Chapter 19 Sixteen Concrete Steps and Too Many Memories
The estate, the social housing project where I grew up, is both the same as I remember it and yet very different.
Karim holds my hand as we walk across what used to be a concrete jungle but now has tubs of greenery, and solar panels, and a small playground full of primary-colored swings and slides. A young mum sits on a bench checking her phone as her toddler plays, swathed in a thick puffer jacket that makes him look entirely round.
The shop is still there, the place where I was sent to buy cigarettes and boxes of off-brand cereal, where I lurked after school. I see the huddled figure of a man behind the security screen, wonder if it is still run by Arif and his sons. They were always nice to me in there, letting me sit in a corner and read magazines for hours on end when I was desperately finding excuses not to go home.
I see the familiar pathways, the steps, the balconies, the doors with wire-meshed windows. I am silent as I look around, taking all this in, feeling the invisible hands of my childhood tighten around my neck.
This is not a place devoid of happy memories, but neither is it a place that makes me smile when I think about it. I had friends I played tag with, neighbors who were kind to me, dogs that would jump up to lick my face when I came home from school.
But it is also the place where I saw my mother cycle in and out of normality, where I spent countless hours and days alone. Where I often went hungry, or felt scared, or simply didn’t know what to do when I was thrust into situations beyond my control and beyond my ability to understand as a child.
It is the place where I first learned the valuable art of counting, where I learned to rely on myself and nobody else, where I learned to stop expecting much of the world. None of those lessons should be learned by the time you are seven.
It is beyond strange to be here again, and I think I may have made a mistake . . .
It is a shock to the system, not only this trip into my own past but the contrast with our trip into the past earlier in the day. Our tour of Tudor London was brilliant, and I think I enjoyed it as much as the students. They took endless photos and dressed up in silly hats and Elizabethan ruffs and listened to everything our guide had to say. I have no idea how much of it they actually registered, and how much they were pretending so that they didn’t get told off, but I was happy enough to take it as a win.
It was good to switch off for a while, to ignore the turmoil in my brain and in my belly, to focus on something far simpler.
By 2:00 p.m., though, it was over. We’d done our tour, had our lunch, and the students were pretty much trembling with excitement at the thought of being let off the leash. Lucy and I gave them The Talk again, made sure they all had our phone numbers, checked they had the address of the hostel and knew they had to be back by six, and uttered the magical words they were all waiting for: “You’re free to go.”
I half expected air punches and cheers, but instead they simply disappeared en masse, a human tangle of backpacks and joy. I said a silent prayer for their safe return, and for the people of London, before saying my goodbyes to Lucy. Apparently, she was off to “the biggest Paperchase in the city.” Part of me wanted to go to the stationery shop with her—looking at notepads would probably be a lot more fun than what I had planned.
Now I am here, and feel all of my grown-up confidence and sense of safety being stripped away from me, one step at a time. I’d kill for an Elizabethan ruff right now.
“This is . . . nice?” says Karim, obviously alarmed by the depth of my silence. I look at him and smile.
“It’s not really, is it?” I reply. “But it is a lot nicer than it was when I was little. We moved around a bit but always stayed on this estate. She lost the flat she was in when she went to prison for a spell, but then got another one here. I always wondered why she didn’t move somewhere else—it was like this place had some sort of hold on her.”
“Maybe she was just too scared to be somewhere she wasn’t used to?” he suggests tentatively.
I think, looking at it now, he is right. She didn’t have much family that I knew of. Didn’t have friends who lasted beyond the next bottle or the next high. Didn’t have much, really—but she did know everybody here. That wasn’t always a good thing, and she wasn’t always known for good reasons, but I suppose it was enough to anchor her down.
“That’s probably true,” I reply. “This was her home, for good or for bad, I suppose.”
“And what about you? Do you see it as home?”
“I think I’m still looking for the place I see as home, Karim. And maybe I’m getting closer, who knows?” He looks around, and I wonder how it all appears to his eyes. He grew up in Birmingham, which has its own places just like this, but I know his family lived in a middle-class suburb. It must be odd for him, trying to match up the me he knows today and the image of me as a child, here.
“I know you were in care when you were a kid,” he says eventually, “but what was she like? What might she be like now, if we find her?”
I frown and find that I can’t even begin to answer the second part of that question.
“I have no idea what she’ll be like now,” I answer. “But as for what she was like then . . . well, she had a mental illness, and she was an addict. I still don’t know which came first, or if one caused the other, or if they just went hand in hand. But the addiction and her lifestyle almost certainly meant that she didn’t get the full benefit of any health care or treatment she was offered—I do remember going with her to doctors’ appointments, sitting outside in the waiting rooms and playing with wooden abacuses and the like.
“She was . . . unpredictable is probably the best word to use. I tell myself she did her best, and I know she did—but it still wasn’t easy. It was all I knew when I was young, though, and kids accept whatever their normal is. They don’t realize it’s not normal, do they, until they’re old enough to glimpse into other people’s lives? I’d go round to friends’ houses for tea or whatever, and it was like being in a different world entirely. There was always food for a start, and they had tellies in their bedrooms, and their mums nagged them about homework. That looked like heaven to me.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, pulling me in for a hug. “I’m sorry you went through all of that.”
“It wasn’t entirely awful,” I reply. “She had some very good days, which I think now probably coincided with when she was feeling well, or maybe when she was on medication that actually worked so she didn’t need to self-medicate? I don’t know for sure. But she could be so much fun, and so loving, on those days. In some ways the contrast made it worse when she wasn’t—and even on those good days, I could never really relax, because I was always waiting for the change. Waiting for the signs that she was feeling bad again.”
I pull away from his embrace, feeling better for the hug, and lead him toward the staircase I’m aiming for.
“And how long is it since you’ve seen her?”
“A long time. At my graduation from uni.”
“Right. Did you just . . . lose touch?”
I can tell that this is confusing for him, raised as he was in a close-knit family, a solid community of people who loved each other. I’m sure he can’t ever imagine losing touch with his sisters and their extended families. They are part of him, part of who he was, who he is, who he will become. His family are his heart—mine was more of a septic appendix.
“Bit by bit. I moved away, but we spoke on the phone now and then, until she changed her number, or got it cut off or whatever. I sent her a Mother’s Day card that year, to this address, with a note inside telling her where I was—but I never heard back. I know this doesn’t cover me in glory, but part of me was relieved—it meant I could reinvent myself completely.”
And I did, maybe too well. I became so independent that the new version of myself needed no one else—and if the last month has taught me anything, it’s that the flip side of that is no one needs you either.
We climb the steps, still the sixteen that I remember, and emerge onto the concrete balcony. I can feel the tension seeping up through my body, my feet reluctant to move on. It is the same feeling I used to have coming home at the end of the school day: a bleak certainty that whatever awaited me was not going to be good. A paralyzing, unformed sense of dread.
Karim feels me tense up and tightens his grip on my hand.
“It’s okay,” he says gently. “I’m here.”
I turn to him and smile.
“Yes. You are. Thank you for that.”
We carry on, and then we are outside the place she last lived, the last address I had for her. This is a place I never even visited in person, but which is only one floor beneath the flat where we lived together when I was a child. It is the exact same layout, the exact same style, built from the same materials. It even smells the same.
I take a deep breath and knock on the door. It is a quiet and halfhearted knock, one that betrays my reluctance, my uncertainty that I am doing the right thing.
I suppose I had been hoping that there would be no answer, that we could leave, flee the scene of the crime; that I could tell myself I’d tried but it simply wasn’t meant to be.
Too soon, I see a figure moving toward us down the hallway, blurred behind the small glass square in the door. I inhale sharply, a rush of emotion flooding through me, wanting so desperately for it to be her and wanting so desperately for it not to be her.
The door opens, and it is not. It is a man in his fifties, bald, a cigarette in his mouth. He looks us up and down suspiciously, and I realize that even in our casual clothes we are too well-dressed.
“Yeah?” he says, breathing out smoke. “Can I help you?”
I can hear the sounds of daytime television in the background, smell just-cooked toast, see past him to the living room. The same living room as ours, on the floor above our heads. It is like nothing has changed. Like I have never left. I freeze. I am suddenly unable to speak. Unable to explain why I am here. Really, I have no idea why I am.
“Hi,” says Karim, after a brief glance at me, “sorry to bother you. We’re looking for a woman called Sharon Jones. I believe she used to live here?”
The man relaxes slightly when he understands that we are not looking for him. That whatever trouble or debt or dispute he was worried about isn’t what has brought these two strangers to his door. That even if we are the police or social services or working for a collection agency, we’re not bothered about harassing him.
“Nah, sorry, mate,” he says, shaking his head. “Nobody here called that. We’ve lived here for about four years now.”
“Do you remember her?” I ask in a hurry as he tries to close the door again. “The woman who was here before? She had red hair. Could be a bit . . . strange sometimes?”
If he was new to the area he might not—but just like my mum, a lot of other people never move on. They just move around, in ever-decreasing circles.
I see him turn it over in his mind, and he answers: “You mean that mad one who shouted a lot?”
I nod. It is a terrible description, an awful thing for a human life to be reduced to—but it is also accurate.
“Yeah. I remember her. I didn’t know she was called that, though, and she wasn’t living here when we moved in—that was a young couple, come from Syria, had a couple of kids so they didn’t want to live by the balcony. Why are you looking for her, love?”
“Do you know what happened to her?” I ask, ignoring his question. “To Sharon Jones? Is she still on the estate?”
“No, don’t think so. To be honest, I heard she was dead.”
“Dead?” I echo, as though I’ve never heard the word before.
“Are you sure?” asks Karim, frowning. “It’s her mother, you see.”
The man’s eyes dart to me, and his expression softens.
“Right. I’m sorry—look, don’t take it for gospel, all right? But . . . well, she was into the drugs, wasn’t she, if I remember right? And someone told me she OD’d. She definitely isn’t on the estate anymore. Wish I could be more help. Do you want to come in? Have a cuppa, slice of toast?”
He looks tough, this man, and I can see the scars that a hard life has left on him. But still, he is trying to be kind. Trying to help. Somehow, it makes me feel even worse.
Karim glances at me, obviously worried, but I shake my head. Going inside won’t help. It will only remind me more of the past, of what I have lost.
“Thank you, but no,” I reply.
The man nods and moves to close his door. Before it shuts entirely, he pauses and says, “Good luck to you, darling. Doesn’t matter what anyone else says about her—she was still your mum, and you only get one.”
He retreats back inside, and Karim and I are left standing there together, on a dull October afternoon, on a concrete walkway lined with doors. Lined with windows. Lined with lives being lived. Lives possibly coming to their ends. Happens all the time.
I am stunned, and silent, and still. I have never imagined that she could be dead. I have never imagined it, despite the logical evidence—she was ill. She made poor choices. She was isolated and had nobody to pull her back from the abyss she stared into on a daily basis. I left her, and there was nobody else, and now the abyss might have taken her. The woman I was relieved to escape from could be gone forever.
“We don’t know it’s true, Gemma,” Karim says reassuringly. “He wasn’t sure—it was only something he’d heard, something he’d assumed. It’s not necessarily a fact. That wasn’t exactly a reliable witness right there, was it? He might even have said it just to spite us. He was that type.”
I nod, because he is right.
He is right, but everything still feels so very wrong.