Exhaustion leaves her unsteady on her feet, so with care I place my palm at her back, guide her towards the bed and sit her down.
Miss Dorothy looks at me, the pain of all that she’s gone through deepening the cloudiness in her aging eyes. The earlier bloom in her cheeks is gone. ‘I had two names all picked out for the first baby. Mark or Milly. That first one never opened up their eyes when they arrived in this world.’ I gasp, but she doesn’t stop. ‘The second one I was going to name Benson or Beverly. That one was born with no breath in her body. I never bothered naming the third or the fourth.’
Then she almost lifts off the bed with a burst of life. Her gaze glitters brightly. ‘Now, number five when she moved in my belly it was like a dancer up at Notting Hill Carnival.’ Her palm taps away to the beat of a tune only she knows. She giggles. ‘And she made me start eating apples with pepper sauce on. Spicy and so full of life was my Hope. That’s why I called her Hope. She brought hope into my life after those four poor souls slipped away from me.’
The veins in her neck begin to throb. ‘Her Majesty’s police force, that’s what they’re called. Let me tell you something’ – she’s pointing now – ‘the Queen would ask for her name back if she knew what they were doing. When I went to the police at first they told me to come back in twenty-four hours. When I came back they changed their tune to she’s probably run away. Next, they’re asking me if I wasn’t sure she was mixed up with a gang.’
How could the police treat the distraught mother of a missing young woman like that? Shame on them!
‘I know my girl. She wouldn’t run off. She wasn’t mixed up in nothing criminal.’ Her neck lengthens. ‘I was tired of their rubbish. Do you know what I did? I marched into that police station one day and refused to leave. Even when they said they’d sling me in a cell I wouldn’t go. I stood there in the middle of the reception singing “How Great Thou Art” over and over again.’
I see it in my head. This ordinary woman, a normal mum, singing and staunch in her refusal to be kicked around any more. My grandmother pulls up her sleeve and reveals a chunky silver bracelet on her bony wrist. Inwardly I cringe because it’s a silver rope bracelet in the shape of a snake, its head at one end, the tail at the other. I see the serpent with the red beady eyes on the DNA box staring through me, the serpent knocker eating its tail on the door of the Suzi Lake Centre. She pulls it off.
‘This was my mother’s, and I was going to pass it on to Hope when she turned twenty-five.’ She places it around my wrist explaining, ‘The shape of the snake is a symbol of the circle of life. We are born, we live, and death takes us on a new journey. And today, the path of my life on this earth has taken on new meaning.’ She caresses my cheek. ‘You, my beautiful granddaughter, have given my life the greatest new meaning of all.’
She gets to her feet and walks towards the hats on the wall. Grandmother takes down the green fedora and faces me. ‘Hope always insisted on wearing this style of hat. She loved that girl group . . . Now, what were they called . . . ? Two sisters from London . . . Del and Sin.’ Her fingers click. ‘Mel and Kim. Hope loved to dress like them and sing their tunes.’
Suddenly I see Hope in here. Singing, dancing and laughing, wrapped in the glory of what it means to be a happy young woman.
With great satisfaction and fanfare, Hope’s mother fits one of the fedoras on my head. She fixes it this way and that until she steps back nodding and grinning. To be wearing something that my mother wore too, my body is where her body was, our breaths dancing in the same place beneath the brim of this hat, leaves me speechless and on the point of emotional collapse. Grandmother senses the turmoil I’m going through and takes my hand in hers.
‘I miss her too.’
Then she gently leads me on to the landing so I can see myself in the mirror. There’s a photo of Hope tucked into the corner. She’s not alone. My jaw literally drops because the shock I feel is staggering. No way. Are my eyes deceiving me? Quickly, I take out my phone and get up the photo of the women in the office at the Suzi Lake Centre. This time I turn my attention to the second row of women. To the young woman on the far right wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses with the ends of two chunky blond cornrows lying over her shoulders. All this time she was in plain sight. I hold my phone and her image against the woman next to Hope in the photo tucked into Miss Dorothy’s mirror.
Urgently I turn to my grandmother. ‘Who is the other young woman with Hope?’