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As she felt him push through a door, she inhaled the rich scent of sandalwood and lime that she associated with him and curled more tightly into his body, not embarrassed enough by her neediness to stop.
He bent beneath her and sat, and she couldn’t help but tense as she expected to be offloaded, but it never happened. He continued to hold her to his chest, until her tears and breathing slowed. At some point she registered his chin resting on her head, neither heavy nor intrusive. She was encompassed by his arms, as if he’d wrapped himself around her completely, and in that moment she knew that he’d make the perfect father. Just holding her, allowing her to feel what she needed to feel. No questions—not yet anyway—no impatience or sense of frustration or distraction. As if his only purpose here was her. It was almost enough to start her tears again.
‘My mum didn’t hide my dad from me,’ she began, for some reason not wanting him to have the wrong impression of her mother. ‘She spoke about him. There were photos of him in the house and always stories—stories of how they’d met, fallen in love so quickly... She would show me the things he’d made from wood, tell me what he’d hoped for his future...formyfuture. So I always felt that he was a part of my life.’
She shrugged against his chest, her eyes unseeing of the room around her. Instead she had been transported back in time, to the little council house they’d lived in when she was younger.
‘I thought that’s what families were. Just children and parents. Skye didn’t see much of her father after he remarried, and Summer’s wasn’t a part of our lives so... I didn’t know to ask about grandparents, about my father’s life outside of us, until school, really. That’s when I became aware of grandparents. The older I got, the more I would wonder about my father’s parents. What they could tell me about him. Who they were. Were they curious about me? Had they been looking for me? Mum was fairly tight-lipped about them. There had been an argument...but she wouldn’t go into the details. She just shut the conversation down whenever it came to them.’
Star sniffed a little, pulling her shawl around her and tucking herself against his side as if to ward off what came next.
‘By the time I was thirteen, I had convinced myself that there had been a tragic misunderstanding between my mum and his parents. I thought if I just went to see them then somehow they’d just...’
She let out a painful breath, expelling the hope she’d once felt into the room. She shook her head in wonder at her own naivety.
‘That they’d justknow, and we’d all hug each other, and my kind, grey-haired, soft grandparents would welcome my whole family with open arms. I imagined Christmases with stockings—because that’s what I thought grandparents did—and perhaps even Sundays at a house with a garden. I’d decided that they had a tiny dachshund. It was called Bobbi and it was half blind and would constantly knock into things, but we would take care of it, me and my sisters, while my grandparents cooked in the kitchen with my mother.’
She huffed out a laugh then. ‘I should really have known it was a fantasy, partly because Skye always did the cooking.’
Khalif felt his stomach tighten, instinctively knowing that this story did not end well.
‘I’d found their address from some letters my father had written to my mother when he’d still been living with them. There wasn’t a telephone number and maybe I didn’t want one. It would spoil my plan. I’d saved up enough pocket money for the train ticket, worked out that if I ditched school, I could get the bus to the station and the train from there. I copied out the map from the computer at school. I even took some flowers. Who doesn’t like flowers?’
The thought of thirteen-year-old Star with a bunch of flowers travelling to see these people he already didn’t like did something to him.
‘I was so surprised it worked. No one stopped me, or wanted to know what I was doing out of school. I thought I had been so clever. Then I was standing in front of the red-painted door of number thirty-four College Road. I’d imagined blue, but I quite liked the red. It looked cheery,’ she said.
Her voice was laced with a sarcasm he’d never heard from her before.
‘I knocked, and the woman who answered lookedalmostlike what I’d imagined. There were still traces of the marmalade colour hair she’d given to her son, but faded with streaks of white. Just like the way her eyes faded from an open, pleasant welcome to something almost like disdain. She called for her husband without taking her eyes off me.“I’m your granddaughter,”I said. You see, I thought they hadn’t realised. But she had. They did. They knew who I was.’
She took a deep breath. ‘They said that they didn’t have a granddaughter. They said that I was unchristian and unlawful because my parents had never married and they told me never to return.’
Khalif cursed under his breath, not that Star noticed. She seemed to be lost in her memories. ‘What did you do?’ He was half afraid to ask.
‘I found a payphone and called home, but of course my sisters were in school and Mum was away. I left a message asking Mum to come and get me and then I waited by the bus stop.’ She shook her head again, the silken strands of her hair brushing against his shirt. ‘I felt like I’d let her down,’ she said, running her fingers across her lips.
‘Who?’ Khalif asked, trying to keep the consternation from his voice.
‘My mum. I knew why my parents hadn’t married. It wasn’t because they didn’t love each other, but because they did, and they didn’t need a piece of paper to prove it. I felt like I’d betrayed that somehow by visiting these people.
‘I didn’t realise how long I’d been sat there but when a policeman found me it was dark. He explained a bus driver had seen me on his route and been worried. They finally managed to track Mum down and they drove me home.’
It was only when she’d seen her mum and sisters, rushing from the door of their little house and sweeping her up in their arms, that Star had let the tears fall. They’d surrounded her completely with hugs and love and held her while she sobbed, the force of it shaking each and every one of them.
‘The only way I was able to stop crying was when Skye began to read me my favourite story. From that day on, almost every night for an entire year, after dinner we would all sit down in the sitting room and take it in turns to read stories of love, hope, happy ever afters.’ Until the memories of that awful day at her grandparents’ home were buried beneathPride and Prejudice,Little Women,Romeo and Juliet,North and South,Sense and Sensibility,Gone with the Wind...
‘Did it make things better?’ he asked, the vibrations from his voice rumbling gently into the side of her body pressed against his.
She wanted to turn her lips to his chest, but instead was content with her cheek resting there.
‘It did. Losing myself in romance and happy endings was a much better thing than to lose myself in sadness, hurt and shame.’
She yawned, utterly spent and exhausted. Both the emotions of the last couple of days and the work she’d put in on the suite had drained her completely.
‘Thank you,’ she said, looking up at him, still encircled in his arms. ‘Thank you for just listening.’
‘Of course.’
