Black Gold of the Sun (10 page)

At eighteen Kodwo won a scholarship to Oxford to study
English. He departed one morning in a flurry of scarves and coats, a stack of science-fiction paperbacks crooked under his arm. For years I'd been waging battle against him across the sea of comics. The coup had driven him to some remote place within himself. With squabbling as my weapon, I'd hoped to bring him back to ordinary life. He wouldn't thank me, I felt, but at least things would be more like they'd been before. At least I wouldn't be alone.

With his departure I saw that even without the coup he'd have grown beyond the confines of the room. Watching him vanish out of the door I assumed that Kodwo had effected an immaculate escape from Kingsbury and the past itself. It was years before I found out how wrong I'd been.

During our final year in Queensbury I had spent a half-term holiday week with my father. Each morning I rode to work with him in the midnight-blue Volvo. From the back, I could see Mr Johnson's gloved hands at the wheel steering us towards the Ghanaian High Commission in Belgravia. My father sat beside him, crackling through the newspapers and passing the
Daily Mirror
back to me so I could read
Andy Capp
and
Garth
. Behind the windows office towers and mansion blocks slipped past in a conspiracy of whispers.

Inside the High Commission, I followed my dad up the curve of the staircase to his office. The gold letters on his
door read ‘Attaché to the Ministry of Information'. If that title meant anything to me at eleven years old it was the understanding that authority is the opposite of exertion. My legs dangling from a leather armchair, I watched him from a corner of his office. Behind a vast desk he dictated letters to his secretaries and took calls on twin black telephones. Assistants bustled into the office with documents bearing the eagle crest of Ghana. When he signed his name at the bottom of them, the signet ring on his left hand would flare beneath the brass desk lamp.

For lunch one afternoon, he took me to the Spaghetti House in Knightsbridge. It had been the site of a siege three years before, he told me, taking off his jacket and draping it over the top of the velvet banquette. Three gunmen calling themselves the Black Liberation Front had raided the safe and locked the staff in the basement while the police massed outside. The stand-off lasted for six days until, having accepted the plane they demanded would never materialize, the robbers surrendered.

I looked round at the chequered tablecloths and the plastic grapevines twined through the rafters. My experience of restaurants was largely confined to quarter pounders at the Wimpy on Queensbury high street. For all I knew six-day stand-offs with the police were an everyday part of the adult dining experience. I nodded in what I hoped was an appropriately sage manner. Burrowing into the velvet banquette beside my father I felt swell and grown-up, as if we were two men of the world accustomed to its mysterious ways.

After spaghetti all'amatriciana there was a plate of fruit salad, which, to my delight, came fresh, not out of a tin like at home. Black grapes glimmered beneath cream like the domes of a winter palace crested with snow.

‘This is great, Dad,' I said, resisting the urge to suggest we cap off the meal with a cigar each.

We went back to the High Commission. He worked while I read a library hardback of T. H. White's
The Once and Future King
, imagining myself as Wart to his Merlin.

Riding home along the Edgware Road that evening, I started to feel sick. I wanted to tell my dad to pull over, but something ominous was happening in my stomach. With abrupt force, the afternoon's spaghetti all'amatriciana and fruit salad came splashing into my lap. At the sound of retching, my father twisted round and uttered a small and distinct ‘Oh' of surprise. The Volvo pulled over and he opened the back door with a box of tissues in his hand. I felt as limp as a shipwreck survivor crawling to the shore. My eyes slid shut and I passed out.

We were still riding home when I woke. My father had moved to the back and his arm was round my shoulder. I shut my eyes again. For the rest of the journey, all the world consisted of were the subterranean echoes of his belly as they rang in my ear.

My parents didn't talk about money when we moved to Kingsbury, but I knew we had none. Poverty is subjective. We were hardly destitute. Yet the comfort of 176 Beverly
Drive made our new circumstances more difficult to bear.

A while after we moved house our phone line was cut off. We couldn't afford to pay the bill, and it remained disconnected for the next eighteen months. When Jamie Brown or Benny Mitchell complained they couldn't get through I'd shrug and say there must have been a fault on the line. Even a weak lie seemed better than admitting the truth. But if I was ashamed of what we'd lost, how must my parents have felt to see everything they'd worked for vanish?

With my mother working at the hospital, my dad enrolled at City University and began a business degree. His presence filled the house. Watching him in the evening, as I lay with the fibres of the living-room carpet rubbing against my face, I wondered at how confined he felt. Now that he was limited to home, I thought he looked trapped, as if the force of him had turned in on itself.

My father and I used to go out every weekend to buy the family groceries at Sainsbury's. It was a ritual that had been in place since before the Fall. Standing in the kitchen one Saturday, I decided to break it.

‘Why? You don't want to come with me?' he asked.

‘I don't feel like it,' I said.

That was how it seemed to me at the time. Looking back I see that what I meant was I'd grown tired of simulating a normality that no longer existed. It was another rebellion, like dropping a plate on to the hard floor. In which case, perhaps it's not surprising my father heard a challenge to his authority.

‘So you don't want to come with me?' he repeated, this time slapping me heavily across the head.

The shock of the blow more than its force set my head spinning. I staggered backwards and he cuffed me again, then repeatedly. I fell to the tiled floor. Hands around my ears I curled into a ball.

‘I'll come to the shops,' I said. ‘I'll come.'

He didn't seem to hear me. With my head against the tiles I saw him wrench open the cutlery drawer and heft a spatula in his hand. Dissatisfied he flung it back in the drawer, dug out a long-handled wooden spoon and started to smack me around the head and legs with its convex back.

Through streaming eyes I noticed the outline of his vest against his blue shirt, and how the black frame of his glasses sat askew on the bridge of his nose. Beneath the fluorescent light a globule of phlegm glistened on his chin. I was less aware of the pain of each blow than the sting of humiliation. At twelve years old, my ambition was to become an astronaut. But I had another, less lofty aim. I wanted to be recognized for myself instead of simply as my father's son or, at school, as a representative of All the Black People in the World. Finding myself on the kitchen floor proved I'd failed in even these modest desires. It meant I was worth nothing.

It was five years before my father got another job. After his business degree he did an MA, then started working for Brent Council. During that time I often saw him
brooding and frustrated. Yet I can't look at those years with any anger because they seem to me only part of the larger measure of a man: the scud of clouds across a landscape.

As I wobbled on my first bicycle he was the person who ran alongside and held me up. In the school holidays I'd wake up early to stretch on the carpet beside him as he practised yoga. Some mornings I followed him when he went jogging. The sun still pale and the streets empty we'd work our way round Roe Green park and come home together, panting and exultant.

When I was thirteen I managed, through a mix of complacency and disaffection, to garner a report card of such horror I was convinced my life would end, swiftly and violently, when I took it home. Counting a total of thirteen Ds, five Es and a full set of must-do-betters in the comment column, I decided that drastic action was necessary. With a Bic pen I converted the grades to Bs and Cs, and presented the counterfeit to my father with a trembling hand. He looked it over, told me off for the displeased comments of my teachers, then passed it back to me. I'd got away with it. Dizzy with relief I reached out to snatch it back. Maybe it was the eagerness of that action or the glint of triumph on my face, but something made him hold on to the report. He peered closer at it and frowned. Then he held it up to the bulb, exposing the shadow of the original grades.

My mouth turned dry. I couldn't move. Downstairs, I was aware of a Road Runner cartoon playing on television.
A police car raced by outside with its siren on.

My father looked down at me.

‘So,' he said. ‘I see.'

And that was it.

I wasn't the only one that was speechless. After his shock wore off, he had a lot more to say. It was all sympathetic, though.

In the woefulness of my grades he recognized, more clearly than I had, that I'd come to a crossroads between trying harder and abandoning effort – and maybe school itself – altogether. Possibly he saw, too, that the point I'd reached had something to do with the coup. That perhaps what I needed at that moment was someone to tell me things would be all right.

My father is in his sixties now. Age agrees with him. I spot delight on his face when we meet. We hug without self-consciousness, clinging together for a few moments longer than is necessary. His chest beats against mine. Beneath my hands I feel the broadness of his shoulders, the solidity of his frame. And I know him then to be one of the fragile creatures of this earth.

The summer of red, black and green – The discovery of the Gold Coast – The walls of Elmina castle – Inside the male slave dungeon – Through the Door of No Return – The troubled life of Jacobus Capitein

On my tenth day in Accra I woke up to a drowned city.

Overnight, rain clouds had barraged the streets like warplanes on a bombing mission. Daylight brought a scene
of devastation. Cars lay overturned in the road. The body of a cow was discovered bloated and stinking in a back yard in Asylum Down. Alongside the Nima highway, the side of a house had caved in, offering drivers the unusual sight of a woman mopping her sodden living room in full view of the passing traffic.

I decided to get out of town.

At Kaneshi station I bought a bus ticket that would take me west along the Atlantic coastline to Elmina. The bus left that afternoon.

An air of malaise hung over the city, as if it really had been the victim of wartime catastrophe. In place of the normal commotion there was a dazed hush. Passers-by picked their way along mud-caked streets. Cars inched over rutted tarmac. As the bus grumbled out of the station I shut my eyes, and the sensation was exactly that of a boat struggling out of port against heavy waves. I clung to the armrest and let the bus carry me away from Accra and across the open sea that stretched vast and unmapped behind my eyelids.

My mind drifted.

I thought of Dwayne Hall, my tormentor at high school, and how I had never found a good answer to his question.

‘Where you from?' asked Dwayne.

I still couldn't say today.

The last of Accra dropped away. The bus eased on to the highway.

When we were both fifteen Dwayne had been a head taller than me. Extra height gave him a better reach. It
meant he could hold me back with one arm while pounding me in the stomach with the other. Flanked by his lieutenants Devon Mitchell and Mark Curtis, Dwayne always wore a puzzled expression as he stood over me, as if he felt obliged to carry on pummelling me even though he wasn't sure why.

‘Where you from?' he'd ask, between blows.

‘Oi, Kunte Kinte, where d'you live?'

‘Up a tree?' added Devon Mitchell and Mark Curtis.

When I tried to answer the words would come out as hiccups of tears. Even if I'd been able to speak clearly I'm not sure what I'd have said. After they'd finished punching me, I was allowed to go back to the other side of the playground from where they'd plucked me. I could feel Dwayne watching me as I hobbled away. After a year of irregular beatings, he and his crew lost interest in me. For the most part, they stopped turning up for school altogether. So it was only with hindsight that I realized how much I envied them.

Born in England to Jamaican parents, it seemed to me they drew from their dual heritage without angst – in the patois they traded and the exercise books they stickered with the Jamaican flag. In their height, and the swagger with which they proceeded, three abreast, down the school corridor, I saw a self-assurance I could never match. For Dwayne and his crew, being West Indian and British brought with it an ineffable cool. They were the school trendsetters. The first kids with the newest style of Fila trainers or the latest Streetsounds Electro album. They
were the ones who pollinated patois across the playground and created the template for a teeth-kissing disdain of adulthood adopted by the entire fourth year. Looking back I can see they belonged to a generation of young Caribbean-originated Britons making themselves heard during the early 1980s. Black sitcoms such as
No Problem
were being broadcast on television. Jazz funk singers such as Junior Giscombe and David Grant scored hits in the charts. John Barnes was scoring for England. Thanks to that generation, black people were garnering a level of popular respect in Britain they'd never before held.