Assembly(9)

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Transcends race, they say of exceptional, dead black people. As if that relentless overcoming, when taken to the limit, as time stretches on to infinity, itself overcomes even limits, even infinity, even this place.

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I only know Jamaica from stories. Visiting aunts and uncles, cousins – family. Unwrapping wedges of breadfruit; Julie mangos; fruit cake; a rich buttery pear sliced open, spread on to harddough bread; stories about family, sitting out on a veranda into the night, all together, telling each other other stories. A promise of a welcome, warm, loving family, always, retreating. They all fly back.

I stay here. Their English cousin.

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I went to school with this boy – haven’t seen him since Year Six, but I remember his parents used to make him stand at a desk in their front room to do homework each evening. As soon as he got in. No food, drinks, or bathroom breaks. Just stand there and work. His mother bragged about it at the school gate. He even told me, the way kids tell things sometimes, that he’d wet himself one night, stood there. And his mother made him stay. Wet trousers cooling, sticking to his legs, until all the homework was complete.

He got his scholarship to Haberdashers’ Aske’s. His well-thumbed brochure boasted a twenty per cent Oxbridge acceptance rate.

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But what it takes to get there isn’t what you need once you’ve arrived.

A difficult realization, and a harder actualization.

I understand what this weekend means. Pulling back the curtain, he’s invited me to the chambers beyond. It’s not acceptance, not yet. It’s just a step further, closer. I must learn to navigate it. Through him, and Rach, I study this cultural capital. I learn what I’m meant to do. How I’m meant to live. What I’m supposed to enjoy. I watch, I emulate. It takes practice. And an understanding of what’s out of reach. What I can’t pull off.

Born here, parents born here, always lived here – still, never from here. Their culture becomes parody on my body.

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Sitting here, I feel cramped and prickly. My handbag is stowed above. Coat folded over on my lap. I’m hot and my skin is crawling. I want to be off this train, back in my flat, peeling off these scratching clothes and sliding between cool cotton sheets.

I just want to rest. Stop. Just for a minute.

This kind of thinking leads to undoing. Or else, not doing, which is the slower, more painful approach to coming undone. So much still to do. Yet so much, done, already.

I’m still here, aren’t I? Soon, it might be over. Maybe I can stop caring. Stop trying – no, I mustn’t be rash, can’t close doors just yet. It could take years. Luck. It’s just opportunity and preparation.

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My exam prep was meticulous. It was everything. Morning to night, every hour accounted for in my self-devised schedule. I had an absolute dedication, back then, that I’ve never since recaptured. No distractions, no lost focus. No idle thoughts. It was a meditation. And after months of that devoted study, I walked once more from the station to the school, across the busy junction. I was ready.

And I saw all: forty years stretching indefinitely, racing along a cobbled and sparkling road. Boats and champagne, flights, panoramic views, the board room, flashing trading screens; flickering lights, the corner office, the dark corner of the members’ club; green, sprawling grounds. Clouds streaming like wet-stretched cotton; wool, strung across the sky. A sky blue, and cold. Swish, the windscreen wiper wipes across dry glass and –

A lady is shaking my arm and scream-shouting WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? There’s a car, at a wrong angle, spanning two lanes, others honking and pedestrians stopping to look. It’s all stopped – temporarily, the lady has pulled me back on to the island. Shaking me, still.

I aced the exams.

Premonition or plan? Doesn’t matter, I keep chasing.

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I’m greedy for a hundred years from now.

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This is the boom

and this is the climb, you’ve twinned it, followed it up. Not euphoric, as you’d imagined. But perhaps it never is, when you’re in the thing. It can’t

last, though, you know. And so, you put it away, you save. It rains every day in England! Here you are, with your accounts and now your accountant, and you put things into bonds, into funds; you pound cost average. And you brace yourself for it. Hold cash in accounts, in a wallet, in a box beneath the bed. Gold – you start to consider. Seriously, something is always coming. Words embossed – into brass, into aluminium, you watch videos of men, pouring fire into buckets; the charred, white-hot remains. Money is just belief, reality is perception, so why not? Stow some there, some everywhere. Be careful, though, and save

you see others – Rach, Lou, they spend. They enjoy it. But is their current lifestyle peak truly a new floor? You don’t know. But you can weather an emergency, stress-test yourself, you will not be undone by a small thing. You hope. There’s only hope. Hope it’s enough to weather any bust until the swing back around when you can grab hold, pull up and start the climb again.

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The small envelope is government-brown in a pile of white. I open it and find my unsmiling face twice amongst the pages. Name, date of birth, citizenship. I am appalled at my relief and at this sort of relief – thin and substantive only as the paper it’s printed on. We’ve seen now, just as then, the readiness of this government and its enterprising Home Secretary to destroy paper, our records and proof. What is citizenship when you’ve watched screaming Go Home vans crawl your street? When you’ve heard of the banging, unexpected, always, at the door? When British, reduced to paper, is swept aside and trodden over? The passport cover feels smooth and new in my hands. Slip it, away. Into the folder at the back of the bottom dresser drawer.