I don’t know if there’s a God, but if there is, one day I will have to stand before him and explain myself, and I can’t. Nothing excuses what I did, all I can do is hope desperately that I will have done enough with my life to atone for the hurt and the harm my mean, gleefully spiteful, unthinking malice has caused, and that I’ve maybe earned the right to at least ask for the mercy I don’t know that I’ll ever deserve.
I know Bobby feels the same way. Perhaps one day our mother will forgive us for being what we were and take us to herself way she did her beloved Nicky, who wasn’t even her son, but who loved her more than life itself.
*
After two long years of endless court hearings, dismissals, re-filings, and court appearance after court appearance, the Court of Appeal finally made the jaw-dropping decision that my dad had committed crimes against The United States of America, and could be handed over to the Federal authorities. We watched in helpless shock as they led my dad out of the court and straight to a prisoner transport to take him directly to Heathrow Airport, so he could be handed over and punished for his so-called crimes by a country notorious for ridiculously heavy-handed sentences. Watching him being led away in handcuffs was the hardest thing I’d ever had to endure, because I knew, I just knew, we were never going to see him again. He seemed to know it, too, because he never even looked-up to see us one last time as they led him away.
And now the hard slog began; Bobby and I had very little money, just two savings accounts dad had set-up for us that were haemorrhaging cash we desperately needed to stay alive. With no income, Bobby and I were sunk; if we wanted to eat, we were going to have to dig-in and start looking for work. We trudged miles following-up ads in local papers, in the Jobcentre, information boards in shop-windows and supermarkets, anything we could think of, but always there was nothing for teenage boys without any kind of qualifications. Dad had had us home-schooled, but had never sent us for any public examinations, because he thought they were for losers; we were going to inherit his businesses and he didn’t think we needed a piece of paper to take over from him, he’d decide how qualified we were.
Predictably enough, the job-market for teenage boys with no formal schooling was pretty limited. Bobby got lucky and landed a dogsbody, zero-hours contract job with the local council, meaning he only worked when they called him in, and only paid him minimum wage for the hours he did work, cutting grass verges and road-sweeping, a pointless, grinding, minimum-wage job with no prospects. I wasn’t quite nineteen by then, and I couldn’t find anything, so Bobby slogged away at his thankless job while I hung around the house wearing most of my clothes to keep warm, saving heat and hot water for when we really needed it, and just killed time until Bobby got home so I could light a fire to warm up a little and have someone to talk to.
Eventually, out of sheer boredom, I started rummaging through the house just to keep myself occupied, and make myself tired enough to sleep (and, in the winter, keep warm; we couldn’t afford to keep the heating on, we could barely afford basic utilities like gas and electricity). The house was a huge, echoing barn of a place, built in the days when labour was cheap and everyone who could afford it wanted a mansion to overawe the neighbours with. There were six bedroom suites, each comprising of a large master bedroom, dressing-room/maid’s room, and a bathroom, which used to have a high-backed cast-iron enamel bathtub and polished copper pipes everywhere. Those antique bathtubs were taken away, of course when the courts stripped the house for valuables for auction; they would command a high price from the interior designer, retro, and vintage stores.
I worked my way through the rooms, scavenging anything we could use, although there was precious little of that; anything too ramshackle or damaged was left behind, while all the good stuff was carted away. It was during one of these scavenging tours that I decided to go through the piles of boxes and crates of dad’s papers in one of the attics, stuff that had been returned as being ‘of no evidential value’ according to the Crown Prosecution Service labels slapped on them. I had nothing better to do, so eventually, sheer boredom drove me to rifle through them to see if there was anything interesting or valuable in there. At first it was just tedious and dull; store receipts for clothing, supermarket till receipts, Bobby’s and my old exercise books, incomplete tax returns, letters and documents from his business associates full of wordy paragraphs about dull things, the kind of stuff that ends up in landfill.
One of those boxes turned up a few surprises, through; I kept coming across mention of an Ayesha Shahida, and increasingly, documents with her name and signature, and, finally, fragments of paperwork from a hospital in East London that hinted at the possibility that this Ayesha person had given birth around the time Bobby was born. That set me back on my heels; was this woman the mysterious ‘mother’ dad had always refused to discuss with us, or even allowed to be mentioned? Was she in fact Bobby and my mother? Barbara obviously wasn’t our mother, she was Nicky’s mother, but Nicky was older than us, so why did his mother live with us, while there was no sign of mine? Was it possible this Ayesha person was more than just a name on a few pieces of paper?
The more I dug and waded through those boxes and boxes of paper, the more I became convinced Ayesha Shahida was somehow connected to Bobby and me. All I had was hints, and scraps of paper that individually didn’t really say anything much, but put together they began to paint a picture of someone who had a long-standing, possibly even family connection, to dad, and Bobby and me.
I tried to involve Bobby in what I thought I’d found, but he wasn’t interested; his life was taken up with being the breadwinner, and he was too busy being sunk in depression and nursing his anger to take any notice of anything I had to say.
Eventually, after wading through piles and piles of meaningless papers, I struck gold; a torn-up envelope addressed to ‘Ayesha Shahida’, in dad’s handwriting, stamped but never used, for an address in Dalston, North-East London, in the London borough of Hackney. Finally, I had something, and once again I tried to involve Bobby; perhaps it would lead to this mysterious mother of ours who was never mentioned, or at least to someone who had a connection of some kind with my dad. Bobby didn’t care, he was too sunk in anger and depresion to give a fig, so I made an executive decision, took (let’s be honest: I stole) the emergency fund Bobby had stashed under his bed, 200 in all (which I do feel guilty about even today, when so much has happened; it was all he had socked away for a rainy day) and headed out on my quest to find out who we really were.
*
London was a long, long journey from Carlisle, travelling on the cheaper (but still crushingly expensive) stopping services as I was to conserve the meagre funds I had; endless stops at every rural train station, multiple train changes at obscure, out of the way railway stations and halts, a long and wearying journey zig-zagging down the length and breadth of England, but I kept going because I felt sure I was on the verge of something that would change our lives, hopefully for the better, because let’s face it; it couldn’t get any worse…
Arriving in London was a confusing, scary experience; the place is vast, with a capital ‘V’; just looking out through the row of glass doors at Euston Train Terminus to the Euston Road was intimidating; I’d never seen so much traffic, so many people, such huge buses in my entire life, and I sat for what seemed like hours trying to work out how to find this place, ‘Dalston’. As luck would have it, I spotted a newsagent, and in the window, a map book titled ‘London A-Z’. Bingo, there was my map.
Using my London street-map, I was able to locate the road I was looking for, and, after a few wrong turns, and a little guesswork, I found the address I was looking for, an imposing three-storey Victorian terraced house with a front garden, black iron railings, and high, impressive bow windows. And that’s when my nerve failed; supposing this Ayesha Shahida person didn’t live here anymore? Supposing she wanted nothing to do with me? Maybe she wasn’t our mother, or maybe she was, and wanted nothing to do with either of us? At this point I had no other option; most of the money I’d lifted from poor Bobby was gone, I was alone in London hundreds of miles from anywhere I knew, so I might as well take a shot, and play it by ear from there.
I’ll be honest with you; knocking on that door was one of the hardest things I’d ever done; supposing this Ayesha person only vaguely knew of dad, supposing the elaborate scenario I’d concocted in my head was nothing but wish-fulfilment, and she was nothing but one of dad’s shadowy business contacts? But I knocked, and waited, then waited some more, but nothing.
Just as I’d decided this was not going to happen, that it was just a red herring, and I’d wasted my time and money, I heard the lock being turned, and the door was opened by a handsome Indian woman with thick, wavy, dark mahogany hair, golden olive skin, and bright, light green-hazel eyes that looked like they were lit from behind.
“Can I help you…?” she began, but her voice trailed off as she stared at me, with something like veiled hostility, although I could have been wrong; reading other people was not one of my strong suits back then.