Long Time No See

by Hannah Lowe

  That night we went to the House of Roots, driving over the Thames to Vauxhall, parking up on a side street by the railway arches. ‘Wait until you see this place,’ Adam said. I could hear the bass line booming from outside, vibrating the red doors we went through. Inside, a single bulb lit a room with a low curved ceiling, beneath which half a dozen old Rastafarians were bent intently over games of chess and a woman in a bright headdress sold tea and ginger cake behind a counter. The bass thundered through the door to the main room, and as we went in, it hit me – a gust of noise that shook the walls and made the hairs on my arms stand up. Dim light inside, the speakers stacked in piles that reached the ceiling at the back, the strong sweet smell of cannabis, a white gauze in the air.

  Men stood facing the front – Rastafarians whose dreadlocks swung in thick ropes down their back, some in long robes that brushed the floor. They were entranced by the music and by the DJ, a little dreadlocked man who danced and swayed on the stage, placing records on his single turntable and twisting the knobs on his mixing station. This was the Aba-shanti Sound System, and Aba-shanti himself playing dub reggae, a phenomenon Adam had been talking about for months. Aba-shanti’s shout of Jah! reverberated through the microphone as he bounced on the stage and the crowd called back, Ras Tafari!

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Adam shouted over the noise, and it was amazing – the force of the music, the mood of the room, more like a religious service than a nightclub. I knew enough of Rastafarianism to know that, for some there, this was a genuinely religious ritual. If anyone objected to our being there, they didn’t say. We were the only white faces. We danced for hours, passing joint after joint between us, and although I loved it, still I felt somehow intrusive, prying into a culture I didn’t fully understand, acquiring only the elements I liked, namely the music and the dope. The walls around the room were draped in the Jamaican flag – black, yellow and green – and pictures of the Lion of Judah. The pale, thin face of Haile Selassie in fur cloak and crown looking disapprovingly down on us from his ornate golden frame.

  ♣

  The course on literary theory was bewildering. Each week, a small group of us sat on battered armchairs in the cramped office of Professor Jameson, pretending we understood the set reading. It was a whistle-stop tour through various complicated, philosophical approaches to literature – structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and feminism. I don’t think anyone in the seminar really understood the language or the basic concepts of the texts we read. At eighteen, we didn’t understand enough about politics or history to situate the ideas. Each week left me more confused until I bought an idiot’s guide to theory that explained the main points.

  For the seminar on post-colonialism we’d been given a long essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ by the Indian critic Gayatri Spivak. I’d spent two hours trying to make sense of it.

  ‘So the question is, can the subaltern speak? Anyone?’ Professor Jameson looked eagerly around the room, his eyebrows raised. They were an inch long and curled to the middle of his forehead. ‘Hannah?’ I jumped in my seat. ‘What is your opinion? Can the subaltern speak?’

  I’d discovered that week that the subaltern, in the context of the essay, were those who had been colonised – subaltern meaning ‘lower in position’, oppressed by those in power and stripped of power themselves. The question posed referred to whether they could ever speak for themselves, when they had continually been spoken for by those who had colonised them – or at least that’s what I’d gathered from my reading. The example given was the ban of sati in India, the custom of self-immolation practised by women who throw themselves on their dead husbands’ funeral pyres. Apparently there are endless accounts of this ritual written by the British colonisers, but rarely are the Hindu women invited to speak for themselves. Reading this, I could just imagine those women under the scrutinising lens of the British, making all kinds of conjectures about their lives and motivations.

  ‘Umm,’ I said, my mind racing. ‘I’m not sure. Sort of yes and sort of no?’ Professor Jameson’s face told me he was waiting for me to elaborate, but I’d gone blank. I could feel my face turning red.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘can anyone expand on Hannah’s, um, point?’ he asked the room, his disappointment evident. No one could.

  But when I had to write a paper for the course, I came back to that essay. I thought about my father growing up under British rule in Jamaica. How his term for himself, ‘West Indian’, was actually a colonial term. I was learning academic terms for him – ‘subaltern’, ‘other’, ‘colonial subject’, and I understood a bit of what Spivak said – that Western academic writing about non-Western cultures tried to present itself as ‘innocent’ and without agenda, but in fact, always spoke from a place of power, always informed by the culture it spoke from, and by whom it was speaking to. In essence, it was white men in universities speaking to white men in universities about black men and women – describing and defining them. It struck me as ironic that my all-white seminar group were discussing these problems.

  But it also struck a chord, one thought spiralling into another, moving back and forth from Spivak’s essay. I thought of all the ways my father might be represented – all the stereotypes of him as a black man or a Chinese man; a Jamaican or an immigrant. What power did he have to define himself in any public way? He’d had no door to education, less chance of a decent job. In another world he might have been a mathematician or a politician or a teacher, a position to be proud of, one that used his mind – like the fathers of my new friends who worked as magistrates and diplomats and bank managers. Not a gambler or card sharp, scraping an immoral living in seedy clubs and dives. The gambling world, with its own hierarchies and allegiances, might have been the only place he had agency or authority, regardless of skin colour, but it never extended beyond the card club’s walls.

  It was a secret and silent life – a night-time existence in the underbelly of London, untraceable through official records or legitimate channels. My father had lived on the margins all his life, and not through choice. Born poor and black in Jamaica, the odds were always stacked against him. Most of all, I thought about how these academic thoughts and arguments weren’t at all about abstractions – they were about real people’s lives, my father’s life.

  ♦

  That Christmas I went back to the house in Ilford, where the Christmas tree stood in the front-room window, sagging under the weight of tinsel and too many baubles. My father had been in hospital for a stomach ulcer, but had come home that morning, looking thinner than ever. ‘Hello, Han,’ he said solemnly from the sofa, folding his paper.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Dad!’ I said brightly.

  ‘Hmm. Happy Christmas, I suppose,’ he said. ‘But when you’ve seen as many Christmases as I have, they’re no longer of interest.’

  ‘That’s the spirit – happy bloody Christmas!’ my mother chipped in. She was arranging presents under the tree. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ she said, looking at me. ‘Solomon Kallakuri died.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Solomon?’ I hadn’t thought of him in years. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a bit bleak, I’m afraid, love,’ she said, getting up. ‘It was in the newspaper. And then a reporter phoned the house, asking did I know this, did I know that? Because I used to teach him, remember? When he was five. He was a little rascal then, but I didn’t tell them that.’ She left the room and came back with the paper, handing it to me, but I couldn’t read it. I’d never known anyone my age who had died. I couldn’t believe Solomon was dead.

  I read the article in my room that night. It was worse than I could have imagined. Solomon Kallakuri had become a small-time drug dealer. He’d been sent to prison, not for dealing, but for GBH against a local man who apparently owed him money. Solomon had gone to his house, tied him up and, according to the paper, tortured him with a hot poker. Torture? I couldn’t imagine Solomon doing anything like that. The paper used the words mi
ndless and frenzied. Apparently he’d been sentenced to seven years in Belmarsh Prison, and was found dead in his cell two weeks ago. He’d hanged himself. God, I thought. What had happened to him? I remembered that day I’d seen him in Sam’s bedroom, playing tough guy with the older boys; the day he’d come into school with his lip busted like a split plum. I lay on my bed and cried. Little Solomon, the first boy I ever kissed, the only boy in the gymnastics team. The first boy I had loved.

  ♠

  Christmas Day followed the same routine as always. My parents and I sat in the living room, waiting for Sam to come downstairs in his boxer shorts and insist we open presents. He was back from Nottingham for Christmas. I hadn’t seen him in months. ‘Did you hear about Solomon Kallakuri?’ I asked him when he appeared. I was older now and less in awe of him, and he less easily annoyed by me.

  ‘Yeah, Mum said,’ he replied. ‘I hardly knew him, but he was a bit off his head. Sad, though.’ It was sad, and I couldn’t shake the sadness all day. My father was in a gloomy mood as well. I gave him his present – a biography of Nelson Mandela and a pair of socks. ‘Happy Christmas, Dad!’ I tried to be cheerful.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said. ‘If you insist.’

  My father might have seen too many Christmases but he was still an aficionado of the traditional English Christmas rituals – pulling his cracker at lunchtime, wearing his paper hat, reading out his awful joke before carving up the turkey. But he hardly ate a thing, and by the afternoon he was asleep on the sofa in the back room, not waking until bedtime. ‘Come on, you lazy lump!’ my mother said, shaking him gently. I was standing in the door watching them. It took a long time for him to come round, and when he did he gripped his stomach in pain. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

  ‘Just very painful,’ my father said. He was struggling to sit up, his arms wrapped around his middle. ‘Must be the ulcer – back again already, do you think?’

  ‘Maybe,’ my mother said. She helped him to his feet. ‘Or too much turkey,’ she said jollily, pulling him to his feet, her face full of worry.

  ♥

  After Christmas, I moved from halls into a dilapidated Victorian house in Brighton, sharing with three friends. It might have been nice once but now the walls were peeling, the window frames held cracked glass and bright green moss grew on the bathroom walls and ceiling. Still I loved the house – light poured in through the tall windows and you could climb onto the roof and sit beside the chimney, watching seagulls swooping between the rooftops. I was sitting there in the winter sun when the phone rang and I clambered back through the attic window, rushing down the battered stairs to pick it up. ‘Listen, love.’ It was my mother. ‘I’ve got some news.’

  It could have been anything, but I knew it was about my father. My stomach tightened.

  ‘Your dad’s just back from the hospital. And the doctor said he’s got cancer. Of the stomach. They’re going to operate next week.’

  Cancer. Oh God. I thought of him at Christmas, looking so thin, his clothes hanging off him. ‘Is it bad?’ I didn’t know anything about cancer, except it could kill you. But this cancer could be caught, my mother told me. They’d found it early. They would remove part of my father’s stomach and kill the rest of the cells with chemotherapy.

  ‘And he’ll be right as rain,’ she said. ‘Will you come home next week and see him after the operation?’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’ll come.’ I paused. ‘Is he there now?’

  ‘Yes, he’s sat here with his cup of tea. Do you want to talk to him?’

  I thought about it for a second. I wouldn’t know what to say. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I won’t. But tell him I’ll come and see him next week.’ I hung up.

  ♣

  I have a clear memory of going to see my father in hospital after his cancer operation. He is sitting up in the ward bed under the bright lights, a drip in one arm. On the bedside cabinet: a bottle of Lucozade, his glasses, a newspaper. The image reminds me of all the times I visited him in hospital as he recovered from one operation or another.

  I remember him singing old Jamaican folk songs to the nurses. High on morphine, singing at the top of his voice, a nurse laughing but asking him to sing more quietly. ‘Think of the other patients, Mr Lowe.’ ‘Call me Chick,’ he tells her. ‘I come from Jamaica. I used to sing these as a boy.’ And something about the way he sings announces that he means to survive. Yes, the cancer has come for him, but no, it’s not his time. Look what the marvellous NHS can do! They can dose you up and cut you, and pump you full of chemicals, stop the bad cells raging, stick a tube in here, a tube in there, hang a clipboard at the bed’s end, covered in scrawl you can’t understand a word of but the doctors can; the doctors understand, sweeping through the wards with pens in hand, a tick in this box, a cross in another, and hey ho you’re fixed, and heading home.

  In my memory, my father pulls his blanket up and raises his pyjama top, saying ‘What d’you think of this, Han?’ He is proud of the neat scar across his abdomen, a long thin smile, a little red at its puckered edges but already half healed.

  But years later, my mother told me that I didn’t go to the hospital.

  ‘You came back from university the day after he had the operation. And I was driving to the hospital, but suddenly you had something more important to do. Shopping, you said. You had to get something from the shops in Ilford.’ She was disgruntled, remembering.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘No, I definitely did go, Mum. I remember Dad singing to the nurses.’

  ‘No, you didn’t go at all. I told you about the singing. He was off his head on bloody morphine, singing to the nurses and to Mac and Sylvester. All the old boys went to see him, but you couldn’t be bothered.’

  I could tell from the way she said it that it was true. I didn’t go. Why couldn’t I remember what had happened? Why could I remember what didn’t happen?

  I could still hear him singing to those nurses, could still hear his good clear voice:

  She had the man piaba, woman piaba, Tantan, Fallback and Lemon Grass,

  Minnie Root, Gully Root, Grannie Back Bone,

  Bitter Tally, Lime Leaf and Toro, Coolie Bitters, Caralia Bush,

  Flat o’ the Earth and Iron Weed, Sweet Broom …

  ♦

  I came home the following summer and worked back at the pizza restaurant. I was saving money for California, for the exchange year that was part of my course. It was a strange time, waiting to leave. Adam and I broke up in an amicable way. He was going to Italy for a year, and a year seemed like infinite time back then; more practical to call things off, but our pragmatism didn’t stop me missing him.

  My father’s chemotherapy had finished and he’d been given the all-clear. He was cheerful, pottering around the house fixing door handles, putting up shelves. We fell back into our usual routine – him driving me here and there, and finally dropping me at the airport in September, insisting on wheeling my suitcases through to the departure gates, where we had an awkward goodbye as I joined the long queue. I turned back as I passed through the metal detector and he was still standing there, looking for me, as people passed to and fro around him.

  ♠

  Santa Cruz in California was long beaches and small coves where the Pacific waves crashed on the sand. There was a giant rollercoaster on the boardwalk and a main street where old hippies lolled on the sidewalk with wrecked guitars, tattooed stars below their eyes. One side of town was wealthy – big timber houses painted in pastels set back from the wide, leafy streets. A river divided those avenues from a run-down neighbourhood of graffitied concrete duplexes – a scrappier, edgier place where Mexicans lived, and which we international students had been told to avoid after dark.

  We mingled with the rich kids who went to the university, its campus on a rolling hill overlooking the ocean, a far cry from most British universities. There was an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a state-of-the-art gym, an amphitheatre where Shakespeare festivals took place. The faculty bu
ildings had won prizes for architecture – the bold postmodern angles and colours contrasted with the redwood forest the buildings nestled in, giant trees shading the walkways and bridges, the tallest trees I’d ever seen. Students’ families paid a hefty sum to send them there, and in return the university treated them like customers whose needs should be met. We were lucky. An exchange year meant an American student had paid their fees for each of us and taken up our place in England.

  Browsing the brochure of campus accommodation before I left, I discovered there was the option to live in racially segregated halls. I couldn’t believe it. You could choose the Pacific-Islander hall, the Afro-American hall, the Mexican-American hall. The logic, I think, was that some people preferred to live among their own kind, a position updated from its bleak origins in Jim Crow segregation to what was now a positive choice, to enhance the racial harmony on campus. I didn’t understand it until I lived in America, and realised that the myth of the melting pot was just that – a myth of assimilation and equality. There was a non-white middle class, but generally to be black or Mexican in America meant to be poor, and this divide was reflected in the cities and towns I saw – San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles – where racial communities lived separately. This, to me, was much more evident than in Britain, and soon the segregated halls made sense – they reflected the real-world apartheid which, I assume, some students were comfortable with.

  ♥

  I was lonely in Santa Cruz at first – homesick for Brighton, for Ilford, for my family. The leaflet for foreign students told us to expect culture shock, but I wondered how different America could be from what I knew. I’d seen hundreds of American films, followed American bands, read American books. I knew the place I was coming to. But I don’t think culture shock is about the superficial things like currency, or eating foreign food, or hearing different accents. It’s the shock of realising that another world exists in parallel to yours. I lived in America now, but my old world carried on regardless with everyone I knew still in it – five thousand miles and half a day away. Even now I find it hard to accept that while people sleep away the night on one side of the world, the other side are busy and awake, let alone the belief of some scientists that there are infinite parallel worlds, all playing out simultaneously.