Long Time No See

by Hannah Lowe

  Often he thought of Mr Ho Choy, Felix and Mr Manny, and wondered what they were doing. He missed the warmth of his people, the easy talk, knowing where you stood with another fellow. He missed his mother. Even the memory of his father’s face was a pang for home.

  ♦

  That winter, it snowed. The boy had seen snow before in Maine and New Jersey, but it was Lionel’s first time. Four inches settled overnight and in the early morning the street looked wonderfully clean and bright. ‘The whole world’s gone white!’ said Lionel as he clambered up the basement steps and out into the road, marvelling at his sunken footprints. ‘I never thought snow would feel like this,’ he said, scooping a handful from the ground. ‘Or be so cold.’ He frowned.

  ‘Like this damn country,’ the boy said, bending to lift a handful. Two women were walking on the other side of the street. The shorter, squat one looked disapprovingly at them and tutted loudly.

  The boy turned to her, suddenly angry. ‘We’re just two men stood in the snow!’ he said, his hands spread. ‘Is that a crime?’

  The woman looked aghast. ‘How dare you!’ she said to the boy. ‘You darkies come here and think you can behave any way you want. Well, we won’t have it, we won’t have it at all.’

  ‘Come on, Maeve,’ her friend said, pulling on her arm. She looked at the boy, her face friendlier. ‘You can’t go round frightening old women, you know,’ she said to him.

  ‘We don’t want any trouble here,’ said Lionel, coming up next to the boy, the snow still in his hand.

  ‘We’re not doing anything, Lionel,’ the boy said. ‘Just looking at the snow.’

  ‘Well, that’s no crime,’ the kinder woman said. ‘I don’t s’pose you have it where you come from.’ She turned, pulling her friend away, but the other woman hadn’t finished.

  ‘We won’t have it, do you understand?’ she said, red in the face. ‘You darkies should go back to your own home.’ She straightened her coat.

  The kinder one yanked on her friend’s arm. ‘Good day to you,’ she said over her shoulder.

  ‘How can you be nice to them?’ the boy heard the other one say. He shook his head as they stood watching the women walk away. ‘You should watch yourself, man,’ Lionel said, looking worried. ‘I don’t trust the English. Who knows who those old ladies gon’ tell?’

  ♠

  At Somers Town, they told the boy the marshalling yard was closed.

  ‘Till when?’ he asked, thinking of the rent due in a few days.

  ‘Till there’s no more snow, Chick,’ the clerk in the entry booth told him. ‘Go home and put your feet up.’ The boy thought of sitting in the freezing cave watching Lionel snore. This can’t go on, he thought.

  It was lunchtime. He found a café on Euston Road for a cup of tea, then caught the bus to Bow, following the directions Keith had given him.

  The Nag’s Head was a run-down place on the corner, a hulk of peeling paint. There were the remnants of gold gilt on the horse’s head on the sign over the door. Blacked-out windows at the back. Two men trudged quickly through the snow, their collars pulled up, glancing at the boy before entering the pub.

  The boy blew on his hands, straightened his coat, and followed them in.

  17

  Down to the Felt

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master

  – Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

  It was bad luck to move from Ashgrove Road. My parents had lived there for thirty years, but the house was too expensive to keep. It was old and draughty with a leaking roof and the boiler on its last legs. My father’s cancer was in remission but he was still unwell with high blood pressure and a poorly heart. He was barely earning any money. With Sam and me gone they didn’t need the room, and so in my last year of university they sold the house. Only now does it seem to matter that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to my old bedroom, the cherry tree, our mossy pond, even the dark, dusty loft that scared me as a child.

  Our new house was my cousins’ old house, a mile or so from Ashgrove Road. Perhaps it was my mother’s urge for familiarity that made her buy it. Over the years we’d spent more time there than anywhere else. Now my cousins had left and Uncle Terry had moved away with his girlfriend. The new house was smaller with compact, boxy rooms, but it overlooked a big park with a lake, and there was a long garden and an attic room with a skylight that let light stream in.

  Chloe kept running back to the old house. Each time, Irish Bridget would phone to say she’d found the dog on the path and my father would go and pick her up. Chloe was an old dog then, following a scent that led her over two main roads to Ashgrove Road. How strong her urge to return must have been.

  The last time she did it, she was hit by a car. It was night-time, heavy rain, Chloe scuttling in car headlights, drivers skidding to avoid her. The first my mother knew was when a woman called to say Chloe had been hit but was still alive. At the vet’s, my parents found her on the table, two broken legs, blood in her fur. Her tail slowly lifted and thumped when she saw them, but she was cold when my mother touched her, her breathing slow. The vet said she didn’t have a chance. She died a few minutes later. They buried her in the back garden of the new house, but we all knew she should have been laid in the garden of Ashgrove Road, where her old rubber bones were buried and the familiar rattle of the trains might soothe her.

  If my parents felt the loss of Chloe, or the old house, they didn’t say so. Even as my mother told me Chloe had been killed, she was stoic, almost cheerful. I wished she would say how sad she was. She loved that dog. Chloe was part of our family. Sometimes, I wondered if my parents had their own emotional camaraderie, a private rapport behind bedroom doors, where they declared their love, or talked deeply and intimately, sharing their fears, their regrets and griefs, their hopes for us, their children. Perhaps to each other they confided the sorrow of leaving Ashgrove Road, where Nan had lived and died, where my brother and I had been raised, where they had socialised and loved and laughed, as well as fought and despaired. But I doubt it. I don’t remember ever hearing them say they loved each other; can’t recall a single kiss or hug.

  The only open display of emotion I remember was when my father, not long before he died, lifted his head from his newspaper and said to me, ‘Your mother is a good woman. One of the best.’ And with that pronouncement, he went back to reading, and I pretended not to have heard.

  ♥

  Soon after I graduated I moved into a house in Clapham with friends from university – a tall, decaying Victorian house on a street behind the railway. We were all trying to find meaningful work, wishing we’d taken more notice of the careers advice offered in the final year. What a fall from grace it was to discover that after four years of being encouraged to find my own voice, think independently and express my opinions, all prospective employers cared about was how fast I could type and whether I could use Microsoft Excel. I took the first job I was offered – in a university department, each morning catching the Tube to a dusty office on Baker Street where the head of department, a haughty professor of business studies, handed me a pile of scrawled notes to type and a stack of photocopying it took all morning to finish. No matter how I willed it on, the clock’s hand ticked round more slowly as the day progressed.

  I enrolled in a master’s degree I saw advertised in the newspaper. Anything to stave off my rapidly-developing brain rot. The course was Refugee Studies, its focus on the ‘lived experience of migration’, studying the reasons people moved from one country to another, the psychosocial impact of migration, how diasporic communities formed themselves in exile. The other students were a mix – some were refugees themselves, from Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Bosnia, Palestine. Others were people who worked in the field as legal advisors or caseworkers. One of these was a human rights advocate, fifteen years older than me, with whom I embarked on a brief but passionate fling, attracted to him only because I admired his work.

  I look back now and can see how my father’s story, still ha
lf unknown to me, was the catalyst to my need to learn these other stories, not of economic migrants like he was, but of frightened, desperate people escaping war, persecution, horrors I couldn’t imagine, and how they awoke in other lives – safer, yes, but uprooted, living the shock of displacement, subject to legal machinations and legislation, a popular media that sought to discredit them as strangers, scroungers, spongers. It was the same story over and over. They’d been coming for thousands of years, but this country didn’t like foreigners.

  ♣

  ‘Your mum’s ill, Han,’ my father told me on the phone. It might have been the first time he’d ever phoned me. ‘Can you come over?’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked.

  ‘The doctor said it’s Bell’s palsy, but I don’t think it is. Can you come?’

  I admit, I was annoyed with him for phoning. Sam was home. Surely between the two of them they could work out what was wrong with my mother. It was because I was the girl. If anything ever needed organising or taking care of, it was always me my parents turned to, never my brother. ‘Phone the doctor,’ I said. ‘See if he can come out and see her. I can’t today but I’ll come tomorrow.’ I hung up.

  I was just leaving the house the next day when the phone rang. It was my father again. ‘Your mother’s in hospital,’ he said. ‘We didn’t realise. She’s had a stroke.’

  I remember the bus journey from the Tube to the hospital, the long walk through the corridors to the ward where my mother was propped up in bed wearing an old T-shirt. She looked the same, albeit dishevelled. She wasn’t paralysed, she could still speak. I took those things as signs she was fine. The doctor said ‘mild stroke’. She would be home in a few days.

  It took weeks or months for the stroke’s effects – not on her body, but on her mind – to show themselves fully, and they were severe enough that she had to give up work. There was nothing mild about the transformation she underwent. Where my old mother had been stoic and reserved, this new mother was confused, tearful and sentimental – she talked to her pets as though they were human, cried at the television, cried at the radio. My old mother had had endowment policies and insurance, had kept things just under control, but the new one was reckless, buying things she didn’t need or want because the act of spending was a comfort. My old mother had kept an ordered house with everything in its place. The new one hoarded and amassed, decked the walls with wonky photographs in cracked frames, crammed every inch of shelf with vases and trinkets, until the whole house had the look of her mind – mawkish, over-brimming, disarrayed.

  Each time I saw her, some new eccentricity would reveal itself, the effects of the stroke always in flux, more evident when she was tired, and sometimes I saw her old self in a fleeting glance. I found that the hardest. Other people thought the difference was subtle. They didn’t know her well enough to see her mind was an unhappy muddle. She was depressed, wanting her old self back and things to be as they had been – a place she would eventually reach, but not before several years had passed.

  I think of my parents in that house now – two sick people caring for each other, the blind leading the blind. I think they found a new peace after years of ups and downs, a different way of loving each other, knowing they might lose each other. They moved through the old routines in the way they always had – my father cooking, my mother tending to the garden in her new, haphazard way – crowding the patio with plants she didn’t water, building a water feature in the middle of the lawn – too large and grand for its small patch of grass. They bought a new dog and called her Ellie, another mongrel, smaller than Chloe but just as neurotic. Some evenings that summer they took her out together, walking slowly around the park.

  I found it hard to see them. I didn’t visit enough. Instead I threw myself back into to a heady social life of parties and clubs, doing my day job sufficiently, my MA sufficiently, spending my wages on clothes and cigarettes and drink and taxis. I had a big group of friends in London – all of us single, our lives just beginning. If I felt different from them, I was desperate not to show it, desperate to fit in. Inside, I was a child, really – angry at my parents for their illnesses, for their lives veering from plan, for stopping me from being carefree.

  One night I went to a party in Tooting – a gathering of friends who drank together in a bar up the road. It was a warm evening, a barbecue going in the back garden, and a gang of thirty were there, my age or older, sitting in deck chairs or sprawled on the grass, the sun going down, everyone waiting for dark to pop pills into their mouths and let the ‘real’ party start. I spent most of the night talking to a man I’d not seen before. His name was Sid – he was tall and very thin, blue eyes in a good-looking face splashed with freckles. Somehow in the light banter of our flirtation, he told me both his parents were dead – his mother when he was four, his father ten years later. He had a brother in Plymouth and one ancient Scottish grandmother, but he was alone in London, trying to get his own business together, but more often, he confessed, losing days to partying and its fallout. Even later, when I saw him pull a plastic bag from his pocket, dishing out pills to my friends who presented him with ten-pound notes, I remember wanting to know him, wanting to see him again, not just because I was attracted to him, but because I hoped he might help me through the dark days I was in, the loss I felt, the loss I knew and didn’t know was coming, my sense of things falling apart.

  When he phoned the next week, I was delighted.

  ♦

  ‘Don’t you like the bracelet?’ my father asked, whenever I did see him. I suppose I was saving it for something special, but in the end, I wore it to meet Sid for a drink one night months later, just because. I remember admiring it on the Tube on the way and turning it on my wrist as I walked through the rain, excited to see him. But when we left the pub my wrist was bare.

  ‘I have to go back,’ I said, turning on my heel and running to the pub, crouching down to search the sticky floor. Sid helped me, but it wasn’t there. I couldn’t believe it. Outside, I walked off through Soho, retracing my route, scouring the wet pavement, Sid behind me trying to catch up. I must have looked mad, combing the streets with my eyes, thinking the wet stone glinting was the bracelet’s diamonds, refusing to stop until finally he said, ‘Hannah! It’s gone, all right? It’s gone.’

  ‘It can’t have!’ We stood in the downpour, my hair stuck to my face.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he said again, reaching his hand out to me, pulling me towards him.

  ‘No,’ I said again, sounding like a child.

  ‘Look, don’t worry about it. We can get another one, eh?’

  ‘No. That’s not the point. You don’t understand. I can’t have lost it.’

  But I knew it was lost. Another bad omen. The rain fell more heavily as I stood sobbing into Sid’s coat.

  ♠

  Despite my mother’s confusion, she was still astute. She knew my father’s cancer had come back. That Easter they booked a holiday to Crete but he was complaining of stomach pain, wondering aloud if it was his ulcer, as though naming the return of the ulcer negated the possibility of the return of cancer. Before they flew, he went to Dr Goldstein, who took him very seriously. That’s how I knew, my mother said. The doctor always laughed your father out the door before. The doctor prescribed painkillers – the strongest type that needed diluting, and so everywhere they went in Crete they took a water bottle and my father’s pills.

  And he didn’t eat, my mother said, although they sat for dinner every night on the veranda of the guest house. A local fisherman played guitar for the diners in the evening and my parents and he got to talking. His name was Stavros. His father had died of stomach cancer months before. He became my father’s friend. Every evening after playing, Stavros slipped his elbow through my father’s arm and walked him slowly from the hotel to the bay and back again, their heads together, talking.

  ‘We’ve been to the hospital,’ my mother told me on the phone, a week after they returned. ‘It’s a s
hock, love, but your dad’s cancer’s back. It’s spread all over. There’s nothing they can do.’

  ♥

  Sunday lunch, a few days after the news. Maria and Alf were back in Ilford. A dismembered roast chicken rested on the table. We worked through the mound of food on our plates, making small talk, filling in the silences. My father was at the table, slumped so low his face almost touched the polished wood. His dinner was pushed aside. Suddenly he sat up straight and looked at me. ‘You know I’m dying?’ he said.

  I was shocked to hear him be so blunt. ‘Dad, don’t,’ I said. Ellie whined under the table.

  ‘I’m going to die,’ he said, looking around at everyone. We all looked away. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes to stop himself crying.

  Nothing they can do. I hadn’t believed it until then. My father had been ill so many times. There was always something they could do. They’d always fixed him – poked and prodded him, sent off samples for tests, delivered diagnoses, prescribed pills. It was a routine we all knew. But this wasn’t the same. The shock of his prognosis had tipped him into a new place of despair – the loneliness of the banished man, told he will die, and nothing to be done, and no one to go with him there.

  I remember the room that day – everything so familiar – the Welsh dresser my parents had had for years, the carved heads we had brought from Jamaica, the African prints on the wall – and my cousins, my mother, Sam, me, sitting at that table while my father looked around at the world he would leave very soon. He didn’t want to die, his distress so acute it made the light of the room brighter, the air thinner, harder to breathe.

  In the kitchen, I asked my mother what had happened at the hospital. ‘Just what I told you,’ she whispered. ‘The doctor said it’s terminal. He said your dad had weeks to live. Or days.’

  ‘And what did Dad do?’ I asked, and she gave me that do-you-have-to-know-everything look.

  ‘He broke down in tears,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t stop crying.’