A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  Pippa saw the light under my door and came in and lay down beside me.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Are you thinking about Oliver?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought so. I miss him too.”

  “We haven’t heard from him in almost a week.”

  “True, but you shouldn’t worry.”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes he travels to places where he can’t call.”

  “I know.”

  The next morning, I awoke shivery and the flat was full of cold drafts. I heard Stasha gently scolding Pippa in the other room.

  “You left the front door wide open when you came in last night. What were you thinking?”

  “I guess I forgot.”

  “Look at this place, Pip. Marcel needs some stability and order.”

  Pippa said nothing.

  Stasha then tidied up the flat while complaining aloud about Pippa’s erratic housekeeping.

  The next day when I returned from school, Pippa was in the kitchen wearing a man’s shirt backwards, in smock fashion. She was pretending to be domestic, it seemed. There was a drinking glass with floppy buttercups in the middle of the table and she was cracking eggs into a slick of bacon grease. Her hair was pinned back, and her eyes seemed more alert.

  “Come give a kiss,” she said, tilting her cheek towards me. “How was school today, darling?”

  Later we sat outside on the front stoop and watched a man rebuild a garden wall at the edge of his yard. He replaced the rotting green bricks with new grey bricks, waiting for the first row to dry before starting on the next layer. When he was done, he lifted his hand and gave us a wave and we each waved back.

  “So what do you think?” she said after the man had left. “You’ve been here for two months. Are you settled in?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good.”

  I think that’s all she needed to hear. She didn’t have the strength to keep up the domestic act. After that brief exchange, she began to spend more time alone, wandering off whenever she felt like it.

  I eavesdropped outside the kitchen one day and heard Stasha tell Pippa that she was tired of her behaving like a vagrant.

  “I can’t keep track of you,” Stasha said, and Pippa muttered something about Stasha taking some time to do some strolling of her own. (“It might make you less tense.”)

  After a few minutes, Stasha came out and went to the hallway. I watched her bang the mud and grass off Pippa’s shoes and pick bits of leaf from her coat. She seemed furious at first, grumbling under her breath, but gradually her tidying motions grew slower, and a little sadder.

  A few weeks had passed since I had met Kiyomi at the warehouse event, but I found myself thinking of her constantly. I finally mentioned her name to Pippa, and asked if she would help me track her down. She made a few calls and discovered that Kiyomi lived fairly near us with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.

  Another week went by and then one day the doorbell rang and there was Kiyomi, standing on the doorstep beside her mother. She was wearing plain tweed trousers and an argyle vest. Her bangs lay flat against her forehead, the left side of her hair mashed upwards from sleep.

  Kiyomi’s mother was beaming at me. She grabbed me by the shoulders. “Marcel,” she said. “I’ve been hearing all about you. I’m Natsumi.”

  Kiyomi grimaced, then pointed. “Let’s go inside.”

  I gave Kiyomi a tour of the flat while Natsumi and Pippa chatted in the kitchen. We made our way through every room, with Kiyomi gazing admiringly at Pippa’s various collections, the colourful pieces of fabric everywhere, and me gazing admiringly at her.

  When we ran out of things to look at, I showed her my sketchbooks.

  The next time she visited she came alone, carrying her own oversized notebook under her arm. “Go on,” she said, urging me to take a peek.

  I hesitated, steeling myself for what I might find. Seeing me pause, she opened the book herself and leafed through the first few pages—a girl holding a swan with two heads, a man walking a giraffe across an ocean, another girl shooting butterflies with a bow and arrow. It took me a moment to absorb what she was showing me.

  “Wait,” I said, putting my hand on her wrist.

  I looked through the rest of the book slowly. Some pages were completely mapped with complex webs: tree branches, root systems, leaf veins. Elaborate flowering things. I looked back at her, in awe.

  Kiyomi started coming over regularly. We passed much of the spring and summer together—talking, listening to records and drawing. She lined up her coloured pencils on the floor and drew while lying on her tummy. I sat at my desk. We shared a taste for tidy, detailed renderings, though hers tended to be a bit stranger than mine. When we showed our work to Pippa and her friends, they admired our efforts but encouraged more mess, more active spattering. They didn’t see why we were so hung up on making pictures of things. Confirming their suspicions, we arranged still-lifes: fruit, flowers, dead birds.

  “They don’t understand, Marcel. You and I have our own way,” she said. Whenever she said things like that, it made me feel incredibly good, as if we were destined to be together, safe in our secret place of knowing.

  When Kiyomi didn’t want to draw, we found other ways to occupy ourselves. One day, when we were “playing house,” she pointed at the bed and said, “Why don’t you lie down there?”

  So I did and she got into bed beside me, pressing her back right against my chest. “Pretend we’re sleeping,” she whispered.

  She took my arm and wrapped it around her waist; I had never held anyone so close before. I could feel her breathing, her heart beating, dun, dun, dun, thick and slow. And then, when it seemed she was deeply asleep and I had almost nodded off, she jumped up and down on the bed, shouting, “Up you get, you’ll be late for work!”

  I did not see it at the time, of course, but all we wanted was a normal life. Surrounded by artists who shunned anything traditional, and separated by circumstance from others our age, we were becoming odd counter-revolutionary children.

  I kept reminding myself how lucky I was to have Oliver and Pippa in my life. Whenever I would get a letter from Oliver I would feel embarrassed about my pettiness, my quest for an ordinary family. I had no business complaining. There I was wishing that some Belgian artist hadn’t finished the last of the milk, while children my age in other countries were really suffering.

  I have since met journalists who do what Oliver did, who find anonymity in airports and oblivion in crumbling hotels and serenity in room service, who watch one country vanish into another. To some detractors, they are disaster cattle—a migratory herd eternally searching for a new grazing patch. They thrive in the gap—arriving after the tourists and foreign residents have fled and before the missionaries and relief workers descend. Unlike the latter, they offer little in the way of aid or solid assistance. They come with different purposes, some professional (to shine a spotlight, influence public opinion) and some more personal (to feel needed and alive, to outrun their feelings or families). They travel with different tricks: cigarette filters in the nostrils to keep out the stench of death, a dummy notebook to share with officials, pockets full of hard candies to stave off hunger.

  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.”