It matters not how strait the gate How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul
– William Ernest Henley, Invictus
My grandfather Walter had played the piano, my mother played the piano and then I began to play the piano. My father drove me to weekly lessons at Miss Phelps’s house on Breamwood Road, with its dark rooms of brocade furniture, the windows blocked by ornate nets and velvet curtains, the lingering smell of polish. Miss Phelps was in her eighties with thin white hair pulled into a bun and half-moon spectacles she peered over to observe my hands misbehaving on the keys of her piano.
‘Stop, stop!’ she would cry in her croaking voice, yanking my wrists up with a pencil, ‘Lift them, lift!’ Sometimes she would shut the piano lid altogether, sighing, and would bring me an orange from her fruit bowl. ‘Feel the orange,’ she ordered and I had to sit in her upright chair and roll the fruit between my palms, to mould my hands into the proper shape to play – fingers spread like claws, high wrists.
Miss Phelps had a brain tumour. I didn’t find this out until my mother announced that we needed to find a new piano teacher because Miss Phelps was in hospital and not expected to come home. I didn’t have the chance to see her before she died, to thank her for her teaching and her patience. By then, I was quite good at the piano, having left behind Teaching Little Fingers How to Play for Step by Step to the Classics.
My father used to see Miss Phelps every time he came to pick me up from lessons. They would pass the time of day while I stood between them, squirming, wanting to be gone. He was upset when he found out how ill she was, worried that she didn’t have any family to visit her. She’d never married and didn’t have children. He bought flowers and drove to the hospital to sit at her bedside, returning the next day and all that week until the last time, when the staff told him Miss Phelps had died in the night. He came home looking sadder than I’d ever seen him.
After Miss Phelps I went to Maisie, who was barely eighteen, a punk who wore long black skirts and slashed T-shirts, painted her nails blue and had three rings in her nose. She was a virtuoso, her long fingers dancing on the piano keys in her mum’s back room where she gave lessons. I wanted to play like her. At nine years old, I wanted to be her. She hennaed her hair and smelt of cigarettes. I practised more and more.
After Nan had died, my mother inherited the rest of the house and we took over the rooms downstairs. The brass bed was removed and Nan’s bedroom became our front room and home to the piano. It was a space rarely used except by me – a quieter, stiller room somehow, with pale green walls bathed in light from the tall bay windows. I was only allowed to play the piano in the afternoons and evenings – morning practice was banned because it disturbed my father in the room above, sleeping off a night of poker. When I could practise, I’d play for hours at a time, until my arms and shoulders ached. I found it peaceful and was rarely interrupted, unless by my father. ‘Play me a song, Han?’ His head popped through the front-room door. For him, the piano was a serious pastime with the genteel associations his upbringing in colonial Jamaica encouraged him to admire. Sometimes I just refused, but other times I’d shut the lid heavily and leave the room, stalking past him. Worse was when he had a friend round and wanted to show me off. I couldn’t bear it and I never would. Often I’d hear him shuffling outside when I practised and would fling the door open to find him standing listening.
‘Honestly, Dad! Go away, will you!’ I’d say, and like a chastised child he’d turn and slope off down the hall.
I resented the pride he showed in me. It made me angry in a way I didn’t understand then and still don’t entirely. Looking back, I see how he claimed his children’s successes as his own, as though we existed as reflections on him, despite his hands-off parenting. He would boast to anyone about my half-brother Tom’s first-class degree in Maths from Durham, or my half-sister Gloria’s glamorous work in Atlanta. ‘Yes, my daughter is Head of Cultural Affairs,’ he’d say. ‘She’s clever, like me,’ and ‘Brains are in the family.’ Most children want to make their parents proud, but I sensed a desperation in his pride, his need to prop himself up through me. Because what did he have? No qualifications, no job, no access to the institutions he so admired. No bank account, no mortgage, no pension. Nothing of any import. Nothing that carried any currency or status. Even aged nine, I knew I had the opportunity for those things and that my life would take a very different path from his. I looked down on him because of it. And of all the things he coveted, the one he wanted most was my respect.
♣
Your father didn’t know how to be a father, my mother once said. He had no role model. I remembered the silky scars on my father’s legs, pale and raised, made by the belt of his father, my grandfather. They haunted me – I was horrified that marks made so long ago could endure.
I wondered what a good father might be. A breadwinner? When my father slapped cash onto the dinner table, he was claiming that status, but we all knew our household needed our mother’s income too, that his winnings were erratic and unreliable. Was a father supposed to make the rules, perhaps, to be the disciplinarian of a family? I’d heard that threat – Wait until I tell your father – from the television and from the mothers of my friends, as though the father was the chief justice of punishment, the last recourse when you were really bad. But my mother was our judge and jury, and my father was soft as butter – he never told me off, never raised a hand to me.
Half the time he wasn’t there – out in the evening, asleep half the day. My mother tried to compensate, to be both mother and father to us – but perhaps this undermined him even more, although it seemed to suit him to let her. ‘Ask your mother,’ he’d say whenever I would ask to bake a cake, or walk to the shop, or watch TV. ‘Ask your mother. Ask your mother.’ Until I didn’t ask him any more.
Many of my friends’ fathers had enthusiasms – football, sailing, DIY, stamp collecting – some activity they might share with their children. But what were my father’s hobbies? Going to the bookies? Nothing we shared, although he’d sometimes do a card trick for me, and we spent a lot of time in the car together, driving from A to B, or the occasional trip to the park, where I would push the roundabout, working up a speed before jumping on, while he stood a way off under a tree, smoking a roll-up.
In the car, he’d boast: ‘I know the streets of London like the back of my hand.’ A cliché, but one he often used, and of course he did – his gambling took him everywhere, all over London, at times all over England, and later even overseas. He spent hours driving, the talk-show chatter from the radio keeping him company. One night, somewhere near Bow, he said, ‘Come on, Han, let’s see if you can get me lost.’ He was smiling. ‘I bet you any money you can’t.’ I saw his need to impress me in that smile – ‘Look what I can do,’ it said, and although I didn’t want to, I played along, giving him instructions, ‘Turn right here, Dad,’ and, ‘Turn left, then left again.’ I see us from the outside now, crossing the river onto a dual carriageway, past a dilapidated art-deco factory, a huge estate of high-rise blocks with their balconies crammed with crates and bicycles and laundry on the washing lines. Past traffic lights and down a noisy street where men crowded at the pavement cafés, past neon signs in kebab shop windows, below a railway bridge. And finally, sure that he must be lost, that I had led him miles from our starting point, we stopped and he reversed and turned to drive us back a different way, laughing the whole time and saying, ‘I know my way, I know my way, you see?’ I wished I didn’t feel as though I’d made a child happy.
The card tricks were an uncommon occurrence, but one I liked. ‘Cut open the deck anywhere, Han,’ he’d say, and I would, carefully lifting a section of the deck and turning it over, handing it to him. ‘So that’s the four of clubs, you want that one?’ I nodded, stood in front of him, my eyes fixed to the card. ‘You sure now, yes? You sure?’ I nodded again. ‘Right then, now blow!’ He held the deck open where I’d made the cut. I blew. He would make the smallest movement with his hand, almost imperceptible, and suddenly the four of clubs had disappeared, replaced by eight of spades. ‘How? How, Dad?’ I always asked, or my cousins begged if he’d performed the trick for them. We’d pull his trousers. ‘Show us, show us!’ But he just offered the trick again, or sat back and crossed his legs, laughed and tapped his nose. ‘That’s for me to know, and you to find out,’ he said, but of course we never did.
I used to watch as he sat on the sofa with a pack of cards. He could shuffle them in twenty different ways, arching and flexing the deck between his thumb and middle finger, so they looked as pliable as rubber, then split them, stack them, flip them. I can still hear the pitter-patter of a riffle shuffle, when he split a pack in two, cascading the cards into an interwoven pile. It looked so easy, but it wasn’t. The cards would fly away from me when I tried to copy him, scattering on the floor.
I liked the names of the games he played too. Some were common – blackjack, poker, rummy – but others sounded foreign and sophisticated – baccarat, kalooki, chemin de fer. I loved the feel of cards, playing patience for hours or building card towers, balancing the cards in pyramids, one on top of the other. I imbued the royal cards with personalities. The jack was suave but impetuous, the worst of these the jack of diamonds. The queen was stoic and unflinching. The king was wise but passive, and of course, ruled by the queen.
One of the clearest memories I have is watching my father asleep upstairs – it was always daytime, the curtains holding back the light. I was intrigued by his slumbers. Why else would I have so often held my breath and quietly opened the door to stand observing the rise and fall of his chest below the covers? I knew the smell of him asleep – a pungent scent, completely physical, but not unpleasant.
Over the years he must have adapted to those strange hours, driving in the city in the early light from games in Ladbroke Grove or Kentish Town or Pimlico, through the West End then out along the littered East End streets, the shuttered shops and garages of Romford Road, below the flyover where Ilford’s one-way system starts. Then turning through the tidy maze of residential streets that brought him home, often around dawn. Sometimes if a game had gone on, we’d all be up and having breakfast when his car pulled into the drive, Sam and I on stools at the kitchen counter, my mother buttering toast for us. He’d appear fleetingly in his suede jacket, car keys in hand, the smell of cigarettes on his breath. While the kettle boiled he’d dig into his pockets for a roll of money, counting out the notes and handing them to my mother, who would slip them into her handbag. Then he’d make himself a cup of tea and vanish off to bed. He was a ghost-father – gone all night or in the house but asleep – a present absence, hovering at the edges of our lives.
♦
I woke one morning and, through my bedroom window, saw my father standing in the garden with three other Caribbean men. On the grass were a pile of timber and several long rolls of bright green fabric. It was a warm day and they were in their vests, heads bent together, talking. Every now and then one of them would gesticulate, as though drawing a diagram in the air. My mother carried a tray of mugs out to them, and they smoked and sipped their tea, eyeing the wood on the ground.
‘What’s he doing?’ I asked my mother when I came down. She was in the kitchen, sifting flour into a mixing bowl. ‘Making tables,’ she replied.
‘What sort of tables?’
‘Snooker or dice,’ she said. ‘Not sure. Why don’t you ask him?’
John from St Lucia was on the patio, sawing wood, singing under his breath. He had a strange, hollow face with big eyes, but I thought he was kind-looking. I knew he was completely bald under his trilby hat as he sometimes took it off and let me rub his shiny head. My father called him John the Carpenter, a biblical-sounding name befitting John’s religious convictions, his penchant for quoting the Bible. I’d known him all my life. He lived round the corner and had six children. Last time I’d seen him, he’d pulled out a crumpled photograph of ‘his people’, as he called them. The eldest girl was twenty-one and the youngest two were baby twins, a boy and girl. ‘Look how sweet they are,’ he said, pointing to the picture. ‘Children are a heritage from the Lord. Sweet God, I’m blessed.’ The children were all dark like John, posed in their Sunday best around a Christmas tree. He had more than six kids, my mother said. He’d probably lost track. Too busy in the bookmakers.
‘Good morning to you,’ John said when he saw me. He dipped his hat. There was a sheen of sweat on his face. My father and the others were kneeling on the lawn, nailing beams of wood together.
‘What are they for, Dad?’ I asked, enticed by the green felt, the same shade as the grass, an overload of colour in the bright garden. ‘Dice,’ he said. ‘The club want two new tables, so we making them.’ He introduced me to the other men – ‘This me daughter.’ He had adopted his Jamaican accent. The men, Frank and Sylvester, looked up from their hammers to greet me.
They were out there all day, and all the next, making those tables, enormous when finished, with the green felt tacked tightly on their tops. And they were beautiful. John spent hours sanding and waxing the legs and frames until the curved wood gleamed, and as the sun went down, the four of them stood around the table, my father shaking dice and rolling them out across the baize. I stood at the side. John put his arm around me.
‘Watch this, Han,’ my father said, ‘two sixes.’ And he threw the ruby-coloured dice so they bounced against the table’s rim, rolling back to land with twelve dots facing up.
‘You’ daddy always get the numbers,’ John said. ‘You see? Boy, he’s skilful. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.’
‘Your call, Han,’ my father said, looking up at me.
‘A two and a four?’ I said, and he took the dice and shook them, rolling a two and four on the green table top. I called the numbers again, then Sylvester called, then Frank, and my father rolled the call every time, the dice spinning off the high wood rim. Then they all threw the dice – Sylvester, Frank and John – but none of them could do what my father could.
‘Darlin’, have a go!’ Sylvester said, dropping the dice into my hand. He wore a gold ring on his little finger. ‘Blow some luck into your fist.’ I blew into my balled hand and rolled the dice, then scooped them up, and rolled them again. It was a hot evening in the garden, the sky a soft shade of pink. I felt small and safe with those tall men on either side of me.
‘Yes, yes, we training you,’ Frank said, and put his hand on my head. They were laughing. I knew I’d been included in a ritual I wasn’t meant to be a part of, and I liked it.
Afterwards, they carried the tables upended down the alleyway at the side of our house and put them into the truck pulled on the drive. It was nearly dark. I was feeding the fish in the pond, letting them kiss my fingers, when John came through the alley gate, his hat in his hand, showing his shiny head.
‘You like the dice,’ he said. ‘You see your daddy play?’ His smile showed his gold teeth. ‘Not bad, not bad.’ I didn’t know what to say. We stood side by side, watching the fish.
‘I see you liking it,’ he said. ‘Your daddy is a good man.’ He sat down on the grass and crossed his legs. ‘Let me tell you a story.’ He paused to make sure he had my attention. I took my hand from the pond reluctantly, not sure I wanted to hear it.
‘I came from Castries, thirty years ago,’ he began. ‘You know where Castries is?’
‘St Lucia?’ I asked.
‘That’s right, clever girl.’ He winked. ‘My mother told me, “John, go on now. Be always good. Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.” She said, “You have a gift for wood and England will be rosy.” ’ He pointed to himself. ‘I was seventeen. Oh, it was a scary place, the ship, the sea. I couldn’t sleep, played cards the whole long journey; what I lost the first night, took me sixty days to win again.’ He sighed dramatically, his head bowed. ‘I came to Paddington. So lonely. I met your daddy dealing on the Edgware Road. All the fellows in the upstairs room, below a yellow bulb, and no one going home.’ He raised a finger. ‘A gambler is never lonely – is another man who always wants his money.’ I realised I was listening to John’s confession, and he was in no hurry to let me go, lost in his own reveries.
‘Every gambler has his curse,’ he said authoritatively. ‘For me it’s horses. The devil prowls around, seeking someone to devour. Then a letter in my post box said my mummy is dying, am I coming home?’ He looked up, tears in his eyes. ‘It was thirty years since I came from Castries.’
Suddenly I felt sorry for John. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
He sighed. ‘I took my money to the bookies and I lost it all. In bets there is a fool and a thief.’ He shook his head. ‘It was your daddy give me work and lend me what him can. Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.’ He smiled, showing his gold teeth. ‘I made it home. Her hand in mine, I help her on from this life to the next. Amen. Amen.’ He stood abruptly, put his hat on and tipped it. ‘Be good. Listen to your father who gave you life. God loves you. And love your daddy, don't forget. He was whistling as he walked away.
♠
Clearly my father had magical powers when it came to dice, and could manipulate playing cards in all kinds of ways, but beyond knowing this, his night-time activities were a mystery to me. There was a cupboard in our hall, below the stairs, where the hammer and screwdrivers were kept, along with tins of varnish, buckets, rollers, a paint-splashed stepladder. A bare bulb lit the space, which always seemed mysterious, as though its dark corner might slope off to a secret room. The shelves held an assortment of cake and biscuit tins of different shapes and sizes. Inside these were my father’s dice – not the small white dice of a Monopoly board, but large red and green dice, transparent, the shades of rubies and emeralds with big white spots. Other tins held packs of cards, always Kem, the American brand, plastic backed with swirling red or navy blue patterns. Alongside them were marker pens and pots of ink, pins and needles, Stanley knives and razor blades, and right at the back of a shelf was a very small guillotine. I didn’t know it then, but these were the tools of my father’s trade.
It was my mother who filled me in, years later, repeating my father’s motto – If you can’t win it straight, win it crooked, meaning that he cheated when he needed to, in a variety of ways. These included counting cards, marking them, or slipping them in and out of play. She didn’t know about this when they first met, but later she saw him practising and he would leave things out around the house – the pens and the blades for shaving cards, a dentist’s drill for loading dice. Back then he was playing all the time, out all afternoon at dice games in Whitechapel or Bow. He’d come home for dinner and to change his shirt, blow her a kiss and be gone. He might come back at twelve if things were slow, or he mightn’t come home until the following day. We needed the money, she said, so I didn’t complain. He was winning big all the time – three hundred pounds here, four hundred pounds there – a fortune in 1968 for one night’s work. My mother was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the way my father earned his living; in her mind, there was a distinction between his methods – counting cards and using sleight of hand were expert skills, but marking cards was dishonest. Regardless, all of them required hours of practice. Your dad had a photographic memory, she said. ‘He might have been born with it, but he honed it well.’ Here, my own recollections corroborate her words. I used to watch him dealing out cards to memorise them, mouthing the numbers and suits to himself. He’d be at it for hours. He could recall the order of an entire deck, so he always knew which cards were in the pile and which were still in play. He used to deal the other players what they needed, but he always had the better hand. One time he came home raging mad, complaining to my mother that a man he’d dealt a jack of spades to hadn’t played it. Like he’d done your father wrong, my mother said, and not the other way around!
He also had incredible sleight of hand, and was able to slip cards in and out of play. I think he learned all that in Jamaica, she said. Some Chinese fellow used to show him tricks. He was brilliant at it. But he marked cards too. I wasn’t sure about that. It wasn’t moral. Indeed, the whole world of gambling, according to my mother, was immoral and dangerous. A few people – ‘confidants’, my father called them – knew what he could do, and would pay him to prepare a deck or load a pair of dice. It was a nice earner, she said, but I worried that they’d tell on him. Nothing good would come of getting caught.
I always thought my father had false front teeth because he was old, but in fact some fellow who thought my father had cheated him had knocked them out. Another time, in Ladbroke Grove, another chap accused him of palming a card. Things got nasty and my father had to leave. It hadn’t ended there. There were lots of phone calls and worry – who knew what and who’d seen whom – but one way or another my father finally charmed his way out of it.
He was older than many in the gambling fraternity and he was renowned among them, for his dexterous dealing and his winning streak, no doubt. He was considered a kind-hearted gentleman in that tough, edgy world, but surely his cronies can’t have known the truth of what he did? My mother didn’t think so. If you can’t win it straight, win it crooked. They can't have known my father lived by that motto .
♥
My father was a complicated man, full of contradictions and morally ambiguous – on the one hand, seemingly happy to cheat his fellow gamblers out of their money; on the other, happy to lend or give money when he had it, to just about anyone who asked. From either side, it was as though he didn’t value money in the way that other people did. Some days he had it, some days it was gone.
Years of gambling must have taught him to read situations well. Yet there were other times when his skills of intuition failed him completely. He’d once been arrested for, in his words, ‘doing a friend a favour’. This friend was Ginger Brian, a local criminal everybody thought was mad. He had a shock of red hair and small, rabbity teeth, and was missing a finger and a thumb, apparently lost to a dog. Brian organised illegal dog fights and rumour had it he beat his dogs with chains to toughen them up.
My father knew Brian from the bookies, but they weren’t close. It was a mystery as to why he phoned the house one day and asked my father for a lift to town because his car had broken down. Anyone else might have smelt a rat, but my father told him yes, no problem, and arranged to pick him up in Forest Gate. But in the car, Brian pulled out a gun and started waving it around, telling my father that he planned to kill a nightclub owner in Piccadilly who allegedly owed Brian money. The details are a little fuzzy here. For some reason, perhaps because he was scared, my father drove Brian to the club, but as soon as they got there, before they’d even stepped out, the police surrounded the car – and not just any police, but armed police, and my father and Ginger Brian were arrested. They kept my father in a cell overnight, and all the next day and the following night.
My mother was frantic with worry and phoned every number in my father’s phone book. He finally called her from the police station, asking could she come and get him and could she ask her brother Terry if he could put some money up for his bail? He’d been charged with intent to commit affray and possession of a firearm. The silly git, my mother said. I should have left him there.
In the end, the case was thrown out. It turned out that Ginger Brian and the club owner had been waving guns at each other for weeks, but no one was quite sure of the reason, including them. Nevertheless, my father had to spend two nights in jail for doing Ginger Brian a favour, or, as my mother said, for being bloody thick.
You might expect a gambling man to be reckless or profligate, unconcerned with the affairs of the wider world, but in fact my father felt his responsibility as a citizen and was surprisingly political – a committed socialist, in fact, since, as a young man in Jamaica, he’d been involved in the country’s struggle for independence. In England he’d joined the Communist Party and sold the Daily Worker outside the Tube. Then, when Harold Wilson became prime minister in 1964 – the year my parents got together – they both joined the local Labour Party, went to all the meetings, posted leaflets at election time. My mother used to staff the polling station on election day, keeping a list of who’d been in, while my father drove his car around our neighbourhood, knocking on people’s doors. He would bring old ladies to the polling station to cast their vote, or teenagers who hadn’t known they were old enough.
Aged six or seven, I remember trailing with him up and down our neighbours’ garden paths, a stack of bright red Labour leaflets in our hands. I didn’t understand elections or politics. I used to watch the police attacking the miners on the television and Margaret Thatcher speaking in her bright blue suits, her bouffant hair always looking thin and wan. I didn’t understand the things she said, knowing only that I didn’t like her. When I misbehaved, my father used to hunch his shoulders, pull a face and say, ‘You better watch your step, or I’ll send in Mrs Thatcher.’ From this, I gauged her villainy. In my childish world, it was enough to know Labour liked the colour red and were the good guys, while the Conservatives were blue and bad.
♣
The incident with Ginger Brian was not my father’s only run-in with the law. Apparently he had been caught at an illegal poker game sometime in the sixties, just before getting together with my mother. Betting shops were already legal but card gambling was still prohibited, and police raids on gambling parlours were common. My father been arrested at a card table – red-handed, as it were – playing cards in hand, a pile of cash in front of him.
In court, he chose to represent himself, taking the stand in his smart suit to give an impassioned speech against the current gambling laws. His argument had two threads – the first was that the criminalisation of gambling was a moral censor initiated by the church, who associated gambling with the sin of selfishness and could not tolerate participants’ faith in chance over God; and secondly, related to the first, the laws were a paternalistic form of social control, penalising and patronising the working classes whose agency and self-determination they denied. The transcript of the speech was printed in the evening newspaper and my father preserved the cutting, proudly glueing it onto the first page of an empty scrapbook, perhaps hoping to fill the rest of the pages with further reports of his campaign. Like many of my father’s ideas, it came to nothing in the end. The judge in the case listened with amusement as my father extolled his views, then imposed a hefty fine.
There were other minor misdemeanours. Small-time criminality went hand-in-hand with gambling, and my father often brought home ‘swag’ from the clubs – leather coats and shoes, plates and silver cutlery, expensive towels. He brought home a microwave and a Moulinex food mixer my mother loved. Everything knocked-off, of course. She turned forty in 1984 and the day before her birthday he dragged a bin-liner of dresses in from the car – ‘No tat,’ he said. ‘Upmarket frocks.’ She hung them in her wardrobe: glitzy dresses with pleats and shoulder pads, not her style at all, and she never put them on, except for the bright red dress she wore the night of her birthday party. It was red satin with a black sash across the middle, like something worn by a character from Dynasty or Dallas, my favourite TV shows at the time.
My memories of the party are slightly hazy, mainly because I was blind drunk. My mother’s friends arrived at Ashgrove Road in droves – mostly teachers she had known from the different schools she’d worked at over the years and neighbours from our street. Sam and I and the three cousins were banished upstairs with Joseph, my father’s niece’s son, all the way from Peckham. At fifteen, he was the oldest. He wore his Afro in a flat-top and when he laughed, his eyes creased up and made him beautiful. The girls and I swooned.
We sent Alf down to steal the alcohol, bottle after bottle, then, clueless what to do with it, we mixed it in the way we’d seen our parents do, on the ironing board we set up as a bar in the big spare room. We had no mixers, so gin was mixed with lager and rum with Babycham, concoctions we then downed with great bravado, grimacing, until our heads fizzed and we couldn’t stop laughing. Hits Five was playing on the tape recorder, the volume turned right up. We drew the curtains and put the lamps on for a nightclub feel.
‘Let’s limbo!’ Maria shouted, holding up the broom, and the six of us straddled, bumped and shook below it, lower and lower, until I bent so far I thought I’d snap in two, as though the alcohol had made me bendier. Then Susanna had a nosebleed and had to lie on her bed with her head hung back while Alf pinched her nose. It didn’t work. I was sent downstairs for ice to stem the flow of blood.
From the top of the stairs I saw a small man with highlighted hair standing by the front door. He was naked except for a leopard-skin loincloth. In his shaking arms he held my mother, who must have weighed three stone more than him. The red dress was hitched above her knees to show her shiny thighs, a black lace garter sunk into the flesh. She was flushed in his arms, her head thrown back, laughing. Everyone, including Tarzan, was singing ‘Happy Birthday’ at the tops of their voices.
‘Everyone! Tarzan’s downstairs!’ I ran upstairs and shouted, but the limbo dance had resumed with Joseph nearly on his knees to slide below the broom while the others cheered him on. By the time I went back to look, Tarzan had disappeared, as though I’d dreamt him. My father was standing in the hall with Charlie Walker, both smoking and talking conspiratorially. The pair of them looked out of place and shifty among my mother’s friends. Back in the bedroom, Sam had disappeared. Alf and Susanna were passed out across the bed, and Joseph and Maria were in the dark corner, their arms wrapped around each other, kissing.
♦
We went on holiday in Dorset that summer, to the same campsite we’d been to with the cousins for the last five years. We packed our trailer, fixed it to the car, and off we went in convoy to Osmington Mills, just outside Weymouth. Two weeks on the green cliffs above the sea, barbecues every night or fish and chips, the adults supping beer on benches outside The Smuggler’s Arms, us playing on the swings and slides, as the sun went down over the hills.
I had my first bikini that holiday – bright blue with Minnie Mouse’s smiling face embossed on the top and bottoms. My mother had found it in a seafront shop in Weymouth. I remember little Alfie running to the campsite pool to tell me I had a present waiting at the tent. I ran back and my mother handed me the bikini. I loved it from that moment and didn’t take it off all holiday. Imagine my surprise when, years later, she confessed she’d stolen it. It wasn’t only my father whose attitude to the law was flexible. Annoyed at the long queue in the shop, she’d snuck it into her bag and ambled out, making a getaway along the promenade. My father had chased her and grabbed her arm.
‘What, you going to call the police on me?’ she said incredulously, shrugging his hand off.
‘You can’t just steal it!’ he said. ‘You must take it back.’ In his view, receiving stolen goods was fine, but stealing them in the first place clearly wasn’t.
‘Not on your nelly!’ she replied.
♠
I nearly drowned that year in the campsite swimming pool. I could just about doggy-paddle, but when Sam told me I should try jumping into the deep end, I did, wanting to impress him. The pool was packed with children leaping and diving in, with rubber rings and lilos. I panicked, flailing, then sinking down, my lungs too full of water when I cleared the surface to call for help. I was only a few feet from the edge and I remember a blonde girl clinging to the side in arm-bands, watching as I sunk and surfaced over and over again, the strange silver-turquoise light of the water and the kicking legs and feet all around me. I knew I was going to die, until an arm was around my neck and pulling me clear as I gasped for air, my eyes fixed on the clear sky above me.
It was Maria, standing on the tips of her flippers, wading through the water from the shallow end where she’d seen me struggling. She dragged me out onto the concrete and held me as I caught my breath and cried into her thin brown shoulder. I was scared and exhausted, shivering in the hot sun, wrapped in my towel. Later we walked across the fields to the tents, and vowed we wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. We both knew it was serious – I was lucky to be alive.
♥
My father was happy on these holidays. Each day we went to the beach, where he would tuck himself behind the windbreaker to read the paper. It was a long, wild beach below the campsite. You had to scramble down. No beach huts, no café, just the high dunes of pale sand and the waves crashing on the shore. My father didn’t like the sun and rarely took his jeans and shirt off, but he would get into the spirit of the beach, making sandcastles and burying us. There’s a photograph of Sam and me and the cousins sunk into the sand with just our heads visible, my father stood behind us in his anorak, smiling at his handiwork. And he and Auntie Lyn enjoyed each other’s company. They would roll their jeans up and walk along the shore together, talking, sometimes gone for hours. They had an affinity, I suppose you’d say, my mother said, because neither felt they fitted in.
The next year there was no holiday with the cousins because Lyn had gone, and a rupture in our family had started, one that never really healed itself. She’d had affairs with women before, my mother told me, so that part was no surprise. Lyn had left Uncle Terry and the children, moving out to live with a woman she’d met at work. Where exactly she had gone was kept a secret from us all that year, but I was old enough to understand.
I listened to snatches of my parents’ conversation. My father was incensed about Lyn leaving. ‘How could she be so stupid? How could she leave the children?’ he said to my mother, over and over, an attitude I found odd, another veer in his moral consciousness, since he’d left two marriages and two children himself. Maybe his outrage was because Lyn was a woman. I’d never heard of a mother leaving her children before, but plenty of my school friends’ dads were absent. More likely, I suspect, my father, older now, regretted his own behaviour.
I knew very little about his previous lives, only that he had married very young in America and had a daughter, Gloria, whom he’d left when she was a baby. The second marriage was in England, to Elsie, a nurse. They’d had a son, Tom, but my father had left again when Tom was nine, and hadn’t seen him much in the years after. They saw each other more when Tom had two children. My father enjoyed his new role as grandfather, but even as a child I could sense his regret that he hadn’t been a better father to Tom, a kind, bookish man. I liked Tom when I met him but it was hard to regard him as a brother. We hadn’t grown up together. He was twenty-three years older than me – nearer my mother’s age than mine.
♣
Instead of Weymouth, we went to Newquay, just the four of us, staying in a run-down B&B that smelt of fried eggs. The week before, my mother had told us there was no money for a holiday this year, and I remember money was a problem all the time around then. My father wasn’t winning much. They talked about selling the house and moving somewhere smaller. But money had appeared from somewhere – my father had had a win of sorts, no doubt – and last minute, there was just enough for us to take the coach for seven hours from Victoria to Cornwall, where it rained all week. My father disappeared most afternoons into one of Newquay’s betting shops, while my mother remained stoic, taking Sam and me to the Lighthouse Cinema and the Japanese Bonsai Garden, where we yawned and complained. One afternoon she led us through the drizzle on the seafront with promises of ice cream. The sea was dark and stormy, ominous. Sam hung behind as she marched on. He pulled a marker pen from his coat and ‘tagged’ a bench and the side of a beach hut in his thick black scrawl. I tried to read what he’d written, but it was indecipherable. I trailed behind him, hoping for the best.
♦
It was soon after we came back that my father was taken into hospital with chest pains. My mother didn’t drive, and we didn’t have the money for a taxi, so each evening we walked the two miles to St George’s Hospital. It was autumn, growing colder, copper leaves piled on the pavements. Our route took us down Glencoe Avenue, where my mother had been born and raised in the Newbury Park house owned by Walter Hart. He came home one evening to find his first wife Stella, Nan’s predecessor, had left him, taking every stick of furniture they owned. Stella was a socialite who liked tennis clubs and drinks parties, while my grandfather was more content to walk alone for hours through Epping Forest. He knew all the forest wardens and they left him to himself to sit cross-legged beneath the trees and meditate.
The hospital corridors were jaundiced in the fluorescent strip lights, with a cloying antiseptic smell. My father lay in the ward bed in his paisley pyjamas, his glasses on as he read the newspaper. Illness had made him serious, but then it seemed to be a serious illness – a collapsed lung. They’d pumped it up but he had haemorrhaged, losing lots of blood. ‘I was getting colder and colder,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t speak. I thought they hadn’t noticed.’ He’d needed a transfusion. Tubes ran beneath the blankets and I couldn’t see where they plugged into him. ‘There’s blood in my wee,’ he said. ‘They say my blood pressure is up.’ His face was fixed and grim. He’d come into hospital with one problem but now it seemed that there were others – with his prostate, and the doctor thought the stomach pains he’d had for weeks might be an ulcer. ‘I’m not well,’ he said, unsmiling.
He came home from the hospital looking grey and weak with a paper bag of pill bottles he carefully stacked in the bathroom cabinet. He always was a hypochondriac, my mother said, but now his fears were named. They were conditions to be managed. Tablets for blood pressure, antacids for the stomach ulcer. He worried that the lung problems might be linked to cancer, and tried to give up smoking, but never lasted more than a few days. Cigarettes were swapped for roll-ups, as though they were a healthier choice, but he just smoked more of them, and before too long the black and gold packs of John Player Specials were back on the kitchen window sill where he always kept them.
That was the first time he was very ill, but it was a marker of things to come. It was a shame for my mother – she was much younger, still full of energy. She must have known that a man my father’s age, and with his lifestyle, would suffer bad health eventually. She might have known she would end up alone. But of course she looked after him – the hospital visits, trips to the doctor. She listened to his worries, organised his medicine and pills. Other families weren’t like ours. My friends had dads who chased them up and down the garden, did ridiculous dad dances in the living room, swung their mothers round. We weren’t like other families. My dad was a liability, my mother stoic and reliable. I felt sorry for my father, but I felt more sorry for her.
♠
We’d had Chloe since I was three or four, since Penny, the dog next door, had a litter of puppies – four mongrels that my cousins and I had marvelled at with their little wrinkled faces and tiny paws. I was allowed to choose a puppy and Chloe had come to live with us. She was a small dog, long-haired, with a dopey face and watery eyes, and she was nervous about everything – the doorbell, strangers, being left alone. My father decided after his illness that for exercise he would walk her every day – the five-minute trot to the newsagent and back – and after years of ignoring each other, my father and Chloe became good friends. When he read the paper in his armchair, she would curl up by his feet or scramble up into his lap.
Much later than my friends, I got a bicycle. It was a birthday present. My father took it upon himself to teach me how to ride. On Saturday afternoons we manoeuvred the bike into the car. I sat in the front seat with Chloe on my lap as he drove us to Goodmayes Park, where I wobbled along on the bike, his hand behind the seat to steady me and Chloe running out in front. As I got better and picked up speed, he’d try to jog behind me, making sure I didn’t fall, but often this would end with him bent double in the shadow of a tree, his lungs too tight to breathe or even cough to clear them. He’d recover on the park bench while I whizzed along the path, Chloe behind me, sprinting with her ears pinned back. Yes, I thought, I can ride the bike! When I grew bored, I’d cycle back to him. ‘Had enough, Han?’ he’d ask as I dismounted, and we’d put on Chloe’s lead, wheel the bike back to the car and head for home. Sat beside him, I could hear his laboured breathing, as though he couldn’t get enough air. I glanced over. His face was sad and worried.