Wagon Wheels

October 2020

Yvonne

Kiama stares out of the car window and bites his thumbnail.

‘Are you okay?’ Yvonne asks.

‘Yeah.’

What else can she say? He’s obviously nervous; she can feel it in his one-word answers and the way he keeps fidgeting. But then, she’s nervous too. Maybe she said too much last night about Cynthia and Neil, or maybe she should have said more. It’s so hard to know if she’s saying the right thing at all.

Kiama was so self-assured about this trip when they first met, so straightforward about what he wanted to do here and why, but less than twenty-four hours in and he looks unsure, he looks exhausted.

She hadn’t even realised he’d fallen asleep last night until she turned to ask him a question. She couldn’t bear to wake him, especially after he had spoken about his troubles with sleep, of easily triggered night terrors. She threw a blanket over him and eventually fell asleep down the other end of the bed.

‘This area looks quite different to where they lived before, doesn’t it?’ she asks emptily, because really it looks exactly the same. Neat, well-kept, gated.

‘Hmm.’

‘I liked their old house. It was quite decadent in a way.’

‘Guess so.’

Yvonne’s strongest memory of Cynthia and Neil isn’t of their shell-shocked faces at the hospital when they were told about Emma’s passing, nor of the last time she saw them at Emma’s flat bagging her things for the charity shop, but of a dinner at their house in Kilimani. It summed them up, sitting at the dining table, everyone pretending to enjoy stringy rhubarb crumble and small talk about current affairs back home. All this while Kiama tried to suck up his tears at the other end of the table after being scolded for playing football in the corridor. They weren’t bad people, but they were terrible parents and even worse grandparents.

‘So, what did you end up doing with them the last time they came to England?’

He turns to face her, his big eyebrows knot together, ‘What did we do? Erm. We had lunch at their hotel. It was a short visit.’

Like the posting of birthday cash but no card, the hotel lunch was a speciality of theirs. Each time they visited England they always insisted Emma travel into central London to eat out with them, not once taking an interest in seeing where she lived, where she was studying, who her friends were.

The car slows and Joe points up at a series of sandy orange high-rise apartment blocks. When Yvonne originally asked Kiama if he minded them staying in a hotel rather than with them, the relief in his voice was palpable.

‘I really liked their old place too,’ Kiama says as he looks out of the window. ‘It was so big you could always find somewhere to hide.’