A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  We exchanged a look acknowledging the unlikeliness of this.

  I tried not to mind it when he emerged from his garden conservatory and accused me of chipping dishes that were already chipped. Or when he blamed me for tracking mud on the rug when it was clear that the footprints matched his own boots. At first I protested, but soon I saw no point. I apologized for mistakes I hadn’t made: smudges on the windows, missing butter cookies, a broken door handle. No child’s thoughts are pure and I thought he could see through me to some wickedness buried somewhere inside. Maybe he knew the truth about me. Maybe everything that went wrong was my fault. Maybe I was the reason my mother left.

  Because I was suspected, I began to behave suspiciously. My hand trembled when I was asked to pass Mr. Bowne the salt shaker. Anxiety gripped me as I carried a cup and saucer across the room. My hands broke things, and I caught a glimpse of the person I was meant to become.

  Dorothy dropped by every week to see how I was doing. When I asked after Stasha and Pippa, she told me they weren’t allowed to visit until I had settled in. She said they were “triggers,” which meant that if I saw them I might get upset and cut my arm again. She spoke gently, evenly, as if I were a child that might need talking down.

  But phone calls were allowed and Pippa called every few nights to make sure I was not too unhappy. She had never fussed so much before. Some nights I felt that I was speaking not to her but to her bad conscience.

  I asked her finally if she had found out anything about my mother.

  “Have you started looking for her?” I asked.

  “Yes, Mish. No news yet. But I really have started looking.”

  Something about the simple, clear way she said this made it sound sincere.

  A few weeks after I arrived, Kiyomi sent a card from Copenhagen. The card was stuffed in an envelope along with a delicate drawing she had done of Rita Hayworth wearing a slinky green dress. I placed this picture with the other mother look-alikes I kept in my sketchbook. I held the book against my ear and pretended to hear them: a chorus of mothers singing sad songs of regret and longing, aching for their little boy.

  At the Bownes’ I slept in Oliver’s old attic bedroom with its sloping blue walls and its army cot. Everywhere I turned, there were musty traces of him: a book of Greek mythology with his name scribbled on the title page, a desktop globe, a football in the closet, a picture of a ship carved on the desk. I felt that I was getting to know him better. I found his old pencil set in a desk, and, then, at the back of a dresser drawer, a collection of shrapnel and shell casings. When I showed Mrs. Bowne the contorted metal pieces, she declared them too strange and sad to keep, but I convinced her that they were too strange and sad to throw away; so, together, we washed the objects carefully, and set them on the bookshelf, one by one.

  I remember watching as she carefully polished and neatened them with her crooked hand, as though they were fancy jewels and not ugly bits of aftermath. What impressed me most was how she could change her mind so wholeheartedly. It made her trustworthy in my eyes.

  I knew that for weeks she had been furious at Oliver for going away to Saigon and putting himself at risk. She refused to use the words foreign correspondent; refused to dignify him with a legitimate title. She said he was “behaving like a cowboy” and “shirking his responsibilities.” Why couldn’t he cover local stories? She still considered the Beckenham triplets story he had written in 1959 a career pinnacle. Three babies to one mother. Now that was a story!

  Bright House Primary School was one of the newest schools in Beckenham. The shorts were grey flannel, the cap and blazer were a gory red. The school emblem, a red and white winged lion, was so poorly rendered I thought at first it was a fox attacking a swan. There was only one other beige boy in the school and I didn’t meet him right away because he had chicken pox the week I started. I climbed the steps to the two-storey brick building every morning, trying to be inconspicuous. I might as well have dressed in a spacesuit or a gorilla costume.

  On the third day of class, a gang of boys formed a ring around me during recess, slowly circling like sharks. My bladder seized, recognizing my plight immediately.

  “What’s your name?” demanded a tall boy with chapped knees.

  “Marcel.”

  “What kind of name is that? You French?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “London.”

  “Why’d you come here for?”

  “Got kicked out of my old school.”

  “Yeah? You staying here for a while, then?”

  “Yeah, my father is a war reporter. He travels all over the world.” I adjusted my satchel, feeling the contents (ruler, compass, notebooks, texts, pencils) shift against my hip. I was sure we had clicked. I was wrong.

  “So? What do you say?” the boy declared, expressionlessly. “Are you ready?” He hooked his right arm up through the air in a tight jab. Swish. Then the other arm. Swish. He began dancing around me, throwing punches in the air, sharp matchstick limbs jutting and angles forming like some Futurist sculpture. It took me a moment to realize that I was about to be attacked. I saw his fist flying towards my face and heard the boys around us let out a collective “Oooff!”

  I fought my way through several days of initiation, if it could be called that. If fidgeting, rocking backwards and forwards, allowing oneself to be pushed and punched and pinched from all sides could be called fighting. (I was, and remain, without question, a terrible fighter.) I slept very little that whole week. For the first two days, I tried to make up for all the times I had been passive when bullied at my first school. I grabbed my attacker by the lapels of his blazer and kicked his shins. I pulled him down and a cloud of dust went up around us as we rolled around in a furious knot. Nerve and daring flowed out of me. So did blood and mucous and spit and a few tears. I cried out the hardest when my wrist smashed against the ground.

  On the fourth day, exhausted, and fearing for my precious drawing hand, I offered my nose in sacrifice. A ribbon of red unfurled through the air.

  The boy smiled and relaxed his fists.

  As blood poured down over my upper lip, lower lip, chin, the boy offered me an unexpected handshake, eyeing me respectfully. His hand was rough and callused, a stubby peasant hand. My head was starry.

  “You okay, then?” he asked.

  I nodded at his faceted face, his prism of eyes and mouth, then wobbled off to the school lavatory where I stuffed a rocket of twisted toilet paper up my nostril, shook out the dust and creases in my clothes, and pulled up my socks. I didn’t feel so bad. My chest was still heaving and my body hurt, but the swift judgment of a physical beating was nothing compared to the slow emotional put-downs I had faced at Draycott. (If you were going to fall, wasn’t it better to plummet quickly and be done with it?) When the dizziness receded, I slowly made my way home to Copers Cope, trying to hide my injuries from Mrs. Bowne, who had either the tact or cowardice not to inquire.

  The next morning, I sat in the class staring at the blackboard while the teacher converted decimals to fractions. I was mesmerized by the short crisp noise of the chalkstick. Every line has a unique sound. The sound is determined by the drawing instrument, the drawing surface, the pressure of the hand. Take, for example, the rasp of charcoal on cardboard or the squeak of a Magic Marker on glass. The chalk that morning was percussive. It had a comforting click.

  The light was shining through the tall cathedral windows. The desk legs resembled hour-glasses in profile. I turned to my left and saw the boy who had beaten me up, whose name I had discovered was Malcolm. I noticed that in class, Malcolm was much less confident. Even in this repeat year, his grades were poor. The curt drill-sergeant voice he had used outside became soft and unsure. He kept his head lowered, hoping to avoid notice.

  Out in the schoolyard for recess that day, I remained vigilant. At one point I kicked a tree to show I was erratic and volatile. A boy ran up to me and asked if I lived on a banana boat. Ano
ther called me a “stupid anarchist” just so I would know that I was a piece of nothing. But mostly I was left alone.

  Back in class, drawing took up most of my attention. I was experimenting with line. Clotted, shaky, faint. Lines that stuttered, shook, shouted, and whispered. In art workshop, the rest of the class had just learned to draw a “basic horse” and busied themselves stacking and assembling their simple forms of ovals and rectangles into something generically horselike. Even back then, I knew there was no formula for drawing a horse. A horse was not a puzzle of shapes. Aspiring to be an artist and not an illustration machine, I had opted instead to draw the sky I could see from my desk. What was the point of having eyes if you couldn’t see that the world was filled with unique, ungeneric things?

  I was drawing a beam of clouds, when the teacher walked by my desk and halted. “Bravo,” he said, clapping his hands. “Bravo! More, more!” After that incident I was more careful to hide my talents.

  A few days later, the school’s only other beige boy returned. In mid-daydream, I turned my head away from the windows and caught his eye. He was seated near the front of the class, chewing on the end of his pen. He stopped and smiled, revealing a row of bright white teeth. I smiled back. We kept looking at each other. He was alarmingly scrawny and dotted with chicken pox scabs. When he swallowed, his protruding Adam’s apple jerked up and down.

  At the end of school, he was waiting for me by the gates. “Hello, Marcel.”

  “Hello—” I paused.

  “Chris. Persad,” he said. “I’m, um, in your home form. What’s that you’re holding?”

  “My sketchbook.” I took a step back and looked around nervously.

  But he stepped forward. “Can I see?”

  I pointed to a wooden bench at the far edge of the school field and said, “Walk with me over there and I’ll show you.”

  We sat together for nearly an hour, me flipping through my book. Or, rather, I sat. Chris seldom stopped moving, often leaping abruptly to his feet, then plopping himself back down again. Even when he was seated, his legs moved about restlessly. His hands fluttered like fighting pigeons while he chatted on. Among the facts he shared with me that afternoon were the following. He excelled at recorder. He got a reprieve from swimming on account of his weak constitution. He struggled through athletics, cricket, football and judo. He was a fussy eater and was known as “Mr. Teeny Teeny Weeny” by the dinner lady because of his request for very small portions. He had switched from Alexander Junior School because of bullying and poor performance.

  When I reached the final page, Chris brushed and flicked his shoes against the ground and gave me an uncomfortable smile. “Um, sorry about my rambling. Sometimes it all rushes out.” Then he gave me an admiring nod. “You’re a really great artist, though.”

  “I’m okay,” I said and snapped the sketchbook closed.

  Chris, reacting as if he had just heard a starting gun, bolted to his feet.

  “What are you all jumpy for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you just sit down?”

  He sat down, picked at a scab on his wrist and nodded pensively.

  “Would you, um, consider drawing me one day?” he said, finally.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Then, moved by the sight of hope on Chris’s face, I found a friendlier tone in which to add, “After the Christmas holidays could be a good time.”

  When I returned home from school there were two pieces of mail awaiting me. A short letter from Pippa saying she had a lead on the name of the clinic where my mother may have stayed on and off after I was born. And a postcard from Oliver asking a few questions about my life at school and Copers Cope.

  Mrs. Bowne had also received a letter from Oliver and I saw her staring at a newspaper clipping that had slipped from the envelope. I went and quietly stood behind her, reading.

  CHAOS REIGNS IN BATTLE OF AP BAC

  10 January 1963

  by Oliver Lawrence

  Saigon (Novus)—Fourteen US helicopters were hit by heavy VC machine-gun fire near the village of Ap Bac in the Mekong Delta, the region known as Vietnam’s rice basket. The guerrillas did not scatter as predicted but maintained their lines as the Vietnamese Air Force arrived with napalm, rockets and artillery fire. It was a shocking defeat for the better-equipped South Vietnamese—

  When Mrs. Bowne noticed me reading over her shoulder, she refolded the clipping and shooed me out of the room.

  Later on, while we were watching television, Mrs. Bowne put down the yarn she had been unknotting and rewinding, rested her hand lightly on my knee and asked about the letter I had received from Pippa.

  “What does Pippa have to say these days?”

  “She’s helping me dig up information about my mother.” It still seemed incredible that Pippa had kept her word.

  “Oh?” she said, picking up the ball of yarn again. “What sort of things has she discovered?”

  “She says that my mother may have stayed in a clinic for a while.” The word clinic chilled me, with its image of cold white corridors and rolling metal beds, and I wanted to know how Mrs. Bowne would react.

  “I see,” she said.

  I watched her fingers tensely pluck the yarn. Then she laid down the ball as if about to say something more, but seemed to change her mind. There was more tense plucking.

  “That’s all the information I have for now,” I said. “Did Oliver ever tell you anything about my father?”

  “Oliver is your father.”

  “I mean my other one. My birth father.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  I watched her close her housecoat and pinch her lips together.

  “Oh,” I said. “I just thought it would be good to know.”

  She didn’t respond. At last, without looking at me, she said, “Just promise me you won’t forget who your real family is.”

  I started at the fierceness in her voice and said, “I promise.”

  I drew Chris. I drew him many times. I drew him large on the page to boost his confidence. I filled out his face and padded his scrawny limbs. I put him in a fedora and made him look like a fearless spy. I added a cape and gave him super-powers. Chris shook his head. “You don’t have to do that.” So I drew him again, this time with knobby grey knees and elbows, perfectly parted hair, worried eyebrows and hooded sleepy eyes.

  Though incapable of prolonged stillness, Chris was a very willing model. Often he would talk without stopping while he sat for me. His openness, his readiness to expose his private self, always surprised me.

  He said his mother wouldn’t allow him to swim or even soak in a full bath because her brother had died by drowning. He said she wanted him to be a doctor one day but he wanted to be an actor, though maybe he would have to move to Pakistan to make that happen. (He asked me what my background was: “Maybe Indian or Mongolian or Persian?” and I said, “Yes, I’m maybe Indian Mongolian Persian.” He gaped at me for a minute, then said, “What?” and I said, “Exactly.”) He said he had been born with a surplus finger but the surgeon chopped it off. He asked me more about my parents but I said nothing. He said he fancied a girl named Edith whose father owned Carnaby’s sweet shop on the High Street but she was too tall and pretty and so he fancied a girl named Jane whose father owned Harden and Berkins.

  “The barber?”

  Chris nodded, jiggling his leg. “She’s, um, about my height and she’s got a damaged lip.”

  I stopped drawing for a moment.

  “Do you like anyone?” Chris asked.

  I looked down at my pencil, considered mentioning Kiyomi, then shook my head. I was still holding back.

  Chris, meanwhile, had no reservations. He grinned the minute he saw me and hopped around as if our friendship were a scorching, unexpected blaze of sunshine. His hands would paddle with excitement as he told me this or that story and he would laugh his scarily loud laugh while I doled out meagre lines about living in London. He hardly seeme
d to notice that I was playing it cool.

  We began meeting at the cinema on Saturdays for the Minors Matinees. The movies we saw were American Westerns and British nature films, and, if we were lucky, a few slapstick shorts involving collisions of face and pie and victims who scooped gobbets of cream from their eyes. If Mrs. Bowne gave me pocket money, we would treat ourselves to ice cream in sodden paper cups and cheer and boo from our balcony seats as Zorro or Roy Rogers saved the day. We always rooted for the whites over the savages.

  After the movies, we walked along Beckenham’s S-shaped high street. Sometimes we would re-enact scenes from the picture we had just watched and button our mackintoshes around our necks and fly down the street like Captain Marvel or pretend we were Roy Rogers shooting guns out of villains’ hands.

  On seeing us, older women crossed the road or clutched their purses tightly to their chests. Once, when I asked an older man for the time, he lifted his arms in the air and backed away as if I were a gun-waving hooligan. We could throw a street into disarray just by appearing on it.

  The corner bullies began to take notice. The way Chris hopped around certainly didn’t help matters. I remember the shame of being treated to bared bottoms and mashed-up faces when we sat in the window of the chip shop, the terror of being chased down the street by a gang of thugs wielding drainpipes and sticks.

  IN HINDSIGHT, I find it curious that Chris and I never talked openly about these shared experiences. We didn’t remark on the fact that we were constantly mistaken for each other, even though we didn’t look at all alike. We acted as if it made no difference at all. How could it not have weighed on our minds? At least once a day, we were harassed, sneered or spat at, called names. At school we had our shoes stolen, our notebooks destroyed. We were pelted with chestnuts on street corners. I suppose a boy can get used to almost anything, but I know I still carry a residue. It’s like an ache that arises in damp weather, a hurting along my spine. From that period of my life comes the habit of circumspection, of avoiding homogenous groups, of being better than most at reading body language, of deducing exits.