“She’s down below,” the sound technician told Deborah in answer to her unasked question. “She said she needed a word with Zawadi and that was . . . I dunno . . . thirty minutes ago? We’re on the clock, so it doesn’t matter to me or Elise here, but I don’t know how long we can keep this lot waiting.” She tilted her head towards the girls.
“I’ll see if I can fetch her,” Deborah said. She didn’t want to lose a day of work, which she would do if the girls decided they’d waited long enough and drifted away.
She left the erstwhile chapel that Orchid House occupied at the far end of Trinity Green, a walled-in collection of seventeenth-century almshouses in Mile End Road. As she descended the chapel stairs, she caught a glimpse of an antique bloke watching her from a window in the nearest cottage along the green. She gave him a jaunty wave and, quick as that, he ducked away from the window. She went to a door that was tucked beneath the stairway and opened it. Here were the offices of Orchid House, among them the one belonging to Zawadi, Orchid House’s brusque and rather intimidating founder.
Deborah wasn’t anxious to interrupt whatever Zawadi and Narissa were doing, as the former had greeted her arrival for the first round of taking photos a few days earlier with a dislike she didn’t bother to veil. “Let me tell you this, eh? I don’t want some do-gooding, privileged white cow on this project at all,” had been her greeting. “Jus’ so you know, I want a Black photographer and I mean to find one and when I do, you’re gone. You understand?”
Deborah’s slowly spoken “Right,” and her snappy “I don’t blame you at all,” had seemed to surprise Zawadi. But the surprise lasted only a moment, after which she narrowed her eyes and said, “Go take your bloody pictures, if you can.”
It wasn’t exactly the hearty vote of confidence and approval that she’d hoped for and she’d wondered at first if Zawadi’s displeasure was something she intended to communicate to the girls. But that had not seemed the case, as once the girls had been given—from one of the adult volunteers—an example of what Narissa Cameron wanted from them in front of the camera, the project lurched forward, with Deborah photographing some of the girls while Narissa was filming others. Aside from Zawadi’s marked dislike of her, there had been very little to impede Deborah’s project until this morning.
“Two more days is what I can manage,” was what Deborah heard as she approached Zawadi’s office. “I’m sorry, Zawadi. It’s just that I’ve a contract with my parents. As long as I stay clean, I can use the basement flat. If something violates that, upsets them, offends one of my sisters or my brother . . . ? Who knows what it will take? But if that happens, I’m out on the street. And then I’m done for.”
“Just talk to them. Be up front, be above board, be whatever. They’re reasonable people, yes?”
“I don’t want to make things more difficult than they already are.”
“Things’re always difficult. Haven’t you worked that out yet?”
Deborah coughed to alert them of her presence. She popped into the doorway. Zawadi was sitting behind her desk albeit shoved back from it in her wheeled office chair. She had adopted a position that indicated no compromise: arms beneath her breasts, no hands visible, stoic expression on her face.
“Sorry,” Deborah said to them both. “We’re ready above, Narissa. I’m a little concerned the girls might scarper. Everything all right?”
She knew as soon as she added that last bit that she shouldn’t have, for Zawadi rolled her eyes and came back with, “‘All right?’ Really? When was the las’ time things were all right for any of us?”
Narissa said firmly and—it had to be said—kindly, as if to make up for Zawadi’s hostility, “Everything’s fine. And you’re right: I’ve got to see to my work. We can talk later, eh?” She directed this last to Zawadi. “If you’ll make a few more calls in the meantime . . . Please. I can only do what I can do.”
Zawadi huffed and turned her desk chair so that she didn’t need to look at either of them. As she did so, Deborah followed Narissa to the stairs.
“Try to ignore her,” Narissa said as they ducked outside and round the corner of the building to the stone steps up to the chapel. “She’s been at this for over a decade, and she gets out of sorts when things aren’t running the way she wants them to run.”