I wanted to speak to someone. I wanted to go out, but I no longer had places to go. I had shed my friends in the past eighteen months, more Robert’s friends than mine. My mother was six months dead and I had been six months in the grave as well, or so it felt that evening when I was ready to rush out trailing my winding sheets. I called Rose.
“Mum! Hello. I was just wondering whether I should call to say bye.”
It was not the first time she had traveled without telling me. My daughter had a life removed from mine. I glimpsed it on her social media pages: photographs with people I didn’t know, in places I’d never been to. Her pose was always the same, legs angled to highlight her slim thighs, smile wide like a commercial. It was what you hoped for your child after twenty-one: independence. And yet, once in a while, the severance still came as a shock.
“Where are you off to now?” I asked.
“Mumbai, for work. I’m part of a team helping a car manufacturer get back on its feet. I know. I’m sorry. I should have mentioned it but it was decided at the last minute and I’ve been so busy. I have to switch off.”
“I’ve been reading about Bamana,” I said.
“What’s that you said? Panama? Yes, I’m getting off. Just saying bye to my mum. Sorry about that. I have to go. We’ll talk about Panama when I get back. I love you. I miss you.”
My daughter had the strange habit of never saying bye. She said she preferred to leave things on a comma, not a full stop.
I put my phone down and set the kettle to boil. Where was Francis Aggrey now? Was he alive? Did he have another family? He was a handsome man. I couldn’t imagine him still single.
I put a tea bag in a mug and poured boiling water over it. Steam rose. The water turned black. I took out the tea bag but I didn’t throw it away. Aunt Caryl always said a woman and a tea bag were the same. No matter how many times you boiled one, there was always something left.
3
It is a Sunday the next day and I go to the park. The sun is out, a rare winter sun that raises a glare. There are families with small children on leashes, tugging at the cords that bind them to their parents. Dogs roam free, ranging far from their owners.
If Francis Aggrey had stayed in London we would have been a colored family, welcome only in Notting Hill or Brixton. I saw the marches on television in the seventies, the placards, KEEP BRITAIN WHITE, the faces of the race warriors, bared to the cameras, unashamed.
“Switch it off,” my mother always said.
“Let her see it,” Aunt Caryl would retort.
Grandpa Owen always concluded, “The English are shites.”
A woman sits on the far end of my bench with a child clinging to her. Her hair, done up in a bun this morning, is escaping from the knot, falling down her face like wisps of dry grass. She holds a cigarette in her free hand, unlit, poised.
Aunt Caryl was a smoker. My mother was not. My grandfather had a pipe he lit occasionally. He was from a Welsh mining family. He showed me a picture of his father once, up from the mine with a dozen other men, faces covered in soot.
“Looked like a colored fella when he came home.”
I was the only black child on our street. The shopkeeper called me Sambo and gave me free sweets, sherbets and cherry suckers that turned my tongue bright red. Jenny Jenkins was my neighbor and my best friend. When we quarreled, she called me a stinking wog.
“Can you watch him for me, please?”
It is the woman on the bench. She is speaking to me, leaning across the gap between us.
“Pardon?”
“Just for a moment. I need a smoke. Please. I’m just going across there.” She points to a tree a few steps away. She props the child against the bench before I can answer. He is bundled in a red jacket stiff with padding, his arms sticking out like a scarecrow. She smokes and paces, watching us, turning her back on us. The child whimpers but does not cry. The wind picks up. Tar and nicotine invade our lungs. She drops the cigarette, only half smoked, and stamps out its spark.
“Thanks. I don’t usually,” she says. “I’m trying to quit.” She picks up the child and is gone.
I remember my first year with Rose. The feeling of being watched and judged. I wanted someone to guide me through the rituals, someone who had been there before, any mother except mine. We couldn’t talk—not about anything serious.
I watched a documentary after I had married and had Rose, in the nineties, when the personal trauma of ordinary people was becoming regular programming. It was about single mothers who had given up their children for adoption. The cameras tracked down the white mothers and the dark grown-up children. The producers staged meetings between the two parties then filmed the results: tears, anger, accusations, faux reconciliations, prime television. The next time I saw my mother, I asked, “Did you ever think of giving me up?”