Today, Blessing had driven to the nearest DIY shop. She had initially been shocked to hear that I’d never done any painting, until I asked her to name a room in the cottage that looked as though it had been decorated in the past quarter of a century, and she had to admit that my lack of experience made sense.
While she stocked up on paint, rollers, brushes and whatever else we might need, I started clearing out Mum’s wardrobe and chest of drawers, separating clothes into rags and things worth donating to the local clothing bank. It didn’t take long. Neither did sorting her two pairs of shoes.
From there, I quickly binned the scant remaining toiletries, and her cheap, plastic hairbrush. She had a few more utilitarian items lined up on top of her chest of drawers, which I relocated elsewhere in the house, including a box of tissues, nail scissorsand packet of painkillers. I also moved a hot-water bottle, the small suitcase containing a washbag and, unsurprisingly, very little else.
I replaced the letters in their original box along with the photograph and dried flowers, and moved that downstairs for now.
By the time Blessing returned (with a distinct whiff of McDonald’s fries clinging to her T-shirt), I was done. Under two hours and the room was emptied of anything reflecting the woman who’d slept there for three decades. I stood there for a while, feeling a sudden rush of grief for, not only the mother I’d lost, but any chance to discover who else she’d been. The letters had helped fill in some missing pieces, but the thirty-seven years prior to those were a mystery that, thanks to her disdain for sentimentality, I would never find the answers to.
‘That’s not quite true, though, is it?’ Blessing said, when I expressed this while in the process of dismantling the old MDF wardrobe.
‘What do you mean? If there was anything stored anywhere else in the house, I’d have found it by now.’
‘But she isn’t the only person who can answer those questions. Contrary to the rumours, she wasn’t an android built in a lab. And despite being the toughest, most independent person ever, she didn’t bring herself up.’
I sat back, wiping the sweat off my face. Who knew unscrewing screws was such hard work? ‘You mean her family?’
‘I meanyourfamily.’
‘You know my birth mum died when I was tiny.’
‘Yes, but what about your grandparents? Her aunt, whatever you want to call her. Did your mum have brothers and sisters?’
I frowned. ‘Which mum?’
Blessing looked up from where she’d been working on a door hinge. ‘Either.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Okay, so what do you know?’
‘I know Mum decided none of them were worth knowing. She left strict instructions in her “death folder” not to invite any of them to her funeral.’
We put down our screwdrivers and sat back against the dusty wall.
‘Did she explain why?’
I shrugged. ‘She used to say that the only limit to her family’s depravity was their own laziness.’
‘What does that even mean?’
‘Kennedy, my mother, had been to prison a couple of times.’
‘How did she die?’
I leant my head back until it rested against the wall. ‘I’m not even sure. As I got older, I assumed it was drug-related. But we never talked about these things. I learned very young not to try. I know Nell’s and Kennedy’s mums were twins.’
‘So they’re likely to have been close?’
‘And likely to have also died. Mum’s birth certificate says her mother was eighteen when she was born, so they’d be, what, in their early nineties now?’
‘Do you want to know if you have a family out there, somewhere? Who they are, what they’re like? Whether they love reading and dreaming about adventures in far-flung places? Because you definitely didn’t get that from Nell.’
‘I don’t know. I used to fantasise about Kennedy, invent a personality that explained why I was so different from Mum, but as I got older, it felt less and less relevant. I thought about it when Mum died, obviously, but while Kennedy was still only a name on a piece of paper, it was easy to put her out of my mind. That time was hard enough without stirring all that up.’
‘Of course. So, what about your dad?’
I shook my head. ‘That’s a mystery that will never be solved. Short of doing one of those DNA tests and miraculously finding a paternal match.’
