I did try to be happy for her. I knew it was what she’d always wanted. But it’s hard, when you’re at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others, and besides I felt bad for my father, and sorrier for myself. The thought of moving back in with my mother seemed to cancel out what little I had achieved in the previous three years. But I couldn’t survive on my student loan much longer. Despondent, packing up my room, flicking through my now pointless essays, I looked out to sea and felt I was waking from a dream, that this was all that college had been for me, a dream, placed at too far a distance from reality, or at least from my reality. My rented mortar board was barely returned before kids who had seemed not so different from me began announcing that they were leaving for London, right away, sometimes heading to my neighborhood, or others like it, which they discussed in derring-do terms, as if these were wild frontiers to be conquered. They left with deposits in hand, to lay down for flats or even houses, they took unpaid internships, or applied for jobs where the interviewer happened to be their own father’s old university pal. I had no plans, no deposit and no one who might die and leave me money: what relatives we had were all poorer than us. Hadn’t we been the middle-class ones, in aspiration and practice? And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass. But I was awake now, and clear-eyed: some facts were immutable, unavoidable. Whichever way I looked at it, for example, the eighty-nine pounds currently in my current account was all the money I had on this earth. I made meals of baked beans on toast, sent out two dozen application letters, waited.
Alone in a town that everyone else had already left, I had too much time to brood. I began to look at my mother from a new, sour angle. A feminist who had always been supported by men—first my father and now the Noted Activist—and who, though she continually harangued me about the “nobility of labor,” had never, as far as I knew, actually been gainfully employed. She worked “for the people”—there was no wage. I worried that the same was true, more or less, for the Noted Activist, who seemed to have written many pamphlets but no books, and had no official university position. To put all her eggs in the basket of such a man, to give up our flat—the only security we’d ever known—to go and live with him up in Hampstead, in exactly the kind of bourgeois fantasy she’d always bad-mouthed, struck me as being both in bad faith and extremely reckless. I went down to the seafront each night to use a dodgy phone box that thought two-pence coins were tens and had many ill-tempered conversations with her about it. But I was the only one in an ill temper, my mother was in love and happy, full of affection for me, although this only made her more difficult to pin down on practical details. Any attempt to delve into the precise financial situation of the Noted Activist, for example, got me fudged answers or a change of subject. The only thing she was always happy to discuss was his three-bedroom flat, the one she wanted me to move into, bought for twenty thousand pounds in 1969 with the money from a dead uncle’s will and now worth “well over a million.” This was a fact which, despite her Marxist tendencies, evidently gave her a huge sense of pleasure and well-being.
“But Mum: he’s not going to sell it, is he? So it’s irrelevant. It’s not worth anything with you two lovebirds living in it.”
“Look, why don’t you just get on the train and come for dinner? When you meet him you’ll love him—everybody loves this man. You’ll have a lot to talk about. He met Malcolm X! He’s a noted activist . . .”
But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty. Our first meeting was dominated not by political or philosophical discussion but by a long rant against his next-door neighbor, a fellow Caribbean who, unlike our host, was wealthy, multiply published, tenured in an American university, owned the whole building and was presently constructing “some kind of fucking pergola” at the end of his garden. This would slightly obscure the Noted Activist’s vista of the Heath, and after dinner, as the June sun finally went down, we took a bottle of Wray & Nephew and, in an act of solidarity, stepped into the garden to glare at the half-built thing. My mother and the Noted Activist sat at their little cast-iron table and slowly rolled and smoked a very poorly constructed spliff. I drank too much rum. At a certain point the mood turned meditative and we all gazed over at the ponds, and beyond the ponds to the Heath itself, as the Victorian lamplights came on and the scene emptied of all but ducks and adventurous men. The lights turned the grass a purgatorial orange.
“Imagine two island kids like us, two barefoot kids from nothing, ending up here . . .” murmured my mother, and they held each other’s hands and pressed their foreheads together, and I felt, looking at them, that even if they were absurd, how much more absurd was I, a grown woman resentful of another grown woman who had done, after all, so much for me, so much for herself and yes, for her people, and all, as she rightly said, from nothing at all. Was I feeling sorry for myself because I had no dowry? And when I looked up from the joint I was rolling it seemed my mother had read my mind. But don’t you realize how incredibly lucky you are, she said, to be alive, at this moment? People like us, we can’t be nostalgic. We’ve no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury. For our people, the time is now!
I lit my joint, poured myself another finger of rum and listened with my head bowed while the ducks quacked and my mother speechified, until it got late and her lover put a hand softly to her cheek and I saw it was time to get the last train.
? ? ?
In late July I moved back to London, not to my mother’s, but to my father’s. I offered to sleep in the living room, but he wouldn’t have it, he said if I slept there the noise of him leaving for his rounds each morning would wake me, and I quickly accepted this logic and let him fold himself into the sofa. In return I felt I’d really better find a job: my father truly did believe in the nobility of labor, he’d staked his life on it, and he made me ashamed to be idle. Sometimes, unable to go back to sleep after hearing him creep out of the door, I would sit up in bed and think about all this work, both my father’s and his people’s, going back many generations. Labor without education, labor usually without craft or skill, some of it honest and some of it crooked, but all of it leading somehow to my own present state of laziness. When I was quite young, eight or nine, my father had showed me his father’s birth certificate, and the professions of his grandparents stated upon it—rag boiler and rag cutter—and this, I was meant to understand, was the proof that his tribe had always been defined by their labor, whether they wanted to be or not. The importance of labor was a view he held as strongly as my mother held her belief that the definitions that really mattered were culture and color. Our people, our people. I thought of how readily we’d all used the phrase, a few weeks earlier, on that beautiful June night at the Noted Activist’s, sitting drinking rum, admiring families of fat ducks, their heads turned inwards, their bills nestled into the feathers of their own bodies, roosting along the bank of the pond. Our people! Our people! And now, lying in the funk of my father’s bed, turning the phrase over in my mind—for lack of anything better to do—it reminded me of the overlapping quack and babble of those birds, repeating over and over the same curious message, delivered from their own bills into their own feathers: “I am a duck!” “I am a duck!”
Four