be coffee. In the café there is a queue for service even though it hadn’t looked that busy outside. I stand behind a tall, wide man who wears clothes that are too small for him. The teacup clatters because my bag wants to slip off my shoulder, and I can’t quite get the correct angle with the notebook and pencil in one hand and the cup in the other, so I am playing a sort of balancing act that rattles the cup and saucer.
I should put the whole lot down at the nearest unoccupied table and reorganise myself so that I’m not in imminent danger of dropping something. I shouldn’t be looking around the café, scanning as I always do, for a face I recognise in the crowd. In the time before I met my biological family, I used to do this all the time. I used to look at people to see if I knew them, if they looked like me, if I looked like them, if they were that familiar stranger I was connected to by blood. I still do it. A habit of a lifetime cannot be broken in a few short months, after all.
I spot it. I see a face that I recognise. And another. I see two faces I recognise, sitting right at the back of the café, in that hidden, private nook all the best cafés have. Those are the areas where I conduct my business with new clients who don’t invite me into their homes, the places Abi and I would probably sit so we won’t be easily seen as we conduct our sibling affair. This pair, this couple, obviously do not want to be seen. They have come here, to this secret café, and they have taken up a private space. And they are sitting with their heads close together as they make their plans, probably discussing how they’re going to tell me about their relationship. Or maybe they’re chatting about how much longer they’re going to keep me and everyone else in the dark about them. The jangling of the crockery in my hand is now out of control – I’m going to shake the cup off the saucer altogether at this rate because I am so horrified by who I have seen together.
My eyes dart around looking for a clear surface, but my gaze keeps returning to the couple in the corner because if I look away for too long, they might disappear, I might realise I have imagined it, imagined them. I choose the table in front of me to set down my burden. It’s occupied by two people who probably mind having a half-full teacup and tea-flooded saucer placed in front of them, but would probably concede it’s better than it being dropped beside them.
I stare at the couple at the back. I can’t believe what I am seeing. My Paddington Hard Stare is so firm, immovably fixed, one half of the pair glances up in my direction, looks away then immediately swings back when they register that they’ve seen me. The other one notices their companion is staring and looks in that direction too. That half of the couple is more openly horrified at being caught.
‘You should have drunk the tea,’ I tell myself. ‘If you had, none of this would be happening.’
Without noticing them properly, fully, I move around the other people and tables in the café until I am in front of the couple in the back, waiting for one of them to speak. They stay silent. They sit and watch me: one is wide-eyed with alarm, the other impassive; the only clue as to their shock is the way their eyes keep darting to the door, waiting to see who else will arrive and catch them together.
I look first at Mum, I look second at Julius, my father. The pair of them together, so close they’re … Surely not.
‘We have to tell her, anyway,’ says Mum when the silence has gone on long enough for them to know I won’t be speaking first.
‘But—’ begins my father.
‘Just tell me,’ I say.
One remains mute, the other fixes me with their pale blue eyes, eyes that are used to hypnotising me, making me stand still while I’m about to be told off or insulted.
‘We did it,’ Mum says. ‘We’re the ones who helped your grandmother to die.’