A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  ‘Hello,’ Joseph said. He took the man’s hand and shook it. ‘How are you?’ He couldn’t think of anything else to say. His mind went back to the reason for the man’s presence. Perhaps he’d been at the festival and was eager to meet privately with the black director from England. Joseph smiled, trying to communicate the sense of comradeship the man must have been seeking. ‘Were you at the festival today? I’m Joseph Coker.’

  The man smiled back at him.

  ‘I know. I read of you in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘I am George Coker.’

  His English seemed almost perfect, but he spoke slowly, as if struggling to get the words right before he let them go.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Joseph said, amazed at the coincidence. No wonder the guy had come to see him. ‘Same name.’

  George Coker smiled, his lips twisting ironically.

  ‘I know. My mother saw you on BBC World Service television. Your father’s name is Kofi.’

  Joseph grinned. This, he thought, was the closest he’d come to fame.

  ‘He was a student in Russia,’ George continued. ‘Yes?’

  Joseph nodded, remembering. He’d said all that when they interviewed him. At the time he’d wondered whether anyone would be interested.

  ‘Kofi Coker,’ George said slowly. ‘That is my father’s name also.’

  ‘You have got to be kidding me,’ Joseph replied. ‘No offence, man, but this is weird.’

  George frowned, as if trying to understand. Then he smiled again.

  ‘Not weird. This is the same Kofi Coker who is my father, too. This is why I have an English name like you. You are my brother.’

  George had stopped smiling and was staring at him intently, as if trying to gauge the effect of what he’d said. Joseph looked back at him steadily, noting the colour of his eyes, a light greenish brown, and his relaxed pose, left hand in his trouser pocket, the other resting casually on the armchair. Paradoxically it was his visitor’s assurance which steadied Joseph, because it offered him a clue about what was happening. On the previous evening he’d been met at the airport by a thin, middle-aged woman with a twitchy neurotic manner, who described herself as his festival guide. As they drove towards the town she’d given him a rapid tour of its history and geography. At the end she offered him a few warnings, mostly about pickpockets and tricksters, who were, apparently, ‘foreigners, Ukrainians, gypsies, Hungarians. Prague has many rich tourists, so they come here from the East.’ As she said this her eyes glared anxiously at him from behind her horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Be careful.’

  Remembering her intensity, Joseph wondered how she would have reacted to George, but he was also certain that this approach had to be some variation on the kind of scam about which he’d already been warned. George had the assurance of an experienced con man, and it occurred to Joseph that, for this man to survive in this world of whites, where they still treated the dark-skinned gypsies like outcasts, some formidable skills were required. Be careful, he reminded himself. Whatever this guy wanted he’d be tough and smart and probably dangerous.

  ‘I suppose there’re thousands of Kofi Cokers in Ghana. Like in this country they’re probably all named Václav or something like that. You know what I mean?’ George nodded slowly, as if following his words with care. ‘Your father might be named Kofi. He might even have lived in Russia. Sorry to disappoint you, man, but it doesn’t mean it’s the same Kofi.’

  George nodded again.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘This is not easy to believe. For many years my mother believed that my father was in Africa. She wrote to the embassy, and to Ghana. But there was no answer. Then she saw you.’

  Joseph felt himself losing patience. This was some kind of smokescreen, he was certain, but he couldn’t begin to guess what the man was after.

  ‘Bullshit,’ he said tersely. ‘This is bullshit. I appreciate you coming and talking to me. I really do. If you want something, tell me what it is and I’ll say yes or no. But don’t bullshit me, man.’

  George frowned, a shade of anger in his expression.

  ‘No bullshit, mister,’ he said. He took his hand out of his pocket and held it out to Joseph. ‘Look.’

  Joseph took the photograph reluctantly. In that moment he already knew what he would see, and he already knew, somehow, that what George had told him was true.

  ‘What’s this?’

  George shrugged.

  ‘You look.’

  The photograph was faded and creased, but still clear. His father was standing on some kind of bridge with his arm round a woman. She was pretty with long fair hair and she was looking up at his dad with a broad and adoring smile on her face. Joseph brought the photo closer and studied the faces carefully. No mistake about it. He was forty years younger, but Joseph had already seen a few pictures of him at around this age. It was his dad.

  ‘Who is this woman?’ he asked George.

  ‘My mother. Her name is Katya. This was in Moscow.’

  His voice trembled a little, and Joseph avoided looking at him. He turned the photo over. There was a line of writing in Russian letters on the back and a date: 1956.

  ‘Vajlooblenni navzegda. In English,’ George said, pointing, ‘it says true lovers always.’

  Quickly, ignoring George’s hesitation, Joseph thrust the photograph into his hand.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll be back.’

  Without a pause, he turned and walked away. Behind him George said something, but he paid no attention. His head seemed, literally, to be spinning. In his mind the image of his father’s face loomed. Pacing down the corridor to his room, the whirlpool settled for a few seconds and he found himself focusing on the Russian woman who had been nestling next to his dad, and whose features were, oddly, very much like those of the receptionist downstairs. She was prettier, he thought, like his mum had been, and suddenly, it struck him that she also resembled his mother. In his bedroom, in his flat in Kentish Town, there was a framed photograph of his parents in precisely the same pose, arms around each other.

  In the room he sat on the bed, picked up the phone and dialled his father’s number in London. As he did this he checked the time by the electronic clock on the TV set. Seven o’clock in Prague. It would be six in London. Whatever the old man had been doing during the day he’d probably have staggered in by that time. No answer. Joseph let it ring, watching the seconds flash past in a blur of green numerals. Then he slammed the phone down.

  From where he sat he could see the building site at the back of the hotel. They were rebuilding everywhere, he thought idly, even here in Holesovice, outside the central loop of the town. Typically, though, there were no workers in sight, and no signs of activity. He imagined that they must have packed in and gone home to their families, or whatever it was they did during the evening, and as if in response to his thought a sudden blare of music filled the air, blasting effortlessly through the window. He recognised it immediately. George Michael, his voice quavering under the pressure of relentless amplification.

  If George Coker was telling the truth, Joseph thought, there was a great deal he didn’t know about his father – he corrected himself, their father. Would his mother have known, and if she did, why hadn’t she told him before she died?

  Thinking about his mother steadied him, imposing a kind of gloomy calm on his thoughts. There could still be some rational explanation. Indeed, everything George had said could be discounted or explained away, if it hadn’t been for the photograph. They could have picked up the name Kofi from the interview, and perhaps none of this would have happened if he hadn’t talked about his father on television. He hadn’t intended to, but when the interviewer asked him where he’d got the idea for the film, a story about his father had simply popped out.

  There was something about the interviewer, too. She’d had a kind face which smiled easily and a shock of dark brown curls which had just begun to acquire a sprinkle of grey. She had arrived a few minutes late for the preview, but a
t the end, she had introduced herself, taking his hand and complimenting him on ‘a wonderful piece of work’. She gestured. ‘Those men. So much larger than life.’ Something about the men in the film, she said, had touched her deeply.

  Joseph nodded and smiled, feeling the dizzy pleasure which still flooded through him every time this happened. Of course, he’d been lucky in his subjects. The film was no more than a series of interviews with a group of ageing Africans who had lived in Britain shortly after the war, more than fifty years ago. After he had filmed them he found himself thinking that most of them would be dead within the next ten years, but they spoke about their lives with a vitality and charm which seemed to belong to another, more expansive age. Some of them, recounting incidents from their past, made the preview audiences rock with sympathetic laughter. After the first showing a critic from one of the broadsheets had patted him on the back and told him that it would be a hit in the documentary section on the festival circuit.

  The woman at the World Service had used almost precisely the same phrase before the interview, and when the recording started Joseph talked freely and with confidence, eager to please. The film, he told her, had always been somewhere in the back of his mind, because his father had been one of those Africans who had come to Britain shortly after the end of the war as a student. After Ghana achieved independence he had become part of its diplomatic corps and studied in Moscow before eventually returning to Britain. Part of his intention, Joseph said, had been to record and to understand the experiences of men like his father and the environment in which they had lived.

  His interviewer listened with a flattering attention, smiling and nodding from time to time. Afterwards she complimented him again. ‘Great, great. That was really fascinating.’

  At the time he had been too dazzled to remember what he had said. Now he sat running the interview through in his mind, struggling to isolate the information that a listener might have gleaned from it about his background, and about his father’s life. What he remembered best was how much he hadn’t been able to say. This wasn’t because the interview hadn’t been long enough. On the contrary, she kept encouraging him to tell stories about the men and their experiences. At the same time she made it clear that her audience would be bored and alienated if he started to talk about the process by which the film had emerged, or about the pain and rage which it concealed. When people complimented him on the work his head spun with pleasure, but underneath his excitement he sometimes experienced a spurt of churning unease about the meaning of their words.

  The truth was that the first audience who saw a rough cut of the film had received it very differently. These were the men he had interviewed and whose stories he had culled and assembled. He showed it to them in a preview cinema in Soho, and, sitting in the dark it seemed to go down well. They laughed in the right places, and sometimes they shouted with approval when someone made a telling point or told a funny story. Afterwards, as they filed out, most of them shook hands and congratulated him. The only discordant note came when one old man, Mr Mensah, a Ghanaian and a particular friend of his father, held his hand for a moment and gave him a knowing smile. ‘Very clever,’ he said. ‘The whites will love it. You’ll do well.’

  Later on, alone with his father, this was the first question he asked.

  ‘What did Mr Mensah mean by that?’

  Kofi shrugged his shoulders, cutting his eyes sideways at Joseph and away again.

  ‘Mensah is a radical. He’s got his own opinions.’

  In that instant Joseph knew how much his father despised what he had done. His first reaction was anger, then he wondered how to get Kofi to say what was wrong. The problem wasn’t simply that his father would try to spare his feelings. He knew that Kofi and his friends were privately contemptuous of people who were governed by fear of damage to their self-conceit. ‘Most of the people in the world,’ he told Joseph once, ‘have to live with the terror of sudden death for themselves and their children, or famine or torture. Out of my mother’s eleven children I am one of three survivors and I don’t know what happened to the other two. In this country they spend years weeping over a nasty remark, or because they didn’t get enough love.’

  On the occasions when he said such things it was clear that he was also talking about the differences between himself and Joseph’s mother. There was no arguing with Kofi about this. In this respect he was like most of the black people Joseph encountered, regarding the whites and the fuss they made about their emotions as ludicrously soft, self-indulgent; and Joseph already knew that if he confessed to being hurt by the old man’s reaction it would prompt a sarcastic smile.

  ‘I really want to know how they felt about it,’ he told Kofi.

  The handshakes had been sincere enough, but he knew that their praise was not for what they had seen. Instead, it was a compliment on his achievement in wrestling so much from the hands of the whites. Coming from Kofi’s son, a man who was almost one of themselves, it was a matter for congratulations.

  ‘What would they feel about it?’ Kofi said with an undertone of irritability in his voice. ‘It was a nice film.’

  It was the response Joseph had feared. He could question his father all day without getting a direct answer. In comparison his mother had taught him that a direct question was to be answered directly. If someone asked about her actions or her feelings she would tell them, except on the occasions when she said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Sometimes she said, ‘None of your business.’ ‘I can’t be bothered to beat around the bush,’ she would tell Joseph.

  Kofi and his friends found such behaviour irritatingly confrontational and sometimes downright rude. In their world politeness and respect demanded circumspection. To make matters worse, they had all spent most of their lives in countries like Britain, where concealing their deepest feelings and beliefs from the whites had become second nature, an instrument of their survival.

  ‘You didn’t like it,’ Joseph said. ‘I could tell you didn’t.’

  ‘It was okay,’ Kofi replied. Then he relented a little. ‘Maybe it was light. You left some things out.’

  It was Joseph’s turn now to be irritable, but he held his tongue; he knew precisely what his father meant. The lightness and charm of the film was the result of careful selection. Most of it was actually made up of spontaneous fragments, some of them off the cuff remarks or stories incidental to the main drift of the interview. Joseph hadn’t planned it that way. The film had been commissioned as part of a television series about ‘outsiders’ in Britain, but Joseph had been trying to make a version of it for more than a couple of years. In a sense it was the project at which he had been working for nearly two decades, and which had started with a long interview he had conducted with his father as part of a film school exercise. From that point he had believed that the reminiscences of men like Kofi were a sort of hidden history which had to be told. Making it happen was another matter, and it took more than a dozen years, during which he worked as a TV researcher, then a film editor, attending courses in his spare time, and assiduously writing proposals and scripts which were inevitably rejected. It wasn’t until his mother died that her legacy gave him the resources to set up his own company. The company consisted of himself, a computer and a rented office near King’s Cross, but he was able to begin touting for work as an independent producer. The jobs were few and far between, consisting mainly of short segments of film or video for other producers’ programmes, and it had taken a couple of years, but his big break came when he was asked to submit a proposal for one film in the series on outsiders. The offer wouldn’t have been made, he knew, at the time when he started his first job. In those days the largest companies still patted themselves on the back when they hired a black researcher, but attitudes in the industry had changed gradually, and it was now conventional practice, in most of the less prestigious TV series, to make room for at least one black independent.

  On the other hand, he was competing with another doz
en hungry black producers with more or less the same experience, but the passion and detail of Joseph’s proposal, in preparation for most of his career, won him the commission. In the moment that he heard the news, it was as if, having been born dumb, he had suddenly been granted the gift of speech. And when he started work he had a clear outline of what he wanted in his mind, and for a time the project seemed to be going smoothly. All of the men he contacted had a lot to say, most of it the product of long years of disappointment and frustration. In comparison, Joseph’s life had been comfortable and secure, but their words stirred echoes inside him, and, sometimes, listening to some story of insult or violence he felt an outrage stronger than any of the feelings prompted by his own experiences. The first edit was an angry polemic in which the men described a hostile, oppressive society and the way they had survived it. Joseph had no doubt that it was powerful and moving, but when he showed it to the producer of the series it was obvious that she didn’t share his satisfaction.

  ‘It’s a bit gloomy,’ was Hattie’s first comment.

  She had a businesslike, almost curt manner which, he suspected, was partly to do with the fact that when she started her training, fresh from university, he was already working as a researcher. At the beginning she had been warmer. Discussing his proposal in her office for the first time she had brought him a cup of coffee and sat on the edge of her desk swinging her legs which were clad in battered jeans. It was more or less what he would have expected, given their previous acquaintance as colleagues, and she had been friendly and sympathetic, nodding as she listened, then commenting that his passion was exactly the kind of motivation the series needed. Viewing his first draft, however, she seemed to have forgotten her initial enthusiasm.