“Here, it’s about time you try some rum. Is your cultural heritage.”
“Grandy, I have drunk rum before, you know.”
I pass him his drink.
“I’d better be careful or I’ll end up like Mum, a total alky.”
“Except Donna’s not a big drinker, Danny-boy.”
“You’re kidding me, right? She drinks like it’s orange juice and then has the cheek to tell me I’m not allowed to drink. How insane is that? Then she’ll spend drunken hours on the phone with her girlfriends, crying about how lonely she is because she’s on the shelf.”
Donna lonely? I never thought she was lonely.
“You don’t seem to feel much sympathy for her,” I tell him. “Is hard being a single mother.”
“How can I? She says she wants a nice, respectable man to marry, so this is how she goes about it: posts a really old photo of herself on those dating sites, pretends she’s thirty-five instead of fifty, and then wonders why her dates run off after the first drink. What did she think? They were expecting a woman to turn up who could be their mother? She even asked me to go on a date with her, and believe, I was about to call Social Services when she said seeing a film or eating out together was ‘special time’ between us. She said parents went on dates with their children these days. First I’ve heard of it.
“Now get this. Say she asks me how I am and I reply, ‘Fine,’ or she asks me if I’ve got any homework to do and I reply, ‘Yes.’ Next thing you know she loses her temper and shouts that if it wasn’t for her I’d not have been born. Yes, she really did say that. Or she buys these celebrity cookbooks but doesn’t even open them. I was raised on junk food, which should be classed as a form of child abuse. She can’t even rinse lettuce under a tap, has to buy it ready-washed. I taught myself to cook. You’d be proud of me. I’d go organic if I could afford it. I’ll cook for you this week, you’ll see.”
Daniel waves his empty glass at me for a fourth time. “Any more where that came from?”
I beckon for him to pass his glass over to me. He swipes it my way and it ends up smashing on the kitchen tiles.
Danny-boy, I want to tell him, unlike you flawless teenagers, we adults can be contradictory fools. We fuck up. Sorry to fall off the Pedestal of Perfection, Sonny-Jim, but all we trying a-do is stop you from fucking up too.
I feel sorry for Donna, though. It never entered my mind she was a lonely lush. Sorry for Maxine too. You can’t reach forty and still be unwillingly single and not feel it.
Sorry for their father too, who’s been trapped in the loneliest-ownliest marriage in the world.
Who alone suffers, suffers most i’ the mind.
It is time to detour the conversation.
“I hear you’ve got to revise for your exams this week, right? How you getting on with all of that?”
“Cool. I’ve been revising for months now, unbeknownst to her.”
All of Daniel’s conversations lead back to his mother, same way all Maxine’s conversations lead back to herself.
Daniel raps his skull with his knuckles. “The data is all lodged up in this hard drive of mine. I’m leaving nothing to chance. After Oxford I’m setting my sights on Harvard. One degree’s not enough these days, but there’s too much competition ahead of me, Grandy. Only one person can be Britain’s first black PM. I’m running out of time.”
He has plenty of time to get on with it. What a shame it’s only when you got practically a whole century behind you that you can appreciate that fact.
“Mr. Lowry, head of sixth form, says I’m the shining star of the school. He also said I had nice legs when he passed me in the corridor on my way to play rugger last year.” He emits a derisory snort and runs a hand over his cropped head. “As he went to Oxford himself and is friends with half the dons there, he reckons I’m a shoo-in. It’s the game, Grandy. It’s all about who you know, not what you know. I’ve read about it.”
If only life was so straightforward. That university’s only got a handful of our black British kids out of some twenty thousand. I been reading about that, Danny-boy. He’s got the advantage of acting just like them, so maybe he’ll get through the interview when hidden prejudices come into play. Daniel’s got to be the exception. Same way Obama proved everyone wrong.
“Danny-boy,” I say, breaking my unspoken rule not to give advice to anyone under the age of twenty-five because they get insulted when you dare imply they don’t know everything, “the real test of success is how you manage failure. You got to be prepared to improvise.”
“I’ve got plenty of experience improvising when my plans go tits up. Like, do you think that when I was in the womb, planning my future, I knew I’d be born to a madwoman?”
Maybe the boy has a sense of humor after all. I been wondering . . . Maybe he right to be cocky too. All-a-we people need more self-belief. I seen how we talk ourselves out of our ambitions and then complain we can’t get on. I talked myself into buying properties, same way I could-a talked myself out of it.
“Yuh ready for something to nyam?”
Pizza has got to be safe, right? All children, even seventeen-year-old boy-men, like pizza, don’t they?
“I got pizza?”
“Yep, Mum said it would be junk food. See what I mean about her?”
Don’t suppose he likes Curly Wurlys or drinks hot chocolate either. What the hell do I know?
“How about beans on toast, then?” You can’t go wrong with that.
“Brown or white bread?”
“White.”
“Wholemeal’s better, but what the hell, I’m sure the beans aren’t sugar-free either.”
Whoever heard of sugar-free baked beans? This boy is as absurd as his auntie.
I set to cooking, and we fall into relaxed, boozed-up quietude.
“I like being here, Grandy,” Daniel says drowsily, beaming sweetly the way he used to before he became a fancy-pants know-it-all.
“Where’s your partner-in-crime?” he asks, as I dollop beans on to his toast.
“I take it you mean Uncle Morris? He busy right now.” My tone signals an end to this particular conversational thread.
“Aha, so you had a lover’s tiff?” he says, smirking.
Where the hell did that come from?
“What you say?” I reply, sounding sharper than I intended.
“It’s Mum’s joke. She says you and Morris should have married each other, because you’re inseparable.”
What am I supposed to say to that, ehn? Danny-boy, let me tell you something you don’t know. Me and Uncle Morris been lovers since we was younger than you are now. So what you got to say about that?
If one thing go make him speechless, it go be this, right?
* * *
That night I sit up in bed contemplating how those Ancient Greek eggheads came up with four categories of love: agape is unconditional love; eros—intimate; philia—brotherly; and storge—a deep, familial affection. Eliminating eros and philia, was I feeling unconditional, familial love for my grandson? Yet how can you distinguish between an obligation to love and the real thing? I’m not sure I even like him. Am I merely feeling a residual affection for the memory of the adorable grandson who seems to have turned into a bit of an arrogant prat?
Lord, where is that rass mood-merchant when I need him? All my life I been able to discourse things with Mr. Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary, and there’s nothing like someone disagreeing with everything you say as a way to clarify your own opinions. I need to talk to him about Carmel, about Daniel, about my conversation with Donna, about the inner turmoil I suffering.
Morris, you obstreperous ole fart, seeing as you’re usually so telepathic, why don’t you be the one to eat humble pie and just call me now, in the middle of the night, help me straighten out my thoughts?
10
The Art of Losing It
Saturday, May 15, 2010
The Prince of Poshness usually stumbles all groggy into the kitchen about four hours after I
have arisen. As anyone over fifty knows, longer you live, less sleep you need. In his disorientated state, I even get him eating Coco Pops for breakfast, a victory that generates a succession of grandfatherly smirks, internalized.
He spends the day revising in Carmel’s hallowed front room, where there’s no telly to distract him and no grandfather wanting to creep in and watch it.
It is a week after I was made his de facto guardian, and he’s been in there over four hours without a pee break, not even mucking about with his mobile phone, because he leaves it in his room every day. I know. I check. Lord knows what I’d-a become with his self-discipline. At his age all I wanted to do was fool around with my Antiguan Valentino, who had all my attention when with me, and all my attention when not. Yes, it’s true, I had the chance to bust mi balls studying, but I was too preoccupied with emptying them instead.
I go outside and stretch my arms up to the sky. I can feel all the cricks popping in my joints, but when I try to bend over I barely reach my thighs. I try to roll my shoulders, but they won’t rotate. Am I the fella who used to do cartwheels and backflips with Morris on the beach just for the sake of it?
I sit down on the front steps to catch the late-spring sun, fully cognizant of the fact that Carmel wouldn’t approve.
“Why you acting like you don’t have a sixty-foot back garden?”
“And why you acting like you didn’t grow up in a communal culture where everybody sat out front come rain or shine?”
That woman acts really English when she feel like it.
Nonetheless, I should try to enjoy the calm before the (butt-butter) storm. But how can I? Way I see it, I have three options. Maintain the status quo? Divorce Carmel and live alone? Divorce Carmel and move in with Morris?
Yes, I’m a scaredy-cat, Morris. The idea of telling Carmel that I’m taking her on a journey toward her decree-absolutely-no-turning-back . . . It’s only when you about to enter a Conflict Zone that you realize how entrenched you are in your so-called Comfort Zone.
I put my sleeves at half mast, release my braces, and unbutton my shirt, discreetly, seeing as I got one or two gray weeds sprouting there these days.
Then I indulge in one of the greatest stress-busters known to mankind, a hand-rolled Montecristo Habana straight off the paddle-steamer from Cuba.
I notice my hands all dry-up and realize I didn’t moisturize them with Vaseline Intensive Care this morning. Yuh slipping, Barry. This is what happen when everybody gives you a hard time, including the wife and the mistress.
I know I should call, but I got Daniel on my hands, right?
Eventually I decide to ask Laddie-O what he wants to eat tonight, and offer some tea and biscuits at the same time as a midafternoon stopgap. PG for me and fair-trade organic Earl Grey for him (I ask you), forcing me to break my boycott of the wholefood shop, seeing as I couldn’t be bothered to go all the way to Sainsbury’s.
I knock on the door, and Daniel complains he’s had a headache for hours. I tell him he should ease up with the studyfying, fetch him some aspirin and a glass of water, and bring in the tray containing our respective teas and ginger biscuits artfully arranged on a plate, all nice and civilized.
He says he’ll be with me in a minute because he’s just finishing off.
I watch him in his green khaki pants and gray shirt with Reasonable Doubt splashed across it in black Gothic print, all sprawled on Carmel’s white leather sofa (still covered in plastic wrapping forty years after she bought it . . .), with his textbooks and laptop and one leg bent under the other.
How the hell do you sit on your own leg and not feel it snap?
As my gaze wanders around the room, I realize I’ve not looked at it properly in years. Furniture, decor, wife—after a few decades you might look, but you don’t see what you looking at, right?
I don’t know how he sticks it out in a room stuffed with the very same objets tat that sealed Wifey’s reputation as a Madame Arriviste back in the ’60s. Could write a cultural studies essay about that particular phenomenon: Coming from sparsely furnished homes, the women of the West Indies went goggle-eyed at the veritable cornucopia of colorful fripperies on sale in the Land of Hope and Affordable Ornaments. Easy.
I confront the concentric, psychedelic, and positively hallucinogenic orange discs masquerading as wallpaper and realize nobody need bother with LSD no more. No wonder Daniel got a headache. I should line up the local junkies and charge them to look at this wall.
Superimposed on said walls are sentimental reproductions of tearful Victorian urchins and gilt-edged photographs of the various Walker and Miller generations. The carpet is thick Persian, and the embroidered drapes more suited to a medieval castle. Lace antimacassars are placed on armrests, a glass coffee table is adorned with silk flowers in a vase, its stem wrapped in a red, frilly thing (why?), a glass cabinet is filled with every type of gold-rimmed drinking vessel, even though the sole drinker resident in this house is not allowed to use them except on special occasions. A trolley features her pineapple ice bucket, the radiogram in the corner is what they call vintage these days, and another cupboard must be where she locks up her chocolate stash and whatever else. Add to this ceramic dogs and cats, glass fish, birds, crochet dolls with flouncy flamenco skirts, and a wooden clock above the gas fireplace doubling as a giant map of Antigua, and it’s safe to say Wifey is the Goddess of Bad Taste.
If Mr. Socrates was right when he said, “Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within,” then this room is a worrying reflection of my wife’s state of mind.
Salvador Dalí would-a loved it, though. Maxine thinks it is “beyond kitsch” and keeps threatening to steal in one night, dismantle the whole room, and reassemble it as an art installation. I always objected to its rather trashy OTT-ness, even back in the day when I could be forgiven for not knowing no better. After I took my history of art course, I could barely come in here.
Donna used to plead with Carmel to strip the front room down to plain white walls, trendy Habitat furniture, and bare floorboards. Wifey too smart for that. No way was she giving up sovereignty.
History of art, Birkbeck, one evening a week from 1984 to 1986. I loved that course. Come to think of it, wonder what happened to that fella Stephen Swindon or Swinthorne or whatever it was. Not thought about him in years. I was forty-eight, he was about ten years younger and, from the way he used to ogle me in class, totally up for a taste of Antiguan masculinity. We fellas don’t need to spell nothing out. We got vibe language. Don’t need to spend money courting and being polite and telling a girl how pretty she is for weeks before we allowed to get our cocks out, either.
Stephen could’ve walked out of Brideshead Revisited, with his foppish blond fringe and rah-rah vowels. Lived in a loft over at Canary Wharf. Old spice warehouse, acres of scarred floorboards, brick walls, and wharf windows with no curtains, because, what the heck, nobody could see in except the seagulls circling the Thames. Still with the same hoists outside that used to haul up barrels of cinnamon and turmeric, saffron and cumin—when the spoils of Empire flowed upriver.
Had a Chinese emperor’s brass bed at one end, with the kind of black satin sheets so slippery one could spin on one’s own buttocks, if one was so inclined. At the other end was a wrecked trestle table with rusty iron legs as some kind of fashion statement. In the vast atrium in between there was a black leather chair and a sofa, a big modern telly, sound system, and sliced tree trunks masquerading as coffee tables. His wardrobe was a clothes rack with all of his flashy, color-coded barrister suits and shirts on show; a regiment of John Lobb shoes stood smartly to attention just underneath.
I’d never been in a home like it before, and it opened my eyes to the possibility of a lifestyle for real men: wood and metal, leather and brick.
I grew rather fond of being seen to while leaning out a window, waving at the unsuspecting tourists passing by on pleasure boats . . . I have to say.
Me and Stephen amused ourselve
s for a while, exotic beasts to one another, until he started getting ideas and wanting more than I could give him—a proper relationship.
How did he think that was goin’ work out?
He left the class thereafter.
Wonder what became of him? He wanted to become an art collector.
Years later, when Maxine was eighteen, I bought that huge Shoreditch loft apartment for her when she passed her exams with a royal lineup of four As—wishing it was me moving into a place like that. She painted the brick walls white, the concrete floor yellow, put a futon in one corner, a copper bath she’d found in a skip in another, placed a fridge she painted pink by the stone sink, and turned the last corner of the room into her “studio”—cluttered up with easels, oils, fabrics, and other signs of artistic intent.
How can she think she’s so different from those posh interns out there, backed to the hilt by their parents?
Anyways . . . so where will I live after this possible, potential divorce, then?
Divorce: such a spiteful-sounding word—but such an appealing concept.
Marriage: such a softly seductive word—but such a spiteful reality.
So who goin’ get the house? Okay, what about if (if it comes to it) I let Carmel take away the front room, brick by brick?
I get the rest, ’cos I ain’t moving. No sah. Problem is, Wifey will put up a fight. That woman is too she own way.
* * *
“What you want for dinner tonight, Danny-boy?” I ask him, as I resurface from the country I visit most frequently, the past. He looks up, slightly dazed from deep concentration.
“You want Chinese, Indian, Caribbean, Chippian, or Kebabian?”
Experience has taught me I need to get enough food for four, because, like the Tasmanian Devil, teenage boys can eat 40 percent of their body weight in one sitting and still have those flat stomachs most men over twenty envy, most men over thirty try to get back, and most men over forty remember with fond yet melancholic nostalgia.
“How about the traditional man-on-the-street English chippie tonight?” he replies, as if it would be simply the most exciting adventure into the lifestyle of the working classes. “Haddock, chips, and mushy peas for me, guv.”
Mr. Loverman Page 16