Long Time No See

by Hannah Lowe

  www.periscopebooks.co.uk

  Long Time No See

  A memoir of fathers, daughters and games of chance

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Periscope

  An imprint of Garnet Publishing Limited

  8 Southern Court, South Street

  Reading RG1 4QS

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  Copyright © Hannah Lowe, 2015

  The right of Hannah Lowe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

  ISBN 9781859643983

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book has been typeset using Periscope UK, a font created specially for this imprint.

  Typeset by Samantha Barden

  Jacket design by James Nunn: www.jamesnunn.co.uk

  Printed and bound in Lebanon by International Press:

  interpress@int-press.com

  To my mother and Lorna, for their unfailing memories and in memory of my dad, Ralph Lowe

  Author’s Note

  This book is a reconstruction – part fiction, part truth. The early chapters set in Jamaica are loosely based on a notebook my father kept, discovered after his death, in which he wrote about his childhood.

  And either I’m a nobody, or I’m a nation

  – Derek Walcott, The Schooner Flight

  1

  1935

  The boy was ten when he discovered his mother had sold him, but by then he hadn’t seen her in a year. He and his father were together all day serving in the shop, and at night, they ate together at the table in the shop’s back room. The room was small and served as kitchen, bedroom and stockroom. In the corner stood a wood fire and hotplate where they cooked; a sink. The walls were lined with ramshackle floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with the shop’s goods – rolls of cloth, pots and pans, plimsolls, bags of dried beans, tins of oil. On the floor, hemp sacks of rice and grain were piled wherever there was space, and at the long wall, placed a few feet apart, were two low cots on which the boy and his father lay at night listening to each other’s breathing. They were constant companions, knew the other’s habits as well as they knew their own, but the boy never spoke to his father unprompted, and the man only ever spoke to the boy when issuing a command related to the shop which was their livelihood. The boy hated his father, and the father’s hatred in return sang itself in the cracking of his leather belt on the boy’s small limbs, named itself in the dark bruises and red welts on his skin.

  It was a one-storey wooden building, the only Chiney shop in Yallahs. This was backwater Jamaica, the green land wrapped in mist before the sun came up to heat it, one main track running inland from the coast, joining all the villages. The shop stood at the junction. The boy and his father rose in darkness to the silent work of lighting oil lamps and heating water, and from a mile away the silhouettes of villagers were visible walking the road in the purple light of early morning. They made their purchases of johnny cakes or salt-fish fritters wrapped in brown paper, simple food for the day’s work in the fields. Most customers had credit and it was the boy’s job to note their transactions in the shop’s large, yellowed ledger.

  This was the third shop they had owned. Two before in other towns, Mocho and Hearts Ease, had gone up in flames, as though tragedy followed them; that’s what some said. But other rumours went around the Yallahs market – that James Lowe burned down his own shops for insurance money, owed so much in gambling debts he had to torch his shop, his home. And the boy knew this was the truth, remembered sitting by his father in the truck crossing the Yallahs River, the shop building still smoking, a hulk of wood and ash behind them, the smell of petrol on his father filling the small cabin, so acrid that the boy had to look away and cover his nose.

  Now they were miles away. His mother had lived close to the last shop and had sometimes passed by, bringing the boy a treat – a notebook or piece of sugar cane – nothing the shop didn’t sell, but he loved her gifts, craved them and the way her eyes searched his face for pleasure at them. Her name was Hermione and she was just a girl really, a light-skinned girl in a pale dress. He was forgetting her face but still recalled the smell of her, of frangipani and oranges. He knew that he had lived with her once, a long time ago, as a baby. She had sung to him. He thought he remembered this, searched hard through his mind for those memories, but they were like bright, tangible dreams you woke from but could never recall, both real and unreal. He missed his mother, was scared of losing her from his mind. After his father’s worst beatings he had run to her, to the small shack by the river. She cleaned the cuts made by the leather, rubbed arnica on his bruises, and, standing shaking in the doorway, he had begged to stay with her, but no matter how he pleaded – Please ma, please ma – she always, always sent him back.

  There was no one to run to now. The boy’s days filled themselves with the routine of the shop and school, when he went. It was a three-mile walk to the classroom with its galvanised roof and Teacher Lewis or Miss Harvey sat at the table on a raised platform at the front. There might be forty children crammed at the small square desks and on the window ledge; some sat on the floor by Mrs Harvey’s feet – boys with small hand mirrors who tried to look up her skirt. She was a fat woman in bright, billowing clothes, conducting the children through hot afternoons, chanting times tables, spelling simple chalk words on the board which they would scrape onto their slates.

  School was too easy for the boy, whose quick mind had been honed in the shop, who could add and multiply big numbers in his head, and could already read the newspaper cover to cover. His father couldn’t read English and sometimes when the shop was quiet, ordered the boy to read the news to him aloud. The boy almost liked doing this, could not understand how, even hating his father, he wanted to impress him with reading, wanted him to be proud.

  He went to school less and less often these days, his father demanding he run the shop when he went to Kingston to buy and trade stock. Most times his father was gone for a day, returning with a laden truck. But other times he might be gone for two days and nights, returning with bloodshot eyes, looking thinner and meaner in his creased clothes. The boy knew then that his father had been to Chinatown, to the illegal gambling dens that lined Barry Street, and lost himself in all-day-and-night mahjong games. The smell of rum would be thick on his breath and no matter how hard the boy tried to keep away from him, a beating always came in the days that followed the Chinatown trips, where money had been lost. The tiredness and hangovers made his father more brutal and he beat the boy with more ferocity, as though he were beating the man who’d taken his cash.

  ♣

  The shop was a hub in the village, busy all day and open long after the sun went down. At dusk, the boy and his father would light the oil beacons, and from miles away the glow could be seen, luring the village men to come and sit at the small tables, to drink beer or rum and play dominoes. An awning overhung the veranda, keeping them dry if a storm broke, and James Lowe knew this social time was good for business, would stand in the doorway making light conversation, asking after wives, children, sometimes ordering the boy to bring a plate of fritters to share. The mood was light,
no sign of the tension that snagged between the blacks and Chinese, the resentment at Chinese wealth, the stories from the other side of the island of Chiney shops looted and burned. James Lowe liked to keep things sweet, and meanwhile fixed the scales he weighed their goods on, bedded rocks of salt in fish to give it weight, mixed new flour with old.

  The boy liked these nights and the company of the men. The less time spent alone with his father the better. He liked their talk, listening from his spot in the shadow at the side of the porch as he played dice against himself. Sometimes Rufus or Luther, his friends from school, would come and they would play against each other. Rufus was the same as him – had a mother who didn’t want him, a father who beat him. They bet pennies on the roll, and the boy loved the clicking of the ivory cubes in his fist, loved the chance of the dice. But in truth, the boy loved to play alone the best, testing the laws of probability against the truth of the dice.

  When his father was away and the boy was left in charge it was his job to clear the veranda when the men left, to lock the wooden shutters, bolt the door and grille. His father’s absence brought a kind of peace, a quiet time the boy did not feel scared in, safe in the company of the lime-green geckos that clung to the shop’s whitewashed walls and the cicadas clicking in the grass.

  It had rained on the night he couldn’t find the dice, and he spent the evening fetching drinks for the men or sitting to the side listening to their banter, sometimes thinking of his mother. When the men had gone, the boy moved through the shop with a lamp, casting tall shadows on the shelves, holding it up to light the cabinets behind the counter where they kept the dice and dominoes sets, the packs of playing cards. He thought to help himself to another pair, but the shelf was empty and so he carried the lamp across to where they slept, setting it down on the table between the low beds. The boy wanted another pair of dice badly, and thought he might find some among his father’s things, an old pair from a mahjong set, perhaps. There was a wooden chest on his father’s side that had many thin drawers, each with a brace for a written label, but there was no paper in them, no indication of what the drawers held.

  The boy wondered what he might find in the drawers he had never opened, never even thought to open. He pulled the top one out and reached in. There were letters from China that looked the same as those he sometimes saw his father reading intently while sat at the kitchen table. They were written in calligraphy, delicate black marks the boy traced below his fingers. He could feel the texture of the ink but it gave no clue to what was written there. He tucked the letters back in place and opened the next drawer, which held his father’s passport and official-looking papers, stamped. Here was his father’s Chinese name – Lowe Shu-On. Lowe Shu, Lowe Shu. He’d heard other Chinese men call his father by this name. And here was a date of birth. The boy quickly did the maths. His father was thirty-one. He had not known his age before. No birthdays were celebrated in the room behind the shop.

  There was a tattered photograph of a young Chinese woman, staring impassively at the camera. She was thin-faced, delicate looking. The boy thought the photo looked older than other photographs he had seen. Who it was it? A sister? His father’s mother? In another drawer was a cufflink box that held two gold cufflinks with black onyx stones. The boy had never seen his father in anything but a vest and so the cufflinks surprised him – everything in these drawers surprised him – and suddenly he was pulling open every drawer and examining its contents – holding papers up to the lamp light, as though the answer to the riddle of his father might be found here if he looked closely enough, as though the reasons his father could barely look at him, never in the eye, might be found here in this drawer or that drawer, the reasons for the beatings, the slaps and punches, the reason the father did not love the boy. The rain began outside again, hammering on the tin roof of the room. And it was there, in the fifth drawer down, that the boy caught sight of his own name on a slip of paper. It was a handwritten receipt like the ones they gave for large purchases in the shop, but here, where the goods were usually described, was his father’s writing and own name spelt out in block capitals, and the words altogether read For the Care and Upkeep of Ralph Lowe, a sum of £25 received. And there below it was his mother’s name, signed and printed in her shaky hand.

  2

  Flowers Shaped as Dice

  I can’t give you anything but love, baby

  My father died on a Tuesday in March. Three days later, we sat on the hard seats of the cold crematorium at Manor Park, the light filtered by the high stained-glass windows. The pews were full. My father had been as zealous in his atheism as any religious fundamentalist and so the ceremony was led by a Humanist official – a tall, bony man with a neat moustache who gave a careful eulogy about my father’s life, notable for what it left out as much as included.

  The service was punctuated by the old jazz music my father had loved – Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. My brother read Invictus, one of his favourite poems. My mother stood at the end, smiling brightly, thanking everyone for coming. The ceremony was over. We sat in silence as the conveyor belt slowly moved the coffin through the hatch towards the furnace. It didn’t seem feasible to me that my father’s body was in that box, just as it seemed impossible his ashes were in the plastic urn delivered home by the undertaker a few days later, and all this just as inconceivable as the fact that he was dead.

  We trailed outside into the rainy afternoon where already other mourners were arriving for the next service. There was space on the flagstone terrace for flowers to be placed. We hovered beside the display for my father, noticeably different from other arrangements nearby. There were a number of garlands shaped as dice, bright red with white spots on each side, and as a centrepiece, an enormous white and red playing card made of roses and carnations – the ace of hearts.

  A way off stood a circle of middle-aged men in suits and overcoats or leather jackets, one or two in trilby hats. All of them were smoking. There were black faces and white faces, some I recognised, others I’d never seen, and yet, in a way, I knew them all. Over the years I had come to distinguish their voices on the phone when they rang to speak with my father, always asking for Chick or Chan or Chin. I knew their names too: Sylvester, Mac, Felix, Ray the Pilot, John the Carpenter. They were the gamblers who had known my father for decades, with whom he had spent long nights at card and dice tables in clubs and casinos all over London. They were here to pay their respects.

  The wake was held at my parents’ home in Ilford, an unremarkable semi-detached house, identical to others on the street opposite the park with its small front garden and pebble-dashed walls. The doorbell rang as the mourners arrived, more and more, too many for the cramped back room and kitchen. The front living room was off limits since we hadn’t had the heart to move the single bed my father had died in, placed there when he could no longer climb the stairs. It hadn’t seemed right to open that room up yet. My family had no religious beliefs, but I, at least, felt that room was still charged with sadness and the strange energy of illness and death.

  There are photographs from that afternoon, evidence of the strange mix of people at the wake. My mother’s elderly relatives stare into the camera from their upright chairs against the wall, looking twee and confused. Our old next-door neighbours, Irish Bridget and her husband Dick, raise their glasses to the camera. In other photographs my own motley crew of friends stands together, young and casual, getting stuck into the wine and beer. I was moved by how many of them had come – friends from university, friends from college, even friends of Sid, my newish boyfriend. It was strange to see them in their best clothes, in a different setting from the nightclubs and house parties where we danced into the early hours.

  Visible in a corner behind them were the gangster-suave men from the crematorium, all younger than my father. They looked up to him, my mother said. Like apprentices, I suppose you’d say. In that crowd was Charlie White, a man I’d known as long as I could remember. He was a plumber, a hard-looki
ng man, squat and muscular, his face webbed with red from his early years of hard drinking. He’d been wild as a young man – a real delinquent, my mother said. Some unspeakably violent act had put him in borstal for a time, but that rage had mellowed. He was often stoned, and never without his tin of Rizlas and tobacco. When I’d turned thirteen, he’d shocked me by rolling a joint and holding it out to me to light. He’d done the same with my brother four years earlier, as though it were a coming-of-age ceremony. I had taken up his offer, inhaling the heavy black hash he crumbled, exhaling a thick tongue of smoke and trying not to cough.

  Charlie was a regular at our house, often found sitting in an armchair in the front room, or opposite my father at the table, the two of them drinking tea and discussing the state of the world. He’d bring a crossword with him and they would work through the clues together, Charlie filling in the boxes neatly with his biro.

  There’s a photo of him with Angie, his wife, a kind, gossipy woman who’d been a hairdresser when he met her, still glamorous in her fifties. Charlie was twenty years younger than my father, but six months later he too was dead, collapsed at work from an aneurysm. He left a surprising amount of money to Angie. Now where did that come from? my mother said, and we all wondered. I thought well of Charlie for leaving her enough, unlike my father, whose belongings fitted into three cardboard boxes. He didn’t even have a bank account, let alone a will.

  Charlie was devastated by my father’s death. He was the only one of my father’s friends to visit every day in the last week of his life when Dad lay unconscious in the front room. Charlie sat in silence at his bedside, in the room where they had passed hours together, a mug of tea in his hand, talking gently. ‘Chick’s still listening,’ he said. ‘I know the fella.’

  There’s a photograph of my mother, her hand on the shoulder of Wes, another of my father’s friends. She is smiling broadly, but looks dishevelled, her hair awry, the half-there, half-absent look I had come to know well since her stroke two years before. It had changed her in strange and subtle ways – no serious paralysis, no loss of speech, but a softening inside, a new gentleness, confusion, tears that came easily and often. She’d become extremely sentimental about animals. Their injuries, illnesses and rescues from cruelty, as aired on various TV shows, would leave her bereft, speechlessly weeping in the blue flicker of the screen. Yet in the days leading up to my father’s death, and on the day of the funeral, she didn’t cry, or if she did, no one saw. She was proud and always concerned with keeping up appearances. This didn’t change with the stroke.