Where Women are Kings Read Online Free PDF Page B

teenager.Breast cancer.’ He looked at Nikki. ‘It was awful seeing her go through so much pain. Before that my dad and I didn’t really spend much time together but we both looked after my mum as she was sick, and then cared for her at home while she was dying. It was horrendous but the one positive is that my dad and I are very close now. He lives around the corner, and we see him all the time.’
    Nikki could hardly believe it. In their whole marriage, she’d managed to get this much out of him, in little puzzle pieces, and now he’d said it all at once. She wanted to hold his hand, hug him, but she didn’t dare touch him.
    ‘That must have been really traumatic, for both you and your dad.’ Ricardo was really focusing on them today. He’d asked them so many questions, and Nikki wondered if it was some sort of test to see if they’d cope: a room full of strangers and personal information.
    ‘Many thanks for sharing that with us, Obi. It’s very important that we are able to talk openly about loss. Any child that you adopt will have experienced the loss of their birth mum. Even a tiny baby.’
    Nikki looked up.
    ‘For a child, there is no greater loss than that.’ Ricardo paused and looked up at Obi. ‘Or maybe there is no greater loss at all than that. Whatever the age. That wound will remain forever, and we need to help children live with it. We can’t do that unless we talk openly.’ He looked around the room. ‘The children we’re talking about have to feel safe enough to trust us, to talk to us. And some of them have a very disturbed background where they find it hard to trust, where their sense of reality is completely distorted.’ Ricardo looked at Nikki. ‘That’s why it’s so important, this open communication. Can you tell us a bit more, Obi? About your mum.’
    Obi uncrossed his legs, sat up straighter. ‘It’s funny but, even though I was fourteen by then, I can’t remember a lot of it. My memory is awful.’
    Nikki flashed a look at Obi. His memory was perfect. He remembered in tiny details; everything, to the extent that she often joked he had a photographic memory.
    He looked at her, then back at Ricardo. ‘There is something else,’ he said. ‘After the miscarriages … After all those miscarriages.’ Obi was breathing deeply. His voice had changed, become strained, as if he was forcing the words out. ‘I felt them all too.’ He stopped talking and everyone in the room held their breath. He had that effect on people. Then he turned towards Nikki, and picked up her hand. ‘And after the stillborn, after losing our baby, I felt like I’d lost Nikki.’
    *
    Later, they ate tiny sandwiches in a room with no chairs. It was awkward, being in a room with people who knew intimate details of your life, yet were strangers. Everyone had a sad story. People ate their sandwiches carefully. Couples passed each other napkins and touched each other’s arms. Everything was being watched. Even so, Nikki leant towards Obi in the corner of the room and kissed his cheek before whispering, ‘Thank you for opening up – for talking. I love you,’ quietly enough that nobody could hear. When she moved away from Obi, they laughed as they saw the mud she’d deposited from her boots on the bottom of Obi’s pinstripe suit. As they were laughing, Nikki noticed Ricardo across the room, looking at them and smiling before writing something down.

FOUR
    Ricardo’s car smelt like an exploded forest. Elijah leant forward and touched the air freshener dangling from the mirror and rubbed it with his finger and thumb, then brought his hand to his nose. He’d been to a forest once; Sue and Gary had taken him. The trees had dropped a soft carpet and Gary found a stick for him. Sue had made sandwiches and they ate them on the pine-needle blanket, watching squirrels jumping up the trees above. He tried to think about the smell of pine trees and not the water in Sue’s grey eyes as the car pulled away, the