Their eyes held. They watched me cross the divide and disappear through revolving doors.
?
Let’s say: A boy grows up in a country manor. Attends a private preparatory school. Spends his weekends out in the barn with his father. Together they build a great, stone sundial. The boy, now a young man, achieves two E-grades at A-level, then travels to Jamaica to teach. His sun shadows cycle round and round and he himself winds up, up. Up until the boy, an old man now, is right up at the tippity-top of the political system. Buoyed by a wealth he’s never had to earn, never worked for. He’s never dealt in grubby compromise. And from this vantage, he points a finger – an old finger, the skin translucent, arm outstretched and wavering. He points it at you: The problem.
Always, the problem.
?
The other day, a man called me a fucking n—r. A panhandler at Aldgate, big guy, came up too close, and trapped me – between him and the steep drop down to the tracks. He leaned right into my face and spat out those words. Then, laughing, he just walked away.
You don’t owe anything.
I pay my taxes, each year. Any money that was spent on me: education, healthcare, what – roads? I’ve paid it all back. And then some. Everything now is profit. I am what we’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit. A natural resource to exploit and exploit, denigrate, and exploit. I don’t owe that boy. Or that man. Or those protestors, or the empire, the motherland, anything at all. I don’t owe it my next forty years. I don’t owe it my next fucking minute. What else is left to take? This is it, end of the line.
I am done.
?
There’s no time in October for more than peanut butter, traffic lights, and liberated slaves. It’s disorientating, prevents you from forming an identity. Living in a place you’re forever told to leave, without knowing, without knowledge. Without history.
After the war, the crumbling empire sent again for her colonial subjects. Not soldiers, this time, but nurses to carry a wavering NHS on their backs. Enoch Powell himself sailed upon Barbados and implored us, come. And so we came and built and mended and nursed; cooked and cleaned. We paid taxes, paid extortionate rent to the few landlords who would take us. We were hated. The National Front chased, burnt, stabbed, eradicated. Churchill set up task forces to get us out. Keep England White. Enoch, the once-intrepid recruiter, now warned of bloodied rivers if we didn’t leave. New laws were drawn up; our rights revoked.
Yet, some survived. And managed somehow, on meagre wages, to put a little aside. Eventually enough to move wife, husband and child from a rented room in a house shared by five families, to a two-up two-down all of their own. That they owned. And an ethic, a mindset, a drive was established then, that persists now. A relentless, uncompromising pursuit.
?
Transcends race, they say of exceptional, dead black people. As if that relentless overcoming, when taken to the limit, as time stretches on to infinity, itself overcomes even limits, even infinity, even this place.
?
I only know Jamaica from stories. Visiting aunts and uncles, cousins – family. Unwrapping wedges of breadfruit; Julie mangos; fruit cake; a rich buttery pear sliced open, spread on to harddough bread; stories about family, sitting out on a veranda into the night, all together, telling each other other stories. A promise of a welcome, warm, loving family, always, retreating. They all fly back.
I stay here. Their English cousin.
?
I went to school with this boy – haven’t seen him since Year Six, but I remember his parents used to make him stand at a desk in their front room to do homework each evening. As soon as he got in. No food, drinks, or bathroom breaks. Just stand there and work. His mother bragged about it at the school gate. He even told me, the way kids tell things sometimes, that he’d wet himself one night, stood there. And his mother made him stay. Wet trousers cooling, sticking to his legs, until all the homework was complete.
He got his scholarship to Haberdashers’ Aske’s. His well-thumbed brochure boasted a twenty per cent Oxbridge acceptance rate.
?
But what it takes to get there isn’t what you need once you’ve arrived.
A difficult realization, and a harder actualization.
I understand what this weekend means. Pulling back the curtain, he’s invited me to the chambers beyond. It’s not acceptance, not yet. It’s just a step further, closer. I must learn to navigate it. Through him, and Rach, I study this cultural capital. I learn what I’m meant to do. How I’m meant to live. What I’m supposed to enjoy. I watch, I emulate. It takes practice. And an understanding of what’s out of reach. What I can’t pull off.