Sunday morning, Mama’s preparing lunch ahead of time. Sweet-pea paella and barbecue chicken. Mango and cherry trifle for dessert. She pads about the flat, almost soundless, words gathered inside her mind like a fist. She’s not letting anything out. When she’s finished with the meal, she comes in to wake me, draws aside the curtains.
‘Morning, sweetness,’ she whispers, leaning over me. ‘Beautiful day! May His name be praised!’ Mama spreads her palms upwards, like a vessel waiting to be filled with holy light. I pull myself up into a sitting position and we both close our eyes.
‘Dear Lord,’ she begins. ‘You’ve seen fit to bring Louis to another day …’
In an hour or so, we’re out the door. Mr Ambrose wheels me into his car. His wife, Madeline, waves. Mama squeezes in. It’s a people carrier – you see them everywhere these days. The Ambroses have had theirs for years, though. They’re always quick to point that out.
‘Morning, Louis dearest,’ Mrs Ambrose swivels round and smiles. I could be thirteen for all she knows, or ninety-three. She sees me, but doesn’t see, if you know what I mean. I’m not whole, complete to her.
‘Just look at the sunshine this morning,’ she announces.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ That’s Mama. She claps her hands. ‘Glory be! Winter last too long this year.’
We’re setting off in the buggy, as Mr Ambrose calls it, playing Happy Families.
‘Mm, hmm,’ Mr Ambrose feels compelled to join in. ‘Spring’s just around the corner.’
‘Buds are showing,’ I mumble, for something to say. I point to trees. There’s a split second of silence.
‘Oh, yes!’ Mrs Ambrose exclaims. ‘So they are.’ Everyone looks.
There’s a scrum at the entrance to the church. We’re a bit late. Mama’s trying not to appear too anxious, but she’d just as soon rugby tackle the milling stragglers at the door in order to secure good seats. As it is, there’s a prime spot not too far from the pulpit, just where Mama likes to sit. As we move closer, a family – two adolescent boys, an older girl and their parents – is trying to come to a decision: our potential seats or the pew on the other side of the aisle? We’re nearly there, but they’re still wavering. Mama unfurls my scarf in one swift movement, folds it up into a ball and hurls it. It whistles through the air and lands just where we want to sit. Touch down.
‘’Scuse me,’ she swerves in between the ditherers like nothing’s happened. Mr and Mrs Ambrose squeeze past her so she can sit next to me in the aisle. The seats on the other side are occupied now. The family stands there floundering. ‘Over there!’ Mama points them in the direction of spare seats in the corner, at the back of the building. All sweetness and light. I look away.
Mama sits still and closes her eyes for a moment. Then she spins round to scan the congregation. She gives a wave. Then she mouths ‘Hello’. A wave to another person. A laugh. There’s Mrs Avery, Celeste Williams and Coretta Pascal. Hazel Carter, Mrs Dixit and her mouse of a husband. ‘Lunch?’ she’s calling out to Esme Severin, who’s sitting next to Sandrine Hoyte and Colette Joly. So many widows, women left alone.
Papa left one August on a Saturday night. Mama always said it wasn’t my fault. He was tempted by the devil and he just couldn’t say no. Spirit was weak. She didn’t say this as soon as he left. Not for a long time after that. There were years when she was inconsolable. Everything she knew, everything familiar had been shaken: the touch of him in the middle of the night, the certainty that wherever she was, whatever was happening to her or around her, she could close her eyes and think of him, an amulet. Someone to rely on. All gone.
But she found someone else, eventually, and she never let go. ‘Bride of Christ,’ she says sometimes. ‘Jesus is all you need in this world.’
‘Do you know where you’re going to?’ the preacher’s yelling. I wasn’t listening. He’s caught me out. Now he’s pointing at me. ‘Do you know where you’ve just come from?’ Why is he staring? I want to turn away from his gaze. Maybe he’s looking at someone else; his eyes are a bit skewed, lopsided. Instead, I stare at a point just above his right ear so it appears I’m looking at him. That I’m listening and I’m not afraid. But the words fly out of him and I only see his mouth making shapes.
People are singing and clapping. Everyone’s up on their feet, jumping, swaying. Coretta Pascal is yelling ‘Hallelujah!’ over and over again. The preacher’s singing and half-preaching. The pulpit’s rocking. Mama’s bellowing to one side of me, some women are doing the jitterbug in the aisle. I’m looking up at everyone, losing my breath. All the air is emptying out of me. All that movement and thunder. Losing control. The pent-up frustration, the disappointment, the heartache, the hope. Everything is sweet release.
Esme, Coretta and Sandrine join us for lunch afterwards. Everyone’s buzzing from the service. Mama’s like a skillet of corn kernels on a stove.
‘More rice anyone? Juice? Sandy, eat up you skinny little thing. S’all got to go.’
When everyone’s eaten more than they can manage, Mama whips the trifle under their noses. Coretta groans like a woman in labour. Esme’s eyes light up. ‘Just a little bit,’ she says, fingers pinching the air.
‘Louis?’ Mama asks. I nod.
‘Boy sure like his food,’ Coretta says.
‘Amen!’ That’s Sandrine and Mama in unison.
The ladies retire to the living room. I can hear the gentle chorus of their voices from my bed. Sundays always tire me out. Not that I’m expending extra energy. It’s simply exhausting to watch other people doing so, getting high on the atmosphere. Sometimes I wonder about this life of observation.
I can’t hear what they’re saying, but Esme’s cackle identifies her. They’re tired too. Everything is muted now, slowing down, calm. I think of Rosa in the supermarket. She turns to me and smiles. She licks her lips, once, then again in slow motion. She lifts her fingertips to her warm brown throat and strokes gently, then lowers them. That’s when I switch off. Mama’s in the next room, after all.
Wednesday morning, I visit Angus at the hospital.
‘Time for more punishment,’ he smirks.
That’s what I used to say in the beginning, when my limbs wouldn’t work. The arms flagging, my chest collapsing, the useless legs. I saw Angus as the personification of evil. I wanted to be left alone with my own catastrophe. There was no one else to blame.
Mama kept quoting from the Bible. I wanted to smash the Good Book in her face. There were things I had never said, that I could never say to her now. There was no escape. I thought of Papa, wherever he was in the world. I wanted him to suffer. To be filled with torment for leaving her, for leaving me with her.
I raise my arms and Angus loops his own around me, lifts me gently on my legs. I fold into him and he half carries me to the table. We’re working on surface to wheelchair mobility as I’m not so good at that. Table to wheelchair, bed to wheel-chair; I usually end up flinging myself in an untidy motion, flapping through the air.
‘There’s an art to this,’ Angus says, and I believe him. Most times. ‘A swinging motion, but swift. This time try for a little more control, okay?’
He shows me how it’s done himself even though we’ve gone through this before. I try, but it’s a poor parody.
‘Perhaps we should do some more work on your arms,’ he muses. It’s always ‘we’. Never ‘you’ on your own. We’re doing this in tandem.
We go through the movements repeatedly until he’s satisfied. The real work, the practice, I do at home. He illustrates the exercises I must do to increase strength. To stop the trembling in my arms when the pressure overwhelms. Then he lifts me from the table, enveloping me in his grip. His breath pours out of him in hot waves. There’s a hint of something – Saint Laurent, Valentino? – I can’t tell which. I think, This is a place I could remain for ever – between the table and the wheelchair, in the scented garden of his embrace.
I wheel out to Mama who’s sitting in the cafeteria, poring over the Express.
I approach slowly, from an angle so she can’t see me. I want to guess what’s in her head. I can make out a distant tune. ‘At the Name of Jesus’? ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness’? And then it clicks.
‘Rock of Ages!’ I call out.
‘Oh … Louis!’ Her hands fly to her chest. I’ve startled her, but not unpleasantly. Her face, the way it looks then – all the hurt emptied out, just surprise and happiness now that I’m back, someone familiar is here – makes everything worthwhile.
We’re in the food aisles again, so it must be Friday night. No sign yet of Rosa, but we’re still near the beginning. We have the whole evening to track her down. Mama thinks I like to linger over the purchases, but really, there’s so much else on offer here. There’s a woman in a fake-fur top, combat trousers, running shoes. She’s grazing in fruit and vegetables. Her face screams, Somebody look at me! It’s Friday night and I’m alone. I am looking, but she’s not interested. I’m a whole other country to her. Too much geography to learn. Someone else – she looks like a housewife – is staring at me, but not in the way I’d like: sheer, dumb fascination, without a hint of a conscience.
Glances ricochet around the supermarket as if there’s a battle going on. Hungry eyes eat each other. This is gastronomic war. I’m on the sidelines, watching everything. An international observer with no allegiances.
Sometimes I strip away the singing, the church, everything that fills my life. I think of a life without Mama. I know she’s getting old. I look at it all without the dressing, the accoutrements and I know that I’m alone. This isn’t so much frightening as it is bewildering. I think, How did I get to this place? When did this swath of desolation cut through my life? Mama says the way of the Lord is an oasis in the desert of this world, but I don’t see things so clearly. I’m not strong the way she is. Sometimes I see a parched road stretching ahead of me, for ever. I’m trying, but I haven’t got her faith, the way it’s gripped her and not let go.
We double back for carrot cake mix. Mama’s planning ahead for Sunday lunch. We’ve covered all the floor space now and still no sign of Rosa. I’d ask one of the assistants, but not with Mama by my side.
I think of my disappointment now that Rosa isn’t here. I wonder where she is, what she’s doing. Is there someone in her life? I gather up all the kernels of her existence in my mind: her easy smile, the way her hands rest upon her hips, her breasts huddled within that sour uniform. Her strawberry lips. Then I remember, at night, the early morning, when the will is weak. His face appears and it’s no longer Rosa I’m thinking of. I see his strong arms, the hollow of his neck, the suck of his cheeks when he begins to speak. His easy voice. Reassurance. Musk. And for a moment, here in the aisles, there is nothing in this world that can wipe away that image. Not Mama or a heavenly choir. Not Rosa and her smile. I think of him, Angus, and I see my limbs moving of their own accord, leaving behind the singlet of skin, the stagnant flesh, the useless bones. I get the strangest feeling; my swelling chest, my cartoon heart leaping out of me. And almost as soon as I’m in this state, something gives. I cut it out. It’s as easy as tearing out a page from a book; pinch the edge of it and pull hard.
There’s no carrot cake mix, so Mama plumps for chocolate fudge instead. It makes no difference to me – food is food – but Mama thinks it’s second best.
‘We could make our own,’ she ponders.
‘Chocolate’s fine, Mama,’ I sigh. ‘Let’s go.’
She glances down at me. It’s not often I’m worn out. Something’s drawn out of me like wind from a sail. But I’m not really tired. I would just like to lie down on my own for a while. Mama raises a finger to her lips and squints. I know what’s coming next: something for courage. I can see her racing through her mind’s index. Something for the night, for the week, for a lifetime ahead.
She tosses the cake mix into the trolley and we steer towards the tills. All around us, the bright lights dazzle. Shoppers skate and slide into each other’s sights. Circling, almost touching, gliding on. But we don’t care. We’re moving slowly now. Mama’s singing, I’m humming – Onward Christian Soldiers – in harmony, all the way along the aisle.
THE LONG WAY HOME
WE TAKE HIM to Extra Maths on Saturday mornings because he’s not so good in class. In the car on the way back from Eliza’s, I ask, ‘So, what did you learn today?’ and J says, ‘When two polygons are forced together, without gaps, they te … tessellate,’ without having to think. I believe that’s a sign of progress, although I have no idea what he’s talking about.
We drive to Tesco for the grocery shopping and although the store is teeming at eleven, it provides a chance for us to talk. J is at school in Eastbourne – two hours’ drive from here – so it makes sense for him to board during the week. The drive from school on Friday nights is exhausting for me. It’s different for V, who does alternate Sunday shifts, but I’ve just completed a tough working week, so we’re both, J and I, a bit distant. There’s usually a fight over who gets to listen to what: Jazz FM for me, Radio 1 for the boy. Sometimes we’ll compromise with an audio cassette: an actor reads a book in an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. I used to wonder how they accomplished it – surely it takes longer to capture the essence of a book? Then we borrowed the tape of East of Eden from the library – it’s one of the few novels I have ever completed – and I realised they had omitted large chunks of it. I kept waiting for the part where Steinbeck writes, ‘A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?”’ I always liked that turn of phrase, and also, ‘What way will the world go? How does it end?’ It made me shiver when I read it even though I was in a warm place at the time. I listened hard for that part of the novel, and when the cassette came to an end I felt cheated on behalf of J and anyone else who had ever listened to a book on tape without ever having read the novel itself. The next day I went out and bought the book for J, but up until now he hasn’t so much as broken the spine.
In the supermarket J reads out his mother’s shopping list; he’s memorised the aisles and he knows where everything is. There’s hardly ever any backtracking involved. I pointed out his unusual skill to Eliza one day; it disturbed me, but she claimed it was a good memory aid. Sometimes I test him.
‘Plum tomatoes?’ I say.
‘Aisle 7. On the le … le … le … left-hand side. At the bo … bottom.’
We’ll go and look and sure enough, most times, the boy’s right. If there’s a tasting imminent, J usually hovers close by; it doesn’t matter what’s on offer so long as it’s free and edible. He discovered a love of anchovies one Saturday, and a hatred of Emmenthal cheese only last week, both of which struck me as peculiar. Sometimes we’ll bump into friends, or people who live along our street to whom we hardly speak. I’ll nod and smile and maybe say ‘Hello’, often wondering when J’s stammer will disappear. It’s much better than it used to be; there was a stage when he could not complete a sentence without floundering. It happens less frequently now, but often enough for me to worry whether I’m throwing the money for speech therapy down the drain.
‘Dad, Amaretti biscuits!’ he announces. That’s today’s tasting. We swing the trolley round for free food. I’ll go first, then J, then I’ll return for J’s sake. The staff are less likely to object when it isn’t a child. J has no problem with ‘Amaretti’, I notice. Why stumble on an unadorned word like ‘left’ or ‘right’ when ‘Amaretti’ is standing bolt upright, an upended paving slab? Where is the sense in that? Where’s the reasoning?
Once we happened upon Eliza in the supermarket. This was during the school break. This wasn’t a Saturday. We were both surprised to see her there. She didn’t have a thing in her trolley.
‘Hello, J,’ she said to the boy. Her voice leaked out like fog from the ice-cream compartment. ‘I can’t wait.’ She was looking at me.
I thought, What if V were here and not at home awaiting a mail-order delivery? I stared hard at Eliza so she wouldn’t say anything else, then glanced at J who only smiled and s
aid, ‘Hello, Miss Fernandez,’ but her eyes were tight and she seemed ready to spring. There was a moment when no one spoke.
‘Tinned pineapples!’ I half-shouted, and J shouted back, ‘Aisle 10! On the right! In the middle!’ And I thanked God for the minor mercy he didn’t start stammering again. I sent him to fetch two unwanted tins of fruit, while Eliza announced she needed me badly.
‘I need you too,’ I said, which was the truth. ‘But we have to be careful; the supermarket is not the place to meet.’
She fled, abandoning the empty trolley in the aisle, while J ran back with the two tins, beaming, wondering where his maths tutor had gone. I really loved him then, the security of him. The innocence. My hands were shaking.
I was concerned Eliza might still be in the building. Would she pop up in ready-made meals or pet foods? She owns a dachshund, after all. But we didn’t see her again until the next maths lesson and I had already visited her on my own by then.
Eliza and I meet once or twice a week in the late afternoon or on my way back from work. I drive quite a bit; I’m in telecommunications, on the sales side of things. Often we go to her place, but if we want a change of routine we might meet earlier in the West End for a meal or a matinée. She likes her dramas, Eliza, films and the occasional musical. The King and I was a favourite, and Art with the American cast, although we didn’t laugh along with everyone else. I took it far too seriously, and I think Eliza did too. My only explanation for this is that she grew up in Seville, while I spent my formative years in Ibadan. Perhaps something’s lost in translation. I don’t know. Maybe we’re humourless.
A Life Elsewhere Page 13