by Diana Evans
Laurence Hope was a political activist and writer who had come to England from Trinidad as a teen and made a career of his outrage. He was one among the crusaders, who had witnessed personally the landlords who would not give them rooms and the police who would not let them go and the thugs who would not let them be, and retaliated. He had rioted, organised and campaigned. He wrote articles about the pernicious violations of racism, gave speeches in dim community halls about the need for action and the importance of black unity. ‘Without unity we’re lost,’ he would say to Damian, over breakfast or while watching the evening news or on a Saturday night in the smoky living room in the company of fellow crusaders. The community halls had eventually advanced into lecture theatres and the articles were picked up by the newspapers. Laurence Hope’s book of essays on the struggle for racial equality in Britain was considered a notable volume in academia and was still a set text on some university courses. He had never published another book, and he never managed to secure a permanent university post, but he had carried on writing, in the corner of his bedroom which he used as a study, even when the commissions faded and the requests for speeches dwindled, when the movement, as he saw it, crumbled, and the world turned away and turned in on itself and the legacies of Thatcher made people selfish. He carried on working and thinking until this outrage became the only world he had left, and he shrunk with it, became thin and alone. ‘We’re still not free,’ he would tell Damian. ‘They think they’re free, but they’re not. There’s still lots of work to be done.’ Damian would be haunted, worried by this work that still had to be done. He would look at the bookshelves lining the walls in his father’s room, bearing Fanon, Baldwin, Wright and Du Bois, those haloed, courageous men who had spent their lives doing this very important work, and he would wonder how he was going to continue this very important work, when all he wanted to do some days was just come home from school and watch Neighbours and not think about how and why there were no black people in Neighbours, and eat shepherd’s pie, or lasagne, or something that people ate in happy homes where there was someone around who cooked.
A woman’s touch. That thing. That bright, tender and colourful thing. A woman’s presence. The lack of it made him sexist. He wanted a woman to come and put flowers on the windowsill and make the balcony like Chelsea. Wash curtains, change sheets. He fantasised, coming up the stairs to the fourth floor, that he could smell not the clinical funk of a government stairway, but spices, marinades, tomatoes, chicken, wafting out from underneath the black door, the braising of his supper, the hot food of her love. This woman that Damian longed for was not his mother. His mother had left and gone to Canada when Damian was five and had never returned, and he practically forgot her. The woman he longed for, after she too had left, was named Joyce, an ex-girlfriend of his father’s, who had come for a while and made it nice.
Joyce was also from Trinidad, though more recently arrived. She was lighter, breezy. She still held the whisper of the island. She wore colourful skirts that swayed in the air, in the winter months a purple cardigan with gold buttons down the front, and she had wonderfully soft hands. She cooked the best food Damian had ever tasted, better than the takeaway on Brixton Road where he and his father were regular customers. Her marinades were high on pepper, her rice and peas was flaky. She made ginger cake and bought pineapples and sliced them from their cores. They all ate together around the folding table in the living room, previously a dusty surface for stray folders and empty glasses, now permanently opened out, bearing a bowl of fruit and, yes, flowers. She said that men were boys and boys were men and both of them needed women to help them live. ‘Damian,’ she would say, ‘wipe your mouth with the napkin when you finish.’ ‘Damian,’ she would say, ‘I see you have on that same shirt from yesterday, you must change it.’ And they talked around the table about their days and their lives. Laurence was loosened, he was laughing. Damian discovered things about him that he had not known before, things about his childhood in Trinidad which he hardly ever talked about, as if it were not significant, as if it were only England that had made him who he was, as if he did not exist before he became angry. The call of the crusade backed away in the light of Joyce’s presence, and his father also, for a while, became light.
But the relationship did not last. Laurence eventually got tired of sharing his room with someone else and complained that he couldn’t think. Joyce began to accuse him of the same things Damian’s mother had once accused him of, that he was cold, blinkered, selfish, arrogant, that he didn’t take her out, he didn’t make her feel good any more, he didn’t appreciate her. The smell of marinade became less frequent as Damian climbed the four flights of stairs, and one evening as he unlocked the front door, he heard them arguing. Joyce said to his father that he did not know how to be with a black woman. She said he could only be with white women because white women did not need to be respected in the way that black women did. Laurence told her to get out. He was angrier than Damian had ever seen him. Late that night, in the darkness of his bedroom, Damian felt her soft form sitting close by him, a soft hand brushing the side of his face. He did not open his eyes because he knew that she was going and he did not want to say goodbye. The sway of her fabric as she stood, the tread of her feet across the floor, followed by a complete silence as she paused by the door. The next morning she was gone. The flat returned to its original austerity, Laurence returned with greater doggedness to his gloomy desk, the treatment of black people by the police, the handling of the Brixton riots, the disproportionate number of black men in mental hospitals and in prison.
All of this had left Damian with a sense of obligation to do something important with his life. Like a Marley or a Kuti, he should continue his father’s work, accept his position in the social strata as a vessel of ongoing change. But on trying to decide what degree to take at university in the inception of this vocation, he came up against a wall. Deep in his heart he wanted to take English, but he felt he should choose Politics, or Sociology, and rebelling against this feeling of what he should do, he chose instead to do Philosophy, and spent three years adding doubtful theoretical and literary scaffolding to the very large question of what everything meant – why do we exist? do we actually exist? what is the meaning of human life? what is the purpose of religion? He left university with a deeper vagueness about the future and allowed himself to be commissioned, through Laurence’s contacts, to write occasional book reviews and to help with research for a documentary he had been working on for twelve years about the legacies of the slave trade. Meanwhile he considered postgraduate degrees in English, as a way of backtracking to the original impulse, but by then the sensation had already arrived that it was too late. He turned to the job market, that Situations Vacant that represented the safe dead end of dangerous dreaming, and after several interviews found himself in a communal office in Edgware, drafting tenancy agreements and writing eviction letters and coordinating claims for housing benefit. It was not what he had imagined for himself, but he saw it as a stopgap until he discovered what he really wanted. He read books. He read Shakespeare, Kafka and Flannery O’Connor. He read Raymond Carver and yearned to capture the piercing moments of lives. And he began, in the evenings, sitting in his room in Kennington at an old school desk he had found in a junk shop (the kind that lifts up to reveal a compartment underneath) to write a novel. It was a coming-of-age story about a man in his twenties trying to find himself. He worked on it for a year, smoking cigarette after cigarette, wearing short socks and long shorts so that only his calves were bare – this was very important, the draft around the shins, it helped him concentrate – making copious notes and reading relevant-seeming books on psychology and identity. At some point, though, he came up against another wall. He became confused. The words tripped over one another. Every time he tried to write a sentence the idea of it in his head shrivelled and turned to ash, a kind of impotency, and he could not go on with it. It was around this time that he met Stephanie.
Standin
g there, next to him in her red shoes, aisle 3 of the Islington Business Design Centre, red-brown hair, clear pale skin, a little bit taller than him, frank brown eyes and a gentle way of watching, she asked him if he knew, according to this over-complicated conference map, where she would find the seminar room, and they went on a friendly mission to find it together. It was clear from the beginning that she liked him. She was direct about it, she was focused. He looked, she thought, and later revealed to him, exactly like a man she had seen in a recent dream, a little stocky, going towards chubby, large hands, close dark curls and light-brown skin, charging suddenly into her dream as if he were looking for something. Maybe, he told her, I was looking for you. Maybe you were, she said, as they lay in his room with Bobby McFerrin playing on the turntable, vinyl sleeves spread across the floor, her red shoes touching toes, discarded beneath the school desk. They walked all over the city together with her in those shoes, gigs, pubs, restaurants, movies, mulled wine in a Camden twilight, the river from the banks of Hammersmith; the city which for her was temporary, she would go back to the hills, she said, with this family, these children she knew that she would have, and they would run across the fields making flying shapes and flying kites, they would ride horses, they would know the woods and the meadows. There are woods and meadows in London, Damian had said, but no they are not the same, she said, you hear traffic still, and sirens, and helicopters hover, I hate hovering helicopters they make me think of air raids. The argument continued as they rented a flat together in Dulwich, where they frequented the woods, became married people, and walked in the woods now with Summer strapped to Stephanie’s torso in a Mamas & Papas baby carrier, until one day while driving through the back streets of Forest Hill with Summer peacefully asleep in the Mamas & Papas car seat, Stephanie saw three men walking along the pavement in broad daylight towards the mini-roundabout, one of them holding a rock the size of Summer’s head, which he was aiming at the head of one of the other men, while the third man was trying to stop him from throwing it. Stephanie did not stop to see whether the man actually threw the rock, but the murderousness in his face was terrifying, and she went home and told Damian that very evening that she was moving back to Surrey whether he liked it or not, and had no ears when Damian tried to argue that people in the home counties probably also got their heads smashed in sometimes with large rocks.
Patrick and Verena were pleased. They helped them out with a deposit on a starter house in Dorking, three miles east from the town centre, then again on this bigger house, this final house on Rally Road when Stephanie was pregnant with Avril. Damian was adamant that they would pay them back but so far they had not. He had changed jobs twice since meeting Stephanie but had still not managed to get out of housing, only to a higher echelon of it, at a residential research consultancy in Croydon. On his journey into work now he hardly even needed to touch the surface of London. He could avoid the tube completely. He could join the other commuters flocking into East Croydon station at 5.20 p.m. with the steely office blocks and tall silver scrapers of that strange spaceship town looming above them, and board a crowded train bound on smooth, efficient rail tracks out towards the countryside, the crowd gradually decreasing, the green increasing, the city long gone, arriving home in time to help Stephanie put the children to bed. Sometimes he got home early enough to eat dinner with them and listen to them recounting their days: the times tables beat-the-clock scores, the trip to the farm, the Christmas carol concert, Stephanie’s updates on insurance renewals and swimming-lesson bookings and forthcoming local funfairs or circuses they might attend. There was so much to think about and so much to do with all this activity and responsibility that he hardly had time to really consider how he missed London, the hum of it, the Brixton roar and the beloved river, the West Indian takeaways, the glittering of the tower blocks at night, the mobile phone shacks, the Africans in Peckham, the common proximity of plantain, the stern beauty of church women on Sunday mornings, the West End, the art in the air, the music in the air, the sense of possibility. He missed the tube, the telephone boxes. He even missed, deep down, the wicked parking inspectors and the heartless bus drivers who flew past queues of freezing pedestrians out of spite. He missed riding from Loughborough to Surrey Quays on his bike with the plane trees whizzing by, the sight of some long-weaved woman walking along in tight jeans and a studded belt and look-at-me boots and maybe a little boy holding her hand. The skylines, the alleyways, and yes, the sirens and helicopters and the hit of life, all these things he knew so well. And the fact, most of all, that he belonged there in a way that he would never, could never, belong in Dorking. He was outside, displaced. He was off the A-Z. He felt, in a very fundamental way, that he was living outside of his life, outside of himself. And the problem was, if indeed it was a problem – how could you call something like this a problem when there were bills to pay and children to feed and a house to maintain? – the problem was that he did not know what to do about it, how to get rid of this feeling, how to get to a place where he felt that he was in the right place. And this not being such a serious problem, not really a problem at all, he had suppressed it and accepted things as they were. He rode his bike to the station in the mornings (though lately he had stopped this and was becoming chubby, as Stephanie had predicted). He boarded the train and entered the spaceship town and re-emerged from it and came home and talked about pressing domesticities while all of his doubts, worries, yearnings and melancholic nigglings were stored away in a cupboard with his unfinished novel, where they had remained quiet, neat and generally manageable – until around about now.
Laurence died of congestive heart failure in a hospice on the north side of Clapham Common. He retreated, to a no-way-back place. His breath gave up on infinity. Damian was with him in the final days, as he sank into the sheets, as his skin became ashen, his eyes yellow, as he turned his face to the left and stopped, right there, in the deep of a September night. It was strange, when it happened, because Damian had felt almost nothing. He watched him die. He’d fallen asleep in the chair next to the bed and he woke up suddenly, at just the right time, as if Laurence had called to him with his small, awful cough, as if he did not want him to miss it. He knew straight away that something had changed, that his father was going, that this was the moment. So he watched it, this man passing into dust, receding into immediate history, his vanishing, this old man from whom he came – but apart from a faint reaching inside of him, a faint call with the arms of his heart, he felt nothing. He stood there for a while afterwards, looking just to the left of Laurence’s face at the white pillow, then back at the face. Then he went out of the hospice and walked in the surrounding streets, sensing that the world was different now but not quite being able to feel it. He had expected to feel lonely in a new way, to begin a process of reconstruction in which Laurence would walk out into a chamber of his mind white-robed and holy, ennobled by his pain and glittering with a wisdom from the other side. He had expected to cry, or to be angry, or in some way ethereal and connected to heaven, but nothing happened. The clouds did not change. There was no message in the trees. He returned home, and in the following days went about the busy administration of death. Laurence died on a Thursday just after midnight. On the Monday morning, Damian went back to work.
What he did feel was something else, something specific yet ambiguous that came to him the morning after the funeral as a seventeen-word question. There was no voice attached to the question. It was very faint, an accumulation of yearnings, and once it had been asked it would not go away. The question was this: How long will you go on living your life as if you were balancing on a ribbon? He did not quite understand what it meant. It was teasing, flimsy yet urgent, like a trick. It followed him everywhere he went. It was in his head now as he emerged from the cleaning of the downstairs toilet, still wearing his dressing-gown, as he came through the kitchen, whose gangway was presently taken up with the Homebase extra-large ironing board and a pile of washing, as he wandered through into t
he dining room, tired of this house, its daytime gloom, its demeaning regularity, the frivolous, frankly tacky gazebo, he hated that gazebo. How long? it said. How long will you go on living your life, as if you were balancing on a ribbon?
Contrary to Stephanie’s assumption, Damian was actually looking forward to going to Michael’s place that afternoon. He and Michael went back a long way. They had been at university together. They used to have deep discussions about Franz Fanon and race and black music in the student-union bar, and Damian had come to feel that he owned these things for himself, not just through his father. Once Michael got together with Melissa they had made the effort to keep in touch, meeting for drinks or having dinner together as a foursome. Damian always enjoyed these dinners, the sharing of food, the playing of music. They always talked about the music, and films, and books, he would come away feeling happier and reconnected to the floundering artistic side of himself. At times, on returning home, after Stephanie had gone upstairs to bed and the house was still, he would even go to the cupboard in the dining room where he kept his old folders and papers, and take out the unfinished novel and look at it. He would just sit on the floor and look at it, and it would seem possible again. He would read some of the sentences and think about how they could be improved, how the whole thing could be massaged and rearranged to become a rich, complete thing. Then he would put it back in the cupboard with a firm intention to work on it the following evening – except that he never did. He blamed this, also, on Stephanie.