‘We talked to her. Discussed the options, came up with a plan,’ my father says.
‘Did that plan happen to include me getting practically arrested?’ I ask.
‘I told the police it was me,’ Mum says. ‘I told them. They wouldn’t believe me. Even when we got to the police station. I told them again but they thought I was just trying to protect you. That’s why we’re going to confess.’
‘Oh, right, after I was “brought in for questioning”?’ I turn on my father. ‘And you just sat there next to me and let them accuse me when you knew it was you all along.’
‘I was in shock – I did not realise how far along the process you were. That you had been to my house so many times to see her and how close you came to carrying out her plan. I could not confess, either, until I knew what Mrs Smittson was going to say. I did not want her to get into any trouble when this was my task to complete and she merely stayed to hold both our hands.’ He pauses, waits to see if I have understood. ‘I told you to keep away so that you would not be further implicated.’
‘This is the first chance we’ve had to meet. And Mr Zebila has been trying to contact his other son, heal the rift caused by your grandmother before he potentially goes to prison.’
Mum’s last sentence clarifies for me what my mind has been grasping for: the other night she was talking like someone who was mending fences before they left. ‘Is that why you tried to convince me that Kibibi was a good mother?’ I say. ‘You thought she’d be able to take over from you if you go to prison?’
‘No, Clemency. I simply wanted you to remember that even though she doesn’t know you, she loves you, like a mother or father should.’
‘How did you even know?’
Mum is unusually abashed all of a sudden.
‘You might as well tell me now you’ve told me everything else,’ I say.
‘Little things all pointed to it: the look on your face when we left their house that first time. The question you asked about your father and if he felt he was a burden. What you said reminded me of the look on your face the day you met your grandmother and how I felt when your father asked me the same thing. Telling me she’d been in hospital …’ Mum seems incredibly uncomfortable and even squirms in her seat a little as though being interrogated. ‘I got confirmation from eavesdropping on your conversations with Seth. To be fair,’ she adds quickly, ‘I thought you might be pregnant because of the way you two were suddenly so close and were off whispering all the time.’
I blink at her because I don’t understand why she thinks this is such a heinous thing to have done, considering she’s been doing that most of my life, and considering what she actually did do with my biological father.
‘Mrs Smittson was a great comfort to me,’ my father says. There’s a strange formality between them considering what they did together. I would have thought that would have made them incredibly intimate, closer than friends. ‘She cycled over to the house on the day my mother had chosen. Kibibi was out early with Lily-Rose, Abimbola and Ivor were at work. I left the house to go to work as usual, and when they had gone, I returned. We sat with my mother, we held her hands and we talked with her the whole time while the medication took effect and afterwards when she slipped into a coma.’ A wisp of a smile haunts my father’s face. ‘I had not held my mother’s hand since I was a small boy.’
‘Was she, my grandmother, was she …’ ‘OK’ or ‘all right’ seem inappropriate considering the outcome, but was it still what she wanted, is what I want to know.
My father, who I look a lot like, understands what I am trying to say. ‘It was what she wanted and how she wanted it to happen. It was one last act under her control, as the person she used to be. She was …’ ‘Fine’ seems the wrong word for him, too. He nods, conveying his understanding of my question and the answer I wanted. ‘She was.’
‘We are going to tell the rest of our families before we go to the police,’ my father says.
Mum is looking at me. That’s nothing new, though. She’s always done it. From the earliest age I can remember her staring at me – the multiple photos she used to take were just an extension of that, I suppose. I used to look at her, a lot, too, especially when I realised that apparently, according to other people, the liquid that flowed in our veins was water because the connection between us was meant to be weak. I was always desperately trying to do as Dad had told me back when I was four, to focus on the things that made us similar, to find a point of contact that made water and blood and their thickness irrelevant. Our greatest similarity is each other, I’ve come to realise. We love the other so much, we’re willing to do anything for them.
My father is looking at me, too. I had been upset and more than a little curious as to why he didn’t look at me before, didn’t seem to see me even when his gaze did stray in my direction. Our eyes meet over the table.
He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out an envelope and places it on the table in front of me. ‘These are for you. I was going to give them to Mrs Smittson to give to you, but now I can give them to you.’
It is an unassuming brown A5 envelope and on the front he has written For you. When I reach inside, my fingers feel photographs. I pull them out and place them on top of the envelope. The first picture is a strip of four black-and-white photo-booth pictures. In them, a man holds a baby. He has a small neat Afro and he is so incredibly handsome. The baby in his arms is wearing a light-coloured bonnet and a white towelling Babygro. The baby looks nonplussed, obviously enjoying being held by the man in the photo but not sure what’s going on. I turn another photo over – it is a professional colour photo, the man sits on a chair, holding the baby in a swaddle of blankets, the same bonnet in place. The other four photos are colour, too, but faded from age. They are of the baby on her own in the butterfly box, without her bonnet. And in each picture she is a little older than the last, and each time her face is confused but delighted to have this man around.
I stop staring at the photos of myself and my father, and look at him. ‘Mrs Stoner, your foster carer, let me take you out a few times. I didn’t want to forget what you looked like. I had never seen a baby so beautiful. I wanted to take so many photos of you. Every time I saw you, you had changed. Kibibi never knew that I came to see you. She still does not know. I wanted … I wanted to be a better man but I could not.’
‘I don’t want you to go to prison,’ I say suddenly. ‘Either of you. I want you to stay with me. It feels like I’m only just getting to know both of you and now you might be taken away from me.’ I can’t stop the avalanche of emotions that cascade down my face. ‘This isn’t fair. None of this is fair.’
They each take a hand, my ‘Mum’ and my ‘father’. Then they tell me as many times as they can in the time they have left that it’s all going to turn out for the best.