Chapter Thirty-Four
They stand shoulder to shoulder at the entrance to Cam’s bedroom and Anika’s eyes sweep over the room in the dim light from the hallway.
Big, wide windows and minimal furniture.
Cam steps inside and flips on the lamp on the bedside.
It reveals a neatly made bed with a dark, jersey bedspread and invitingly fluffed pillows. She has to admit, she’s impressed.
He walks over to a chest of drawers and opens it to reveal neatly folded T-shirts.
‘Rah, is it OCD, or … ?’ she says teasingly.
Cam purses his lips, though she can see amusement in his eyes. ‘It’s called keeping my shit together, actually.’ He pulls out a navy tee and throws it towards the bed. ‘That good for you?’
‘I’d be OK sleeping in this …’ she says, plucking her oversized T-shirt dress, but her eyes drift down to the T-shirt Cam has picked out.
She sees a logo on there from the tiny, short-lived indie record label he used to run.
For a while it released Zaya’s music. The top must be special to him, and Anika feels another surge of warmth towards him.
‘Actually, this is good. Thanks.’ Realising she still has her underwear balled up in her hands, she pulls it on, whips off her dress and her bra, and then puts on Cam’s T-shirt unselfconsciously while he busies himself folding down the bedclothes, clearly trying to avert his eyes.
Anika smiles at the irony of his politeness kicking back in.
‘I’m gonna go and get us some water,’ he says.
He seems at pains to come off as relaxed but the more she thinks about it, the more Anika detects a faint sense of unease in him.
He looks at her for a second, then gives her that half-grin.
‘At the risk of – what’s the word – besmirching my mental health again,’ he adds.
‘There’s some unopened toothbrushes in the basket in the bathroom, too. It’s just down the hallway.’
Anika smiles at him. ‘Thanks.’ She grabbed her phone from her bag on the way upstairs and, realising it’s out of charge, she almost asks Cam for a charger too. But then she remembers not only the missed call from the hospital, but the fact that she dipped out dramatically on her friends.
A few minutes later, she’s under the cool covers of Cam’s bed, waiting while he brushes his teeth.
She can smell the spicy scent of his aftershave lightly clinging to the sheets and breathes deeply, settling back on the pillows.
When he returns to the room, Cam pauses for a moment just looking at her, his expression surprisingly serious, almost emotional.
Then he reaches back, pulling his T-shirt off from the neck and dropping it onto the floor, his face emerging with a typically disarming smile.
Anika admires the confidence he exudes with his thick middle, the dark, smooth skin punctuated with a light spray of peppercorn curls that extends up over his chest.
Cam climbs into bed beside her and Anika seizes the moment to curl her body into his, her palm resting on his stomach. He lifts her hand and pats it against him, grinning down at her. ‘Hope you like dad bods,’ he says, still smiling.
‘I do, as it happens.’ She kisses his chest, then rests her head against his warm skin as his arm settles around her. It feels like heaven. After a while she emits a wry laugh. ‘Teenage Anika is freaking out right now, you know. Homagosh, actual Cam Asiedu.’
His amusement rumbles against her ear. ‘That so?’ He pauses, then says, ‘And thirty-year-old Anika?’
She bites her lip, not quite sure how to answer.
‘Thirty-year-old Anika has to process a few things,’ she says softly, her smile slackening.
‘I really didn’t think I’d be here.’ She hears the words sounding different as they come out.
‘Maybe in more ways than one,’ she adds, though she’s a bit fearful of uttering the words.
Cam draws a hesitant breath, picking up on it.
‘It’s fucking mad that last month you were, what?
In hospital?’ She feels him adjust to look down at her, but she keeps her gaze fixed on a plant sitting on a stool near the bedroom door.
How long has he been waiting to bring it up?
she wonders. Her mind flashes again to the call earlier, and to the email from the doctor’s clinic a couple of days ago suggesting that now it’s been several weeks since the surgery, they really do need to do a full check-up.
Blood tests. Scans. Ugh. It feels like a step backwards over a line she’s already drawn.
But Cam is right. ‘It is mad,’ she replies quietly. She doesn’t temper the statement with her usual defences. She has the sense that Cam will listen – to her words and to the spaces in between.
‘Do you …’ Cam seems uncharacteristically unsure of how to phrase his question. Anika feels tension in his body. ‘Do you think you’re on the other side of it now?’ he asks tentatively.
She presses her eyebrows together. The other side? Has she cheated death? Or even passed beyond it? Is she like a ghost? She feels too solid for that. Cam’s body feels too real beneath hers.
And yet her mind goes to her father. To the days leading up to him being gone for good. On that last visit, the proximity to death put Nelson Lapo on the other side of an invisible wall that she couldn’t reach over, no matter how hard she tried.
Late April 2009
It had been quite the elaborate operation for Anika and her mother to visit her father, and the atmosphere of Nelson Lapo’s house resonated with Eloise’s resentment.
The temporary absence of his ‘real’ family was palpable in the chic décor, and in the photographs dotted around the large living room showing their happy evolution.
The majority of the pictures were arranged on the mantelpiece opposite where her father sat in his armchair.
It was obvious how much their lives were estranged from Anika’s.
The visit had been arranged because Nelson could no longer leave the house easily; he was too weak.
Medications had ravaged him to the point where his tall frame, which had once felt intimidatingly large to Anika, now seemed like a long coil of dark, ropey limbs drowning in his trousers and fleece, with that familiar cap now needed indoors, keeping his bald, bony head warm.
‘My only daughter,’ he said, his voice raspily familiar, his accent still tinged with that Ghanaian lilt despite having lived in London for forty of his sixty-five years by then.
He smiled and held out his hands towards her, and Anika fought not to recoil from the strangeness of their dry grasp as she moved closer to him, squinting at the sunlight coming in through the bay window behind him.
‘And Nella, my dear, you are still looking good,’ he added teasingly.
Her mother chuckled sadly, indulging him now that the frisson that had existed between them sixteen years earlier had no chance of rekindling.
Nella hardly ever talked about how she and Nelson had met.
Anika knew that her mum had been his secretary, and of course that they had conducted a secret affair that had resulted in her conception.
Their shared West African background was rare in the investment bank where they worked, so she figured maybe their connection had sprung from that.
Anika had heard even less about the fact that Eloise was herself Nelson’s second wife.
His first one had been left back in Ghana, and apparently their relationship had been childless.
Once they’d got together, Eloise had stuck by Nelson through many infidelities; Anika knew her mum wasn’t the first, or the last. However, it had only been a couple of months before this final visit that Eloise had even found out about Anika’s existence.
His wife had facilitated the meeting begrudgingly to say the least, making only the barest effort to disguise her dislike for Anika and her mother.
Perched awkwardly on the sofa beside Nelson’s armchair, Anika felt an almost unbearable hum of sorrow and anxiety. Her father continued to hold her hand, smiling at her with shining eyes.
‘You have grown into a beautiful, poised, graceful young woman, Anika. I am very proud of you. You must always remain like this.’ He spoke slowly and deliberately. The words stuck with her, lodged somewhere deep within.
Anika glanced over at the photograph above the fireplace, of the nine-year-old boy grinning in his school uniform. Did Kwesi get to hear praise like that from their father every day? Why was it only now that she’d got to hear it, when it was almost too late?
The boy had wide green eyes like his mother’s. On another of her eavesdropped conversations, Anika had overheard Nella talking to her sister on the phone about Kwesi, and how Eloise had struggled for years before they’d conceived him.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ Anika said at last, acknowledging his praise.
Suddenly she was struck with the thought that this might be the last time she addressed her father directly, and it sent panic shooting through her.
Anika had never experienced any real, permanent loss in her life up until then, not even of a pet since her mother had never allowed her one.
For all his absence and the complicated resentment that she’d felt over Nelson being so sporadically in her life, Anika knew that losing him would be entirely different.
She felt as though she was looking at him through a gauzy veil that she was unable to cross, and it devastated her.
Despite his authoritative air and powerful job, dictating everything on his own terms, including his love for Anika for all his years, death was the one thing that Nelson Lapo could not control.
Nobody could.
Anika shakes free of the memory, sitting up a little in Cam’s bed.
‘You OK?’ he asks.
She nods. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I just … I was thinking about my dad.’
‘Yeah?’