Butterfly Fish (44 page)

“What are you going to do about it?” he taunted. “What the fuck can you do?” He watched me struggling to move my body forward. Blood trickled into the hundred silences in my mouth. He searched my face, looking for the pig's features he thought were rearing up again, the snout winging its way into the gap. His right arm twitched at his side. A shooting pain cracked my head open. He left me struggling to breathe, footsteps fading away. The panic was overwhelming. I lay there, thinking maybe he had been the smoking gun in the farm owner's bed in Buenos Aires. Perhaps the painter in
Mexico paid for his love in currencies other than cash. Maybe the pig he'd killed as a boy continued to have human guises. I tasted its blood on my tongue. I thought of Rangi the drifter, the shaman, the night in those photographs of red light women, stealing moments from them; a ring, a lock of hair, a last rite. I imagined him leaving those items in a passenger seat, the pig's snout turning between them. I passed out. When I came to, Anon stood above me, touching my skin with cold hands, leading me outside.

I caught up with Mervyn in Harlesden at a community project he volunteered for on Wednesday evenings. A former sports centre, the faded brown building looked abandoned except for the orbs of light morphing into shapes behind the smoggy windows. It hosted pop-up comic book fairs, knitting workshops, treasure hunting days and music gigs. He was playing chess in the small sports hall when I arrived. Cross-legged, he moved a piece three squares up to the centre poker faced; he glanced at his opponent, a spotty kid stroking his chin dramatically. Reggae music played softly in the background, Peter Tosh crooning defiantly. At the far corner, a couple of kids were kicking soft a yellow ball over a damaged badminton net grazing the ground. A cluster of teenage girls wearing brightly coloured leotards was hoola hooping, throwing their bodies into the swing of the hoops. I didn't know why I'd run from the station but I felt wired. My chest was burning and my heartbeat quickened expectantly.

“I need to talk to you,” I said by way of greeting. Squeals from the other end interrupted my train of thought. A bunch of other teenagers trudged in carrying chocolates from a vending machine somewhere in the building that spat out multi-flavoured delights at the jangle of coins.

Mervyn unfolded his legs, half-smiled at the boy apologetically. “Give me a moment yeah? Joy this is Delroy, our reigning chess champ and mathematical problem solver.” He laughed heartily but a fleeting look of worry crossed his face. I nodded at the kid,
whose retro high top fade made me think of De La Soul and sleeper summer anthems. Mervyn grabbed his Queen. “I'm superstitious about leaving her unattended,” he joked, pocketing it then leading the way.

The building was a maze; hubs sprang up from every corner. In the hallway, we passed a series of spaces including a snooker room and a storage area. Unpainted walls added to the rustic feel. We followed the low lit route right to the end and out into the garden area, where misty eyed gargoyle statues wearing comic expressions dotted the green, stirring their tails in any bits of conversation that filtered through. The air between us crackled. He stood only a few feet from me but I could feel the tension in his large frame.

“Tell me the truth,” I said urgently. “Are you ashamed of me?” My voice cracked a little, I berated myself internally, trying to hold back tears.

“What?” The hand rummaging in his pocket stilled. “Why would you ever think that?” Car horns sounded in the distance, leaves blew across the green. I stepped closer, watching his face for the tiniest flicker of betrayal. “Because you've been lying to me for years! You were using my mother and when you knocked her up, you continued to live your double life without any responsibility. God! I feel sick; your sons are my friends. Don't they suspect you're not who you say you are?”

The Queen was out in the open again, turning in his hand, small and pale in the moonlight. His face etched in pain, he rubbed his baldhead wearily. “It wasn't like that Joy. I loved your mother. She was a troubled, complex woman but I loved her. I knew this day would come and I've dreaded it. It's just like her to leave me to deal with this.”

“Why are you trying to absolve yourself of any responsibility?” I cried, holding the sadness between us, the pangs of rejection I felt.

“I'm not your father. I wish I was, Lord knows I do but I'm not.” It was said so quietly I almost missed it. This was how a ten-foot truck could hit you without sound or warning. I was close enough to see
his watery eyes, the regret there. I peeled the dented truck bender off my body, raised it above our heads. “You're lying!” I accused, pointing a shaky finger. “Otherwise why stay around us all these years? It never made sense to me before but now it does. The secret phone calls, those pictures I found, gifts I wasn't meant to see. That was all you.”

He threw his arms up, the red tie he wore fluttered. “I admit it, I'm not perfect. We don't always stay in love with the same people. I loved my wife. I had a responsibility to the boys. I thought about leaving her but I couldn't in the end. Your mother and I were friends at first. I- by the time we became lovers, it seemed best to keep things as they were.”

“How convenient for you.” I spat, walking back and forth between two gargoyles.

“Tell me who he is. I have a right to know. I know you know something.”

He looked down to the ground, the sadness in his face so palpable even the gargoyles concrete expressions may have changed slightly. “Your mother was raped. Your grandfather is your father. She went to see him and… I don't think he was himself.”

“That's not true!” I replied but horror was building inside me. That feeling of seeing something awful and being unable to look away. Pain shot through my stump, the taste of nausea filled my mouth. I ran to the side, vomiting into a hedge. Suddenly, certain things made sense; my mother sleeping in the afternoons, her emotional distance from me sometimes, the lies she told to save us from the truth.

Tears ran down Mervyn's cheeks. His eyes filled again as he turned the chess Queen in his hand. His chest swelled as though a river of sadness would split it open and carry us both away. I trembled watching the look of despair on his face, the pain there. I felt sick seeing Anon appear between the gargoyles, reaching into their mouths to skim her hands over the secrets they knew. Something inside me seemed to be realigning, travelling somehow. A searing
pain shot through my head, then my chest. The gargoyles turned their heads, hissing into the dark.

Mervyn placed one hand on my shoulder, gently raised me up.

A part of me was dying from the shame, another crumbling from the weight of it.

I couldn't look him in the eye. I felt like nothing, a tiny speck under a shoe.

“Leave me alone,” I mumbled, pulling away. I couldn't thank him for saving my life, for stopping my mother from drowning me. I stumbled through the hallway, deformed again in the light, blinded by tears. Bath water ran down the walls, its sloshing sound slipping through the plughole, filling my chest.

Outside my legs buckled in the night. I left the pale chess Queen crying in Mervyn's pocket and the gargoyles holding bits of a battered chessboard chased the small openings on me, widening in the cold air.

Echo, Belly and the Rubik's Cube

When I arrived at Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos I couldn't bring myself to call Mervyn yet. I knew we needed to talk but I was still hurt and confused about being a hidden thing. Peter Lowon's diary sat in my handbag. Outside, the driver of a yellow taxicab between mouthfuls of pineapple slices informed me the drive to Benin was long. I thought of my mother Queen. I imagined she took Peter Lowon's diary and the brass head all the way from Africa to London, her only connections to the father whose footsteps she trailed as a little girl. I imagined she read the diary from cover to cover many times, knew it like the back of her hand; that when she passed her first school exams, she ran home to it and heaved bittersweet breaths of success over its pages. That she studied his scrawl and doodles, imitated them. And after she kissed the first boy who whispered chewing gum flavoured nothings in her ear and turned out to be completely useless, she weighed it in her hands and eyed it with resentment. He cursed her by leaving her that legacy. It was the curse of the broken-hearted, the way that only a father can.

Weirdly, I remembered it then: the black and white photograph from the diary. I fished it out, held it at the corner and stared at the faces, the creases. It hit me, I recognised him. Peter Lowon was the man from the café scene that trespassed regularly in my head, the
one where I always struggled to hear what was said, the man who was both father and grandfather to me. He was out there, somewhere. I had met him once before. It was a memory after all, a fallen snowflake becoming a tear.

Peter Lowon Journal Entry July 1964

Dear Queenie,

 

I am a killer. I am a coward. I am your father.

If you find this, then you know I have gone. I was brought to this place and feared this day. The day you know what I have done. Please keep this diary, here are honest pieces of me I can offer you, hold them up to the light. I want to apologise for bringing shame on my family. I cannot make amends; I can only say that sometimes people do desperate things, terrible things. I ask for forgiveness. Queenie there are no good or bad people don't let anyone tell you this, these lines are blurred daily. The bad we often see in others, we recognise in ourselves, bouncing off our own hand made mirrors. We are all flawed people trying to make our way. Should you choose to find me one day, I am out there waiting.

Tell your mother I've always loved her and I'm sorry for being the man she suspected I was. There is no blade to cut my weakness away, no shot to numb the darkness out. Would you believe me if I told you I am a prisoner of myself? I wish so much more for you. Queenie, you are me and I am you. This is the one thing I see with so much clarity; through you I was born twice. One day you will have your own child, and you will know a joy no words can describe, no mathematical equation can depict. It is pure, purer than water, purer than air, injections of life into the blood. And you will make mistakes too! Queenie I am in pain, the kind of pain that makes you
run inside to bleed on your carpet privately. I worry that one day you will forget what I look like. I worry you will see me in the faces of strangers. See the black and white picture inside this journal? I am the one on the left laughing. In case you find yourself forgetting: THE ONE ON THE LEFT. Please keep it with you.

With you I laughed. I worry about other things too: that your mother will grow old hating me, that she will count her grey hairs and hold me responsible for each one. I worry you may marry a man like me, that life will beat the importance of knowing yourself out of you. I fear your anger and emptiness within you long after you have stopped calling for me. I have cheated you and myself.

I no longer have the strength to be mad because it has been sapped by a tree sprouting roots somewhere. Wherever I am I will be running from myself. Imagine no day without night, night without the day; there is no end to this. It is an empty well running through the homes of underground creatures we never see, a tunnel through the chests of farmers toiling the land, it is the hidden void where our dreams pile up like dead bodies. It leads back to me. As for the brass head, please get rid of it. Give it to a beggar man to sell, throw it in a river or gutter. I should never have brought it into my house; if you keep it you will bear the burden of the cursed and pay in a currency not found on earth.

Today is so ordinary Queenie. You are playing by the outside tap, counting coins for your bank by the white sugar cube wall. It is the worst day of my life. It is the last time I will see you throw your arms up so trustingly to me, or hold a terrible crayon colour drawing that I will say is perfect because it is. Or attempt to measure your laugh, something that cannot be done. You cannot tell that tomorrow your world will be different. Right now the mayguard is lazily swatting flies from his face, no longer pretending to do his job. The house girl is peeling yams in the kitchen. Aunty Eunice is hanging clothes on the washing line, a yellow vein shot through the sky, which is throbbing, swelling with lost years to come. Your mother is standing at my shoulder. Life carries on, Queenie. When you have ceased asking questions and my name has turned to dust in your mouth know that: