“What did you say to her?” Solange asked her daughter. She dropped her hand from her forehead.
Rosie replied with, “Maman, she was dangling out hope to him. That’s what she does. I wanted her to stop it, so I told her. What difference does it make? She didn’t love him. She didn’t want him. She didn’t want a baby with him, she—”
“Of course she wanted a baby with him!” Solange cried. “They tried and tried but she was damaged. She’d been damaged for nearly thirty years.”
Rosie stared at her mother. She looked at Nkata. He kept his face without expression. Rosie said, “What do you mean, damaged?”
Solange began to weep. She tried to speak. Failing, she got to her feet and hurried from the room.
Rosie turned to Nkata. “What did she mean?”
He saw no purpose in keeping her in the dark, so he said, “Your sister got cut bad b’fore you were born. In Nigeria.”
“What d’you mean, cut bad?”
“She got circumcised. Or whatever you want to call it. Serious bad, this was. I expect they”—with a nod at the door to indicate her parents—“di’n’t want you to know. Or she di’n’t want you to know.”
Rosie swallowed. Her lips looked quite dry. “You’re lying,” she said. “That’s what the police do. They lie to people to get them to talk about things they don’t want to talk about.”
“Not the case,” he said. “On the telly, p’rhaps, but not for real. And with this, there wouldn’t be any need to lie.”
“But Ross never said. He would’ve said. He would’ve told me.”
“Could be he di’n’t want you in his private business. I mean his business with your sister. Could be he knew she di’n’t want you told. Could be he respected that.”
“She didn’t want him. He was over her.” Her gaze dropped from Nkata’s face to the floor. She added, “Oh . . . please.”
THE MOTHERS SQUARE
LOWER CLAPTON
NORTH-EAST LONDON
Changing the soiled sheets on Lilybet’s bed gave Mark Phinney the opportunity he wanted. It was always a two-person job, this morning made exigent because of the foul-smelling excretion that had seeped from Lilybet’s body and her nappy during the night. So disgusting was the odour that he found he could not breathe through his nose. Pete managed to, despite the smell. He couldn’t understand how she was able. But then, she had always been a woman fully capable of rising to whatever occasion needed her to be involved in it.
She looked as she always looked, despite the early hour. She was calm and composed, her white T-shirt tucked neatly into her blue jeans and her hair swept back and fixed behind her ears. There were grey strands in it here and there. She would never be bothered to colour them.
They’d done the cleanup of Lilybet together, one of them stripping her of her pyjamas and nappy as the other held her upright. He had sponged off the residue of her accident—as they always called it—while Pete murmured and comforted her with a soft song comprising nonsense words set to “Con Te Partiró” by that blind Italian bloke whose name he could never recall. After the sponging, they transferred Lilybet to the bath, and they were in the midst of washing her from head to toe when Robertson arrived. He called out a hello, to which Mark responded, “In here,” and the nurse searched them out. Mark heard him pause at Lilybet’s bedroom door and say, “Oh dear,” and then call to them, “Shall I handle this or help with the bath?” It didn’t matter to Mark as both needed to be done. It mattered to Pete, who said, “The bed please, Robertson,” because she didn’t want Lilybet to be humiliated by what was going on despite no one knowing if humiliation was in her repertoire of reactions.
It was fine with him, Mark thought. It gave him more time to consider what Pete might have taken to one of Paulie’s two pawnshops. It also gave him more time to consider why she’d needed—or wanted—to pawn anything in the first place. He didn’t know which worried him more: the what of it or the why.
He asked himself if he truly needed or even wanted an answer to either of the questions. Was it any of his business? Under normal circumstances he might have said it was not. Under the circumstances of her having known about Teo and having also communicated with Teo, he had to say it was.
He knew the physical part of his relationship with Teo would not bother her. Whether it comprised actual intercourse or something short of intercourse, she would not worry. She’d been encouraging him for years to find—as she put it—a release. And while she didn’t know that the way he’d wanted Teo and fantasised about Teo had come to very little in the end, what she’d apparently worked out was exactly to what extent his heart—rather than his body—was compromised. Here was her terror set before her: that her own encouragement of his sexual infidelity may have led him to find someone with whom he could have a complete relationship, that he might then leave her—Pete—because he’d come to see that the half life she offered was far less than what he’d thought he could endure. He knew that the fear of desertion had long been the reason that Pete shouldered most of the burden of caring for their daughter. More than anything, she wanted to seem fully capable of handling everything so that he wouldn’t leave.