Chapter 20 #2
The question caught Gemma off-guard as she’d not mentioned her recent discoveries about her birth mother to anyone other than her parents and Google. She certainly didn’t know anyone who shared a similar backstory. ‘No, I’d love to,’ she said. ‘But I’ve only just started searching for her.’
‘What’s that been like?’
‘Weird.’
‘Are you going to meet her?’
Gemma turned away and bit her lip. She didn’t want to start crying again.
‘You okay?’ Laila asked.
Gemma nodded. Maybe she wasn’t as ready to talk about this as she’d thought.
‘You don’t have to tell me. I get it, it’s hard. I’m being fostered, if you didn’t know,’ Laila said.
‘Timothy did mention it.’
‘They’re okay, Jodie and Simon, even though I’m kind of pissed off with them. They’re all about openness and love for everyone, blah blah blah.’ Laila sighed as if her foster parents were being such bores.
‘They want me to re-establish a relationship with my mother someday. But I don’t know if that’ll ever happen.
I’m not seeing her in prison, and unless she changes when she gets out …
’ She scraped a heel across the stones with her foot.
Gemma immediately scoured the newly exposed mud in case there was something to be found there.
‘It’s like history’s repeating itself,’ Laila continued.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I never knew my grandparents because they basically disowned Mum.’
‘Oh, dear …’
‘Yeah. Mum’s parents had immigrated from Pakistan when Mum was a child.
They dreamed of Mum marrying someone from their culture or who was, at least, South Asian.
But Mum always wanted to fit into the “white” world and didn’t want to acknowledge her background.
They clashed a lot when she was a teenager and then when she was twenty-one, she met a non-Asian man and got pregnant with me.
‘You can imagine the fall out. Even though they didn’t want Mum to be with my father, they also didn’t believe in abortion and didn’t want her to be a single mother, so they insisted they marry.
That was a step too far for both Mum and my father.
Anyway, I don’t even know how much they really loved each other, to be honest, but they tried to stay together, pretending to my grandparents that they would marry after I was born.
Mum even agreed to give me a Pakistani name to try and appease them.
She chose Laila because she wanted one that was familiar to and used by non-Asians. ’
‘Laila’s a pretty name.’
‘It means “of the night”. I was born at two in the morning.’
Gemma smiled. It made her wonder what her two given names meant and whether it had any bearing on why they’d been chosen, or absolutely none at all. ‘So, what happened?’
‘It didn’t work out between my Mum and father, so Mum agreed to move back with her parents. I was about two or something. But that didn’t work out either. Then Mum got in with the wrong people and here we are. All I ever wanted was a normal life with a normal mother.’
If Laila kept chewing her lip like that, she was going to draw blood.
‘I’m sorry.’ Gemma put a hand on the girl’s back. Not for long, but long enough to show that she cared.
‘I didn’t mean to blab my life story.’
‘Don’t apologise. It sounds like you’ve been through a lot. How long have you lived with Jodie and Simon?’
‘Six years, with a gap in between when I went back with Mum, because everyone thought she was getting her life back together. She tried.’ Laila looked sad for a moment.
‘It’s been all right with Jodie and Simon.
I know they mean well but … I dunno … they want me to like school and I don’t.
They didn’t like my boyfriend. Or my tattoo.
Then we had a massive argument. That’s why I’m staying with Gramps. ’
‘I thought you had to be eighteen to get a tattoo.’
‘Not in Ireland. You can be sixteen if you’re with a guardian who’s over eighteen.
My boyfriend was twenty. We secretly took a trip there so I could get one.
I wasn’t going to tell Jodie and Simon before we went because they wouldn’t have let me go.
Plus, Trey wanted to see his half-sister in Dublin.
’ Laila paused, as if thinking fondly of the memory.
Gemma understood that being a teenager was never easy, but Laila’s rebelliousness was completely foreign to her.
Gemma had never had a desire to challenge authority.
The most daring thing she’d ever done was smuggle a hip flask of vodka into a nightclub, which proved laughable.
Having left it in the kitchen while she was getting ready, her housemates had drunk it without telling her, so it was empty anyway!
Laila continued. ‘Trey and I laughed and laughed at the idea of him being my guardian. But I wanted a tattoo so badly. I’d decided to get one of the rabbit Jodie and Simon got me when I first moved in with them, because he’d just died.
It was the second saddest moment of my life.
The first was when I had to leave Mum. Or when Mum had to leave me.
The first time. Whichever way around it was. ’
Laila stretched out her arm so Gemma could get a better look at the tattoo. ‘I called the rabbit Nuts because he was brown, and I love Nutella. I wanted something to remember him by.’
‘Are you still with Trey?’
‘Nah,’ Laila said abruptly. ‘He started mucking around with someone else. My friend caught him with some girl behind the pizza shop. I wasn’t having any of that.’
‘Good for you.’
‘Hello, you two, what’s going on over here?’ Phyllida approached, waving a stick at them. ‘Made any finds?’
‘Yep,’ Laila said.
Gemma studied her. Had Laila really made some interesting discoveries or was she humouring Phyllida? There was something charming about her directness.
‘I thought we could gather in half an hour and do a show and tell. What do you think?’ Phyllida said.
‘I’ve definitely got another half an hour in me.’ Gemma packed up her Thermos. ‘What about you, Laila?’
Laila did a nonchalant shoulder jig yet slipped the sketchbook and pencil in her bag and got up.
‘You can come with me, if you like?’ Gemma suggested. ‘But no chatting, deal?’
‘Deal.’
It was probably Laila’s best offer all day.