Sankofa(28)

I let myself into the building. Almost no one was left from the old days. The Sharmas moved to Willesden, to a house with a garden. Mrs. Levstein died. The Okoyes went back to Nigeria. The changes were gradual. At first, there were clashes between the old and new. Skirmishes were waged on the cork noticeboard: PLEASE KEEP THE NOISE DOWN AFTER 10PM. THE COOKING OF CERTAIN FOODS CAUSES THE BLOCK TO STINK. And then only the new tribe remained, with their parsley and olive oil. The old were all gone.

I unlocked the door of flat 7 and walked into the hallway. I was twelve again, letting myself in after school. I put my bag down. I took off my shoes from habit. We had a beige carpet. My mother was very careful of it. On the right was her double room. Her taste ran to clutter: framed family photographs on the walls, porcelain figures on the window ledge, too many cushions on her bed. My room was plain in comparison. I had a single bed, a double wardrobe, and a shelf of worn books that she bought secondhand. Adrian Mole came of age at the same time as me. It was all bare now, cleared out after she died.

Our rooms were on one side of the hallway, the toilet and bathroom were on the other. We could hear each other’s pee striking the water. Sometimes at night, I would knock on the adjoining wall and she would knock back. We would pretend we were signaling in Morse code.

“Did you ever wish I was white?” I asked her when I was an adult.

“What do you mean? Of course not.”

“But you always said, ‘You’re just the same as me, Anna.’”

“I didn’t mean it that way. It was just when you came home and some kids had been mean about your hair being a bit different from theirs.”

“A lot different. You can see that, can’t you. It’s very different. There’s nothing wrong with it being different.”

“I never said there was.”

We couldn’t speak about my childhood without me getting angry. It puzzled her. What had she not done? What had she not given? A sense of rightness, a sense of self. It was nothing when you had it. You hardly noticed. But once it was missing, it was like a sliver of fruit on a long sea voyage, the difference between bleeding gums and survival.

At the end of the hallway, a left turn took you to the living room and kitchen. The kitchen was small, functional. Our food was sound but plain—potatoes, meat, and green vegetables. She sewed in the living room. There was a cloth mannequin, a torso on a stick, smooth and flat-chested, riddled with pins. She adjusted our neighbor’s clothes and made dresses for herself from patterns. She sewed all my clothes until I staged a teenage rebellion. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, but I was not going to look like something out of a Laura Ashley catalogue. Even then, all she would concede to buying was jeans.

We didn’t always get on in my teenage years. It was my snobbery, not any fault of hers. Grammar school made our home life suddenly seem mean and small. Why did we watch so much television? Why didn’t we speak French?

I spent as much time outside of our flat as I could, in the homes of girls I envied. It wasn’t like my local primary school. Nobody called me a wog or a darkie, but they always wanted to touch my hair. They wanted to know if I tanned, if food tasted different with thicker lips, if my hearing was sharper than theirs. I watched their parents, the father always a professional, the mother sometimes working but rarely. I thought to myself, one day I’ll have a nice house, and a husband and a child, in that order.

I stepped out onto the balcony. It was empty now, like the rest of the flat. Once it had been filled with potted plants and flowers. My mother hung birdhouses there stuffed with seeds. In the summer we dried our laundry on it, and our clothes would smell of meadows. There was no laundry on the balconies in the block now.

The couple buying the flat would probably rip up the carpets and tear off the wallpaper. They’d knock down the wall between the kitchen and the living room. They’d lay wooden flooring and they’d give me more money than I’d ever earned in my life.

I could go to Bamana now, thanks to them, thanks to my mother. At her funeral I stood by her graveside dry-eyed. She was a good mother, hardworking, kind, quiet, timid, too timid to have raised a black child in the seventies. She was a very good grandmother. Rose cried as the earth covered the coffin.

Below, a line of cyclists darted past, trilling their bells. It would soon be evening. I left my mother’s flat for the last time.





14


Aunt Caryl lived in a Jewish nursing home in North London. She chose it herself when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was admitted on the technicality that my great-grandmother Esther was believed to have been a Jew. According to Aunt Caryl’s research, Jewish homes had the lowest incidence of bed sores.

I waited in the lobby. There was one other name in the guestbook. Under Purpose of visit, they had written, Light bulbs. Some renovation had been done since my last visit. The faded carpet and fringed lampshades were gone, replaced by clinical lights and laminate flooring.

Aunt Caryl wasn’t in the common area where residents were arranged in armchairs like large potted plants—the closer to the TV, the more alert. Each step away from Homes Under the Hammer was a shade deeper into senility. On good days, Aunty Caryl was in hearing distance of the television. On bad days, she was by the door. On terrible days, she was in her room.

“Mrs. Graham.” It was Maria, a petite Filipina carer.

“Hello, Maria. How are you today?”