by Hannah Lowe
♣
‘Oh, you’re back,’ was all Hermione had said when he’d called to her through the screen door of the little house. She’d put on weight since he’d last seen her, her clothes tight around her body. He followed her through the kitchen into the living room. She carried a jug of iced tea and poured it into two glasses. ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘I wondered when I’d see you again.’
They sat on the veranda, where she lit a white-tipped cigarette, the first time he’d seen her smoke. He told her about his time in America, making her laugh with his stories, her eyes widening when he told her about the South.
‘You didn’t get my letters?’ he asked. Hermione looked straight at him, paused, shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but the mail here is bad, you know. Always bad. Letters get lost, turn up a year later at the wrong address.’ She blew a long tongue of cigarette smoke, and the boy knew she was lying. She’d received the letters but hadn’t been bothered to reply.
‘But I received the money,’ she said, as though she just remembered. ‘Thank you for that. You must have made a lot in America?’
‘I did all right,’ the boy said, thinking of his dwindling stash. ‘Put a little away.’
‘Things sure have been tough while you’ve been gone. Half of Kingston is out of work, you know.’
‘It’s worse for sure,’ the boy said. ‘We need to rule the island ourselves, you think?’ Hermione said nothing, uncharacteristically quiet. ‘It’s about time,’ the boy pushed it. Nothing again. ‘Did you vote in the election?’ He wanted to know.
‘Oh, let’s not talk about politics,’ she said. ‘Do you mind? It’s so depressing.’ He knew she hadn’t voted.
‘How about you?’ he asked, changing subject. ‘How you been keeping? How’s Fay and Angela and Laura?’
‘So-so, you know. I don’t see them so often now. Not so much time to be visiting family. I’ve been working. Taking in clothes, sewing, repairs. Washing sometimes.’ She held her hands out and turned the palms up then down. ‘My poor hands are ruined from the soap!’ The boy thought Hermione’s hands looked as pretty as ever. Long graceful fingers, the nails neatly painted coral pink, but like Felix, she looked older, the skin on her face no longer as supple.
They chatted some more until Hermione looked at her watch. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise the time. I have a visitor coming in just a minute. Can you come back another day? I’m sorry to throw you out.’ It was just like old times.
‘No problem,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll come next week.’ He wanted to ask who her visitor was, wondered why she didn’t tell him. At the door, she pecked him on the cheek, closing the screen quickly behind him, in a hurry for him to be gone.
The boy went down the steps and walked half the length of the road before stopping and turning back. The sun was hot in the sky and he cast a long shadow on the pavement. Who was the visitor? He really did want to know, walking slowly back towards her house, his eyes searching the street. He felt conspicuous, standing on the street corner. No one appeared, and after five minutes had passed the boy suddenly felt ridiculous. What was he doing, spying on her? He turned on his heel, ready to walk back towards the bus, and nearly crashed into a man coming in the other direction. ‘Oh excuse me,’ the boy said. He stepped back. The man was holding a brown paper bag under his arm and a thin bunch of flowers in his hand. He was Chinese. ‘Hope I didn’t crush them,’ the boy said, looking at the flowers.
‘Oh no, they look fine to me,’ the man answered, turning the bunch round. ‘Don’t worry. But mind how you go now.’ He continued up the street and the boy walked on, turning half a minute later to see the man climbing the steps to Hermione’s porch. He knew his face. It was the Chinese shopkeeper from Barry Street. The boy had seen him last week in the shop. He and his wife serving behind the counter.
♦
‘You see the notice in the paper?’ Felix asked the next time they met at the bar near the harbour. ‘Boy, I wish I had that sort of money. I’d take myself to England in a second.’
‘What notice?’ the boy asked. ‘I didn’t see anything.’
Felix pulled the crumpled page from his trouser pocket. ‘I don’t know why I’m carrying it around,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ He smoothed the paper on the table and the boy bent over to read it. It was a notice advertising passage to England on the SS Ormonde, a returning troopship. It said the ticket would be in the region of £48, should it be possible for the vessel to call at Jamaica. There were two hundred berths.
‘They don’t even know if this ship is coming,’ the boy said. ‘Either it’s coming or it’s not.’
‘I think it’ll come,’ Felix said. ‘Because enough Jamaican boys would sell their mothers to be on that boat and be away. But forty-eight pounds is a lot of money, man. And forty-eight times two hundred is a whole lot more.’
They lifted their bottles and drank.
13
Every Dog Has His Day in Luck
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss
– Rudyard Kipling, If
My father had a heart attack at Coral’s card club in Stoke Newington. Or thought he’d had one. It was early September and unusually warm – too hot and humid in the basement room where he’d been playing poker for close to five hours. When he keeled over clutching his chest, the other players gathered round him, laying him out on the carpet while someone phoned an ambulance. At 1 a.m. the phone rang at home, and a man my mother didn’t know told her my father was on his way to the Homerton Hospital in Hackney. Without waking Sam or me, she phoned a cab, wrote us a note and left the house.
Before I saw the note in the morning, she called to say my father was fine. ‘He’s asleep, the lazy bugger!’ she joked. In fact, he’d been asleep since she arrived, slept through the night, and was still asleep. He hadn’t had a heart attack after all, but the doctors thought he might have angina and wanted to keep him in for tests. It seemed a regular occurrence – testing my father for one medical ailment or another, dispatching him with a new medication. The only difference was the more dramatic circumstances. I made myself toast and a cup of tea, packed my bag for college and left the house.
He was home that evening, laid up on the sofa looking serious. ‘It was a terrible pain,’ he told me. ‘Up and down one arm. Across my chest. I thought I was dying.’
‘It’s the stress of gambling,’ my mother said in the kitchen, out of his earshot.
‘But he didn’t have a heart attack,’ I said. ‘Did he?’
‘Angina attack. Heart attack. It’s the same thing. It’s the stress of it all.’ She lit her cigarette. ‘He’ll drop dead playing bloody poker. Mark my words. Or I’ll drop dead of worry.’
The doctors told him to avoid stress, fatty food and cigarettes, and for two weeks my father stayed home, stopped smoking and ate more vegetables. His stash of pills increased, filling three of the bathroom cabinet’s shelves. Pills for blood pressure and angina, statins to lower cholesterol, PPIs for his stomach ulcers, antacids, painkillers. He took them religiously, swigging them down before he put his front teeth in. But soon he was back on the cigarettes, cadging them from my mother because he couldn’t afford his own.
‘I’m getting old, Han,’ he told me the next morning. ‘My body’s giving up.’
He’d been ill so often, and over so many years, that I didn’t take it seriously. ‘You’re fine, Dad,’ I said. ‘Stop worrying.’ I looked at the clock. I was late. ‘Can I have a lift to college?’
♠
I didn’t want to stay on at Pinners for A-levels, and I wasn’t welcome to. The school had made quite clear that my bad behaviour had consequences. I wasn’t allowed into the sixth form. Instead I went to the local college in Barking, where Sam had gone four years before. It was a relief to be away from that school. Maybe all secondary schools
are harsh places where children vie for a position in the strict hierarchies of good looks, ability or popularity, but Pinners was harsher because of its own elitism. It instilled a sense of superiority that gave way to a firm pecking order and much bullying of those who didn’t fit in. I’d spent five unhappy years enduring the long journey on the Tube and bus, stuffed into that regimental school uniform, hating it all. I quickly lost touch with the friends I’d had there. I was trying to forget.
Barking College was liberation – no uniform, no stuffy assembly or Lord’s Prayer, no heavy-handed authority. It embodied the spirit of further education – community-based courses for adults and teenagers from all backgrounds, studying anything from further maths to drama to car mechanics. The academic curriculum was more radical than what I was used to. Two teachers, both named John, set books to study that my old school would never have taught – experimental novels, black women’s poetry, the lesser-known Shakespeare plays. I found a new love of reading and a new engagement with politics through literature.
The Students’ Union was run by Tim, a camp boy from Dagenham, who told scandalous tales of his encounters in the dark rooms of East End gay clubs while calling us to arms against the British National Party and the National Front. I went on my first demonstration that year. Under the college banner, we marched in a sea of yellow placards with seventy thousand protestors to Welling, where the British National Party headquarters stood.
I had a sudden memory that day, of my father, years ago, his glasses perched on his nose, standing in the hall reading a red and white leaflet he’d lifted from the doormat. He’d crumpled it when he saw me, but I found another in the letter box a few days later. It was from the National Front. ‘Enoch Powell Was Right’ it said in bold letters across a Union Jack – ‘Stop Immigration. Start Repatriation’. I’d asked my mother who Enoch Powell was, what repatriation meant, and as she explained I knew they wanted to send back people like my father, even after forty years in England. Who knows how many leaflets he had found before? I was glad to be marching against racism that hot May day.
We walked for an hour, chanting slogans, singing songs, until the procession came to a halt. It was fractious in the crowd as word came back of a police barricade at the crossroads. There was a strange, volatile energy, and things turned nasty quickly – police riding their horses into the crush, protestors in balaclavas throwing bricks and bottles, police on foot with riot shields and batons, dragging demonstrators across the ground to where their vans waited. The violence ebbed and surged. I was torn between wanting to witness what was happening and wanting to be away. When the crowd charged forward, we lost the Barking College banner. I was separated with my new friends, Holly and Ella, and we ran, scared and holding hands, over the rubble of a wall, through a graveyard, down an alley to the high road, where shoppers ambled, oblivious of the uprising streets away.
‘Police protect the Nazis!’ Holly shouted as we walked towards the bus stop, people giving her strange looks. On the top deck of the bus she yanked open the window, yelling, ‘Down with the BNP! Down with Nazi scum!’
♥
I’d met Holly on the first day of college. She wore fashionable clothes and chain-smoked, flicking her long hair down her back. She lived in Forest Gate with her parents and sister, and another set of parents and their two daughters, Ella, who was a year younger than Holly, and Melissa, who was little. The two couples had pooled together to buy a big Victorian house overlooking a park. They were members of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and Holly and Ella grew up in a house of political talk and protest. Unlike me, they were seasoned demonstrators. They could quote Marx and Chomsky, and every Saturday they sold the Socialist Worker newspaper at the railway station. I’d not met anyone like them before – my age and so politically engaged – but they were also products of their environment, had gone to the local secondary school, spoke with cockney accents and dated the local black boys – boys with thick gold chains around their necks, and expensive, spotless trainers.
I was flattered that they liked me, and secretly delighted to be invited to their house. I loved it there, and envied them the four narrow floors joined by creaky stairs, stained glass in the windows, the old-fashioned fireplaces. I loved their living room the best – the walls lined with books and records, and hung with film posters in bright wooden frames, a vintage jukebox in the corner – everything so stylish and chic, a far cry from the brash new wealth of pupils at Pinners, who lived in vast mock Tudor houses with stone lions at the gates and satellite dishes stuck to their roofs. I was confused about class. I wasn’t sure whether class depended on your background – who your parents were and where you were born, the job you did, how much money you had in the bank – or something else.
Most of all, I envied them their familial camaraderie. There were long, sociable meals in the kitchen, fresh bread and bottles of red wine spread out, the din of conversation. Everyone got on, or so it seemed. Holly’s dad was an ex-docker who had gone back to university and become a lecturer. Holly adored him and he adored her, would sling his arm around her shoulder, pulling her in for a kiss, and together they’d go to art exhibitions and gigs. My family life couldn’t have been more different. Sam and I would sit at the dinner table long enough to eat our tea before returning to the enclaves of our rooms, where our parents were not welcome. I couldn’t imagine sharing any actual activity with my father, and hadn’t known his physical touch in years, except for that terrible afternoon two years before, which I was still trying to forget.
♣
It was at college that I met my first boyfriend, Jason, a druggy dreamer, five years older than me. He tied his long hair in a ponytail, wore baggy jeans that hung from his thin frame. We were in the same film studies class, but he only came to college one day a week and worked the rest at an industrial bakery, making apple turnovers. ‘Bloody apple turnovers,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I dream I’m standing in a field of them, miles and miles of the sodding things.’
Jason lived with his parents on a dilapidated estate in Stratford. Until I met him, I’d never walked through an estate, only seen them from the road or on the television. From those viewpoints, council estates seemed like scary places – mazes of concrete alleys and minimal playgrounds, the high anonymous blocks. I could never imagine living sandwiched between people above and below, taking the wrecked elevator to my small box in the sky. But when I went to see Jason I saw that estates can be safe places for those who live there, havens from the world outside. There was a strong community where Jason lived – children who’d grown up together, adults who’d worked together for most of their lives. Most people knew each other, and soon I came to know them, through a wave and a smile on my way to Jason’s place.
But too many people lived in his thin-walled maisonette with its cramped rooms – the three grown-up sons still lived at home with their parents. Jason’s mum was a school cook. His dad and brothers all worked at the bakery. A lifetime of apple turnovers beckoned inevitably.
‘What I’d like to do is direct films,’ he said. ‘Not big-budget action ones, but arty films about bands, you know. With mad dream sequences.’ He was lying on his bed, rolling a spliff. ‘Yeah, direct films, or maybe music videos.’
Jason had enrolled at three different colleges in the last three years, each time to study A-levels he didn’t complete. He lasted six weeks studying at ours. ‘I hate being told what to do,’ he moaned, pulling on a cigarette as we stalked through the rain from the college to the bus stop. ‘Why does that bloke think he knows more than me?’ He meant our lecturer. ‘And the films he shows are crap.’
‘I don’t think they’re crap,’ I said. That day we’d watched The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, an American documentary about women going out to work in the Second World War. I’d found it fascinating.
‘They’re crap!’ he said, unwilling to enter a debate. ‘Anyway, enough moaning.’ He flung his arm around my neck. ‘What shall we do tonight?’
We jumped on the bus to Mile End. I remember how new it all felt, catching the bus with a boyfriend who held my hand. He’d already had two girlfriends and was worldly-wise compared to me. I felt warm and snug, sitting beside him, wiping my initials on the steamed bus window as we rode through Ilford’s drab town centre and down the Romford Road, walking through the alleys tagged in spray paint to his house, where he whisked me up to his bedroom.
The first time I visited, he’d lain on his bed and pulled a rectangle of paper from his pocket. It was wrapped in cling film. ‘Look what I’ve got,’ he said, unpeeling it. Inside there was a pile of white powder.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘Speed,’ he said. He tipped it into a can of Tango, swilled it round and drank. ‘Shall we?’
I thought about it for five seconds before taking the can and taking a swig. We passed it between us. ‘Nice one,’ he said, draining the dregs, wincing at the taste. ‘Let the fun begin.’
High on amphetamines, we walked through Maryland and Leytonstone towards Wanstead Flats, car headlamps and street lamps magnified in our dilated eyes: a dazzling orange blur. We talked and talked, the drugs making every thought bubble excitedly to our mouths. Wanstead Flats at night was a haunting place, miles and miles of wild wasteland surrounded by distant tower blocks, the windows like dominoes of light. There was a lake in the middle, a wide stretch where the bold white shapes of swans glided on the black water. We kissed for the first time there, high as kites, laid out on Jason’s coat, our bodies pressed hard together, kissing suddenly more exciting than talking.
I sneaked home early the next morning, hoping to avoid my mother. I hadn’t slept. ‘Where on earth have you been?’ She was up already, standing in the kitchen as I came through the back door.
‘Nowhere,’ I said, then: ‘But I’m here, look!’ I prodded myself. ‘Safe and sound, no damage.’
