The White Family (7 page)

Dirk was so much slower than the other two kids. Not tall like Darren, nor good-looking like Shirley. He was skinny, painfully so. And he’d inherited Alfred’s great beak of a nose – a nose of pride, of character, May tried to tell Dirk when he was thirteen and she caught him crying in his bedroom mirror – together with a bony jaw that had suddenly grown heavier in his late teens. Between the two outcrops, his mouth seemed to shrink.

For years they told themselves there was a temporary blockage. They had flashes of hope; he could add up in a trice, could price a load of shopping before she reached the till. But his English essays were short and abysmal. ‘No imagination,’ the teacher had said. ‘His basic trouble is no imagination.’ She hoped he was wrong. Dirk just lacked words. But there came a time when you had to give up.

He did have nice hair. Unusual hair. Hair like May’s when she was a girl. (May had been grey for thirty years, though until she was sixty she always dyed it, and Alfred, bless him, never knew. Even in marriage, there had to be secrets.)

Mr Punch. That was her youngest son
. She made herself face it, finally. Overshot, underhung. And that shining blond head made folks look at him, which wasn’t a kindness when you weren’t a film star.

Shirley had always been kind to Dirk, and he had hero-worshipped his sister, saved his pocket-money to buy her sweets, which he ate himself, but the thought was there.

It was over now. They weren’t close any more.

He just couldn’t stomach her marrying Kojo.

‘She can’t love him. You’ve seen him, haven’t you. I mean, he’s not half-caste, or something like that. He’s black as black. He’s a fucking gorilla.’

‘I saw him,’ said May, coolly, calmly. ‘He’s a human being like anyone else. I talked to him. And I quite liked him.’

‘You crept around him,’ said Dirk, disgusted. ‘You acted like he was the bee’s knees.’

May wouldn’t let him get away with that. ‘I’m polite to everyone who comes to this house,’ she said, turning to look him in the eye, putting down her tea-cloth, drawing herself up. ‘You mind your manners with your sister’s friends, while you’re still living under our roof.’

She rarely spoke to him like that. She was the angrier because he had expressed her own feelings, the ones she had almost completely suppressed – why did Shirley have to go the whole hog?
Did she have to choose one as black as that?

Dirk never discussed it with Shirley. Instead, he withdrew from her altogether. The women retreated to a knot in the kitchen whenever they wanted to talk about the wedding, planning the guest list, dreaming of the cake.

‘We can pay up to two thousand pounds,’ May had said, hot with fear as she spoke the words. Spinning noughts, whirling, disappearing … It was her own money, a savings plan she had put aside for over twenty years, cheating on the housekeeping, stinting herself.

But Shirley said, ‘Don’t be silly. Kojo wouldn’t dream of accepting any money. His family were paramount chiefs, in Ghana. He’s going to pay for everything, including a new outfit for you, if you want one. You could do with one. You know you could.’

On the day Dirk turned up at the very last moment, wearing a dark jacket he had borrowed from someone, not the sort of jacket that teenagers wore, and a bright pink tie, entirely surprising. He looked almost handsome, with his yellow-white hair, but he spoke to no one, stood open-eyed and furious throughout the ceremony, never kneeling down to pray, then afterwards retreated to a corner of the beautiful apricot hotel lounge and sat with his father, backs to the wall, drinking beer, not wine, and refusing to eat. They wove away together at the very end, self-righteous and sullen, looking neither left nor right, as if they alone had behaved irreproachably, as if they had won a great victory, between them.

Yet only a year after the wedding, Dirk had started going round to Shirley and Kojo’s house. When Shirley told her mother, May couldn’t believe it. ‘He’s not coming round to make trouble, is he? His dad’s put some strange ideas in his head.’

‘He said he missed me,’ Shirley told her. ‘I don’t mind. Forgive and forget. He’s found out Kojo likes football too.’

And so they had seemed to get over it, and be close again, like when they were children. Dirk didn’t know what to say to Kojo after they had totted up the football scores, so he told him the plot of television films he’d seen, and Kojo sat and nodded, patiently, though he hardly ever watched TV.

Then Kojo got ill with lung cancer and Dirk was nearly as upset as May. He had kept his sister company when things were bad. He visited right up to the end. The night Kojo died and the phone call came he sat in May’s kitchen, shaking his head, and after the funeral he went home with Shirley.

But eighteen months later she took up with Elroy, and to May’s astonishment they started again, Dirk and his father, as if they’d learned nothing.

‘Kojo was different,’ Dirk insisted. ‘Kojo wasn’t like the others. You know he wasn’t. You liked him too.’

‘Yes,’ said May. ‘But –’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Dirk said, head down. His new blond crewcut stared her in the face.

And that was that. May had tried to understand it. People kept things in their brains in tight little boxes … Because Dirk like Kojo, Kojo stopped being black. And so Dirk could go right on hating blackness.

Dirk wouldn’t talk to Shirley, either. ‘I can’t understand him,’ Shirley said. He hadn’t talked to her, except to say ‘Hello’, for years. Which was a sadness to May and Alfred, who had always liked the two kids being close, and hoped it might last them all their lives, so the family wouldn’t end with the parents.

But things didn’t last. Why hadn’t she realized? The years like water washed them away, the things of beauty, the things you loved, dipping and glinting away into the distance. The only constants were bills, and getting older, and the pain in her knees, and the ache in her neck.

And the house, the bloomin’ house where they’d lived forever. With its creaks, and its knockings, and its leaky gutters –

And its whitewashed front in the morning sun. And the smell of apples from the fruit-bowl in the living-room. And that dot of gold dancing about off the mirror. He would catch it on one finger, on his free afternoon, and point at her like a magician. His chair, her chair. With Shirley’s cushions, easing their bones as they sank down. Their little house, with its steamy kitchen, smelling of washing and hot Ribena. Its warmth, its sheen, its – familiarness. Was that the word? Their family home.

Alfred, pet.

She would take him home.

‘Here’s Dirk,’ said Alfred abruptly. ‘Look.’

You couldn’t miss him. That ash-white hair, and something jerky about his walk, as if he was head-butting a low brick wall. As if this habit had injured his brain … Dirk hadn’t had an easy time in life.

‘I wonder if he met his sister on the stairs.’

As he got nearer, you could see the boy was small. His head slightly bowed, he nodded on forward, blinking and grinning, glad to see his father.

May thought, he almost worships his father.

‘Is that your boy?’ It was a woman’s voice. May turned to look at her, surprised. The body in the next bed was female. She was sixty-ish – maybe seventy-ish – with a plump red face, powdered in patches, and a swatch of red hair pulled back in a bun.
Alfred must have been encouraging her
. May didn’t approve of these mixed wards.

Alfred had pulled himself virtually erect (he’s certainly thinner – they aren’t feeding him) and was grinning at the woman, a mask on a stick – if he knew what he looked like he wouldn’t do it. ‘No, this is Dirk.’

The woman smiled and nodded.

Dirk stood there, doggedly ignoring her. ‘Dad,’ he said. ‘How goes it, then?’

Dirk had always lacked social graces. Once May had worried about his shyness because she thought it would stop him getting on with girls. But as Dirk grew up, there never were any girls, and sometimes she thought that he hated women. Then she’d started wondering if he liked boys, because May had read Oscar Wilde, and Thom Gunn. Once she’d found a strange magazine in his room, with photographs of black men without any clothes, but he got very cross, and said it was disgusting, he’d just brought it home to get rid of it. There were no other signs that he liked anyone at all.

‘This is Dirk,’ said May, to the painted woman. She used the most educated voice she had. ‘I am his mother. I didn’t catch your name.’

‘I think Alfred has forgotten it,’ the woman chirped, raising one eyebrow at him. ‘He hasn’t got much memory for names.’

May looked at her resentfully.
Why is she gazing at my husband?

‘This is Pamela,’ Alfred said rather gruffly, with the hint of a smirk. ‘Dirk, say hallo to Pamela.’

‘So this is the famous journalist.’ Her smile was smarmy, lipsticky.

‘Oh no,’ Alfred corrected her, dismayed. ‘This is Dirk, the other one. I probably didn’t mention him … Darren’s flying in from Spain today.’

‘Lovely,’ said Pamela, vaguely, grandly (
but she’s not a lady, with that dyed hair
). ‘We had a château in Spain you know. We always wintered in Andalusia. Olives, oranges, wonderful light … it was almost like a religion, with us.’

‘Why did you come back then?’ May asked coolly.

‘That is a very long story, my dear. One I may well tell Alfred one day.’ The woman winked, elaborately. May stared open-mouthed at her turquoise eyelids.

‘He probably won’t be here,’ she said. ‘We don’t expect him to be here very long.’

‘Really?’ Pamela said, her voice almost pitying, then turned away in her bed, and read, and May wanted to say, I’m a reader too, I read the works of Alfred Tennyson, but she knew the woman thought she was stupid.

Alfred was looking very put out. Perhaps the family had let him down. Dirk wore scruffy denims and a studded leather jacket and his face was reddened by the wind. It somehow made his nose look bigger.

‘Why do you keep on talking to
her
?’ Alfred hissed at May, furious. ‘Can’t you see she’s trying to read?’

Ignore the injustice, May told herself. Don’t argue with him. He’s not a well man. ‘Dirk, your father’s feeling much better –’

‘I never said I was feeling better.’

‘What did you say then?’ She wanted to weep.

‘Dad, I brought you some treacle toffees –’ Dirk stood there, clumsy, at the foot of the bed, left out of the quarrel as he usually was. They both turned to stare. The boy was giving them a present!

‘Thank you, son,’ said Alfred, startled. ‘I appreciate that. I hope you didn’t nick them –’ But Dirk’s hurt face was an annoyance when it was Darren he wanted to see. ‘Sit down, sit down, you’re blocking the light.’

Dirk sat down swiftly, patting at his hair, though bristles like that could never be untidy. May realized that he felt in the wrong. He was patting at himself to put himself right. It’s the parents’ fault if they feel like that. Yet May felt nothing could ever have been different. Do your best, she had told herself day after day, struggling to deal with her growing kids, but her best had never been good enough, and now they had come to this strange place, one by one, to be inspected.

‘How’s work?’ asked Alfred.

‘Same as usual,’ said Dirk. And that was the trouble, his mother thought. The newsagent he worked in was on Hillesden Gardens, only two hundred yards away from home. Their friend George Millington, the owner, was an asthmatic smoker with gammy legs. He had taken Dirk on for ‘work experience’ nine years ago, when Dirk was sixteen, when it wasn’t yet completely impossible to hope that he’d scrape enough GCSEs to go to college. May had stopped hoping before Alfred did.

‘How’s St George?’ Alfred asked. It was a very old joke.

‘All right. He had a turn today.’

‘You’re a good boy to look after him,’ May said quickly, comfortingly.

‘It’s disgusting,’ said Dirk. ‘He goes this horrible colour. Like he was dying, or something.’

‘You’re a good boy.’

‘He’s too old to work.’

‘He’s my age,’ said Alfred, affronted.

‘It’s different,’ said Dirk. ‘You’re not dying, are you.’ There was an uncertain silence, then he carried on. ‘I’m worried he’s going to peg out in my arms.’

‘George has been good to you, young man.’

‘Has he, Dad?’ Dirk went white around the nostrils. ‘You don’t know what it’s like in that shop. He smokes non-stop. I mean
non-stop
. I come out of there, I stink of smoke. Every time he coughs, he starts sicking up his guts. And when he’s not smoking, he’s bloody wheezing. He doesn’t do a shagging stroke –’

‘Language,’ said May. ‘George is fond of you,’ she added, suddenly afraid that Pamela was listening. ‘He must have got fond of you, I’m sure. Not having any sons of his own.’ (She dreamed that George would leave Dirk the shop, and he’d be all right for the rest of his life. Plus Dirk could afford to leave home, at last. They’d be left in peace, her and Alfred – Not that she wanted to get rid of him, of course.)

‘He hates me,’ said Dirk, simply. ‘He couldn’t manage without me, that’s all. I do all the work. He gets all the money.’

‘Of course he doesn’t hate you,’ said Alfred sternly. ‘Course he doesn’t. He’s my oldest friend.’

‘Have you managed to get rid of the Christmas stock?’ May was determined to turn the conversation.

‘The charity ones were rubbish, this year. No one round our way wants fancy things with otters on, they look at them and think they’re rats –’

‘Well
I’m
quite ecological,’ May interrupted him, indignant. ‘I bought two boxes of otters, dear.’

‘We still got lumbered with twenty-three boxes. Chocolates were quite good this year though. No thanks to George. He can’t think beyond Cadbury’s –’

‘Cadbury’s were always good enough for us,’ said Alfred.

‘Point I’m making is, people want Belgian.’

‘Good English chocolates. That’s what you want.’

‘What are you doing with these, then?’ asked Dirk, triumphant, pointing to the giant white-and-gold box that Shirley had left on the bedside table. “Best Belgian Chocolates”, it says, look, there.’