Mr. Loverman

by Bernardine Evaristo

  Morris nods obligingly. “Barry, seeing as you’re not an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who’s goin’ be buried with your credit card to use in the afterlife, although you might strut around like you’re a god (ahem), you might as well support Maxie’s fashion venture.”

  I’m not even goin’ honor his slander with a rejoinder.

  I been sending money back home since the ’70s. Plenty of my relatives been clothed and privately schooled and housed and sent abroad through the spreading of my lucre-lurve, as well Morris knows. I’ll sort out Daniel at university too, undergrad and postgrad, that boy will continue to benefit from my beneficence.

  Never no mind, I am soused in rum and feeling quite swell, as those black GIs used to say who was stationed on my island back in my youth. Oh Lord, they was something else. Courtly, well groomed, and with a self-assurance we colonial subjects lacked and admired. After Morris left, I engaged in some military maneuvers with one or two or three handsomely uniformed fellas, safe in the knowledge that neither party was goin’ be air-dropping propaganda leaflets about it.

  As we leave, me and Morris have to prop Maxine up.

  She’s chatting happily away like she is seven years old again and I’ve just taken her to see Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo or The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh for the hundredth time at Holloway Odeon. We’d dissect what we’d seen as we caught the bus to Finsbury Park, cut down Blackstock Road, and crossed over Green Lanes into Clissold Park. When she got tired, I’d put her on my shoulders.

  By the time she’d started secondary school she’d been to all the museums in South Kensington. And to the Unicorn Theatre in Leicester Square, Jacksons Lane, the Tower Theatre up the road, Sadler’s Wells at the Angel, the Bubble Theatre tent in Regent’s Park—there wasn’t a kiddie show that she didn’t see. In this respect, I injected a little bit of Hampstead Bohemia into my girl’s Hackney Caribbean childhood. You see, no matter how busy I was, I tried to give Maxine my Saturday afternoons. She even attended classes at Anna Scher for a couple of summers. That girl rowed the Serpentine, sailed down the Thames on tourist cruises from Charing Cross, went to the summer festivals dotted around London, the funfairs, the circus, and we even took a few day trips to the seaside: Margate, Bournemouth, Hastings, Brighton.

  It’s true, I adored her, especially her combination of innocence and cheek. Young kids will tell you exactly what’s on they mind without the adult filters that turn grown-ups into fakes.

  Even when she was throwing a strop in the middle of the street, I couldn’t stay vexed for long.

  On the other hand, Maxine and her mother never really gelled. I was the buffer between them. Carmel still don’t get arty-fartiness, and the only culture that interests her is the one she decimates with bleach.

  I always made Maxine feel her opinions was important. I never slaughtered my child in an argument. I knew the rest of the world might do that to her, but not me, not her father.

  This is when it hits me.

  The world did do it to her.

  It said, You, my dear, are not the star of our show.

  * * *

  As the door of Café Zanza shuts slowly behind us, Maxine’s still rabbiting on.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to fast on freshly squeezed vegetable juice of spinach, cabbage, celery, fennel, and, yeh, beetroot, why not? Damage limitation. Twenty-year-olds have absolutely no idea how lucky they are. Drink and drugs all night, then get up looking fresh and peachy the next day. I absolutely loathe their pert little arses.”

  While we wait for an empty taxi to cruise by (and they do stop now that me and Morris are OAPs, because we appear to be what we always been: harmless), Maxine looks up Bond Street with a Hollywood-esque triumph-over-adversity gleam in her eyes.

  “From this very spot the House of Walker shall spread out across the globe to Fifth Avenue in New York, Champs-Élysées in Paris, Causeway Bay in Hong Kong, Ostozhenka Street in Moscow—”

  “Kingsland High Road in Hackney,” Morris interjects.

  “Shuddup!” She goes to slap his arm but misses.

  “When I do make it,” she says, pointing a disoriented finger at Morris that almost ends up squirreling up one of his nostrils, “I’m going to become a philanthropist. Support starving children around the world, et cetera. You certainly won’t catch me wearing blood diamonds hewn from the killing fields of Sierra Leone or the Congo. Or real fur. I shall be a multimillionaire with morals. Hey, I’ve just invented a tongue-twister, a millionaire with—”

  At which point she sways backward off the curb into the road, and I grab her just in time to avoid a collision with a cyclist who looks like he ain’t about to stop for no one. I pin one of her arms to me; Morris holds the other.

  “Daddy, Uncle Morris, I sense my second life is just beginning. There is hope. There is a god, and he’s called my daddy.”

  Yes, Maxine, some folk get only one life, which, if they fuck it up, ain’t no joke, and some folk have two lives goin’ on contemporaneously.

  7

  The Art of Metamorphosis

  Friday, May 7, 2010

  Is a somewhat temperate Friday lunchtime as I stroll down Cazenove Road to meet Morris at the Caribbean Canteen at Dalston Junction. I ain’t seen that fella since the Long Night of Expensive Cocktails at the Dorchester, where the barman refused to serve us any more drinks and got security to evict us off of the premises.

  It’s all Maxine’s fault. Can’t take her nowhere, making a right show of herself, overdramatizing her fashionista stories with rotating arms and ranting about celebrity so-called designers who, as she so eloquently put it, “don’t know their bandeaux from their basques, their back yokes from their bateaux necklines, and have probably never even heard of besom pockets.”

  Morris was no better, egging her on, wanting to know insider gossip.

  The taxi dropped madam off at her warehouse in Shoreditch, and she was last seen using her Day-Glos as a torch to unlock the entrance to her old warehouse building.

  Soon as the carriage ejected me and the original hell-raiser at my gaff, we made for the living room to have a nightcap, and that’s the last thing I remember. I don’t know how that happened, because while Morris was paralytic, I was merely on the wrong side of tipsy. By the time I woke up Tuesday afternoon, with a sore neck from where I’d slept half on and half off an armchair, he’d already fled the scene of the crime.

  Since then he’s claimed a three-day hangover and has only now summoned me to lunch, for a chat. Since when do me and him arrange to have a chinwag?

  Well, I’ll soon see whether his summons is suspicious or auspicious, but I got something on my mind too—I been having second thoughts about my second chance.

  Once we are in situ in the café, we will chow down some (good-as) home-cooked food in the absence of any left by my wife in the fridge or freezer, because (fair dues) she didn’t have no time to rustle up my meals and freeze them before she left, but (shamefully) also because I’m without the kind of daughters who phone up their poor, elderly father and tell him they just popping around with some rice and stew because they know he needs feeding after five days alone.

  I could be dead from starvation by the time Carmel gets back.

  What happened to the idea of payback time for parents? Fatherhood’s supposed to be an investment, and my daughters are defaulting on their dividends. Problem is, one of them don’t cook and the other one don’t eat.

  As I walk down Cazenove, I join the Friday lunchtime dance of the gentlemen of the Hasidim, silently wending and crisscrossing with the gentlemen of the Mohammedeen: the former dressed in the style of prewar Poland, with their black coats, bushy beards, and long ringlets hanging down from underneath their tall black hats, as they make their way to the synagogue; the latter attired in the style of twentieth-century Pakistan, with their white skullcaps, long cotton waistcoats, and salwar kameezes, as they also make their way to their house of spiritual sustenance, in this case the mosque.

  Everybod
y minds they own business, which is good, because this here gentleman of the Caribbean, attired in the sharp-suited style of his early years, minds his own business too.

  I can’t remember when anything last kicked off, and when it does, it’s because the youngbloods let their raging testosterones get the better of them.

  I observe my fellow dancers, discreetly wondering, as I am wont to do, how many of these fellas are harboring secret desires. How many of them are habitués of Abney Park Cemetery at the junction ahead? How many are leading double lives: Secret Agents K and Y?

  Statistically speaking, some of them has got to be bona fide shirt-lifters, right?

  * * *

  Toward the end of the road I pass Aditya’s Minimart, which used to be the Casablanca Club back in the ’80s. Even today I still get flashbacks to what happened one Sunday morning in the early hours.

  Snow had prettified the city all night, and I’d just got in from a calypso rave in Tottenham. I was drinking a mug of hot milk laced with cognac, when I heard a loud thump outside. I went to my front door and saw a car had crashed into the lamppost opposite. Blue Datsun. Whole of its frontage mashed up like the face of an English bulldog. Without any ado, I ran out in my slippers and sank my feet deep back into my own bear prints. The driver had been shot; he was slumped back, his face a bloody mess. How he’d managed to drive forty yards up the road, as I later found out, is beyond me, because half his scalp was hanging off of the back of his head, and by the time I reach him he was, without a doubt, dead.

  Then I recognized him. A Jamaican fella called Delroy Simmons, local electrician, sometimes worked for me. I stood there, in the freezing snow, and froze.

  The official story was that he’d been in a bust-up outside the Casablanca over some woman and been shot up by the gangsters who frequented it. Word on the street was he’d been cheating on his woman with a “batty” man; she’d caught him in flagrante delicto, and her gangster brother took revenge on him for shaming the family.

  No wonder I couldn’t leave Carmel back then.

  When me and Morris heard, we met at the Lord Admiral and sat bloating our emotions with pints all night, quietly contemplating the dangerous world we was living in.

  Still living in.

  Just last year that fella got beaten to death in Trafalgar Square by some young thugs. One of his attackers was a seventeen-year-old girl.

  Soon as I land at the junction of Cazenove and Stamford Hill, I am blasted back to the present day by the bad-tempered four-wheeled kings of the road furiously honking at the daredevil motorcyclists and suicidal cyclists who weave betwixt and between them like they don’t care for they lives.

  I turn left and then right, taking the scenic, quieter route via Church Street, seeing as I’m in the mood for some contemplative perambulation.

  So long as my legs can walk, I go walk.

  I pass Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, wherein reside my first three rental properties, bought in the ’60s before the Great Luvvy Invasion.

  I remember the exact moment when the Kingdom of Barrington was conceived.

  A summer evening after work, and me and Morris was breezing off having a lager and a smoke in Clissold Park, delaying the return to our respective farmhouses until the squealing sucklings had been put to bed. We’d both taken off our sweaty shirts, partly because of the heat, partly because we was both a right pair of preening peacocks. Yes, even back then. Morris was a perfect specimen of manhood, with his polished chest and naturally pumped-up pectorals. At times like these I found it hard to keep my hands off him in public, especially when all around us males and females of the species was engaging in extreme canoodling and groping on the grass—blatantly, unashamedly, legally.

  At some point I found myself paying proper attention for the first time to the three slummified Victorian houses on the walk opposite our spot. Vandalized windows, wrecked roofs, gardens being reclaimed by the forests of Ye Olde England. I said to Morris, “Look how huge they is, spar. Once upon a time they must-a been built for the rich, and, you mark my words, one day the rich shall recolonize them. I, Barrington Jedidiah Walker, hereby predict the gentrification of Stoke Newington.”

  Or something like that. Even if I didn’t speak those words out loud to Morris exactly, it was on my mind.

  I’d already been thinking about how I could make my mark in this country, defy the low expectations the indigènes had for us, exploit an economy that, compared to our poor-poor islands, was a financial paradise. I’d been thinking about how the Syrian and Lebanese immigrants back home started off their business empires by selling door-to-door on foot with only a suitcase, progressing to vehicles, and, before you could say ambition, resourcefulness, and bloody hard work, they was running the stores of St. John’s.

  Mr. Miller was an exception to the rule. A local Antiguan made good.

  Me too. I was goin’ be the exception to the rule.

  Looking at those dumpy houses I could tell they’d been empty for years, which meant they had to be goin’ cheap, right? So I hatched a plan to buy them and rent out. But the banks never lent us no money in those days. Soon as you stepped over the threshold of your financial future, the manager’s smile glaciered. Didn’t matter how viable your proposal, how squeaky clean your finances, how impeccable your references, how speaky-spokey you was.

  I am not a man given to sourness, but I left those banks with my mouth filled with the bile of bitter gourd. I ain’t no political animal neither, but, pray tell, had not our labor drip-fed plantation profits to this country for hundreds of years before manumission? Had not thousands of our young men fought in two world wars for this land? Were not we immigrants paying our taxes and making our way as good citizens of this country?

  No wonder so many of us turned to the Pardner System of community lending, which became the only way to leave wage-slavery behind and get we own homes. Everybody investing and taking their turn to get a lump sum. But I didn’t have time for that. I was a man on a mission before someone else got the same idea.

  It took about a week of charming cajolement (in the days when that worked), brainwashing techniques, and financial projections to convince Carmel that my plan wouldn’t lead to our family’s banishment to the workhouse, and to persuade her to ask her ole boy (who by this time was rapidly expanding his Early Bird empire into Montserrat, St. Kitts, Barbados, Jamaica) to advance me the working capital.

  It took many years to repay him, along with the 20 percent interest that skinflint charged his very own son-in-law.

  No sah, I don’t owe that man nothing. What is more and more furtherly, I hated having him bankroll me. I felt like a beggar, a real bottom-foot buckra.

  I subsequently bought more broke-up houses, which I repaired and rented out. Because I never succumbed to the pressure to sell, most of those babies is now worth three hundred times what I paid for them. Yea, gramercy, I counting my ducats.

  So whenever they open up another fancy delicatessen selling bite-sized lumps of cake for outsized prices, or whenever they open up one of those “yummy-mummy” children’s boutiques with no prices in the window, time soon come to put my rents up, incrementally.

  And any time this country starts Nazifying itself and another Shitler comes to power, I can relocate somewhere safe, émigré myself and my loved ones. The youngsters don’t know about Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and that movement in the ’70s to send we people back to where we came from, all of that hatred we had to endure from the National Front. I ain’t no historian, but any fool living long enough is witness to the history of what the mob is capable of when they rabble-roused enough by some archmanipulator.

  Morris tells me I am one paranoid fella, to which I reply, “No man, I prepared. Look what happened in Germany in 1933: the Jews with the money to leave, did. I might be a positive thinker, but I am also a realist. They want start something? Come on, then. I ready. I leaving.”

  Except I don’t want to, not now, not ever.

  How
did Morris expect me to abandon my manor back then when Odette left him? How did he expect me to move to the alien terra firma of another part of London—to live as man and man? We was still two thoroughbred stallions back then and people would’ve talked.

  Truth is, I only ever lived in three houses my whole life: parental, rental, familial.

  I was transplanted to Stokey over fifty years ago and I gone native.

  This. My. Home.

  But it took awhile, because when we first arrived here the locals didn’t know us, couldn’t understand us, and they certainly didn’t like the look of us. We had chosen to emigrate, so we expected foreignness, whereas they hadn’t chosen to leave their home but all of a sudden it was full of foreigners. With the wisdom of hindsight, I now see they lost their bearings.

  But some of them behaved badly—for a very long time. Some of them behaved nicely too, especially the trippies.

  In the ’60s I witnessed the hippification of Stoke Newington, just as I was settling in. I couldn’t believe the way these radicals was grabbing their freedom when I couldn’t even contemplate taking mine. Some of those trippies still around today. We all veterans now. Me and my great trippy buddy Peaceman (né Rupert) sit outside the pubs in summer, we pass the time, we bemoan the younger generation (anyone under the age of sixty-five), and we usually end up talking about who has just died.

  Peaceman used to own the vegetarian shop at the bottom of Stamford Hill, and I never understood how he got away with selling birdseed and rabbit food for human consumption. Used to tell him so too: “Is a scam, man. You sell cheap pet food at quadruple the price.”

  “It’s brain food,” Peaceman would shoot back. “I think you need to try some.”

  Me and Peaceman was always joshing, which was rare in the ’70s, when so many folk was walking around with a chip on their shoulder just waiting to be offended. Taking offense was very popular in those times. Oh yes, some people made a career out of it.

  Peaceman’s still sporting a wispy gray goatee, a stringy gray ponytail sprouting out of his bald head, and his ’60s embroidered waistcoats are now patchwork. I tell him he should be playing the banjo at country fairs in the swamplands of the Fens. He tells me I look like I should be pimping the pros down at King’s Cross or wherever they’ve gone to.