BANG! BANG! BANG!
Ife jerks up in bed with a start, disoriented.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
‘What the fuck?’ She rolls from one side of the bed to the other, hoping the unwanted caller would simply leave if she doesn’t answer.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
‘Fuck.’ She gets out of bed, slips her feet into the UGGs slippers by the bed, wraps a silk robe around herself and hurries to answer the door before the mad person breaks it down and wakes up half the village if they aren’t already up by now.
‘Hello mummy?’
Ife slams the door shut on the faces on the other side of it. It couldn’t possibly be. IT COULD NOT POSSIBLY BE! And is that… IS THAT HENDRIX?! IT COULD NOT POSSIBLY BE!
There is another knock, this time gentler. Imploring.
She takes a deep breathe, turns the handle, and opens the door.
‘What are you all doing here?’ She asks.
‘Why didn’t you go to The Hope?’ Zainab returns. She’d put a trace on Ife’s phone and last night they got a ping to this exact location and sprang into action. Thank goodness for Hendrix’s private jet.
Tristan holds his hand up for peace and the other falls silent before launching into an avalanche of questions just in case they’d forgotten why his wife ran away. He knew coming here like this was a bad idea, but they’ve hardly have any good ones.
‘May we come in?’ Tristan asks.
Ife opens the door wider for them to file avoiding their eyes. Avoiding HIS EYES! Just before she shut the door, she sees Marinella going to open the shop, she gave her a short wave before shutting the door. ‘Deep breath Ife. Get it together.’ She walks into the living room where her uninvited guests stand, waiting on her to invite them to sit. What is she to feel? She has thought of several moments, played out several moments but never this. Never the moment when her husband, because he still her husband, her ex-boyfriend and father of one set of her twins, her best friends who’d betrayed her, and her children all show up at her door. Never this moment. What’s that saying again? Of all the gin joints? Of all the villages they choose hers to invade today.
‘Please sit down.’ She offers them seats in the living room. ‘How did you find me?’
‘So, you were hiding from us?’ Arthur asks his mother.
‘Yes I am hiding. And running.’ Ife answers, looking at her son who would have read the letter and known all about his real father. ‘I needed to hide myself from the world. To run away from all the secrets I kept, from all the comments and the shame I felt.’ Her voice trailed off looking at her friends and Tristan but not at him.. ‘Still feel.’ God! He is here!! Here after twenty some years of not seeing him, he is here! And he looks just as handsome as she remembers.
Hendrix observes the woman he’d loved, still loves, all his life, she is discombobulated, this ambush has thrown her for a loop, she will not look at him, but he cannot tear his eyes away from her. She looks as beautiful as the day she did when she walked into the Church and turned his world upside down a lifetime ago. He will always love her, that is his lot in life. Always.
‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ Tristan asks. He needs this time alone with her, to simply talk. He wanted to come alone, but his children refused, the friends refused and Hendrix offered up the use of his private jet.
‘Of course.’ She leads him to the second bedroom to the back of the house, pleased to be away from everyone.
‘I have something to tell you and I hope after telling you, you will forgive me.’
‘Okay.’ Ife sits on the small armchair by the window and Tristan takes the edge of the bed. ‘I’m listening.’
‘I don’t know how to say this, and it is the hardest thing I have ever said out loud, and I need you to know that I never meant to hurt you.’
‘Tristan, tell me. You already know all the things I’ve done; I have no leg to stand on in a lot of aspects in this marriage so tell me.’
Deep breaths, ‘I’m gay. I have been all my life.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I am gay. I’ve always been gay. My mother knew it, yours too-’
‘They were best friends.’ Best friends… and then suddenly fractured memories become clearer in her mind; her mother and aunty Jo, laughing together, leaning in closers like gossiping birds, always together or in the shadow of one another. It suddenly makes sense now. All of it. Her mother’s insistence, her father’s upset. Josephine always so helpless and scared around her husband and their family.
‘They were best friends and they set us up.’
‘Tristian-’
‘There’s more and my mother should probably be the one telling you this, and she will, but you might as well hear it from me. They were more than best friends Ife, they were lovers-’
‘What!?’ The images became crystal clear, in HD.
Tristan tells her the story of their mothers as his mother had told him last week when she moved into his house having left his father. That look of shock never left Ife’s face. Shock and confusion at the magnitude of the secrets they have kept from each other. How do they come back from this? Can they even?
‘Besides being who I am and hiding who I am, this was the only way my mother could survive being with my father and continuing a relationship with your mother covertly. I was the great Walden hope, and he would have crushed her to get what he wanted when he found out about the relationship he threatened to destroy her…’ Tristan heaved a sigh just saying these words out loud; the heaviness they left him with after his mother’s confession is unshakeable. ‘Ife, I am so sorry for everything my family put you through, for everything our mothers did to you.’
‘They did it to you too.’ She is reeling from all he’d told her, reeling with all kinds of emotions. She wants to bring her mother back to life so she can scream at her, she wants to scream at aunty Josephine, the woman who’d been like a second mother to her. She wants to scream at her father for not being a better man. She wants to scream out he many hurts and disappointments she feels in this moment. She wants to scream herself hoarse.
They sit in silence a while, the secrets floating through the room all around both feeling truly vulnerable. The black ice that encased Ife’s heart melts away and she can feel the warmth of her heartbeat again but the vulnerability makes her want to run and hide.
‘How is your mother?’
‘She left him.’
‘She did?’
‘She’s at the house. She wanted to come, but I figured all of us coming here, and having her here, would be one too far. You’ll talk, please let her talk to you and beg your forgiveness. Whether you forgive her or not it is up to you, but please talk to her.
‘So, you and Rellie…’
‘That was the plan and she needs to be here to tell that part.’
…
Rellie, Zainab, and Jacob file into the bedroom; their turn to come clean.
‘Ife, we are sorry. ‘ Zainab starts, if they have to kiss the ground she walks on, to gain her friend’s forgiveness, she will. ‘We were only trying to help.’
‘We never meant to hurt you and we see now how badly we did.’ Rellie says.
‘Start from the beginning.’ Ife is no longer sure what they are apologising for and going by everything Tristan told her, she is not sure of anything.
Zainab starts their woeful tale. ‘We’ve known about the children, Astor and Arthur, from the moment they were born, we spent time with you and Hendrix, so how could we not know. They are so like him in how they behave. We gave it time, and time made it pass and you settled into your life, and you were happy. Tristan was happy but we knew something wasn’t quite right, so your mother confided in me before she died.’
‘She did?’
‘Yes. She told me everything because she had to let someone know what she did and why, she knew you were angry at her and by extension Josephine.’
‘She told you about Tristan as well?’
‘No, that part she left for Tristan to tell us. She told us everything else about her relationship with Josephine.’
‘So how did you figure Tristan out?’ How did she not know? Was she that checked out of her life that she missed the signs?
‘It was one night we were working late during the campaign, and it was the briefest of looks between him and…’ here Rellie trailed away but Ife sees the look she spared Jacob.
‘Jacob.’ Oh fucking hell! She is going to need a drink after this saga ends. If it ever ends.
‘Nothing happened.’ Jacobs hurriedly says, ‘nothing physical happened between us, we only talked, and you must know it killed him to keep this a secret from you.’
Jacob her best friend from kindergarten? Had her head been buried so far in the sand, wallowing in her private woes, that she missed this? Bloody hell.
‘So the four of us got together and hatched a plan.’
Rellie takes it over. ‘I’d heard Hendrix got divorced in the summer and so I paid him a visit, asked if he still loved you. We didn’t need a psychic to tell us you still loved him. I talked it over with these three and we agreed it was positively mad, but you would do it for any one of us. I planted the story with Blythe, she follows us around like a hawk so we thought we might as well give her something to write about. She took the bait reported on the affair and set things in motion.’
‘But Ralph and the children?’
‘I spoke to them before everything went down, they’re fine still laying low in the country, but the children are so over it and want to know when you are coming home.’
‘How long have you two had feelings for each other?’
‘Three years… give or take.’ Tristan answers, that weight slowly falling off his shoulders.
Ife can see him deflate before her eyes, goodness how much he’d had to deal with on his own. ‘Tristan your career…everything you worked so hard for-’
‘Means nothing if I cannot be myself and even more so if I cannot be honest with the people I love. I am so, so sorry.’ His voice breaks with emotion and Ife stands from the chair engulfing her husband in a tight hug. Tight as they come. Holding on to him as he cries on her shoulder.
The others give them much needed privacy.
‘Let’s go for a walk.’ Rellie says to Hendrix when they return to the living room, and as one, they walk out leaving the nuclear family behind.
‘I see an ice cream parlour let’s go there.’ Jacob is already leading the charge; he needs to do something with himself before he falls apart. What they did was for him too.
The bell jingles as the customers let themselves into the shop.
‘Buongiorno.’
‘Buongiorno.’ They greet in unison.
‘Are you friends of Ife?’
‘We are.’
‘She is a Godsend.’ Marinella doesn’t know why, but she feels the need to defend her friend.
‘Don’t we know it.’ Zainab says with a little smile. ‘What is your best flavour.’
‘Everything but the newest is the mint chocolate chip which Ife helped me perfect because she does not like mint chocolate chip. She has a particular palette for flavours.’
Hendrix laughs a little because he knows all about her palette for flavours, he has a best-selling whiskey named after her to prove it.
‘We’ll take a scoop each please.’
They take a round table in the corner with four chairs around it, overlooking the village square.
‘I see why came back here.’ Jacob says, ‘it’s very quaint.’
‘She always did like to fall off the face of the earth.’
‘Are you okay?’ Zainab asks Hendrix he’d been too quiet.
‘Honestly, I don’t know. I am not over the shock of seeing her after so long and with everything that has unfolded these past few days, I don’t know.’ He thinks on it, ‘she won’t look at me.’
‘It’s not a mistake that you are here.’ Jacobs knows what he is thinking.
‘If you say so.’
‘Give it time, its Christmas the distillery is closed, the pub is closed, your mother is taken care of. Give her time.’
Hendrix nods. Time. He’ll afford it to her.