He is back on their street within minutes of receiving the text, and the van is indeed gone, leaving an open space of some relief when he looks down the clear road. But when he walks under the striped plastic hood at the front of Vesuvio, in through the front door, the shaking begins again. It’s still too early for the other cooks or Tuli, and so he tries his best to begin as normal, opens out his hat and apron so that they are ready to wear. Ava sees him, clocks the disturbance in him. He has been staring at the items for too long, leaning himself against a chair at one point.
‘Is a shock,’ she says quietly, moving in to help him to sit down. ‘You need to stop for a minute, Shan. Just wait.’
He shakes her off and is up again, walking back out through the kitchen into the yard, the same route exactly, over the same back wall, blindly, frowning hard, walking, just walking till he reaches a thick green hedge of some sort to his left side. People can see you, but they don’t see what you are. He still wants more than anything to shout, the need is fermenting dangerously inside him. It is a basic right, surely, to be able to shout without fear of condemnation? He stops and puts his face in the wet needles, immerses in the sensation of a hundred tiny sharp points against his skin, and only then does he feel the demons begin to leave his body.
Later, he is working hard when he hears Tuli breeze into the main space of the restaurant with his usual greetings. Ava’s voice joins the noise, she is relaying everything with pattering speed. For a moment Shan thinks about going to join in with the explanations. The boss would probably receive him the way he does everyone: with a show of warmth and understanding, even though news of a raid on the street will be unwelcome and bring its own tensions. But he can’t trust himself to talk. There is no benefit to seeking out an audience with Tuli right now, he thinks. Ava will do the needful. Let Ava do it.
Nia
Under Tuli’s watch, the restaurant had an unofficial open-door policy for waifs and strays and Nia knew she was no different in that respect. She had just been thrown out of university, after a year at an illustrious institution, and in not so many words, she had ejected herself out of the family home too.
She had embellished the truth of her parents, in the conversations with Tuli after their first meeting. Her father was a doctor, apparently, yes, but her mother wasn’t a nurse. She didn’t see this latter untruth as actively lying to him. It was just that she didn’t want to get into it, it was a placeholder of sorts. For a start, it was difficult to summarize her mother’s multifarious ways of earning money into a kind of career.
Arriving in Newport at eighteen, the young Sharon Collins had begun temping as a secretary at various firms, at times she’d also been one of those people with clipboards on the street for market research, sometimes working at call centres, for a while she was apparently a bank clerk at Nationwide – all this before Nia was born, which was when she was twenty-two years old. Most jobs lasted for a few months at least, but never really over a year. She grew up in Dinas Powys, a small town in the Vale of Glamorgan that was fortified at weekends by visitors to its castle and Iron Age ruins. A civil servant father who was slowly ascending the ranks at the Inland Revenue, and a mother whose job was ‘to maintain her looks and the house they lived in’. That’s how Sharon told it to her daughters. Parents who she wanted nothing to do with, but whom she was now forced to tap for cash at intervals, a humiliation that was increasing in frequency as the years went on.
How, then, was Nia to describe her own mother? Well, if you were going to talk about the sweet side first, that solid, satisfying element which ran down her spine like the hard chocolate centre of a Feast ice-cream bar, it would be romance. The hippy rosehip variety. She was turning her life into this big sculpture of romance as far as Nia could see – looking back – with a succession of relationships (some long, some short, but she and Mira didn’t know much about their fathers except for their respective ethnicities: Bengali for Nia, Tibetan for Mira), and their mother had a sylph-like quality that went well with this project. Long cocoa hair to her hips, pearly smooth skin, wandering around naked and peaceful of a morning, just because it was, of course, absurd to cover up your body. Generous curves, attractive ones, not from this time we live in, more like the kind you might see in the National Gallery on the second floor. When she had gone through puberty, Nia could remember looking at her mother’s breasts: the large swing of them, the big areolas of the nipples. She could imagine Sharon dancing through fields of daisies to some bongo tune until she died.
Before the descent, of course.
So, yes, Sharon Collins was the kind of mother who played ‘She’s a Rainbow’ by the Rolling Stones when she was feeling light on a Sunday afternoon, baking muffins or painting a bed-frame in the council flat she’d been allocated as a single parent, shouting the rhymes out triumphantly, feeling them to be her own mantra of possibility. The same magical traits came into play when her mother started losing it. She ran a full house, always had lots of friends visiting, she was brimming with compliments and she meant them, she had figured out personal dynamics – how to flatter and be sincere at the same time. In truth, Nia admired her for it. A kitchen crowded with people eating veggie chilli and rolling fags to world music while Nia and Mira played with their kids. But how harsh it was, when the bubbles turned to loneliness. It happened fast, but it must have been building slowly behind the scenes.
There is no big moment of transition that Nia can peg it on, when she looks back. Only that the booze became part of Mum’s diet somehow, and meals seemed less important. On week nights she would often be drinking alone and passing out on the couch, so Nia would sort out dinner. The days were suddenly centred around getting hold of the bottles; this task took on a new urgency, and replaced all other priorities. Then came the manipulation, the same flattery, the deceit. A long, endless list of first times ensued: the first time Nia could remember her mother stealing something from a shop, the first time she looked at her daughters with the sooty eyes of unknowing when they came home from school and roused her from bed. The first time Nia realized their mum was ill enough to be dependent on them, a patient softened from bravado to vulnerability.
Nia was allocated the dangerous roles, being four years older than Mira. She was the one sent to buy alcohol, when Mum was too weak to pretend it would ever change. The first time she gave Nia directions, the first time she gave her the pin to her card, the first time Nia covered up for social services. The first time Mum wet herself and Nia picked her up off the bathroom floor. The first time the gas and electricity got cut off, or one of the girls was mocked for smelling bad at school, the first time they got refused entry on a bus because Sharon herself stank of booze.
She never asked Nia to call her grandparents though, that seemed to be the boundary wall. Ringing them was something she delayed and delayed till there was no other option. Then, she’d sober up especially, straighten her clothes, like she was going to church or something, and perform the rare, polite, call and response. A piece of performance art, delivered in frictionless, measured tones on the phone. Sometimes, she’d do this call from a phone box and Nia would watch her from outside, through the scarlet-lined grid of glass, bemused that her mother could communicate like this when needed, betrayed by the simplicity of her ability to be sober for this kind of occasion, but not for her two children.