by Nina Allan
Anything else, including Janet, seemed a waste of time.
He supposed that made him an arsehole but he didn’t care. Janet thought he was having an affair and he let her believe it. It seemed simpler, somehow. Less painful than the thought of trying to tell her the truth.
~*~
He spent the journey down to Hastings reading some of the stories in Christy Peller’s collection. The longest story was called ‘Allegra’, and was about a ballet dancer who left her home on the Kent coast to become a soloist with a modern dance company somewhere in Scotland. The world of the story was familiar in some ways, but it was also strange. Electricity was rationed. Most people had gone back to writing letters or talking on the telephone because the internet was restricted or unreliable. The dancer, who was called Allegra, became obsessed with a man who kept turning up at the theatre to see her dance. The man’s name was Caton. He sat in the same seat each night and left flowers for her at the stage door but could never pluck up the courage to actually speak to her. Competition within the dance company was fierce, and Allegra developed an eating disorder, something like anorexia, Alex supposed, but it wasn’t named. One night after leaving the theatre Allegra fainted in the street. Caton called an ambulance and waited with her until it arrived, then disappeared forever into the night.
Was Caton meant to be Allegra’s guardian angel? Alex thought that could be one explanation, although the story worked well enough just as a story. Christy Peller described the events of the story in some detail but didn’t explain them. For Alex, the story had the pent-up solemnity of a black-and-white photograph. He thought it was good, but he also felt frustrated because he wanted to understand more about what had happened.
Allegra was supposed to be Linda, that was obvious. The thing that impressed Alex most about the story was the way Christy seemed able to write convincingly about the ordinary everyday life of a dancer in a modern ballet company. On the whole, people tended to believe that because dancers’ bodies were slender they were also frail. Christy Peller wrote of Allegra’s Achilles tendons stretched taut as steel wires, her toes concussed from the impact of a difficult landing.
She spoke of the blood seeping out from beneath her toenails, darkening the pale pink of her pointe shoes, unfurling slowly along the threads of silk like the curlicued, perfumed petals of night scented stock.
Alex liked especially Christy’s use of the word ‘concussed’.
~*~
He could have taken a taxi to the B&B but decided to walk. He took the long way round, along the sea front. It was windy but the temperature of the air was pleasantly mild. Monster gulls swooped and cried and mocked him from the rooftops. The gulls in Hastings were huge, vicious as dive bombers, he remembered that. Give them the chance and they’d steal the fish and chips right out of your hands.
The B&B was called Church View. The woman who opened the door to him seemed diffident and vaguely nervous, as if she had forgotten what exactly she was supposed to be doing there. Alex noticed there were two buttons missing from her cardigan.
The room she showed him to, though, was spotlessly clean.
“Mr Abeyemi, isn’t it?” she said. “Are you here on holiday?”
“Sort of,” Alex said, replying to both questions simultaneously. He felt the surprise he always still felt when someone made a reasonable attempt at getting his name right. He was pleased to find that his room was at the top of the building, away from the noise of the road and overlooking the back garden. The garden was crammed with pink hydrangeas and an enormous concrete bird bath in the shape of a clam shell.
“I’m Trudi,” the woman said. “I’m just downstairs if you need anything.” She backed away from him and out of the room, smiling her nervous smile before edging away along the landing. Alex found himself liking her, she seemed to share his own bewilderment at the way life was progressing. Once she’d gone he closed the door and crossed the room again to the window. At this distance the grassy flank of the East Hill was as smooth and unblemished as the green baize covering a card table. The sea sparkled at its eastern edge, brilliant as rhinestones. The view across the East Hill and towards the shoreline was, Alex supposed, what the temporary residents of Church View mostly paid their money for, that comforting closeness to their pasts as they were embodied in all those things relating to the English seaside – the fish and chip shops, the postcards on spin racks, the amusement arcades and pony rides, that whole amiable rambunctiousness that was not quite innocence and yet posed as such. Such cheeky, dirty-kneed non-culpability you would be churlish if you didn’t believe it was at least harmless.
Even as a child, Alex had never been able to understand what made the tourists come here. He remembered the coaches pulling up, the newly released grandmothers, the pale-skinned fathers-to-be shuffling about in chilly confusion on the tarmac before sidling off towards the fast food outlets and the souvenir shops. He remembered most of all the constant, overcast loneliness of the feeling that he did not belong here.
He had left the town behind long ago, and he wasn’t altogether surprised when his parents left, too. It was as if the two decades they’d spent here were an aberration, a mistake that took a long time correcting but a mistake nonetheless.
It was strange, he thought. He’d never spoken about the town to anyone, not even to Janet.
~*~
He had lunch at a pub in the Old Town, then decided he would go and have a look at Christy Peller’s house on Rotherfield Avenue. Hidden away at the top of West Hill, the street was tricky to find unless you knew where to look. At the top of Croft Road a right turn led him into Bembrook Road. Tracy Chadwick, Alex remembered, had lived on Bembrook Road, Tracy Chadwick, who had been persecuted for having what his tormentors falsely believed was exclusively a girl’s name, and who as a result had seemed determined to make Alex Adeyemi suffer even harder. Alex liked books, wore glasses, and was no good at football, so he was an easy target. Being the only black kid in the class was the icing on the cake. Some of the parents at least seemed embarrassed by that particular brand of name-calling. They made moves to rein it in, even if they couldn’t be bothered to stamp it out entirely.
For some of the name-callers this only gave the forbidden words and phrases a greater allure.
Nigger
Nignog
Monkeynuts
Ape features
Black bastard
Idi Amin
Alex remembered one kid had called him a black-arsed eunuch. He had to look eunuch up in the dictionary and when he found out what it meant he felt confused and ashamed. He recognised the power of the insult, which seemed greater than the ordinary kind because he did not understand how it might apply to him.
For the minority of kids who feared the thick ears and the bawlings-out that might result from the illicit use of such disgraced currency there were plenty of other, less contentious insults they could choose from: specky, four-eyes, spod, dork, geek, spaz, faggot, virgin. Alex kept his parents in the dark as much as he could about the bullying. Once though, when Wayne Baker called him nigger right there on the street in front of his father, he saw in David Adeyemi’s eyes along with the anger some of the fear and shame that always twisted his own guts when he heard such things. A fierce heat rose in his cheeks and for the rest of the walk home he could not look at his father.
He wished he’d chosen some other road for them to walk down.
Alex’s parents were both teachers. They met at the South Bank Polytechnic in the London borough of Southwark. His father David was a Londoner by birth, his mother Marielle came over from Lagos on a scholarship. After graduating they left London for Hastings, on the south coast, because housing was cheaper there and because teachers of maths and physics were in short supply. Alex remembered summers from his early childhood, long weeks spent visiting relatives in Lagos and further inland at Ibadan. He remembered unrelenting heat and the shrieking of bush crickets, a rattan linen chest that was big enough to hide inside, his agonising boyhood crush o
n his cousin Bella. Then there was a period of about six years, when his father could only get supply work and money was tight. The summer trips to Nigeria were postponed indefinitely. When his mother got made up to head of department things became easier again but Alex now found himself reluctant to accompany his parents on their resumed summer pilgrimages. He was in the sixth form by then anyway, so it was easy to fall back on his studies as a reason for not going. But the fact was he was confused by his dual identity.
No one in college called him nigger but there were still dozens of little ways he felt he stood out, not because of the colour of his skin, but because of the insults he’d been subjected to because of it.
He no longer knew how to trust people. He expected trouble, even when there was none. He could never decide which race he properly belonged to.
In Nigeria he felt painfully shy, painfully English. Photographs of Bella sent to them by the Lagos Adeyemis revealed a young woman glowing with confidence and vigour, a trainee hotel manager in Abuja with a smile that could have brought that city’s maelstrom of traffic to a screeching standstill. Alex remembered the adoring little notes he used to write to her with cheek-flaming chagrin. He wondered if Bella remembered his one and only, fumblingly tentative attempt to kiss her. He hoped she did not.
She probably hasn’t thought of me in years, Alex thought. She most likely doesn’t even remember my name. The red dust of Lagos, the cloying heat, dense with the scents of tamarind and mango, the woven rush matting, soft beneath his bare feet, of the long, white-painted rooms of his aunt’s house, Aunt Clo herself, with her coarse, braying laugh and her wickedly ribald, devoutly ironic sense of humour. These things seemed out of his reach, forbidden to him just as true belonging to England was forbidden. He longed for a sense of home, for one of these places to claim him as its own. He supposed that a part of it at least was his fault, that he was secretly unwilling to surrender himself to either.
He honestly couldn’t say why this was. The idea that his disjuncture had anything to do with his being black annoyed him intensely, as if some kid older than himself, the kind of smug bastard who did well in athletics as well as mathematics, had pushed ahead of him in the queue for alienation, claiming the credit for something Alex had worked hard to achieve with no help from anyone.
His encounters with racism made him feel sick. He wanted to deny that the world contained such aberrations. The fact that he could not made him feel ashamed, embarrassed for a world that could fall for such an obvious con.
He had no idea if the individuals who called him nignog or golliwog had ever heard of the slave trade or the Biafran war. He hoped in a way that they had not. If they knew about such things and still didn’t give a shit he’d have to feel embarrassed for them too, as well as hating their guts, and these were feelings he didn’t want to find space for.
By the time he went away to college he had accepted his emotional as well as his racial isolation as a part of himself, like his too-narrow shoulders and general uselessness at football, something he could do nothing about but that needn’t screw up his life unless he let it.
It was only when Leonie was born that he began to worry. He could not help remembering, then, the way he’d been treated by his peers. The thought that Leonie might have to suffer a similar humiliation made him lose sleep at night, even though he knew Leonie would be growing up in London and at the beginning of a whole new century. Things had always been different in London, but the whole country was changing now in any case, not right in its mind yet exactly but at least not as insane as it had been.
He wasn’t sure how Janet would react when he first began reading to Leonie from a book he’d found in Foyles bookshop, on the Charing Cross Road, a volume of Yoruba fairy tales in their original language. He knew no more of the Yoruba language than Leonie did, but that was the point of it, they could learn together, it would be fun.
“Are you okay with this?” he said to Janet. She looked at him as if he were crazy, which perhaps he was.
“Of course I’m okay with it,” she said. “What did you think, that I would want to deny our daughter access to her cultural heritage? How can you even ask me that?”
Janet seemed more comfortable with the thought of Leonie’s cultural heritage than he was. But what was that cultural heritage exactly? Leonie was different from him in so many ways. She had been different from the start, and if she was even vaguely bothered by the things that tormented him while he was growing up there was no outward sign of it.
Leonie had the disconcerting habit of tackling problems head on. If something interested or disturbed her she would ask a question. When they travelled to Inverness to visit her grandparents it had been all questions. It was after their trip to Scotland that Leonie first asked him if she was really Nigerian or really English.
Alex knew it would be wrong to do anything except encourage her in her search for answers, but still he felt scared for her. Standing in Bembrook Road, thinking about Tracy Chadwick – where was he now? On remand, most likely, or else working behind the bar in some dive in St Leonards – he couldn’t help asking himself, as he asked himself daily, if he was doing everything he could to keep his daughter safe.
Safe from what, exactly, he didn’t know. Alex believed that knowledge was power – it was what he lived by – but he knew also that things could change around you in an instant, and that when they did it was always those who were different that were made to suffer.
The houses on Bembrook Road were a mixture of 1950s council semis and newer three-storey townhouses and blocks of low-rise flats. Rotherfield Avenue jutted out at right angles from the junction of Bembrook Road and Egremont Place, a single row of rather attractive 1920s terraces. The houses had small front gardens, variously decorated with terracotta planters and overgrown forsythia bushes. The pavement in front of the terrace was uneven and sloping, with miniature thickets of groundsel and dock leaves sprouting thickly between the cracks. There was also a back access, a strip of potholed tarmac where people could park their cars or stow their bicycles.
It was an odd little road, down at heel, Alex thought, yet saved from being depressing through the grand sweep of its vista over school playing fields and, beyond them, Castle Meadow. In spite of its proximity to Bembrook Road and its haul of bad memories, Alex found he could understand why Christy Peller had chosen to live there. He knew already which house was hers – the last in the terrace. He gazed down the hill towards it, wondering if she was in, wondering how she might react if he were to turn up unannounced. For the first time, he felt genuinely curious about her, Christy Peller as a person, and not just as a connection with her older brother.
He spent the rest of the afternoon walking the cliff path. As he made his way back to the B&B, he felt a momentary but genuine sadness that he had never brought Janet here. Janet, he felt certain, would have liked the town. Janet’s innate and generous capacity for liking things had always been one of the characteristics that had most attracted him. He went upstairs to his room and made himself a cup of instant coffee in the plain white mug provided for that purpose. The house felt silent around him, and Alex wondered if he might be the only guest staying there.
He ate dinner in the same pub in the Old Town where he’d had lunch then returned to his room at the B&B and read the remaining stories in Christy Peller’s collection. They were all similarly odd. ‘At the Cedars Hotel’ recounted the final days an old piano teacher dying in Aberystwyth in the off-season. ‘The Raincoat’ was about a child who became lost at a funfair and saved the life of a pederast. ‘Dogs’ told the story of a woman who was taking part in a scientific experiment. As with the electricity rationing in ‘Allegra’, there was something about each of the stories that seemed to place it beyond the reach of ordinary time. The old woman in ‘At the Cedars Hotel’ reminisced about Queen Victoria as if she were still on the throne, and yet the peculiar nephew who came to visit her used a laptop computer and a mobile phone. In ‘Dogs’, the viewpoint ch
aracter had a computer chip implanted into her brain that helped her communicate with her deaf-blind daughter, yet the mayor of London was still Ken Livingstone, and the nurses at the hospital where the operation was performed talked about the 7/7 tube bombings as if they’d only just happened. Parts of the stories reminded Alex of the science fiction he had enjoyed as a teenager, novels by Samuel Delany and Philip K. Dick, but he’d more or less given up reading science fiction when he discovered George Orwell’s essays, and the writings of Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe.
By the time he finished reading the book it was after midnight. He washed in the tiny bathroom then went to bed. He fell asleep almost at once, only to wake suddenly less than an hour later, filled with the unsettling conviction that there was someone in the room with him. He could not get rid of the idea that the person was Derek Peller. He got up to take a piss, mostly as an excuse to switch on the light. There was no one in the room, nor in the bathroom, nor was there anyone hiding in the wardrobe or in the cupboard-sized shower cubicle. He rinsed his hands under the cold tap and went back to bed.
He wondered if it was Christy Peller’s book that had made him jumpy, though it was more logical to suppose his anxiety over Peller was natural, that it would be foolish to revisit old haunts without being prepared to encounter a ghost or two.
He remembered how Peller had come up to him in the street, stepping quickly like he meant business, then his fists, two fierce blows, one uppercut to the chin and one to the stomach. The pain had been sickening but the shock was worse, the realisation that something like this could happen to anyone, on any street, at any time.
Alex knew how it felt to be thumped, to be knocked down in the school playground, to have the contents of his duffel bag redistributed over a wide area. He had learned these things a long time ago, from the likes of Tracy Chadwick and his friends. Derek Peller though, that was different. Alex understood at once that it was him Peller hated, not his blackness or even his nerdiness. Peller was hateful but he had never been stupid, and for someone like Peller, simple bigotry was too general, too unthinking, too much like someone else’s point of view. Peller would have despised slogans, Alex realised, almost as much as Alex despised them himself.