The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (3 page)

She looked straight at Gran, who was doing her best to pretend she wasn’t listening, flipping through a TV magazine she’d picked up along the way.

‘Mummy! I’m talking to
you!’

Gran looked up then, closed the magazine with some reluctance, and scratched her head.

‘Is what?’

‘This is an experiment. It can only work under one condition. I’m sorry I snapped at you yesterday but that could happen more often if you don’t keep to the rules. Just one rule, really. This is a fresh start; a new beginning. I want a clean slate. The past is past: done with. Whatever happened then has no bearing on now. I want us all to try hard to live in the present, and just get along. Is that understood?’

‘Yeah, but…’

‘No buts, Mummy. I really want this to work. I really want you to be here. I really want us all to live in peace with each other. That can only happen if we don’t rake up the past. It’s swept up and thrown away. Gone. This is now.’

Marion fidgeted in her chair.

‘That’s all very well, Rika, but Mummy…’

‘I said no buts, Marion. Please. That’s all I have to say, short and simple.’

She pushed back her chair, stood up, and left the room. The three of us were left staring at each other. Then Marion shook her head as if in regret.

‘If that’s what she wants,’ she said. ‘Mummy, did you hear? You got to keep your big mouth shut!’

Gran cackled. ‘Not possible!’ she said.

T
he next morning
Gran’s missing suitcase arrived, bright and early, just as Mum had predicted. It was immediately obvious what had caused the delay; it was a battered old thing, and it seemed both of the flimsy locks had broken, spilling out the contents. The airport staff had done what they could to fix matters; the case still gaped two inches open, but it was swaddled in several layers of cling-film and bound with security tape. Gran was both furious and ecstatic. Furious because, as she said, ‘Somebody coulda teef her tings’, and ecstatic because, well, there it was, safe and sound in the hallway, and Mum signing for it. Gran commanded the delivery guy to haul the case into her room. That done, she slammed the door and disappeared.

After an hour she reappeared in the kitchen where I was finishing off the last of my breakfast pancakes.

‘Come, Inky. I gotta show you somet’ing.’

No peace for the innocent; I gobbled down the last bit of pancake, shoved the plate into the dishwasher, and followed Gran back into her room.

‘Shut the door,’ she said, so I did. The open suitcase lay on the carpet, and all around it were various articles; big books of some sort; albums. No wonder the case had not held. Some of the albums were still wrapped in items of clothing; petticoats, blouses, a scarf or two. A couple of knickers and bras, old-lady-grey cotton underwear, were strewn amidst the jumble.

Gran sat down on the edge of her bed, and patted the mattress next to her. I sat down. She took my hand, closing dry, skeletal fingers around it. Again I was reminded of a claw.

‘Darlin’ why you din’t write you old Gran for so long? Ten years, except for Christmas cards. You don’t love you old Gran no more?’

The voice was wheedling, cracked. I stuttered some excuse. When you hit your teens you grow out of things to say to an old lady you never met, and the spaces between letters had grown longer, and finally they had stopped altogether.

‘I still got all you letters! Right over there!’ She pointed to the smaller of her suitcases, the one that had arrived safely with her as hand luggage.

‘That one, the black one. Bring it over here, open it for me.’

I got up and lugged the case over. It was an old-fashioned one, without wheels, of battered old leather. I cleared some space, laid it down flat on the carpet in front of the bed and crouched down to open it.

‘It’s locked,’ I said, and looked up at Gran. She was fumbling with a chain around her neck.

‘Come, child, take off this ting for me.’

The ‘ting’ was a bunch of keys. I got up and pried the keyring off the chain, leaving a single golden cross. She rubbed the cross gently between thumb and forefinger before dropping it into her neckline. She took the keys from me, inspected them all. There were at least six, two of which were tiny suitcase keys.

‘One of these,’ she said. ‘Try them out.’

The suitcase lock sprang open at the first try. I opened the lid. Several shoeboxes were packed together in the case, the gaps between them filled by more stray pieces of clothing.

‘Good. Now take out everyt’ing for me. Lay them out on the floor.’

I did as I was told; Gran’s voice brooked no disobedience or hesitation. She watched in obvious satisfaction as I laid the boxes in a row on the carpet.

‘Good,’ she said, when I was finished. ‘Now put the valise away.’

Again I did as I was told, stepping around the albums and boxes and items of clothing on the carpet, and placing the empty suitcase back in the corner. Gran leaned forward, bending precariously low down from the bed, shuffling the boxes around. She opened one, peered inside, grumbled what must have been some kind of Guyanese curse, and opened another. This time her face lit up in pleasure. She straightened up and again patted the bed beside her.

‘Siddown, child. Lemme show you somet’ing.’

She reached into the shoebox and removed what looked like a bundle of letters. This she handed to me with a smile of pure delight.

‘Go on, open it!’

I removed the cracked rubber band that held the bundle together. I already recognised the writing on the envelope: Mum’s. I knew what was coming. Gran took the top envelope from the bundle and with fumbling fingers, removed its contents. She unfolded the one-page letter, and handed it to me in triumph.

‘There! Read!’

My eyes glanced over the first few lines, but Gran spoke again.

‘Read it aloud!’

I started again, aloud this time.
‘Dear Granny, I hope you are well. Thank you for your letter. I am fine. Mummy is fine. She sends you her love. Yesterday we had the school play; Alice in Wonderland, I was the rabbit. It was fun. Mummy took a photo of me in my rabbit costume, I will send it next time. Here is a photo of me with Daddy, ice-skating. I fell down three times but then I didn’t fall down any more. On Saturday I am going to a friend’s birthday party. She is going to be seven, I am three months older. Please write soon. Inky.’

I looked up, and found her beaming at me. I smiled back politely.

‘See! I keep all you letters. Every one. You want to read some more?’ She reached for the next letter in the bundle. I put my hand on hers to stop her, and shook my head.

‘No, it’s OK. It’s great that you kept them. So those boxes are full of your other grandchildren’s letters?’

Her eyes sank, and her smile disappeared. She took the bundle from me, and fumbled the rubber band back around it. She put it back in the shoebox, replaced the lid.

‘No. My other grandchildren don’t write. Nine grandchildren I got, and only one did ever write me letters, you. The others – nothing. Now Marion’s children, they don’t count, they grow up in Guyana, they know me. But Neville and Norbert – them children never write me. Just Christmas cards, birthday cards. And photos. Lots of photos.’ She sucked her teeth, a long drawn out
choops
sound. Then she chirped up again, grabbed my wrist, and said, ‘Hand me that album!’

She pointed to one of the albums on the floor, half-wrapped in a lacy nylon petticoat. I leaned over, picked it up, and tried to hand it to her. She made an impatient flinging motion with her hand.

‘No, no, not that. The green one.’

I handed her the green album. She sat back in satisfaction, laid the photo album across her lap, and opened it. She pointed to the first picture on the first page.

‘You!’

I knew that photo, and all the other ones in the pages to follow. Gran flipped through the album, showing me the familiar pictures of me growing up, exclaiming over the ones she liked particularly. I knew them all; Mum had them in her own albums.

‘One t’ing I got to say for Rika,’ Gran said now, ‘she never write sheself, but she make sure you write and send photos. What she tell you about me?’

That last was a shot out of left field, in a different tone and a different tempo, stripped of nostalgic chattiness; urgent, probing. I looked up to meet her gaze, and this time there was nothing of the mirth I had seen there before. What I saw this time was – anxiety. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Why – well, nothing, really.’

‘You mother still vex with me, after all these years. She pretend nothing wrong, but she vex bad. She didn’t tell you the story?’

I shook my head. ‘What story?’

Gran searched my eyes for a while, then seemed satisfied.

‘Nothing. It was nothing. Long time ago – over thirty years. She was only sixteen. You mother always take t’ings too serious – she too sensitive. She don’t forget or forgive. It was nothing, everyt’ing sorted out. But she don’t write and she don’t never come back home. Just Christmas cards.’

I was embarrassed. ‘Mum always
wanted
to go home,’ I explained, ‘she always talked about Guyana, she calls it home. But it’s a long flight; she never had the money.’

‘Don’t give me that. Y’all was rich, rich. Y’all did go on big holidays; Kenya, Mauritius, America. But she never bring you home.’

It was true. There had been a few years of wealth and opulence; Dad had even invested in a Docklands penthouse, just before he went bust and his plans to move there dissolved into thin air.

‘She said – she said Guyana had gone to the dogs. She said it was no place for a holiday. She said, when things get better, she’d take me.’

But trying to excuse Mum only made things worse.

‘Holiday? Since when is going home a
holiday
? She cut you off from you own roots, and that’s a crime. You don’t know nothing about where you come from. Not true?’

I wanted to say,
I come from London.
There
are my roots. That’s where I grew up. A London child; a
South
London child, to be precise. Streatham, Norwood, Crystal Palace. Croydon: that's my habitat, my territory. Those are my places, the localities where I prowl. I know the smells and the sounds; I’m sure I could find my way around blindfolded if I had to, and I rarely stray beyond my boundaries, because the sense of home begins to fade, and I start to feel slightly insecure and get fidgety. I will if I have to, of course, and it's fun to take a trip to the West End or Notting Hill or Brighton, or even America. But here is where I feel at home; where I get the sense of belonging. Yes,
this
was home. When people ask me, ‘
Where do you come from
?’ (and they do, because they think I look ‘exotic’. Christ. I hate that word!) I say Streatham, and stare them down. Because
that’s
where I’m from. Not this foreign place across the ocean, just because my mother grew up there. Not Guyana.

What did I care about some half-baked ex-British colony in South America? A country that can’t get its ass off the ground, its act together enough to make itself known, like Jamaica or Barbados? I wouldn’t have minded telling people I was from Barbados. Or even Grenada. A lovely Caribbean island, where everyone wanted to go. But
Guyana?
No one had ever heard of it. They all thought it was Ghana. A country at the very Edge of the Known World, and most probably a dump. Mum had hinted as much often enough. Not a place you could be proud of.

But I couldn’t tell Gran that. I knew what she meant; something nebulous, subtle; home being where the heart is, that kind of clichéd stuff. I nodded helplessly. She let the silence thicken between us, and then once again cut through it with a different voice, a different mood.

Gran fumbled in the big suitcase again and emerged with a bottle of some yellow liquid. The label on the bottle said ‘Limacol’
.
She splashed some on her hands and patted her cheeks and neck with it, then handed it to me. I took it and looked questioningly at her and at it. ‘The Freshness of a Breeze in a Bottle,’
the label stated.

‘Go on, go on! Use it!’ she said. So I did as she had done. It was like Eau de Cologne, fresh, tingling but in this case, limey. I quite liked it, but now I knew where Gran’s distinctive smell came from.

‘You mother was always a queer one,’ said Gran. ‘She was a Quint, a real Quint. Eccentric, them Quint boys, all a bit loopy. ‘Cept one, me husband Humphrey. And Ma Quint, of course. Granma Winnie. But she wasn’t no Quint.’

I felt something soft, smooth and warm press against my calves. It was Samba. I bent down and picked her up, placed her upon my thighs and stroked her shiny black coat. Usually, Samba would snuggle into my lap, meow gently to ask for affection, and, when it came, show her appreciation by purring. Today, she simply stood up and padded slowly over to Gran’s lap, where she circled three times and settled into a cosy ball. She didn’t even have to ask; Gran’s hand was already there, sliding over the sleek black fur.

‘She
never
goes to strangers!’ I exclaimed.

The only response was Samba’s smug and steady purr as she contentedly kneaded Gran’s thighs. Gran stroked her absentmindedly, and didn’t reply. She pointed to a red, much older album. ‘That one.’

I handed it to her, and she opened it at the first page. There was only one picture on it, a sepia photo of five young women standing in a row, five beautiful young women in long dark skirts and white long-sleeved blouses, the buttons up the front rising into stiff high collars. It could have been a photo of Victorian students from a Ladies Finishing College – except that all the women were ebony-skinned.

‘Me mother and she sisters,’ Gran said. ‘Mother in the middle.’ She pointed to her mother, then, one by one, to the four other girls. ‘Henrietta, Josephine, Penelope and Elizabeth. The Williamson girls, my Aunties. All dead.’

She turned the page. ‘Me and you mother,’ she said of herself holding a toddler in a white frilly dress. ‘Me eldest child. And look, me and your Grandad, with your mother.’

She and a handsome, fair-skinned young man were sitting next to each other, a baby on her lap. The man wore a dark suit and a bow tie; she wore a white dress just covering her knees. Hemlines had obviously shot up drastically between photos.

Then it was her, Granddad, and Marion, followed by several combinations of those four, occasionally with Mum in between, looking slightly lost. Towards the end, the new babies, the Terrible Twins, joined the group.

The photos stopped abruptly near the middle of the album, the last photo followed by blank pages. Gran picked up and opened yet another album. Here were still more photos, quite different to the first batch. Here, there were all boys. The photos were all black and white or sepia; totally vintage. I loved vintage. I took the album onto my own knees, and slowly turned the pages.

The photo on the last page showed a group of children, ranging in age from about a year to early teens. ‘The Quint brothers,’ Gran explained. It wasn’t obvious that the boys were siblings, as each was entirely different; some had fair skin and light hair, others were as dark as the Williamson girls. The toddler wore a frilly dress not unlike the one my mother wore in the family photos, so I thought it was a girl, but Gran pointed to this child first and said, ‘Freddy Quint.’ She pointed to the tallest, fair-skinned, boy. ‘Humphrey. Me husband.’

So this was my grandfather. Mum had never shown me photos of her family back home. I assumed she had none. I peered closely at the boy who would grow up to be my Grandad. All the boys wore sailor suits, Humphrey included, though he must have been about fourteen, far too old for sailor suits, even then, surely. The boys at the front wore knee-length socks and highly polished shoes or boots. Not one of them smiled. If not for the fact that some were as dark-skinned as Grandma, it could have been any group of English boys from that time, not mixed-blood boys from a distant tropical colony.