‘No,’ I said, but I could. I could hear the gush of water, rushing to the shore, covering the sand, rising ever higher. The world around me was brightening with each rush of waves, the buildings were fading and the world was being replaced by a beautiful blue sky that only existed in my dreams. The sun was a huge, orange-yellow ball up in the heavens and all around us there was sand and pebbles and palm trees with stout, solid trunks. From the sky it started to rain, red, red and more red. Falling on our shoulders, our heads, our bodies, the beach. The sand on which we now sat was becoming inundated with red petals. Soft, silky red rose petals.
I turned to Mirabelle. ‘We didn’t have this conversation, did we?’
‘I think we did,’ she said.
‘But how would I not remember all that stuff about Fleur?’
‘Or maybe we didn’t,’ she replied.
‘Tell me, did this happen?’
‘I can’t tell you that, you have to work it out for yourself.’
‘But—’
‘You know what to do, Tami, don’t you?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Course you do, you know everything because you’re the mama. Come on mama. Mama. Mama. Mama? Mama!’
Anansy is standing in front of me, holding the handle and body of my favourite mug in two separate hands. ‘It was an accident, Mama, it was an accident,’ she says.
I swallow against the dryness in my mouth, trying to get my bearings, to find a path of reality I can climb back onto.
‘I’m sorry, Mama,’ Anansy says.
‘I know,’ I say, sitting up. My head feels like it is being fed through an apple press. That memory felt like a dream, and that dream felt
like a memory. There was something in it that nagged at me. It’s been nagging at me for an age. But did I have that conversation with her? It felt like I did. I remember sitting on the wall outside her house, but we did that so often. Although I’m sure I’d remember the occasion where she broke down and told me about the daughter she lost.
‘The thing is, Mama, I might have made a bit of a mess,’ Anansy says. Cora is at a friend’s house for the night and I was meant to be with Anansy, but she’d wanted to play in the living room and I was too tired to keep my eyes open.
‘Where?’ I say, looking around the kitchen.
‘Now you have to promise not to shout,’ she says.
‘I can only promise that I’ll try not to shout very loudly,’ I reply.
‘The teddies needed their late, late breakfast,’ she explains. ‘So I had to take the Cornies into the living room. It was to Anansy’s Restaurant. I’m sorry, Mama.’
All things considered, there isn’t that much mess. Just half a packet of cornflakes crushed into the carpet, a bit of milk split on there, too, but my favourite mug did not survive and, of course, I’ve had to come into the living room to sort everything out. I still have an aversion to this room.
It is where my life started to unravel. It is where my life began all that time ago.
‘I’m sorry, Mama,’ Anansy says.
‘It’s fine,’ I say, still a little sleep-addled as I bend to start to gather up the orange flakes littering the oatmeal-coloured carpet. If the carpet was sand and the cornflakes were red, it’d be like picking up rose petals on The Rose Petal Beach.
‘What did you dream about, Mama?’ Anansy asks as she gathers up cornflakes with me.
‘I dreamt about going to The Rose Petal Beach, like in the story Auntie Mirabelle used to tell you.’
‘Oh. Was she there?’ she asks.
‘Yes, she was, actually.’
‘That’s nice. Did you have a nice time?’
‘I did.’
There are parts of that conversation that remind me of something. It has been niggling my mind for a long time. Something is missing. Something that has been staring me in the face is missing.
Putting the detritus from Anansy’s tea party in the bin, the picture of The Rose Petal Beach catches my eye. I walk up to it on my way back to Anansy. I look over the form in the picture, so lovingly painted.
‘Oh, Mirabelle,’ I say as my gaze rests on the rose petals in her arms. I stare at them and stare at them, and then my gaze moves to the hand I can see. A bare hand crammed with rose petals. A bare hand.
The tingling starts in my scalp, but it is all over my body seconds later. I know who did it. I know who killed Mirabelle.
Mrs C was really shocked when we showed up with that picture.
It was the first thing I changed about the house. Not that I’m fixing to live there or anything, I couldn’t stand that picture being there, knowing it was the reason she left.
I’m feeling it now. Since I was in that bathroom and all those memories came pouring in like a swollen river that’s broken the walls of a dam, I could feel. Noah says it was shock wearing off, that I’d been protecting myself from completely falling apart by convincing myself I didn’t feel what I was feeling. I’d think he was right if I didn’t now feel like this. If the pain wasn’t so bad sometimes I cried from the hurt, not from her not being there.
I stay in bed most mornings wishing I could have one more day with her. I’d really talk to her then. I’d ask her why she left. How she could stand to leave. And I’d ask her if she could be my mum again. If she could be my mum instead of the woman I became friends with. Most mornings I shush Noah as he is about to speak, and he knows not to say a word because I am wishing. I am wishing on the life I should have lived. I am begging for something that was obviously never meant to be mine.
The picture had to go. That story was the original thief that stole my life, and I didn’t want reminding of it every time I went there to pack up. I knew Mrs C would appreciate it. I wasn’t sure if she knew or not that the woman in the picture was so obviously my mother. I didn’t tell her or anything like that. I wasn’t sure how she’d feel about having my mother up on her wall after everything, but I know in my heart that’s where that picture is meant to be.
We’ve been through the house looking for the key to the room
with the locked door. we found the cleaner who cried about Mirabelle and said she’d never had a key to the room and had never cleaned it, then we called the police who apparently put it back where they found it but couldn’t tell us where that was exactly. ‘As much help as a toothpick in the rain,’ Noah said after
that
conversation and I’d looked at him funny ’cos I had not a clue what that meant.
So, our next course of action is to break down the door.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Noah asks again.
‘Yes,’ I say. I’m so not sure. It’s technically my house but it’s still her house. I keep thinking she’s going to turn up any minute now and shout at me ’cos I’ve got rid of her picture and I’ve broken down the door to her secret room.
It takes him four goes to manage it and he’s hurt his shoulder and his pride at the same time. ‘My hero,’ I say to him and he tries to tickle me in retaliation but his damaged shoulder stops him grabbing me as I half-stumble into the room. It’s not the mess I expected. The covers on the bed have been pulled back, and there are no guest towels on the chair in the bay. It’s a nice, homely room with a nice, flowery duvet on the bed, and a huge rug with daisies on it. Daisies are my favourite flower. This room has curtains when the other rooms have blinds, these curtains are a royal blue. Royal blue is my favourite colour. Beside the bed is a lava lamp. I loved lava lamps when I was younger, wanted to start up a collection of them but had no space in my tiny room. The walls are painted a duck-egg-blue colour. I had that blue on my walls when I was a little girl. This is my room.
I know it’s my room not because of these things that make up the room, but because it has pictures of me on the walls. My school photos have been put into a large chrome picture frame with white card separating the different images, all in chronological order, so there I am at six, with pigtails, then at seven with one big puff of hair tied back in a ponytail. Dad’s friend’s wife hadn’t remembered it was school photo day so she’d let Dad do my hair. At eight I’ve got two big pigtails with puffy ends instead of plaits because I liked
it. At nine I have my hair really short because Dad didn’t know what to do and so took me to the barber and asked him to cut it. I cried and cried. At age ten my hair is a big, puffball afro and I’m smiling at the camera like I think I’m the cutest ten-year-old ever. (I did look cute, though.) At eleven, my hair is back on my shoulders because Mirabelle had shown up at school in my lunch break and begged one of the black dinner ladies to give me the products she’d brought and explain to me how to use them. That’s when I started using coconut oil. At twelve, my hair is loose and down by my shoulders. At thirteen, I have a side-parting and my hair is falling mysteriously over my eye. At fourteen I am hiding behind my hair and you can barely see my face.
I didn’t know she had these. There are other pictures framed and on the wall: four-year-old me and her, playing at the beach; me at five serving her tea in our minuscule back yard; her holding me when I am a tiny baby. They’re old pictures, reddish from time, but she has blown them up huge and hung them on the walls. And then there are the pictures from recent years of me she has taken with her mobile: me in my car grinning at her; me sitting outside a café in Lewisham with her big sunglasses on my face; me looking back at her over my shoulder as I’m about to walk away; me just smiling at her across the café table. The quality of the pictures isn’t brilliant, but she has had them enlarged and hung on the wall as well. The whole wall is taken up with photos of me.
‘You were cute,’ Noah says.
My heart is beating really fast looking at these photos. I want to run around tearing open the drawers and the wardrobe, frantically searching for what else she had of my life locked up in here. I move to the large, mahogany wood set of drawers sitting beside the window and pull open each drawer. The first is full of towels, the second full of sheets. The next two are empty, but the final drawer is full of official-looking letters. I sit where I am crouching and start to open them. They’re letters from my schools. Letters for school trips, consent forms, open evening dates and times, photocopies
of my school reports – the originals are back at my dad’s place somewhere – even my exams timetables.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say aloud but I do. She asked the schools to keep her updated. I wonder if she told them she’d left? I wonder if she confessed to that and told them she couldn’t come back so all she wanted was to know about me? She wanted school photos and copies of my school reports. That’s why she knew when to turn up after my last exam. That’s why she knew to come back when Dad broke his agreement. It was her, wasn’t it, who told the head and Ms Devendis to work on my dad to let me go on the school trip?
She was there, all along. She was a part of my life from afar.
‘I was important to her,’ I say to Noah.
His familiar, comforting presence returns to me as he crouches down beside me. He puts his arm around me. ‘Of course you were,’ he says.
‘But don’t you see,’ I say to him, showing him the pieces of my past I hold in my hands, ‘she did think about me, all the time. She tried to be a part of my life in any way she could.’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘Babe, the stuff you’ve found out, the stuff you remembered by yourself, all this stuff, it’s been telling you she was desperate to be a part of your life. She did love you. She was your mum.’
‘My mum.’
Mum. I roll the word around my tongue. Mum. Such a small word that means something huge. Mum.
She was my mum.
I look at the picture of her holding me, when I am tiny and wearing a pink, towelling babygro and she has her hair plaited straight back in canerows. She’s not grinning at the camera, she’s looking straight down and smiling at me.
‘Mum,’ I say to the photograph. I’ve said it a few times, I know. But this is the first time I’ve truly meant it.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’
I am standing in the presence of a murderer. Someone who has purposely, knowingly,
intentionally
taken a life. It wasn’t to relieve suffering, it wasn’t to save their or someone else’s life, it was to put an end to someone. To unmake them, to end them. I do not know how someone could do that.
‘Mrs Challey,’ she says to me, smiling as warmly at me as she did in the police station the first time we spoke. ‘A pleasure to see you as always.’ I’m momentarily thrown, but then I see it, the look sliding across her face and sitting in that hollow space behind her eyes. She knows what I’m here for. She indicates with her slender hand to the seat across from her.
I had found her sitting at a table placed on the shingle not far from a small beach-hut café stand. Not many people come down here because its location right beside where the fishing boats come in every morning means by the time the sun is this high in the sky, the smell of fish is powerful and pungent.
She has her hair loose, sunglasses on her face and a book in front of her on the little plastic table. When I see her normally, she is dressed in a suit; today she has jeans on, a pretty floral top, and a brown suede jacket – her day off, obviously.
‘Please, have a seat,’ she continues in the same warm, welcoming tone, removing her glasses and indicating to the empty chair opposite her. My eyes are fixated on that hand. The hand that killed Mirabelle.
I hesitate. This is a public place, there aren’t that many people admittedly, but we’re in full view of the man wearing the food-stained
apron in the hut. A few people are on the water’s edge in deckchairs, fishing rods dangling hopefully in the shallows. She won’t do anything here. No, her style is killing in private. Murder most discreet.
Still hesitant, I lower myself onto the plastic seat. She smiles at me again. Was she smiling as she held Mirabelle under the water, or was she screaming abuse and hatred? Or was there nothing, was it simply another thing to do?
‘I’m just catching up on a little reading,’ she says, indicating to the book that lies face-down on her table. I can’t stop staring at her hands. They are smooth and slender, her nails short and neat. ‘So, how can I help you?’