In the Falling Snow

by Caryl Phillips

  When his mother left he didn’t understand how radically his life was about to change. How could he, for he was only six years old. One day he came home from school and the slender lady was not there and the unshaven man was waiting for him with a packed suitcase. He took him on a train to another town, and then to another house where he met a woman named Brenda and a man who was introduced to him as his father. To begin with, whenever he was left alone with this Brenda he would cry. If the woman suggested taking him out to the park, or to the shops, more tears would begin to roll down his cheeks. His father spoke to him, and tried to reassure his son that everything would be all right, but in his heart he already sensed that he would never again see his mother. As the days passed he began to accept the sweets and small gifts that Brenda gave to him in an attempt to win his favour, and eventually he stopped asking his father about his mother and began instead to ask Brenda, whose standard response was, ‘don’t you worry your head, pet, I’m here for you now.’ And the more Brenda repeated her cheerfully reassuring sentence, the more he gradually realised that she meant it and that she would look after him.

  A whole summer passed, and he turned seven years of age, and his sad anxiety was slowly replaced by a guilty peace with the reality of his mother’s absence. One morning his father reached down and ran his hand through his son’s hair, and then sat him in a living room chair and told his boy that he would never again see his mother as she had gone to sleep. By now he felt an attachment to Brenda, but the memories of his mother came flooding back and he could not stop the tears from beginning to stream down his face. His father paused and swallowed deeply before telling his son that his mother was in heaven, but she still cared deeply for him. Then, as though appearing from nowhere, Brenda came into the living room with an ice-cream cone and suggested that the two of them go for a walk. He took the ice-cream in one hand, and slipped his other hand into Brenda’s, and together they left his father standing by himself in the middle of the room.

  Once they reached the park, they walked through the main gates and directly to the pond, where they found a seat on a bench. For a few moments, they sat together and watched the children sailing boats on the pond, and then Brenda began to explain that although she had never wanted to replace his mother, and she understood that this was not what he wanted either, she would try to bring him up as best she could. She squeezed his hand.

  ‘No matter what happens between your dad and me, I just want you to know that I promise I’ll always be there for you, Keith. You do understand, don’t you?’

  He nodded as he finished his ice-cream, and then he let her wipe his face with a handkerchief. Judging by the way people were looking at them, he imagined that they appeared strange together, but Brenda never seemed to mind how people stared at them.

  ‘Are you going to marry Daddy?’

  He could see from the look of surprise on her face that she was not expecting this question. She smiled, then laughed nervously.

  ‘You do come out with some things, don’t you?’

  But later that year she did marry his father, but the son was not invited to the wedding. Instead, he stayed with a neighbour until the newly married couple came back from wherever it was they had been, and then life went on as if nothing had happened. Every day he thought about his mother, and sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night and stifle his sobs in the pillow. He knew that his father was working hard, but he could never be sure of exactly what he did, and then the arguments with Brenda began. At first it was just his father’s voice that he heard, and then Brenda began to answer him back, and then they both began to shout.

  Eventually, one night the police came to the house. The flashing red and blue lights lit up the bedroom window and woke him up. Downstairs he could hear his father yelling, and then Brenda started to scream and he heard his father ordering her to be quiet. He slowly opened his bedroom door and crawled out on to the landing, where he hid behind the banister. He poked his head around the corner and was able to see straight down the flight of stairs to where everybody seemed to be bunched in the small space in front of the door. It was a policeman who first saw him, and the man nudged Brenda and pointed in his direction. Brenda snatched herself out of the grip of another policeman and she began to race up the stairs towards him. As she came closer he backed away, but it was too late.

  ‘Everything’s all right, Keith, love. Your father’s just going back into hospital for a while, but he’ll be back.’

  He had no idea that his father had ever been in a hospital before, and he wondered what kind of accident he’d suffered.

  ‘I don’t want him to go.’

  He tried hard to hold back his tears, but he couldn’t help himself. Brenda quickly pushed a hand into her pocket and pulled out a fresh packet of tissues. She ripped the plastic apart and gave one to him and encouraged him to blow his nose.

  ‘I don’t want him to go either, but it’s best for everybody. Don’t worry, he’s not going far, and he might be back home before you know it.’

  ‘Can we go and see him?’

  She stroked his cheek with the palm of her hand and smiled. Then she leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead.

  ‘Of course we can. Now then, you be a good boy and get yourself off to bed.’

  Later that night, after all the commotion was over and the policemen had gone, Brenda came upstairs. He tried to block out the noise of her footsteps as she tiptoed closer, but then he heard a squeak as the doorknob to his bedroom began to turn. He instinctively rolled over and faced the wall and pretended to be asleep. Brenda opened the door and then paused. He listened as she took a couple of steps inside the bedroom and then she paused again. He knew that she wanted to say something to him, but he didn’t want to talk to her. Eventually the door closed and he heard Brenda making her way to her own bedroom. In the morning, a sad-looking Brenda dressed him for school and prepared his breakfast, before taking his hand and walking him all the way to the school gates. He remembered that he had nothing to say to her for he remained confused and hurt, but somewhere inside himself he knew that his father had been unkind to Brenda.

  He looks through the same window that he used to stare through as a child. After his father came back from the hospital, the West Indian man from whom they used to rent decided to sell his father the house at a cheap price. Apparently, even though five years had passed by, the man was still upset at what Brenda had done to him, and so once his father regained custody it was this house that a thirteen-year-old Keith had to reacquaint himself with. His father is snoring in the room next to him, and it occurs to him that perhaps it was not such a good idea to leave London and come up north. After all, they passed the last hour or so in the pub in almost total silence, which pretty much summed up the nature of their relationship since he left to go to Bristol University as an eighteen-year-old. Nearly thirty years later, his father remains as much a mystery to him as he was back then. He had sat in the pub and watched the older man polish off another two pints of Guinness, but having done so his father looked as though he was going to fall asleep and so he had suggested to him that they leave the pub and make their way back home. During the short walk he tried to make conversation by talking about what they might do tomorrow, but his father seemed irritated by his questions and suggestions and so they re-embraced silence. Once they reached home, he simply followed his father into the cold, empty, house and then wished him goodnight before climbing the stairs to his bedroom.

  He waits for his father to finish reading his Daily Mirror, and empty the second pot of tea, before he suggests that rather than watch television they might go out for a walk.

  ‘Where?’ asks his father, who now looks again at his newspaper.

  He stands and begins to collect up the cereal dishes and stack them in the sink.

  ‘Just to the park.’

  ‘You want me to go walking in the park with you?’

  He decides to do the dishes later, and so he wipes his dam
p hands on the front of his jeans and looks across at his father, who is now staring back at him over the top of the newspaper.

  ‘Look Dad, I want to talk to you.’

  His father lowers the Daily Mirror, but he doesn’t say anything.

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything drastic or bad, Dad. I’m just saying that we should talk, okay. Let’s just go for a walk and it’ll give us both a chance to stretch our legs.’

  The park is empty, considering what a pleasant day it is, but he also notices that it seems far smaller and scruffier than when Brenda used to bring him. He understands that one’s memory plays tricks, and that the park is exactly the same size, and just as unkempt as it always has been, but he is still disappointed. The pair of them sit side by side on a wooden bench by the small boating pond and he decides to tell his father about the situation with Yvette. He explains that she works for him, and that they started to see each other, and once he broke it off she began to make things both difficult and ugly. He doesn’t stray far from the facts of the story, and he tries not to complicate things by mentioning either Clive Wilson or Lesley.

  ‘The woman sounds like a bitch.’ His father speaks without turning to look at him. ‘Are you blaming yourself for this situation? Is this why you’re telling me about it?’ He sucks his teeth and doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Man, women can be treacherous, but I suppose at this stage of your life I don’t have to tell you, right?’

  He wants to ask his father about Brenda, and why he still can’t accept that she did what she thought was best for both of them. He also wants to ask his father about the women who seemed to drift in and out of his life during the few years he spent in his father’s house before university. And why, for that matter, does he think it’s all right to call Yvette a ‘bitch’? She isn’t his favourite person, but he wouldn’t call her that name. Across the other side of the pond, a boy is trying to fly a kite, while his somewhat desperate mother attempts to help by pointing in the direction that she thinks the wind is blowing. However, the wind is gusting so she keeps changing her mind, and the boy seems to be getting the string in a tangle. He sneaks an oblique glance and notices that his father is also watching intently, as though this sideshow relieves both of them of the responsibility of continuing their awkward exchange. And then his father slowly turns to face him, and he can see that his eyes are red and damp.

  ‘Boy, you’re not feeling the cold? You’re like a true Englishman able to sit out here without a hat or scarf and acting like the weather ain’t bothering you at all.’

  ‘We can go if you like. I just thought it would be nice to have a walk.’

  ‘Have you finish whatever it is you want to say to me?’

  ‘I want to talk to you about how you’re living, Dad. I just don’t think that it can go on for much longer. I hate to say it, but I don’t want to get some phone call telling me that they’ve found you passed out in front of the television set, okay?’

  ‘So this is what you want to talk to me about? I thought you come up here to see me so you can tell me about the girl at work.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Dad, I’m not even sure why I came up here to see you. Maybe I did want to tell you about Yvette. I haven’t really had a chance to talk to anybody about it.’

  ‘And you think that I might be able to give you some advice, is that it?’

  ‘No, that’s not it. I just needed to get out of London, and I wanted to see you too. But now that I’m here, and I’ve seen how you’re living, I’m worried. Do you want me to pretend that I’m not?’

  ‘You ever have people who tell you that maybe you should mind your own business? Well?’

  He looks at his father, whose shrinking frame seems small and inadequate beneath his big, heavy, overcoat.

  ‘Look, I cold. If you want to keep talking then maybe we can walk and talk. I tell a few of the boys that I will see them down at the centre.’ His father gets to his feet. ‘You want to come with me?’

  The Nelson Mandela Community Centre is essentially an old people’s home, although nobody calls it this. Above the dayroom, with its television, its CD player, and its neatly stacked puzzle books, dominoes, packs of cards and unused board games, are twenty-four one-bedroom flatlets from which the residents occasionally appear if they feel like being sociable. The management is sensitive to outsiders, but they don’t mind one or two people coming in during the period between lunchtime and six o’clock in the evening, which is when dinner is served. His father is clearly a regular visitor, for he appears to be on a first-name basis with the staff and residents alike. ‘You all remember my son, Keith.’ His father sits with his three friends at a Formica-topped table and waits to be dealt into a dominoes game with Ronnie, Baron and Boysey. The three men barely look up from their dominoes as they nod and mutter greetings in his direction. His father claims to have known these men since arriving in England nearly fifty years ago, and it amuses him to see them now, at this juncture of their lives, still finding the energy to revel with what he imagines to be the spirit of their Caribbean youth.

  ‘He say he come back home to keep an eye on me. I look like a man who need somebody to keep an eye on me?’

  The men all laugh, and his father winks playfully at his son. ‘Keith don’t know how to relax and just enjoy himself. Which don’t make no sense now that he get rid of the wife.’

  Baron looks up at him and arches his eyebrows. Of all the men, he is closest to ‘Uncle Baron’ who, when he was growing up, seemed to be the most sensible of his father’s drinking pals. More importantly, he was the only one who ever remembered his birthday or bought him a present.

  ‘Keith, you get rid of the nice white lady?’

  He shrugs his shoulders. ‘She’s still a nice lady, but you know how it goes. Sometimes you’re just not seeing eye to eye. It’s difficult with women, particularly if they’re the mother of your child.’

  Baron laughs. ‘Man, I have a few of those knocking about the place.’

  ‘Mothers or children?’

  ‘Both, man, both. They come together like a package deal. Trouble always like company.’

  As Baron throws his head back and laughs, he notices that his ‘uncle’ has lost his front teeth, which gives him a more mischievous appearance.

  ‘Son, don’t take it so hard. Listen to Baron, for he is telling you the truth. Women is nothing but trouble. You leave your wife, but you still got your health and that is all that matters. Plenty more fish in the sea.’

  He looks at his father and wonders what on earth goes on in this man’s mind. One moment he is cold and aloof, barely communicating at all, the next minute he is smiling, and sorting out his dominoes, and acting as though he is the life and soul of the party.

  He sits with his father for an hour, watching him laugh with his friends, but this one table aside, the centre is not a place of joy where men and women at the terminus of their lives can relax in comfortable surroundings. The television that is bracketed to the wall in the far corner of the room seems to be permanently tuned to soap operas, and a group of men in dressing gowns and bedroom slippers sit silently on plastic chairs in an obedient row and gawp helplessly at the screen. He has never been beyond this dayroom, so he has no idea what the flatlets are like, but he suspects that they too are most probably joyless. The centre radiates an aura of communal depression, and the attendants appear to behave more like watchmen than skilled helpers who have been trained to assist the elderly. However, in the absence of close family members, most residents have little choice but to seek admission and accept shelter, and thereafter go about the business of spending what little money they have saved from their working lives in England in order that they might make it to the end with some vestige of dignity. He looks at his father and realises that he clearly has no intention of leaving his game of dominoes any time soon, and so he stands and tells his father that he is going for a walk and he will see him back at the house. His father nods almost imperceptibly, for he remains focused o
n his hand of dominoes. The older man does not bother to look up as his son leaves the community centre.

  It is after seven o’clock in the evening when his father finally walks in and clumsily hangs his coat over the back of a dining chair. His hair is now the shape of the pork-pie hat that he has just removed and dumped on the table, and he is clearly in need of a shave. He looks at his father, and then he picks up the remote and turns down the volume on the evening news. He gets to his feet and passes into the kitchen where he begins to fill the kettle, then he cranes his neck so that he can see his father.

  ‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’

  His father rubs his stubbled face with the palm of his hand and nods before sitting down heavily on the sofa.

  ‘You look done in. Must have been a serious game of dominoes.’

  ‘I had to wait for the blasted bus, but I get fed up so I start to walk.’

  He plugs the kettle in and then crosses to the door of the kitchen.

  ‘You’re not telling me you walked all the way back home? You can’t be serious?’

  ‘No man, I didn’t walk all the way back. I’d be dead if I try to do that. But I walk about half the way and that is more than enough for me.’

  He spoons two sugars into his father’s tea and stirs, before rejoining him and handing him the cup. His father lifts the cup to his mouth and sips noisily at it, and then quickly sets it down on the floor. It is too hot.