? ? ?
As the waiter came to clear our plates the sun appeared in the gunmetal sky. Rainbows passed through the wine glasses on to the wet silverware, through the backs of the Perspex chairs, spreading from Miriam’s commitment ring to a linen napkin that sat between the three of us. I refused dessert, said I had to get going, but as I moved to take my raincoat off the back of the chair my mother nodded at Miriam and Miriam passed me a folder, official-looking, ring-bound, with chapters and photographs, lists of contacts, architectural suggestions, a brief history of education in the region, an analysis of the likely “media impact,” plans for government partnership, and so on: a “viability study.” The sun crept through the gray, a mental fog cleared, I saw that the whole lunch had been for this purpose, really, and I was just a channel through which information was meant to pass, to Aimee. My mother, too, was a customer.
I thanked her for the folder and sat looking at its cover, closed in my lap.
“And how are you feeling,” asked Miriam, blinking anxiously behind her glasses, “about your father? The anniversary’s Tuesday, isn’t it?”
It was so unusual to be asked a personal question during a lunch with my mother—never mind having a date significant to me remembered—that at first I wasn’t sure it was addressed to me. My mother, too, looked alarmed. It was painful for us both to be reminded that the last time we’d seen each other had in fact been at the funeral, a full year earlier. Bizarre afternoon: the coffin met the flames, I sat next to my father’s children—now adults in their late thirties and forties—and experienced a replay of the only other time I’d met them: the daughter wept, the son sat back in his chair with his arms folded across his chest, skeptical of death itself. And I, who couldn’t cry, once again found them both to be far more convincing children of my father than I had ever been. And yet, in our family, we had never wanted to admit this unlikelihood, we always batted away what we considered to be the banal and prurient curiosity of strangers—“But won’t she grow up confused?” “How will she choose between your cultures?”—to the point that sometimes I felt the whole purpose of my childhood was to demonstrate to the less enlightened that I was not confused and had no trouble choosing. “Life is confusing!”—my mother’s imperious rebuff. But isn’t there also a deep expectation of sameness between parent and child? I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years, were perhaps only learning it fully at this very moment, as the flames ate the pinewood, whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face. But this was all my private drama: afterward, at the reception, I realized something larger than my loss had been going on the whole time, yes, wherever I walked in that crematorium I heard it, an ambient buzz, Aimee, Aimee, Aimee, louder than my father’s name and more frequent, as people tried to figure out if she was really in attendance, and then, later—when they decided she must have already come and gone—you could hear it again, in mournful echo, Aimee, Aimee, Aimee . . . I even heard my sister ask my brother if he’d seen her. She was there throughout, hiding in plain sight. A discreet, surprisingly short woman, make-up free, so pale as to be almost translucent, in a prim-tweed suit with blue veins running up her legs, wearing her own natural, straight, brown hair.
“I think I’m going to lay flowers,” I said, pointing vaguely across the river, toward North London. “Thanks for asking.”
“One day off work!” said my mother, turning back, joining the train of the conversation at an earlier stop. “The day of his funeral. One day!”
“Mum, one day was all I asked for.”
My mother affected a face of maternal woundedness.
“You used to be so close to your father. I know that I always encouraged you to be. I really don’t know what happened.”
For a moment I wanted to tell her. Instead I watched a pleasure boat churn up the Thames. A few people sat dotted among the rows of empty seats, looking out at the gray water. I went back to my e-mail.
“Those poor boys,” I heard my mother say, and when I raised my head from my phone I found her nodding at Hungerford Bridge as the boat passed under it. At once the same image that I knew was in her mind floated up in my own: two young men, thrown over the railing, into the water. The one who lived and the one who died. I shivered and pulled my cardigan more tightly across my chest.
“And there was a girl, too,” added my mother, tipping a fourth sugar into a frothy cappuccino. “I don’t think she was even sixteen. Practically children, all of them. Such a tragedy. They must still be in prison.”
“Of course they’re still in prison—they killed a man.” I drew a breadstick from a thin china vase and broke it into quarters. “He’s also still dead. Also a tragedy.”
“I understand that,” snapped my mother. “I was in the public gallery almost every day for that case, if you remember.”
I remembered. I was not long out of the flat and it had been my mother’s habit to call me each evening when she got home from the High Court, to tell me the stories—though I didn’t ask to hear them—each with its own grotesque sadness, but all somehow the same: children abandoned by mothers or fathers or both, raised by grandparents, or not raised at all, whole childhoods spent caring for sick relatives, in crumbling prison-like estates, all south of the river, teenagers kicked out of school, or home, or both, drug abuse, sexual abuse, on the rob, sleeping rough—the thousand and one ways a life can be sunk in misery almost before it’s begun. I remember one of them was a college drop-out. Another had a five-year-old daughter, killed in a car accident the day before. They were all already petty criminals. And my mother was fascinated by them, she had a vague idea to write something about the case, for what was, by that point, her Ph.D. She never did.
“Have I annoyed you?” she asked, placing a hand over mine.
“Two innocent boys walking across a fucking bridge!”
As I spoke I rapped my free fist on the table, without meaning to—an old habit of my mother’s. She looked concernedly at me and righted the toppled salt-cellar.
“But darling, who’s arguing with that?”
“We can’t all be innocent.” Out of a corner of my eye I saw a waiter, who’d just come out to check on the bill, tactfully withdraw. “Somebody has to be guilty!”
“Agreed,” murmured Miriam, twisting a napkin fretfully in her hands. “I don’t think anybody’s disagreeing, are they?”
“They didn’t have a chance,” said my mother quietly, but firmly, and only later, walking back across the bridge, when my bad temper had passed, did I see that it was a sentence moving in two directions.
PART FOUR
Middle Passage
One