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when she took the plunge, she discovered it was indeed cathartic

she came to appreciate that as the oldest girl in a family of ten, she’d had to mother the younger ones when she’d been deprived of being properly mothered herself

as soon as she was born, her mother was pregnant with another child, and each newborn baby had to have her mother’s full attention

Dominique worked out she’d been drawn to Nzinga because she was subconsciously looking to be mothered

then mothering had turned into smothering, and Mummy turned out to be Daddy, as she told Amma, who disagreed and said it was about bad luck rather than unresolved childhood issues, you’re becoming too American, Dom

Dominique kept in touch with Gaia until she passed away, she’d written that Nzinga had been evicted from the community soon after Dominique left, had raged across the property trying to find out where ‘Sojourner’ had gone, threatening people and smashing windows

the police were called, the women didn’t press charges

rest easy, she doesn’t know where you are

Dominique still spent years having nightmares about Nzinga coming at her through a crowd or driving into her as she crossed a street or appeared in a public place, even during her opening speech for the Women’s Arts Festival she founded after a few years in LA

Nzinga would be berating her for leaving her when she’d so kindly taken her on as an apprentice, shown her how to be fully womanist in a misogynist world

I gave you everything, everything, you’d be nothing without me, Sojourner, nothing

many years later, Dominique was told that Nzinga had died some twelve years after she left her

her last girlfriend, Sahara, introduced herself at the festival, she’d become lovers with Nzinga at a women of colour spirituality retreat in Arizona

she talked about you a lot, Dominique, she’d heard about the success of this festival and totally took credit for it, she was your mentor and had made you, she said, you’d used her, no thanks, no public acknowledgement, no belated payments for her extensive investment in your personal development, she was planning to come to LA to confront you, but it was never the right time

I now think she was scared that the person she’d thought of as weak had become powerful

I totally bought her story about you until a few months into our relationship she started treating me like a disciple instead of a lover, and became possessive, aggressive and played mind control games

I was in my twenties, she was in her fifties

she wouldn’t let me out of her sight, said I should be grateful that she’d rescued me, from what? who knows, I never got an answer that made any sense

I was ready to leave her within the year when she had a major stroke, became immobilized, and I couldn’t

she was so utterly alone in the world except for me – no home, friends, no family to call on, she said everyone always left her

when she died, I felt released

hearing of her former lover’s death, Dominique also felt released, sad, too, that Nzinga’s life really had been one of abandonment

and she’d not been capable of seeing that the fault, as an adult, lay with her

Dominique met Laverne in her counselling group, as the only two lesbians they gravitated towards each other

Laverne was an African-American woman who liked to blend into the background, who spoke softly and thought deeply

originally from Oakland, now based in LA as a sound technician, her previous girlfriend had been violent

she left her the third time she ended up in A&E

Dominique found Laverne pleasant and easy company, she’d studied international relations, was well-read and passionately interested in global current affairs

Dominique began to expand her reading beyond women’s literature into non-fiction books about the world at large

they could spend hours discussing the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union

or the marriage war played out in the media between Princess Diana and Prince Charles

or the wars in the Middle East, or the Brixton and LA riots

or the relationship between climate change and capitalism

or the histories of postcolonial Africa, India, the Caribbean and Ireland

their friendship deepened over time and eventually became physical

they respected the free will of each other and made no demands

they were lovers for four years before moving in together, even then Dominique worried that the equilibrium of their relationship, from seeing each other several times a week to seeing each other every day, would throw their relationship off-balance

it didn’t

they wanted children, adopted baby twins, Thalia and Rory, whose parents had been killed in a gangland shooting

they became a family, married each other when it became legal

Dominique moved to America nearly thirty years ago

she considers it her home.

Chapter Two

Carole

1

Carole

walks through Liverpool Street station with its inter-galactic glass and steel ceiling propped up by towering Corinthian columns

she’s headed for the escalators and the soaring windows that let in a holy glow of morning light

she passes underneath the timetable board listing departures and arrivals

articulated through the medium of glowing alphanumeric, text flipping and updating as announcements bellow from the clustered boom boxes informing passengers about platform numbers and itemizing all stations on routes to final destinations

where this train will end

and the numerous delays due to vandalism on the tracks or leaves on the line or sun on the line or a body under a train

how very inconsiderate, not to her

to choose to throw yourself in front of a mechanical iron beast weighing thousands of tons and racing at a top speed of one hundred and forty miles per hour?

to choose such a brutal and dramatic finale

Carole knows what drives people to such despair, knows what it’s like to appear normal but to feel herself swaying

just one leap away

from

the amassed crowds on the platforms who carry enough hope in their hearts to stay alive

swaying

just one leap away from

eternal

peace

these days, however, she feels very much alive, very much ‘looking forward’ as they say at work, to the next ‘window of opportunity’

these days she’s a willing orchestral player in the cacophony of London’s busiest station with a footfall of nearly 150 million pairs of living feet every year, the anonymous convergence of commuters who are 99.9% genetically identical regardless of their visual packaging, regardless of their psychological wiring – warped, tangled, shorted, electrocuted

all of them so perfectly composed, so poised and in control, socialized to be out in public as reasonable members of society this Monday morning where all dramas are interiorized

look at her

in her perfectly-tailored city clothes, the balletic slope of her shoulders, straightened hair scraped back into a martial topknot, eyebrows plucked with calligraphic flair, her discreet, no-nonsense jewellery of platinum and pearls

Carole

whose daily lexicon revolves around the orbit of equities, futures and financial modelling

who loves to immerse herself in a universe where fiscal cells split off to create gazillions of replicas of themselves spinning off into beautiful infinity

the glittering stars of wealth that make the world go around

her idea of bedtime reading is to scrutinize the profitability of businesses and oversee investment plans for the commodities of the African and Asian markets