by Hannah Lowe
Something flickered in the child’s smile and the boy pulled himself up a little taller behind the counter until he loomed above the child blinking up at him.
‘Yes, we brothers!’ he insisted.
‘Get out my shop,’ the boy said, pronouncing each word carefully. ‘You’re no brother of mine.’
‘Yes, my mummy said!’ The child looked hurt. ‘We brothers. Same daddy, the Chinaman.’
The boy pointed at the doorway, spoke louder. ‘Out! Get out of here!’ The child turned to the door, then slowly back to the boy and said simply, ‘Because we look the same, you can’t see?’ and he walked fast out the door and began to run, across the yard and through the gate. He was barefoot. The boy watched him disappear along the road.
He had seen his own face so clearly in the smaller boy’s he couldn’t bear it, and didn’t know what it was he couldn’t bear, the sight of his own self, or of his father. And how many children did his father have with girls from Mocho, Hearts Ease or Yallahs? Linda Bloomfield’s belly was growing and he knew what was in there. How many others, a mile away or thirty miles away? Did he pass them on the road, these children who were not owned like he was, who had loving mothers to care for them and time and leisure to throw stones into the dust, hopping back and forth in the midday sun?
♥
Mr Ho Choy was kind. He helped out the poorest in the village, didn’t chase credit if he knew a family couldn’t pay it, give small loans of cash he knew he wouldn’t see again. He had worked hard, had enough for himself and could afford to be kind. He was kind to the boy too, as though he could sense the sorrow in him, could see below his clothes the scars and marks put on him by his father. When the shop was quiet, and the boy’s father gone to trade, he showed him card tricks – the boy following the queen in Three Card Marney, pointing at the card he knew must be the one because his eyes told him so, even as he knew Mr Ho Choy had somehow swapped it. ‘You sure, you sure?’ the old man laughed in his croaky voice, turning the cards over, fooling the boy again.
Mr Ho Choy was old but his hands were nimble. They were small, strangely pale and reminded the boy of the fragile shells the tide washed up in Yallahs Bay. Mr Ho Choy showed the boy how to hold his fingers still and pressed together, curving his palm just so, to hold a card out of sight, then how to flick his wrist so quickly a swap could not be seen. The boy practised this manoeuvre for hours at the counter, until he too could do the three-card trick.
Some nights he sat outside the shop with the village men, their rum and beers and dominoes set out on the table. He would take out his cards and the men would gather round, one by one trying their luck against the boy, tossing him a penny to deal the three cards face down side-by-side. Then slowly at first, the boy would slide the cards around, swapping them into each other’s places, but always turning them over to show their faces. He knew the banter needed for the trick, the constant talk the confidence man should spin a punter. ‘So there she is,’ he’d say, turning the queen, ‘and there she is again.’ His audience hummed and ahhed along, bent towards the table, the punter’s eyes fixed on the boy’s hands moving the cards faster and faster until finally they came to rest. ‘Now which one is it?’ the boy would ask, looking up, and the fellow would point to a card with conviction, his eyes wide, and say ‘That one! It has to be that one,’ and ‘I haven’t looked away – I know it’s the queen!’
‘You sure, you sure?’ the boy would ask, before turning the card to show a three of hearts or two of diamonds. ‘No way! No way!’ the man cried, outraged but half laughing, and the other men slapped their thighs and shook their heads. All evening, they would play the boy, drunker and drunker, but more determined to outwit him. And sometimes he let them win, enough times to keep them playing, their pennies knocking against each other in his pocket.
5
If You Can’t Win It Straight, Win It Crooked
It matters not how strait the gate How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul
– William Ernest Henley, Invictus
My grandfather Walter had played the piano, my mother played the piano and then I began to play the piano. My father drove me to weekly lessons at Miss Phelps’s house on Breamwood Road, with its dark rooms of brocade furniture, the windows blocked by ornate nets and velvet curtains, the lingering smell of polish. Miss Phelps was in her eighties with thin white hair pulled into a bun and half-moon spectacles she peered over to observe my hands misbehaving on the keys of her piano.
‘Stop, stop!’ she would cry in her croaking voice, yanking my wrists up with a pencil, ‘Lift them, lift!’ Sometimes she would shut the piano lid altogether, sighing, and would bring me an orange from her fruit bowl. ‘Feel the orange,’ she ordered and I had to sit in her upright chair and roll the fruit between my palms, to mould my hands into the proper shape to play – fingers spread like claws, high wrists.
Miss Phelps had a brain tumour. I didn’t find this out until my mother announced that we needed to find a new piano teacher because Miss Phelps was in hospital and not expected to come home. I didn’t have the chance to see her before she died, to thank her for her teaching and her patience. By then, I was quite good at the piano, having left behind Teaching Little Fingers How to Play for Step by Step to the Classics.
My father used to see Miss Phelps every time he came to pick me up from lessons. They would pass the time of day while I stood between them, squirming, wanting to be gone. He was upset when he found out how ill she was, worried that she didn’t have any family to visit her. She’d never married and didn’t have children. He bought flowers and drove to the hospital to sit at her bedside, returning the next day and all that week until the last time, when the staff told him Miss Phelps had died in the night. He came home looking sadder than I’d ever seen him.
After Miss Phelps I went to Maisie, who was barely eighteen, a punk who wore long black skirts and slashed T-shirts, painted her nails blue and had three rings in her nose. She was a virtuoso, her long fingers dancing on the piano keys in her mum’s back room where she gave lessons. I wanted to play like her. At nine years old, I wanted to be her. She hennaed her hair and smelt of cigarettes. I practised more and more.
After Nan had died, my mother inherited the rest of the house and we took over the rooms downstairs. The brass bed was removed and Nan’s bedroom became our front room and home to the piano. It was a space rarely used except by me – a quieter, stiller room somehow, with pale green walls bathed in light from the tall bay windows. I was only allowed to play the piano in the afternoons and evenings – morning practice was banned because it disturbed my father in the room above, sleeping off a night of poker. When I could practise, I’d play for hours at a time, until my arms and shoulders ached. I found it peaceful and was rarely interrupted, unless by my father. ‘Play me a song, Han?’ His head popped through the front-room door. For him, the piano was a serious pastime with the genteel associations his upbringing in colonial Jamaica encouraged him to admire. Sometimes I just refused, but other times I’d shut the lid heavily and leave the room, stalking past him. Worse was when he had a friend round and wanted to show me off. I couldn’t bear it and I never would. Often I’d hear him shuffling outside when I practised and would fling the door open to find him standing listening.
‘Honestly, Dad! Go away, will you!’ I’d say, and like a chastised child he’d turn and slope off down the hall.
I resented the pride he showed in me. It made me angry in a way I didn’t understand then and still don’t entirely. Looking back, I see how he claimed his children’s successes as his own, as though we existed as reflections on him, despite his hands-off parenting. He would boast to anyone about my half-brother Tom’s first-class degree in Maths from Durham, or my half-sister Gloria’s glamorous work in Atlanta. ‘Yes, my daughter is Head of Cultural Affairs,’ he’d say. ‘She’s clever, like me,’ and ‘Brains are in the family.’ Most children want to make their parents proud, but I
sensed a desperation in his pride, his need to prop himself up through me. Because what did he have? No qualifications, no job, no access to the institutions he so admired. No bank account, no mortgage, no pension. Nothing of any import. Nothing that carried any currency or status. Even aged nine, I knew I had the opportunity for those things and that my life would take a very different path from his. I looked down on him because of it. And of all the things he coveted, the one he wanted most was my respect.
♣
Your father didn’t know how to be a father, my mother once said. He had no role model. I remembered the silky scars on my father’s legs, pale and raised, made by the belt of his father, my grandfather. They haunted me – I was horrified that marks made so long ago could endure.
I wondered what a good father might be. A breadwinner? When my father slapped cash onto the dinner table, he was claiming that status, but we all knew our household needed our mother’s income too, that his winnings were erratic and unreliable. Was a father supposed to make the rules, perhaps, to be the disciplinarian of a family? I’d heard that threat – Wait until I tell your father – from the television and from the mothers of my friends, as though the father was the chief justice of punishment, the last recourse when you were really bad. But my mother was our judge and jury, and my father was soft as butter – he never told me off, never raised a hand to me.
Half the time he wasn’t there – out in the evening, asleep half the day. My mother tried to compensate, to be both mother and father to us – but perhaps this undermined him even more, although it seemed to suit him to let her. ‘Ask your mother,’ he’d say whenever I would ask to bake a cake, or walk to the shop, or watch TV. ‘Ask your mother. Ask your mother.’ Until I didn’t ask him any more.
Many of my friends’ fathers had enthusiasms – football, sailing, DIY, stamp collecting – some activity they might share with their children. But what were my father’s hobbies? Going to the bookies? Nothing we shared, although he’d sometimes do a card trick for me, and we spent a lot of time in the car together, driving from A to B, or the occasional trip to the park, where I would push the roundabout, working up a speed before jumping on, while he stood a way off under a tree, smoking a roll-up.
In the car, he’d boast: ‘I know the streets of London like the back of my hand.’ A cliché, but one he often used, and of course he did – his gambling took him everywhere, all over London, at times all over England, and later even overseas. He spent hours driving, the talk-show chatter from the radio keeping him company. One night, somewhere near Bow, he said, ‘Come on, Han, let’s see if you can get me lost.’ He was smiling. ‘I bet you any money you can’t.’ I saw his need to impress me in that smile – ‘Look what I can do,’ it said, and although I didn’t want to, I played along, giving him instructions, ‘Turn right here, Dad,’ and, ‘Turn left, then left again.’ I see us from the outside now, crossing the river onto a dual carriageway, past a dilapidated art-deco factory, a huge estate of high-rise blocks with their balconies crammed with crates and bicycles and laundry on the washing lines. Past traffic lights and down a noisy street where men crowded at the pavement cafés, past neon signs in kebab shop windows, below a railway bridge. And finally, sure that he must be lost, that I had led him miles from our starting point, we stopped and he reversed and turned to drive us back a different way, laughing the whole time and saying, ‘I know my way, I know my way, you see?’ I wished I didn’t feel as though I’d made a child happy.
The card tricks were an uncommon occurrence, but one I liked. ‘Cut open the deck anywhere, Han,’ he’d say, and I would, carefully lifting a section of the deck and turning it over, handing it to him. ‘So that’s the four of clubs, you want that one?’ I nodded, stood in front of him, my eyes fixed to the card. ‘You sure now, yes? You sure?’ I nodded again. ‘Right then, now blow!’ He held the deck open where I’d made the cut. I blew. He would make the smallest movement with his hand, almost imperceptible, and suddenly the four of clubs had disappeared, replaced by eight of spades. ‘How? How, Dad?’ I always asked, or my cousins begged if he’d performed the trick for them. We’d pull his trousers. ‘Show us, show us!’ But he just offered the trick again, or sat back and crossed his legs, laughed and tapped his nose. ‘That’s for me to know, and you to find out,’ he said, but of course we never did.
I used to watch as he sat on the sofa with a pack of cards. He could shuffle them in twenty different ways, arching and flexing the deck between his thumb and middle finger, so they looked as pliable as rubber, then split them, stack them, flip them. I can still hear the pitter-patter of a riffle shuffle, when he split a pack in two, cascading the cards into an interwoven pile. It looked so easy, but it wasn’t. The cards would fly away from me when I tried to copy him, scattering on the floor.
I liked the names of the games he played too. Some were common – blackjack, poker, rummy – but others sounded foreign and sophisticated – baccarat, kalooki, chemin de fer. I loved the feel of cards, playing patience for hours or building card towers, balancing the cards in pyramids, one on top of the other. I imbued the royal cards with personalities. The jack was suave but impetuous, the worst of these the jack of diamonds. The queen was stoic and unflinching. The king was wise but passive, and of course, ruled by the queen.
One of the clearest memories I have is watching my father asleep upstairs – it was always daytime, the curtains holding back the light. I was intrigued by his slumbers. Why else would I have so often held my breath and quietly opened the door to stand observing the rise and fall of his chest below the covers? I knew the smell of him asleep – a pungent scent, completely physical, but not unpleasant.
Over the years he must have adapted to those strange hours, driving in the city in the early light from games in Ladbroke Grove or Kentish Town or Pimlico, through the West End then out along the littered East End streets, the shuttered shops and garages of Romford Road, below the flyover where Ilford’s one-way system starts. Then turning through the tidy maze of residential streets that brought him home, often around dawn. Sometimes if a game had gone on, we’d all be up and having breakfast when his car pulled into the drive, Sam and I on stools at the kitchen counter, my mother buttering toast for us. He’d appear fleetingly in his suede jacket, car keys in hand, the smell of cigarettes on his breath. While the kettle boiled he’d dig into his pockets for a roll of money, counting out the notes and handing them to my mother, who would slip them into her handbag. Then he’d make himself a cup of tea and vanish off to bed. He was a ghost-father – gone all night or in the house but asleep – a present absence, hovering at the edges of our lives.
♦
I woke one morning and, through my bedroom window, saw my father standing in the garden with three other Caribbean men. On the grass were a pile of timber and several long rolls of bright green fabric. It was a warm day and they were in their vests, heads bent together, talking. Every now and then one of them would gesticulate, as though drawing a diagram in the air. My mother carried a tray of mugs out to them, and they smoked and sipped their tea, eyeing the wood on the ground.
‘What’s he doing?’ I asked my mother when I came down. She was in the kitchen, sifting flour into a mixing bowl. ‘Making tables,’ she replied.
‘What sort of tables?’
‘Snooker or dice,’ she said. ‘Not sure. Why don’t you ask him?’
John from St Lucia was on the patio, sawing wood, singing under his breath. He had a strange, hollow face with big eyes, but I thought he was kind-looking. I knew he was completely bald under his trilby hat as he sometimes took it off and let me rub his shiny head. My father called him John the Carpenter, a biblical-sounding name befitting John’s religious convictions, his penchant for quoting the Bible. I’d known him all my life. He lived round the corner and had six children. Last time I’d seen him, he’d pulled out a crumpled photograph of ‘his people’, as he called them. The eldest girl was twenty-one and the youngest two were baby twins, a boy and girl.
‘Look how sweet they are,’ he said, pointing to the picture. ‘Children are a heritage from the Lord. Sweet God, I’m blessed.’ The children were all dark like John, posed in their Sunday best around a Christmas tree. He had more than six kids, my mother said. He’d probably lost track. Too busy in the bookmakers.
‘Good morning to you,’ John said when he saw me. He dipped his hat. There was a sheen of sweat on his face. My father and the others were kneeling on the lawn, nailing beams of wood together.
‘What are they for, Dad?’ I asked, enticed by the green felt, the same shade as the grass, an overload of colour in the bright garden. ‘Dice,’ he said. ‘The club want two new tables, so we making them.’ He introduced me to the other men – ‘This me daughter.’ He had adopted his Jamaican accent. The men, Frank and Sylvester, looked up from their hammers to greet me.
They were out there all day, and all the next, making those tables, enormous when finished, with the green felt tacked tightly on their tops. And they were beautiful. John spent hours sanding and waxing the legs and frames until the curved wood gleamed, and as the sun went down, the four of them stood around the table, my father shaking dice and rolling them out across the baize. I stood at the side. John put his arm around me.
‘Watch this, Han,’ my father said, ‘two sixes.’ And he threw the ruby-coloured dice so they bounced against the table’s rim, rolling back to land with twelve dots facing up.
‘You’ daddy always get the numbers,’ John said. ‘You see? Boy, he’s skilful. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.’
‘Your call, Han,’ my father said, looking up at me.
‘A two and a four?’ I said, and he took the dice and shook them, rolling a two and four on the green table top. I called the numbers again, then Sylvester called, then Frank, and my father rolled the call every time, the dice spinning off the high wood rim. Then they all threw the dice – Sylvester, Frank and John – but none of them could do what my father could.
