by Hannah Lowe
The last time he went abroad it was to Prague. It must have been the one time my father’s preparations were not concealed from me. I remember he stayed up very late the night before, sitting at the dining table doctoring the cards, the overhead light supplemented by two bright lamps on either side. He was there after dinner and still there when I went to bed. Nothing was said. There were glass pots of ink on the table, the little guillotine from the hall cupboard. In the morning I watched him climb into the big black car waiting at our gate. There were three others – two I didn’t recognise, but driving the car was Sylvester, one of the men who made dice tables with him.
I watched them pull away and, for the first time, had a pang of worry about my father. From snatches of overheard phone conversations I had gathered there was a dealer in a big casino there who was willing to swap a deck of marked cards into a poker game for a share of the winnings. Surely my father was too old to be doing that sort of thing?
He was supposed to be gone a few days, but he was back the next afternoon when I came home from school, and in a stinking mood. ‘The guy lost his nerve!’ he was telling my mother in the kitchen. ‘He was blind drunk! Stumbling round the place, security guards everywhere. Oh, it was a posh place. Top notch. We could have cleaned up.’ He took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘But as soon as we saw him, it was game over. We were in bed by nine. And here I am now,’ he said, leaning back on the counter. ‘What a waste of time. And the fool man still has my cards. They could make him a bit of money, I can tell you.’
‘Well, what can you do?’ my mother said, pulling on the washing-up gloves. ‘Ring the casino and complain?’
‘Hello, Dad,’ I said, making myself an orange squash. ‘Thought you were gone until Sunday.’
‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘The dog I went to see was dead.’
♠
There was a swimming pool in Romford called the Dolphin – not just any swimming pool, but a special one – hexagon-shaped and surrounded by tropical plants and rockeries. You could walk into the water on the sloped floor of shell-coloured tiles as if it were the ocean. The showers at the side of the pool flowed like waterfalls, cascading out of fake rock. There was a high slide to slip down and splash into the deep end, and it had a wave machine. I’d had my tenth birthday party there with eight friends from Cotton Lane. We’d swum and played, then changed into our party dresses, heading upstairs to the café where coloured balloons floated above the table spread with sandwiches and birthday cake.
At twelve, I still loved the Dolphin. I had another new friend, Kim, and she and I spent most Saturdays wading and flopping through the turquoise water. The wave machine began every hour, creating huge surges as the water rose high and dipped low on the pool’s sides. I was just playing around when the accident happened. It didn’t occur to me that the depths of the water shifted so dramatically when the wave machine was on, and so I dove deep into what should have been five feet of water, but was actually much shallower. My chin hit the tiled floor hard. At first I couldn’t right myself. Then I was standing and all the lights above were wobbly. Someone gasped and someone else put their hand on my shoulder, and suddenly the lifeguard was there. I put my hand across my mouth. Where my front teeth should have been was a hard, jagged ridge. I had a palm full of blood.
The lifeguard walked me out of the water, wrapped a towel around me and led me to the first-aid room, where a young woman in sports clothes tried her best to fix me up. I couldn’t stop crying. All I had left were two stumps of front teeth. They had punctured my lip. I looked in the mirror and cried harder. I’d liked my front teeth. Half an hour later my father was there, car keys in hand. I was still crying, but as soon as I saw him I pulled myself together. I didn’t want him to hug me.
‘Oh dear, Han,’ he said in the car. ‘You’ve ruined your teeth.’ This was the last thing I wanted to hear. I knew it was bad. I held back the tears as we drove silently home.
♥
The South African dentist made me a pair of veneers to match the size and shape of my old teeth, and fixed them on with ultra-violet rays. This was not before I had to spend two weeks at Pinners with a dull ache in my jaw and my smashed teeth on view to everyone. ‘You look well ugly,’ Simon Porter told me, and I spent lunchtime locked in the sports changing rooms, where no one would find me.
‘Make sure you say thanks to your dad,’ my mother told me on the drive back from the dentist. She wanted me to respect him. The veneers had cost £300, money he had spare since he’d been taking his various trips. The new teeth were really good. I looked normal again.
‘Thanks for my teeth, Dad,’ I said, hovering in the living-room doorway.
‘You’ll have to be careful with sports,’ my father said, looking over his newspaper. ‘I need to protect my investment.’ He laughed. I could see that he was pleased to be acknowledged.
♣
It was a year of accidents. Sam had broken his collar bone three months before, falling from a wall behind his school. I wondered what he’d been doing on that wall. There was a rucksack hidden below his bed, stuffed with cans of spray paint. My father had an accident too, one Sunday after lunch. He was outside, up a ladder, painting the window frames. My mother was in the back garden, Sam was in his room, and I was practising the piano. Suddenly the doorbell rang, and rang, and rang, shrill and intrusive, as though someone was holding it down. But in the hall I saw a pane of the front-door glass was smashed and protruding through the gap was the end of a ladder. I opened the door to see the ladder had fallen, one of its legs breaking the frosted glass. The other leg had wedged against the doorbell. I pushed the leg to the side to stop the bell ringing, and at the same time saw my father, lying across the garden path, half in the flower bed, surrounded by red rose petals. His arms were tidily folded over his body, as though he was asleep. One petal on his cheek looked like a tear.
‘Dear God!’ shouted Irish Bridget, our next-door neighbour, rushing up our path in her apron. She crouched down by my father.
‘Ralph, Ralph, can you hear me? Don’t worry, my darling. Oh dear God, dear God!’ There was no response. My father looked very peaceful. ‘Dick, I think he’s dead!’ Bridget cried, looking up to her husband, who was coming up the path looking perplexed. ‘Call an ambulance!’
Then my mother appeared. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘What’s he done now?’ She knelt down beside my father and lifted the rose petal from his face. ‘You silly old fool,’ she said, and stayed there holding his hand as the other neighbours came. A siren sounded in our street. The medics lifted my unconscious father into the back of the ambulance and my mother climbed in. I watched them disappearing down Ashgrove Road, the blue light flashing.
Joshua from Trinidad, our neighbour on the other side, came up behind me. I was scared of him. His clothes were always stained, he smelt of ale and something sour. He put his arm around me, bent down close, his face on my neck. ‘Don’t fear, don’t fear about your daddy,’ he whispered hotly in my ear.
♦
There was the sensible way, my mother said, and your father’s way. And the two were not the same. The ladder had been uneven and my father thought to prop it in the flower beds on a piece of Contiboard to even up the legs. Contiboard is both shiny and slippery, so it was surprising he’d even reached the top of the ladder before it slid from under him and he toppled ten feet into the roses. He was lucky. He’d only cricked his neck, bruised his coccyx, banged his head. He had mild concussion and had to stay in hospital overnight.
My mother took me to the ward the next day. He was sitting up in bed, tearful and glum. ‘I do everything wrong,’ he said. His head was held rigid by a thick white neck brace. ‘Don’t make the mistakes I make, Han,’ he said to me, a statement I understood had a far wider resonance about his life in general.
‘I’m more concerned about the roses,’ my mother said gently, repeating what she’d said the day before, her hand over his hand: ‘You silly old fool.’ I was surprised to see her gesture. I’d
never heard my parents say they loved each other, never seen them kiss.
As soon as my father’s neck got better, the trips to Newcastle recommenced, once a fortnight. He took the train from King’s Cross, returning the next day or the one after, appearing in the kitchen with his little suitcase. We were noticeably better off. My mother was redecorating. There were new things in the house. Something was going very well up north.
♠
Now I can look back on life at Ashgrove Road with more clarity. The illegal goings-on were interwoven with the everyday domestic. My father often did the ironing, standing with a pile of clothes, watching the television as he worked his way through them. But now and then, instead of clothes, he’d be ironing a square of cellophane around a deck of cards he’d marked, to make them appear brand new and still wrapped. When Sam and I were very young, everything was kept secret, so if we were playing in the garden he’d be upstairs loading dice in the back bedroom, or he’d wait until we were out to mark a deck of cards for the next night’s game. As I grew older I saw more, perhaps because I was more observant, or perhaps he was just less concerned. Perhaps he had worried that a younger child might accidentally blab about what they’d seen.
I remember another failed mission, like the one to Prague, when my father was supposed to fly to New York. I didn’t know it then, but he was planning to carry back a suitcase full of cannabis. I assumed he was going to play cards. All I saw was my mother’s fury. ‘What good are you to me locked up?’ she shouted at him, tears springing to her eyes. And late in the night, I heard him knocking around downstairs. I came down to find him at the table, smoking a roll-up, the ashtray brimming with his crumpled butts.
In the morning, he stood at the front door. ‘See you in a few days,’ he said.
‘If I’m unlucky,’ my mother said.
It was a Saturday and I had ballet. She dropped me off and picked me up. When we came home, he was making tea in the kitchen.
‘How far did you get?’ she asked.
‘Halfway to Heathrow.’ He laughed, and put his arm around her. ‘Your old man lost his nerve.’
Then there was the time the two Americans came to stay. They dealt in emeralds, they said. Emerald dealers? Bloody emerald thieves, more like, my mother said. Their names were Jed and Spike. I was small, but I remember them hazily. Jed was tall with a big Afro. They wore flash clothes – flared suits, thick gold rings and heavy chains at their necks. Spike had a fur waistcoat. The house was full of the scent of strong cologne.
My father had met them at a poker game in Paris. Six months later they were on the phone, coming to stay. It was meant to be three days, my mother said, not three bloody weeks. According to her they were lazy, expecting her to cook them dinner, clean up after them and make their beds. Jed lingered too long in whichever room she was in, constantly asking her questions – what were her favourite flowers, her favourite food, her favourite perfume? ‘They’ve got to go,’ she told my father. ‘As soon as possible. Like today!’
But nothing was that simple. Apparently my father had set a job up for them, to earn them some money to move on – delivering an important package for an Indian friend of his, but something had gone wrong. My mother and I came home one day to find the Americans gone, but there was a big hole in the garden, right in the middle of the lawn. It was deep and narrow, the size of a grave. My father was filling it in. ‘What on earth’s been going on?’ my mother asked.
It turned out that the important package was a Mini, the panels of which were packed with top-quality hashish. It was parked on a side street in Hamburg, waiting to be driven to London. The Indian had been keen when my father had suggested the two Americans for the job, but had been put off when he met them. He didn’t trust them. He was meant to come to our house a week later to give them plane tickets and directions, but arrived an hour late, full of excuses and without the tickets. Jed disappeared from the room, gone for ages as the chat became more stilted, the excuses running out. Finally, my father went to see where Jed was, and found him in the back garden, digging the earth up with my mother’s spade.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, and Jed had leant conspiratorially towards him, a sheen of sweat on his brow.
‘Keep that fucker there,’ he whispered. ‘I’m going to shoot him dead and bury him.’ He patted a gun-size lump in his jacket.
My father relayed the story with great relish as my mother’s eyes bulged.
‘I had to stall him,’ he said. ‘And thankfully Mr Singh had let himself out. Anyway, they’ve gone to Manchester. Probably to rob a bank. We’re lucky no one’s dead.’
‘Just fill this bloody hole in,’ my mother said. ‘And never again, you hear me?’
♥
I came downstairs in my school uniform one morning to find a commotion in front of the house. My father had just arrived home from Newcastle, driving all night in a bright yellow Triumph with a black roof. It was a gift for my mother. She had taken her test years ago, but hadn’t driven in decades. Now she was going to have to, and no one was going to miss her in that car. She was standing on the path with a tea towel in her hands while my father showed the car off to Irish Bridget. ‘Well she’s a beaut for sure,’ Bridget said, nodding. ‘What do you think, Betty? I wish Dick would buy me a car. No chance of that!’ Her laugh turned into a hacking smoker’s cough.
‘It’s only done ten thousand,’ my father said to my mother. ‘She drives beautifully.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘I drove all night to wake you up with a surprise.’
‘It’s lovely,’ my mother said. ‘A real surprise.’ She opened the driver’s door and shut it again. ‘I better go in and get the kids off.’
She passed me in the hall. ‘What do I want with a bloody car?’ she said. She didn’t require an answer. ‘Oh I could bloody kill him.’ I could hear my father outside, still talking to Bridget.
‘Bright yellow,’ he was saying. ‘I knew she’d love it.’
♣
The next time he came back from Newcastle, my mother, Sam and I were eating dinner in front of the television. It was a documentary about death row. He popped his head round the door. ‘Evening,’ he said cheerfully.
‘Oh, hello,’ my mother said. ‘Didn’t think you’d be back tonight.’ The yellow Triumph was still parked on the drive, waiting to be driven.
He rummaged in the pocket of his suede jacket, pulling out an envelope and dramatically slapping it on the coffee table. ‘Who’s going to open it?’ he asked, looking from one to the other. Sam was slouched in his armchair, his legs spread. He craned his neck to look past my father at the TV. My mother looked worried. Suddenly I felt sorry for my father.
‘I will!’ I said brightly, leaning over for the envelope. I picked it up, unpeeled the flap and pulled the papers inside out. It took me a while to realise what I was looking at.
‘It’s tickets to Jamaica!’ I said. I was holding four plane tickets. The summer holidays were only two weeks away.
‘It’s bloody not,’ my mother said. ‘Is it?’ Her eyebrows were raised.
‘We going to Jamaica?’ Sam looked up.
‘Yes we are,’ my father said emphatically. ‘For the whole of August. What do you think?’ None of us said anything. We were shocked. He rubbed his hand through his hair. He looked sad.
‘I need to go home,’ he said.
8
1941
‘The only way forward is for the workers to organise!’
The man’s voice was loud on the stage. The spotlight shone on him. He had a hollow face, light skin, a thin moustache. The rest of the hall was in half-darkness, humid and thick with cigarette smoke. ‘We must throw off the shackles of the colonial rule that has divided Jamaica for too long,’ he continued. ‘We must raise confidence. We must engage in the great task of persuading our fellow Jamaicans that we are not preordained to perpetual inferiority. We are a nation capable of administering our own affairs!’ There were murmurs of agreement all around. Then he
spoke more slowly, emphasising each word, moving his hands with his speech. ‘We must organise. We must work together. We must find the self-determination to build a more prosperous future for all the people.’
‘Yes!’ someone called out from the back. ‘Yes!’ Loud applause. The lights came on overhead. There was a big crowd in the theatre – students, union members, representatives of workers’ groups. The boy sat at the back. They’d listened for an hour to speeches on the need for Jamaica to govern itself, universal suffrage and the increasing power of the People’s National Party and BITU, the trade union led by Alexander Bustamante.
As the audience dispersed, the boy made his way to the front, where the speaker stood near to the stage with the three other party men. His name was Thomas Reid. He was a leading trade unionist and Marxist and the boy admired him greatly, had come to hear him speak for weeks now, in awe of his convictions and the articulacy with which he expressed them. The group turned towards the boy as he held out his hand to Reid, nervous as he spoke: ‘That was a brilliant speech,’ he said. ‘I’m from Yallahs, St Thomas. I want to get involved. What can I do?’ The men took the boy in. He was sixteen now. Tall. A handsome, determined face.
‘Welcome, comrade,’ Thomas Reid replied. ‘I’ve seen your face before. Good to see you again.’ He introduced the other men, who nodded to the boy. ‘What can you do?’ he continued, lighting a cigarette, exhaling. ‘Keep coming to these gatherings. That’s the first thing. There’s a big meeting coming up at the racecourse. Bustamante will be speaking. Spread the word about it. What else?’ he looked to the other men.
‘The union groups need people to go door to door,’ said the smallest of them, ‘to get the workers on board, politicise the people. Whose children are at school? Who has water? Who has light? The war is making things worse. People must realise we need change.’