The building was a maze; hubs sprang up from every corner. In the hallway, we passed a series of spaces including a snooker room and a storage area. Unpainted walls added to the rustic feel. We followed the low lit route right to the end and out into the garden area, where misty eyed gargoyle statues wearing comic expressions dotted the green, stirring their tails in any bits of conversation that filtered through. The air between us crackled. He stood only a few feet from me but I could feel the tension in his large frame.
“Tell me the truth,” I said urgently. “Are you ashamed of me?” My voice cracked a little, I berated myself internally, trying to hold back tears.
“What?” The hand rummaging in his pocket stilled. “Why would you ever think that?” Car horns sounded in the distance, leaves blew across the green. I stepped closer, watching his face for the tiniest flicker of betrayal. “Because you’ve been lying to me for years! You were using my mother and when you knocked her up, you continued to live your double life without any responsibility. God! I feel sick; your sons are my friends. Don’t they suspect you’re not who you say you are?”
The Queen was out in the open again, turning in his hand, small and pale in the moonlight. His face etched in pain, he rubbed his baldhead wearily. “It wasn’t like that Joy. I loved your mother. She was a troubled, complex woman but I loved her. I knew this day would come and I’ve dreaded it. It’s just like her to leave me to deal with this.”
“Why are you trying to absolve yourself of any responsibility?” I cried, holding the sadness between us, the pangs of rejection I felt.
“I’m not your father. I wish I was, Lord knows I do but I’m not.” It was said so quietly I almost missed it. This was how a ten-foot truck could hit you without sound or warning. I was close enough to see his watery eyes, the regret there. I peeled the dented truck bender off my body, raised it above our heads. “You’re lying!” I accused, pointing a shaky finger. “Otherwise why stay around us all these years? It never made sense to me before but now it does. The secret phone calls, those pictures I found, gifts I wasn’t meant to see. That was all you.”
He threw his arms up, the red tie he wore fluttered. “I admit it, I’m not perfect. We don’t always stay in love with the same people. I loved my wife. I had a responsibility to the boys. I thought about leaving her but I couldn’t in the end. Your mother and I were friends at first. I- by the time we became lovers, it seemed best to keep things as they were.”
“How convenient for you.” I spat, walking back and forth between two gargoyles.
“Tell me who he is. I have a right to know. I know you know something.”
He looked down to the ground, the sadness in his face so palpable even the gargoyles concrete expressions may have changed slightly. “Your mother was raped. Your grandfather is your father. She went to see him and… I don’t think he was himself.”
“That’s not true!” I replied but horror was building inside me. That feeling of seeing something awful and being unable to look away. Pain shot through my stump, the taste of nausea filled my mouth. I ran to the side, vomiting into a hedge. Suddenly, certain things made sense; my mother sleeping in the afternoons, her emotional distance from me sometimes, the lies she told to save us from the truth.
Tears ran down Mervyn’s cheeks. His eyes filled again as he turned the chess Queen in his hand. His chest swelled as though a river of sadness would split it open and carry us both away. I trembled watching the look of despair on his face, the pain there. I felt sick seeing Anon appear between the gargoyles, reaching into their mouths to skim her hands over the secrets they knew. Something inside me seemed to be realigning, travelling somehow. A searing pain shot through my head, then my chest. The gargoyles turned their heads, hissing into the dark.
Mervyn placed one hand on my shoulder, gently raised me up.
A part of me was dying from the shame, another crumbling from the weight of it.
I couldn’t look him in the eye. I felt like nothing, a tiny speck under a shoe.
“Leave me alone,” I mumbled, pulling away. I couldn’t thank him for saving my life, for stopping my mother from drowning me. I stumbled through the hallway, deformed again in the light, blinded by tears. Bath water ran down the walls, its sloshing sound slipping through the plughole, filling my chest.
Outside my legs buckled in the night. I left the pale chess Queen crying in Mervyn’s pocket and the gargoyles holding bits of a battered chessboard chased the small openings on me, widening in the cold air.
Echo, Belly and the Rubik’s Cube
When I arrived at Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos I couldn’t bring myself to call Mervyn yet. I knew we needed to talk but I was still hurt and confused about being a hidden thing. Peter Lowon’s diary sat in my handbag. Outside, the driver of a yellow taxicab between mouthfuls of pineapple slices informed me the drive to Benin was long. I thought of my mother Queen. I imagined she took Peter Lowon’s diary and the brass head all the way from Africa to London, her only connections to the father whose footsteps she trailed as a little girl. I imagined she read the diary from cover to cover many times, knew it like the back of her hand; that when she passed her first school exams, she ran home to it and heaved bittersweet breaths of success over its pages. That she studied his scrawl and doodles, imitated them. And after she kissed the first boy who whispered chewing gum flavoured nothings in her ear and turned out to be completely useless, she weighed it in her hands and eyed it with resentment. He cursed her by leaving her that legacy. It was the curse of the broken-hearted, the way that only a father can.
Weirdly, I remembered it then: the black and white photograph from the diary. I fished it out, held it at the corner and stared at the faces, the creases. It hit me, I recognised him. Peter Lowon was the man from the café scene that trespassed regularly in my head, the one where I always struggled to hear what was said, the man who was both father and grandfather to me. He was out there, somewhere. I had met him once before. It was a memory after all, a fallen snowflake becoming a tear.
Peter Lowon Journal Entry July 1964
Dear Queenie,
I am a killer. I am a coward. I am your father.
If you find this, then you know I have gone. I was brought to this place and feared this day. The day you know what I have done. Please keep this diary, here are honest pieces of me I can offer you, hold them up to the light. I want to apologise for bringing shame on my family. I cannot make amends; I can only say that sometimes people do desperate things, terrible things. I ask for forgiveness. Queenie there are no good or bad people don’t let anyone tell you this, these lines are blurred daily. The bad we often see in others, we recognise in ourselves, bouncing off our own hand made mirrors. We are all flawed people trying to make our way. Should you choose to find me one day, I am out there waiting.
Tell your mother I’ve always loved her and I’m sorry for being the man she suspected I was. There is no blade to cut my weakness away, no shot to numb the darkness out. Would you believe me if I told you I am a prisoner of myself? I wish so much more for you. Queenie, you are me and I am you. This is the one thing I see with so much clarity; through you I was born twice. One day you will have your own child, and you will know a joy no words can describe, no mathematical equation can depict. It is pure, purer than water, purer than air, injections of life into the blood. And you will make mistakes too! Queenie I am in pain, the kind of pain that makes you run inside to bleed on your carpet privately. I worry that one day you will forget what I look like. I worry you will see me in the faces of strangers. See the black and white picture inside this journal? I am the one on the left laughing. In case you find yourself forgetting: THE ONE ON THE LEFT. Please keep it with you.