“Good morning, St. Margaret’s Primary School!” the bright voice of the receptionist trilled through the phone.
Glory’s alarm had only gone off five minutes before and her brain still felt clogged with sleep.
“H-hi! I have a bit of a strange question to ask. Did St. Margaret’s change its uniform recently?”
“Recently? Well, if you count . . . oooh, it must be twelve or thirteen years now. If you count that as recent, then yeah!”
“Ah, brilliant,” Glory said, switching to her “approachable” tone. “Was the uniform darker before? Maybe a navy or a black?”
“I didn’t actually work here then,” the receptionist said. “But let me just ask someone.”
Glory heard the woman cup a hand over the receiver and shout to someone in the background.
“It was a navy blue, we think,” the receptionist said when she returned. Glory’s heart leaped in her chest and she sat up straighter in her bed.
“Wonderful, my next question is even stranger, if I’m honest, but I’m looking for someone, an old pupil who would have attended in the early nineties, around 1994 or 1995? Her name was Hope Akindélé—I can spell that for you—or she might have been registered as Hope Marksham?”
“Erm, OK . . .” The receptionist sounded a lot less cheerful but she tried to remain polite. “Are you a journalist or something?”
“No, I’m actually her sister. We were separated as children and I haven’t seen her since, I’m just trying to find her.”
“Oh,” the woman said, her suspicions easing slightly. “I’m sorry love, I weren’t working here then.”
“Do you have like the pupil records or anything? Can you confirm that she attended? I mean, I’m pretty sure that she did now—”
“I’m sorry, I can’t give you any information like that—data protection.”
Glory’s heart sunk and she began to feel tearful.
“What about teachers? Are any teachers from then still around? I’ve got a picture of her when she attended St. Margaret’s, I can send it to you, but I just need to know if any of them know where she moved to after leaving. She’s my twin sister, I don’t know where she is,” Glory pleaded, gripping the phone so tightly it felt like her knuckles would burst from her skin.
The receptionist breathed deeply down the phone.
“One sec, my love, let me ask someone.” This time Glory heard the receiver being set down on a hard surface and the voice receded into the background. She waited, praying and bargaining with God all over again. Yes, she had not kept to her previous promise, but this time—this time—she would join her mother’s church choir if he would just make sure that something here worked out!
“Hello?”
“Hi! Yes, I’m still here,” Glory said, her chest expanding with expectation.
“I’m so sorry, we don’t have any teachers from then still on staff. Have you tried searching for your sister on Facebook?”
“Yes,” Glory said, trying to keep her mouth from breaking open into a sob. “Thanks for trying. Thank you, bye.”
She hung up before the receptionist had a chance to respond.
Glory gritted her teeth and inhaled deeply, the air whistling through her clenched jaw. She did not want to cry, she was tired of crying and being so emotional and frustrated. Her NHS therapist had told her that emotions were not good or bad, they were just signals she needed to pay attention to, but she was tired of the signals. She knew what was wrong and, despite everything, she could not fix this or anything else.
She tried to console herself with the fact that at least she had a location now. She picked the phone back up and typed “Joan Marksham Sevenoaks Kent,” “Edward Marksham Sevenoaks Kent” and eventually “Hope Akindele Marksham Sevenoaks Kent.”
“Of course!” she shouted when the results came back with nothing. At this point Hope didn’t even feel real. She could be stuck in an elongated loop of familial delusion or her sister could have died and not even her parents knew. She threw her phone from the bed, flopping facefirst into her pillow and screaming into it until her throat ached.