Page 47 of Statistically Speaking
“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...unpredictableis 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.
