Something to Hide, page 32
“Pregnancy is what I’m on about.”
“Pregnancy?”
“Rosie’s in the family way. She says it’s yours. She claims it’s meant to be; it’s written across the heavens, it’s a sign of your true and abiding love and all that rubbish. According to her, it’s been in the stars just short of forever. You and her, I mean. Not you and Teo.”
Ross had ceased eating although he still held his plate. He said, “How could she . . . How did it happen?”
Barbara said, “I expect it happened in the normal way ’nless the angel Gabriel introduced her to the Holy Ghost while she was washing her knickers. You seem gobsmacked, Mr. Carver. Or am I reading you wrong?”
He turned and put his plate in the sink, apparently having lost his appetite. He put a teabag in a mug and then spooned coffee into a press. As she watched him, Barbara went on. “So if Rosie is telling us the truth and you and she were dancing the mattress polka, could be that’s what Teo wanted to have a natter with you about. Rosie told her, see. That seems to be what they were shouting about—her and Teo, that is—when the neighbours heard the ruckus. She told my colleague, at first, that they were going at it over visits to their dad. But now Rosie’s claiming that it was all about the pregnancy and you. She says Teo didn’t want you. She says that Teo threw you in the dustbin or to the dogs or whatever. So I need to ask you: Was this Rosie thing a one-off or was it something else? I ask cos we’re having a bloody time of it trying to sort her out. Was she your new and true or had you been diddling her on the side while you were married to her sister?”
He went to the fridge again. This time he brought out a glass bottle of some kind of juice, pomegranate or cranberry. He poured himself a glass and drank it down. The electric kettle clicked off but he made no move towards it. He appeared to have forgotten her tea and the coffee press entirely. He said, “Are you always this crude or am I a special case for you?”
“Why don’t you give me chapter and verse on your relationship with Teo Bontempi’s sister, Mr. Carver? I’ll try to be a good girl throughout though I can’t promise I’ll manage it.”
“Fine. Right. Whatever.” He began to see to the coffee at last, as well as her tea. He shoved the mug in her direction along with a box of sugar cubes. He used the plunger on the press, taking his time about it. She said his name. He said, “Teo.”
“Teo what exactly?”
“It was always Teo. I wanted Teo.”
“So how’d you end up with Rosie?”
“She knew it. I was clear. I didn’t lie to her.”
“What’re you on about?”
“Rosalba knew it was only Teo for me. Everyone knew it. I’ve told you this. We’d been together since she was sixteen. But when Teo wanted me to leave, Rosalba felt like . . . I don’t know . . . She wanted to be a source of comfort, a shoulder to cry on, whatever you want to call it. She wanted to be, like, a confidante. She proposed herself as a go-between. That’s how it started.”
“Seems like you used more than her shoulder,” Barbara observed.
“I didn’t pursue her. She would just show up. Once it started—”
“ ‘It’?”
“The sex, all right? Once it started . . . Each time I told myself, Only this once, I’ll do it only this once. And I meant it and I told her I meant it and then she would show up again. What could I bloody do?”
“Not letting her through the door comes to mind. But you did let her in, right? Inside this place? Yes?”
He raised his gaze as if looking for assistance from the heavens, a way to make what had happened understandable and himself blameless. Barbara half expected him to cry out What’s a man to do? Instead, he said, “I let her in. She’s beautiful. Everything about her is gorgeous. She wanted me and she made that clear. And I was low. I felt crushed. And this isn’t an excuse—all right?—it’s just a reason. It’s why it happened. I didn’t love her. I don’t love her. I told her that. I said, ‘This isn’t love, Rosalba. Don’t think this is love. I love your sister.’ And she said . . . God help me, she said, ‘Pretend I’m Teo, then. Call me Teo.’ So that’s what I did.”
Barbara blinked although what she wanted to do was to strike the side of her head like a cartoon character, making sure she’d heard him correctly. “Are you saying she played a role for you? You did the deed because she was willing to pretend she was her sister?”
“I’m saying that was the how and the why. It gave me an excuse to have her in bed and she knew that for me to do it—which she wanted by the way—I would have to have an excuse. And when she told me she was taking precautions, I believed her.”
“Yeah. Well. Seems she wasn’t. She’s told her mum the happy news, by the way. When my colleague was chatting to her, her mum was there. He’d gone to check on some details she’d given him earlier.”
“What sort of details?”
“She’d told my colleague that her parents hadn’t wanted to adopt Teo, that they’d adopted Teo because it was the only way they could get her—Rosie. She told my colleague the deal from the orphanage was take the sister or you can’t have the baby.”
“She said that? Rosalba?”
Barbara nodded. “Evidently, her mum set her straight.” And then she added, “She also didn’t know Teo had been cut.”
Ross looked at the floor, drew in a breath, raised his head again to look at her. “Teo didn’t want her to know. Only the people who had to know or who knew already: her parents, her GP, me.”
“She talked about it on a film, did Teo.”
He turned, poured some of the forgotten coffee into a mug with piazza san marco scrolled on its surface along with the image of a cathedral. He said, “Why would she talk about it on a film?”
“A filmmaker was coaching girls to tell their stories. Their FGM stories? It wasn’t working out like she wanted. Evidently, they were freezing up—intimidated probably—when the camera started filming. So your wife told hers. It’s not being used in the final film—evidently, the filmmaker promised her—but when I went there to ask about Teo, she showed it me. She seemed . . .” Barbara looked for the right word to convey what she thought she’d seen in Teo Bontempi. “She seemed damaged, did Teo. I don’t mean the mutilation. ’Course she was damaged that way. I mean otherwise. It was like part of her . . . her essence? Her spirit? What I mean is that it looked like that had been cut up as well.”
Carver took up his mug of coffee and walked out of the kitchen and into the sitting room. He went to the balcony but did not step outside. He stood there looking down at the lane and at the miniature farm beyond it. He said, “Most of the time, she hid that well, what you’re saying. It was a part of her—that rupture in her spirit—that I thought might be repaired.”
“D’you mean through some kind of counselling?”
“Counselling, yes. But also physically. I’ve already told you this: I wanted her to see someone. She wouldn’t. She kept saying ‘What’s the point?’ It was part of why I couldn’t stop insisting and she couldn’t take it from me any longer.”
Barbara twigged what he might have meant. She said, “We’re back to evaluation, then, what was written in her diary for July 24.”
Carver turned from the window. “Could she possibly have seen someone about what had happened to her?”
“You said earlier that she rang you and wanted to see you. Could that be why?”
“Because she’d been to a surgeon? But if that’s what evaluation means, why did she wait all those days to tell me? If that’s even what she wanted to talk about.”
“Could be she wanted to have a word about Rosie, then, about you putting Rosie up the spout. Or both, eh? Along the lines of ‘I did this for you, I did this for us, and all the time you were bonking my sister.’ ”
“I didn’t want to. I didn’t intend to. I—”
“Right-oh. But why do I think Rosie didn’t tie you down and have her way with you? How’d Teo sound on the phone?”
“She didn’t ring me. She texted.”
“Was that normal?”
“No. Why? What’re you thinking? I mean, the text did come from her phone. You’re not implying someone else . . . The phone was there in the bedroom. I saw it.”
“We can’t find it.”
“What about cell towers?”
“That takes time. We’re on it, but . . .” She lifted her shoulders. “It’s a case of wait in line.”
“What about records of her calls?”
“We’re onto that as well.” She fished round in her shoulder bag and brought out one of her business cards. She said, “I expect you watch telly, so you know the routine well enough: You think of anything, you see anything, you hear anything—and believe me, I don’t bloody care what it is—you ring me. You hear from her sister, I want to know. You hear from her parents, I want to know. You recall a detail you haven’t mentioned, I want to know. D’we understand each other?”
He took the card from her and put it in his pocket. He said, “Yes. We do.”
KENNINGTON
SOUTH LONDON
Deborah felt uneasy, her mind running away with thoughts that had the power to intrude upon her work. In this case, those thoughts had to do with the discussion-cum-argument she’d had with her husband and her father, followed by a late-night phone call she had received from Narissa Cameron.
Deborah had thought she intended to talk about her documentary, but as it turned out, Narissa was ringing for another reason entirely. She’d been rumbled by her parents, Narissa said. The police had come calling, having been alerted by a neighbour. She’d got home from Orchid House to find a note on her door in her father’s handwriting. Seven words: Come above please. The police have been. When she read this, she knew she’d been discovered.
“It was that bloody kitten,” Narissa said. “I knew this would happen once I heard about the kitten.”
Knowing that the police would hardly have come calling about a kitten, Deborah put the pieces together in short order, aligning them with the hushed conversations she’d heard Narissa and Zawadi having. She said to Narissa, “You’ve got Bolu Akin.”
“They weren’t supposed to know. Or, at least, I didn’t want to tell them.”
“Your parents?”
“I didn’t want to risk anything that might get me thrown into the street. But, once the cops left, my dad went down to my flat—the basement flat?—and he found her. He’d seen the news. My mum as well. So they knew who she was. My dad’s funding the major part of the documentary, and he’s made it clear that he’ll pull the plug on the project if I don’t sort this out. Deborah, I bloody well hate to ask this, but—”
“She won’t be safe here,” Deborah told Narissa. She detailed her father’s news-viewing habits as well as his opinions on the subject of Boluwatife Akin’s disappearance. She went on to explain her husband’s position in the matter: this is something for the police to handle. “If you bring her here, one of them will ring the local station. I swear it, Narissa. My dad believes Charles Akin, start to finish. My husband doesn’t want us involved in what he sees as a police situation. I hope you know I’d take her in an instant, but I can’t get either of them on board with the idea of her actually being in danger.”
Narissa cursed quietly. Deborah said to her, “What about that woman you ring?”
“What woman? What are you talking about?”
“The woman from your meeting?”
“Victoria?” She was silent for a moment.
“Could she keep her for a night or two?”
“If Zawadi finds out I’ve moved her, she’ll pull the bloody plug. Jesus on the Cross, none of this would happen if Zawadi would start using protection orders.”
“Protection orders?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know about them, Deborah. Jesus. Never mind. You’re white, you’ve got buckets of it, so why would you?”
“Buckets of what?”
“Chelsea? Please.”
“All right. All right. I’d say sorry, but we’ve been there, haven’t we? What’s a protection order, please?”
“A weapon against FGM. It puts parents on notice, requires them to hand over their passports, lets them know they’ll be arrested, charged, and probably convicted if they cut their daughter or have someone else do it. Anyone can file one, but Zawadi won’t use them. If she would do, Bolu could go home straightaway.”
“So why won’t she—”
“Because she sees protection orders as just another way whites can pretend to be helping while simultaneously doing sod all to improve anyone’s life. And in case you haven’t noticed, Zawadi does not believe in the ‘good works’ of white people, anyway—inverted commas. Since it was white people who came up with the idea of protection orders—”
“Hang on. Are you saying that protection orders have the support of no Black activists?”
“I don’t mean that. There’re plenty of Black supporters. But Zawadi believes that far too many people are involved in obtaining a protection order, and they’re generally white people. She believes it’s easier and quicker to place a potential victim into the home of a supportive anti-FGM family.”
“For how long, though?”
“Just till social workers can establish a relationship that ensures the girl won’t ever be cut.”
But of course that was exactly what Charles Akin and his wife were refusing to do: establish a relationship with a social worker. It was a matter of principle to them, and so far it seemed that they would not relent.
Because she couldn’t risk bringing Bolu into her home to ease Narissa’s conflict with her parents, Deborah took the decision to speak with Zawadi about Bolu, her parents, protection orders, and the entire situation the very next morning. She managed to get Zawadi’s home address from Narissa, and in advance of going to Orchid House for another photography session, she went early to Kennington.
She found the address she was looking for in Hillingdon Street. It was an immense building of grey concrete, with laundry hanging limply on balconies—hoping for a drying breeze—and satellite dishes winking in the sun. She could have been anywhere in town and she’d find these towers. This particular one was set among four others, a stone’s throw from Kennington Park and perhaps a quarter hour’s walk from The Oval.
Deborah was just getting out of her car when Zawadi drove past her, herself heading towards the tower blocks, not away from them. She braked when, apparently, in her rearview mirror, she saw Deborah waving. She reversed the car, came up alongside her, and lowered her window. Before she had a chance to ask what Deborah was doing there, Deborah herself asked if she and Zawadi could talk about Boluwatife Akin.
Zawadi’s eyes narrowed. “What about her? If you’re here to pry information out of me—”
“Narissa rang me last night. She wanted to bring her to me, but my dad’s siding with Bolu’s dad, and my husband . . . It’s just that I can’t trust either of them.” Deborah gave Zawadi the same information that Narissa had given to her: her parents, the advent of the police, the discovery of Bolu in Narissa’s flat.
Zawadi greeted all this with an admirable stillness. She contemplated Deborah for a good stretch of seconds before she said, “Come with me.” She drove into the car park that served the closest tower. When Deborah parked alongside her, she was grabbing a shoulder bag from her car’s back seat. She gave Deborah a glance and said, “I’ve had to do the school run today. Have you rung the flat?”
“I’ve only just arrived. I didn’t know you had children, Zawadi.”
“Ned. He’s twelve. So what do you want, exactly? If you can’t take Bolu, what’ve we got to talk about?”
“Actually, I thought . . . perhaps in your flat?”
Zawadi looked at her watch and said, “Ten minutes, then,” and she led the way to the tower. Inside the building, she rang for the lift, and while they waited, she said, “I expect your dad saw the television interview.”
“He’s followed the story from the start. It’s to do with my being his only child. He feels for her dad. He believes him.”
Zawadi looked at her, head to toe in that way she had, telegraphing disapproval and dislike. “What about you?”
“I’m on your side completely when it comes to FGM. But if you don’t mind . . . ?” She indicated the lift, meaning, Can we wait?
The lift arrived and once inside, Zawadi pressed the button for the seventh floor. There, she led the way down a dim corridor. There were lights aplenty hanging from the ceiling, but more of them were burnt out rather than actually illuminating the space. The walls were a bit of a patchwork, where tagging had been painted over without bothering to match the colour exactly or even—in some cases—remotely. Originally, the walls appeared to be yellow—one of those depressing shades that make an appearance in council housing throughout the country—but they were now mottled: cream, beige, mint green, pink, and white doing the honours. Nothing hung on them save a cork bulletin board halfway down. Zawadi’s flat was next to this.
Inside, things were in the kind of disarray that attends the presence of a child, a jumble in need of someone to straighten it out. Most of it consisted of items belonging to an active boy: a small drone, a remote-control racing car, Rollerblades, board games, a skateboard, an Xbox, trainers, several footballs. There was a single bedroom with two beds in it. There didn’t seem to be an adult male in residence.
Zawadi appeared to read Deborah’s mind because she said, “It’s the two of us, me and Ned. His dad found someone he liked better.”
Zawadi didn’t look like someone who was planning to sit, so Deborah remained on her feet and tried to work out how she was going to approach a subject liable to make Zawadi’s brain explode. She thought about where and how to begin. She decided upon, “It’s this. I find I’m having some doubts about Bolu’s parents.”
