Turn your lights down low
– Bob Marley and the Wailers, Exodus (1977)
It didn’t take me long to fall in love with Brighton – the tall fairy-tale houses in pastel blues and pinks, the narrow lanes of ramshackle shops selling Chinese lanterns, incense, bohemian clothes. It was so pretty compared to Ilford. I went on long wintry walks along the seafront, the heavy grey waves crashing on the shale, and along the old wooden pier with its tea shops and seafood stalls and the ancient arcade. There were sweet little cafés and old, cramped pubs in which I drank with girls I’d met in my halls.
‘Adam really likes you,’ Jenny told me, over our pints of cider. ‘You can tell by the way he looks at you.’ Adam was a boy downstairs in my hall, whom I liked too. The day before, we’d been for a long walk over the South Downs, just the two of us. It was cold and misty as we stalked up the hill. I was perfectly capable of clambering over fences, but I’d let him help me, and I thought he might have kissed me when we stopped so he could tie his stripy scarf around my neck. Instead, we both blushed and bumped into each other as we turned to walk back down.
I’d met him on the stairs of our halls on the second day. He was settling in, stepping around the stacks of records that took up half his floor space. He’d pinned an enormous poster of Bob Marley to his wall and one of Che Guevara. If these were student clichés, I didn’t know it then. When we’d exchanged the niceties that characterised all my conversations that week – where we lived, what A-levels we’d taken, what we were here to study – and established that Adam was a devoted Tottenham Hotspur supporter, he invited me into his room.
‘What sort of music are you into?’ I asked, as he cleared a space on his single bed for me to sit.
‘I like lots of stuff, but reggae the most.’ I watched him moving things around. He had thick auburn hair, longish and a bit wild, and his features were strong – a long nose, thick eyebrows. He looked clever. ‘I’ll put some on,’ he said, carefully slipping a record from its cover and resting it gently on the turntable. What he played wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. A thick bass line resounded, pulsing slowly below electronic bleeps and reverb, and intermittently, the syncopated guitar of reggae and a man singing would filter in and out.
‘It’s dub reggae,’ he said. ‘Mixed up at Studio One in Kingston.’ I hadn’t a clue what he meant but I loved the sound. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a pack of Rizlas and a bag of bright green weed, rolling a long thin joint he tapped against his hand then lit. We smoked, listening to that feverish music, both lying back on his bed in a sweet cloud of smoke.
In the weeks to follow, Adam’s room became a congregation space for dub reggae lovers – mostly white, middle-class boys – and the smell of cannabis wafted down his corridor to the hall’s reception, the first thing you smelt when you came through the door. ‘Blimey,’ said the security guard to me one evening as I came down the stairs, flapping his hand in front of his nose, ‘even I’m stoned! It’s like this every year, I tell you, but this year is the worst!’
♠
‘God, it’s really white down here, ain’t it?’ said Holly, when she came to visit. We were in my room. ‘And everyone’s posh.’ It was November, raining hard outside, the water streaming down the glass in grey streaks. I’d been so glad to see her when she arrived, dumping her bag and umbrella on the floor, flopping onto the bed and lighting a cigarette. Brighton was an hour from home by train, but I felt a million miles away, distanced more by the new people I’d met than by physical space. But I could tell Holly disapproved of my new life and friends when we went to the pub that night, and after, back in Adam’s room, where a crowd of us got stoned, Holly sat back, quietly observing. ‘Hannah’s dad’s from Jamaica,’ Adam told the room. ‘Mad, eh?’ Holly pulled a face, and I cringed, seeing things through her eyes.
‘No way, man,’ said Piers, one of the dreadlocked regulars. His father was a millionaire who apparently owned a third of the world’s rubber, but Piers always looked unwashed, wore ripped jeans and flip-flops even in winter. His only concession to the cold was his brightly coloured Ecuadorean cardigan. ‘You don’t look it, man,’ he said to me, and I think I detected a trace of a put-on Jamaican accent. Holly tried not to laugh.
I had told Adam that my dad was Jamaican, but he hadn’t met him, and I suspected he and the others might have thought my dad was an old Rastafarian sat at home in Ilford smoking from a chillum. But my father had liked jazz and blues and had left Jamaica way before reggae music had come around. At the time he’d lived there, Rastafarians were looked down upon, in fact. I wonder what he’d have made of those wealthy white kids with their dreadlocks and tie-dyed clothes. How different his Jamaica was from the one of their imagination.
‘So, let me get this right,’ Holly said the next morning. ‘The boys smoke dope all day, and think they’re black.’ It wasn’t a question. ‘Rich idiots,’ she declared. I was annoyed at her for judging so quickly, but there was truth in what she said. There was the wealth of the solid middle classes there. Most students I’d met had been to private school. Most were white. There were a few Asian students in the halls, but I’d not met anyone black.
‘How the other half live, eh?’ Holly said. ‘Spending Daddy’s money on a big bag of weed and their designer hippy clothes!’
♥
I spent most of my time that first term lying on Adam’s bed, listening to reggae. We were a couple by then and I was a permanent fixture in his room, sleeping every night in a cannabis haze to the percussive hiss of a record still rotating on the turntable, the purple light of a lava lamp swirling low on the walls.
Late in autumn we caught the coach to London to the big student protests, marching with thousands of others through Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square. Afterwards, he took me to his parents’ house, a big Victorian semi on a leafy street in north London. ‘They’re not back from France until Sunday night,’ he said in his bedroom, ‘but they can smell dope at a mile’s distance.’ I’d not met his parents, only knew his father was Hungarian and his mother was French. When he went home to watch the football, she sent him back with delicious tarte Tatin we’d devour at midnight, stoned and ravenously hungry. Now we leant out of his window, exhaling smoke into the cool evening air. Red leaves dropped from the trees onto the wide lawn. He pulled me closer. ‘I love you,’ he said and kissed me.
That night we went to the House of Roots, driving over the Thames to Vauxhall, parking up on a side street by the railway arches. ‘Wait until you see this place,’ Adam said. I could hear the bass line booming from outside, vibrating the red doors we went through. Inside, a single bulb lit a room with a low curved ceiling, beneath which half a dozen old Rastafarians were bent intently over games of chess and a woman in a bright headdress sold tea and ginger cake behind a counter. The bass thundered through the door to the main room, and as we went in, it hit me – a gust of noise that shook the walls and made the hairs on my arms stand up. Dim light inside, the speakers stacked in piles that reached the ceiling at the back, the strong sweet smell of cannabis, a white gauze in the air.
Men stood facing the front – Rastafarians whose dreadlocks swung in thick ropes down their back, some in long robes that brushed the floor. They were entranced by the music and by the DJ, a little dreadlocked man who danced and swayed on the stage, placing records on his single turntable and twisting the knobs on his mixing station. This was the Aba-shanti Sound System, and Aba-shanti himself playing dub reggae, a phenomenon Adam had been talking about for months. Aba-shanti’s shout of Jah! reverberated through the microphone as he bounced on the stage and the crowd called back, Ras Tafari!
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Adam shouted over the noise, and it was amazing – the force of the music, the mood of the room, more like a religious service than a nightclub. I knew enough of Rastafarianism to know that, for some there, this was a genuinely religious ritual. If anyone objected to our being there, they didn’t say. We were the only white faces. We danced for hours, passing joint after joint between us, and although I loved it, still I felt somehow intrusive, prying into a culture I didn’t fully understand, acquiring only the elements I liked, namely the music and the dope. The walls around the room were draped in the Jamaican flag – black, yellow and green – and pictures of the Lion of Judah. The pale, thin face of Haile Selassie in fur cloak and crown looking disapprovingly down on us from his ornate golden frame.
♣
The course on literary theory was bewildering. Each week, a small group of us sat on battered armchairs in the cramped office of Professor Jameson, pretending we understood the set reading. It was a whistle-stop tour through various complicated, philosophical approaches to literature – structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and feminism. I don’t think anyone in the seminar really understood the language or the basic concepts of the texts we read. At eighteen, we didn’t understand enough about politics or history to situate the ideas. Each week left me more confused until I bought an idiot’s guide to theory that explained the main points.
For the seminar on post-colonialism we’d been given a long essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ by the Indian critic Gayatri Spivak. I’d spent two hours trying to make sense of it.
‘So the question is, can the subaltern speak? Anyone?’ Professor Jameson looked eagerly around the room, his eyebrows raised. They were an inch long and curled to the middle of his forehead. ‘Hannah?’ I jumped in my seat. ‘What is your opinion? Can the subaltern speak?’
I’d discovered that week that the subaltern, in the context of the essay, were those who had been colonised – subaltern meaning ‘lower in position’, oppressed by those in power and stripped of power themselves. The question posed referred to whether they could ever speak for themselves, when they had continually been spoken for by those who had colonised them – or at least that’s what I’d gathered from my reading. The example given was the ban of sati in India, the custom of self-immolation practised by women who throw themselves on their dead husbands’ funeral pyres. Apparently there are endless accounts of this ritual written by the British colonisers, but rarely are the Hindu women invited to speak for themselves. Reading this, I could just imagine those women under the scrutinising lens of the British, making all kinds of conjectures about their lives and motivations.
‘Umm,’ I said, my mind racing. ‘I’m not sure. Sort of yes and sort of no?’ Professor Jameson’s face told me he was waiting for me to elaborate, but I’d gone blank. I could feel my face turning red.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘can anyone expand on Hannah’s, um, point?’ he asked the room, his disappointment evident. No one could.
But when I had to write a paper for the course, I came back to that essay. I thought about my father growing up under British rule in Jamaica. How his term for himself, ‘West Indian’, was actually a colonial term. I was learning academic terms for him – ‘subaltern’, ‘other’, ‘colonial subject’, and I understood a bit of what Spivak said – that Western academic writing about non-Western cultures tried to present itself as ‘innocent’ and without agenda, but in fact, always spoke from a place of power, always informed by the culture it spoke from, and by whom it was speaking to. In essence, it was white men in universities speaking to white men in universities about black men and women – describing and defining them. It struck me as ironic that my all-white seminar group were discussing these problems.
But it also struck a chord, one thought spiralling into another, moving back and forth from Spivak’s essay. I thought of all the ways my father might be represented – all the stereotypes of him as a black man or a Chinese man; a Jamaican or an immigrant. What power did he have to define himself in any public way? He’d had no door to education, less chance of a decent job. In another world he might have been a mathematician or a politician or a teacher, a position to be proud of, one that used his mind – like the fathers of my new friends who worked as magistrates and diplomats and bank managers. Not a gambler or card sharp, scraping an immoral living in seedy clubs and dives. The gambling world, with its own hierarchies and allegiances, might have been the only place he had agency or authority, regardless of skin colour, but it never extended beyond the card club’s walls.
It was a secret and silent life – a night-time existence in the underbelly of London, untraceable through official records or legitimate channels. My father had lived on the margins all his life, and not through choice. Born poor and black in Jamaica, the odds were always stacked against him. Most of all, I thought about how these academic thoughts and arguments weren’t at all about abstractions – they were about real people’s lives, my father’s life.
♦
That Christmas I went back to the house in Ilford, where the Christmas tree stood in the front-room window, sagging under the weight of tinsel and too many baubles. My father had been in hospital for a stomach ulcer, but had come home that morning, looking thinner than ever. ‘Hello, Han,’ he said solemnly from the sofa, folding his paper.
‘Happy Christmas, Dad!’ I said brightly.
‘Hmm. Happy Christmas, I suppose,’ he said. ‘But when you’ve seen as many Christmases as I have, they’re no longer of interest.’
‘That’s the spirit – happy bloody Christmas!’ my mother chipped in. She was arranging presents under the tree. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ she said, looking at me. ‘Solomon Kallakuri died.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Solomon?’ I hadn’t thought of him in years. ‘What did you say?’
‘Yes, it’s a bit bleak, I’m afraid, love,’ she said, getting up. ‘It was in the newspaper. And then a reporter phoned the house, asking did I know this, did I know that? Because I used to teach him, remember? When he was five. He was a little rascal then, but I didn’t tell them that.’ She left the room and came back with the paper, handing it to me, but I couldn’t read it. I’d never known anyone my age who had died. I couldn’t believe Solomon was dead.
I read the article in my room that night. It was worse than I could have imagined. Solomon Kallakuri had become a small-time drug dealer. He’d been sent to prison, not for dealing, but for GBH against a local man who apparently owed him money. Solomon had gone to his house, tied him up and, according to the paper, tortured him with a hot poker. Torture? I couldn’t imagine Solomon doing anything like that. The paper used the words mindless and frenzied. Apparently he’d been sentenced to seven years in Belmarsh Prison, and was found dead in his cell two weeks ago. He’d hanged himself. God, I thought. What had happened to him? I remembered that day I’d seen him in Sam’s bedroom, playing tough guy with the older boys; the day he’d come into school with his lip busted like a split plum. I lay on my bed and cried. Little Solomon, the first boy I ever kissed, the only boy in the gymnastics team. The first boy I had loved.
♠
Christmas Day followed the same routine as always. My parents and I sat in the living room, waiting for Sam to come downstairs in his boxer shorts and insist we open presents. He was back from Nottingham for Christmas. I hadn’t seen him in months. ‘Did you hear about Solomon Kallakuri?’ I asked him when he appeared. I was older now and less in awe of him, and he less easily annoyed by me.
‘Yeah, Mum said,’ he replied. ‘I hardly knew him, but he was a bit off his head. Sad, though.’ It was sad, and I couldn’t shake the sadness all day. My father was in a gloomy mood as well. I gave him his present – a biography of Nelson Mandela and a pair of socks. ‘Happy Christmas, Dad!’ I tried to be cheerful.
‘Happy Christmas,’ he said. ‘If you insist.’
My father might have seen too many Christmases but he was still an aficionado of the traditional English Christmas rituals – pulling his cracker at lunchtime, wearing his paper hat, reading out his awful joke before carving up the turkey. But he hardly ate a thing, and by the afternoon he was asleep on the sofa in the back room, not waking until bedtime. ‘Come on, you lazy lump!’ my mother said, shaking him gently. I was standing in the door watching them. It took a long time for him to come round, and when he did he gripped his stomach in pain. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
‘Just very painful,’ my father said. He was struggling to sit up, his arms wrapped around his middle. ‘Must be the ulcer – back again already, do you think?’
‘Maybe,’ my mother said. She helped him to his feet. ‘Or too much turkey,’ she said jollily, pulling him to his feet, her face full of worry.
♥
After Christmas, I moved from halls into a dilapidated Victorian house in Brighton, sharing with three friends. It might have been nice once but now the walls were peeling, the window frames held cracked glass and bright green moss grew on the bathroom walls and ceiling. Still I loved the house – light poured in through the tall windows and you could climb onto the roof and sit beside the chimney, watching seagulls swooping between the rooftops. I was sitting there in the winter sun when the phone rang and I clambered back through the attic window, rushing down the battered stairs to pick it up. ‘Listen, love.’ It was my mother. ‘I’ve got some news.’
It could have been anything, but I knew it was about my father. My stomach tightened.
‘Your dad’s just back from the hospital. And the doctor said he’s got cancer. Of the stomach. They’re going to operate next week.’
Cancer. Oh God. I thought of him at Christmas, looking so thin, his clothes hanging off him. ‘Is it bad?’ I didn’t know anything about cancer, except it could kill you. But this cancer could be caught, my mother told me. They’d found it early. They would remove part of my father’s stomach and kill the rest of the cells with chemotherapy.
‘And he’ll be right as rain,’ she said. ‘Will you come home next week and see him after the operation?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’ll come.’ I paused. ‘Is he there now?’
‘Yes, he’s sat here with his cup of tea. Do you want to talk to him?’
I thought about it for a second. I wouldn’t know what to say. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I won’t. But tell him I’ll come and see him next week.’ I hung up.
♣
I have a clear memory of going to see my father in hospital after his cancer operation. He is sitting up in the ward bed under the bright lights, a drip in one arm. On the bedside cabinet: a bottle of Lucozade, his glasses, a newspaper. The image reminds me of all the times I visited him in hospital as he recovered from one operation or another.
I remember him singing old Jamaican folk songs to the nurses. High on morphine, singing at the top of his voice, a nurse laughing but asking him to sing more quietly. ‘Think of the other patients, Mr Lowe.’ ‘Call me Chick,’ he tells her. ‘I come from Jamaica. I used to sing these as a boy.’ And something about the way he sings announces that he means to survive. Yes, the cancer has come for him, but no, it’s not his time. Look what the marvellous NHS can do! They can dose you up and cut you, and pump you full of chemicals, stop the bad cells raging, stick a tube in here, a tube in there, hang a clipboard at the bed’s end, covered in scrawl you can’t understand a word of but the doctors can; the doctors understand, sweeping through the wards with pens in hand, a tick in this box, a cross in another, and hey ho you’re fixed, and heading home.
In my memory, my father pulls his blanket up and raises his pyjama top, saying ‘What d’you think of this, Han?’ He is proud of the neat scar across his abdomen, a long thin smile, a little red at its puckered edges but already half healed.
But years later, my mother told me that I didn’t go to the hospital.
‘You came back from university the day after he had the operation. And I was driving to the hospital, but suddenly you had something more important to do. Shopping, you said. You had to get something from the shops in Ilford.’ She was disgruntled, remembering.
‘What?’ I said. ‘No, I definitely did go, Mum. I remember Dad singing to the nurses.’
‘No, you didn’t go at all. I told you about the singing. He was off his head on bloody morphine, singing to the nurses and to Mac and Sylvester. All the old boys went to see him, but you couldn’t be bothered.’
I could tell from the way she said it that it was true. I didn’t go. Why couldn’t I remember what had happened? Why could I remember what didn’t happen?
I could still hear him singing to those nurses, could still hear his good clear voice:
She had the man piaba, woman piaba, Tantan, Fallback and Lemon Grass,
Minnie Root, Gully Root, Grannie Back Bone,
Bitter Tally, Lime Leaf and Toro, Coolie Bitters, Caralia Bush,
Flat o’ the Earth and Iron Weed, Sweet Broom …
♦
I came home the following summer and worked back at the pizza restaurant. I was saving money for California, for the exchange year that was part of my course. It was a strange time, waiting to leave. Adam and I broke up in an amicable way. He was going to Italy for a year, and a year seemed like infinite time back then; more practical to call things off, but our pragmatism didn’t stop me missing him.
My father’s chemotherapy had finished and he’d been given the all-clear. He was cheerful, pottering around the house fixing door handles, putting up shelves. We fell back into our usual routine – him driving me here and there, and finally dropping me at the airport in September, insisting on wheeling my suitcases through to the departure gates, where we had an awkward goodbye as I joined the long queue. I turned back as I passed through the metal detector and he was still standing there, looking for me, as people passed to and fro around him.
♠
Santa Cruz in California was long beaches and small coves where the Pacific waves crashed on the sand. There was a giant rollercoaster on the boardwalk and a main street where old hippies lolled on the sidewalk with wrecked guitars, tattooed stars below their eyes. One side of town was wealthy – big timber houses painted in pastels set back from the wide, leafy streets. A river divided those avenues from a run-down neighbourhood of graffitied concrete duplexes – a scrappier, edgier place where Mexicans lived, and which we international students had been told to avoid after dark.
We mingled with the rich kids who went to the university, its campus on a rolling hill overlooking the ocean, a far cry from most British universities. There was an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a state-of-the-art gym, an amphitheatre where Shakespeare festivals took place. The faculty buildings had won prizes for architecture – the bold postmodern angles and colours contrasted with the redwood forest the buildings nestled in, giant trees shading the walkways and bridges, the tallest trees I’d ever seen. Students’ families paid a hefty sum to send them there, and in return the university treated them like customers whose needs should be met. We were lucky. An exchange year meant an American student had paid their fees for each of us and taken up our place in England.
Browsing the brochure of campus accommodation before I left, I discovered there was the option to live in racially segregated halls. I couldn’t believe it. You could choose the Pacific-Islander hall, the Afro-American hall, the Mexican-American hall. The logic, I think, was that some people preferred to live among their own kind, a position updated from its bleak origins in Jim Crow segregation to what was now a positive choice, to enhance the racial harmony on campus. I didn’t understand it until I lived in America, and realised that the myth of the melting pot was just that – a myth of assimilation and equality. There was a non-white middle class, but generally to be black or Mexican in America meant to be poor, and this divide was reflected in the cities and towns I saw – San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles – where racial communities lived separately. This, to me, was much more evident than in Britain, and soon the segregated halls made sense – they reflected the real-world apartheid which, I assume, some students were comfortable with.
♥
I was lonely in Santa Cruz at first – homesick for Brighton, for Ilford, for my family. The leaflet for foreign students told us to expect culture shock, but I wondered how different America could be from what I knew. I’d seen hundreds of American films, followed American bands, read American books. I knew the place I was coming to. But I don’t think culture shock is about the superficial things like currency, or eating foreign food, or hearing different accents. It’s the shock of realising that another world exists in parallel to yours. I lived in America now, but my old world carried on regardless with everyone I knew still in it – five thousand miles and half a day away. Even now I find it hard to accept that while people sleep away the night on one side of the world, the other side are busy and awake, let alone the belief of some scientists that there are infinite parallel worlds, all playing out simultaneously.
In my first days in America I thought of my father – the only person I knew who’d uprooted himself from one life to another – leaving Jamaica, his arrival in England. Had he felt what I felt now? I wondered. Disorientation, a sense of unreality, a longing for familiarity, any anchor of home.
A few weeks after I’d left, an airmail envelope arrived in the post. Inside was a long letter from my mother, telling me all the things she wished she’d said before I left, how she was suddenly lost for words as we drove away, how proud she was of me. It was uncharacteristically emotional.
And you know Dad’s proud of you too, she wrote. I know he can be a pain, but don’t forget he’s twenty years older than me and so pleased to see you both having chances and making the most of them. Things he never had a hope in hell of achieving. Think of where he came from – he regards your achievements as his, and in a way, they are.
I folded the letter neatly and slipped it into my desk drawer.
♣
In the end, Santa Cruz itself was a rollercoaster of hedonism, facilitated by a crowd of gregarious new friends who, like me, were off the leash, unbound to partake in a range of iniquitous pleasures I don’t think my parents would have been proud to see – whiskey and pear cider were my tipples at the local Irish bar, the only one in town that accepted my fake ID. My downtown room-mate funded his studies through drug-dealing, but was a pinnacle of abstinence himself. Such level-headed acumen was not my forte. I had a credit card that bore the brunt of my indulgences. I’d worry about the debt when I got home.
There were men I fell for. I always fell so hard. First Bill, ten years older, a college administrator. He was as lonely as I was, fresh from Boston with a broken heart. Then Peter, an art student who styled himself on Motown and made me mix tapes of Marvin Gaye and Al Green. He wanted to come to England the following year. It took me weeks to find the heart to tell him no. Then Richie, then Jake, then Saul from Costa Rica, a barman who played guitar and smoked cocaine. I wanted him the most.
My mother came to see me at Easter.
‘You’ve put on weight,’ she said, and she was right. I was drinking too much, not exercising, eating junk food. But she looked well, like a different woman. She’d given up smoking since I’d left, and lost two stone. We spent a weekend at Yosemite, a few days in San Francisco, a week in Santa Cruz. But away from home, my mother became shy – too reticent to ask directions or buy tickets or talk to strangers. I had to do it all. This wasn’t her territory, and it was strange to see her lack of confidence. Two weeks was a long time to chaperone. I wanted to get back to my friends.
I was young and high-living, I told myself, pursuing no-strings decadence. It was a year removed from real life. But when I look back, the good memories aren’t really good, not wholly good, more like a happy photograph where something bad lurks just outside the frame. I was learning that life was precarious, its foundations unstable. Somewhere in my consciousness, my father’s cancer skulked. I hadn’t forgotten the thin smile of his scar.
♦
Somehow I still managed to get top marks at Santa Cruz, proving that, for a time, the old ideal of work hard, play hard can be achieved, that a person can be two things at once. We had far more lectures than at Brighton, and a surprisingly radical course catalogue to choose from. I took yoga for a semester, the marks from which, albeit a tiny percentage, went towards my overall degree. Aside from this frivolity, I studied modules in Chicano writing, black American playwriting, ethnic memoir. Where the material conditions of black experience in America might still be unequal, the study of black culture and expression was sophisticated – way ahead of the UK. I was building a foundation in the study of black literature in its broadest sense, linked back to the interests I had developed in Brighton – how politics and literature aligned, how writing could resist oppression through testimony, dismantle stereotypes, challenge the status quo. It didn’t occur to me then that these interests might be personal, linked to my family history, my father’s life story. I couldn’t see the picture that broadly then.
I made it back from America in the nick of time. When classes finished I wasted two months partying, not eating enough, not sleeping enough, somewhere between adventurer and girl on self-destruct.
♠
I saw my father before he saw me at the airport, taking in his wild hair, his shoulders slumped as he stood searching the crowd in an echo of the day he’d dropped me off.
‘Hello, Han!’ he called as I walked over.
‘Hello, Dad,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Thought you’d like a lift,’ he said. ‘Good flight?’ We both knew a kiss or hug might fit this occasion better but awkward platitudes would suffice. I let him take my suitcase.
It had been my twenty-first birthday the day before, and to mark both that and my last day in America, a friend had driven me to a piercing parlour where a heavily tattooed man had driven a metal spike through the thick middle cartilage of my ear, fixing a stainless-steel ring in place. On the plane, I’d slept against it, but hadn’t noticed it had bled until I looked in the car’s wing mirror to see a thread of dried blood snaking down my neck and chest. It fitted the surreal drive home, the slate sky, the London streets looking particularly grey, my father full of gloomy prophesies.
‘Tony Blair will send Britain to the dogs,’ he declared on the motorway. ‘Everyone thinks he’s great, but mark my words, he’s bad news.’
I’d stayed up watching the elections a few months before, all the British students glued to the television screen as ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ played, and after eighteen years of Tory government, the newly elected Prime Minister walked onto stage to tell the nation a new dawn had broken.
‘But why do I care?’ my father continued. ‘I’m not long for the world. I doubt I’ll see next year.’ We crossed Tower Bridge, drove down the Romford Road, past the side streets where his old gambling haunts lay. He lit a cigarette, and I said nothing – no half-hearted reassurances, no expression of the irritation I felt. I was determined to be the cheerful returnee, pleased to see everyone – I forced myself to overlook the shadows on the picture.
By the time we reached Ilford, America already felt like a garish, edgy dream, and home a depressing reality. My father took up his place in his armchair, staring out of the window. I went up to my room. My mother had gifted my bed with sunny new sheets and pillow cases. I buried my face in them and cried.
♥
My last year of university was quieter. I rented a damp flat on the seafront, freezing cold through winter, but I loved the bracing sea wind, the trudge along the seafront where the burnt wreck of the West Pier stood in the water, starlings swooping around its charred frame.
I saw Adam now and again. He lived nearby, and I’d pop round for dinner, sitting with him in his room, listening to records like we used to. He was always so kind to me, not like the men I’d known abroad. His clear eyes looked at me and saw someone to be enthusiastic about. It always took me by surprise. ‘Shall we get back together?’ he asked one day. Even now I wonder how it would have been to say yes to someone so kind, how simple more time with him might have been.
But I said no. I wanted to be alone. America had left me with a hangover of sorts. I’d seen too much of the world, been too intrepid. I was more anxious, more prone to bouts of sadness that lasted for days. I wouldn’t have called it depression back then, but there was a seeping melancholy I found hard to shake. I lost interest in clubs and parties, slept a lot in my small room, and, strangely, started to go back to Ashgrove Road, often for weeks at a time. I found my parents’ presence comforting – even my father’s dejection was something solid to rely on. I played Scott Joplin on the piano and wrote my dissertation at the computer in the front room, my mother bringing cups of tea, my father cooking dinner, the three of us passing the evening watching TV.
My graduation was a long, formal affair in a seafront hotel. Afterwards, we gathered in the bar to celebrate. In the photographs my mother looks well and my father looks happy. I remembered my mother’s letter, her words about his pride in me. I was older now – why not let him feel my achievements as his own? It didn’t seem to matter now. He pulled a packet from his jacket pocket, a small parcel in white tissue paper that he held out to me. I unwrapped it to find a thin gold bracelet set with diamonds, a thread-like clasp, much more delicate than anything I owned. ‘George at the club had some rings and bracelets,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like this one.’ He looked hopeful.
It might have been off the back of a lorry but I was touched. My mother always bought our birthday gifts, our Christmas gifts. It was the first thing he’d ever given me himself. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said, allowing him to do it up for me. ‘It’s lovely.’
Across the road from the hotel my friends and I stood on the shingle beach and tossed our mortar boards into the air for the camera. When I look at the picture, I see the carefree, cocky young things we were – shouting at the sky, on the verge of our adult lives.