A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  The boy seated in front of me read first:

  “Your locks are coils of light

  They bounce me to the sky

  Like a clean, fluffy bed.”

  When it was my turn, I read fiercely:

  “‘Your locks are torture.

  But I will get even. My fingers are swords.

  I am the prince of air who escapes . . . ’”

  The teacher, with a face hardening into ice, interrupted: “Thank you, Marcel. That will be all. You may sit down now.”

  “But I’m not done yet.” I was just about to read a line about Houdini.

  “I said thank you, Marcel. That’s quite enough.”

  Oliver, of course, received a call from the headmaster and a letter from the teacher asking if there was some situation at home that might explain my aggression. They, the teacher and the headmaster, just didn’t know what to make of it. But strangely, my standing among my peers improved for several days. The other boys walked around me with a new attitude of respect, almost admiration.

  By my second month, I had garnered the nickname Malay. It was a mild taunt delivered with little ill-feeling. Geographically incorrect, yes, but after the racial fuzziness of nignog–chink–coolie (among other rude names I had heard on the street), it was almost a relief to be tacked to a map.

  During my third month, there was a lice outbreak. This was blamed on the school’s Ethiopian caretaker who, despite immaculate standards of cleanliness, was suddenly accused of slapdash hygiene. Draycott Grammar School was not the only English school experiencing an epidemic of lice that year. In London, it was a virtual Lice Olympics, with athletic pests leaping indiscriminately from scalp to scalp. Across the city, bald children proliferated. At Draycott, alongside a dozen others, I had my hair shorn down to the roots. I was sent home with two brown bottlefuls of lotion and a razored skull that made me look like the lost child of Yul Brynner. Horrified, Oliver called the headmaster for an explanation and was told that I was shaved as a precautionary delousing measure. Apparently my hair’s “natural flamboyance” had prevented a proper check.

  Now no one had any idea how much hair I had or what kind of hair it was—springy, wispy, stick straight, kinky.

  ¿Hablas español?

  Bisakah anda berbicara dalam bahasa Indonesia?

  Nagsasalita ba kayo ng Tagalog?

  I was tired of being a beige person. I wished I had been born in a peaceful, boring country like Greenland, where people never died in wars or earthquakes. A place with exact measurements and a precise population. I longed to be able to say, “I was born on an island, 150 miles long and 50 miles wide . . .”

  The breaking point came one Monday morning as the class filed into school.

  “Keep moving, Malay,” hissed a boy named Henry behind me.

  “Shut up.”

  “What’s that you said, Malay?” another boy said, flicking a pebble at me.

  I swivelled around. “I said quit shoving me and SHUT UP! I’m not your stinking Malay, Barbuda, Mau Mau, Cherokee. Is that clear? I AM ENGLISH so you better shut your trap!”

  The boys closest to me mumbled and stepped back. The ones farther away kept their distance, exchanging glances.

  It could have been the wild look in my eye—the look of a boy pushed to the edge. Maybe they wondered how crazy I could get. No one seemed anxious to find out. As for me, still shaking with fear and woozy with the vertigo of holding my ground, I went to the washroom and vomited into the toilet. Then I climbed up onto the washroom’s recessed windowsill and curled up.

  I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I heard was the caretaker knocking gently against the pine sill with the end of a broom.

  Unazungumza kiswahili?

  In the chilly days that followed, I began drawing my first caricatures. I ignored my lessons and focused on my notebook. As soon as my pencil touched the page, I felt my heart slow down. I could have been Hogarth’s apprentice, for all the gnarly noses and fanged teeth I drew. The tip of my pencil kept snapping, I kept sharpening it. I depicted blood, brains exploding from split heads, hearts ripped open by medieval daggers and crossbows. The teacher, upon discovering my drawings, saw a dangerous revenge fantasy, a sign of violent tendencies. Again, Oliver was advised.

  “Some of the children are apparently afraid of you,” he said that night.

  Scared? Of me? As bizarre as it sounded, it left me with a new perception of myself. Was this who I was? A threat? And why wasn’t Oliver defending me? Why wasn’t he asking, What have they been doing to you? Surely he had some sense of what a boy like me might experience among a class of white children.

  I didn’t think Oliver would ever withdraw me from Draycott, but one afternoon, just after class photo day, the headmaster entered my classroom.

  “Marcel Lawrence?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your father is coming to pick you up. He’ll be here in ten minutes. Please prepare your things.”

  “To leave, sir?”

  “Yes, Marcel. To leave.”

  There was a ripple in the classroom.

  Oliver had discovered that I was being transferred to a class for the educationally challenged, a remedial stream. He was outraged. My time at Draycott was mercifully over.

  I still have my notebook from those wretched days, page after page with drawings that lend some insight into my state of mind at the time. The titles include: Self-Portrait with Two Axes, Trap Door for a Laughing Audience, The Truth about Horrid-Awful Madness, and Picture from the Gutter of the World. It’s not all feverish. There are a few pictures of boats, planes and buildings. Still, there is enough to make me worry for my previous self.

  In the class picture from Draycott, I stand rod straight, skinny bird-bone arms hanging at my sides. I lack weight, presence. I seem darker in the photo, unmistakably black against the startling white of my classmates, and I don’t know if it’s the camera or my imagination.

  I can see in that picture, in the set of my mouth, that I’ve already decided never to tell Oliver about the bullying at school. I am eight and a half and I’ve already determined that, in the future, I will hide my weakness from him until I cannot bear it. I will tend my wounds alone. Gradually, scar upon scar, that’s how a man is formed.

  I was placed on a waiting list for Kensington International School while Oliver moved to Parliamentary assignments. He bought a used white Mini, a London A–Z, and placed a cardboard Press sign on the dashboard. He installed a radio in the car tuned to the police frequencies, which emitted staticky intermittent bulletins so that the leads were often useless. But it served his purposes, keeping him symbolically connected to London’s netherworld.

  He drove like a drunk man, with lurching starts and alarming halts. I sat in the broken front seat, clutching the passenger door with my mittened hand, and tried my best to muffle my terror as we wheeled past tight corners, shaved past parked cars, and took roundabouts at top speed. At traffic lights, I soothed myself by poking my finger in the holes of the wooden steering wheel. Sometimes, when the panic of hurtling forward was too exhausting, my nervous system shut down and I fell into a stress sleep.

  While we drove around, Oliver drilled me on world capitals. “Tegucigalpa.”

  “Is the capital of Honduras!”

  “Accra.”

  “Is the capital of Ghana!”

  I had developed a habit of rubbing my temple with my thumb when I concentrated. While trying to remember the capital of Nicaragua one afternoon, I looked over at Oliver and saw that he was also rubbing his temple with his thumb. I loved these moments when Oliver and I looked and behaved a bit like each other.

  Though I went along with Oliver’s pop quizzes and feigned interest in his car lectures, it seemed to me, increasingly, that Oliver’s most obvious failing was his sense of priorities. He shared facts about the war in Korea, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union—topics that might have held other boys rapt. B
ut these facts were not the ones I wanted or needed. At age eight and a half, I was hungry for information about my mother.

  My interest in her had grown dramatically ever since I had read the hidden hospital letters. So I began to take advantage of lulls in conversation while Oliver drove around. I began asking some simple questions. In this way I discovered that she liked bread pudding with sultanas and that she took two lumps of sugar in her tea. Her favourite shop was Kleins Haberdashery in Soho. She had long fingers, which were my fingers. She had a long flared nose, which was my nose.

  Slowly, the facts Oliver shared became more personal.

  “We were very much in love.”

  Or, “Did I mention how pleased she was when she found out about you?”

  Perhaps I made the fatal mistake of looking too eager during these conversations. Maybe Oliver began to worry that he had disclosed too much or was startled by something he recalled or feared losing me to a ghost—but one day there were no more mother facts. He turned away from my questions, changing the topic to himself. For a while, I had a strange feeling that he was trying to win me back to him.

  “I’ll make you proud, Marcel. Just you wait. One morning you’ll open up the newspaper and see my byline right there: front page, above the fold.”

  I wanted him to feel that he was still my hero, but his ambitions were strange to me. As far as I could tell, the lessons “above the fold” were horrible and predictable: war was continuous, politicians made loads of mistakes, trains and planes weren’t safe, it was better to live inland than by open water, and—if you read the tabloids like News of the World—the streets were full of roving maniacs, perverts, arsonists and murderers. Stories above the middle crease were a kind of horrid stain that made people put their hands over their mouths. They were bleak events children weren’t meant to see.

  It was either a coincidence or a final act of shedding, but a month after this conversation, Oliver gave up the flat in Orme Square (where we had all lived before my mother disappeared). We moved to a skinny house in the middle of a row of skinny houses on New King’s Road in Hammersmith and Fulham, right across from a small park called Eel Brook Common. It was a former workman’s house, and it took me a while to get used to seeing our familiar belongings in cramped, unfamiliar surroundings. I kept staring at our old moss green settee thinking that it looked lost.

  Happily, between New Year’s and my ninth birthday in February, a space opened up at Kensington International School. Oliver promised it would be better than Draycott and this time he was right. Founded ten years earlier, Kensington was the choice of diplomats and visiting dignitaries from former and current British colonies. Some of the children came from plush homes in Belgravia and Knightsbridge. There was a large framed portrait of the Queen at the front of each classroom and children with skin of every colour seated at the desks. My class was an energetic crowd of Ugandan Asian, Irish, West Indian, Greek Cypriot, and Indian kids who often slipped into other languages while playing in the yard. The headmistress, Mrs. Heaney, ancient and thin-lipped, had a strange habit of speaking to our hairlines, and seldom to our eyes.

  A few of the children weren’t black or white but beige, like me. There were two girls, Hayley and Adele, daughters of a Trinidadian-born economist and white British mother, who proudly referred to themselves as “half-caste.” I had never heard the term before and was curious. Was that what I was?

  In the evenings, Oliver began spending more time on the telephone. At first I assumed he was fielding work-related calls, but then I noticed that his voice had a softer tone than usual. It made me suspicious. There was more space between his sentences, and his words had a vagueness that I somehow associated with romance. Whenever I approached, he would dissolve into silence or cover the mouthpiece until I moved away.

  I left him to his murmuring conversations.

  When I felt lonely, I would take out my sketchbook. I had taped the blurry photo of my mother to the inside back cover and would sneak peeks at it. I began to look forward to school each day. Kensington had several kind teachers, mostly young women, who warmed to Oliver and me. My favourite, Miss Humphreys, wore tortoiseshell glasses and a silk scarf tied around her neck like a French woman. She tucked in my collar and once even offered to mend a hole in Oliver’s jacket. We must have appeared wrinkled and chaotic to her. It must have been clear we were missing a woman’s touch.

  Then we met Pippa. She had moved into a house several doors down—a flat with a thickly painted blue door—when I was nine years old. She came from Poland by way of Canada but had been living in London for almost thirteen years and considered herself English. She had dark brown hair that ended halfway down her back. Her face was pretty but there was a hatching of lines around her eyes even when she wasn’t smiling.

  We met her at the park across the street in early spring. She was photographing a tree, though she held the camera at a strange and distracted angle, glancing around every so often. When she noticed me watching her, she lowered her camera and waved.

  “Hi!” she shouted out, and walked over to us.

  “I’m Pippa,” she said, breathless, holding out her hand.

  Oliver stared at her face and at her outstretched hand. Then, at last, he said, “I’m Oliver.”

  “I’m Marcel,” I said.

  She nodded as if she already knew this, and gave my hand a gentle shake with her long fingers. When she let go of my hand, we stood for a moment without speaking. I eyed her coat, which was delicately pleated at the shoulders like seashells, then looked down at her rubber boots, so immense that they might have belonged to a fisherman.

  Finally, Oliver said: “Well, I guess we’ll be on our way, then.” He explained that we were just heading over to the swings. For some reason, he seemed nervous.

  “All set, Marcel?” said Oliver, jerking his head towards the playground.

  Pippa turned to me. “Do you mind if I join you?”

  I glanced over at Oliver, who was now blushing.

  “Would that be okay?” she said.

  Oliver stared intensely at the ground, having evidently discovered something there of great interest. I looked back at Pippa. I didn’t know why Oliver was behaving so rudely.

  “It would be our pleasure,” I said.

  Together we set off for the playground. Unable to decide on a proper strolling arrangement, we proceeded in single file. Oliver. Pippa. Myself. As we walked, Oliver moving briskly ahead, Pippa advancing with a slight bounce in her step, I noticed how the wind lifted her hair and whipped it about like silk ribbons.

  At the playground, Pippa offered to push me on the swings. I said, “Yes,” without hesitation, though I was too old for it.

  She pushed gently at first, then she pushed me higher, and higher. Before long I felt myself riding on waves of air. I looked down and saw Oliver sitting on the bench with Pippa’s camera bag, a glazed look on his face.

  When I stopped swinging, Pippa bent over and picked up two index cards that had fallen from my jacket pocket onto the ground.

  “What does this say? ‘Acquiesce’? ‘Resign’? Well, these aren’t very happy words, are they.”

  I shrugged and reached my hand out for the cards, then slipped them back into my pocket.

  “I can see you’re a funny, serious boy. A nice mish-mash of the two. Hmm . . . Mish. I like the way that sounds. Do you mind if I call you ‘Mish’? Now tell me, why did you bring your spelling homework to the park?”

  “Because Oliver said I could.”

  I watched a bird a few feet away. It pecked at a twig. It hopped onto a rock. It hopped down.

  “He did, did he?” she said. “And I suppose you took could to mean should.”

  “I don’t mind it,” I said with a shrug. “I’m working on my word power.”

  I was still sitting on the swing. To my pleasure and embarrassment, Pippa bent over and retied my laces. When she was done, she tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear. I looked around and saw that the othe
r mums in the playground had sculpted hair, hair that didn’t move. No one else had hair that flew about their faces in silky strips. There was something girlish about Pippa. And the warm way she called me “Mish” made me feel strangely proud.

  I wanted to ask her questions. I wanted to know if she was married, if she had children. But the sky was beginning to darken and it was time to say goodbye.

  “That was lovely,” said Pippa, giving us each a kiss on the cheek.

  Oliver, usually so articulate, barely managed a whisper. “Thank you . . . Pippa, was it?”

  We watched her walk away, her camera swinging against her hip. When she reached the road, she stopped and turned around, as though sensing us. She gave a wave. I waved back.

  Oliver and I looked at each other.

  “That was nice,” I said, just as he said, “That was strange.”

  “Nice and strange,” he murmured as a compromise.

  On the way home, Oliver pointed out Pippa’s door. Other than its blueness, it was an unremarkable door. But how remarkable it seems now that I failed to question: How did he know she lived there?

  That night I sat in the bathroom with Oliver while he shaved, applying a few deft strokes of the razor to his pale jawline. With his cheeks still lathered with cream, he placed his face very close to the mirror. He held the edge of the razor to the bottom of his right sideburn, then stopped and stood back. He studied his face in the speckled mirror, turned his head to one side and then the other. He pushed his hair off his forehead.

  “Look, Marcel. I’m still young,” he said. “Much younger than I feel.”

  He wiped the shaving cream off with a damp towel, rinsed his face in the sink, put his shirt back on. He left it half unbuttoned, exposing the pale ladder of bones below his throat, and walked back to the kitchen to prepare dinner. He made poached eggs and slipped them onto the plates without disturbing the yolks. We sat at the table and I watched as he mopped up the last bit of egg with his toast and chewed it slowly.

  I thought of the wind lifting Pippa’s hair like ribbons.