That Girl From Nowhere (11 page)

‘Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,’ I tell myself. I hang on to the steering wheel, bending forwards. My stomach is not settling, it isn’t as easily soothed and fobbed off as my heart and my lungs. My stomach believes Mrs Lehtinen. My gut is telling me that she is right. I am the little girl who slept in the butterfly box, whose mother went on to give birth to another girl sometime later. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid.’ Even if it is true, there is nothing I can do about it. Simply thinking about it causes the phoenix, fiery and burning, of that promise I made my mother to beat its wings at me, the heat flashing through me. I can’t do it to her. I can’t break her heart when she’s only at the beginning of the journey of the grief of losing my dad.

Tap, tap, tap
against Lottie’s window. So quiet and hesitant it takes a few moments for the sound to properly register.

Tap, tap, tap
again. More certain, more sure this time. I do not need company right now. If there is one thing I do not need it is to speak to someone. What I need right now is to be left alone, to have a breakdown on my own before I go home and pretend to my mother that I haven’t inadvertently broken my promise and I haven’t almost ruined the life of some poor woman who happened to work in the same nursing home as a potential client.

Tap, tap, tap.
Again. This person should have got the message that I’m not up for talking. Although, to be fair to them, they may think I’m dead or something and want to be sure.

The bones in my neck click as I raise my head and turn in the direction of the tapping.

I’ve never imagined being electrocuted before, but this feels like it. It feels like all the volts that used to pass through the power station where Dad once worked have been sent through me at the same time. Even through the grimy, salt-splattered window, the person is clear to me. My gaze does not move from the window while my fingers grope around for the window handle. With the grey plastic grip in my fingers, I slowly slide it open. The person in front of me is immediately crystal clear and I am looking into a mirror.

It’s a mirror that can take away the years, hide your wrinkles, change your hairstyle, give you spots and blemishes in different places, but it’s a mirror all the same. I am looking into my own face as it probably looked ten years ago.

‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘Mrs Lehtinen said you seemed upset and would I mind coming to check on you before you left.’ She sounds nothing like me, of course. She’s from here and I’m from nowhere. She pauses, stares at me like she’s only just seeing what I’m seeing. ‘I’m guessing she meant you as you’re the only person in this car park.’ This is said distractedly – the mirror is starting to work for her, too. She’s looking into it and she has more wrinkles around the eyes, more blemishes on her cheeks, her face is filled out a little more, her hair isn’t sleek and straight to her shoulders, but curly and shorter. But the eyes are the same in this mirror, the nose is the same shape, the lips are the same size, the forehead has the same curve. ‘I only do these things for her because she’s an old family friend.’

I don’t speak. My mouth does not know what to say. My brain knows what it should say but that would be ludicrous. She would probably freak out if I told her.

‘Sorry,’ she says after her eyes have repeatedly examined every part of my face, each time finding more and more similarities: the imperfection in the slope of my left eyebrow, the slight indentation at the tip of my nose, the way my right ear is a tiny bit more curved at the top. ‘Sorry for staring, but why do you look exactly like me?’

‘
I don’t look like you
,’ I want to say. ‘You
actually look like
me
because I was here first
.’

My shoulders shrug at her first of all. Then my mouth decides it needs to speak. It needs to do something because staring and shrugging aren’t the way to resolve this.

‘I look like you because I think I’m your sister,’ I say. And it takes all my strength not to burst out laughing because it’s the most ridiculous, unbelievable thing I’ve ever said in my life.

When we breathe it’s almost synchronised, only a fraction of a second keeps us apart. A lifetime and a fraction of a second’s breathing time separate us in these quiet, uncertain minutes. I want to say something. Something pithy and clever, something that’ll cement me in her mind as someone she’d like to be connected to. My mind isn’t working like that: its fingers keep reaching, grabbing at words, phrases, sounds, even, to piece together and say, but those things keep slipping away, out of reach, unobtainable.

We are sitting in the flower garden as it’s time for afternoon tea and most of the residents who are able will be having tea and cakes down in the rec room where I was with Mrs Lehtinen.

‘This can’t be happening, right?’ Abi says. ‘Cos if you ever met my parents, my mum, you’d know that this couldn’t ever be happening.’

‘I’m guessing your mum never mentioned me. Not to you or her husband.’

‘Husband? My dad, you mean. My mum’s been with my dad since she was seventeen. She came to Brighton to start university, and stayed with my dad’s parents cos they knew her parents back in Nihanara, you know, the country in Africa?’

I nod, I’ve heard of it. If I’d had any idea that was where my DNA came from I might have paid more attention in my geography classes.

‘They fell in love after a few months of knowing each other, and just before my dad finished his first law degree they got married.’ She recites the story as though she has heard it several hundred times. I used to be the same. I’d ask Mum and Dad about how they met, when they got married, over and over again. I used to pore over their pictures, looking at their clothes, their faces, the faces of the people around them. I wanted to know everything about their love and their life before me.

‘My mum and dad did everything so right, they always do everything so right, that’s why this can’t be happening. Cos my mum? Sex before marriage? In the same house as my grandmother? Giving a child up for adoption? No way. NO. WAY.’ She shakes her head. ‘They still say a prayer before dinner. Even now. There is no way.’

All right
, I think,
no need to rub it in. I am their dirty little secret. Their.
It sounds like Abi’s father is my father too. We are full blood sisters. They stayed together and got married. Had another child about ten years later. Forgot the child in the butterfly box ever existed because she didn’t fit into their cosy new life. I wonder why they left it so long? Maybe they kept trying and trying and it never happened. It might even have occurred to them after months and months of no joy that maybe they should have stuck with the one they had first.

‘
I think I need to leave
.’

‘What did you say?’ Abi asks.

My hands fall away from my face, trembling as I swivel slowly to look at her again. It’s uncanny – our features are arranged so similarly, I could be looking at a picture of myself from at least ten years ago.

Ten years ago Seth asked me if we could talk about having a baby. I’d stared at him for a long time, horrified at the suggestion. Yes, obviously we were together for ever as far as I was concerned, but a baby was the last thing on my mind.

‘Have I said the wrong thing?’ he asked.

‘I, erm, Seth, babies … I …’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t think I can.’

‘Not ever?’

I started to breathe deeply, I was about to start hyperventilating, panicking. ‘I can’t … I don’t know anything about where I come from, what sort of stuff is in my biology. What it would do to a child I have. I hate going to the doctors anyway because there are all these things they ask you and I can’t ever answer them because I was adopted and my mum won’t let me find my other parents, not even to ask about my genes, so I’ll never know. It’ll be worse with being pregnant, having a baby, that’s all about what can be passed on. And I won’t know. I’ll never know—’

‘Hey, hey, hey,’ Seth said and grabbed me into a hug to quell my panic. ‘Let’s talk about it another time. Or not. We’ll see how things go. It was a stupid suggestion.’

‘No, it’s not. We can talk about it another time, OK? Just not now.’

Ten years later, him mentioning that we might have made a baby was the start of the last conversation we had as a couple. Ten years ago there was so much going on, and I still looked as young and naïve as Abi.

‘I said, I think I need to leave,’ I reply.

‘Oh. Right.’

‘This isn’t … I’m not coping very well with this and I need to leave.’

‘Why don’t you come meet my parents? Maybe they’ll be able to explain all of this. You might be my long-lost cousin instead of, you know … Which would be mad, but kinda cool, too.’

‘Did you used to sleep in a cardboard box?’ I ask.

Abi frowns at me, her eyes darting up and down over me, checking me out again. ‘Yeah, why? Wait, how’d you know?’

‘I slept in one, too. It’s an old—’

‘Finnish tradition,’ she finishes. Her scrutiny intensifies.

‘Did she decorate it in butterflies? Your mum? I assume it was your mum who decorated it, and not your dad.’

‘No, I had hummingbirds. My eldest brother had eagles. My other brother had doves. Yes, Mummy drew them.’

Brothers?
Brothers.
I have a sister. I have brothers. They didn’t wait ten years to try again.

‘I really need to go now.’ My bag clatters to the ground when I stand and I immediately throw myself to my knees, gathering up my belongings, shoving them away because I feel exposed enough, I don’t need her to see anything else about me, to have something potentially negative to relay to her parents.

‘I seriously think you should come meet my parents,’ she says while I replace my bag’s contents and search thoroughly for anything I may have missed.

‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘No, thank you.’ Am I simply turning down an invitation to tea or the chance to meet my biological parents, the people who gave me the blood that flows through my veins? ‘I need to go.’

‘But—’

‘No offence, but over the years I’ve imagined meeting the people who could potentially be my biological family and it was nothing like this. If you don’t mind, I’m going to leave now. I need to go home, sit down, start to get my head around it.’

‘What do I tell my mum and dad?’

My shake of the head looks more dismissive than I feel inside, and the up and down flap of my arms seems far more exasperated than I feel. ‘I don’t know,’ I tell her, earnestly. ‘They’re your parents.’

My body is tingling all over. My body is numb. Both sensations are there and I’m not sure how I’m driving.

That automatic part of you that takes over when necessary must have kicked in. I half expected Abi to come running out of the building, trying to flag me down, stop me, talk to me. I’ve watched too many movies, I think. If I was her, I’d be turning myself inside out pretending that it was all a coincidence. That the woman who fled was a fantasist. Anything else passing through my brain would be admitting that there’s a possibility that my parents are liars. All parents are liars, of course. They tell you lies all time for your own good – ‘If you pull your face like that and the wind changes it’ll stay that way’, ‘The ice cream van plays music when it’s run out of ice cream’, ‘You were a good baby who never cried’ – but they’re not fundamental lies. All parents are liars, but they pray you never find out the truth about the lies of omission that are etched into the fabric of their personalities, indelible stain-like reminders that before they were parents they were human beings and made human mistakes. Some of those mistakes are stupid and pointless, like a tattoo of the name of the first person you ever loved; others are huge and life-altering – like surrendering your child for adoption.

I’ve done a bad thing to Abi. She will be turning herself inside out trying to pretend that her parents aren’t human enough to make such huge mistakes. She will have to go home and face them.

Red. The traffic light is red and I stare at it. Red for stop. Red for blood. Red for danger. Maybe I should go back. I can’t let her do that alone. She’s done nothing wrong. If I go back, though, go with her to her house, I’ll have to face them. I’ll have to speak to those people. The first thing I’ll do is blurt out, ‘Why?’ and they’ll say … They’ll say … What I always knew and this has confirmed: that it was me. It can’t have been about my mother being all alone. It can’t have been any of the reasons I’ve conjured up and worked out and come to decide were the truth over the years. If they are together, if they had more children, if they’re still living in the same house they did all those years ago, there must have been something wrong with me.

An orchestra of car horns penetrates my thoughts. Green. Green for go. Green for move. Green for pastures new. Green for emeralds, popular in engagement rings. My foot pushes down on the pedal, and nothing happens. Green for go. I push hard, the pedal is to the floor, and nothing. Green. GO!

The orchestra is loud, insistent, angry. The heat inside my head will melt me. I want to take off all my clothes so I can feel the air on my skin and it can cool me down. Other pedal. I need to push the other pedal to go. My foot moves, slams down too hard on the right pedal, Lottie leaps forward, jerking me with her. At least we’re moving now, at least all that stuff is behind me and I’m moving forwards.

The further away it is behind me, the easier it’ll be to forget. To pretend when I get home. The orchestra fades away, the echo of a memory of a stupid mistake I made at some traffic lights. The soundtrack I have now is nothingness. Silence. This is the silence of the lonely ones, of people like me – we who do not know how to talk, or to share, or to open up our truths to the people around us, for fear of how it will be used against us.

Mum is in. The television is telling her something about ruins in Turin. I’m sure she’ll be avidly watching that and doing her Sudoku with her glasses perched on the end of her nose, and tea cooling in the white and yellow mug she favours most.