I slumped back, stomach full and body fully relaxed for the first time in I don’t know how long. Tension I wasn’t even aware of, that had been a part of me for so long it had become normal, had finally been sponged away. Yasmin patted my knee and took the tray away.
“Get some rest, Richard, mummy will want to talk to you in the morning, it’s late… or really, really early; either way, you’re tired, we’ll all talk in the morning. Goodnight… big brother!”
“… Ricky… ” I murmured, and she stopped and looked back at me. “What say…?” she grinned, and I repeated myself, a little louder.
“Ricky, please, call me Ricky… ” and she nodded. “Ricky it is, gotcha; don’t go ‘way now!”
*
Daylight in my eyes woke me, a moment spent wondering where I was, then memory and realisation put me straight. I stretched luxuriously, feeling marvellously rested and at peace, considering the day was going to get worse, because hadn’t Ayesha warned me? So I luxuriated in my one moment of complete peace, letting the apprehension wait until I was ready to deal with it.
“Good morning, how are you feeling?” said a soft voice, and I looked around to see Ayesha smiling at me.
“How old are you, Richard? Because when you’re sleeping, you look so young, but you have to be, what, nearly twenty, am I right?”
“Almost nineteen,” I replied, “and Bobby’s nearly twenty; there’s only a year between us. And please, call me Rick, or Ricky, or Ritchie; no-one ever called me Richard.”
Ayesha came to her feet, leaning on her cane, and indicated a bathrobe and towels and my clothes folded neatly on the other armchair.
“Go and get a shower, you know where the bathroom is, there are some disposable razors and toothbrushes in the cabinet, then come down and we’ll have some breakfast together, just like family… ” She grinned when she said it, to defuse any sting I might have felt at her words.
“Yasmin’s not here, she had to go to school and finish up a few odds and ends after her finals, and Shari’s down at the office, taking care of some things for me, so it’s just you and me this morning, so we’ll have that talk when you’re done. Go on now; I’ll be here when you come back down.”
*
After the best, hottest, most luxurious shower I’d ever had, properly shaved, brushed, and combed, and dressed in my freshly laundered and pressed, clean-smelling clothes, I made my way back down to the sitting room.
“In here, Ricky,” I heard her call, and I followed her voice into the dining room, where something smelled delicious. Ayesha was busy laying the table and she stopped dead, dropping the napkin she was holding as she stared at me.
“My God, you look just like, just like your… just like… ” she stammered, while I stared at her in puzzlement; what had I done now, and what the hell was she talking about?
“I’m sorry…?” I began, and she flushed, her face reddening.
“It’s nothing, I’m sorry, Rich… sorry, Ricky, for one second there you looked just like… never mind, breakfast is ready, please, sit, eat, don’t let it get cold.”
Hot food, hot, tasty food, food like I’d never had before was a dazzling experience; from my perspective now, when I look back on how my life turned, it was simple food, the kind of breakfast millions of people probably have every day of their lives, but for me, it was a revelation; grilled bacon, fried eggs, sausage, grilled tomatoes, hot toast with butter running through it, nothing special or gourmet, but to me, compared to how I’d been living, it was a magical feast, the best, most wonderful things I’d ever eaten.
“Eat as much as you want, Ricky, then we’ll talk, while Yasmin and Shereen are away; right now, I don’t need Shari’s interruptions, and I don’t want Yasmin hearing what I have to say. Eat up and we’ll get this over with, then you can decide what you want to do next, OK?”
I didn’t need telling twice, and I pitched in with a will, and no matter how much I ate, there was always more. When I finally pushed my plate away I was stuffed full, happy and satisfied in a way I’d never been before; there’s a world of difference between getting-by on mediocre grub you eat just to keep yourself alive, and filling up with simple, tasty food that satisfies like nothing ever did before, and I felt strong, together, fit, and ready to fight lions, which something told me I was about to do.
*
Breakfast over and cleared away, Ayesha told me to go wait for her in the sitting room. When she joined me, her mood had changed; during breakfast she’d been friendly, helpful, polite, chatty, even, and had gone to great pains to put me at my ease. Now she looked stern, grim, almost.
“Ricky,” she began, “I want you to understand that none of this reflects on you, do you understand? Your family and mine have a lot of history together, none of it good, and I still feel anger, so much anger, but you must remember, none of this is your fault; if you didn’t need to know this I wouldn’t tell you, but you need to know the truth, and that… creature, your father, will never be able to tell you, or even admit to any of it. I want you to know that I won’t enjoy any of this, do you understand? I hardly know you, but what I’ve seen makes me hope that things will change, that maybe you will make the difference; remember, that Richard Davies, remember that and hold on to it!”
My throat was dry; suddenly I didn’t want to be here, but I knew I had to be; too many secrets and lies had surrounded me for too long, I needed to clear it all away so I could be normal, perhaps with my new family to be there for me. I nodded at her, telling her I was ready to do this.
“Do you remember yesterday, when I showed you my back? That I told you your father did that to me?” I nodded, and she kept going.
“He did that to me because he could; he did it to your brother, he did it to Nicky’s mother, and he did it to Barbara, your poor mother. Robert Davis stole everything I had, he took every last thing I owned, he beat me, he raped me countless times, and he destroyed everything I had, my place in my family, my business everything. And why? Because he wanted what I had, that was the only reason he needed. Your father was a sadistic criminal, a true psychopath, why should he work when he could just take, so he took, and he took, and he took!”
Her eyes were hard and bitter, glistening rocks that stared into my soul, and I couldn’t look away.
“If all he wanted were just things, well and good; but that wasn’t enough; he wanted to own me, for me to know I was his slave, his little chilli-cracker plaything to use and mistreat whenever he pleased, and that’s all I was to him. When he found out I was pregnant with Shereen he beat me so badly he nearly killed me; children with me wasn’t part of his plan, I was just there to be used while he took my business, stole my money, gambled and lost my property, everything I’d worked and saved for. He bankrupted my parents and made them disown me, he destroyed my name in our community and any chance for marriage and a family of my own. He took all that away.”
Something she’d just said struck a chord and I went back, looked at it, and shook my head; that couldn’t be right!
“I… I’m sorry, could you back up a second, please? You just called Barbara my mother, you’re wrong, she was Nicky’s mother, not mine…”
Ayesha shook her head.
“No, Richard, Barbara wasn’t Nicky’s mother, she was yours, you and Robert; your father abducted Nicky from his mother, his first wife, when he was a toddler; Barbara brought him up, but she was your mother, not his… ”
My jaw dropped in shock; now it all made sense, why Nicky’s “mother” was still hanging around our family; it was because she was my mother; we’d had our mother with us all along! That fucking bastard! As the thought rang through me, everything else clanged along with it; how we’d ignored and disrespected her, how we’d followed our father’s lead and treated her like a servant, the way we’d grin when we heard dad abusing her, our smirks and snide comments listening to her begging dad to stop hurting her, the grossly disrespectful way we’d behaved at her funeral, it all came back home to roost, and then I felt the sick horror that came with knowing I’d been a willing part of all that, that I’d been a part of what he’d done, everything he’d done… to my own mother!
Ayesha looked at me levelly and murmured “You didn’t know… ” but we did; we knew decent people didn’t behave like we did, we knew that was not how you treated people, and we didn’t care, because we were better than her, so we did it anyway.
Ayesha handed me a glass of water and I drank mechanically, blankly, horrified almost beyond bearing at what I’d heard, knowing there was yet worse to come…
“Please… finish it… ” I murmured, bracing myself to hear the rest. Ayesha stared at me for a few seconds, and nodded.
“Robert Davies was a monster, a racist pig who loved hurting people, me, anyone, it was what he got off on, he… took me, he beat me, he hurt me so many times, and why? Because he could, that’s why; whenever he came to London he’d show up here, drag me into his bed, knock me around, and leave me bruised and bloody, and I had no-one to help me, and because I had no-one to help me, he kept coming back. When he was finished with me he’d slap me around, call me names like ‘Paki whore’ and ‘chilli-cracker’ and ‘wog’, he did it in front of his daughters, and tell me he was going to sell them too, because no white man was going to want a chilli-cracker, but he knew plenty of men who wanted to one to play with, and when the girls were old enough, and pretty enough, he was going to sell them, because they were little whores too; he had real children already, white children, what did he need half-breed chilli-crackers for?”
My stomach was heaving with disgust as the story unfolded; I couldn’t believe my dad would do things like that, but a small voice inside me kept shouting that yes, of course he could, because I’d always known what he was really like.
“How…” I murmured, and she bit her lip, tears starting in her eyes.
“When I left university, I graduated with a first-class degree in business administration, with an honour in economics; I borrowed money from my father and began a property renovation and leasing business, buying up derelict residential and small industrial premises and remodelling them, renting and leasing them back out again, it was small-scale at first, but this is London, people need places to live, places to work, to do business, and my business grew. Your father and his cronies heard about me, they saw a woman alone turning a small business into a financial success and they wanted it, so they took it from me, they moved in on me, they grabbed everything I’d worked and planned so hard for, and your father was the worst of them; he was the ringleader, it was all his plan, his get-rich-quick scheme; why work a business when you can just hijack one?”