His name is not there. Jalecia huffs on her frozen fingers as she reads the eight names beside buzzers, from top down again, and from bottom back up – as if that would make his appear. This has got to be the right place – Apartment 3, 7 Grand Avenue was written on the back of the brown envelope inside the shoebox under her mother’s bed. Empty, though, no letter asking about her, no saying that he was coming home soon, nothing so. And the date stamped on the front was smudged.
But today’s journey has taken over two hours from Brixton, what with changing trains and walking all the way down the road, from Brighton Station to the beach with no sand, only rockstones, and everything so grey she couldn’t see where the sea ended and the sky began. She’d struggled against the wind strong enough to blast out her teeth, past the big-up statue of Queen Victoria in a long, black dress and up this avenue with a garden in the middle the size of a cane-piece and ginormous black cars lined up like for a funeral.
The name by number 3 is Annabelle Worth. Jalecia shivers – Like he move out. Like maybe I come all this way fuh nutting.
She backs down the five steps, gripping the icy railings that sting like boiling water. Above the black door with a shiny gold letterbox is an archway carved into white whorls, like the biggest seashells God ever made. The dark curtains on the third floor are shut and tied with tassels like guardian angels. If he living here, grand so, no way he going wan’ to know little me.
Under her arms itch from her too-small coat, her feet are killing her in new school shoes, her belly biting and her ears so cold they could crack and fall off, one time. But her train ticket had cost fourteen pounds and eighty-five pence– what was left of her holiday money plus three pounds she’d helped herself to from Aunty Norma’s purse. Jalecia licks salt from her lips – Is you only chance, girl. And 3 is you lucky number. She holds her thumb over the buzzer – Dear Lord, let ’im be here – and presses.
“Hello.” A woman’s voice, high-class, like an ice pick in her right ear.
Jalecia jumps but catches herself and delivers her statement, word perfect. “Please to tell Mister Clarence Cumberbatch that I have come from Barbados to see him.”
No answer. Then, “Ah, um…do hold on. I’ll come down.”
He here! All her prayers have been answered, night after night on her knees by her bed. When she was little, she’d imagined herself running to the gate as he arrived, arms open wide, swinging her round and round like he would never let go, his breath in her ear – “Jalecia, my only child.” She’d made up his face by adding Father Ryan’s smile and her friends’ fathers’ eyes full of pride at their girl-children. Her daddy looked like a brown-skin Jesus.
Lately, she’s been more wary – he stands outside, rock-still, saying nothing. One thing is for sure, though, now she will get to look at his face. And, from the way her mother looks at her, she knows that some part of hers has got to be just like his.
What had been a peeny spark against her mother’s – “I telling yuh forget he” – lit up bright as a hundred fireflies after her aunt’s invitation for Christmas. But this is not how she’s rehearsed it – it’s supposed to be him that opens the door. Jalecia hops from one foot to the other, ready to run – wrong house, so sorry to disturb yuh – to run back down the road. He never try to find you.
The door opens and there is a white lady in a long white dress with blond hair over her shoulders like sleeping beauty, only she’s barefoot with blue toenails. Her smile disappears. So does the question in her green eyes as they open wide-wide – like she jus’ had the biggest shock ever.
______
Annabelle can hardly breathe. The girl is the image of him.
They first met at the private clinic. She’d been there for a routine blood test, so dazzled by the white jacket against his dark skin that she hardly felt the needle prick. And his voice on the phone two days later was so reassuring – “Nurse Practitioner here, cholesterol, a little high, no problem, we just need another test.” It happened to be the last appointment for the day and she’d rather fancied his cool singsong, “You’ll be fine, young lady, only forty-two, call me Clarie,” as they walked along the Prom towards Grand Avenue. His limp made her want to slip her arm under his.
Annabelle grips the bannister as she follows the girl up the stairs. She opens her apartment door.
He’d slid through it and eased himself into her second armchair, making her laugh with quirky jokes about Barbadian cricketers she’d never heard of, sauntering into her kitchen to help himself to smoked salmon and Camembert, beaming over his shoulder to offer her some, igniting a pulse of love she’d never felt before as she followed him into her bedroom. It was as if she hadn’t seen him coming.
She purses her lips to slow her gasping breath, to control the piercing pain behind her eyes. The girl is watching. Annabelle has seen that quizzical look before – on his face. How did she know he was here? Why has she come?
______
Jalecia stands in the doorway of the room, bigger than her mother’s Pentecostal church hall back home. The thick brown velvet curtains are still drawn but she can see well enough. No man ain’t in here.
“Do give me your coat. And take a pew.” The woman takes her coat down the corridor, past two closed doors.
He got to be sleeping in one of them bedroom. She got a next one so I could come and spend time and get some o’ this good living. Jalecia squats, unlaces her shoes and takes them off. There’s a hole in the toe of one of her socks. She tucks them into her shoes and hides them behind the door. The blister on her heel has burst and hurts like a bad burn. She licks her thumb and wipes it.
Papers are scattered across the room – on the floor, on three little tables tucked inside one another, on a fluffy white sofa with cream cushions and two armchairs, one with a red blanket – the only bright thing in here. Hanging from the ceiling is a chandelier like a monster spider made of ice. On the grey stone mantlepiece is a fancy gold clock, a plant with three white flowers, a photo in a silver frame and a card with a bottle of champagne, bubbles flying out.
Jalecia looks over her shoulder, then tiptoes across the room. The flowers have such perfect little faces they don’t look real. In the photo is an old-old woman wearing lavender lace like she belongs in a history book – With love from Granny Florence xxx is written on it. She peeks inside the card.
An Invitationfrom Belle and Clarie to Celebrate our Love
The date is September 4th, four months ago. Jalecia clenches her fists. How muh daddy could love this barbie doll woman? How he could love she and not me? She feels like tearing up the card and mashing up the flowers. But there in the doorway is the woman in the long white dress.
______
Annabelle had arranged an intimate evening with a few friends she hadn’t kept up with since she met him. “Just a little get together, my darling.”
He said nothing but she’d already sent the invitations, maybe not a good idea. She gave him time but time got tight. That night, her head on his shoulder, hair flowing over his chest, his legs wrapped around hers, just the two of them with no world outside, it was her moment. “My dearest one, our love is ours alone, here in our own secret space. But we can share it now.” He didn’t move, didn’t say anything. She should have shut up but gushed on, “I want to show you off. It’s our anniversary – two years together!” She should have looked up and checked the expression on his face.
He didn’t show up. Her phone calls were blocked. The receptionist at the clinic said that he no longer worked there. And Annabelle was not one of those needy women who pester men. She would keep her pride, bide her time.
But she’d screamed curses she didn’t know she knew as she grabbed his bottle of pepper sauce from the kitchen; snatched his toothbrush and aftershave from the bathroom; yanked his mobile cord from the bedroom socket, his white jacket from the wardrobe and a single sock sticking out from under the bed. When men leave, they should take all their damn stuff with them. She shoved everything into a black plastic bag of betrayal, tied a knot and dumped it in the spare bedroom. To be chucked at his smug, black face when he comes back. Who the hell does he think he is?
But it was no bigger than one of the scatter cushions on her sofa. Is this all that’s left of us? Annabelle sat on the floor and hugged it. She hugged the big fluffy pillow on his side of the bed, breathing in the lingering scent of the Armani Eau Pour Homme, her present for his birthday. She listened for the key he still had to click in her front door, all the while letting the love tears flow down her cheeks.
But Annabelle had work ethic stamped into her backbone. And, as a highly respected partner in a family law firm, she’d had to get on with the job – immersing herself in case files, consultations and court hearings dealing with other people’s traumas and tears, so much more dire than hers and so often self-inflicted. She became as angry with herself as she had been at him. How could I let it happen?
Yet she’d kept the photo, the only one she had of the two of them together, cheek-to-cheek, on their first anniversary. A selfie, she’d insisted, despite his antics – ducking and waving his hands. It’s in the drawer of her bedside table – she hasn’t taken it out for months, proving how strong her resolve is to put him behind her. She’s almost forgotten what he looks like.
But here, in her front room, is a girl staring at her through his eyes.
______
Stay cool, girl. You find he. Jalecia unclenches her fists.
“I’m such a messy pup.” The woman scrabbles up the papers, looking like a crazy white feather fowl running round a backyard.
Yuh jus’ got to hold strain. Yet, even now, Jalecia hears her mother’s shout, “He gone, and doan’ look at muh like that,” both hands slapping the kitchen table – braps, braps. When she prayed some more, “Sweet Jesus, please to sen’ my daddy back home,” when she used to wait for the postman to come with a pretty pink birthday dolly that could shut its eyes and say “mama” or just a card with daisies and buttercups, it was, “In God’s name, what yuh doing? Yuh going wait ’til kingdom come. Not one red cent from he.” So, what he send in the envelop under you bed, she wanted to ask, but that would only make more vexation. And that was it. She never tell me if he tall or short, if he got a big belly-laugh, if he like cricket or football, if he good at italic writing, like me – nutting.
The woman stuffs the papers into files and piles them onto the armchair with the red blanket. “Now then, do tell me your name.”
“Jalecia.”
“How charming.” She puts on a smile. “And how old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
She nods and nods again – like she counting out every year.
“Goodness, where are my manners? Do take a pew.” She points to the sofa.
Jalecia sits and pulls the skirt of her dress over her cold knees – the light blue church dress with a white collar. She hates its little girlishness but she’s worn it specially for him. He mussee still sleeping in she big-king bed.
Her stomach is rumbling, her teeth still chattering and she is having her period. And blood on this white-white sofa going be the most shameful thing ever. He going bawl me out.
Jalecia stands. “Please to wake he up.”
But is like the woman didn’t hear. “What about something to drink, to warm you up?”
______
As Annabelle opens the kitchen door, the cat zips out and into the front room. Shit, what if it attacks her?
His only gift – the night he’d brought it home, it scratched her hand. It’s ginger with spiteful yellow eyes and an arched back, a stray from the gutter probably. She has been meaning to ask Granny Florence to take it but somehow hasn’t got around to it – maybe because she actually rather enjoys hissing at it. But what if the girl is allergic?
All is well. She – what’s her ridiculous name, again? – is kneeling by the sofa and making mewing noises. The cat hasn’t purred since he left but still sounds like a gurgling drain.
Back in the kitchen, Annabelle reaches into the back of a cupboard for his cocoa – another thing he forgot to take with him.
Clarie – a free spirit like her, he’d dovetailed perfectly into her life. She’d once had vague ideas about marriage but the demands of her career had left no time. Or, indeed, any inclination – she’d seen too many clients suffering the most awful, endless ordeals as they squabbled over divorce, wrangled over child custody and contested wills.
She and Clarie never quarrelled. Well, there was that time she’d said what fun it might be to introduce him to Granny Florence and watch the horror on her face. “Respect yuh grandmuddah,” he’d shouted thumping his fists on the arms of the chair. But it was only the once. They were soulmates without the domestic baggage. He didn’t expect her to cook and, when she did, was happy washing wares, as he put it. He’d spent hours on his Independence Day, showing off as he made those delightful little parcels of grated pumpkin, sweet potato and nutmeg, wrapped in foil – “because we have no banana leaves,” he sang with dancing feet and a laugh from deep in his throat. Though she had sometimes wondered if she needed him more than he did her and that maybe she’d let it all happen too quickly, it was too late for doubts – she’d opened her home and her heart to him. Blind, besotted, bewitched!
The cocoa has dried up in the tin. Annabelle stabs it with a fork. She stabs again but it’s solid. Her hands are trembling, she grips the edge of the countertop. The piercing behind her eyes has spread, her whole head is one big ache. She’d been up with case files and Chablis until after midnight. The doorbell had woken her, the Barbadian accent jolting her out of bed to throw on her white dress as she stumbled down the stairs.
He did so love her to wear it as she fussed over him at whatever time of night he came home – another emergency at the clinic – hobbling to his armchair, overdoing the limp, another of his endearing qualities. She would fix a rum and ginger with a twist of lime, just the way he liked it, and place it on the little table beside him. “I going be late fuh muh own funeral,” he chuckled, drawing her onto his lap, sliding his hand up the skirt of her long white dress – his special way of loving.
As soon as the girl leaves, I’ll go back to bed with a strong black coffee.
Annabelle opens a packet of Twinings Pure Peppermint Tea. It’ll have to do and she’s bound to take sugar, lots of it, like he did. The kettle screeches to boiling.
Her head is pounding. She‘d known it was more about sex but fooled herself into thinking that her subtle displays of intimacy with caring and sharing and trust would guide him to real love. How could I have been so utterly naïve?
Forget him. Annabelle slaps cold water from the kitchen tap onto her forehead.
Biscuits, bound to be hungry. She reaches for the festive tin embossed with an image of the virgin Mary and baby Jesus – Granny Florence’s latest guilt-trip gift. She puts the teapot onto a tray with a matching china cup and saucer, bowl of sugar cubes with tongs and plate of bourbon biscuits. She’s half listening for her front door to slam but the girl has come for a reason. What does she want?
She is still by the sofa. The cat is licking her fingers. What will I tell her? And how?
The files on the armchair remind Annabelle that she’s coped with paternity suits without so much as a blink – fathers disclaiming, scratching their heads at DNA proof, in denial even after they’ve met their children, refusing to see any resemblance. It’s the younger ones that have tantrums in her office, the teenagers chew thumbnails and stare at the floor with sullen faces.
She glides towards the nest of three tables, lifts out the smallest with practiced ease and rests the tray on top. “Do help yourself.”
“What it name?” the girl asks without looking up.
“Annabelle Worth. Oh, silly me, you already know that from the buzzer.”
“I meaning the cat.” She bites her lip as if she’s holding back a laugh.
Exactly like him when he teased. “Oh, well, it doesn’t actually have a name. It was found, abandoned….” Annabelle clamps her teeth.
But it’s as if the girl – Jalecia, that’s it – hasn’t heard. Annabelle sits on the armchair, the one without the red throw, and curls her hair behind her ear. The sooner children face the truth the better and this girl is mature enough to cope. She looks down to gather her words. The varnish on her big toenail is chipped. She tucks it under her dress.
Annabelle clears her throat. “My dear, there is no easy way to say this. He left and I don’t know where he is.”
Jalecia’s brow puckers, just the way his did.
Annabelle ties her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. How could I be so abrupt? This is his child, here in my home, not one of my cases.
Jalecia gets up from her knees.
Annabelle grips the arms of the chair. I can’t let her go like this.
Jalecia is still frowning. “The toilet please, Miss.”
“The loo, of course. On the left, at the end of the corridor.”
______
Jalecia grabs her coat and locks the bathroom door behind her. She takes a new pad from one of the pockets and replaces the soiled one which she rolls up in layers of fragrant toilet paper – like she spray on scent, duh. From the other pocket she removes the squashed remains of a cheese cutter and stuffs it into her mouth. She washes grease from her hands. There’s only one toothbrush – no Lifebuoy soap, no shaving cream, no cologne. The woman lie, though. She still got the invitation. He here some place, sleeping.
She opens one of the bedroom doors – big bed but nuhbody in it. She sneaks in and eases open the wardrobe – no man clothes hanging in there.
She opens the other bedroom door but there’s just an empty single bed, and a black plastic bag in the middle of the floor. Mussee got in she dirty clothes. Bes’ get back in the bathroom, fast-fast.
Jalecia perches on the edge of the bath. She could sit here as long as she likes – nuhbody banging on the door and harassing me like Mama wid she “what you doing in there?” She reaches for the body lotion, lathers her hands and rubs some onto her chapped lips – it smelling sweet, like Bico vanilla ice cream.
Maybe he gone fuh the newspaper. She will stay right here until he finds her. But the cat starts scratching at the door and screeling loud-loud.
______
Annabelle paces in front of the mantlepiece. She has kept the invitation to remind herself what a cad he is. He will have to face her – she will confront him with her arms folded and not a word. It’ll be like the sessions she organises at work for perpetrators to meet survivors, to confess their cruelty and feel remorse.
He’d never spoken about the future but then, she’d never pressed – that was not how they were. He never mentioned his past either. When the West Indies team lost again and she’d pondered out loud whether he played cricket at school and maybe got hit by the ball and was that why he limped, he just nodded. She’d wondered about affairs in his past, as any woman would. At his age, fifty-and-some so he said, and with his sexy charm there must have been others, probably lots – but it would have been beneath her to ask. And somehow, the mystery had made him more exotic. But a daughter – he never told me, not a word, the bastard.
Annabelle touches one of the orchid flowers with her little finger and prods the potting mix. “My beauties,” she whispers, “I will spray you later.”
I should, at least, give her something of his. Hardly the cocoa tin. Maybe the red throw? It’s cashmere, another of her gifts. But he’d never owned it, never even said thank you, never put it over his shoulders as if it might suffocate him.
Annabelle holds her head in both hands. She needs a painkiller but they’re in the cabinet in the bathroom. What’s taking the girl so long?
Her coat has gone. Annabelle gapes at the empty peg at the end of the corridor. She walks to the front window and lifts the edge of the curtains, expecting to see Jaleicia scampering down the road, shoelaces trailing. But there’s no sign of her.
Annabelle slumps onto the sofa. I could have told her that she has his forehead, the sparkle in his eyes, his sense of humour, that, after my long days in court, he would massage my shoulders with coconut oil – no, maybe not.
I should have told her she’s not like him – that she is brave, not afraid of the truth.
How could he? Bad enough leaving me but his own child?
She will take the tea tray back into the kitchen and make that coffee. But the cat screeches, the bathroom door clicks open and her thoughts shatter.
______
The clock on the mantlepiece chimes three. Aunty Norma said she’d be back at six from her revival meeting and Jalecia had promised to stan’ home and keep safe. She shoves her arms into her coat sleeves but the blister on her heel is biting worse than ants, centipede, all two both. How I going get back on muh shoe?
“Oh, poor you, that must be so sore,” the woman says. “I’ll get a plaster.”
A blessed silence fills the room. Like this crazy woman wid she pew and loo and she poor you doan’ never shut up she mout’, and doan never stop studying me – like I drop down from the sky. Plaster, then I out and gone.
Jalecia sits on the sofa and runs her hand over the white fur. She pours tea into the little white cup with a golden rim and handle, adds a lump of sugar and stirs. She sips with her little finger up. The mint flavour is like fresh air in this stuffy dark room.
She is thinking about slipping the pretty-pretty cup into her coat pocket when the woman returns and sits on the sofa. “Right, let’s get you patched up, young lady.” Her complexion is like her teacup, so clear you could see through but the blue varnish on her toe has a big chip. So, this perfec’ lady ent suh perfec’.
She dabs the blister with cotton wool and spreads on white cream stinking like Pine-Sol. She got to be smelling she lotion on muh hand and maybe she toilet paper in my pocket. Whadever, I doan’ give a pang what the woman thinking.
She peels off the back of the pink-pink plaster and holds it up. “Especially for blisters.”
Yeah, like I is a idiot, come from the bush, doan’ know nutting.
The woman smooths on the plaster, stroking her foot and humming a tune that Jalecia knows from ever since though she can’t seem to find the words. There’s a warm fullness in her belly, the cat curls its tail around her ankles and the room is like a sea-bath in the sun, now glimmering behind the curtains. She is dissolving like the sugar lump she’d held between the tongs and dipped into the tea, melting from hard white to soft brown.
Jalecia’s eyes flicker open. She’s got to go, now-now – Aunty Norma going be mad, blue vex. But the woman is holding her foot and she’s been kind. It would be bad manners to leave, just so. She points, bold-faced, to the photo on the mantlepiece. “That is yuh grandmother.”
The woman sighs. “I’ve…I haven’t always been kind to her.”
“She raise you?”
“Partly, yes. Her dream was for me to walk down the aisle in a white lace dress with a long trailing veil.”
“So she could be a great grandma?”
“That, too.” The woman carries on, like she’s talking to herself, about how her grandmother polished her with ballet and violin lessons and then dropped remarks about old maids and flowers lining up against a wall. “She arranged tedious soirees with eligible young men, all public school and peaky white….” She stops. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean….”
Jalecia shrugs. “No prob.”
“Well, after the last suitor left, it was Christmas Eve four years ago, she threw the canapes into the bin, her hands up in the air. He happened to be an expert in inheritance tax.” The woman actually snorts. “Why am I telling you all this?”
“Is awright. I doan mind.”
“Maybe I should have listened to her.” She lifts the hem of her long white dress and pats the corners of her eyes.
She telling the truth. He ent here. He gone and lef’ she, too.
Jalecia reaches her hand to touch the woman’s hunched up shoulders but pulls back. “Grandmas, them like them cyan understand wha’ going on but still loving yuh real bad. Sometime better than yuh own mother.”
______
How could someone so young know exactly what to say? Annabelle squeezes the girl’s foot, so gently as if it’s one of Granny Florence’s Royal Doulton figurines.
Jalecia’s hands are clasped together as if she’s praying. “You got a photo o’ he?”
In the bathroom, Annabelle swallows two Panadol. In her bedroom, she holds up the photo and moves it from left to right but his eyes never meet hers, just squint over her shoulder. What she’d seen as a smile now looks like a condescending smirk. She reaches into the drawer for her nail scissors and snips herself out, the blades curving between their cheeks without a nick. As her half drops onto the floor, she expects tears to well up but there’s nothing – just a giddy light headedness. And a laugh that wants to burst out as she suppresses the urge to cut his throat.
Annabelle hands Jalecia the photo. “You have his forehead. And his eyes. He used to say mine were like the cat’s.”
Jalecia has been nibbling cream from the centre of a bourbon biscuit. She wipes chocolate from the photo with her coat.
Annabelle hides a smile behind her hand. Still so young – too young to make a legal claim to contact him. I could help her with that.
Jalecia tilts her head to one side and peers at the photo.
Annabelle stands by the mantlepiece. I could tell her that I pretty much grew up without my father. Not the same as not even knowing what your father looks like, though, not the same at all.
Jalecia is so perfectly still – no tremble in her hands, not even a twitch in the corner of her mouth.
Annabelle’s heart pumps in her ears but her headache has eased. I should tell her that he never belonged to me.
Jalecia, too, moves the photo from left to right.
Annabelle can bear it no longer. Oh, this dear, dear child. She takes a step forward. “If you give me your phone number, I can try….”
Jalecia shakes her head. “Thank yuh fuh showing me, Miss Annabelle. And sorry ’bout the chocolate.”
“Don’t worry, it’s only a….”
“I doan’ look nutting like he.”
“But still, you keep it.”
Jalecia puts the photo on the sofa, face down. “Nah, he ent coming back.”
She has lived with the truth of him all her life.
“Yuh could stick back in yuhself.” Jalecia grins.
Annabelle laughs, her mouth wide open. She strides to the window, takes hold of the curtains and heaves them aside. Her arms are strong, her heart is free.
Sunshine streams in, lighting up the room, making rainbows dance on the chandelier.