Page 46 of Statistically Speaking
These are not mine or Karim’s students, not our responsibility, but their being here is enough—it breaks the moment. Suddenly there is noise, chaos, and hyped-up teenagers are milling around. It is not a time or place for subtlety.
“I’ll see you later,” I say quickly before we are swept up into the vortex. “I’ll text you, all right? Have a great day. Good luck!”
I stride away before he can object, needing to go and stand outside for a moment, to make the most of the ten minutes I have before the history group is scheduled to come downstairs.
I head round the corner of the building, where I find a single student having a sneaky cigarette. I recognize him and see from the Van Gogh sunflower on his shirt that he is with Art. He practically eats the cigarette whole, then runs away, apologizing and trying to wave the smoke away. He’ll probably spend the next hour worrying that he’s going to get into trouble.
He’s not the only one. I suck in some deep breaths, the air heavy with lingering smoke and the diesel-heavy smell of London, and count the windows on this side of the building.
I have spent some time trying to track down my mother, with no real success. I suspect I have been halfhearted in my attempts, calling the same number I know has been disconnected, and searching for her on social media—but with a name like Sharon Jones, it’s not easy. She’s probably not even on social media, I know.
I want to find her, yet also I do not. It isn’t a straightforward thing. It has been sixteen days since Katie, and my baby girl, turned eighteen. I have not heard from her, or from the Adoption Contact Register, and I am slowly and sadly lowering my expectations that I ever will.
It is a hard truth to swallow, but one that I must face—I may never know what became of her, and all the wishing and hoping in the world will not change that.
As I have reluctantly taken these first steps toward finding my own mum, I wonder if she feels the same. If she thinks about me, is it with yearning, or guilt, or regret? Is she well enough to even think about me at all? This trip, coming here, being so close to where everything happened and didn’t happen, feels like one of those moments in life when you have to make some tough decisions. I am here, and she might be here, and this is an opportunity for me to decide. Do I knock on her door, or do I leave the past behind me, where it has always so firmly been?
“Miss Jones?” says Lucy, popping her blond head round the corner nervously. I have told her repeatedly to call me Gemma, but I must seem too old to be granted first-name status. I see her eyes flicker to the discarded cigarette butts and realize that she assumes I have been out here having a quick smoke.
“Yes?” I reply, dragging myself back to the here and now and the fact that I am needed.
“They’re starting to gather for our Tudor tour. Are you... are you all right?”
“I’m absolutely fine,” I say and walk toward her.
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 hosteland 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.”
