Sticks and stones may break my bones …
It was 1990 and there was a new scene happening – indie music coming out of Manchester and Liverpool and dance music everywhere. Kim and I were too young to go to the actual parties, but we knew all about them. People were taking Ecstasy at raves, dancing to sound systems in marquees and fields and warehouses, or in people’s front rooms. Somehow the mores of that subculture diluted themselves into signs and symbols we could be part of. Boys grew their hair long. We wore T-shirts with yellow smiley faces on, hooded tops patterned with psychedelic suns and moons, strange new shoes called Wallerbees in lilac and pink.
Romford was our stomping ground, equidistant between Ilford, where I lived, and Upminster, where Pinners was, and not far from Kim’s house. We were fourteen and looked it, but there was an off-licence there that would sell us bottles of dry Martini or Cinzano or Thunderbird. We’d walk the town centre, swigging straight from the bottle, my vision blurred and spinning from the booze – the shops and alleyways and bus shelters doused in refracted light. There were boys we saw around the town, beautiful boys whose names we didn’t know. We didn’t talk to them, but talked endlessly about them, watching from a distance as they knocked around a football, or stood smoking cigarettes, or sat perched on the back on a bench, high up, their feet on the seats where they deserved to be – kings of the shopping parade.
I’d tell my parents we’d gone to see a film, but really we were drinking and mooching until my father came to pick me up. I didn’t swim at the Dolphin any more, but it was a landmark for him to fetch me from. The yellow Triumph had finally gone, replaced by the more economical Mini – electric green, a joke of a car, shameful when he came to meet me, shameful as he was, parked up under a street light outside the pool with a roll-up on the go.
Once, I was sick into my bag all the way home, sat beside him in the car. He pretended not to notice, didn’t say a word as we swerved back to Ashgrove Road, and by the time we got there I was recovered, my head no longer swimming. I thought I’d gotten away with it but he walked through to the kitchen and told my mother. I was standing in the hall, holding a bag full of my own sick. In the living room, he flicked the television on and sat down in his armchair. Not a word from him the whole way home, but he told her, and as usual passed the problem – me – straight on.
♦
It was ironic that the most significant role my father had in my life was as a driver, since he was a notoriously bad one, the butt of a running joke between Uncle Terry and my mother. I don’t know if he’d learned to drive in England or Jamaica, but his driving, according to her, was ‘pure Jamaican’. I remembered driving in Jamaica the year before – motorists overtaking at speed on the twisting roads, trucks zig-zagging up hills with hitchers clinging to their backs, cars aggressively nudging and beeping their way through the Kingston rush hour. In our hired Honda, my father joined in these practices with relish.
In England, his irreverence for road regulations endured. He seemed unable to keep the car between the white lines of a dual carriageway, veering dangerously into the path of other vehicles, oblivious to their drivers, who beeped and harangued him. Once a cab driver rolled down his window, shouting at my father as he passed, ‘Oi, Nelson! Keep to your own lane, will ya!’ My father’s hair was mostly white by then and with his broad nose and face, he did resemble Nelson Mandela, whose release that year was constantly in the news.
My father’s bad driving had a long history. My mother enjoyed relaying the anecdote about his run-in with police in the early seventies. At this time, he had been employed by a casino as a games inspector. Not realising my father was cheating constantly on their turf, the casino figured that his experience of cards and knowledge of card games made him perfect for the job. Every night they perched him up a stepladder above the card table to spot any irregularities in the punters’ play, a poacher-turned-gamekeeper job he came to relish. On that particular night my mother had joined him for a drink after a night out with her friends. They had left together in the early hours, my father worried that he was over the limit to drive. ‘But he’d only had two gin and tonics during the night,’ she said, ‘so I wasn’t worried at all.’ My father sat next to her as she told the story, talking about him as though he wasn’t there.
‘So we get in the car and he starts the engine. But he doesn’t look in the mirror, not even a glance. Straight into reverse, foot down, then clunk. We’ve backed right into someone. We both sit there in silence for a few seconds and I’m thinking, Bloody Nora, maybe he is pissed. Then I turn round to look, and he’s only gone and reversed into a police car! Can you believe it? I tell him what he’s done and he just sits there, swearing under his breath. The air went blue, I can tell you.’
‘I didn’t see them,’ my father said, holding his hands out innocently.
‘But,’ my mother carried on, ‘that’s not the half of it. Because there’s only two policemen sat in the car. They must have had their eye on someone in the club. Then suddenly one is tapping on the window. “Excuse me, sir,” he says. “You appear to have reversed into a police vehicle. Were you are aware we were parked behind you?” And your dad goes, “Good evening, Officer,” in his best Queen’s English. “If I had been aware you were parked there, I certainly wouldn’t have done so, no.” Of course they breathalyse him, and it turns out he was over the limit, so they nicked him for that and for reckless driving. How many points did you get?’ She turned to my father.
‘I think it was four,’ he said solemnly, although I could tell he was pleased with his misdeed.
Another time, years later, the police pulled him over when I was in the car. He was giving me a lift to Kim’s house, but somehow he’d turned the wrong way down a busy dual carriageway. It was dark and raining, the windscreen wipers going frantically, but through the blur of rain I could see other cars looming bigger as they drove straight at us, swerving dramatically out of our way. ‘Dad?’ I said. ‘I think we’re on the wrong side of the road.’
‘Eh? What do you mean?’ He leant forward, peering through the windscreen, then sideways at the other lane, where cars were travelling in the same direction as us. ‘Oh dear,’ he said with exaggerated formality, putting the brakes on and pulling up on to the inside kerb, just as a siren sounded in the other lane. A police car stopped alongside us on the other side of the railings. There were two policemen. One got out of the car, climbed awkwardly over the railings and indicated I should roll down my window. He leant his face in, two inches from mine. He was young. I could smell his breath as he spoke. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Mind if I ask what on Earth you’re doing?’ He produced a torch and bathed us in its yellow glare.
‘Oh dear. I don’t know what happened, Officer,’ my father said, sounding shaky. ‘I don’t know what happened. Oh dear me. I’m on my way to drop my daughter at her friend’s house, that’s all.’ The policeman looked between us, clearly confused that the old black man was father to a white teenage girl. I said nothing.
‘Well,’ he said, his tone easing a little. ‘Didn’t you see a sign, sir? This is a dual carriageway. It’s very well signposted. You could have had a head-first crash there.’ His ‘sirs’ sounded less sincere as the interrogation continued, my father repeating ‘I don’t know what happened, Officer’ and ‘Oh dear me’ until the policeman gave up, sighing dramatically, bored with us.
‘Well, well. Looks like we’re going to have to get you out of this,’ he said. He popped his head back out, and half a minute later he and his colleague were standing in the rain facing the traffic, hands raised to stop the oncoming cars so that my father could pull away from the side, turn round, and continue in the correct direction. All the other drivers were looking at us. I was mortified.
‘Mind how you go, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘You’re lucky I haven’t arrested you.’ He looked at us contemptuously. We pulled off into the rain.
‘Oh well, Han,’ my father said as we drove along, the rain bursting on the windscreen, the wipers going furiously again. ‘Looks like we got away with it,’ he laughed. ‘Yes, my dear, we escaped the police!’ But I didn’t laugh. I was thinking how old and confused my father was. I saw it clearly, and the policeman had seen it too.
♠
There was an under-18s club night in two large carpeted rooms above the Dolphin. It was called the Academy. They turned the lights down and played the rapid, delirious music we wanted. No alcohol but you could drink your fill before or nip out to swig from a bottle tucked in the flower bed. I went with Kim and Pauline, our new friend from school. We pooled our money for two packs of Silk Cut from the machine. ‘I don’t even know how to do it,’ I said, pulling on the cigarette, a foreign shape in my mouth, tasting its bitterness.
‘Just breathe in, breathe out,’ Kim said. ‘Don’t taste great, does it?’
It didn’t, but we lit one cigarette from another, strolling around the Academy feeling pleased and proud of ourselves. Oh they’re smokers, I imagined other people thinking with awe – they must be part of an older, wiser, more complicated world. I was sick for an hour in the downstairs toilet back at Kim’s house, trying to make sure her mum didn’t hear.
Aside from the Academy, there wasn’t much for us to do. At fourteen we were too young for pubs, too old for the playground. Sometimes we went ice-skating at the new rink in Romford. It was a soulless place with rubber floors and plastic chairs, bright billboards and vending machines. Every time I skated, and no matter how many pairs of socks I wore, the hired boots cut into my feet in minutes, leaving blisters like small gaping mouths on my heels. I couldn’t go backwards like the others could. I could barely go forwards. The only way I could stop was to slam myself into the rim of the rink against the adverts for McDonald’s and Tango. I preferred to sit out.
But the last time I went ice-skating, something horrible happened. I was perched in the spectator zone, watching the others spin and glide below the rink’s stark lighting, when a boy clambered over the seats behind to reach me. I hadn’t noticed the group sat back there – four girls in a row, drinking cans of Coke, their trainered feet propped up on the chairs. They were the same age as me, I think, but I didn’t recognise them from school. In the boy’s hand was a bright orange Post-it note he held out to me. I took it, turning it over to find a biro drawing of a stick man hanging from a noose and gallows. ‘They want to fight you,’ he said, gesturing to the girls. ‘You’re the hanged man.’
I turned to look at where the girls were huddled, staring back and laughing. I felt my stomach flip. Who was the boy? A younger brother? His nails were bitten to the quick. ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know them.’
‘I dunno,’ he replied. ‘They don’t like the look of you, I guess.’ I noticed the splatter of freckles across his nose. ‘They’re gonna get you outside.’
I didn’t know what to say. The butterflies in my stomach worsened. I’d never fought with anyone. Would it be four against one? I looked at my watch. It was half past one and my father was coming to pick me up at two.
‘Tell her she’s a slag!’ one of the girls shouted. I glanced up. She was the smallest of them, her long brown hair scraped back with gel into a pony tail, a bright pink ski jacket.
‘Did you hear that?’ the boy said. He looked like he felt sorry for me. I wanted to cry. ‘I think they’ve got a knife,’ he added.
I sat for a nervous few minutes until Kim and Pauline came back and I whispered what had happened. ‘Stupid cows,’ said Kim loudly. ‘They’re not going to do anything. They haven’t got a bloody knife.’ She looked up at them and held a stare.
‘It’s her we want to give a kicking, not you!’ shouted Pink Ski Jacket.
‘I better go home,’ Pauline said. She grabbed her bag from under the chair and changed into her shoes quickly. She had her own clean white ice skates. ‘Bye, see you Monday!’ she said, rushing off to the exit.
‘So much for her loyalty,’ said Kim as we watched her leave. She looked up again. ‘I know those girls from the Academy. They go to Hall Mead.’ Hall Mead was a rival school. Male pupils regularly challenged Pinners boys to after-school fights outside Lloyd’s Newsagent – fights which galvanised the school’s rumour mill all day, but rarely took place – but this wasn’t the same.
Kim and I returned our boots to the hire booth, my hands shaking as I pulled my socks and trainers back on, sat on the rink’s grimy white chairs, horribly conscious that the Hall Mead girls had followed, sitting opposite, still laughing and jeering. I was in a surreal panic, unable to look at them, desperately needing the toilet.
I prayed my father would be early as we walked out into the cold afternoon. The bright sun lit the empty car park. The Hall Mead girls came out behind us. ‘What are we going to do?’ I said.
‘Keep walking,’ Kim said, taking charge, and we did, crossing over the entrance lane of the car park.
‘Where you going, slag?’ shouted Pink Ski Jacket. There were footsteps behind me and, quicker than I expected, two hands shoving my back hard. I fell forward.
‘Back off!’ said Kim. She spun round to face the four of them, her small body puffed up, jaw clenched, fists gripped at her side. I pulled myself up from the ground, just as Kim said, ‘There’s your dad!’
Sure enough, the green Mini was weaving through the car park, my father at the wheel. He pulled up by us, leant over and pushed open the door, a lit John Player in his hand. My relief was palpable – those girls couldn’t do a thing if an adult was there, even it was just my father – it changed the stakes.
‘You’re fucking lucky!’ shouted Pink Ski Jacket, as we scrambled in.
‘Is her dad a black bloke?’ I heard another one of them say. ‘Slag.’ We pulled away.
‘Who were they?’ my father said, stubbing his dog end into the overflowing car ashtray.
‘No one,’ I replied, looking to the side to hide my tears.
‘How are you, Mr Lowe?’ said Kim brightly.
‘Oh, you know, Kim,’ my father said. ‘Could be better, could be worse.’
I took a deep breath, watching the girls grow smaller in the wing mirror. I knew they didn’t have a knife, and that I was a random target, but for years after I dreamt about that day – the hangman scrawled on an orange Post-it, the boy with the bitten nails, Pink Ski Jacket with her sharp, angry face, following me into that bright afternoon, the empty car park, my heart thundering in my chest, sure I would be badly hurt, or worse.
♥
I was jealous of my brother, whose social life seemed exotic and exciting compared to mine. He was eighteen and no longer interested in graffiti, much to my mother’s relief. Instead he disappeared for whole weekends to raves in Essex. There were fliers on his walls for clubs called Rain Dance and World Party. He’d turn up on Sunday afternoons looking spaced out, wouldn’t eat his Sunday lunch. There were new boys coming round for him, although they weren’t boys really, though not men either. Tall, spotty boy-men in Duffer St George T-shirts and Adidas hoodies. They all had long hair. My brother grew his hair long too and I was jealous of it – dark, shiny hair that fell down his back, poker straight.
His friends sat on the floor of his room, listening to music, sometimes getting stoned. I knew the smell of hash from Charlie White, and then Craig Fox at school had brought some in and we’d smoked it on the shot-put circle at the back of the school field, four of us pretending we’d smoked dope before, hiding our coughs in our stripy Pinners scarves. I hadn’t enjoyed it much.
On the landing outside my brother’s door I would rack my brains for reasons to knock – I’d lost my book and wondered if he’d seen it, or did he know what time our mother would be home. I was Annoying Little Sister, Nosey Little Sister. I’d push open the door to find the room thick with smoke, and the faces of my brother’s friends all turned at once – the twins, Colin, Mickey. I had a crush on them all, and I was suddenly shy, stammering over my words.
One time I came in and saw Solomon Kallakuri sitting cross-legged on the floor with a tin of Red Stripe at his feet, a cigarette in his hand. There were six or seven of them there, a record spinning on the turntable, the gentle thud of Soul II Soul. I was shocked to see Solomon. He was taller, bigger, filling out his green bomber jacket. His hair had grown long and was parted in the middle, like the others. He looked straight at me, but his look said don’t say a word, don’t say a word. Little Solomon playing at being grown. Something in his face had changed – he wasn’t my friend any more.
♣
I had become a thief again, but of a different kind. I can’t recall the first thing I shoplifted. A lipstick from the chemist, was it; a pot of lip balm? It was something to do. Sally Ramwell first suggested it. She was an old hand and never got caught, she said. Every Saturday we went to the shops in Romford and spent an hour or two helping ourselves. Four girls conspicuously loitering in the aisles of Marks and Spencer, fingering the underwear we couldn’t afford, or in the Body Shop, smelling lotions and bubble baths, waiting for the right moment, when the till girl was serving and the security guard had looked the other way, to shove a bottle in my bag. There was a thrill to stealing. My heart hammered hard in my chest when I walked back through the shop doors.
I was at it for months, coming home every weekend with new things I’d hide in my room, never enough of anything to raise suspicion. I didn’t value the things I stole and none of them lasted – clothes fell apart or I lent them out and never cared to get them back. I’d lose the cheap necklaces from Chelsea Girl, the hairbands and hairclips. I remember feeling upset about stealing. I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t stop, even when the thrill had gone. What was wrong with me? It occurred to me there was something wrong with both Sam and me, though it manifested itself differently. Where Sam was rebellious and angered by authority, I was sneaky and dishonest. Was it because I came from a home where dishonesty was an organising principle, where we all turned a blind eye to the shady goings-on of my father; was it my own boredom; or was it, as I suspected, just something I did because other kids did, just because I could?
Looking back, I can’t believe we didn’t get caught more quickly, and of course we were caught in the end – myself and Claire Fitzgerald. The others ran out the door when the security guard laid his hand on my shoulder. Upstairs, the manager had us tip out our bags in his small, hot office. They dimmed the lights and stood behind us as we watched the CCTV footage. The delinquent girl in the grainy picture was me, I realised, watching myself slip a box into my carrier bag from the shelf. On the table in front of me were tubes of anti-aging cream and eye cream, nothing I wanted or needed. The manager said the police were on their way and made us write down our phone numbers. Claire had the sense to give a false one, but it didn’t cross my mind. Perhaps I wanted to be found out. When, after half an hour, it was clear the police hadn’t really been called, the manager told us never to come in his shop again and sent us away. When I got home, my mother was ironing in the back room. She didn’t look up. ‘So you got caught,’ she said, running the iron down a shift sleeve. ‘Maybe it’s time to stop, eh?’
My father said nothing about the shoplifting. It was not his place to tell me off. Nor did he say anything to Sam about the smell of dope outside his bedroom door, the late nights and early mornings, Sam’s unruliness. But he’d been quieter anyway since our return from Jamaica. Nothing had come of the talk of going home. I doubted he’d even mentioned it to my mother.
When I see photographs from that time, I’m shocked by the image of a frail man standing in the kitchen, or sitting in an armchair, always smoking, never smiling. He was still taking medicine for high blood pressure; the stomach ulcer had gone, but he looked unwell. Often I’d come home from school to find him sitting in the thin light of the front room, staring at the net curtains, no book in his lap, no newspaper. He went out less often. There were no more trips to Newcastle, but he must have had one big win around then because one evening he announced he was opening a bank account for me. ‘You need to save,’ he said, trying to look wise. ‘I’m going to give you fifty pounds a month.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of notes and peeled some off.
Fifty pounds. This was strangely generous, and I reciprocated with simulated seriousness regarding my financial education. Of course I would manage the money carefully, I promised solemnly, before going to Romford to spend it all on clothes I didn’t even like and a mountain of sweets. I remember thinking I would be rich now, there’d be no temptation to steal with fifty pounds a month. But the following month there was no fifty pounds, or the month after, and my father was back in his armchair, the dog curled in his lap. One afternoon I found him rifling frantically through the living room bin. He pulled out a few dog ends, rolling the charred tobacco in a Rizla and lighting it. ‘I can’t afford tobacco,’ he told me, exhaling a stale gust of smoke with relief. I didn’t want to know. I wanted that fifty pounds – and not just for clothes and sweets. I wanted to live in a world where my father could make me a promise like that and be able to keep it.
♦
In line with my bad behaviour outside of school, my conduct in school worsened. Looking back, I’d like to say I was the architect of an insurgence against the school’s authority, but this imbues my immature pranks with a grandeur they do not warrant. At best I was irreverent, at worst completely puerile. I was rarely acting alone – Emily Bonnyface was my main accomplice. As a twosome we were negative influences on each other, according to our teachers, and, looking back, they were right. When we were banned from sitting together in lessons, lunchtime became our witching hour – we sprinkled paprika and chilli onto the charity cakes we sold in the staff room, stole paintbrushes from the art room, bunked off cross-country running to hide out in the wood behind the school field.
A particular low point in our mischief-making was an incident involving an iced bun, for which we became notorious for a time – and which involved Kim. This was unusual since she was normally well behaved. But one lunchtime in the dining hall she dared me to throw a flat currant bun topped with glutinous pink icing at the school caretaker as he stood on a stepladder, fixing a window. My aim was always poor – hence my place on the second reserve teams for both rounders and hockey. But by some miracle, the pitch of the iced bun that day was perfect – it sailed gracefully through the air on a perfect arc, hitting the caretaker on his left cheek, sticking to the side of his face for a second, then slowly peeling off and dropping to the floor.
Kim, Emily and I were fixated by the spectacle, which seemed to play out in slow motion, the slap of the bun on the ground jolting us back to reality. Witnesses were all around, fellow students and dinner ladies, not to mention the red-faced caretaker, who stared across the room looking outraged. In these circumstances there was only one thing to do – scarper! We scraped back our chairs and hurried from the hall conspicuously, hiding out behind the bins for the rest of the lunch hour to formulate a ‘story’ we swore to stick by, despite its implausibility. We would swear on our lives that Emily had dared me to throw the bun at Kim’s mouth; the throw had gone askance and the bun had hit the caretaker. We were desperately sorry. We ran away because we knew we wouldn’t be believed.
It was Friday lunchtime. We anticipated being pulled out of lessons that afternoon. But by the end of the day nothing had happened. Perhaps the incident had not been reported after all. We went our separate ways for the weekend. But on Monday morning, in a manoeuvre reminiscent of a police raid, the three of us were removed from our different lessons at exactly the same time. I knew it was serious when Mr Harrington, our head of year, loomed up through the window of my French class. Little did I know the two deputy heads had gone for Emily and Kim. Like members of a resistance group, we stuck to our story religiously in the ensuing grillings. As I implored Mr Harrington to believe me, his moustache twitching irritably, the time I’d stolen my mum’s meringues came to mind. What was it with sweet things that made me so fraudulent?
When the three of us were brought to the dining room an hour later, the game was over. We were ordered by our respective inquisitors to sit at separate tables in the hall. Mr Harrington handed us each a sheet of graph paper, a pen, a protractor and a compass, and asked us to draw an exact diagram of the events of last Friday lunchtime, mapping our places at the table, the position of the caretaker and the flight of the iced bun. We were not in a position to collaborate. When we had finished, Mr Harrington laid our drawings out and announced the disparity of our diagrams evidenced our duplicity and guilt. Admittedly we had drawn each other in different locations, with wild variations in the positioning of the caretaker. But what all of this demonstrated to me was the pedantic nature of the powers-that-be at Pinners, wasting a valuable morning of teaching on their petty investigation. Sadly, my mother didn’t see it this way when Mr Harrington phoned to say I was suspended for a week and would be readmitted only after a parent–teacher meeting at which my ‘immoral conduct’ and ‘burgeoning delinquency’ would be discussed.
♠
My father was actually seven years younger than Nelson Mandela, who was born in 1918. In April that year, my mother bought us tickets for the Nelson Mandela Tribute Concert in London, to mark Mandela’s release two months earlier. At one point, Mandela backed out of appearing at the concert because bloody Margaret Thatcher, as my mother put it, was still prime minister and supported the apartheid regime. But he changed his mind on the condition the speech he gave would be broadcast unedited on television.
Sam didn’t want to go to the concert so I invited Kim, and we took the Tube to Wembley with my parents, joining the crowd of thousands in the stadium, my father receiving the odd glance by concert-goers who noted his resemblance to Mandela. I’d never been to a concert before, and the scale of this one was huge – hours of performances: Tracy Chapman strumming ‘Freedom’ on her guitar, Simple Minds singing ‘Mandela Day’, and as the sun went down, Anita Baker on stage belting out ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.
What everyone was waiting for was the appearance of Mandela himself, his face broadcast in close-up on the big screens, very thin but standing proud, smiling and waving as the crowd erupted into cheers that lasted nearly ten minutes. Winnie Mandela and Adelaide Tambo stood behind him on stage, their fists raised in solidarity. We were high up in the stadium, standing in the night air, cheering with the crowd. There was a black South African family behind us, a man and woman, two children the same age as me, dressed in their traditional clothing – bright coloured robes and headdresses. It was clear they were deeply affected by the appearance of Mandela and his speech. He thanked the international community and paid long tribute to Oliver Tambo, the exiled ANC leader who was ill and unable to be there. I kept looking at that family so enraptured by Mandela – I wanted to know their story. When they played the South African national anthem, they sang along, their fists raised. I was stirred by Mandela’s appearance too, the crowd’s reception, the music, to be part of that momentous day. It made me want to live a different sort of life. I was a teenager with teenage concerns, I knew, but even so, my current existence was pretty contemptible. Life in and out of school was infantile and inconsequential, and just a bit grubby.
♥
Suddenly I was tired of Romford, hanging around smoking, hoping boys would talk to us. I stayed home, read more, played the piano more. I was still having lessons with Maisie the punk, but by then I could sight-read well, and, with practice, play most of the music in the front-room cupboard. This housed piles of my mother’s old manuscripts and my grandfather’s piano scores, signed in his scratchy fountain pen.
It was there that I found an anthology of a black American composer, Scott Joplin – railroad labourer turned ragtime impresario at the turn of the century, a solemn portrait of him at his piano on the front cover. Joplin’s music made me sad – his melodies both jaunty and melancholy in turn. They spoke to me of another time and place – the bars and saloons of Memphis and New Orleans at the turn of the century, America reconstructing itself post-slavery – my imaginings constructed from films and books.
I’d spend hours playing Joplin’s pieces in the front room – straddling the left-hand chords of ‘Bethena’ and ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, the tricky runs of ‘Elite Syncopations’. One version of Joplin’s death says he went mad and died from syphilis contracted in a brothel where he was a pianist, but the biography of my anthology told a much greater tragedy: how Joplin’s magnum opus – an opera named Treemonisha – was never published or performed because he was a black man. Faced by the will of a society whose racism was endemic and crushed his creativity, I read that Joplin died in the asylum of ‘a broken heart’.
I was practising his ‘Pineapple Rag’ one day when the phone rang. My parents were in the garden making a bonfire. I answered to Emily Bonnyface’s mother, a woman I’d never properly met, only seen at the school gates parked in her shiny black car, patting her blonde hair in the side mirror. She wore sunglasses no matter the weather.
‘Is that Hannah?’ she asked in a thick Essex accent. ‘Is your mum there?’
‘No,’ I lied. The tone of her voice made my wary.
‘Well,’ she carried on, ‘I want to talk to you. Emily’s been in trouble. We think she’s been stealing.’
I didn’t know what to say. Why was she telling me? ‘I’ve had a long talk with her dad and we’ve decided we don’t want her to see you any more.’ I hadn’t shoplifted for months by then. ‘We’ve decided,’ her mother repeated, as though I had challenged her. She sounded flustered. ‘Is that clear, Hannah? I’ll tell your mum if I have to.’
‘OK,’ I said. She hung up.
After, I wished that she had told my parents because they would have stood up for me. I felt angry and misjudged. But something told me to keep it to myself. I phoned Kim and told her instead.
‘Stupid woman,’ she said. ‘That’s nothing to do with you. But Emily probably told her you came from Ilford and …’ She paused. ‘Well, she probably told her your dad was black. I heard her saying something nasty about it, and her dad would be pissed off if he knew. Sorry, Han.’ Oh God, was that it? How stupid were these people? I felt enraged, but I also didn’t want to talk about it. ‘What’s your art project?’ I asked, changing subject.
Later I lay on my bed thinking. I had another year of Pinners. I was tired of the small-mindedness, the petty prejudices. One more year. I curled up with a book, impatient to leave school behind.
♣
Alan Slade was a strange, gossipy boy, a loner in our class, but not shy, often in trouble with the teachers. He lived with his mother, a fierce presence in his life whom he talked about endlessly. Alan didn’t register on the wavelength of the boys at Pinners, who were more concerned with rugby trials and football, but the girls ribbed Alan constantly – for his small stature, big ears and slight lisp, for his sometimes tatty clothes and unfashionable school bag. In the world of Pinners, taunting and derision were everyday occurrences, but the cruelties of one day were often forgotten the next. Alan had a survivor’s instinct – no matter how harsh our heckling, he came back with quick and spiteful rejoinders.
It was Alan who labelled me ‘white wog’ at school – a name that gained widespread use for a time. He shouted it out as we jostled down the corridor after an hour in the French language lab, listening through huge headphones to François booking a hotel room avec douche, Michelle asking directions to le banque.
‘All right, white wog!’ Alan called out, coming up to me, laughing.
Peter Collins was standing next to us. ‘Why’s he calling you that?’ he asked.
‘’Cos her dad’s a wog, but she’s white,’ Alan said matter-of-factly, before I had the chance to speak.
‘Oh yeah,’ Peter said. ‘That’s funny. Funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar.’
‘No, it’s not funny,’ I said. ‘It’s racist and pathetic.’ But I already knew I’d hear it again.
‘Oh, come on,’ Alan said, pushing his arm through mine. ‘I’m only joking, aren’t I? Can’t you take a joke?’
‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ I said, but he wasn’t listening. I let him drag me off to the dining hall.
♦
We bunked off school one Thursday afternoon, Alan and I. His mother was at home, so we caught the train to Goodmayes, walking cagily down Ashgrove Road to my house. It was a sunny day. I hoped my father would be out, or asleep, although I could usually rely on his obliviousness – he might not even notice I’d come home.
Alan had cigarettes and we shared one as we leant out of my bedroom window, letting the warm air in. It was a while before I heard Dad’s footsteps on the stairs.
‘Why aren’t you at school, Han?’ He came into the room just as Alan stubbed the cigarette out, flicking the butt from the window sill, standing in the corner looking conspicuous.
‘Got the afternoon off,’ I said, turning back to look out of the window, willing him to leave, but he didn’t move. I turned again. ‘What do you want, Dad?’ I said.
‘I don’t want anything,’ he said, ‘I’m just wondering what you two are up to.’ He’d adopted a sterner demeanour in front of Alan, who stayed silent, looking at the books on my shelf. My father was standing in the middle of the room, looking worn out, his old cardigan draped on his hunched shoulders.
‘Nothing, Dad.’ I said. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
The punch took me completely by surprise. I didn’t know what had happened. Then I saw him standing before me, his first clenched at his side. I felt a sharp pain in my mouth and the taste of blood. ‘Don’t you ever call me stupid!’ My father’s face was up close to mine as he spat the words out. ‘You hear me? Don’t ever call me stupid.’
It took a while for the gravity of the situation to be clear to me. My father had just punched me in the face in front of a boy from school. Christ! I was mortified, and outraged.
‘Just fuck off, Dad!’ I pushed him, both hands on his chest. I was strong, and he was an old man. He fell backwards against the wall, looking winded and shocked. ‘Just get out of my room! Fuck off!’ I was shouting and crying and pushing him. How dare he, how dare he? He let me shove him out of the room, his body slackening under my palms, his face already softened. I slammed the door and looked down at the blood on my hands.
‘Oh God, are you all right?’ said Alan. He looked horrified.
‘Yes,’ I said, but I felt my split lip as I spoke.
‘I’d better go,’ he said, picking up his bag from the floor. ‘Sorry, Hannah. Sorry. See you tomorrow, yeah?’ He was halfway through the door.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ I said to his back. ‘I’ll kill you if you tell anyone.’
He turned, looking sympathetic. ‘I won’t. I promise.’ I heard his feet knocking down the stairs and the slam of the front door.
♠
My father was gone for four days, banished from the house by my mother. The car was in the drive, so he must have gone somewhere on foot. My mouth was sore and swollen. I covered the redness with make-up for school the next day, where Alan Slade was as good as his word, acting as though nothing had happened.
But I had bigger things to worry over – Where was my father? When was he coming home? I knew I didn’t deserve to be punched, I knew that, but I also knew I’d triggered that rage in him by what I’d said – that word, stupid, had struck a raw nerve. I was scared I could make him so angry. My mother was being very nice to me, but I didn’t deserve that either. I felt I’d done something very wrong.
The bell rang at lunchtime on Sunday. I answered the door. My father was standing on the step, looking dishevelled and tired. In his hand, three Topic bars in their shiny red wrappers. He held them out to me, asking to be let back in. My mother came to the door, her mouth fixed in a thin, angry line. She pulled me back inside. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but that evening he was back in the house, sitting in the front room on his own watching television. The Topic bars were in the fridge. ‘Don’t you dare eat them,’ my mother said, pointing her finger at me.
In the morning I bumped into him on the landing, coming out of the spare room in his pyjamas. ‘Hello, Han,’ he said solemnly.
‘Hello, Dad,’ I said.
Later in the day I heard him rustling on the other side of the front-room door as I was practising Scott Joplin. I didn’t pull open the door to catch him as I used to, just played on as though I didn’t know he was there.
The change in sleeping arrangements was not temporary. The spare room became his room after that, with a single bed, a bedside cabinet with his tablets and books, a narrow wardrobe for his clothes – just like a lodger’s room. I was too young to understand my parents’ relationship, its own stresses and strains – all I knew was that my father had been evicted from the marital bed, and the fault, I felt, was mine.
♥
When Sam was a baby, my father used to look after him one night a week when my mother had a course. One night she came home to find my father sitting at the table crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, sitting beside him, her hand on his arm.
‘I don’t think I should look after Sam any more,’ he replied, looking down.
‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘It’s good to have time with him. What’s wrong?’
‘He’s so small. I keep thinking I’ll hit him, or shake him, or worse. What’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me?’ He held his head in his hands.
They went to the family doctor in Seven Kings, where my father confessed his dark thoughts to Dr Goldstein, who diagnosed depression, offering him pills or counselling. ‘I’ll have the pills,’ my father said. He was always a great believer in medicine of any kind, and the thought of counselling, of exploring his past, probably terrified him. He took those pills for months and months – old-fashioned anti-depressants that made him too drowsy to drive, too tired to stay up all night. But the dark thoughts stopped.
They came back when I was born and he went back to the doctor for more.
There are photographs of me sitting on his knee, a fat smiling baby, his hands around my middle, or holding me high, delighted, in the air above his head. I look at them now and search his face for the fear he had of hurting me. It was the way his dad had hurt him, my mother said.