by Hannah Lowe
‘But what about normal mongrels, who don’t look weird?’ I asked, unable to follow his logic. I was thinking about our dog Chloe, whom Charlie loved.
‘Well, they’re not right either,’ he said. Chloe was sat at his feet. He bent forward to tickle her. ‘Chloe’s a sweet dog and all, but she’s not a pedigree, is she? She’s not the best that she could be.’ Chloe jumped into his lap and licked his face.
‘She likes you though,’ I said.
‘That’s as may be.’ He leant back in his chair, straining his neck to see if my father was in earshot, stroking the dog. ‘Now your dad, he’s all right. You know he’s my best mate. I’ve known him half my life. But bloody hell, we’ve had some rows about this one. We’re never gonna agree on this one.’ He was speaking conspiratorially, as though I could surely see the reason of his argument, even if my father couldn’t. ‘I told him, “Chick, it’s like two different dogs – no reason not to get on, but just don’t mate them.” But he sits there in his bloody armchair, lights his cigarette and looks straight back at me – like I’m a fool, like I’m a bleeding idiot!’
♠
My father liked to remind me that I was, in Charlie’s words, a mongrel. ‘You’ve got a touch of the tar brush,’ he would say. ‘Don’t forget now.’ He’d be laughing, knowing well enough how loaded that phrase was – its origins in the bigoted slang of those obsessed by racial purity. He found it funnier because of that. His humour was often irreverent and sometimes careless – a sort of schoolboy insolence. He took the joke one step further once or twice, finding a ruler in the bureau drawer to measure the width of my nose. I was seven, completely unaware of the implications of this, long before I knew about scientific racism that used this type of anatomical investigation to prove its awful theories. I laughed along as he measured my nose from side to side, then let me measure his. It was strange to be so physically close to him, to be touching his face. But his nose was 6.5cm across at the widest part, a figure I was impressed with.
‘Your nose is massive, Dad!’ I worried that mine might grow to match the size of his.
♥
Up close to my father was too close to his moles. There were literally hundreds of them, covering his face and neck, down his arms, across his back. The ones on his back were large, the size of five-pence pieces. Others were smaller and resembled sultanas, raised from the skin and gathered in clusters with waxy surfaces. In some places, there were more moles than actual skin. Once he went to the doctor’s about a mole that had become irritated and had an operation to remove it. Apparently the hospital dermatologist had been fascinated by the volume of moles covering my father’s body and had wanted to conduct tests on them. But my father didn’t want to be experimented on. He seemed unfazed by the moles, which he called his black spots, even though there were more and more every year.
But those black spots horrified me and he knew this. I had a few dark moles on the side of my face he used to point at or try to touch. ‘Oh dear, Han,’ he said, ‘looks like you’ll be covered soon, like me!’ I ran to the mirror in the hall to check the size of the moles and search for the appearance of more.
It was a rare skin condition – Seborrhoeic keratosis – although I don’t think he was actually ever properly diagnosed. Sufferers develop multiple benign moles from the age of forty onwards. They weren’t so bad when I met him, my mother said. But by the time he was sixty, his black spots covered the surface of his skin and one day, driving with them, I announced my decision to stop kissing him. ‘I don’t want to catch black spots,’ I said, pulling a face.
‘They’re not catching,’ my mother turned round from the front seat. ‘They’re just moles. We’ve all got moles.’ My father said nothing, his hands on the steering wheel.
‘Well, I’m not kissing him anymore, just in case.’ Although I didn’t mean it, I really didn’t kiss him again, not once, not a kiss, not a hug, for fifteen years, until he was lying unconscious in our living room, the night before he died.
♣
The Ashgrove Road house was a place of mysteries. I both knew and didn’t know it. It was so familiar, my house, my home, but something made me a snoop there. I was in everything. No drawer unopened, no cupboard I hadn’t rooted through. For a while I was a thief and liar too.
One morning I rose early and found a packet of meringues in the kitchen cupboard. Six perfect white meringue nests. I crunched through them, one after another, washed them down with orange squash. There were crumbs on the carpet in front of the television where my cartoons played. I was happy. It was good to be awake at 6 a.m., alone with myself and sated with sugar as Wile E. Coyote pranced across the screen.
But hours later, at lunchtime, my mother went to look for those meringues. It was Sunday and we had a guest at the table – not just anyone, but Dolores, all the way from Canada. She was my father’s cousin, but much younger. They had known each other in Jamaica, but had lost touch for years. Then out of the blue, she was on the phone and coming to visit in her red blouse with a jewelled brooch pinned to it. She had long fingers with red painted nails and wore gold rings. The lunch was special. The good white-and-brown china was on the table, and – how could I know? – raspberries from our garden and a pot of whipped cream were waiting in the fridge to be spooned onto those meringues.
To lie well you have to shift reality to match your truth. For a second before you tell a lie, you must believe that what you are about to say is unequivocally the truth and hold your nerve about it. Stick with the lie and not betray it. So when my mother came back into the room, I already knew I hadn’t eaten the meringues. When she asked, the denials came easily. Even when I saw she really knew – because, after all, what other explanation was there? – the only thing that mattered was to hold the lie, to keep denying, and so I lied and lied. ‘I swear, Mum, I didn’t eat them.’ She sat down at the table and watched me. ‘I didn’t, I didn’t.’ It was all planned – the raspberries, meringues, whipped cream, and I had ruined it all, ruined the lunch, the visit. ‘I promise, Mum, I didn’t eat them. I didn’t eat them.’
We sat around the table and watched the lie, like a ball I rolled towards my mother. Every time I rolled it, she rolled it back, harder each time. So then I rolled it to my father, who was keeping the conversation going with Dolores as though they couldn’t hear the lie rolling on the wood, and without even looking, he raised his hand and stopped the ball and rolled it back. Sam sat smiling at the other end of the table. Slowly he shook his head. By then, of course, I was crying, and there was only one place for me to go, and I was grateful when my mother sent me away to my bedroom. Yet I still felt I was the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice, even as I lay sobbing into my sheets, the tears were not of guilt, but of indignation – sorrow, not remorse.
Was it minutes or hours after that Dolores held me and told me everything was all right? She smelt of a sweet perfume. We were on the bed and she was leaving. I was crying still because she couldn’t give me what I wanted – her belief in the lie. Instead I took what was offered – forgiveness. It made me heavy in her red silk arms, still sobbing: ‘I didn’t, I didn’t.’
♦
My mother’s younger brother, Uncle Terry, lived a mile away from us with Auntie Lyn and my three cousins, Susanna and Maria – ‘the girls’ – both older than me, and little Alfie, a year younger. Lyn had been my mother’s close friend at teaching college, which is how she’d met Terry. I was sometimes scared of my uncle, of his big dark beard and loud voice. My aunt was gentle and pragmatic. I liked her and I pretty much worshipped Susanna and Maria, just for being older than me and for being my cousins. In each other’s pockets, my mother said about the five of us together before my brother outgrew us, leaving the girls with me trailing after them, and Alfie trailing after me through long summers in the bright garden and the park with its hideaways and secrets, the endless games of leapfrog and hide-and-seek, dressing up in Nan’s old dresses and old hats with peacock feathers, our small feet in her
old-lady shoes, and the sleepless sleepovers and camping holidays, Christmas Day not starting until they arrived at our house, or us at theirs.
In 1982, I was desperate to join the girls at Margie Sparrow’s Dance School in the church hall at Chadwell Heath and my mother finally agreed. On Wednesday evenings after school would-be ballerinas aged five to fifteen would train under the tutelage of Margie herself. Some looked as though they were born to dance, while others had been pushed into the class by their mothers. They looked dazed and lonely, loitering at the back of the hall to fidget with their leotards and pink tights, until we were called to our places to warm up. Then we rested our hands on wooden chairs as Margie, frail and ancient in a yellow gauze dress, her dyed black hair in a tangled beehive – swept down the rows, turning our knees out with her wooden cane, her rheumatic eyes locking with ours as though she could see the bad inside of us.
Susanna was ten by then. She was studious and bookish and didn’t like dancing at all, but Maria was a natural dancer, full of self-confidence. Even Alfie had a go at ballet, wanting to be wherever we were. He was the only boy in a class of fifty girls, his thin body clad in black tights and a wrap-around cardigan. The older girls laughed at him when we lined up to run and leap, one by one, across the hall’s polished floor, even though Alf could jump higher than all of us, and looked so lithe and elegant moving through the air. ‘Saut de chat, girls!’ cried Margie Sparrow. ‘Your arms are wings! Reach for the stars!’ Alfie looked like he was flying. I thought he was brave for joining in, and said so, but he stopped coming at the same time as Susanna, then Maria moved to the advanced class on Saturday mornings, leaving me to fend for myself.
At seven, I was as tall as the ten-year-olds and it soon became clear to me that long limbs were not an advantage in ballet, in the way that they were in netball or running. I wasn’t going to excel at dancing. Joy and Suki Lovell were in the same set as me – small, blonde, angelic sisters, who stood at the front and executed every plié and jeté perfectly. I persevered through the twice-yearly exams – always Commended, never Highly Commended, never a Distinction – and through the annual shows at Ilford Town Hall, which required our parents to pay out for garish pink or lilac tutus and obliged our mothers to spend hours stuffing us into our costumes in the dressing rooms, slicking us in blue eyeshadow and red lipstick, before the curtain rose and we spun and polka-danced across the stage.
My father never came to these events but he dropped me off and picked me up from every lesson. We spent more time together in his car than anywhere. He patiently ferried me to choir and piano lessons, to and from school, to birthday parties and back again. After ballet, I would come out to find him standing among the Essex mothers in their leopard-skin leggings and stiletto boots and gold jewellery. Once, after a particularly gruelling class in which I had failed to master a series of chassés, my feet seemingly too large for one to ‘lightly chase’ the other, an exasperated Margie Sparrow had ordered me to stand aside to let the other girls pass. ‘Fairy steps, girls!’ she cried, ‘Don’t wake the fairies up!’ Her look told me I was more elephant than fairy. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as horribly body conscious as I did at that moment. Afterwards my father was in the foyer, standing to the side looking dishevelled in his old suede jacket and jeans, grey hair uncombed, jingling his car keys. ‘Hello, Han!’ he called out to me. Why couldn’t I just be normal, I thought, the same size as other girls, with a normal father, who looked like other fathers?
I saw Suzette Bryce, a portly girl who struggled with dancing even more than I did, look at him, and then look quizzically at me. As we went to the pegs to retrieve our coats and shoe bags, I turned to her and whispered, ‘My mum’s at work so she sends a cab driver for me,’ and she whispered back, ‘Oh right, I wondered.’
Penny Hodge, another little dancer, was nearby, listening. ‘I always wondered too,’ she said, leaning in. She looked in my father’s direction. ‘Is it always the same man?’
We were conspiratorial. I nodded. ‘They always send the same one.’
‘Well,’ said Suzette. ‘I could ask my mum to give you a lift if you like.’ We all looked at my father again, who suddenly looked exactly like a cab driver.
‘Oh no, it’s OK,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t really mind.’
‘See you next week, then?’ Penny asked, picking up her bag.
‘Oh, I suppose,’ said Suzette. She looked miserable at the thought.
‘Yep, next week! See you!’ I replied brightly, pulling on my coat. I turned away to my father, who reached out for my shoe bag, completely unaware of my betrayal.
4
1938
The boy and his father were living in a small village near to Yallahs. They worked in Mr Ho Choy’s grocery. The old shop was gone. The boy did not know why there had been a change of fortune but his friend Rufus told him his father had pledged the shop in a mahjong game and, unable to pay the debt, had been forced to hand it over. Once again they had tied their mattresses to the truck, packed their clothes and whatever goods were left, and gone off into the night, along the yellow dust lanes, past moonlit banana fields and coffee groves, the storm debris of branches cracking under their wheels.
Mr Ho Choy was an old man who limped behind the counter. He had white whiskers and a bald head. He was kind to the villagers, who all had credit with him, and his business had grown from a simple grocery to a sprawling store that sold hardware and timber, with a rum shop attached and a kitchen selling snacks. He lived with his wife in a large white house half a mile away and allowed the boy and his father to sleep in the shop’s back room, among the sacks and crates.
A makeshift curtain split the room in two and on the other side, Linda Bloomfield, the shop’s servant, slept with her two small children. She was young and very black but reminded the boy of his mother with her wide doe-eyes and the coils of plaits she wore wrapped above her ears. Her children whimpered and cried and the boy lay awake listening to Linda’s cooing. The soft lull of her songs floated out of the window into the blue night, reminding the boy of his mother’s singing. Sometimes the boy awoke to hear another noise – not children, but something animal behind the curtain, a low grunting, rhythmic and breathless, and a woman’s soft cries. The boy sat up and looked over at his father’s empty cot, the bare sheets crumpled in the moonlight.
He was thirteen now. He didn’t go to school but worked all day in the shop, often left alone with Mr Ho Choy when his father was sent to Kingston for goods. He was grateful, always, to be out of his way. His father still beat him, his violence sudden and chaotic.
One night he had been reading the newspaper to his father in the back room of the shop. The news told of workers demanding more wages and rioting at the sugar factory in Westmoreland. People had been killed. Caught up in the injustice, the boy blurted out a curse: ‘Damn the factory owners! The workers have a right to stand up for themselves.’ Before he could continue reading, the blow struck his ear. His father’s left fist first, then his right, again and again as the boy stumbled round the lamp-lit room, trying to duck the punches, until finally he lay on the floor, curled against the bare feet kicking his back.
Sometimes the boy would wake in the morning, the first light sloping up the wall, to find his father sitting on his own cot, bent forward and staring at him, a brooding look on his face. Before the boy could speak, his father’s hands would be on him, pulling him up and pushing him towards the door, the two of them in a strange, silent dance, out across the yard and towards the trees. There was no one else awake to see the man dragging the boy, naked but for his shorts, fallen to his knees and clawing at the dirt. There would be rope, the boy’s body tied to the trunk, and then his father’s punches, quick in succession, sharp jabs to his back and sides, the boy’s cheek scraping on the bark, his body waking up to pain, the snap of his father’s belt before the buckle whipped against his thighs. Sometimes his father neglected to tie him, but he still leant there, nailed to the tree by the force of his father
’s fists.
Afterwards the boy watched his father’s back heaving as he walked away, out of breath. He would bend to wash his hands in the bucket on the veranda, as though the boy had dirtied him somehow, as though he needed to be rinsed off. He never looked back. The boy would pick himself up from the ground, slowly unfurling. He never cried. He would go inside and dress slowly and carefully in the back room, examining the bruises already showing on his torso, dark blooms on his skin, dabbing the bright cuts with a cloth. Then the day would begin, as though he had just risen.
♠
One day he was alone minding the shop, leaning on the counter, his mind busily running over the accounts, only vaguely aware of a small child skipping back and forth in the yard outside the door. Customers came and went and each time they left the boy would look up to see the child, a boy of five or six, playing hopscotch, throwing a stone into the dust, the sound of his counting just audible. The boy looked down again. Then suddenly the child was before him, bare-chested, his nose just touching the counter, his grubby fingers gripping the wood. ‘What you doing?’ the child asked, looking at the ledger, the pen in the boy’s hand, then immediately, ‘My mummy says we brothers.’
‘Hmm?’ The boy looked up, pretending not to hear. ‘Take your hands off the counter.’
‘I’m your brother,’ the child said proudly. ‘I’m Kenneth.’ His smile showed his pink gums and the threat of a nervous laugh rippled in his thin chest. The boy took him in – the pretty face below his scalp shaved and scarred by a careless razor. They had the same slant eyes, the same cheekbones, the same nose. He could see that what the child said was true. But quietly he said, ‘No,’ looking him in the eyes, ‘is not true,’ and then a whisper: ‘Your mummy is lying because she don’t know who your daddy is, I promise you.’
