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I look over at him and he appears lost in thought. I don’t want to rush him and honestly, I am trying to decide how to tell him a story I have avoided telling for most of my adult life.
I think about my parents and sisters, and I realize I am stroking the fern that is always around my neck.
“Tell me about that pendant,” Simon says breaking the silence.
I’m surprised by his question, but happy to share.
“My parents gave it to me when I was too young to understand its significance. In Ghana, before Christianity there was an indigenous religion with the many aspects of God represented by symbols called Adinkra. This one, Aya, symbolizes perseverance and resilience. My mother told me it was because, even at five, there wasn’t a challenge I wouldn’t rise to.”
Of course, they had no idea what it would come to mean to me. I think about it and that despite everything, I have persevered and am sitting here against all odds with a man who I have started to develop real feelings for.
Right now, I can feel it almost pulsing around my neck. It is telling me, Addie, rise to this challenge. Be brave. Tell him.
So I start to speak. I don’t look at Simon as I talk. I tell him about that morning thirteen years ago when my whole world changed. `
I don’t tell him exactly who my father is, I don’t think it’s important, right now. I tell him we had to move. I tell him how much I resented my mother for her defense of him. For her refusal to be angry at him. How there was nothing I wanted more than to be nothing like the weak, foolish woman I thought her to be.
Simon listens quietly and when I finally muster the courage to look at him, he is watching me with a look of admiration in his eyes, which causes my speech to falter. He reaches out to take my hand and squeezes it softly. It’s his cue for me to continue.
I tell him how I have been driven in my career pursuit. I’ve wanted to make sure I could always stand on my own two feet. I confess my fear of getting involved with anyone because I don’t think I could take the betrayal I had watched my mother endure.
As my confessions, pent up for over ten years, spill from my lips, I feel a lightening in my soul. I feel a calm I haven’t felt my entire life.
Sitting here, talking with this man who I’ve known for such a short time, I feel a kinship I’ve never known before.
The look in his eye—still shining with a look of admiration and understanding—I realize this is how he has always looked at me.
“Simon, tell me your story.” I say abruptly. I am suddenly eager to know why I feel this way. What has he suffered that allows him to know my suffering so well?
He sighs. It’s a heavy sigh, full of resignation. Then he starts to speak. I don’t release his hand because I can sense he needs the contact.
“I don’t know my father. Well, that’s not true. I know who he is. He was never married to my mother. They were together when I was born, so I have his last name. I know he is from Ghana, and he lived in the same neighborhood as we did until I was twelve, then he disappeared and no one knows where he went. Not that it matters. He didn’t have anything to do with me or Kyle, who was born four years after I was.”
He looks at me as if gauging my response. I just smile at him, hoping it’s all the encouragement he needs to continue. It is.
“My mother is an alcoholic and a drug addict. After Kyle was born, my father stopped coming around all together, and she had different men in and out of our home. We lived in a council flat.” He pauses, “Do you know what that is?”
I shake my head in the negative.
“It’s like state housing. I think you all call it welfare. Anyway, because she had kids, we always had a roof over our heads. My father’s family always tried to make up for his lack of interest, so we always had food and clothes, too. I knew from a very early age school was going to be my ticket out of the hell of my life, for me and Kyle, and then eventually for Ashley.”
“I spent most of my childhood trying to keep my brother and sister out of my mother’s path. When she was drunk and high, she was mean, and when you added her boyfriends into the mix, it was ugly.” He grimaces.
“I was always big for my age, so I made sure to use my size to my advantage, becoming a shield for Kyle and Ashley. When her rages turned violent, I made sure she took it out on me.”
This makes me shudder. What he must have suffered.
“I couldn’t be home all the time, though. When I was fourteen, I got a scholarship to play rugby at Harrow. Most boys boarded there, but I didn’t. I couldn’t leave them alone at home, so I took the train every day. Rugby meant I had practice after school. Kyle and Ashley knew they had to stay at Mercy’s house until I could come pick them up.”
I interject, “Mercy? Henry’s nanny?”
“Yes, she is my father’s sister.” He says quickly, clearly eager to get the story told.
“One evening, I got to Mercy’s house and no one was there. I didn’t have a mobile phone, and I had no idea where they were. I ran home. When I got there, my mother was passed out on the couch. I walked into the bedroom to find Ashley naked in the corner crying, while the bastard straddled Kyle on the bed trying to force him to…,” Simon’s voice is barely a whisper now and it breaks as he continues, “to suck him off.”
This rushes out of his mouth like he is expelling a bite of poisonous fruit. I can’t control the sob escaping my mouth. I think of Kyle, easy going and handsome. The horror of what I’ve just heard is beyond measure. I can’t imagine what Simon felt witnessing it.
He has stopped speaking and the haunted look in his eyes breaks my heart.
