At what moment does your life become your own?
At birth? No, you are owned and helpless, unwitting and unaware. Life is food and sleep. But you are listening, listening to and learning from Dad and Mum. Your ’rents, they make you.
And if your dad strikes a copper and ends up in the slammer, well, that’s stirred into your pot.
School arrives, but you are not free. Once again, you are owned, this time by teachers who have heard of your rep and know of your dad and decide without cause that remedial work is your lot.
They don’t see into your flat. They don’t see the angelic faces of Marna or Teeter, your sibs who had no dad or mum to learn from because Mum spent her days weeping and her final nights little more than a zombie at the factory. But even then, I suppose, they were watching, learning that our brief lives are never our own, and the future is as murky as the London sky.
Mercifully, your final term ends. Exams show you to be equal parts unemployable and incorrigible, but it doesn’t matter, as that is how they show everyone to be.
And for the first time, you have a choice.
You tuck a blanket over your last memories with Mum, remembering her fitful sleep and her cold face stained with tears. You listen to your brother and sister — children you’ve raised — arguing in front of the telly, and wonder what you’ve done.
When will you be more than a sum total of your ’rents’ many mistakes . . .
And your one large one.
When does your life start?
And in a fit, you rummage beneath your bed, retrieve your passport and all the savings you own, and stare into the mirror.
Nobody stares back.
“Clara?”
Teeter’s call acts like a vise, and the squeeze is unbearable.
“Clara!”
You repeat your name. “Clara.” A whisper that gains strength. “Clara.” Because unlike your life, your name cannot be lifted from you. Friends, family, teachers — thieves all — have taken everything else, but they grudgingly agree; the name is yours. Even to the swine, it is sacred.
You stare at that name in your passport and look out over Marbury Street, at the buses that run the same routes, at the same times, carrying the same blokes. They’ve given up, traded teachers for bosses, and will live the rest of their lives in responsible agony. And you vow you will never be like them.
“I’m hungry, Clara!”
“On the hob! Start without me.”
You stroke the world map, yellowed and torn . . . together with a Celtic cross and journal, they are the few pieces of Dad you’ve allowed to remain. One hundred red tacks supposedly mark one hundred selfless acts Dad performed for strangers across the globe.
At least that’s what Mum used to say . . . and maybe she was right, but . . .
There is no tack in London.
Now, tomorrow, he is coming home.
According to the warder, Dad’s incarceration was the result of “extraordinary circumstance,” and Mum’s recent death qualifies him for early release. He will return to your flat, to Marna, an eight-year-old he has never met, and to Teeter, a thirteen he will not want to.
He will not return from prison to you.
Not when your actions had a hand in sending him there.
“Clara!” Marna calls. “The wash wasn’t started.”
“No, it wasn’t.” You remove Dad’s weathered leather journal from the trunk in the closet, the volume entitled 1995.
You quietly fill a bag — one is enough, because at eighteen years old there’s little to remember — and wait for night to fall, and for unfamiliar stars to call you far away.
And you never look back.