Stray Love (10 page)

That year, 1962, Oliver dropped out of many clouds, one among a cluster of news gatherers, each hoping to be the first on the ground. Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Ethiopia. I like to think that he distinguished himself—in manner and speech—from the novices. I like to think that he did not strut, that he made every effort to keep up with local customs, that he spoke English apologetically and acknowledged native tongues, that he stayed receptive to tragedy’s needs without making promises he could not keep.

A veteran reporter knows there is a disconnect between how an event in a region is experienced and the way it is perceived in distant capitals. He sends dispatches about violent insurrections, riots and clashes, and feels his words loom large in his mind, then become small, minuscule, in the sending, until eventually he discovers that none of his reporting produces more than a twinge or yawn in the wider world. A veteran knows you cannot save anyone, and thinking that will just turn you into an emotional wreck. It is a reporter’s manner to abandon
his subjects and not let anything or anyone sink in too deeply.

I know that Oliver became a veteran in time, but there must have been regret.

Just when I feared he was dead, that he had died of knife wounds, gangrene, decapitation, insect bites, a capsized ferry, a hotel blaze, brutal gunfire, he would return. Sometimes, just after I had fallen asleep, the front door to Pippa and Stasha’s flat would open and no matter how quiet he tried to be, I would know. I would feel the air suddenly fizzing with Oliver and my eyes would snap open.

The first time he came back, after two and a half months away, I ran at him with open arms. When he picked me up, I locked my long legs around his thin waist. Pippa walked over and planted a kiss on his cheek to welcome him home, at which point I could tell from his face, which suddenly had more colour than usual, that the hug and kiss were too much for him. He clapped me on the back and gently set me down.

There was a moment’s embarrassment, then he said, “How about we go back to our flat so I can wash up.”

I never lunged at Oliver again. Instead of robust hugs there was backslapping, a handshake, a quick mussing of hair or gentle whap on the head, a squeeze of the arm, a peck on the cheek. I learned to accept these greetings, which Pippa snortingly called “the contortions of embrace invented by men,” but I did not like them.

That first time we returned to our flat, he walked over to the coffee table, dumped out the contents of his pockets (coloured bills, loose change rolling every which way) and headed off to the bathroom. While waiting for him, I carefully sorted the coins into towers, banker perfect, putting the ones I could not
identify in the empty ashtray. He emerged, nearly an hour later, shaven but unbathed.

“You didn’t wash,” I pointed out.

“Oh, I guess I forgot,” he said, examining my coin towers.

The next time he returned from the field, I had a better sense of what to expect, but this did not make the things he did seem any less peculiar.

The plunder of gifts he carried back wasn’t unusual. It was the quantity and choice of items that perplexed me. The gifts fell into several categories.
Clothes:
Guayabera shirts and elaborate local hats, not the kind of clothes I wanted, though to please him I did make a point of wearing them indoors.
Sweets:
Sour tamarind balls, honey-drenched baklava, pistachio barfi. I tested their curious textures and lopsided shapes with my fingers until they were warm from my kneading and, when I was satisfied, popped them into my mouth (sometimes spitting them back out a moment later).
Toys:
Soft animals, including a variety of British plush teddy bears and cats (purchased at airport shops), and a menagerie of exotic beasts, which soon took over my bed. The latter included a leather crocodile from Accra, a koala from Qantas, a rhinoceros stuffed with seeds from Mali.

Over time our flat would fill up with teak masks, ivory ornaments, stone ashtrays and straw weavings until Pippa’s flat began to look plain in comparison.

But more baffling to me that first visit was his unpredictable behaviour. He had harsh, unexpected outbursts. (“Just be grateful you have limbs.”) Followed by sudden moments of decadence. (“Let’s go to Fortnum & Mason and fill our bellies with
tarte framboises
and chocolate
gâteau.”
)

I understand now that colonialism was coming to a crashing end and Oliver was experiencing pangs of white oppressor’s
guilt. He began talking about brave men he had met named Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, who had fought for self-government for Africans. He quoted a man named Marcus Garvey and read aloud from a book by novelist George Lamming about a young boy coming of age that began with the words “Rain, rain, rain.” Oliver even used the words
heritage
and
pride.

He didn’t want me thinking and acting like a white person. He wanted me to feel black inside, whatever that meant. “I have no idea what I feel inside,” I wanted to say. Out went Paddington Bear books, BBC’s
The Goon Show
and gossip about the Royal Family. In came Anansi spider stories, BBC’s
Caribbean Voices
(“This is London calling the Caribbean.”) and conversations about coloured heroes who were “leading the way.”

He bought an
Around the World Cookbook
at the Smith bookshop on King’s Road, which had a special section devoted to “one-pot” meals. He started off by making variations of stew. Improvising the ingredients, he substituted lemon peel for lemon grass, Maggi seasoning for shoyu, Uncle Ben’s rice for orzo. We went to the continental shops in the back streets of Soho and trolled along the busy streets of Ladbroke Grove, searching for ingredients. With Pippa’s help, we discovered grocery stores owned by Greeks and Spaniards and stocked up on rice, black-eyed peas, dates, cumin, saffron. Soon, my favourite place to shop was Brixton Market. I loved the overflowing stalls selling everything from pepper sauce to magical potions and religious trinkets. I had never seen so many flashy wigs, so much salt fish and tinned breadfruit, so many brown and black faces everywhere I turned. I wondered if my real father had shopped in the market and I began looking at strangers, scouting for women who might be my mother and men who might
be my father. Amid the boisterous crowd, the lively greetings, it struck me one afternoon that people here came to find
each other,
even more than to find their week’s provisions. That’s why they lingered and spent so long touching the fruit and testing the weave on rolls of fabric.

Oliver was now making me the best meals of my life and I devoured each dish as if it were an offering of love. But, of course, it couldn’t last. Too much work, too little time. As Oliver put it, “Too many shops selling bouquet garni, too few selling garam masala.” He settled for less-inspired solutions. Heinz beans flavoured with cumin or tapioca sprinkled with cardamom. Vermicelli with sesame oil. Fish sticks kebabed with onion. Then the strategy was to throw loads of garlic into everything he cooked. I never complained. I was always hungry.

Oliver, on the other hand, just picked at the food he prepared. He had grown so skinny I could see the outline of his thoughts on his face—sharp, angled, urgent thoughts.

Four weeks after his return, he was off again.

Oliver was gone much of the summer. At the end of August, Pippa’s wish came true and she became chief window designer of the Marble Arch store. All at once she seemed to regain footing, as if her work had been the only thing standing in her way. She looked sturdier. She began ironing her clothes, put on red lipstick, stopped taking night walks. Her friends still milled about the flat on the weekends, but she was much busier and often retreated to my room to work out new ideas, even closing the door so she wouldn’t have to hear any noise. Soon the wall was covered with new plans and projects.

When she had first started at Marks & Spencer, window
dressing had entailed little more than fitting mannequins, fanning skirts and buttoning cardigans. Clothes for the men’s display were pinned to the wall at various angles—knitwear arranged with nipped waists and undulating sleeves, trousers cinched at the ankles, in a manner resembling a half-hearted school assignment.

Pippa changed all that. By November of 1962, a mere two months after her promotion, her windows were drawing crowds with Escher-inspired staircases, a live dance-a-thon, a garden display involving real grass and actual ducklings. She created a convincing beach using three truckloads of sawdust—which came from a nearby meat-packing plant and carried a faint carcass odour.

I came to see the Marble Arch store as a mysterious, self-enclosed universe. One second it was autumn, then it was winter, but not when it was autumn and winter for the rest of England. Every few months the lightweight fabrics were switched for heavier material or vice versa. Impossibly well-folded jerseys and stacks of white shirts appeared overnight, repeated to infinity.

Pippa made friends throughout the store. The food department staff always made sure that our cupboards were well stashed with broken tea biscuits, just-expired cheese, onion crisps, and Christmas cake year-round. Her closest workmate, Jean Cordon, was supervisor of the lingerie department.

Not all of Pippa’s big ideas were welcome, though. Her proposal to illuminate the whole store with blue lights as part of an ocean-themed display was declared impractical, as was her plan to turn everything literally upside down. How could customers buy clothes in the near dark, or off the ceiling? No one was very surprised when she was called into head office for a
disciplinary meeting with her boss. By the end of the meeting, she reluctantly agreed to provide “less spectacle and more product.”

She tried to push a few more ideas through head office, but by January she had surrendered the fight. Her efforts from that point on were half-hearted. She came home from work and went straight out again without even removing her coat. Stasha kept up a household routine with the quietness and stealth of an expert stagehand. She made sure there was bread in the bread bin and milk in the icebox. She set out my toothbrush so bedtime would feel more official.

I began to wonder if Pippa still existed inside this wandering woman who returned damp with rain. Often I would hear her leaving again just as I fell asleep. Why didn’t people rest when they were supposed to? Pippa’s habit of washing dishes dwindled, then came to a halt. What reassured me was Stasha’s watchful eye. She eyed the clock, the kettle, the stove. She eyed Pippa narrowly and changed the subject when Pippa’s stories got disjointed or when she laughed too hard, causing her whole body to shake. Stasha worked hard to fill the void.

I asked Stasha one evening to call Oliver for me. I had been having a recurring dream in which I was running through a maze trying to find him. Every time I’d spot him, something would happen. He would fall into a sinkhole or disappear in a dust storm or turn into someone else. Stasha thought the dream would stop if I heard his voice.

“Speak louder, Marcel, I can barely hear you,” he said, when we finally got through. His own voice was buried under blankets of static.

“I said I finished reading
The Chronicles of Narnia,”
I shouted. “And I’ve decided what I want to be when I grow up.”

“What is that?” More static.

“I want to be a war artist. I want to draw battles and …”

Over the phone I heard a distant rattling sound, then a quiet sigh. “I’m sorry, Marcel, the connection is awful. I can hardly hear you at all. Listen, I’ll be leaving Algiers in a few days’ time. I’ll call you when I reach Nigeria.”

He sounded so flat, even then I could tell it wasn’t just the static.

Years later, I would learn that Oliver had just returned from reporting from Kabylie, Algeria, a village destroyed by the French, homes flattened, children burned by napalm. It was one of the worst tragedies of the Algerian War. Oliver had written about a mother cradling the seared body of her daughter while her husband screamed at the sky.

It’s painful for me to imagine Oliver in that burnt-down village, his mind ricocheting back to the Blitz, forcing him to relive the terror that had descended on his own childhood. Sometimes I wish he could have let out his anguish and joined that man screaming at the sky.

The first modern war reporter was a Dutch painter by the name of Willem van de Velde. In 1653, van de Velde travelled in a small boat across choppy water to observe a naval battle between the Dutch and the English. He took notes, but mostly he made countless sketches, which he later developed into one enormous pen drawing and attached to his written report, presumably believing that images were as valuable as words.

I was definitely going to be a war artist. Stasha had bought me a
History of Art
book by H.W. Janson and I spent hours looking for tips on how to depict battle. I studied Delacroix’s
Liberty Leading the People,
Géricault’s
The Raft of the Medusa,
and Picasso’s
Guernica.

And then I came across a picture so horrible I almost threw up. It was a picture from Goya’s
The Disasters of War
series. The etching showed a man impaled on the branches of a tree through his rectum and shoulder blade. His arms were severed, and his face was twisted in agony.

In an unsuccessful effort to drain that image of some of its power by sharing it, I lugged the book to school one morning and showed it to the two sisters, Hayley and Adele. Upset, the sisters told Miss Humphreys, our teacher. That afternoon, I was summoned to her office, but when I sat down, feeling my heart boxing in my chest, she simply closed the door, stretched out her long arms, and declared, “You and I are both art lovers, then.”

To my amazement and delight, Miss Humphreys took my interest in art seriously. She kept me after school once a week to tutor me in art history from old books she had found at the antiquarian bookshops along Charing Cross Road. The books had missing pages and cracked spines and smelled of damp basements but they offered up new ways of seeing the world. It was in these books that I first discovered the snaky lines and strong contrast of Aubrey Beardsley; the grittiness of Käthe Kollwitz; Max Klinger’s lopsided perspective; Dürer’s scientific accuracy; Van Gogh’s truthful imperfections.