Turn Us Again (3 page)

Jenny tumbled off her chair in mock hysterics, and I waited several minutes for her to enlighten me. At last, she lifted her head off the floor, “There are trolleys and moving walkways in Heathrow, but
no taxis
. If there were, people would take them.”

Perhaps it is a bit odd, but I can't bear taking taxis over short distances when I can walk. It feels like such a waste of money. On the other hand, I loathe exhibiting behavioural traits which might be classified as stingy. In fact, I do quite a lot to waylay any suggestion that I am tight with money. I'll never forget my first encounter with racism, even though I was pretty young at the time. When I related the incident to my father, he said it wasn't real racism, just an example of ignorance. I remember standing in the schoolyard with a couple of friends, when a fellow from Newfoundland called Troy approached us. I knew him well by sight though I had never talked to him very much. He proffered some chips to the assembly in general, and then became engrossed by the change in his hand.

“Hey. That guy at the canteen gave me the wrong change. How much should those chips cost?”

“I don't know, man. A dollar or two?”

“Well, what is it, a dollar or two? I gave that guy a fiver and he gave me two-fifty back.”

“You should have counted it right away, you can't go back now. He won't believe you.”

Troy waved his fist in the air, “That canteen guy jewed me! He probably does it all the time.”

It was the first time I'd ever heard the expression. It gave me a slight shock. “What did you say? He what you?”

“He jewed me, man. He screwed me over. He stole my money on purpose.”

“I'm sure it was a mistake,” I murmured, but the other boys had already lost interest. The expression was obviously a well-known one.

My father was enraged, as I knew he'd be. “Did you tell him that it's a racist expression?”

“I don't think he knew it was racist. What does it mean?”

“It means that we are bringing you up in a place of inferior human beings, who seem as aware of what comes out of their mouths as a barking dog.”

I had already been told a hundred times that we were superior and everybody else was inferior. It was a frequent rant. But I still didn't understand the relevance of the expression.

“Why ‘jewed'? What's stealing got to do with being Jewish?”

“Anti-Semites claim that Jews love money. Traditionally, Jews tended to work in money lending, mostly because Christians weren't allowed to work in those professions. People started to resent their money and claimed they were stingy, stealing from others and hoarding it away.”

“Are we stingy, Daddy?”

“Of course we're not stingy. Don't be stupid. Stinginess is one of the most repulsive of human shortcomings.”

I was determined never to be perceived as stingy. I shared my sweets, and later my cigarettes, with wild abandon. I bought my girlfriends extravagant gifts and surprised them with fancy getaway vacations. But generosity in my mind is defined by how much I give to others compared with what they give me, and doesn't apply to myself at all. As a result, I am stingy with every aspect of my own life, from buying clothes to eating out. A taxi for a fifteen-minute walk is unthinkable.

Thus I find myself trudging down the narrow sidewalk along Green Street, with a fine drizzle in my face, the suitcase getting heavier and heavier with each step.

TWO

G
reen Street doesn't even feel much like England. If it weren't for the quintessentially English drizzle, I might have been in Delhi. The streets are crowded with brown faces and bright saris. The shops sport Indian spices, Indian clothes, Indian take-outs. I had had no idea that I was coming to London's ‘Indian town,' or even that London had such a thing. It's exciting, as though I am embarking on an exotic adventure. The crowded, bustling sidewalks please me, even though maneuvering through the throng makes my suitcase twice as heavy. I laugh at the traffic jams and the bus driver tooting at a hesitant car. I smile like an idiot at people and rejoice in the fact that nobody meets my eye, let alone smiles in return. This is a big city, not a little town like Halifax, where you have to smile and even mutter ‘good day' if you have the bad luck to meet somebody's eye. Where traffic rotaries are based on politeness, for God's sakes.

Oh London. Anonymity, black and white rules to keep the masses of humanity under control, and brilliant Indian take-out, by the smells of it. Chinese restaurants in Halifax produce food as authentic as unadventurous Nova Scotian palates permit. The rest of the world is barely represented, though one or two half-way decent Lebanese restaurants do survive, due to the Lebanese being the largest population after the English and French. But now I see the restaurants here, I can see that even the Lebanese in Nova Scotia have kow-towed to the majority. Most of them are selling donair, a strange combination of meat the likes of which I never saw during my visits to the Middle East.

In London it will be the real thing, because the clients demand it. No need to go to India; it's all right here in Forest Gate.

I stop for little rests and gaze about me with the powers of observation granted to strangers in a foreign land. I notice that while the façade is colourful, the area is not really like India at all. Behind the shops, down the side streets, stretch the long, brick row houses where the majority of the urban population live. They are dull reds and greys, with tiny concrete courts at the front sporting garbage cans, maybe a stroller and a few toys. They don't seem to have much grass or flowers, but I guess they have little plots around the back, because I remember row houses from my childhood and they went hand in hand with flowers. Everything grows so well in England, with its mild, moist temperatures.

All the houses are identical, so I have to look at the numbers once I get to my father's road. Of course there are no toys or strollers in front of his house. Instead of cement there's a little patch of green. I stand looking at the house which has contained my father for the past few years, and a reluctance to enter overcomes me. All my joy at arriving in England and discovering a mini-India evaporates in one sweep. Such a medley of feelings, I can no longer tell if it is old stuff playing tricks with my adult self or a general repulsion for the old and infirm, who reach out to touch you as though young flesh gives them pleasure, without grasping what their elderly flesh might do to you.

I must remember not to sprinkle my language with “fuck,” like I do at home.

Old people frequently smell funny, like they no longer have the energy to reach those difficult nooks and crannies that emit the least acceptable aromas. My father said he was dying. I don't even know what he's dying from. Maybe it's skin cancer, and his whole face will be eaten up by some malodorous wound, like the mother in
Mad Shadows
.

While I stand there dredging up the courage to cross the tiny courtyard and knock on the door, it opens and a little old man stands there. My first shock: I remember my father as huge. He peers out at me. “I expected you over half an hour ago,” he snaps, and then turns around and disappears inside, leaving the door open.

Am I disappointed or relieved by this welcome? Even though I had been dreading an excess of physical affection, this reunion between father and son doesn't seem adequate. So when I discover my father waiting by the coat rack just inside the door, I drop my case and embrace him. I hold him longer than I thought I'd ever hold an old person, and in the end it is he who moves away. He does not smell, nor cling in gratitude at my embrace. He feels much smaller than I remember, frailer. Maybe all this repulsion/attraction stuff hasn't got anything to do with old or young, but is simply a case of my own perverse nature. If I feel the other person wants to touch me, I recoil, but if they have no intention of touching me, then I begin to fancy a hug. I hope this journey is not going to involve discovering a whole bunch of unsavoury truths about myself.

As my father draws away I look into his face and see that I have provoked tears. He turns away and ambles down the corridor, which leads to a small, dark kitchen at the back of the house.

“You must be tired after your trip. Sit down, I'll make you a cup of tea.”

“No really, let me make it for you. How do you feel?”

“I feel fine. This is my house and I'm making the tea. At least on the first day.”

His voice sounds the same, his brusqueness rings a bell too. I want to be glad that he's so straightforward, rendering mind games unnecessary — no need to guess what the other person wants from you. But there is a stirring of discomfort, because he can be so unpleasant, and I have gotten used to gentle, predictable Canadian behaviour.

He bustles about, boiling the kettle, putting some bacon in the frying pan, taking the eggs out of the fridge and placing them beside the sizzling pan. Everything is imbued with a strange combination of familiar and unfamiliar. I remember how my father always heated up the eggs before cracking or boiling them, insisting that they needed a gradual transition from cold to hot. He also insisted that English bacon was better than Canadian bacon. I believed him and was his joyful accomplice every time we came through customs toting bags chock a block full of English bacon. Now I prefer crispy, fatty Canadian bacon. Even the gas fire, with the inconvenience of elusive matches, evoked memories: my father kneeling before the hearth at our Nova Scotia farmhouse.

“Do you remember how you tried to save matches every morning when you were lighting the fire? It used to take you ages, but you'd find a spark from the night before and tease it with some paper until it caught. You were so proud that you'd saved a match.”

It is the right thing to say. My father ceases his activities and smiles.

“While you used to sit there informing me how much a match costs. As though that had anything to do with it.”

“So how are you, anyway, Dad?” The ‘Dad' feels strange, at first.

“I'm fine. How are you?”

“I mean, are you feeling OK, from a health point of view?”

“I'm fit as a fiddle, for a man of almost eighty. We are blessed with longevity in our family.”

Yes, I want to say, but what about the fax that said you were dying? It's uncomfortable to ask personal questions of this nature when it's obvious my father wants to avoid the subject. At least it's not face cancer.

My father places a cup of tea and a plate of bacon and eggs before me. Everything is how I like it. There are two pieces of toast, dripping with butter. One bears two pieces of crispy bacon and an egg with the yolk just a bit soft. The second bit of toast is spread liberally with jam. I am suddenly happy. “It's wonderful to see you! There's so much between us…” I'm thinking about the perfection of my tea and my bacon and eggs. Jenny never gets it right. There's never quite enough sugar in my tea or butter on my toast. As soon as I say it, I feel that it is inadequate, that my father will think I'm an idiot. I remember living a large part of my childhood worried that he would think this. Instead he says, “We are father and son.”

And I am consumed with guilt that I abandoned him.

He asks me about my life, and I tell him about my job and Jenny, careful not to swear. I want him to think my job is interesting, so I make it sound like a big deal.

“I design online courses for the web. I'm called an instructional designer. You can do marvelous things these days — animations, video, photography. I have to find a way to convey the teaching point in the simplest way with text and a visual element.”

“What are the subjects of the courses?”

Yes, well, I kind of hoped he wouldn't ask that, just assume that I'd followed his footsteps and gone into education. “Technical things, Dad. I work for a telephone company.” I searched my brain for the most impressive course I had done. “It's varied, anything from ergonomics to broadband, how high speed internet works. I learn a lot of different things.”

My father, a professor of English literature who taught books that he loved, doesn't look too impressed.

“I want to write a book,” I say. “I would like to make a living from writing, but it takes some time to get started.”

“You remember it took me twenty years to write my book?” My father laughs, “Starting is the easy part.”

“Long after you'd published your book, you would say to me, ‘Will I ever publish my booky?' and I would yell back, ‘You've already published it.'”

“Hats off gentlemen,” we shout simultaneously, and laugh. We always used to say that when we toasted the publication of my father's book. I feel full of affection for this man, my father. Of course I need to know about his illness, even if it feels uncomfortable. I take a deep breath.

“Dad, your fax said that you were dying.”

He picks up a sugar cube carefully in the tiny tongs, without answering.

After an unbearable minute of silence, I try again, speaking very gently. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“What is the … nature of your sickness?”

He waves the tongs dismissively. “Apparently there's an uncouth rabble of cells breeding like rabbits somewhere in my innards. Cancer, you know. I wish my book had done better. It deserved to.”

“But Dad, how bad it is? Do you feel ill?”

The tongs fall against the sugar bowl with a little clatter. “The subject of my illness bores me. I didn't want you here so we could natter on about cancer ad nauseam, and I will certainly regret contacting you if you go on and on and on about it.”

Tension churns in my stomach again. We'd been getting along so well. How stupid I'd been to annoy him. I wrack my brains for a safe subject.

“You're right about your book. It was brilliant.”

He merely grunts.

A note of desperation creeps into my voice. “Do you remember that time at the beach for Mum's birthday? You started to sing ‘Three Little Fishies' and Mum and I laughed and laughed.”

That does it. My father throws back his head and his rich baritone flows out.

Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool

Swam three little fishies and a mama fishie too

‘Swim' said the mama fishie, ‘Swim if you can'

And they swam and they swam all over the dam

Boopboopdit-tem dat-tem what-tem Chu!

Boopboopdit-tem dat-tem what-tem Chu!

And they swam and they swam all over the dam
.

His head bops around as he sings, he closes his eyes, and I am lost in the strangest sensations from my past.

“Then Mummy lost the ring you'd given her, and we searched all along the beach. We never found it, and it was an invaluable ring that was originally your mother's. Irreplaceable.”

Again, a frisson of fear as I recalled the white, strained face of my mother, desperate to find the ring. But my father hadn't said anything at all, just never mind. Have I wronged this old man sitting opposite me? Surely it is outrageous to abandon the parents who have given you life, returning to the fold only when they are dying? The ultimate in selfishness.

“Father, I cannot justify why I haven't been in touch. I am a rotten son.”

“I quite understand.”

What does he mean he quite understands? What is there to understand? My behaviour is selfish and unforgivable. I don't understand what he is understanding.

After our meal my father takes me out to see the garden. It is as I thought — there is a decent-sized plot around the back, private, with tall brick walls on each side and a profusion of flowers. I express my admiration, and my father takes me around the entire circumference, explaining the name and history of each flower on the way. This is an interminable process, and I am bored, but I make the appropriate noises. All this takes a lot of energy, and I am starting to feel exhausted. After what seems like hours in the garden, we re-enter the house, and my father makes another cup of tea and brings out a tin of chocolate biscuits.

“Can I smoke here?”

“Of course. After our tea I am going to bed. I'm U.E.”

U.E. — utterly exhausted. A favourite expression of my father's. Of course he is exhausted too. The way that our energy drains away in the company of other people is another shared trait.

I cannot sleep, despite the fact that I have been travelling all night. I twist and turn, trying to justify my behaviour. I cannot believe myself, wonder how I've lived with myself. Every aspect of his lonely life and small pleasures — the bacon and eggs, the chocolate biscuits, the garden — smites me. How did I become so selfish?