“I need another lead besides my mum or Faith,” Glory explained to Julian in the back office of the barbershop.
“Mmm,” Julian said, distracted. Since the attempted robbery, Julian had fitted a new security system that included CCTV and iron security grilles on his office door and the back entrance. It had cost him a lot.
“If I could find that Mama Wawo at the very least, she might be able to help.”
“Mmmm.”
“Julian, are you listening?”
He sat up, snapping his attention back to Glory. His disappearances and unanswered calls were becoming more and more frequent, and when he told her he was “handling business,” she noticed that “business” often had nothing to do with the shop. She wasn’t stalking him but Pharoah’s was only around the corner from her mother’s house, and he seemed to be spending less and less time there.
But finally Glory had him all to herself—kind of. The door to the office was closed and she swung around like a child in Julian’s squeaky chair while he sat on the edge of his desk, falling in and out of their conversation as his thoughts drifted this way and that.
“What about the school uniform in the picture? If you can work out what primary school Hope went to, maybe it would lead you to something else.”
Glory stopped spinning, shocked that he had been paying enough attention to come up with a sensible suggestion. Then a shout sounded from the shop and Julian leaped to attention, reaching for the baseball bat he now kept under his desk.
“Stay there,” he told Glory, and he opened the door with one hand, keeping the weapon down low by his side as he peered around the doorframe.
He relaxed, tossing the bat back under the desk then leaving the tiny office. Glory got up to see for herself what was going on.
Julian stood in the doorway talking with a group of men wearing the uniform of youth, thick dark puffa jackets and layered tracksuit bottoms, despite the sun that had begun to warm up the day.
One of them seemed particularly agitated, pacing in front of Julian, his arms flying around sharply to animate whatever he was saying. Julian said little, nodding occasionally and putting his hands out in a gesture that asked the young man to calm down. This carried on for a while, and eventually Glory returned to the office chair, spinning around and around until Julian reentered, reaching for his jacket and keys.
“Listen, Glory, I need to head back to my yard real quick, but go home and I’ll call you when I’m done.”
“Done doing what? I can come with you.”
Glory rose from the seat.
“Nah, just wait at yours.”
Julian looked toward the front of the shop, where the group had dispersed apart from the agitated one who was still rocking on his toes.
“What’s going on?” Glory asked, following his eyes. He had caught whatever nervous energy was powering the boy outside, she could feel it.
“I just need to let Telly in to mine, get him settled then I’ll come get you.”
“Settled? Is he going to be staying with you?”
“For a bit.”
Julian threw on his jacket, motioned for Glory to stand, and pushed the chair back into position at his desk. He checked around, confirming he had everything he needed, and locked the door behind him.
“What’s happened, Julian?”
“I’ll explain later, just go home.”
Of course they didn’t live together, but the thought of this unknown volatility invading Glory’s world via Julian’s flat made her uneasy. But with no real grounds to object, she left with Julian, his goodbye trailing behind her as she turned in the opposite direction and walked back to her house.
She knew that he wouldn’t call her later. Or at least not during daylight hours, and she wasn’t going to wait until the sorry text or sheepish call that would come at some point between sundown and midnight.
As she turned onto the end of her road, a car cruised past, the unmistakable bassline for Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money” rumbling from its subwoofer. “Fuck bitches, make money! Fuck niggas, make money!” Glory found herself mumbling along to the track and given the circumstances, it seemed sage advice.
As her mother never tired of pointing out, she was not working and, besides having no money, this also meant she had too much time on her hands to wait for Julian to fill. It was time for her to expand her horizons workwise—or perhaps lower her sights.
When she reached home, Glory went straight to her room. Sitting on her bed, she took out her phone and in the Notes app began listing every possible job she could do that wouldn’t completely kill her spirit. The list was short and the only realistic option was working for the silver service agency she had spent a summer at, before her aborted stint at university.
The pros were it was flexible work, she would be working private functions with little chance of being spotted on the job, and sometimes the tips were really good. The main con was that one small step for a healthy bank balance was another giant leap into the past. At this rate, she thought, she might as well trade in her iPhone for a Sony Ericsson and go back to tying multicolored shoelaces in her hair.
Glory laughed, despite herself, thinking back to a picture that Lará had sent her soon after their reunion in Shoreditch. It was the two of them with a few other teenage girls, posing on the top deck at the back of a bus, their hair tied with shoelaces, color matched to their outfits. Glory thought they looked like Power Rangers, each girl a carefully coordinated block of color. She was all in green, Lará was in blue.
“Was this from your Bebo page?” Glory had typed back, throwing in a few laugh-cry emojis for good measure.
“Yep! I think we were going ice-skating in Streatham or something.”
If Glory wanted to go ice-skating now, she wouldn’t be able to afford it unless she borrowed money from her sister or Julian. She had less money at her disposal than when she was in college on EMA, and that thought alone shamed her. Her father would be mortified.
Her parents had never had family to rely on when they arrived in England. She knew the stories of the indignities of low paid jobs they were overqualified for. She knew the insults leveled at them as if she had been the one to swallow them herself. But despite that, they had provided more than a stepping-stone; their blood, sweat and tears were the foundation that her life was built on. And, yet, she was agonizing over whether to do something useful or to keep doing whatever she was doing, which was nothing, and was clearly taking her nowhere. So, of course, she put her pride to the side and submitted her CV to the agency’s website.
Grimly satisfied, Glory lay back on her bed and checked social media for the umpteenth time that day.
When she opened the Facebook app she sat up like a jolt of electricity had run through her. She had a private message from Hope Kehinde. She waited a long time to open it, trying to decipher the feeling that made her delay reading the message she had been waiting on for weeks. What she felt most was fear: fear it was her long-lost twin, but that Hope had no knowledge of her existence; fear that it was her long-lost twin but she had no interest in her existence; fear that it wasn’t her sister at all.
Glory coaxed herself into clicking on the message. She squeezed her eyes closed, breathing out for a count of three before she slowly opened them again.
“Who this?? Am sorry,, I don’t know where you mean,, Where is Midland? I want to go to London. Write back pleas.”
Glory sighed, and closed the app without replying.
Then she remembered Julian’s suggestion—the school uniform. She scrolled through her photo album, locating the images she had taken of the photographs. She zoomed in on the crest embroidered on Hope’s cardigan. It definitely said “St” something. She cropped the image so it was just the crest and sent it over to Lará.
“Since you love fonts and letters and stuff, can you work out what the name of this school is?”
A few minutes later Lará responded with the nerd emoji followed by:
“Do you have this in a higher resolution?”
Glory didn’t and she wasn’t sure where in the house her mother might have hidden those photographs now.
“I can try and scan the original, but I don’t know where it is at the moment . . . You can’t make anything out at all?”
“Hmmm. Give me a little while and I’ll see what I can do.”
Lará ended the message with a detective emoji and Glory thanked her friend.