Was I ready to meet my father? In the documentary, just before the black children met their white birth mothers, they would have a moment alone with the camera. Their insecurities would surface. Sometimes they would cry from the anticipation. Will she recognize me? Will she like me?
I wanted Francis to like me, but Francis was gone. It was Kofi I would meet. The former president. The alleged murderer who was now a philanthropist in his old age. The Internet had recorded his good deeds too—orphanages, scholarships. He smiled in his recent photographs. His eyes twinkled at the viewer.
I walked past my neighbor and his dog, a small brown terrier, kept close on a leash. We had been neighbors for years but I didn’t know his name. Robert would know.
“Evening,” we mumbled at each other.
In some houses, the blinds were drawn and the front rooms were arranged, it seemed, for actors to weave around the furniture. You could stage a domestic drama in one of them, a daughter looking for a father who was not looking for her. Sometimes, someone would come on set, peer out into the night, and close the curtains.
13
My answering machine was blinking when I got home. I put down my shopping bags and pressed play.
“Hi, Anna. It’s Shola here. Good news. We’ve got an offer for the flat. The couple had another seller pull out at the last minute. They’re ready with all their paperwork, down payment, everything’s ready. We can expect to close in about a month’s time. Congratulations. Call me when you get this.”
I braced myself against the wall. I was going to Bamana. I was going to meet my father. I called Shola back.
“Hello. Shola Ajayi speaking.”
“It’s Anna,” I said.
“Oh, hello. You must be very excited. Congratulations.”
“I can’t believe it. How much?”
“Well, they started at three-ninety but I pushed them up to four hundred. It’s ten thousand below our asking price, but remember, I said this property sits around the four hundred thousand mark because it hasn’t been modernized.”
Four hundred thousand pounds.
“So what do I do need to do now?”
“Nothing. I’ll draw up the paperwork and when everything’s ready, I’ll ask you to come in and sign.”
“What’s the couple like?”
“Lovely. Young. They got married two years ago.”
“Children?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Well, I thought I should call you straight away with the good news. I’ll get started on the paperwork and I’ll see you in about a month.”
“Can I still go to the flat?”
“Of course. It’s yours until we sign the papers. All right. Bye for now.”
I’ve met Shola only once. She was dressed immaculately—overdressed, it seemed—for a high-street estate agent. Her weave was long and expensive, human hair, the tips flipped with a tong. She was British Nigerian, more British than Nigerian, I thought, until she picked up a call from her father.
“Sorry, I’ll have to take this. It’s my dad and he’s in hospital.”
When she put the phone to her ear, she stopped speaking English. Her voice was deeper in the other language. She was more animated. She covered her mouth to laugh.
“What language was that?” I asked when she dropped the call.
“Yoruba. That’s my tribe in Nigeria. Again, sorry about that. As I was saying—”
My mother’s flat was in a low-rise council block in Islington and it was a stand-alone unit, unattached to a housing estate. These features slightly increased its value. On the walk from the station, I passed a bakery, two estate agents, an independent coffee shop, a gym, a massage therapist’s with white pebbles and green succulents in the display window, all of which had opened in the last five years.
I had always thought she rented the flat from the council until the executor read out her will. “Left to my beloved daughter, Anna.” She was a sales manager in a department store, watching other women step in and out of clothes, rehearsing for their lives in her dressing room. I was impatient with the size of her life, disdainful of it. And yet, somehow, she had amassed the money for a down payment. My mother, with no financial education and no university degree, had worked out how to own property in London. The paperwork showed she applied successfully for a mortgage in 1984 and completed her payments in October 2009.
I let myself into the building. Almost no one was left from the old days. The Sharmas moved to Willesden, to a house with a garden. Mrs. Levstein died. The Okoyes went back to Nigeria. The changes were gradual. At first, there were clashes between the old and new. Skirmishes were waged on the cork noticeboard: PLEASE KEEP THE NOISE DOWN AFTER 10PM. THE COOKING OF CERTAIN FOODS CAUSES THE BLOCK TO STINK. And then only the new tribe remained, with their parsley and olive oil. The old were all gone.
I unlocked the door of flat 7 and walked into the hallway. I was twelve again, letting myself in after school. I put my bag down. I took off my shoes from habit. We had a beige carpet. My mother was very careful of it. On the right was her double room. Her taste ran to clutter: framed family photographs on the walls, porcelain figures on the window ledge, too many cushions on her bed. My room was plain in comparison. I had a single bed, a double wardrobe, and a shelf of worn books that she bought secondhand. Adrian Mole came of age at the same time as me. It was all bare now, cleared out after she died.
Our rooms were on one side of the hallway, the toilet and bathroom were on the other. We could hear each other’s pee striking the water. Sometimes at night, I would knock on the adjoining wall and she would knock back. We would pretend we were signaling in Morse code.
“Did you ever wish I was white?” I asked her when I was an adult.
“What do you mean? Of course not.”
“But you always said, ‘You’re just the same as me, Anna.’”
“I didn’t mean it that way. It was just when you came home and some kids had been mean about your hair being a bit different from theirs.”
“A lot different. You can see that, can’t you. It’s very different. There’s nothing wrong with it being different.”
“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 o
f 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.
I had not visited since my mother’s death. The bereavement, the separation from Robert, monitoring Rose’s eating: it was all too overwhelming. I knew Aunt Caryl was no longer capable of missing me, yet I still felt guilt.
“Who’s that?” she said.
“It’s Anna, Aunt Caryl.”
“Have you come to give me the paper?”
“No. I just came to see you.”
“I’m fine. You can go now unless there’s something special you want to tell me.”
“I’m going to see Francis.”
“About time. I always told your mother to tell you about him. I didn’t mind her having my leftovers. I had enough attention from the boys back then. If you press that button someone will come and pour you a cup of tea.”
“I’m all right, thank you.”
“You don’t want any tea?”
“No, thanks.”
“Then you can fuck off.” When I was younger, Aunt Caryl was the only one who understood that I was a black child living with a white family. My mother and grandfather’s denial was farcical, almost sinister.
“You’re Welsh,” my mother would say, when I came home with grit in my hair.
“There’ve been Bains in and around the Wye Valley for generations,” my grandfather would add.
Aunt Caryl took me to the Notting Hill Carnival when I was six. She held my hand as we moved through the throng of black people, more black people than I had ever seen in my life.
“Are we in Africa?” I asked.
“Not quite, love.”
There was music, feathers, sequins, drumming. There were black women with white gauze wings, gold paste crowns, mirrors and face paint, floats and thrones, transformed for a day into carnival kings and queens before they sank back to earth at midnight. The crowd responded to the rhythm, swaying, bending, stamping, except the two of us, who stood as still as oak trees in the wind.
That was also the year of a riot at the carnival. Small and contained, so we only saw it on the news when we got home, but neither my mother nor Grandpa Owen thought it appropriate for a child after that. I don’t know why I never went as an adult. I felt I had to go with someone, perhaps, and it didn’t seem Robert’s thing.
Aunt Caryl was growing restless now. Her bottom lip appeared from and disappeared into her mouth. Her eyes darted around the room, resting on everything but me. I stepped back from the bed and sat on the armchair in the corner.
“Do you remember Francis?”
“Yes. The butcher’s boy,” she said.
“Not that Francis. Francis Aggrey?”
“I’d have gone to Africa if I’d been the one who was pregnant.”
Her moments of lucidity were brief, flighty as a sparrow perching.
“Did he know about me?” I asked, keeping my voice casual.
“About who, love?”
“Did Francis Aggrey know Bronwen had a baby?”
“I’ve never met a Bronwen in my life. Pretty name, though.”
The moment was gone. Her mind had flitted off into confusion again.
“I found his diary.” I said.
“Whose diary?”
“Francis’s.”
“That must have been a surprise.”
“I can read you a passage.”
“Go on, then.”
I picked a passage that might jolt her.
“I have walked out a few times with Caryl. Thomas congratulates me for finally finding an obroni woman. He says it is about time I know that a woman’s secret place tastes the same, no matter what color hair surrounds it. I do not believe all Thomas’s tales of conquest. One man cannot have such stamina, but he undoubtedly has an effect on obroni women. He is bold with them, leaning close when he talks, touching them lightly for emphasis. They appear receptive. Without immodesty, I am taller than Thomas and have often been called handsome, whereas even the kindest would not describe Thomas in that way. I, too, might have such an effect if I wished, but I am suspicious of obroni women. I think it is not attraction but curiosity that makes them follow Thomas.
On the MV Aureole to England, a district officer’s wife stumbled against me in a deserted passage. I steadied her, and she must have taken this as encouragement for she slid her hand down my trousers like a common wharf whore. We remained in this position for a few moments. There was alcohol on her breath and the fug of her sweat repelled me, but I am a curious man. I kissed her, my first obroni kiss, and her tongue barreled past my teeth, filling my mouth with the taste of rum. ‘Let me see,’ she said dragging at my belt. ‘I want to see what size it is on a nigger.’
Never was a man so fast deflated.”
“You should never say that word, Anna.”
“Which word?”
“Rhymes with ‘bigger.’”
We smiled and for a moment she was Aunt Caryl again.
“Go on. What else did he say about me?”
Francis Aggrey’s words were almost mystical in their power. For a few minutes they had pulled my aunt back from senility.
“Caryl and I have chosen to remain friends. There is no spark bet
ween us and I am uncomfortable with her in public. Whenever she reaches for my hand, I wonder if I am a romantic extension of the political work she does in Menelik’s flat. A man called her a nigger lover in the street. ‘And what if I am,’ she replied. I do not wish that my person be used as a statement for racial equality. We never slept together: a black mark against me, Thomas says. He finds my objections absurd. ‘Nobody’s saying marry a white woman. Just find out what they’re hiding under those wide skirts.’ Thomas himself is married. His wife, Blessing, is in Rhodesia. What would she think of his escapades? ‘I’m a man,’ he said. ‘No woman can chain me.’”
“That’s a nice story. Please pass me my knitting.”
“Do you remember this?” I asked.
“My knitting.”
It was too early to tell what she what she was making out of the ball of green wool that lay on her dressing table. When she got to the end, a carer would unravel it and she would start again. It was cruelly efficient.
“Why won’t you pass me my knitting? It’s just there.”
I didn’t know where Maria had kept the needles, and she wasn’t allowed to knit unsupervised. She had poked herself in the eye once.
“I think you’re very unkind. I want you to leave now.”
“Don’t you want to hear any more?” I asked.
“Just leave.”
I sang to her.
“Huna blentyn ar fy mynwes, Clyd a chynnes ydyw hon.”
The first few lines of “Suo Gân” could always quiet her. When Maria came back, she had fallen asleep.
“Poor dear,” she said.
“How is she? I’m sorry I’ve been away for so long. We had a family bereavement. My mother died suddenly.”
“Sorry to hear that, Mrs. Graham. She’s been well. Just some days she wakes up and doesn’t want to get out of bed. I don’t blame her. I feel like that sometimes.”
There were red scratches on Maria’s arm. Carers mopped up pee and wiped anuses. They gave showers, trimmed nose hairs, clipped fingernails, endured the shit pay. And for this, they were hit and spat on by some of their charges, pinched and groped, called niggers and monkeys and chinks. I had complained to the manager, a white male overseer whose fingernails were too long.
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