“Of course. I’m due at home anyway.”
“Where d’you live?”
“Chelsea.”
Narissa hooted and rolled her eyes. “Why, of course you do.”
RIDLEY ROAD MARKET
DALSTON
NORTH-EAST LONDON
He told Sophie. Her comments were, “Oh my God. I can’t believe . . . Is your mum . . . ? Do you even know why she . . . ?,” all of which came tumbling out of her. But he had no answers to anything, so it was just as well that she could not even articulate the questions. He’d revealed to her that, yes, there was something in his father’s life and yes, it could have been used to force his father to cooperate except it wasn’t illegal, and his mother knew all about it.
Sophie couldn’t understand it. She couldn’t get her mind round it, she said. Neither could he. But once it became clear to him how pointless it was to threaten his father with blackmail over Lark, he knew he had to start thinking in another direction.
Tani considered bringing Simi into the picture at that point, telling her about Abeo’s second family, about Monifa’s knowledge of the second family, and about the plan to offer Simi to some Nigerian bloke willing to pay a bride price. But he knew there was a risk involved. To reveal all of this to her very likely would prompt her to go directly to their mother and ask her if what Tani had said was true. Monifa would deny it. And that would be that. Simi trusted their mother one hundred percent. It was Tani’s job to create a fissure in that trust, and he had no idea how to do that.
What he could do, though, was to make his sister ready to disappear in preparation for the moment when he made her understand that she had to disappear. That meant first packing up some of her belongings into his old rucksack. He went to Simi’s end of their clothes cupboard and fished there for garments suitable for the summer heat. He went to the chest of drawers and scored underthings and T-shirts. From beneath her bed, he brought out some of the items she used when making head wraps or decorating her charity-shop clothing. In each case, he took just enough so as not to raise Simi’s suspicion should she rustle round her clothing or her decorative supplies prior to his removing her from Mayville Estate. All of this went into the rucksack and the rucksack itself went into his side of the clothes cupboard, pushed to the back, ready to be grabbed at a moment’s notice.
Then he had to ponder where to take his sister when the time was right. There didn’t appear to be many options. The best seemed to be in Ridley Road Market. Simi knew any number of people there. He merely needed to speak to them carefully in order to ascertain if one of them would temporarily hide his sister until he could come up with a better plan for her safety.
He walked to the market. He understood that he had to be careful. Conversations in the market were water in a sieve, and confidential had never made it into anyone’s vocabulary. He reckoned that the people most familiar with Simi would also be the people most familiar with Monifa and Abeo. It wasn’t likely that those people would help out with removing Simi from her home for the simple fact that doing so crossed a line among them, one that differentiated market business from family business. Thus, he had to cross Talatu off the list as well as Masha and anyone else who worked at the cake decorating place above the party shop.
When he arrived, Ridley Road was a din of music, conversations, haggling, and bagging. It was crowded this early in the day. Half the street was in shadow from the nearby buildings, and perishables had been moved to this shade even though neither the hour nor the shadows were doing much to mitigate the heat.
Tani decided upon the hair salon. He knew that Simi had gone to the same salon any number of times to watch the stylists fashion cornrows, add extensions, and create styles with braided hair. His problem was that there were four salons in Ridley Road, and he couldn’t remember which of them Simi had visited.
He got lucky on his second try. Inside Xhosa’s Beauty, he discovered two stylists who were acquainted with his sister. One of them was called Bliss, the other Tiombe. When they saw Tani in the doorway, Bliss whistled appreciatively and Tiombe looked him over head to toe and said, “Mmmm, mmmm! Look what’s for lunch.” Everyone laughed.
Obviously, these were women who were not cowed by men. This was a good thing because once Abeo started looking for Simi, the kind of person who was sheltering her couldn’t shrink in his presence or in the face of his anger.
He said, looking from Bliss to Tiombe to Bliss, “Wondering if I could have a word?”
To which they responded in unison, “Now?”