Into Suez by Stevie Davies

dislike that was out of proportion really, but then everything was out of proportion where Nia and Ailsa were concerned. Sometimes Nia had wished her mother dead. But when your mother dies, the sun sets behind the mountain and never rises; the eternal dies that day. Poppy, at eighteen months old, had given Nia the will to live. Against the tide of a profound reluctance whose origin she took care not to examine, and because Archie seemed saddened beyond measure when the letters kept coming, Nia had eventually got round to informing the creature of Ailsa’s death.
    The creature was a concert pianist of world stature. On her record sleeves one saw a strong, melancholy face with full lips and striking eyebrows. Her dark hair was coloured with henna and kohl rimmed her nearly black eyes. It turned out that Ailsa hadn’t kept Stalking Mona informed about her life: she’d not bothered to mention her remarriage to Nia’s step-dad and the two boys. So Mona Serafin-Jacobs had addressed her mam all those years as ‘Mrs Ailsa Roberts’. How typical of Ailsa to withhold vital information.
    Dear Dr Serafin-Jacobs , Nia had written. I am sorry to have to tell you … Something like that .
    Dear Nia – came the reply, I am more grieved than I can say to hear of your mother’s death. I had learned (though not directly from Ailsa) of her remarriage and her two sons . May I ask you, Nia: how has your life been? You see, although it is a quarter of a century since I saw you, I recall you so well – you are etched upon my memory. If there is anything I can ever do for you and yours – anything – please let me know. And I would love to see you again .
    She had signed herself: Ever, Mona.
    Visceral inertia had stayed Nia’s hand. Nia had neither replied with a letter nor responded to the request that she phone, nor, God forbid, that they meet. She’d left it till now to get properly in touch. But cards had kept flocking in to herself, every birthday and Christmas, with a handwritten note enclosed, as if Nia had somehow or other been doomed to inherit the burden of her mother’s adorer.
    The name Mona in Ailsa’s journal carried a sickening resonance. Nia had no memories of that woman. But in the act of reading the name, she seemed to see a dark, dramatic face emerge from a mist, nothing like the forbidding mask on the record sleeve: vivacious, reckless. Forcing itself up too close. Swooping down, snatching her up, breathing on her face with a licorice scent. Nia had a sense of – whatever was it? – something she could only think of as boundless cruelty . Even so, Nia had never realised Mona’s importance until Ailsa’s journal came into her hands. The existence of the green notebooks gave her no peace. She read in fragments: shards that penetrated her heart and stuck there festering.
    The young Ailsa was not the mam she knew. Nia recognised herself all right, a horrid, boisterous, attention-seeking little madam. Deep down she was still the only child she’d been then, proclaiming and defending the unique bond that attached her to her mother’s heart, forit could so easily be forfeit. Had she detected that danger so young? The leaves of the green journal with its neatly forward-sloping handwriting imprinted on Nia a fresh signature of loss. She’d rarely felt secure in a relationship. No sooner had she begun to love, truly love, Poppy’s father than she’d gone cold on him. He will change. Something namelessly bad will happen. If I love him. If I let myself. Yet Jude and she had become excellent friends over the years and that meant something to her and everything to Poppy.
    The journal paper had scarcely aged: it might have been written last week. Nia struggled in the web of handwriting. It was like falling in love, she thought, with a thousand misgivings, in love with a fresh Ailsa, hungry for life and craving adventure. More akin to a sister than to the mother she remembered. Actually, Nia thought, as the window whitened