by Hannah Lowe
Then, suddenly, the work finished. The liaison officer came to tell them they would be moved on in a few days. But the days became a week, the week two weeks. There were problems all over, the liaison officer told them. There was enough work, but no one was sure where, or when. The men’s contract guaranteed them work for two-thirds of their time, but because they moved around, no one was sure who paid for their downtime. The only thing they knew was that there was work in the South. They waited in their barracks, playing dominoes, writing letters home. It started to rain, and then it rained constantly, the world outside running in dirty grey streams.
‘Let’s go south, then,’ said Charles Dee, stooping down to stare through the window. ‘I’m bored here, man. We’re not earning any money.’
Another week passed and the farmer came and told them he couldn’t keep feeding them, not if they weren’t working.
‘I’m grateful for what you’ve done,’ he said, ‘but it’s time to move on.’
Three more days passed. The men were hungry. All of them had credit they couldn’t pay at the camp store. No one had ready money. The liaison officer had disappeared.
‘We need to eat,’ said the boy, and early the next morning they crept out in half-darkness, walking a mile through forest to the barbed-wire fence of the neighbouring orchard. It was a low fence, but with only one torch between them, they ripped their trousers and tore their hands on the steel barbs.
‘Come on! Come on!’ Roy Atley called, running forward to the trees. They ran and jumped into the air for the green apples above them, crunching into the fruit, chewing, biting, tossing the cores and picking more. Apple after apple until all of them were full. They leant at the bottom of the trees to rest, the sky getting light. A cold wind blew through the orchard.
‘I’ve eaten eight apples,’ Paris Brown groaned below a tree. ‘I feel sick.’
‘Eat another,’ the boy said from under his tree. ‘Who knows when we next going to eat?’
♣
The next day they took the bus from Portland to New York, and caught the overnight train south. On the way they saw a chain gang of black men working the fields while white men with guns stood over them. ‘Oh man,’ said George McLean. ‘This is a bad idea.’
In was mid-morning when the Jamaicans stepped onto the platform in Jacksonville, Florida, shading their eyes from the morning sun.
There was work here. There was money. They would do what needed to be done.
11
Oi, Nelson!
Sticks and stones may break my bones …
It was 1990 and there was a new scene happening – indie music coming out of Manchester and Liverpool and dance music everywhere. Kim and I were too young to go to the actual parties, but we knew all about them. People were taking Ecstasy at raves, dancing to sound systems in marquees and fields and warehouses, or in people’s front rooms. Somehow the mores of that subculture diluted themselves into signs and symbols we could be part of. Boys grew their hair long. We wore T-shirts with yellow smiley faces on, hooded tops patterned with psychedelic suns and moons, strange new shoes called Wallerbees in lilac and pink.
Romford was our stomping ground, equidistant between Ilford, where I lived, and Upminster, where Pinners was, and not far from Kim’s house. We were fourteen and looked it, but there was an off-licence there that would sell us bottles of dry Martini or Cinzano or Thunderbird. We’d walk the town centre, swigging straight from the bottle, my vision blurred and spinning from the booze – the shops and alleyways and bus shelters doused in refracted light. There were boys we saw around the town, beautiful boys whose names we didn’t know. We didn’t talk to them, but talked endlessly about them, watching from a distance as they knocked around a football, or stood smoking cigarettes, or sat perched on the back on a bench, high up, their feet on the seats where they deserved to be – kings of the shopping parade.
I’d tell my parents we’d gone to see a film, but really we were drinking and mooching until my father came to pick me up. I didn’t swim at the Dolphin any more, but it was a landmark for him to fetch me from. The yellow Triumph had finally gone, replaced by the more economical Mini – electric green, a joke of a car, shameful when he came to meet me, shameful as he was, parked up under a street light outside the pool with a roll-up on the go.
Once, I was sick into my bag all the way home, sat beside him in the car. He pretended not to notice, didn’t say a word as we swerved back to Ashgrove Road, and by the time we got there I was recovered, my head no longer swimming. I thought I’d gotten away with it but he walked through to the kitchen and told my mother. I was standing in the hall, holding a bag full of my own sick. In the living room, he flicked the television on and sat down in his armchair. Not a word from him the whole way home, but he told her, and as usual passed the problem – me – straight on.
♦
It was ironic that the most significant role my father had in my life was as a driver, since he was a notoriously bad one, the butt of a running joke between Uncle Terry and my mother. I don’t know if he’d learned to drive in England or Jamaica, but his driving, according to her, was ‘pure Jamaican’. I remembered driving in Jamaica the year before – motorists overtaking at speed on the twisting roads, trucks zig-zagging up hills with hitchers clinging to their backs, cars aggressively nudging and beeping their way through the Kingston rush hour. In our hired Honda, my father joined in these practices with relish.
In England, his irreverence for road regulations endured. He seemed unable to keep the car between the white lines of a dual carriageway, veering dangerously into the path of other vehicles, oblivious to their drivers, who beeped and harangued him. Once a cab driver rolled down his window, shouting at my father as he passed, ‘Oi, Nelson! Keep to your own lane, will ya!’ My father’s hair was mostly white by then and with his broad nose and face, he did resemble Nelson Mandela, whose release that year was constantly in the news.
My father’s bad driving had a long history. My mother enjoyed relaying the anecdote about his run-in with police in the early seventies. At this time, he had been employed by a casino as a games inspector. Not realising my father was cheating constantly on their turf, the casino figured that his experience of cards and knowledge of card games made him perfect for the job. Every night they perched him up a stepladder above the card table to spot any irregularities in the punters’ play, a poacher-turned-gamekeeper job he came to relish. On that particular night my mother had joined him for a drink after a night out with her friends. They had left together in the early hours, my father worried that he was over the limit to drive. ‘But he’d only had two gin and tonics during the night,’ she said, ‘so I wasn’t worried at all.’ My father sat next to her as she told the story, talking about him as though he wasn’t there.
‘So we get in the car and he starts the engine. But he doesn’t look in the mirror, not even a glance. Straight into reverse, foot down, then clunk. We’ve backed right into someone. We both sit there in silence for a few seconds and I’m thinking, Bloody Nora, maybe he is pissed. Then I turn round to look, and he’s only gone and reversed into a police car! Can you believe it? I tell him what he’s done and he just sits there, swearing under his breath. The air went blue, I can tell you.’
‘I didn’t see them,’ my father said, holding his hands out innocently.
‘But,’ my mother carried on, ‘that’s not the half of it. Because there’s only two policemen sat in the car. They must have had their eye on someone in the club. Then suddenly one is tapping on the window. “Excuse me, sir,” he says. “You appear to have reversed into a police vehicle. Were you are aware we were parked behind you?” And your dad goes, “Good evening, Officer,” in his best Queen’s English. “If I had been aware you were parked there, I certainly wouldn’t have done so, no.” Of course they breathalyse him, and it turns out he was over the limit, so they nicked him for that and for reckless driving. How many points did you get?’ She turned to my father.
�
��I think it was four,’ he said solemnly, although I could tell he was pleased with his misdeed.
Another time, years later, the police pulled him over when I was in the car. He was giving me a lift to Kim’s house, but somehow he’d turned the wrong way down a busy dual carriageway. It was dark and raining, the windscreen wipers going frantically, but through the blur of rain I could see other cars looming bigger as they drove straight at us, swerving dramatically out of our way. ‘Dad?’ I said. ‘I think we’re on the wrong side of the road.’
‘Eh? What do you mean?’ He leant forward, peering through the windscreen, then sideways at the other lane, where cars were travelling in the same direction as us. ‘Oh dear,’ he said with exaggerated formality, putting the brakes on and pulling up on to the inside kerb, just as a siren sounded in the other lane. A police car stopped alongside us on the other side of the railings. There were two policemen. One got out of the car, climbed awkwardly over the railings and indicated I should roll down my window. He leant his face in, two inches from mine. He was young. I could smell his breath as he spoke. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Mind if I ask what on Earth you’re doing?’ He produced a torch and bathed us in its yellow glare.
‘Oh dear. I don’t know what happened, Officer,’ my father said, sounding shaky. ‘I don’t know what happened. Oh dear me. I’m on my way to drop my daughter at her friend’s house, that’s all.’ The policeman looked between us, clearly confused that the old black man was father to a white teenage girl. I said nothing.
‘Well,’ he said, his tone easing a little. ‘Didn’t you see a sign, sir? This is a dual carriageway. It’s very well signposted. You could have had a head-first crash there.’ His ‘sirs’ sounded less sincere as the interrogation continued, my father repeating ‘I don’t know what happened, Officer’ and ‘Oh dear me’ until the policeman gave up, sighing dramatically, bored with us.
‘Well, well. Looks like we’re going to have to get you out of this,’ he said. He popped his head back out, and half a minute later he and his colleague were standing in the rain facing the traffic, hands raised to stop the oncoming cars so that my father could pull away from the side, turn round, and continue in the correct direction. All the other drivers were looking at us. I was mortified.
‘Mind how you go, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘You’re lucky I haven’t arrested you.’ He looked at us contemptuously. We pulled off into the rain.
‘Oh well, Han,’ my father said as we drove along, the rain bursting on the windscreen, the wipers going furiously again. ‘Looks like we got away with it,’ he laughed. ‘Yes, my dear, we escaped the police!’ But I didn’t laugh. I was thinking how old and confused my father was. I saw it clearly, and the policeman had seen it too.
♠
There was an under-18s club night in two large carpeted rooms above the Dolphin. It was called the Academy. They turned the lights down and played the rapid, delirious music we wanted. No alcohol but you could drink your fill before or nip out to swig from a bottle tucked in the flower bed. I went with Kim and Pauline, our new friend from school. We pooled our money for two packs of Silk Cut from the machine. ‘I don’t even know how to do it,’ I said, pulling on the cigarette, a foreign shape in my mouth, tasting its bitterness.
‘Just breathe in, breathe out,’ Kim said. ‘Don’t taste great, does it?’
It didn’t, but we lit one cigarette from another, strolling around the Academy feeling pleased and proud of ourselves. Oh they’re smokers, I imagined other people thinking with awe – they must be part of an older, wiser, more complicated world. I was sick for an hour in the downstairs toilet back at Kim’s house, trying to make sure her mum didn’t hear.
Aside from the Academy, there wasn’t much for us to do. At fourteen we were too young for pubs, too old for the playground. Sometimes we went ice-skating at the new rink in Romford. It was a soulless place with rubber floors and plastic chairs, bright billboards and vending machines. Every time I skated, and no matter how many pairs of socks I wore, the hired boots cut into my feet in minutes, leaving blisters like small gaping mouths on my heels. I couldn’t go backwards like the others could. I could barely go forwards. The only way I could stop was to slam myself into the rim of the rink against the adverts for McDonald’s and Tango. I preferred to sit out.
But the last time I went ice-skating, something horrible happened. I was perched in the spectator zone, watching the others spin and glide below the rink’s stark lighting, when a boy clambered over the seats behind to reach me. I hadn’t noticed the group sat back there – four girls in a row, drinking cans of Coke, their trainered feet propped up on the chairs. They were the same age as me, I think, but I didn’t recognise them from school. In the boy’s hand was a bright orange Post-it note he held out to me. I took it, turning it over to find a biro drawing of a stick man hanging from a noose and gallows. ‘They want to fight you,’ he said, gesturing to the girls. ‘You’re the hanged man.’
I turned to look at where the girls were huddled, staring back and laughing. I felt my stomach flip. Who was the boy? A younger brother? His nails were bitten to the quick. ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know them.’
‘I dunno,’ he replied. ‘They don’t like the look of you, I guess.’ I noticed the splatter of freckles across his nose. ‘They’re gonna get you outside.’
I didn’t know what to say. The butterflies in my stomach worsened. I’d never fought with anyone. Would it be four against one? I looked at my watch. It was half past one and my father was coming to pick me up at two.
‘Tell her she’s a slag!’ one of the girls shouted. I glanced up. She was the smallest of them, her long brown hair scraped back with gel into a pony tail, a bright pink ski jacket.
‘Did you hear that?’ the boy said. He looked like he felt sorry for me. I wanted to cry. ‘I think they’ve got a knife,’ he added.
I sat for a nervous few minutes until Kim and Pauline came back and I whispered what had happened. ‘Stupid cows,’ said Kim loudly. ‘They’re not going to do anything. They haven’t got a bloody knife.’ She looked up at them and held a stare.
‘It’s her we want to give a kicking, not you!’ shouted Pink Ski Jacket.
‘I better go home,’ Pauline said. She grabbed her bag from under the chair and changed into her shoes quickly. She had her own clean white ice skates. ‘Bye, see you Monday!’ she said, rushing off to the exit.
‘So much for her loyalty,’ said Kim as we watched her leave. She looked up again. ‘I know those girls from the Academy. They go to Hall Mead.’ Hall Mead was a rival school. Male pupils regularly challenged Pinners boys to after-school fights outside Lloyd’s Newsagent – fights which galvanised the school’s rumour mill all day, but rarely took place – but this wasn’t the same.
Kim and I returned our boots to the hire booth, my hands shaking as I pulled my socks and trainers back on, sat on the rink’s grimy white chairs, horribly conscious that the Hall Mead girls had followed, sitting opposite, still laughing and jeering. I was in a surreal panic, unable to look at them, desperately needing the toilet.
I prayed my father would be early as we walked out into the cold afternoon. The bright sun lit the empty car park. The Hall Mead girls came out behind us. ‘What are we going to do?’ I said.
‘Keep walking,’ Kim said, taking charge, and we did, crossing over the entrance lane of the car park.
‘Where you going, slag?’ shouted Pink Ski Jacket. There were footsteps behind me and, quicker than I expected, two hands shoving my back hard. I fell forward.
‘Back off!’ said Kim. She spun round to face the four of them, her small body puffed up, jaw clenched, fists gripped at her side. I pulled myself up from the ground, just as Kim said, ‘There’s your dad!’
Sure enough, the green Mini was weaving through the car park, my father at the wheel. He pulled up by us, leant over and pushed open the door, a lit John Player in his hand. My relief was palpable – those girls couldn’t
do a thing if an adult was there, even it was just my father – it changed the stakes.
‘You’re fucking lucky!’ shouted Pink Ski Jacket, as we scrambled in.
‘Is her dad a black bloke?’ I heard another one of them say. ‘Slag.’ We pulled away.
‘Who were they?’ my father said, stubbing his dog end into the overflowing car ashtray.
‘No one,’ I replied, looking to the side to hide my tears.
‘How are you, Mr Lowe?’ said Kim brightly.
‘Oh, you know, Kim,’ my father said. ‘Could be better, could be worse.’
I took a deep breath, watching the girls grow smaller in the wing mirror. I knew they didn’t have a knife, and that I was a random target, but for years after I dreamt about that day – the hangman scrawled on an orange Post-it, the boy with the bitten nails, Pink Ski Jacket with her sharp, angry face, following me into that bright afternoon, the empty car park, my heart thundering in my chest, sure I would be badly hurt, or worse.
♥
I was jealous of my brother, whose social life seemed exotic and exciting compared to mine. He was eighteen and no longer interested in graffiti, much to my mother’s relief. Instead he disappeared for whole weekends to raves in Essex. There were fliers on his walls for clubs called Rain Dance and World Party. He’d turn up on Sunday afternoons looking spaced out, wouldn’t eat his Sunday lunch. There were new boys coming round for him, although they weren’t boys really, though not men either. Tall, spotty boy-men in Duffer St George T-shirts and Adidas hoodies. They all had long hair. My brother grew his hair long too and I was jealous of it – dark, shiny hair that fell down his back, poker straight.
