That Girl From Nowhere (26 page)

The district nurse had given me a huge smile on her way out, nodded as though she approved of my visit – and I could see why when I entered the bedroom – my grandmother had seemed pleased to see me, lighter and freer somehow. Relieved, too, I’d imagine.

As I lower myself to the bottom drawer, without intending to, I pause to look at the medication on top of the cabinet: some of the tablets and capsules are distorted behind the colour and curve of the glass and look like the little jars I keep beads in. I know what ails her, but what are all these tablets actually for? How do they alleviate the pain she is in?
Do
they alleviate the pain she is in? If they do, there would be no reason for her to be contemplating what she is, surely?

From the bottom drawer I remove a heavy, large, shallow, lidded box that is a pale beige, the thickness of the butterfly box I once slept in, but not decorated like that one. ‘This?’ I ask. I hold it up and she nods slowly. Her tremors seem worse today, her face tired and agonised at the same time. I should not stay here too long, but I need to get to know her if I am going to think seriously about what she asked me to do.

‘Yes,’ she says.

I place the box on the floor by the bed so she can see it, and sit cross-legged in front of it. For some reason, the idea of taking photos of this stuff seems unsavoury as though I am planning to kill her for it. I want to see it, though, because jewellery is how I get to know people.

‘You are a true Zebila,’ she says suddenly. Although her tremors are more pronounced and have destabilised her mood, she seems able to talk more clearly and fluently today. Maybe that is how it works, with the conditions she has – some days your body, beyond the basic necessities for survival, will concentrate on being able to do one thing.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
Has Abi shown her the DNA test results?
The idea of that panics me, makes me think that after everything they still didn’t believe I was one of them.

‘When Abimbola said you made jewellery, my heart soared. We are from a gold family. Your grandfather’s great-great-grandfather was one of the first Nihanarans to own a gold mine. The Europeans tried to trick him out of it and then with later generations they tried to steal it from our family, but it never worked. It has been passed down through our family until now. My eldest son, Douglas, he is in Nihanara, he runs the family business.’ She rests back on her mountain of pillows. ‘You are the first one to work with the family metal.’

I don’t make much gold jewellery from scratch because it is expensive and not worth having unless it is pure, but I do relove a fair amount of it since once someone has a piece made from gold they’re often loath to part with it.

‘That is something that makes you special in this family,’ my grandmother says. Considering she didn’t even see me after I was born, she is laying it on a bit thick – but I don’t mind. It’s a way of getting to know her; finding out what she is really like. What she is really like is that she over-eggs the pudding because she thinks it will get me to do what she wants. Which shows how little she knows about me.

I open the box and inside there is a universe of wonder. It’s almost as though someone has created my fantasy world inside this box. That was why it was so heavy, there is so much inside, and it is disorganised and meshed together, and like something from my very best dreams. I’m not sure where to begin – I have to unravel pieces from each other, which adds to the excitement building inside me. Having to do this starts the reloving process: I can see what different shapes the item can be twisted into, shaped and made. How it can look next to different materials, jewels and other stones and precious items.

The first piece I reach for is a thick link bracelet, heavy because each link is solid, eighteen-carat yellow gold. It’d be impossible to wear for any length of time – male or female – without developing wrist ache. I run my fingers over the flattened top and bottom of the bracelet. They are smooth and cool to my initial touch, leavened to allow them to rest flat against the wrist. ‘Is this yours?’ I ask.

‘Yes. Julius’s father gave it to me when we were courting in Nihanara. He did not realise that it was a man’s bracelet.’ My grandmother chortles, quietly, the most she can manage, I guess, and the laughter she is able to produce livens her face. It tells me she must have been so in love with my grandfather, the way she laughs at the thought of him. ‘He had no idea. It was far too heavy, too thick.’ If I was to relove this item, I would take it apart, break it down to its tiny component links and then remake several items to suit the owner. I usually start with the person, but in this case, it would need to be broken down and rebuilt.

‘Tell me a story about you. Something that no one else knows,’ I say to her. ‘Not about the jewellery, anything about you.’

She seems to go away to another place while she thinks about this. Her body tremors, her face twitches violently on her right cheekbone, but her eyes are still and steady as she contemplates what it is she does not mind me knowing that no one else knows. ‘Your grandfather, he was called Ivor, too, he was not the first man to win my heart,’ she confesses. ‘There was another boy who … he was from another family in the same city. We had grown up together. I met him at school. The three of us, we were friends but it was clear to me as we moved through our years who I was to marry.’

A shiver of recognition shimmers through me – it sounds like the situation I was in with Dylan and Seth. My grandfather was her Seth – not the first to win her heart, but the one she realised she loved and wanted to be with forever. I stop myself there, prevent myself from remembering where that eventually led.

‘Didn’t the other boy love you enough?’ I asked. Or was it like with Dylan and me – did she finally stop loving him when she realised how uninterested he was in anything except keeping her dangling on a line for when he needed an ego boost or an unchaste Christmas kiss.

My grandmother frowns at me as though I am being ridiculous at the very idea that someone wouldn’t love her enough. ‘Not at all. They were both in love with me.’ It must be nice to have that certainty of how other people feel about you.

‘If you loved him, he loved you, and he was the man you were meant to marry, then why didn’t you?’

‘He was not the man who I was meant to marry. Ivor was.’ I must look confused. ‘Ivor Zebila was from a decent family. They had status and wealth.’

‘The other boy didn’t?’

‘He was nice, he had some wealth, but he was not a Zebila. Everyone knew of the Zebilas. They were respected and coveted.’

‘That was important to you?’ Status, wealth, power. Everything done for show.

‘When you grow up with very little, you learn what is important and necessary to have in life. Their parents could both afford the school, my parents had to work long and hard to make enough money to send me, the eldest of their six daughters, to school. I knew what was important, what I had to do for my family.’

So not like Seth, Dylan and me at all, really. I know nothing of what it must have been like to be in love with someone but to do your duty and marry someone else because it will mean your family is taken care of, your sisters will be able to go to school and your parents will not have to work so hard.

It still rankles, though, that she would choose money, wealth and status over love. She is doing a very good job of removing any images I might have had in my head of her being a fluffy grandmother, ill and sickly, who is coming to the end of a life lived with and filled by love. She is showing me she will do whatever it takes to get what she wants.

‘Did you love my grandfather?’

‘Of course. I grew to love him over the years, very much. He chose me because he knew I would make a good wife, I would improve the standing of their family by giving him strong children. You asked me to tell you something that no one knew and that was it. Are you disappointed?’

‘No, no, just surprised at how candid you are.’

‘I see.’

I look down at the bracelet again. I would struggle to remake this piece even if I had broken it down. It would need to be completely melted to start again. Or maybe … I pick it up again. If I were to reshape one of the links into a circle, I could make it into a flower pendant. Solder the different links on to the circle. Or maybe the links laid out in a seemingly random pattern, linked into an asymmetric chainmail design, that would sit across the chest. It would be heavy but, like the other design, showy, large, unmissable. This is what she would like – the outward appearance of wealth. I move the links, see how they look next to each other.

‘Would you like to take that?’ Mrs Zebila asks.

‘Pardon?’ I realise what she is talking about. ‘No, no. Thank you, but no. I’m curious. I love looking at jewellery, it’s one of my favourite things to do. Which is why this collecton is simply amazing to me.’ Carefully, I lay the bracelet back in the box.

‘I insist you have it.’

‘No, I have no use for it. I don’t keep things I don’t need or don’t fit into my life.’

Silence passes between us because I’m not sure what either of us are meant to say to my unintentional reminder of who I am. Instead of speaking, I place the lid back on the box. ‘I think I’d better go.’

‘You will come back tomorrow?’ she asks eagerly.

‘Do you want me to?’

‘Yes, of course. Clemency, it is such a pleasure to see you.’

I know she wants something, but it’s nice to hear. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow then.’

To: Jonas Zebila

From: Abi Zebila

Subject: Is it me?

Thursday, 16 July 2015

Dear J,

So here we are. Two weeks later and
nada
. I’ve had daily texts from her saying hello and asking how we are, but nothing more. No asking to meet up or to talk on the phone, nothing.

Clearly she’s keeping us at arm’s length. Declan – yes, I finally told him everything – reckons it’s to do with Gran. But he would say that, seeing as he’s terrified of her. We’re all on a knife-edge in the house, except Lily-Rose who asks to see the photos again and again because she’s fascinated by having so many photos of this woman who is her aunt, once being as small as her. She’s not that close to Declan’s sisters, mainly because Declan won’t spend that much time with them. Not sure why, but you know what? My family’s F’d up enough, he’s not forthcoming on sharing that with me.

I hear Mummy and Daddy talking sometimes in the middle of the night, and, you know, they can’t seem to get over this barrier between them and say what they really feel. I mean, if I had the child I hadn’t seen in nearly forty years walk into my life, I’d be talking with the only other person who’d understand how I felt. They can’t seem to do that. They’re a lot nicer to each other nowadays, and there’s far less of an atmosphere, but they don’t talk.

Declan and I talk all the time even when we’re not living together. He’s actually been really supportive during all this, and I wish I didn’t have that fear of being with him all the time. If I start to rely on him, will he let me down again? I know it was years ago, but I’m sort of waiting for him to do it again.

Maybe that’s what Mummy and Daddy are thinking. That if they talk, they have to go over what happened, and why they did it, and what it means about them. Because I can’t imagine what’s going through their heads.

Ivor is on another planet. I don’t know what his f-ing problem is, but he’s been saying stuff about Clemency being a con artist. He never says it in front of Mummy and Daddy, but if it’s just me and him, he’ll make some comment about how we’re such a trusting family and how she could be from anywhere. I’ve told him to tell that to Mummy and Daddy if he truly believes that – funnily enough, he won’t.

I wonder if Declan is right and this is all down to Gran – Clemency did look like she’d seen a ghost when she came out of Gran’s room. Maybe Gran told her to back off? But she wouldn’t do that, would she? Look who I’m asking!!! Gran cried with the rest of us, though, so I’m not sure why she’d warn Clemency off.

Thing is, Gran’s not always rational these days. That’s a realisation I’m coming to accept. She isn’t making sense a lot of the time, she forgets things, she becomes incredibly angry if you point out something contradictory. On top of the other stuff wrong with her, I’m not surprised Mummy wants to get her proper, specialist care from people who can tend to her needs around the clock, give her meds at the right times in the right doses. Also, sometimes it’s a struggle to get her to take the meds. She doesn’t want to, doesn’t like the side effects, wants to skip some in case they’re what’s making her ill.

I’ve said to Daddy that I’d get her a nice room at our place, I could work out a good deal, I’d see her almost every day, there are nurses who are trained to deal with people who aren’t handling their long-term illnesses very well. When I mentioned it at dinner, after Lily-Rose was in bed, Daddy got really angry. ‘That’s not how we deal with problems in this family,’ he said. We were all sitting there and he raised his voice. ‘We find a way to take care of family members, we don’t move them out and abandon them at the first sign of trouble.’

None of us said anything and even Ivor looked uncomfortable. It took Daddy a couple of minutes to realise what he’d said in the light of all the recent revelations and he seemed very embarrassed and ashamed. Maybe that’s what the problem is, why he and Mummy can’t talk – they’re ashamed of what they did. Not that I think they’d ever admit it to anyone – not even each other. Kind of ended the discussion about what next for Gran, though.

Why doesn’t Clemency call? Things got so much better at home after she arrived, and now we’re all in this limbo of waiting for her to get in touch again. I miss her. I miss you.

Lots of love,

Abi

xxxx

Her jewellery box is like nothing I’ve ever been through. I thought Mrs Lehtinen’s was incredible but my grandmother’s is out of this world. I want to run my fingers through it, feel the different textures dribble through my fingers. I have been to see her on ten of the past fourteen days. Sometimes she has had to struggle to the door, because it is not a day when she is visited by the district nurse, and I have sensed her mortification at being helped back to bed.