I couldn’t believe it, but there was no doubt it was true. The pain in her eyes told me that.
‘My parents flipped out, as you’d expect. There’d been no warning that I was involved with anything like this, despite being a little rebellious.’
‘So what did they do?’
‘They panicked. Thought the only solution to my behaviour was to send me away.’
‘So you all moved?’
‘No, that was never an option. If we moved to a new town it would mean my parents giving up their jobs, their home. They weren’t educated people, so there was no guarantee they would find jobs that paid the same. They had to stay where they were. It was me that had to move.’
‘And that’s when you came to England?’
She nodded, her gaze and thoughts elsewhere.
‘At the expense of my brother.’
‘Why? Had he been in trouble as well?’
‘Oh no. Johnny was a saint compared to me. And he was sharp. Had a brain in his head that he wanted to use. We would joke about where it came from, that they must have dropped him as a child to knock such sense into him. He was my parents’ great hope, the one who would make something of himself.’
‘So why were they planning to send him here?’
‘For school. University eventually. Whatever he needed to give him his education. My father had a relative here, a cousin who had not been blessed with children. His wife was so depressed about it that he agreed to give Johnny a home, in the hope that she would treat him as her own. But when I got into trouble, they persuaded them, somehow, to take me instead.’
‘Was your brother annoyed?’
‘He had no anger in him. It wasn’t his way. And he was only ten years old. He didn’t want to leave my parents. Why would he?’
‘But you did?’
‘It didn’t matter what I wanted. I’d lost any choice when I brought that package into their house. As soon as they’d persuaded my father’s cousin, I was off, before I could bring more shame on them.’
It was hard for her to tell me all this. There were no tears, but the light that usually shone from her eyes seemed to dim as she told me about life in a new country. How the cousin who took her in tried hard to make her feel welcome, but it quickly became clear that his wife didn’t feel the same. Taking on a ten-year-old genius was one thing, but a surly fifteen-year-old?
They didn’t know the extent of the trouble Ade had found herself in back home, but at the same time they saw her as damaged goods, as a child they didn’t want to claim as their own.
‘I did not blame them,’ Ade said, painting something resembling a smile back on her face. ‘Now or then. They took me in with the best intentions, but I didn’t make it easy for them. I refused to fit in, dodged school in the same way that I did at home, threw any attempts that they made back in their faces.’
‘Did you feel like going back home, then?’
‘With what? My parents had spent their savings sending me over here. I could not ask them to pay for me to return when I was behaving like I was. I had to at least pretend I was doing well, if only to make it easier for my brother.’
‘Why, what had happened to him?’
‘What my parents feared would happen. He became aware of what was going on around him, saw the poverty people were living in, the way so many struggled to feed or clothe themselves. It pricked something in him, troubled him so much that he started to ignore his studies, became more interested in protesting instead. He joined a group of people who wanted to challenge what was going on, people who wanted to turn things on their head. He was only fifteen, but he was sharp, intelligent. When he spoke they didn’t see a child. When he spoke they listened.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with that, though, is there? I mean, people are allowed opinions, aren’t they?’
‘Of course, but not when they don’t keep them to themselves. This was Nigeria twenty years ago. Put your head above the parapet and you put yourself in the firing line.’
I felt uncomfortable, fearing where this was going, hoping that I was wrong.
‘He was only fifteen years old when he found himself in the middle of a march, and for years I felt, knew, that if it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t have been there. He would have been tucked away in a comprehensive school in England edging nearer to becoming a doctor or lawyer. While he was being battered with truncheons by the police, I was sat on a bench drinking cheap alcohol with people who knew nothing about me and cared even less.’
She stood up, shaking the blood back into her legs.
‘Shall we walk?’ she asked. ‘I make more sense when I’m on the move.’
I nodded, lifting her rucksack off the ground, throwing it on to my back.
‘Things fell apart when I heard the news. I don’t know what hurt more, hearing it second-hand through my new mother or the fact that I couldn’t go home for the funeral. My parents didn’t say I wasn’t welcome, but they made no attempt to arrange my return, and in my head I took that as the sign that I was on my own.’
‘That must have hurt, to not be with them.’
‘It did, but in my head it was a problem of my own making. If I had not been so headstrong and foolish, then none of it would have happened. Or at the very worst it would have been me on the end of the truncheons, not Johnny. The guilt got inside me, took up my every moment until I was convinced that I should be punished more than he had been. I have no idea why you self-harm, Daisy, but for me it was punishment, a weekly reminder of the shame I’d brought on our family, and what I had caused them to lose. It almost pleased me that, when the pain disappeared, I still had the scars as a reminder.’
It was strange to hear her reasons, so different from my own and so controlled in how she chose to do it. I thought about her scars and the preciseness of them, which, after hearing her story, somehow made sense. It was punishment, not panic that made her do it, and suddenly I was scared, terrified that whatever worked to stop her cutting wouldn’t apply to me, that I’d be doing it as long as the panic attacks kept coming.
We walked for a while, enough time for me to roll a cigarette and focus my thumping heart.
‘Is it a long time since you cut yourself?’
It seemed like a safe question to ask. She was so together now, after all.
‘Fifteen years,’ she answered, glowing with pride.
‘And you’re never close to doing it again?’
‘Sometimes, of course. It took me a long time to get here, a lot of talking to realize that I wasn’t holding the truncheon that broke my brother’s skull. I will not go back now. I’ve reclaimed what happened, turned how I felt around, and now I look at it differently from how I did. Instead of wasting my life mourning him, losing him drives me now. It makes me get up every day.’
I felt deflated at the prospect of a long process ahead of me, wanted almost to pick holes in her recovery.
‘But you’ll always have the scars, won’t you? Don’t they just remind you every day?’
‘For a long time they did, but not any more. I’m reclaiming them as well, one by one.’
I looked at her, confused, which made her break stride and roll her sleeve up to the very top of her arm.
‘Every year, on the date of my brother’s death, I congratulate myself for not hurting myself any more, or for being responsible for his death. Every year, on 6 May, I reclaim one more line, to remind myself that I am still here.’ She giggled, a reaction completely at odds with the conversation. ‘My friends tell me I’m mad, that I’ve just found a different way to hurt myself. But I think they’re wrong. This isn’t killing me now. It’s reminding me that I’ve beaten it, that I’m still alive.’
With that she let her hand slide down to her waist, exposing the full length of her arm.
The scars continued above the elbow with the same precision and regularity, until they were halfway to her shoulder. There everything changed.
Instead of the dull puckered skin that made up each scar, there were bursts of blue ink, a series of tattooed lines, each one interrupted only once, where it spiked upwards before falling back into a perfect flat-line. The effect was mesmerizing, repeated again and again all the way to the very top scar. It looked like a gigantic heartbeat and I stood staring, as if watching a monitoring machine in an intensive care ward.
My jaw fell open. There was nothing to say. Nothing that could do it justice. So I did nothing, except wipe the stray tear that fell down my face.