That Reminds Me

by Derek Owusu

  2

  My first day of school a boy in year 6 asks me if I’m a rude boy. I’m not rude, I think, and carry on watching the girls playing marbles, waiting for the right moment to ask if I can join. I have a cat’s eye but they ask how I can see through my dark skin.

  On the second day the only student who will talk to me tells me to undo my shirt’s top button, roll up my sleeves and walk with a bop. There’s no official school uniform but second-hand shirts and trousers are cheaper than tracksuits so I always look smart and ready to learn and this, the boy informs me, makes me a bod. The transformation helps.

  On the third day a girl in year 6 takes me round a corner, cups my face and kisses me. Her lips are soft and as they press against mine it feels like nectar from the pressure is trickling down my chin to branch out inside my chest and suddenly, I love London best. After a few weeks, my classmates are less hesitant to talk to me and soon even my teacher can address me without smirking at my clothes, my clogged shoes or my constantly split bottom lip. I’m told my breath smells like an African. I take the insult with baptised eyes, seeing who I am, unable to rebut it because as I lift my hand to cup my mouth, I can smell last night’s soup still on my fingertips. It’s past lunchtime so I lick them clean, unsure if I’m trying to savour the taste to subdue my speaking stomach, unsatisfied with the ham sandwich packed for lunch, or I’m embarrassed, revealed to be an African who eats with his hands. Some days I try to play football but I’ve never been picked because I do something called toe-punt, so I sit behind the goal and dig a stick into the grass, trying to create a grave for the ants that pass by. Maybe I’ll join their march. I’m still in love with the girl in year 6. A teacher caught us pressed together behind a skip and I haven’t seen the girl again. I’m in year 3. So now I just play with my sticks, watch the boys running after the football and think about the next person who’ll want to be my friend.

  3

  The Color Purple. I sat so close to the TV I could hear the static, felt it shuffling around the down on my face. My hands were tightly grasping the covers; I imagined my grip had turned yellow sheets white, mirroring my desire for the fight for breath and bloody choking of Mister. I watched as, fresh from stroking leather, the blade hung in the air stealing kisses from his Adam’s apple. With his head back, Celie moved in close to carve out control while he waits for the first stroke – the blade moist, beads of sweat, fear, instruments even nervous in his presence; the lather, complicit, exposed his skin so all it took was to ignore personal morality and hold your breath as the turpitude took over, cutting open what helped keep his head high. I sat on the edge of my bed, a bed moved into the living room where robed men sitting for supper watched sand surface in our eyes. My mum was asleep beside me, grinding her teeth as Celie was caught from behind, pulled out of a dream and made to walk back into a nightmare. I fell asleep without seeing it through to the end but for days after would depict Mister’s death with my pen – a dark blue mood, purple was pain, bruised and beaten. Suddenly, it wasn’t just my suffering confined to my pad; I wrote Celie out of her story and added her to mine, with the last drops of my ink gave us both a father neither of us had.

  4

  My aunt’s feet beat the road, catching us just before we boarded a bus, handing over a different videotape: that’s The Golden Child, she said, this is Coming to America.

  Relieved that my interest settled beyond seeing the inside of electronics, my mum lets me sit in front of the TV rewinding and playing the first movie she saw me pay attention to. References to clean dicks and cartoon breasts with no sense of gravity streamed by as I waited for the end of the film, watching Eddie Murphy marry his Queen. He was Eddie to me because I believed the video was playing back something I couldn’t remember, something that kept me quietly thinking when I wasn’t rewinding to see the Prince remove the cover of a rosy-lipped Sunrise. Love speaks on, while sex needs time to breathe, and it was the echo of someone who loved me that kept me from thinking I needed to get a word in on my destiny. Feelings uninterrupted, I rewind the videotape one more time.

  5

  My mum watches me bite the skin on the inside of my lip, places her palm on my hand and lowers my fist. Listen to me, K, the world is not yours. Her words open up into a bus stop on Tottenham High Road. My mum looks up the road, weavon protected by a Kwik Save bag, trying to will the digits that can open doors to get her home. Her nail polish is cracked, splintered first by her work and then by her nerves – floors are clean but her krata is still a dream. Beside where she stands is a path that leads anywhere the foreign may choose, and peering into the area stripped of light, a silhouette, an outline where no rain seems to fall. Out walks a figure, dry, catching no one’s eye but hers. They lower their hand onto her curved fingers, cold, but the chill creates warmth, moving them away from her mouth as she spits the last bits of varnish from her lips. ‘Who does the world belong to?’ they ask. ‘Not you. So why do you worry?’ These are closing words, nothing more is said – K, you think I saw them again? My tongue circles the inside of my mouth, tasting the metallic of the bitten sores, and the pressure of my jaw eases. This is her favourite story. I don’t see her leave, my mum, having passed those words to me, again.

  6

  In the same hall where all nights murmured with prayers and bargains to God, I stand against a wall, looking on at all the colours and adinkra patterns that embellish the robes my aunties and uncles wear. The music imbibed shakes ancestors alive and permits only one dance; a side-to-side shimmy, causing partners to slowly eddy. My uncles become aunts and aunts uncles, bodies representing a language where gender has no use. She watches me, my mum, with a gesture saying, ‘Come’ – bottom lip upturned, eyebrows raised, hands swaying by her sides and an apology in her eyes. We’ve fought today but here, in the hall where prayers still linger, white handkerchiefs in the air waving them away, and Lumba’s voice causes waists to limber, she looks like mother, her ntuma kente printed with akoma ntoso, my body understanding where my tongue can’t reach, giving in to the cloth’s impression. I approach, my steps wanting to forgive; our bodies get close, not one of us is speaking, no one is resisting, the music becomes a whisper as our dancing speaks and listens.

  7

  Our flat contained thoughts of God, my dad and Daniel O’Donnell. Country music called my mum while the homeland had a Western hand to keep its culture quiet, its palm giving off the odour of a corroded shovel and dirt. Irish accents and Twi became interchangeable during a sign-obsessed period of British life, and ‘Give a Little Love’ became more a clutch for capital, a tune dying before most could hear. My mum danced, – rhythmic with moves beyond the confining ashanti shuffle – sliding on a tape worn out by thousands of steps, a tape that refused to give up while my mum swayed to its cassette. I sat by the player, watching, in love with the fusion of mother and music, my finger raised, ready to take it all back, keeping everything in time, or possibly pause a moment where there was no other life to define. Musical notations fell to splash in leaked puddles, the poverty of home became music with Daniel O’Donnell. My mum called his face the only mirror of virtue, that he sang words like it could never be in their nature to hurt you.

  8

  I hear the bouncing pitch of my mum’s voice. ‘That’s how I talk’, her defensive phrase, but her strain to bring forth ‘English English’, muffled by her Ghanaian accent suffocating every word, tells me something different, so I get up to check who she’s talking to. She needs me. My dad is around, back on our sofa for another abbreviated visit, but will not help, dreams of East Legon keeping his eyes closed. I take the phone and speak in a stream of consciousness – sax-playing words and long-winded sentences I feel will move things into place. I set a date for the council visit and hand the phone back. I don’t return to my room, I stand to listen to the end of the conversation – my mum able to say goodbye politely – to see all that I’d done, arms folded, satisfied. My mum hangs up, thanks me and squats on the floor to carry on mixin
g her pepper with double-sided pestle grinding the mortar. I watch her. Then I shout, ‘Meeko dah’. She doesn’t look up, only says, ‘Okay, okay’, the words nkwan to swallow her laugh.

  9

  There’s no limit to my new family. New aunties and uncles are met every day. What was supposed to be my mum and I popping in to say hello becomes, by the end, concern that we’d missed our last bus home. Between the beginning and end of one back-and-forth homily, I look out of the window, down at the kids screaming (no way to tell who the sounds come from) and running around the small park between the flats, battling in the playground at its centre, jumping off the swings and balancing on the seesaw. And also, what I most want to do, standing close to the older boys talking.

  I need to know what is said. I walk through the words of the family, unlatch the door and run along the corridor, down the stairs and out into the sun cooking my company of cousins, everyone Ghanaian. Slowly, I move closer to where the older boys stand and lean against the railings, a bar slipping between my bum cheeks. I realise they are not speaking English; they are speaking (what I know as) Ghana language. Aren’t they embarrassed? Their bodies – chests in the air, rising with each response, or the breath of what they are smoking – speak as loud as their voices. One is connecting sentences with more frequency than the rest. He is telling a story. Here – Broadwater Farm, where any parked car could be police, where killers wipe off their fishing knifes before saying, ‘hello, Auntie’ – being Ghanaian is turning into something else. I listen, not understanding much, but feeling like somewhere in my chest I was hearing everything. Then silence, all of the boys look around at each other, a prelude to a burst of words: ‘Wo boa!’ ‘heh, fa wa sεm ko ɔuwhaa.’, ‘hwe lies na wo ka!’ ‘Don’t mind him.’ ‘Ay, busy busy Griot. Griot of the estate. Tell some more, let us enjoy.’

  Who was lying? I was hearing African pride and I was hearing the truth. And then a hand on my neck, pulling me back towards the flat. My uncle had seen me out of the window while smoking a cigarette, one sin revealing another, my aunt would say. But he was too late. I already I wanted to hear more from the Griot; I wanted to tell my stories too.

  10

  The Glory of God rests on Sundays so voices of praise have room to uplift. Gospel becomes the voice of God so Esther Smith sang salvation through a single breath of our Saviour. These mornings still held the sound of my mum fighting through tears, her fists in motion treating Satan as a speedball with an Azumah Nelson-like endurance before falling asleep. When sent to bath, my champion’s pour was really a Goliath’s gulp, with clean water splashing at my ankles as it was drained. I stepped out of the bathroom and my mum recognised that only tongues could cleanse the last of her litter. She pocketed anointing oil and I swallowed Seven Seas, even more hesitant these days since I split one open and the unbearable smell became the first time I questioned the odour of holiness. Sometimes my friends would already be out as I trailed my mum to the bus stop. Nodding at me, hoping one day I’d join them on these hot days. My mum grabbed my wrist and pulled me along. They knew better than to knock for me but sometimes, knowing the time I’d get home, they sent ‘hw was chuch’ messages on MSN. But, as post-praise conversations filled our rented hall, I would receive them too late.

  11

  The flat speaks its night noises and she responds with her own absent-minded murmurings. The kettle bubbles and the rising boil sounds and brings to mind the waters of Accra, Ghana, a memory of something she never experienced. When will she go back and stand before the tide she imagined as a child, waters that ignore boundaries and smother sands that eventually lead back to skyscrapers, distant from her and imagined – the Ghanaian garden city of Kumasi too traditional for a young mind tuned to Western standards of living. The tea is too hot but she’s acclimatised, feeling only a familiar sensation, forgetting to register it as pain. It’s 4.30, the bus comes in two minutes, but she’d rather be late than risk toppling over – no one would help her up in the morning mist or the lights of her own home. The school in which she works is quiet. You’d never know children ran up and down these corridors, so attentive is she to the floor, like wiping food from her child’s face, showing it a gentleness she’s always given but never received. Gospel hums in her throat, the words never coming for fear a teacher might pass and think her unfit for work. It’s been twenty years and she’s weary, the early morning wind feeling like a breeze visiting the edge of a cliff. Her humming is in sync with her thoughts, cleaning shit from toilets transforms into arms raised to the sky, praising at the feet of an almighty God – through everything, there sits her Saviour. She’s finished by 7.30 and as she walks out of the building a teacher says, ‘Hello, on your way?’ She smiles, no words, her gentle hum is enough to think all is okay.

  12

  Its mouth spoke with small squeaks like a sound bubble popping with a weak peep and I saw it from a distance the dimensions of my room shouldn’t allow. No sparrow had swooped in, stepped in stately with sandy feet, so I was sure what I saw came from wherever deities defined as outdoors. No face but I was aware of one, covered by the blurred wall between realities it seemed to have pushed its beak through. It was motionless for hours, still, blinks infrequent, but I was sure every time I closed my eyes that it drew closer but kept the same distance. It followed me from country care to a city where lights should have obscured its instruments, polluted its watching eyes by the lamps that force us to look for sparkles in the sea. One early night, where sapphire patches surrounded the colour of coals forging in the sky, it returned to me, appearing in my room with its mouth working out of time with the frequency of its peeps – and a bush brow now visible to show the range of its furrows. It was incensed by my leaving and not saying a word. But it’s always been this way, my words unable to leave my mouth as the thing’s own played the high-pitched sound of my imagination. That was the last night I saw it. At daybreak, as I lifted myself onto my elbow and my lashes fluttered away my fancies, I saw a mousetrap covered in peanut butter and its victim’s mouth closed.

  13

  The first friend I allowed in my house ran back to tell our class I was poor. They saw my mum and dad’s mattress lying on the uncarpeted floor – homeless, unsupported, the framework having fallen apart, with sheets seeming to drag along like a dropped flag gliding through an ocean of scattered clothes. When we bickered in school, my living conditions were his weapon of choice. Although the house didn’t smell of spice, curry powder or Maggi, the white boys of the area instead mocked the visible tinge of black that stained the bottom of our inner curtains. They were there when we moved in and I suspect it was this unwillingness to change them, maintained by financial difficulties, that led the old woman from five doors down to knock at ours and enquire about her friend. In our garden we had a bomb shelter, fascinating to me but really a reminder of how soon the house might crumble. Suitcases longing for their promised flight to Ghana waited patiently next to Lidl bags full of sardines that kept guests company in our living room, distracting them from the black mould that gathered in the corners of our ceiling. Still, nobody left our home without a story of relative poverty to relay – the truth is, we were all black working class, but pretending we couldn’t relate.

  14

  My dark skin saved my dad from child services but no one saved me. My mum’s eyes were always elsewhere, too out of reach to pull me into something akin to sympathy. Her eyes were dry as they fell to the floor – fingers down a neglected window, down my childhood photos, the ones taken by door-to-door photographers, a blue background I now see as a sea I could mercifully push my younger self into. Connecting slaps, like feints and jabs, worked up his confidence, more coming as if encouraged by an imagined applause. Confusion had left me, leaving only lies I’d tell myself about who I was: I must be a bad boy; I must deserve it; I must have done something wrong; the knocks on my head a father’s premonition? My dad, he walked with his head low, hands in pockets, not even seeing the pavement, and I wondered what he th
ought about, aside from the punitive ways to communicate with me. One evening I followed him out, with my head still in the itchy state of pain that followed his knuckles – as I walked and watched, stepping on the long shadow he cast, I thought he’d stroll out into the road, so unseeing he looked, so uncaring. Trees behind houses swayed with the wind, like giants in the darkness peeking round homes to see if he was okay. I felt sympathy – I watched him cross the road and enter the shop, but ran home when I saw him making his way back. Walking into the living room, he looked down at me; my peripherals filled with his presence, I kept my focus on the screen, on Kenan, Kel and Coolio. He threw something into my lap as the last nick of the show’s theme tune echoed out – a bar of chocolate, a peace offering or manipulation disguised as guilt. I began to eat it, broke off a piece and offered it to him – but he spat back, ‘I bought it for you; and make sure you eat it all.’