Something’s holding me back. Instead of going into the tekkie café in the Georgian square, I stare at Keats through the window as I stand on the opposite side of the street. I’m finding it hard to take that next step. Fear holds me immobile. A fear of being confronted by things I never knew about my own mother. Stuff that may be too hard to hear. I’d left Dad’s upset, brain trying to sift through truth and lies, fired up to mow down more truths including any concerning Mum. But, here I am now, and, God help me, I can’t go past the edge of the pavement where the tips of my feet touch.
The tangled arguing voices of a young couple at the end of the street draws my attention. The streetlamp illuminates the shine of tears that wet the guy’s face. His distressed features twist into Philip’s, silently pleading with me to leave him, run, Rachel, run. The muscles and veins in my neck pull taut and strain as my eyelashes flutter, eyelids rapidly blink. It’s for Philip, I brave the unknown demons waiting for me in the café that enable me to cross over and join Keats.
Tears For Fears’ Everybody Wants To Rule The World plays with a melancholic energy inside. A memory at the back of my mind clicks that an Erasure song was playing the one and only time I was here before. This place must have a thing for retro eighties pop. Why I’m recalling this now I can’t figure out. Is it a delaying tactic for what waits for me at the table I’ll share with Keats?
The place is empty except for Keats and the woman with the blue and white striped apron behind the counter. Keats looks scrubbed-up clean, her curls damp with water or gel and the only part of her usual get-up she wears is the navy bandana knotted under her chin.
She gives me a quizzical once-over as I take the chair facing her. ‘Why were you peering at me from across the street?’
She catches me on the hop; it’s not what I expect her to say. Flustered, I respond, ‘I was feeling really hot, so needed five to cool down.’
Her blatant expression tells me straight that she’s not buying a word of it. But Keats keeps that to herself. She sucks deeply from her water bottle before taking out her mobile and pulling something up on screen.
‘Can you use your digi wizardry to find out anything about my house?’ I ask her.
Keats fiddles with her mobile. ‘In relation to what?’
I hesitate for a second. ‘How it might be connected to Michael.’ Then my voice runs along as if speeding on imaginary tracks. ‘I’m not sure if I’ve got this right or wrong, but I need it checking out.’
Keats nods, then levels me with an unexpectedly frank stare. ‘What do you know about how your mother died?’
There it is, that gut-blasting uncontrollable internal feeling I was afraid of. It’s akin to the blow I’m dealt when trapped underground. I glance hurriedly up at the over-bright florescent tube lighting. Light means air. That’s what I need. Air. My eyelids hood halfway as a funnel of blessed air, cool and refreshing as peppermint on my tongue, rushes through me. I stay like that for a time, filling my body with oxygen and courage.
Back in control, ready for whatever’s to come, I tell Keats, ‘She was sick, on and off, for years. Dad took her to a number of doctors who couldn’t diagnose the problem.’ I shake my head with sadness. ‘No-one could fix her. I had to watch her die before my eyes.’
A dead silence lies between us. Keats, for reasons known only to her, whips out her shades and puts them on. Maybe it’s her way of covering up that she’s as emotionally shot as me.
She looks down at the screen of her mobile. ‘I’m looking at copies of your mother’s medical records.’
‘How did you find them?’
Keats’s mouth quirks to the side. ‘Trade secrets, but the clinic she visited in the final years of her life,’ God, it hurts to hear that, ‘really should use a decent firewall in their data system—’
‘What did you find out?’ I prompt. I suspect we’d be here all night listening to her tales of firewall woes.
Keats settles her chin. ‘Right. I’ve summed up what I found out. She was ill because her immune system was failing.’ This I know. ‘She was also seeing a therapist at the clinic—’
‘What?’ The word wobbles along with the astonishment running through me. ‘Why would Mum be seeing a therapist? Apart from the illness, she was happy.’ Mum visiting a shrink somehow feels like an attack on me, my childhood. Our happy home.
‘No she wasn’t,’ Keats tells me without ceremony. ‘That’s what her therapist and doctors concluded. They think she was sick because of some type of stress in her life. The stress, in turn, was causing her to become depressed. Her immune system took the brunt of this. It’s as if her own body was attacking itself.’
I open my mouth to deny this but the veil of a twisted memory falls over me, obscuring the café, propelling me back to my childhood home.
I was twelve. Dad had been away on business for five days, leaving me and Mum alone. I came in from playing outside with my neighbourhood friends to find Mum looking drawn and pasty as she stepped out of Dad’s office.
‘What’s wrong, Mum?’
The strain as she tried to smile in response dropped the sides of her mouth down instead of up. She looked so sad.
‘I’m fine, baby. Just fine.’
Her dragging footsteps told their own story. Then she wobbled and collapsed. Frantically I ran over to her screaming, ‘Mummy, wake up. Wake up, Mummy.’
I called for an ambulance which came quickly. I sat with her in the back of it, feeling helpless, sobbing my heart out.
When we reached the hospital, I didn’t want to let go of her hand, but the nurses and doctors told me they needed to take her away to make her better again. I’d never felt anything as cold as her hand. I called Dad on the payphone but all I got was an eternal dialling tone. When the doctor came to speak to me to assure me Mum was on the mend, I asked him what was wrong with her. He wouldn’t tell me.
I stood in the middle of the corridor shrieking at his back, ‘Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong with my mummy? Why won’t you tell me?’
I come out of the awful memory with a huge audible gasp, as if I’ve been underwater. My hand comes up to my chest to steady my breathing, to halt the shockwaves stunning my body.
Someone’s calling my name. ‘Rachel, are you okay?’
Keats. I look over at her. She’s worried, shaken, sunglasses lying discarded on the table. I grab her water bottle and greedily gulp like it’s the liquid of life.
With a gentle ease, I place the bottle down. Slide it back into her space. Know it’s time to face my own truths. ‘I think I always suspected there was more to her illness than Dad told me. Maybe he was trying to put a gloss on it for his child—’
‘Her therapist thought her problems stemmed from a troubled marriage.’
Keats’s interjection rocks me back in my seat. I frown so hard the skin above my eyes is twisted and raked with pain. ‘That can’t be right. They were happy. Loved each other. A more devoted couple you couldn’t meet.’
One of Keats’s hands spread across the table, her way of trying to connect physically with me. ‘I’m only telling you what I found out. It took me years to realise that my parents detested the sight of each other. Years later to find out they married because he got her pregnant with my sister.’ It’s Keats’s turn to fight for air to her lungs. ‘A child’s vision of the world is so innocent it often numbs the reek of rottenness around them.’
We both struggle to regain our composure before she carries on. ‘Your father, Frank Jordan, many believe grew his empire through sheer ruthlessness. There are lots of stories about him having the reputation of a man who will do anything to get what he wants. Anything.’
Keats’s solid gaze locks with mine. ‘People are scared of your father. Are frightened to speak out against Frank Jordan because he uses the law to take them out by threatening libel action. That seems to be an old trick of his, using libel to shut people up. There was another story where it was alleged a family was destroyed after Frank Jordan made a successful hostile takeover of their business which was in trouble.’
I should be shocked. I’m not. Not after hearing Dad threaten Michael and his mother. ‘My razor-sharp claws.’ And didn’t he himself admit to my very face, ‘Business associates aren’t your friends, Rachel; on the contrary, they’re more likely to be your enemies.’ Other memories and unspoken words cloud my mind. How, after Mum’s passing, Dad wouldn’t mention the words, ‘wife’, ‘mother’ or ‘mum’. And ‘Carole’. How hadn’t I seen, heard, that he’d also stopped using her name? I’d put it down to grief, but the plain and honest fact may have been he didn’t care about her anymore. My whole world’s falling apart and I sit here calmly as if it’s happening to someone else. Someone else’s dad. Someone else’s mother. Someone else’s daughter.
‘Do you think,’ my question is slow, ‘that maybe that’s why Michael has lured me to the job? He’s seeking some type of business revenge against…’ Dad. The word’s lodged in my throat. The muscles inside my neck won’t let it go. Instead I finish with, ‘Frank Jordan?’
Keats nods with approval and I realise that’s why she’s been mainly referring to Dad as ‘Frank’, trying to create a distance between him and me. I silently thank her for that.
‘Dad – Frank – told me that Danny is Michael’s father. Maybe Michael is a proxy of revenge for his father. I don’t get it. Dad said he and Danny weren’t friends.’ My brows come together, pulling the skin across my forehead, although I swear he said they were friends when he got me the job at Danny’s when I was eighteen. I shake my head in an attempt to clear the fuzzy memories of the past. The haze gets thicker instead of lighter. ‘I can’t be sure, but there must’ve have been more of a connection between them if Dad felt an obligation to financially help Danny’s family by buying one of his companies.’
Keats leans across the table with urgent intent. ‘I wouldn’t believe a word that came out of Frank Jordan’s mouth.’ She wets her lips and then capsizes my pitching world. ‘Your mother’s doctors believed there was something she wasn’t telling them. Something she was hiding about her life with Frank Jordan.’