“I never said there was.”
We couldn’t speak about my childhood without me getting angry. It puzzled her. What had she not done? What had she not given? A sense of rightness, a sense of self. It was nothing when you had it. You hardly noticed. But once it was missing, it was like a sliver of fruit on a long sea voyage, the difference between bleeding gums and survival.
At the end of the hallway, a left turn took you to the living room and kitchen. The kitchen was small, functional. Our food was sound but plain—potatoes, meat, and green vegetables. She sewed in the living room. There was a cloth mannequin, a torso on a stick, smooth and flat-chested, riddled with pins. She adjusted our neighbor’s clothes and made dresses for herself from patterns. She sewed all my clothes until I staged a teenage rebellion. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, but I was not going to look like something out of a Laura Ashley catalogue. Even then, all she would concede to buying was jeans.
We didn’t always get on in my teenage years. It was my snobbery, not any fault of hers. Grammar school made our home life suddenly seem mean and small. Why did we watch so much television? Why didn’t we speak French?
I spent as much time outside of our flat as I could, in the homes of girls I envied. It wasn’t like my local primary school. Nobody called me a wog or a darkie, but they always wanted to touch my hair. They wanted to know if I tanned, if food tasted different with thicker lips, if my hearing was sharper than theirs. I watched their parents, the father always a professional, the mother sometimes working but rarely. I thought to myself, one day I’ll have a nice house, and a husband and a child, in that order.
I stepped out onto the balcony. It was empty now, like the rest of the flat. Once it had been filled with potted plants and flowers. My mother hung birdhouses there stuffed with seeds. In the summer we dried our laundry on it, and our clothes would smell of meadows. There was no laundry on the balconies in the block now.
The couple buying the flat would probably rip up the carpets and tear off the wallpaper. They’d knock down the wall between the kitchen and the living room. They’d lay wooden flooring and they’d give me more money than I’d ever earned in my life.
I could go to Bamana now, thanks to them, thanks to my mother. At her funeral I stood by her graveside dry-eyed. She was a good mother, hardworking, kind, quiet, timid, too timid to have raised a black child in the seventies. She was a very good grandmother. Rose cried as the earth covered the coffin.
Below, a line of cyclists darted past, trilling their bells. It would soon be evening. I left my mother’s flat for the last time.
14
Aunt Caryl lived in a Jewish nursing home in North London. She chose it herself when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was admitted on the technicality that my great-grandmother Esther was believed to have been a Jew. According to Aunt Caryl’s research, Jewish homes had the lowest incidence of bed sores.
I waited in the lobby. There was one other name in the guestbook. Under Purpose of visit, they had written, Light bulbs. Some renovation had been done since my last visit. The faded carpet and fringed lampshades were gone, replaced by clinical lights and laminate flooring.
Aunt Caryl wasn’t in the common area where residents were arranged in armchairs like large potted plants—the closer to the TV, the more alert. Each step away from Homes Under the Hammer was a shade deeper into senility. On good days, Aunty Caryl was in hearing distance of the television. On bad days, she was by the door. On terrible days, she was in her room.
“Mrs. Graham.” It was Maria, a petite Filipina carer.
“Hello, Maria. How are you today?”
“Very well, thank you. Follow me, please.”
In the corridors, we passed other carers dressed in pale blue scrubs. I recognized faces: Daniel from Uganda, who was studying to become an accountant; Moses from South Africa, who filled out his scrubs like a body builder.
“Where’s Tina?” I asked.
“She went back to Bulgaria.”
Tina had a masters in communication. She also had three teenage sons who ate like horses.
Aunty Caryl’s door was shut. Maria knocked but didn’t wait for a response.
“Hello, love. Haven’t seen you in a while.”
She was looking at Maria.
“All right, Mrs. Graham. I’ll leave the two of you for half an hour. I think that’s all she can take today.”
I stood at the foot of Aunt Caryl’s single bed. Her hair was freshly cut and dyed the brick red it had always been. When they let it go grey, her reflection shocked her. There was a card on the windowsill from her birthday two months ago. They remembered the details. The Bethel Home for the Elderly was better than most. There was no smell of neglect, no fog of urine.