Hangovers had the potential to stop me thinking clearly. I’d learned that pretty quickly after arriving at Bellfield. It fact, they stopped me thinking at all. That was part of the reason I drank so much.
But as I sat on the edge of the cliff I really regretted getting tanked the night before, because I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
It was like I’d been sucked into a twilight zone movie or something, as there was Ade sat beside me, her arm naked to the sun, her dark brown skin littered with line upon line: the same lines that decorated my own.
I was so shocked that part of me wanted to laugh. It was absurd.
But I didn’t. Instead I reached out slowly and rested my hand on her forearm, surprised when she didn’t flinch or pull away.
There was the same smile, the same warmth, but a very different Ade now, which brought problems of its own, as immediately I felt the guilt in me swell, remembering how I’d spoken to her, how I’d insisted she couldn’t have a clue about what I was feeling.
I wanted to say sorry but knew it wouldn’t come anywhere close to covering it. I hoped my hand on her arm might say more.
‘I haven’t shown you this to make you feel ashamed,’ she said brightly, ‘so you can get rid of that thought right now, do you hear me?’
My face flushed at the accuracy of her words.
‘I didn’t mean to make you show me,’ I stuttered. ‘You must think I’m a right cow.’
‘No, not a cow. A mule maybe, or something else that’s just as stubborn, but not a cow.’
I lifted my hand from her forearm, feeling the warmth in my fingers, and looked again at her scars. There was a horrible symmetry to them, a preciseness to the intervals at which they fell, to the length of each line. They were old too, a lighter brown and raised from the rest of her skin, but obviously wounds that had long since healed.
‘Don’t think too much about what to say,’ she sighed. ‘I haven’t shown you to shock or make you feel guilty. To be honest, I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘Am I the only one who knows, then?’
I didn’t like the idea of another secret, of the mischief I could do as a result, but she shook the comment off with a wave of her hand.
‘No, there are others back there who know. Floss and Eric, all of the staff in fact, some old residents too.’
‘But Naomi? Or Paddy?’
‘No, I don’t think they’ve noticed.’ She looked like she had to give it some thought. ‘None of them have infuriated me like you. Hard to believe, I know.’
She bumped me with her shoulder, trying to knock some of the tension out of the situation.
I had questions bubbling away in my head, but couldn’t work out if I’d asked too much of her already, or whether in fact she expected something back from me. You know, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours …
It was a relief when she carried on talking.
‘I have watched you these last two months, all of us have, and it has been torture. We’ve seen you carry this load around, some days so heavy that it is making you shorter before our eyes. All of us have seen it and we’ve all looked for the tap that we can turn to let it out. But at the same time we’ve seen that you weren’t ready, for whatever reason.’
She looked serious for a second before relaxing again, the trademark smile sliding back into position.
‘Me showing you this doesn’t change anything either. There’s no contract now, no expectation for you to tell me everything or even anything. I just had to make you see that you aren’t alone in feeling powerful. That other people feel guilt too.’
‘Who do you think you hurt, then?’ I couldn’t help asking the question. Hoped she didn’t mind answering it.
‘Right now?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘Nobody.’ Her answer was emphatic. ‘Ask me again tonight, or tomorrow morning, I may have a very different answer for you.’
I didn’t understand and my frown told her so.
‘It depends how logical I am feeling, and that changes with how tired I am or whether I got drunk the night before. All these things affect just how powerful I am.’
My head ached with the riddles. All I wanted was a straight answer, but they didn’t seem to apply to me any more.
‘So when you’re tired or hungover, who did you hurt?’
‘It’s always the same person, always my brother.’
‘Where is he, then? Does he live around here?’
‘Oh no. He isn’t anywhere. He died in Nigeria twenty-two years ago.’
I exhaled deeply, felt my lungs scratching, demanding a cigarette.
‘Is that why you moved here, because of what happened to him?’
‘I was already here. I’d been here five years when he died.’
‘But I thought you said you’d hurt him.’
‘I thought I’d killed him.’
‘But how could you when you were on the other side of the world?’
Her smile got wider despite the gravity of what she was saying. ‘I never said it made sense.’ She bumped my shoulder again. ‘You of all people should understand that, shouldn’t you?’
I nodded, adjusting my position to face her, hoping she’d take it as a sign to go on. ‘I lived in Nigeria until I was fifteen years old, with my parents and brother. My parents both had jobs, good jobs in factories. OK, they weren’t doctors or teachers, but my father was responsible for other men who worked there. We were a lot luckier than others, you know?’
I didn’t know, didn’t know the first thing about Nigeria, couldn’t have pointed it out on a map, but that didn’t matter. I just wanted her to keep talking.
‘I didn’t realize how lucky we were, so instead of being grateful I made life impossible for everyone.’
‘Really?’ I couldn’t imagine Ade making things difficult for anyone.
‘I took advantage of our situation. Instead of going to school, I took every opportunity to skip off. Couldn’t understand what they could teach me that I couldn’t learn from my friends at the market. I met new people there, most of them older than me, and they filled me up with stories, about how school did them no favours, how they earned a good enough living without it. I listened to them, was seduced by what they told me, and started working for them, delivering things to other people.’
‘You mean dodgy stuff?’ It all sounded so unlikely. ‘Like what?’
‘There were many things. Alcohol. Drugs. Money itself. There were other things too, things that I’m too ashamed to say out loud. I didn’t realize at the time what I was involved with. I was naive. Stupid.’
My mind boggled at the potential.
‘They convinced me to start hiding packages too. Said that they would pay me well if I could stash them overnight. So I did. Until my father found one of them in my room.’
‘What was in it?’
For the first time in her story her eyes left me, falling to her arm, which she rubbed gently with her hand.
‘It was a gun. A pistol. I didn’t realize, because it was wrapped up in rags so I couldn’t feel the shape of it. But I should have realized. As soon as I saw it, I knew these people, my friends, had played me well.’