“I don’t. Really. Do you ever feel like that, Tommy?”
“Most days I feel exactly like that, thinking if I only try this, or if I only turned things this way instead of that, if I only considered one more point in addition to everything else I’ve tried or done . . . surely I’ll have the result I want. But that’s where we all get lost, I think. With hanging our hats on what I want when we could be hanging them on something new. Or something different. Or something unexpected, for that matter.”
“I see that. There’s no prescription for living, is there.”
“If only there were.” He ran a knife round the side of the steak and kidney pie sans kidney and let it release its fragrant steam. He upended it onto his plate. He forked up a courgette and examined it for its gustatory possibilities. “I’d offer to come down,” he told her, “but I’m afraid I can’t.”
“No need. But . . .”
He waited. She did not go on. He would have thought they’d been disconnected but he could hear faint noise in the background, probably from the inn’s car park.
She finally said, “But I find I would love to have you here, and I don’t quite know why.”
“Ah.”
“？‘Ah’？ That’s all?”
“Should there be more?” he asked her.
“That’s the question, isn’t it.”
“Still and always, Daidre.”
“Gwyn’s just come out of the inn, Tommy. I expect she’s wondering what’s happened to me. I must join her. But may I say . . . Our conversation? It’s been quite helpful.”
“Has it? I’m happy you rang, then. I would have been happy in any event, but I expect you know that already.”
“I do know that. And thank you for it, Tommy.”
“Enjoy your dinner.”
“I will.”
He hoped he could do the same. The courgette, he reckoned, would provide the answer. To that, if to nothing else.
13 AUGUST
BRIXTON
SOUTH LONDON
Monifa Bankole wasn’t a prisoner, but she felt like one, even if the prison was one of her own making. She could easily leave the Nkatas, true. Alice wished her company at the café today, but she could refuse to go. Or she could walk off on her own on the way to the place and raise a ruckus if Alice tried to stop her. Or, for the matter, she could go along to the café and slip off while Alice was busy with cooking or with customers. But doing any of that did not put her closer to restoring her children to her. There was only one way to gain access to them.
The detective sergeant had made that clear before he left for work. He was going to be honest with her, he said. He told her that Mercy Hart—she who had been Easter Lange—was now in police custody.
Mercy would this morning be questioned for the second time, the detective sergeant told her. The subjects of interest were going to be practicing medicine without a licence and performing female genital mutilation. Now, she’d been clever and the clinic had been—for better or worse—clean of concrete and unassailable evidence of FGM. Because of this, the key to charging her with that part of her criminal behaviour lay at Monifa’s feet. This key constituted her statement—from A to Z—written in her own hand about the clinic and her experience there.
“You think about wha’s right to do, Missus Bankole,” he’d said before he left the flat. “Both for you and for your kids. You got my card so you c’n ring me whenever.”
When he was gone, she rejoined Alice and Benjamin in the kitchen. If they’d heard their son’s words, they gave no indication. Benjamin was folding the washing. Alice was making him a lunch to take on his bus route. This consisted of what remained from the dinner Monifa had cooked for them the previous night: efo riro, eba, and egg rice. Benjamin Nkata had taken himself to Peckham’s Nigerian and African markets to buy the ingredients.
The dinner had been filled with the sweat and the compliments that generally accompanied a successful Nigerian meal. She’d taken care with her spices and she thought she’d used the heat sparingly, but the first mouthful had sent the detective sergeant to the fridge for milk while his father laughed, saying, “He’s one hundred p’rcent English, our Win. You come back here, Winston, an’ have some food put hair on your eyeballs.”
Now Alice put containers of each dish into Benjamin’s lunch bag while Benjamin finished up what he’d started last night. Monifa had never before seen a man in charge of the family’s washing, but it seemed the Nkatas were full of surprises. After their dinner, he’d gathered up a basket of towels and sheets and clothing and out the door he went to the building’s laundry room, not returning till all of it was both washed and dried.