by Hannah Lowe
There were no other customers, only his mother standing at the counter talking to the shopkeeper, a man the boy knew by sight from Barry Street. He became suddenly aware of himself, his heart beating hard in his chest. He pretended to choose star apples from a basket by the door, listening to their conversation. Slowly the boy understood his mother wasn’t talking in English, but in Chinese, stood with one hand on her hip, facing the shopkeeper. Suddenly she laughed – the giggle of a young girl – and the boy could tell the tone of her talk was flirtatious. The shopkeeper chatted away with her while his hands busied themselves, wrapping fish in wax paper, measuring rice on his scales, then sugar. He took down a jar of pink sweets from the shelf behind the counter, tipped them into a paper bag, rolled the top over and added them to the pile before him. The boy saw one hand go out to squeeze Hermione’s waist. She laughed again, like the tinkle of a bell, switching her hands on her hip. Then she leant over the counter and pecked the shopkeeper on the lips before turning with the shopping bag in her arms. It was too late for the boy to move from her path. He looked up as she came towards him, but she didn’t even register him. Her face was fixed and grim, no sign of the coquettishness of seconds ago. She walked out the door and down the step.
‘You want help?’ the shopkeeper called from behind the counter to the boy, eyeing him suspiciously. ‘Yes or no? You want help? You want the apples?’
The boy shook his head and placed the apple in his hand back on the pile. He stepped out of the shop into the sun, the street full of people. He looked up and down, but Hermione had gone.
♠
The boy lay on his sack-bed below the counter in the shop. It was nearly midnight. His head was full of Hermione, trying to make sense of what he’d seen the day before. A heavy feeling filled his chest. How could she not have recognised him? Would he see her again? He wanted to, badly. He should have spoken to her. He was angry with himself.
Outside on the veranda the evening customers had gone, but he could hear his father still out there in the night talking to Rhona. He heard her laugh. The boy stood up and went to the front window of the shop, peering through the slats. The oil lamp was burning, lighting the two figures standing entwined. On the table were a liquor flask and glasses, an overflowing ashtray.
Rhona stumbled suddenly but his father’s arms were round her and he pulled her up. She threw her head back laughing. ‘Oh, I’m spinning!’ she laughed, shut-eyed, her arms tightening around his neck. James Lowe pulled Rhona closer to him, bent lower, and led her in a dance, round and round, his face pressed to hers. ‘I’m spinning,’ she said again weakly, then, ‘I want to go to bed.’ James Lowe held his daughter tighter and danced her across the wooden floor, his face lost in her hair. Round and round they went, and round and round again.
7
White Flight
But to go to school in a summer morn, O it drives all joy away!
– William Blake, The School Boy
In the summer of 2012 I took the train from London to Norwich to see a friend – reading all the way, oblivious to my surroundings. But on the journey home I stared through the window at the country landscape speeding by, so fresh and green after the endless summer rain. Drawing closer to London, the scenery shifted to factories, scrapyards, backs of houses. Suddenly it looked familiar and I recognised the view – we were on the line that ran behind my childhood home. I hadn’t realised the train’s route – through Ipswich across the Suffolk border into Colchester, to Romford, Chadwell Heath, Ilford, then on to London. Growing up, I’d caught trains along this line all the time. I strained my neck to see what I might recognise. Soon we were racing through Goodmayes, past the back gardens of Ashgrove Road, a blur at seventy miles per hour. I tried to pick out my house from the others, and I think I saw it flashing past – the skylight in the roof, the weeping willow still cascading onto the lawn.
I felt a strange bewilderment. I’ve thought so much about that house and what went on there, its existence in my mind so powerful, and yet it’s locked in my memory as a place just always out of reach, a history I can’t go back to. But of course the physical house, the bricks and mortar, still stand. All houses have their histories, but it’s strange to think about the other lives that must now unfold between those walls – another family in the house of my mysteries. There will be different secrets there now.
When I was a child, I was fascinated by those railway tracks. You could clamber on the old stone wall behind our shed and push your way between the pines to reach them. They were so forbidden. I never made it further than the trees, but I’d overheard the other children on our street claim they’d walked along them, or worse, run across the eight steel rails to reach the other side and back again. Sam made those boasts as well. On the other side there was a bus garage, the red double-decker buses parked in tidy rows. I’d driven past that garage with my father a hundred times, but from my bedroom window, with the tracks in-between, it seemed as distant as a foreign land.
I spent many night-time hours, when I was supposed to be asleep, with my face pressed to the glass pane, watching trains run past, the blur of scribbled figures in the windows. Sometimes the train stopped at a signal on the track and those blurred faces came into relief, brought into focus the fact of other people living other lives. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked them silently, but the real question was, ‘Who are you?’
♥
I didn’t talk to the other children on Ashgrove Road. All of them had gone to the same school as my brother in Goodmayes, and they all knew each other. But I had gone to Cotton Lane, ‘the other school’, which meant we didn’t have the common base for friendship. I knew their names, though – Dean and Leila Franklin, next door but one; Bobby and Rami Bent across the road; a family four doors down with seven children. Their dad was Dennis, a wiry Jamaican friend of my father’s who appeared at our house all hours of the day and night, always dressed in jeans and a denim jacket, a can of Tennents Super in his hand.
Then there was Michael McCabe, Sam’s friend, who lived at number 83. I was often dispatched to his house to fetch my brother home for dinner. I loved Michael. At our house, he would lie on the carpet of our living room playing computer games. I’d lie beside him quietly, pretending to be watching, but really I was sniffing him. He smelt of coconuts. Sometimes, if I was sure he wouldn’t notice, I’d nuzzle my face against his jumper and kiss it.
My brother and he were amateur breakdancers, teaching themselves moves from a book called Breakdance: Mr Fresh and The Supreme Rockers Show You How to Do It! and from repeat viewings of Breakdance: The Movie. Sometimes they were joined by Raminder, a Sikh boy who lived round the corner. The three of them would take my brother’s tape recorder into the back garden and stand around a square of lino, swinging their arms in time to the beat of Grandmaster Flash or Run DMC. Raminder’s topknot posed problems when he tried to head-spin, but he was the best by far at the other moves – the caterpillar, which involved throwing your torso down and wriggling along the ground, or the windmill, in which the dancer’s body rolled around on the ground while his legs rotated at speed in a sort-of windmill motion. I was irked that I could perform all kinds of dexterous manoeuvres at gymnastics club which would have enabled me to breakdance well, but daren’t ask to join my brother’s garden rehearsals, knowing full well what the answer would be. Instead, when they had finished and disappeared to the ghetto of his room, I would go into the garden alone to practise head-spins.
I wished I had friends my own age on Ashgrove Road to practise breakdancing with, to do anything with. Every day I walked silently past the children on my street – no ‘all right?’ or ‘watcha’, no knocking on their doors to see if they could come out. No one knocking for me. I had the feeling that they thought I held myself above them, which I didn’t, not one bit, but I was embarrassed, and if I saw a group of them sitting on the low wall outside somebody’s house, I crossed the road. Of course, I had my friends at Cotton Lane, and I was sociable, gregarious.
But seeing them always had to be arranged – lifts from my father there and back, or sleepovers – because we lived that bit further away. I used to watch the children of Ashgrove Road racing down our street from behind the net curtains in the front room. Summer evenings, games of run-outs. I’d hear their shouts above the piano as I practised, and I always felt left out, somehow forgotten.
♣
That last summer at Cotton Lane, the staff arranged a Leavers Country Dance for the fourth-years, about sixty of us. We’d do-si-doed our way through both Infants and Juniors, and at eleven we had become experts at formation dancing. I promenaded with half the boys that night – our arms folded across each other’s bodies, holding clammy hands. I danced with Jitsingh Bansal, who had slammed my fingers in the classroom door two years before, an accident I’d just forgiven him for; with Marvin Pearl, who didn’t love me any more and who had a girlfriend in the year below called Mickey – Mickey and Marvin, pah! – with Lucien Festen-Jones, an eccentric boy who’d joined in the middle of the year and was picked on for his funny accent and 1940s clothes. Lucien had replaced Marvin as a potential suitor to me. One day he trailed my father and me as we walked home from school, Lucien declaring his love, much to my father’s amusement.
On the night of the country dance, filtered lights were set up in the darkened hall and pools of colour shimmered on the floor. We drank plastic cups of Coke and stuffed ourselves with French Fancies and Wagon Wheels. There was fractious feeling that night, as though we all knew that nothing from now on would be the same. We were on the verge of new lives, whatever they might hold.
Outside, the late evening light fell on the playground’s asphalt. I walked across the chalked lines of the tennis court, knowing I’d find Solomon Kallakuri round the corner from the Juniors annexe. He’d become rebellious this year, talked back to the teachers, mucked around in class. He had a fight one weekend with a boy from another school and came to class with a black eye and a split in his lip. Now he was leaning against the wall, where I knew he’d be, smoking a cigarette. This was not the first time I’d seen him smoking. When he saw me, he stubbed it out and came towards me. He was still a few inches smaller than I was. His joined eyebrow seemed to have thickened in the last year. He put his hand on my shoulder and kissed me quickly on the lips. He tasted of smoke. Then he kissed me again, and held it for longer. He tasted of getting older.
♦
I’d like to say that I failed the eleven-plus on purpose, but in fact, I simply failed. I could manage the arithmetic and writing tasks, but I was lacking the ability to apply logic to simple problems. I couldn’t crack codes or arrange a sequence of numbers. One morning my mother announced that I’d be attending after-school revision sessions for the exam. She was standing in the doorway of her bedroom, half dressed, getting ready for work. My father had just arrived home and was lying in the bed behind her with the newspaper. ‘I don’t want to take it,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go to grammar school!’ This was Woodford Girls, on the other side of Ilford. I had no interest in going to an all-girl school.
‘You’re doing it, Hannah, whether you like it or not.’ She sounded stern. ‘Your dad wants you to.’
I was too surprised to say anything more. My mother sounded unconvincing, trying to assert my father’s authority. I peered past her at him. My dad wanted me to? He’d expressed an opinion? I caught his eye, but typically he said nothing, just shook the paper as he turned a page. He had always deferred to my mother in regards to my education – this was the first time I’d ever known him to express an interest.
Then later, after the revision session when I failed to understand most of the questions, I felt angry. What right did he have to interfere now? What did he know about education, for that matter? He wasn’t a proper father. He was more like a lodger who came and went as he pleased. He never told me what to do. If anything, it was I who told him what to do – and worse, he would do it. And now he wanted me to take the eleven-plus, because he respected that old-fashioned exam, respected grammar schools, and because if I passed, it would reflect well on him. And my mother supported this decision. So I would have to take it. I was enraged.
And then I failed, as I knew I would. There were twenty or so of us that day in the sweltering gym, the big clock on the wall ticking distractingly – as distracting as my schoolmates’ pencils scratching away on their answer books. I answered the questions I could, but half of them made my brain clog, unable to move forward or recall the previous line of thought. Eventually I gave up, staring out to the bright school field instead, where a class of infants were happily running races.
I was only slightly disappointed the morning I opened the letter with the news, even though I knew I wouldn’t have gone to Woodford Girls by then. I’d been accepted into Pinners, the school my cousins went to. This was better than a grammar school. I’d had to take a test and attend an interview where the scary headmaster asked about my future plans and ambitions. My mother briefed me thoroughly – Make sure you talk about the piano, she said, and somehow I’d been admitted, one of only thirty children from outside the borough, a significant feat, considering my brother had failed the same interview four years previously.
Sam was another reason my secondary school had become a subject of such fuss. My mother didn’t want me to go to his school – Hope Park – because of the trouble he’d been in. My mother blamed the school, but I was pretty sure Sam would have rebelled anywhere. His latest misdemeanour had been ‘accidentally’ setting off a fire extinguisher, covering his Geography teacher in chemical foam. By then he’d been behaving badly for months, staying out later with new friends my mother didn’t like. She suspected something, but didn’t quite know what. He was short with her and surlier than ever. Then one day the police phoned to say they’d caught him in the train yards at Farringdon, with a rucksack full of spray cans they doubted he’d paid for. They brought him home in a police car. The following week my mother hid his trainers to stop him from going out, a strategy I could see was unwise. They had the most terrible row – my brother, just fifteen but over six foot tall – squared up to her in the kitchen, shouting and shouting, bright red in the face. I thought he might hit her. Finally, she relented, retrieved his trainers and threw them at his feet. He in turn threw a brick through our front door on his way out.
He was caught a week later, at the same train yard, spraying graffiti with two other boys. The police didn’t charge him but he was assigned a social worker, a small black woman with close-cropped hair and dangly earrings. She came to our house once a week, sitting in the front room with Sam and my mother, who laid out bowls of potpourri and doilies as if these would demonstrate how undysfunctional our family was. I listened at the door, but was unable to hear the details of my brother’s rehabilitation. My mother had allowed him to spray the walls of his bedroom in the hope this would keep him away from public property. The room smelt constantly toxic, each wall daubed in a thick blear of red, purple and green paint, dried in thick, globular tears.
♠
There were two ways for me to get to Pinners. On my own, I could take the train from Goodmayes to Romford, along the line that ran behind my house, then change for another train to Upminster. Or if I was up in time, my mother would drop me round at Uncle Terry’s and he would take the three of us – myself and the girls – to Upney station where we’d catch the Tube. It was seven stops along the slow end of the District Line, then a mile’s walk to school in our stiff school uniforms, loaded down with school bags full of folders, textbooks, our PE kits. Pinners was a sporty school, and there was no escaping netball, swimming, hockey, rounders, tennis, high jump, discus and the torturous twice-weekly cross-country runs.
Soon after I started at school, Maria and I had a strange encounter on our journey. We were travelling alone one day as Susanna had an eye test. It was a bright morning but freezing cold, so we sat in the platform waiting room where the old-fashioned radiator was turned up high, filling the small space wi
th the smell of hot paint. A man came in. He wore bright jogging clothes – tight turquoise tights, a red tracksuit top with stripes, a woolly hat and gloves. He was black, forty perhaps, with a short, grey beard. I thought it strange that a jogger would catch the Tube, and sure enough, we both soon realised that the man wasn’t waiting for a train. He was in the waiting room for us. He stood facing the radiator, but slightly angled so he could watch us, making slow movements with his body, circling his groin against the hot metal bars. He watched us, and we watched him, and I had no idea what he was doing. Then the train pulled in, Maria grabbed my arm and we rushed out.
‘Dirty old man!’ she exclaimed, slumping into the carriage seat and pulling a face.
‘Was he?’ I said, surprised. ‘What was he doing?’
‘Didn’t you see? He had a big hard-on. That’s what the tight clothes were for. What a perv!’ But she was laughing. And then so was I. He’d looked so stupid, gyrating around.
The next day he was there again, and the next. It was the same routine, but we couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed so much my stomach hurt, until I could hardly breathe. And on the third day, he smiled coyly at us as though to say Look, I know I look ridiculous, but it’s something I have to do. Then he laughed. The three of us laughing at a really bad joke.
He wasn’t there the next day or the next and he didn’t come to the waiting room again, but I used to see him around and about, on buses in Ilford, or in the park. Sometimes with a beard, sometimes without – always in those coloured jogging clothes, but I never saw him jog.
