If it is not too far-fetched a comparison, the sexual and cultural revolution we have experienced these past two decades is not a million miles away from the horticultural revolution that has taken place in our herbaceous borders and sunken beds. Where once we were satisfied with our biennials, poorly coloured flowers thrusting weakly out of the earth and blooming a few times a year (if we were lucky), now we are demanding both variety and continuity in our flowers, the passionate colours of exotic blooms 365 days a year. Where once gardeners swore by the reliability of the self-pollinating plant in which pollen is transferred from the stamen to the stigma of the same flower (autogamy), now we are more adventurous, positively singing the praises of cross-pollination where pollen is transferred from one flower to another on the same plant (geitonogamy), or to a flower of another plant of the same species (xenogamy). The birds and the bees, the thick haze of pollen – these are all to be encouraged! Yes, self-pollination is the simpler and more certain of the two fertilization processes, especially for many species that colonize by copiously repeating the same parental strain. But a species cloning such uniform offspring runs the risk of having its entire population wiped out by a single evolutionary event. In the garden, as in the social and political arena, change should be the only constant. Our parents and our parents’ petunias have learnt this lesson the hard way. The March of History is unsentimental, tramping over a generation and its annuals with ruthless determination.
The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied offspring that are better able to cope with a changed environment. It is said cross-pollinating plants also tend to produce more and better-quality seeds. If my one-year-old son is anything to go by (a cross-pollination between a lapsed-Catholic horticulturalist feminist, and an intellectual Jew!), then I can certainly vouch for the truth of this. Sisters, the bottom line is this: if we are to continue wearing flowers in our hair into the next decade, they must be hardy and ever at hand, something only the truly mothering gardener can ensure. If we wish to provide happy playgrounds for our children, and corners of contemplation for our husbands, we need to create gardens of diversity and interest. Mother Earth is great and plentiful, but even she requires the occasional helping hand!
– Joyce Chalfen, from The New Flower Power, pub. 1976, Caterpillar Press
Joyce Chalfen wrote The New Flower Power in a poky attic room overlooking her own rambling garden during the blistering summer of ’76. It was an ingenuous beginning for a strange little book – more about relationships than flowers – that went on to sell well and steadily through the late seventies (not a coffee table essential by any means, but a close look at any baby-boomer’s bookshelves will reveal it lying dusty and neglected near those other familiars, Dr Spock, Shirley Conran, a battered Women’s Press copy of The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker). The popularity of The New Flower Power surprised no one more than Joyce. It had practically written itself, taking only three months, most of which she spent dressed in a tiny t-shirt and a pair of briefs in an attempt to beat the heat, breast-feeding Joshua intermittently, almost absent-mindedly, and thinking to herself, between easy-flowing paragraphs, that this was exactly the life she had hoped for. This was the future she dared to envisage when she first saw Marcus’s intelligent little eyes giving her big white legs the once-over as she crossed the quad of his Oxbridge college, miniskirted, seven years earlier. She was one of those people who knew immediately, at first sight, even as her future spouse opened his mouth to say an initial, nervous hello.
A very happy marriage. That summer of ’76, what with the heat and the flies and the endless melodies of ice-cream vans, things happened in a haze – sometimes Joyce had to pinch herself to make sure this was real. Marcus’s office was down the hall on the right; twice a day she’d pace down the corridor, Joshua on one substantial hip, nudging open the door with the other, just to check he was still there, that he really existed, and, leaning lustily over the desk, she’d grab a kiss from her favourite genius, hard at work on his peculiar helixes, his letters and numbers. She liked to pull him away from all that and show him the latest remarkable thing that Joshua had done or learnt; sounds, letter recognition, coordinated movement, imitation: just like you, she’d say to Marcus, good genes, he’d say to her, patting her behind and luxurious thighs, weighing each breast in his hand, patting her small belly, generally admiring his English Pear, his earth goddess… and then she’d be satisfied, padding back to her office like a big cat with a cub in its jaws, covered in a light layer of happy sweat. In an aimless happy way, she could hear herself murmuring, an oral version of the toilet-door doodles of adolescents: Joyce and Marcus, Marcus and Joyce.
Marcus was also writing a book that summer of ’76. Not so much a book (in Joyce’s sense) as a study. It was called Chimeric Mice: An Evaluation and Practical Exploration of the Work of Brinster (1974) Concerning the Embryonic Fusion of Mouse Strains at the Eight-cell Stage of Development. Joyce had read biology in college, but she didn’t attempt to touch the many-paged manuscript that was growing like a molehill at her husband’s feet. Joyce knew her limitations. She had no great desire to read Marcus’s books. It was enough just to know they were being written, somehow. It was enough to know the man she had married was writing them. Her husband didn’t just make money, he didn’t just make things, or sell things that other people had made, he created beings. He went to the edges of his God’s imagination and made mice Yahweh could not conceive of: mice with rabbit genes, mice with webbed feet (or so Joyce imagined, she didn’t ask), mice who year after year expressed more and more eloquently Marcus’s designs: from the hit-or-miss process of selective breeding, to the chimeric fusion of embryos, and then the rapid developments that lay beyond Joyce’s ken and in Marcus’s future – DNA microinjection, retrovirus-mediated transgenesis (for which he came within an inch of the Nobel, 1987), embryonic stem cell-mediated gene transfer – all processes by which Marcus manipulated ova, regulated the over or under expression of a gene, planting instructions and imperatives in the germ line to be realized in physical characteristics. Creating mice whose very bodies did exactly what Marcus told them. And always with humanity in mind – a cure for cancer, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s – always with the firm belief in the perfectibility of all life, in the possibility of making it more efficient, more logical (for illness was, to Marcus, nothing more than bad logic on the part of the genome, just as capitalism was nothing more than bad logic on the part of the social animal), more effective, more Chalfenist in the way it proceeded. He expressed contempt equally towards the animal-rights maniacs – horrible people Joyce had to shoo from the door with a curtain pole when a few extremists caught wind of Marcus’s dealings in mice – or the hippies or the tree people or anyone who failed to grasp the simple fact that social and scientific progress were brothers-in-arms. It was the Chalfen way, handed down the family for generations; they had a congenital inability to suffer fools gladly or otherwise. If you were arguing with a Chalfen, trying to put a case for these strange French men who think truth is a function of language, or that history is interpretive and science metaphorical, the Chalfen in question would hear you out quietly, then wave his hand, dismissive, feeling no need to dignify such bunkum with a retort. Truth was truth to a Chalfen. And Genius was genius. Marcus created beings. And Joyce was his wife, industrious in creating smaller versions of Marcus.
Fifteen years later and Joyce would still challenge anyone to show her a happier marriage than hers. Three more children had followed Joshua: Benjamin (fourteen), Jack (twelve) and Oscar (six), bouncy, curly-haired boys, all articulate and amusing. The Inner Life of Houseplants (1984) and a college chair for Marcus had seen them through the eighties boom and bust, financing an extra bathroom, a conservatory and life’s pleasures: old cheese, good wine, winters in Florence. Now there were two new works-in-progress: The Secret Passions of the Climbing Rose and Transgenic Mice: A Study of the Inherent Limitations of DNA Microinjection (Gordon and Ruddle, 1981) in Comparison with Embryonic Stem (ES) Cell-mediated Gene Transfer (Gossler et al., 1986). Marcus was also working on a ‘pop science’ book, against his better judgement, a collaboration with a novelist that he hoped would finance at least the first two children well into their university years. Joshua was a star maths pupil, Benjamin wanted to be a geneticist just like his father, Jack’s passion was psychiatry, and Oscar could checkmate his father’s king in fifteen moves. And all this despite the fact that the Chalfens had sent their kids to Glenard Oak, daring to take the ideological gamble their peers guiltily avoided, those nervous liberals who shrugged their shoulders and coughed up the cash for a private education. And not only were they bright children, they were happy, not hot-housed in any way. Their only after-school activity (they despised sport) was the individual therapy five times a week at the hands of an old-fashioned Freudian called Marjorie who did Joyce and Marcus (separately) on weekends. It might appear extreme to non-Chalfens, but Marcus had been brought up with a strong respect for therapy (in his family therapy had long supplanted Judaism) and there was no arguing with the result. Every Chalfen proclaimed themselves mentally healthy and emotionally stable. The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the right order, they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father, and, unusually, this feeling only increased as they reached adolescence. Rows were rare, playful and only ever over political or intellectual topics (the importance of anarchy, the need for higher taxes, the problem of South Africa, the soul/body dichotomy), upon which they all agreed anyway.
The Chalfens had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family (the good genes which were so often referred to: two scientists, one mathematician, three psychiatrists and a young cousin working for the Labour Party). Under sufferance and on public holidays, they visited Joyce’s long-rejected lineage, the Connor clan, Daily Mail letter-writers who even now could not disguise their distaste for Joyce’s Israelite love-match. Bottom line: the Chalfens didn’t need other people. They referred to themselves as nouns, verbs and occasionally adjectives: It’s the Chalfen way, And then he came out with a real Chalfenism, He’s Chalfening again, We need to be a bit more Chalfenist about this. Joyce challenged anyone to show her a happier family, a more Chalfenist family than theirs.
And yet, and yet… Joyce pined for the golden age when she was the linchpin of the Chalfen family. When people couldn’t eat without her. When people couldn’t dress without her assistance. Now even Oscar could make himself a snack. Sometimes there seemed nothing to improve, nothing to cultivate; recently she found herself pruning the dead sections from her rambling rose, wishing she could find some fault of Joshua’s worthy of attention, some secret trauma of Jack’s or Benjamin’s, a perversion in Oscar. But they were all perfect. Sometimes, when the Chalfens sat round their Sunday dinner, tearing apart a chicken until there was nothing left but a tattered ribcage, gobbling silently, speaking only to retrieve the salt or the pepper – the boredom was palpable. The century was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of each other, their dinner table was an exercise in mirrored perfection, Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely, bouncing from Oscar to Joyce, Joyce to Joshua, Joshua to Marcus, Marcus to Benjamin, Benjamin to Jack ad nauseam across the meat and veg. They were still the same remarkable family they always had been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers – judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at – there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers of The Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more than Joyce.
To fill long days left alone in the house (Marcus commuted to his college), Joyce’s boredom often drove her to flick through the Chalfens’ enormous supply of delivered magazines (New Marxism, Living Marxism, New Scientist, Oxfam Report, Third World Action, Anarchist’s Journal) and feel a yearning for the bald Romanians or beautiful pot-bellied Ethiopians – yes, she knew it was awful, but there it was – children crying out from glossy paper, needing her. She needed to be needed. She’d be the first to admit it. She hated it, for example, when one after the other her children, pop-eyed addicts of breast milk, finally kicked the habit. She usually stretched it to two or three years, and, in the case of Joshua, four, but though the supply never ended, the demand did. She lived in dread of the inevitable moment when they moved from soft drugs to hard, the switch from calcium to the sugared delights of Ribena. It was when she finished breast-feeding Oscar that she threw herself back into gardening, back into the warm mulch where tiny things relied on her.
Then one fine day Millat Iqbal and Irie Jones walked reluctantly into her life. She was in the back garden at the time, tearfully examining her Garter Knight delphiniums (heliotrope and cobalt-blue with a jet-black centre, like a bullet hole in the sky) for signs of thrip – a nasty pest that had already butchered her bocconia. The doorbell rang. Tilting her head back, Joyce waited till she could hear the slippered feet of Marcus running down the stairs from his study and then, satisfied that he would answer it, delved back into the thick. With raised eyebrow she inspected the mouthy double blooms which stood to attention along the delphinium’s eight-foot spine. Thrip, she said to herself out loud, acknowledging the dog-eared mutation on every other flower; thrip, she repeated, not without pleasure, for it would need seeing to now, and might even give rise to a book or at least a chapter; thrip. Joyce knew a thing or two about thrip:
Thrips, common name for minute insects that feed on a wide range of plants, enjoying in particular the warm atmosphere required for an indoor or exotic plant. Most species are no more than 1.5 mm (0.06 inch) long as adults; some are wingless, but others have two pairs of short wings fringed with hairs. Both adults and nymphs have sucking, piercing mouth parts. Although thrips pollinate some plants and also eat some insect pests, they are both boon and bane for the modern gardener and are generally considered pests to be controlled with insecticides, such as Lindex. Scientific classification: thrips make up the order Thysanoptera.
– Joyce Chalfen, The Inner Life of Houseplants, from the index on pests and parasites
Yes. Thrips have good instincts: essentially they are charitable, productive organisms which help the plant in its development. Thrips mean well, but thrips go too far, thrips go beyond pollinating and eating pests; thrips begin to eat the plant itself, to eat it from within. Thrip will infect generation after generation of delphiniums if you let it. What can one do about thrip if, as in this case, the Lindex hadn’t worked? What can you do but prune hard, prune ruthlessly and begin from the beginning? Joyce took a deep breath. She was doing this for the delphinium. She was doing this because without her the delphinium had no chance. Joyce slipped the huge garden scissors out of her apron pocket, grabbed the screaming orange handles firmly and placed the exposed throat of a blue delphinium bloom between two slices of silver. Tough love.
‘Joyce! Ja-oyce! Joshua and his marijuana-smoking friends are here!’
Pulchritude. From the Latin, pulcher, beautiful. That was the word that first struck Joyce when Millat Iqbal stepped forward on to the steps of her conservatory, sneering at Marcus’s bad jokes, shading his violet eyes from a fading winter sun. Pulchritude: not just the concept but the whole physical word appeared before her as if someone had typed it on to her retina – Pulchritude – beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till.
‘Mill-yat Ick-Ball,’ said Marcus, making a performance of the foreign syllables. ‘And Irie Jones, apparently. Friends of Josh’s. I was just saying to Josh, these are the best-looking friends of his we’ve ever seen! They’re usually small and weedy, so long-sighted they’re short-sighted, and with club-feet. And they’re never female. Well!’ continued Marcus jovially, dismissing Joshua’s look of horror. ‘It’s a damn good thing you turned up. We’ve been looking for a woman to marry old Joshua…’
Marcus was standing on the garden steps, quite openly admiring Irie’s breasts (though, to be fair, Irie was a good head and shoulders taller than him). ‘He’s a good sort, smart, a bit weak on fractals but we love him anyway. Well…’
Marcus paused for Joyce to come out of the garden, take off her gloves, shake hands with Millat and follow them all into the kitchen. ‘You are a big girl.’
‘Er… thanks.’
‘We like that around here – a healthy eater. All Chalfens are healthy eaters. I don’t put on a pound, but Joyce does. In all the right places, naturally. You’re staying for dinner?’
Irie stood dumb in the middle of the kitchen, too nervous to speak. These were not any species of parent she recognized.
‘Oh, don’t worry about Marcus,’ said Joshua with a jolly wink. ‘He’s a bit of an old letch. It’s a Chalfen joke. They like to bombard you the minute you get in the door. Find out how sharp you are. Chalfens don’t think there’s any point in pleasantries. Joyce, this is Irie and Millat. They’re the two from behind the science block.’
Joyce, partially recovered from the vision of Millat Iqbal, gathered herself together sufficiently to play her designated role as Mother Chalfen.
‘So you’re the two who’ve been corrupting my eldest son. I’m Joyce. Do you want some tea? So you’re Josh’s bad crowd. I was just pruning the delphiniums. This is Benjamin, Jack – and that’s Oscar in the hallway. Strawberry and mango or normal?’
‘Normal for me, thanks, Joyce,’ said Joshua.
‘Same, thanks,’ said Irie.
‘Yeah,’ said Millat.
‘Three normal and one mango, please, Marcus, darling, please.’
Marcus, who was just heading out the door with a newly packed tobacco pipe, backtracked with a weary smile. ‘I’m a slave to this woman,’ he said, grabbing her around the waist, like a gambler collecting his chips in circled arms. ‘But if I wasn’t, she might run off with any pretty young man who rolled into the house. I don’t fancy falling victim to Darwinism this week.’
This hug, explicit as a hug can be, was directed front-ways-on, seemingly for the appreciation of Millat. Joyce’s big milky-blue eyes were on him all the time.
‘That’s what you want, Irie,’ said Joyce in a familial stage whisper, as if they’d known each other for five years rather than five minutes, ‘a man like Marcus for the long term. These fly-by-nights are all right for fun, but what kind of fathers do they make?’
Joshua coloured. ‘Joyce, she just stepped into the house! Let her have some tea!’
Joyce feigned surprise. ‘I haven’t embarrassed you, have I? You have to forgive Mother Chalfen, my foot and mouth are on intimate terms.’
But Irie wasn’t embarrassed; she was fascinated, enamoured after five minutes. No one in the Jones household made jokes about Darwin, or said ‘my foot and mouth are on intimate terms’, or offered choices of tea, or let speech flow freely from adult to child, child to adult, as if the channel of communication between these two tribes was untrammelled, unblocked by history, free.
‘Well,’ said Joyce, released by Marcus and planting herself down at the circular table, inviting them to do the same, ‘you look very exotic. Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Willesden,’ said Irie and Millat simultaneously.
‘Yes, yes, of course, but where originally?’
‘Oh,’ said Millat, putting on what he called a bud-bud-ding-ding accent. ‘You are meaning where from am I originally.’
Joyce looked confused. ‘Yes, originally.’
‘Whitechapel,’ said Millat, pulling out a fag. ‘Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus.’
All the Chalfens milling through the kitchen, Marcus, Josh, Benjamin, Jack, exploded into laughter. Joyce obediently followed suit.
‘Chill out, man,’ said Millat, suspicious. ‘It wasn’t that fucking funny.’
But the Chalfens carried on. Chalfens rarely made jokes unless they were exceptionally lame or numerical in nature or both: What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt.
‘Are you going to smoke that?’ asked Joyce suddenly when the laughter died down, a note of panic in her voice. ‘In here? Only, we hate the smell. We only like the smell of German tobacco. And if we smoke it we smoke it in Marcus’s room, because it upsets Oscar otherwise, doesn’t it, Oscar?’
‘No,’ said Oscar, the youngest and most cherubic of the boys, busy building a Lego empire, ‘I don’t care.’
‘It upsets Oscar,’ repeated Joyce, in that stage-whisper again. ‘He hates it.’
‘I’ll… take… it… to… the… garden,’ said Millat slowly, in the kind of voice you use on the insane or foreign. ‘Back… in… a… minute.’
As soon as Millat was out of earshot, and as Marcus brought over the teas, the years seemed to fall like dead skin from Joyce and she bent across the table like a schoolgirl. ‘God, he’s gorgeous, isn’t he? Like Omar Sharif thirty years ago. Funny Roman nose. Are you and he…?’
‘Leave the girl alone, Joyce,’ admonished Marcus. ‘She’s hardly going to tell you about it, is she?’
‘No,’ said Irie, feeling she’d like to tell these people everything. ‘We’re not.’
‘Just as well. His parents probably have something arranged for him, no? The headmaster told me he was a Muslim boy. I suppose he should be thankful he’s not a girl, though, hmm? Unbelievable what they do to the girls. Remember that Time article, Marcus?’
Marcus was foraging in the fridge for a cold plate of yesterday’s potatoes. ‘Mmm. Unbelievable.’
‘But you know, just from the little I’ve seen, he doesn’t seem at all like most Muslim children. I mean, I’m talking from personal experience, I go into a lot of schools with my gardening, working with kids of all ages. They’re usually so silent, you know, terribly meek – but he’s so full of… spunk! But boys like that want the tall blondes, don’t they? I mean, that’s the bottom line, when they’re that handsome. I know how you feel… I used to like the troublemakers when I was your age, but you learn later, you really do. Danger isn’t really sexy, take my word for it. You’d do a lot better with someone like Joshua.’
‘Mum!’
‘He’s been talking about you non-stop all week.’
‘Mum!’
Joyce faced her reprimand with a little smile. ‘Well, maybe I’m being too frank for you young people. I don’t know… in my day, you just were a lot more direct, you had to be if you wanted to catch the right man. Two hundred girls in the university and two thousand men! They were fighting for a girl – but if you were smart, you were choosy.’
‘My, you were choosy,’ said Marcus, shuffling up behind her and kissing her ear. ‘And with such good taste.’
Joyce took the kisses like a girl indulging her best friend’s younger brother.
‘But your mother wasn’t sure, was she? She thought I was too intellectual, that I wouldn’t want children.’
‘But you convinced her. Those hips would convince anyone!’
‘Yes, in the end… but she underestimated me, didn’t she? She didn’t think I was Chalfen material.’
‘She just didn’t know you then.’
‘Well, we surprised her, didn’t we!’
‘A lot of hard copulation went into pleasing that woman!’
‘Four grandchildren later!’
During this exchange, Irie tried to concentrate on Oscar, now creating an ouroboros from a big pink elephant by stuffing the trunk into its own rear end. She’d never been so close to this strange and beautiful thing, the middle class, and experienced the kind of embarrassment that is actually intrigue, fascination. It was both strange and wondrous. She felt like the prude who walks through a nudist beach, examining the sand. She felt like Columbus meeting the exposed arawaks, not knowing where to look.
‘Excuse my parents,’ said Joshua. ‘They can’t keep their hands off each other.’
But even this was said with pride, because the Chalfen children knew their parents were rare creatures, a happily married couple, numbering no more than a dozen in the whole of Glenard Oak. Irie thought of her own parents, whose touches were now virtual, existing only in the absences where both sets of fingers had previously been: the remote control, the biscuit tin lid, the light switches.
She said, ‘It must be great to feel that way after twenty years or whatever.’
Joyce swivelled round as if someone had released a catch. ‘It’s marvellous! It’s incredible! You just wake up one morning and realize monogamy isn’t a bind – it sets you free! And children need to grow up around that. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced it – you read a lot about how Afro-Caribbeans seem to find it hard to establish long-term relationships. That’s terribly sad, isn’t it? I wrote about one Dominican woman in The Inner Life of Houseplants who had moved her potted azalea through six different men’s houses; once by the windowsill, then in a dark corner, then in the south-facing bedroom, etc. You just can’t do that to a plant.’
This was a classic Joyce tangent, and Marcus and Joshua rolled their eyes, affectionately.
Millat, fag finished, sloped back in.
‘Are we going to get some studying done, yeah? This is all very nice but I want to go out this evening. At some point.’
While Irie had been lost in her reveries assessing the Chalfens like a romantic anthropologist, Millat had been out in the garden, looking through the windows, casing the joint. Where Irie saw culture, refinement, class, intellect, Millat saw money, lazy money, money that was just hanging around this family not doing anything in particular, money in need of a good cause that might as well be him.
‘So,’ said Joyce, clapping her hands, trying to keep them all in the room a little longer, trying to hold off, for as long as possible, the reassertion of Chalfen silence, ‘you’re all going to be studying together! Well, you and Irie are really welcome. I was saying to your headmaster, wasn’t I, Marcus, that this really shouldn’t feel like punishment. It’s not exactly a heinous crime. Between us, I used to be a pretty good marijuana gardener myself at one time…’
‘Way out,’ said Millat.
Nurture, thought Joyce. Be patient, water regularly and don’t lose your temper when pruning.
‘… and your headmaster explained to us how your own home environments aren’t exactly… well… I’m sure you’ll find it easier to work here. Such an important year, the GCSEs. And it’s so obvious that you’re both bright – anyone can tell that just by looking at your eyes. Can’t they, Marcus?’
‘Josh, your mother’s asking me whether IQ expresses itself in the secondary physical characteristics of eye colour, eye shape, etc. Is there a sensible answer to this inquiry?’
Joyce pressed on. Mice and men, genes and germs, that was Marcus’s corner. Seedlings, light sources, growth, nurture, the buried heart of things – that was hers. As on any missionary vessel, tasks were delegated. Marcus on the prow, looking for the storm. Joyce beneath deck, checking the linen for bedbugs.
‘Your headmaster knows how much I hate to see potential wasted – that’s why he sent you to us.’
‘And because he knows most of the Chalfens are four hundred times smarter than him!’ said Jack, doing a star jump. He was still young and hadn’t yet learnt to demonstrate his pride in his family in a more socially acceptable manner. ‘Even Oscar is.’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Oscar, kicking in a Lego garage he had recently made. ‘I’m the stupidest in the world.’
‘Oscar’s got an IQ of 178,’ whispered Joyce. ‘It’s a bit daunting, even when you’re his mum.’
‘Wow,’ said Irie, turning, with the rest of the room, to appreciate Oscar trying to ingest the head of a plastic giraffe. ‘That’s remarkable.’
‘Yes, but he’s had everything, and so much of it is nurture, isn’t it? I really believe that. We’ve just been lucky enough to give him so much and with a daddy like Marcus – it’s like having a strong sunbeam shining on him twenty-four hours a day, isn’t it, darling? He’s so fortunate to have that. Well, they all are. Now, you may think this sounds strange, but it was always my aim to marry a man cleverer than me.’ Joyce put her hands on her hips and waited for Irie to think that sounded strange. ‘No, I really did. And I’m a staunch feminist, Marcus will tell you.’
‘She’s a staunch feminist,’ said Marcus from the inner sanctum of the fridge.
‘I don’t suppose you can understand that – your generation have different ideas – but I knew it would be liberating. And I knew what kind of father I wanted for my children. Now, that’s surprised you, hasn’t it? I’m sorry, but we really don’t do small talk around here. If you’re going to be here every week, I thought it best you got a proper dose of the Chalfens now.’
All the Chalfens who were in earshot for this last comment smiled and nodded.
Joyce paused and looked at Irie and Millat the way she had looked at her Garter Knight delphinium. She was a quick and experienced detector of illness, and there was damage here. There was a quiet pain in the first one (Irieanthus negressium marcusilia), a lack of a father figure perhaps, an intellect untapped, a low self-esteem; and in the second (Millaturea brandolidia joyculatus) there was a deeper sadness, a terrible loss, a gaping wound. A hole that needed more than education or money. That needed love. Joyce longed to touch the site with the tip of her Chalfen greenfinger, close the gap, knit the skin.
‘Can I ask? Your father? What does he -?’
(Joyce wondered what the parents did, what they had done. When she found a mutated first bloom, she wanted to know where the cutting had come from. Wrong question. It wasn’t the parents, it wasn’t just one generation, it was the whole century. Not the bud but the bush.)
‘Curry-shifter,’ said Millat. ‘Bus-boy. Waiter.’
‘Paper,’ began Irie. ‘Kind of folding it… and working on things like perforations… kind of direct mail advertising but not really advertising, at least not the ideas end… kind of folding – ’ She gave up. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. When there’s a lack of a male role model you see… that’s when things really go awry, in my experience. I wrote an article for Women’s Earth recently. I described a school I worked in where I gave all the children a potted Busy Lizzie and told them to look after it for a week like a daddy or mummy looks after a baby. Each child chose which parent they were going to emulate. This lovely little Jamaican boy, Winston, chose his daddy. The next week his mother phoned and asked why I’d asked Winston to feed his plant Pepsi and put it in front of the television. I mean, it’s just terrible, isn’t it. But I think a lot of these parents just don’t appreciate their children sufficiently. Partly, it’s the culture, you know? It just makes me so angry. The only thing I allow Oscar to watch is Newsround for half an hour a day. That’s more than enough.’
‘Lucky Oscar,’ said Millat.
‘Anyway, I’m just really excited about you being here because, because, the Chalfens, I mean – it may sound peculiar, but I really wanted to persuade your headmaster this was the best idea, and now I’ve met you both I’m even more certain – because the Chalfens-’
‘Know how to bring the right things out in people,’ finished Joshua, ‘they did with me.’
‘Yes,’ said Joyce, relieved her search for the words was over, radiating pride. ‘Yes.’
Joshua pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. ‘Well, we’d better get down to some study. Marcus, could you come up and help us a bit later on the biology? I’m really bad at reducing the reproductive stuff in bite-size chunks.’
‘Sure. I’m working on my FutureMouse, though.’ This was the family joke name for Marcus’s project, and the younger Chalfens sang FutureMouse! after him, imagining an anthropomorphic rodent in red shorts. ‘And I’ve got to play a bit of piano with Jack first. Scott Joplin. Jack’s the left hand, I’m the right. Not quite Art Tatum,’ he said, ruffling Jack’s hair. ‘But we get by.’
Irie tried her hardest to imagine Mr Iqbal playing the right hand of Scott Joplin with his dead grey digits. Or Mr Jones turning anything into bite-size chunks. She felt her cheeks flush with the warm heat of Chalfenist revelation. So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn’t drag ancient history around like a chain and ball. So there were men who were not neck-high and sinking in the quagmire of the past.
‘You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you?’ pleaded Joyce. ‘Oscar really wants you to stay. Oscar loves having strangers in the house, he finds it really stimulating. Especially brown strangers! Don’t you, Oscar?’
‘No, I don’t,’ confided Oscar, spitting in Irie’s ear. ‘I hate brown strangers.’
‘He finds brown strangers really stimulating,’ whispered Joyce.
This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best – less trouble). Yet, despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other’s lives with reasonable comfort (like a man returning to his lover’s bed after a midnight walk), despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist.
But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance. Even the unflappable Alsana Iqbal would regularly wake up in a puddle of her own sweat after a night visited by visions of Millat (genetically BB; where B stands for Bengali-ness) marrying someone called Sarah (aa where ‘a’ stands for Aryan), resulting in a child called Michael (Ba), who in turn marries somebody called Lucy (aa), leaving Alsana with a legacy of unrecognizable great-grandchildren (Aaaaaaa!), their Bengali-ness thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by phenotype. It is both the most irrational and natural feeling in the world. In Jamaica it is even in the grammar: there is no choice of personal pronoun, no splits between me or you or they, there is only the pure, homogenous I. When Hortense Bowden, half white herself, got to hearing about Clara’s marriage, she came round to the house, stood on the doorstep, said, ‘Understand: I and I don’t speak from this moment forth,’ turned on her heel and was true to her word. Hortense hadn’t put all that effort into marrying black, into dragging her genes back from the brink, just so her daughter could bring yet more high-coloured children into the world.
Likewise, in the Iqbal house the lines of battle were clearly drawn. When Millat brought an Emily or a Lucy back home, Alsana quietly wept in the kitchen, Samad went into the garden to attack the coriander. The next morning was a waiting game, a furious biting of tongues until the Emily or Lucy left the house and the war of words could begin. But with Irie and Clara the issue was mostly unspoken, for Clara knew she was not in a position to preach. Still, she made no attempt to disguise her disappointment or the aching sadness. From Irie’s bedroom shrine of green-eyed Hollywood idols to the gaggle of white friends who regularly trooped in and out of her bedroom, Clara saw an ocean of pink skins surrounding her daughter and she feared the tide that would take her away.
It was partly for this reason that Irie didn’t mention the Chalfens to her parents. It wasn’t that she intended to mate with the Chalfens… but the instinct was the same. She had a nebulous fifteen-year-old’s passion for them, overwhelming, yet with no real direction or object. She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfishness. The purity of it. It didn’t occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, née Chalfenovsky), or that they might be as needy of her as she was of them. To Irie, the Chalfens were more English than the English. When Irie stepped over the threshold of the Chalfen house, she felt an illicit thrill, like a Jew munching a sausage or a Hindu grabbing a Big Mac. She was crossing borders, sneaking into England; it felt like some terribly mutinous act, wearing somebody else’s uniform or somebody else’s skin.
She just said she had netball on Tuesday evenings and left it at that.
Conversation flowed at the Chalfen house. It seemed to Irie that here nobody prayed or hid their feelings in a toolbox or silently stroked fading photographs wondering what might have been. Conversation was the stuff of life.
‘Hello, Irie! Come in, come in, Joshua’s in the kitchen with Joyce, you’re looking well. Millat not with you?’
‘Coming later. He’s got a date.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, if there are any questions in your exams on oral communication, he’ll fly through them. Joyce! Irie’s here! So how’s the study going? It’s been – what? Four months now? The Chalfen genius rubbing off?’
‘Yeah, not bad, not bad. I never thought I had a scientific bone in my body but… it seems to be working. I don’t know, though. Sometimes my brain hurts.’
‘That’s just the right side of your brain waking up after a long sleep, getting back into the swing of things. I’m really impressed; I told you it was possible to turn a wishy-washy arts student into a science student in no time at all – oh, and I’ve got the FutureMouse pictures. Remind me later, you wanted to see them, no? Joyce, the big brown goddess has arrived!’
‘Marcus, chill out, man… Hi, Joyce. Hi, Josh. Hey, Jack. Oooh, hell-low, Oscar, you cutie.’
‘Hello, Irie! Come here and give me a kiss. Oscar, look, it’s Irie come to see us again! Oh, look at his face… he’s wondering where Millat is, aren’t you, Oscar?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Oh dear, yes he is… look at his little face… he gets very upset when Millat doesn’t turn up. Tell Irie the name of the new monkey, Oscar, the one Daddy gave you.’
‘George.’
‘No, not George – you called it Millat the Monkey, remember? Because monkeys are mischievous and Millat’s just as bad, isn’t he, Oscar?’
‘Don’t know. Don’t care.’
‘Oscar gets terribly upset when Millat doesn’t come.’
‘He’ll be along in a while. He’s on a date.’
‘When isn’t he on a date! All those busty girls! We might get jealous, mightn’t we, Oscar? He spends more time with them than us. But we shouldn’t joke. I suppose it’s a bit difficult for you.’
‘No, I don’t mind, Joyce, really. I’m used to it.’
‘But everybody loves Millat, don’t they, Oscar! It’s so hard not to, isn’t it, Oscar? We love him, don’t we, Oscar?’
‘I hate him.’
‘Oh, Oscar, don’t say silly things.’
‘Can we all stop talking about Millat, please.’
‘Yes, Joshua, all right. Do you hear how he gets jealous? I try to explain to him that Millat needs a little extra care, you know. He’s from a very difficult background. It’s just like when I give more time to my peonies than my Michaelmas daisies, daisies will grow anywhere… you know you can be very selfish sometimes, Joshi.’
‘OK, Mum, OK. What’s happening with dinner – before study or after?’
‘Before, I think, Joyce, no? I’ve got to work on FutureMouse all night.’
‘FutureMouse!’
‘Shh, Oscar, I’m trying to listen to Daddy.’
‘Because I’m delivering a paper tomorrow so best have dinner early. If that’s all right with you, Irie, I know how you like your food.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Don’t say things like that, Marcus, dear, she’s very touchy about her weight.’
‘No, I’m really not-’
‘Touchy? About her weight? But everybody likes a big girl, don’t they? I know I do.’
‘Evening all. Door was ajar. Let myself in. One day somebody’s going to wander in here and murder the fucking lot of you.’
‘Millat! Oscar, look it’s Millat! Oscar, you’re very happy to see Millat, aren’t you, darling?’
Oscar screwed up his nose, pretended to barf and threw a wooden hammer at Millat’s shins.
‘Oscar gets so excited when he sees you. Well. You’re just in time for dinner. Chicken with cauliflower cheese. Sit down. Josh, put Millat’s coat somewhere. So. How are things?’
Millat sat down at the table with violence and eyes that looked like they had recently seen tears. He pulled out his pouch of tobacco and little bag of weed.
‘Fuckin’ awful.’
‘Awful how?’ inquired Marcus with little attention, otherwise engaged in cutting himself a chunk from an enormous block of Stilton. ‘Couldn’t get in girl’s pants? Girl wouldn’t get in your pants? Girl not wearing pants? Out of interest, what kind of pants was she-’
‘Dad! Give it a rest,’ moaned Joshua.
‘Well, if you ever actually got in anybody’s pants, Josh,’ said Marcus, looking pointedly at Irie, ‘I’d be able to get my kicks through you, but so far-’
‘Shhh, the two of you,’ snapped Joyce. ‘I’m trying to listen to Millat.’
Four months ago, having a cool mate like Millat had seemed to Josh one hell of a lucky break. Having him round his house every Tuesday had upped Josh’s ante at Glenard Oak by more than he could have imagined. And now that Millat, encouraged by Irie, had begun to come of his own accord, to come socially, Joshua Chalfen, né Chalfen the Chubster, should have felt his star rising. But he didn’t. He felt pissed off. For Joshua had not bargained on the power of Millat’s attractiveness. His magnet-like qualities. He saw that Irie was still, deep down, stuck on him like a paperclip and even his own mother seemed sometimes to take Millat as her only focus; all her energy for her gardening, her children, her husband, streamlined and drawn to this one object like so many iron filings. It pissed him off.
‘I can’t talk now? I can’t talk in my own house?’
‘Joshi, don’t be silly. Millat’s obviously upset… I’m just trying to deal with that at the moment.’
‘Poor little Joshi,’ said Millat in slow, malicious, purring tones. ‘Not getting enough attention from his mummy? Want mummy to wipe his bottom for him?’
‘Fuck you, Millat,’ said Joshua.
‘OooooooOOO…’
‘Joyce, Marcus,’ appealed Joshua, looking for an external judgement. ‘Tell him.’
Marcus popped a great wedge of cheese in his mouth and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m afwaid Miyat’s oar mu’rer’s jurishdicshun.’
‘Let me just deal with this first, Joshi,’ began Joyce. ‘And then later…’ Joyce allowed the rest of her sentence to get jammed in the kitchen door just as her eldest son slammed it.
‘Shall I go after…?’ asked Benjamin.
Joyce shook her head and kissed Benjamin on the cheek. ‘No, Benji. Best leave him to it.’
She turned back to Millat, touching his face, tracing the salt path of an old tear with her finger.
‘Now. What’s been going on?’
Millat began slowly rolling his spliff. He liked to make them wait. You could get more out of a Chalfen if you made them wait.
‘Oh, Millat, don’t smoke that stuff. Every time we see you these days you’re smoking. It upsets Oscar so much. He’s not that young and he understands more than you think. He understands about marijuana.’
‘What’s mary wana?’ asked Oscar.
‘You know what it is, Oscar. It’s what makes Millat all horrible, like we were talking about today, and it’s what kills the little brain cells he has.’
‘Get off my fucking back, Joyce.’
‘I’m just trying to…’ Joyce sighed with melodrama, and drew her fingers through her hair. ‘Millat, what’s the matter? Do you need some money?’
‘Yeah, I do, as it happens.’
‘Why? What happened? Millat. Talk to me. Family again?’
Millat tucked the orange cardboard roach in and stuck the joint between his lips. ‘Dad chucked me out, didn’t he?’
‘Oh God,’ said Joyce, tears springing immediately, pulling her chair closer and taking his hand, ‘if I was your mother, I’d – well, anyway I’m not, am I… but she’s just so incompetent… it makes me so… I mean, imagine letting your husband take away one of your children and do God knows what with the other one, I just-’
‘Don’t talk about my mother. You’ve never met her. I wasn’t even talking about her.’
‘Well, she refuses to meet me, doesn’t she? As if it were some kind of competition.’
‘Shut the fuck up, Joyce.’
‘Well, there’s no point, is there? Going into… it upsets you to… I can see that, clearly, it’s all too close to the… Marcus, get some tea, he needs tea.’
‘For fuckssake! I don’t want any fucking tea. All you ever do is drink tea! You lot must piss pure bloody tea.’
‘Millat, I’m just try-’
‘Well, don’t.’
A little hash seed fell out of Millat’s joint and stuck on his lips. He picked it off and popped it in his mouth. ‘I could do with some brandy, though, if there is any.’
Joyce motioned to Irie with a what can you do look and mimed a tiny measure of her thirty-year-old Napoleon brandy between forefinger and thumb. Irie stood on an overturned bucket to get it off the top shelf.
‘OK, let’s all calm down. OK? OK. So. What happened this time?’
‘I called him a cunt. He is a cunt.’ Millat walloped Oscar’s creeping fingers that were looking for a plaything and reaching speculatively for his matches. ‘I’ll need somewhere to stay for a bit.’
‘Well, that’s not even a question, you can stay at ours, naturally.’
Irie reached between the two of them, Joyce and Millat, to place the big-bottomed brandy glass on the table.
‘OK, Irie, give him a little space right now, I think.’
‘I was just-’
‘Yes, OK, Irie – he just doesn’t need crowding right at this moment-’
‘He’s a bloody hypocrite, man,’ Millat cut in with a growl, looking into the middle distance and speaking to the conservatory as much as to anyone, ‘he prays five times a day but he still drinks and he doesn’t have any Muslim friends, then he has a go at me for fucking a white girl. And then he’s pissed off about Magid. He takes all his shit out on me. And he wants me to stop hanging around with KEVIN. I’m more of a fucking Muslim than he is. Fuck him!’
‘Do you want to talk about it with all this lot about,’ said Joyce, looking meaningfully round the room. ‘Or just us?’
‘Joyce,’ said Millat, downing his brandy in one, ‘I don’t give a fuck.’
Joyce took that to mean just us and ushered the rest of them out of the room with her eyes.
Irie was glad to leave. In the four months that she and Millat had been turning up to the Chalfens, ploughing through Double Science, band I, and eating their selection of boiled food, a strange pattern had developed. The more progress Irie made – whether in her studies, her attempts to make polite conversation or her studied imitation of Chalfenism – the less interest Joyce showed in her. Yet the more Millat veered off the rails – turning up uninvited on a Sunday night, off his face, bringing round girls, smoking weed all over the house, drinking their 1964 Dom Perignon on the sly, pissing on the rose garden, holding a KEVIN meeting in the front room, running up a three hundred pound phone bill calling Bangladesh, telling Marcus he was queer, threatening to castrate Joshua, calling Oscar a spoilt little shit, accusing Joyce herself of being a maniac – the more Joyce adored him. In four months he already owed her over three hundred pounds, a new duvet and a bike wheel.
‘Are you coming upstairs?’ asked Marcus, as he closed the kitchen door on the two of them, and bent this way and that like a reed while his children blew past him. ‘I’ve got those pictures you wanted to see.’
Irie gave Marcus a thankful smile. It was Marcus who seemed to keep an eye out for her. It was Marcus who had helped her these four months as her brain changed from something mushy to something hard and defined, as she slowly gained a familiarity with the Chalfen way of thinking. She had thought of this as a great sacrifice on the part of a busy man, but more recently she wondered if there was not some enjoyment in it. Like watching a blind man feeling out the contours of a new object, maybe. Or a laboratory rat making sense of a maze. Either way, in exchange for his attention, Irie had begun to take an interest, first strategic and now genuine, in his FutureMouse. Consequently invitations to Marcus’s study at the very top of the house, by far her favourite room, had become more frequent.
‘Well, don’t stand there grinning like the village idiot. Come on up.’
Marcus’s room was like no place Irie had ever seen. It had no communal utility, no other purpose in the house apart from being Marcus’s room; it stored no toys, bric-a-brac, broken things, spare ironing boards; no one ate in it, slept in it or made love in it. It wasn’t like Clara’s attic space, a Xanadu of crap, all carefully stored in boxes and labelled just in case she should ever need to flee this land for another one. It wasn’t like the spare rooms of immigrants – packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends – that stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.) Marcus’s room was purely devoted to Marcus and Marcus’s work. A study. Like in Austen or Upstairs, Downstairs or Sherlock Holmes. Except this was the first study Irie had ever seen in real life.
The room itself was small and irregular with a sloping floor, wooden eaves that meant it was possible to stand in certain places but not others and a skylight rather than a window which let light through in slices, spotlights for dancing dust. There were four filing cabinets, open-mouthed beasts spitting paper; paper in piles on the floor, on the shelves, in circles around the chairs. The smell of a rich, sweet Germanic tobacco sat in a cloud just above head level, staining the leaves of the highest books yellow, and there was an elaborate smoking set on a side table – spare mouthpieces, pipes ranging from the standard U-bend to ever more curious shapes, snuff boxes, a selection of gauzes – all laid out in a velvet-lined leather case like a doctor’s instruments. Scattered about the walls and lining the fireplace were photos of the Chalfen clan, including comely portraits of Joyce in her pert-breasted hippy youth, a retroussé nose sneaking out between two great sheaths of hair. And then a few larger framed centrepieces. A map of the Chalfen family tree. A headshot of Mendel looking pleased with himself. A big poster of Einstein in his American icon stage – Nutty Professor hair, ‘surprised’ look and huge pipe – subtitled with the quote God does not play dice with the world. Finally, Marcus’s large oaken armchair backed on to a portrait of Crick and Watson looking tired but elated in front of their model of deoxyribonucleic acid, a spiral staircase of metal clamps, reaching from the floor of their Cambridge lab to beyond the scope of the photographer’s lens.
‘But where’s Wilkins?’ inquired Marcus, bending where the ceiling got low and tapping the photo with a pencil. ‘1962, Wilkins won the Nobel in medicine with Crick and Watson. But no sign of Wilkins in the photos. Just Crick and Watson. Watson and Crick. History likes lone geniuses or double acts. But it’s got no time for threesomes.’ Marcus thought again. ‘Unless they’re comedians or jazz musicians.’
‘ ’Spose you’ll have to be a lone genius, then,’ said Irie cheerfully, turning from the picture and sitting down on a Swedish backless chair.
‘Ah, but I have a mentor, you see.’ He pointed to a poster-sized black and white photograph on the other wall. ‘And mentors are a whole other kettle of fish.’
It was an extreme close-up of an extremely old man, the contours of his face clearly defined by line and shade, hachures on a topographic map.
‘Grand old Frenchman, a gentleman and a scholar. Taught me practically everything I know. Seventy-odd and sharp as a whip. But you see, with a mentor you needn’t credit them directly. That’s the great thing about them. Now where’s this bloody photo…’
While Marcus scrabbled about in a filing cabinet, Irie studied a small slice of the Chalfen family tree, an elaborate illustrated oak that stretched back into the 1600s and forward into the present day. The differences between the Chalfens and the Jones/Bowdens were immediately plain. For starters, in the Chalfen family everybody seemed to have a normal number of children. More to the point, everybody knew whose children were whose. The men lived longer than the women. The marriages were singular and long lasting. Dates of birth and death were concrete. And the Chalfens actually knew who they were in 1675. Archie Jones could give no longer record of his family than his father’s own haphazard appearance on the planet in the back-room of a Bromley public house circa 1895 or 1896 or quite possibly 1897, depending on which nonagenarian ex-barmaid you spoke to. Clara Bowden knew a little about her grandmother, and half believed the story that her famed and prolific Uncle P. had thirty-four children, but could only state definitively that her own mother was born at 2.45 p.m. 14 January 1907, in a Catholic church in the middle of the Kingston earthquake. The rest was rumour, folk-tale and myth:
‘You guys go so far back,’ said Irie, as Marcus came up behind her to see what was of interest. ‘It’s incredible. I can’t imagine what that must feel like.’
‘Nonsensical statement. We all go back as far as each other. It’s just that the Chalfens have always written things down,’ said Marcus thoughtfully, stuffing his pipe with fresh tobacco. ‘It helps if you want to be remembered.’
‘I guess my family’s more of an oral tradition,’ said Irie with a shrug. ‘But, man, you should ask Millat about his. He’s the descendant of-’
‘A great revolutionary. So I’ve heard. I wouldn’t take any of that seriously, if I were you. One part truth to three parts fiction in that family, I fancy. Any historical figure of note in your lot?’ asked Marcus, and then, immediately uninterested in his own question, returned to his search of filing cabinet number two.
‘No… no one… significant. But my grandmother was born in January 1907, during the Kingston-’
‘Here we are!’
Marcus emerged triumphant from a steel drawer, brandishing a thin plastic folder with a few pieces of paper in it.
‘Photographs. Especially for you. If the animal-rights lot saw these, I’d have a contract out on my life. One by one now. Don’t grab.’
Marcus passed Irie the first photo. It was of a mouse on its back. Its stomach was littered with little mushroom-like growths, brown and puffy. Its mouth was unnaturally extended, by the prostrate position, into a cry of agony. But not genuine agony, Irie thought, more like theatrical agony. More like a mouse who was making a big show of something. A ham-mouse. A luvvie-mouse. There was something sarcastic about it.
‘You see, embryo cells are all very well, they help us understand the genetic elements that may contribute to cancer, but what you really want to know is how a tumour progresses in living tissue. I mean, you can’t approximate that in a culture, not really. So then you move on to introducing chemical carcinogens in a target organ but…’
Irie was half listening, half engrossed in the pictures passed to her. The next one was of the same mouse, as far as she could tell, this time on its front, where the tumours were bigger. There was one on its neck that appeared practically the same size as its ear. But the mouse looked quite pleased about it. Almost as if it had purposefully grown new apparatus to hear what Marcus was saying about him. Irie was aware this was a stupid thing to think about a lab mouse. But, once again, the mouse-face had a mouse-cunning about it. There was a mouse-sarcasm in its mouse-eyes. A mouse-smirk played about its mouse-lips. Terminal disease? (the mouse said to Irie) What terminal disease?
‘… slow and imprecise. But if you re-engineer the actual genome, so that specific cancers are expressed in specific tissues at predetermined times in the mouse’s development, then you’re no longer dealing with the random. You’re eliminating the random actions of a mutagen. Now you’re talking the genetic program of the mouse, a force activating oncogenes within cells. Now you see, this particular mouse is a young male…’
Now FutureMouse© was being held by his front paws by two pink giant fingers and made to stand vertical like a cartoon mouse, thus forcing his head up. He seemed to be sticking out his little pink mouse-tongue, at the cameraman initially and now at Irie. On his chin the tumours hung like big droplets of dirty rain.
‘… and he expresses the H-ras oncogene in certain of his skin cells, so he develops multiple benign skin papillomas. Now what’s interesting, of course, is young females don’t develop it, which is…’
One eye was closed, the other open. Like a wink. A crafty mouse-wink.
‘… and why? Because of inter-male rivalry – the fights lead to abrasion. Not a biological imperative but a social one. Genetic result: the same. You see? And it’s only with transgenic mice, by adding experimentally to the genome, that you can understand those kind of differences. And this mouse, the one you’re looking at, is a unique mouse, Irie. I plant a cancer and a cancer turns up precisely when I expect it. Fifteen weeks into the development. Its genetic code is new. New breed. No better argument for a patent, if you ask me. Or at least some kind of royalties deal: 80 per cent God, 20 per cent me. Or the other way round, depending on how good my lawyer is. Those poor bastards in Harvard are still fighting the point. I’m not interested in the patent, personally. I’m interested in the science.’
‘Wow,’ said Irie, passing back the pictures reluctantly. ‘It’s pretty hard to take in. I half get it and I half don’t get it at all. It’s just amazing.’
‘Well,’ said Marcus, mock humble. ‘It fills the time.’
‘Being able to eliminate the random…’
‘You eliminate the random, you rule the world,’ said Marcus simply. ‘Why stick to oncogenes? One could program every step in the development of an organism: reproduction, food habits, life expectancy’ – automaton voice, arms out like a zombie, rolling eyeballs – ‘WORLD DOM-IN-A-SHUN.’
‘I can see the tabloid headlines,’ said Irie.
‘Seriously though,’ said Marcus, rearranging his photos in the folder and moving towards the cabinet to refile them, ‘the study of isolated breeds of transgenic animals sheds crucial light on the random. Are you following me? One mouse sacrificed for 5.3 billion humans. Hardly mouse apocalypse. Not too much to ask.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Damn! This thing is such a bloody mess!’
Marcus tried three times to shut the bottom drawer of his cabinet, and then, losing patience, levelled a kick at its steel sides. ‘Bloody thing!’
Irie peered over the open drawer. ‘You need more dividers,’ she said decidedly. ‘And a lot of the paper you’re using is A3, A2 or irregular. You need some kind of folding policy; at the moment you’re just shoving them in.’
Marcus threw his head back and laughed. ‘Folding policy! Well, I suppose you should know; like father like daughter.’
He crouched down by the drawer and gave it a few more pushes.
‘I’m serious. I don’t know how you work like that. My school shit is better organized, and I’m not in the business of World Domination.’
Marcus looked up at her from where he was kneeling. She was like a mountain range from that angle; a soft and pillowy version of the Andes.
‘Look, how about this: I’ll pay you fifteen quid a week if you come round twice a week and get a grip on this filing disaster. You’ll learn more, and I’ll get something I need done, done. Hey? What about it?’
What about it. Joyce already paid Millat a total of thirty-five quid a week for such diverse activities as baby-sitting Oscar, washing the car, weeding, doing the windows and recycling all the coloured paper. What she was really paying for, of course, was the presence of Millat. That energy around her. And that reliance.
Irie knew the deal she was about to make; she didn’t run into it drunk or stoned or desperate or confused, as Millat did. Furthermore, she wanted it; she wanted to merge with the Chalfens, to be of one flesh; separated from the chaotic, random flesh of her own family and transgenically fused with another. A unique animal. A new breed.
Marcus frowned. ‘Why all the deliberation? I’d like an answer this millennium, if you don’t mind. Is it a good idea or isn’t it?’
Irie nodded and smiled. ‘Sure is. When do I start?’
Alsana and Clara were none too pleased. But it took them a little while to compare notes and consolidate their displeasure. Clara was in night school three days a week (courses: British Imperialism 1765 to the Present; Medieval Welsh Literature; Black Feminism), Alsana was on the sewing machine all the daylight hours God gave while a family war raged around her. They talked on the phone only occasionally and saw each other even less. But both felt an independent uneasiness about the Chalfens, of whom they had gradually heard more and more. After a few months of covert surveillance, Alsana was now certain that it was to the Chalfens Millat went during his regular absences from the family home. As for Clara, she was lucky to catch Irie in on a week night, and had long ago rumbled her netball excuses. For months now it had been the Chalfens this and the Chalfens that; Joyce said this wonderful thing, Marcus is so terribly clever. But Clara wasn’t one to kick up a fuss; she wanted desperately what was best for Irie; and she had always been convinced that sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting. She even suggested a meeting, between herself and the Chalfens, but either Clara was paranoid or Irie was doing her best to avoid it. And there was no point looking to Archibald for support. He only saw Irie in flashes – when she came home to shower, dress or eat – and it didn’t seem to bother him whether she raved endlessly about the Chalfen children (They sound nice, love), or about something Joyce did (Did she? That’s very clever, isn’t it, love?), or something Marcus had said (Sounds like a right old Einstein, eh, love? Well, good for you. Must dash. Meeting Sammy at O’Connell’s at eight). Archie had skin as thick as an alligator’s. Being a father was such a solid genetic position in his mind (the solidest fact in Archie’s life), it didn’t occur to him that there might be any challenger to his crown. It was left to Clara to bite her lip alone, hope she wasn’t losing her only daughter, and swallow the blood.
But Alsana had finally concluded that it was all-out war and she needed an ally. Late January ’91, Christmas and Ramadan safely out of the way, she picked up the phone.
‘So: you know about these Chaffinches?’
‘Chalfens. I think the name is Chalfen. Yes, they’re the parents of a friend of Irie’s, I think,’ said Clara disingenuously, wanting to know what Alsana knew first. ‘Joshua Chalfen. They sound a nice family.’
Alsana blew air out of her nose. ‘I’ll call them Chaffinches – little scavenging English birds pecking at all the best seeds! Those birds do the same to my bay leaves as these people do to my boy. But they are worse; they are like birds with teeth, with sharp little canines – they don’t just steal, they rip apart! What do you know about them?’
‘Well… nothing, really. They’ve been helping Irie and Millat with their sciences, that’s what she told me. I’m sure there’s no harm, Alsi. And Irie’s doing very well in school now. She is out of the house all the time, but I can’t really put my foot down.’
Clara heard Alsana slap the Iqbal bannisters in fury. ‘Have you met them? Because I haven’t met them, and yet they feel free to give my son money and shelter as if he had neither – and bad mouth me, no doubt. God only knows what he is telling them about me! Who are they? I am not knowing them from Adam or Eve! Millat spends every spare minute with them and I see no particular improvement in his grades and he is still smoking the pot and sleeping with the girls. I try and tell Samad, but he’s in his own world; he just won’t listen. Just screams at Millat and won’t speak to me. We’re trying to raise the money to get Magid back and in a good school. I’m trying to keep this family together and these Chaffinches are trying to tear it apart!’
Clara bit her lip and nodded silently at the receiver.
‘Are you there, lady?’
‘Yes,’ said Clara. ‘Yes. You see, Irie, well… she seems to worship them. I got quite upset at first, but then I thought I was just being silly. Archie says I’m being silly.’
‘If you told that potato-head there was no gravity on the moon he’d think you were being silly. We get by without his opinion for fifteen years, we’ll manage without it now. Clara,’ said Alsana, and her heavy breath rattled against the receiver, her voice sounded exhausted, ‘we always stand by each other… I need you now.’
‘Yes… I’m just thinking…’
‘Please. Don’t think. I booked a movie, old and French, like you like – two thirty today. Meet me in front of the Tricycle Theatre. Niece-of-Shame is coming too. We have tea. We talk.’
The movie was A Bout de Souffle. 16 mm, grey and white. Old Fords and boulevards. Turn-ups and handkerchiefs. Kisses and cigarettes. Clara loved it (Beautiful Belmondo! Beautiful Seberg! Beautiful Paris!), Neena found it too French, and Alsana couldn’t understand what the bloody thing was about. ‘Two young people running around France talking nonsense, killing policemen, stealing vehicles, never wearing bras. If that’s European cinema, give me Bollywood every day of the week. Now, ladies, shall we get down to business?’
Neena went and collected the teas and plonked them on the little table.
‘So what’s all this about a conspiracy of Chaffinches? Sounds like Hitchcock.’
Alsana explained in shorthand the situation.
Neena reached into a bag for her Consulates, lit one up and exhaled minty smoke. ‘Auntie, they just sound like a perfectly nice middle-class family who are helping Millat with his studies. Is that what you dragged me from work for? I mean, it’s hardly Jonestown, now, is it?’
‘No,’ said Clara cautiously, ‘no, of course not – but all your auntie is saying is that Millat and Irie spend such a lot of time over there, so we’d just like to know a bit more about what they’re like, you know. That’s natural enough, isn’t it?’
Alsana objected. ‘That is not all I’m saying. I am saying these people are taking my son away from me! Birds with teeth! They’re Englishifying him completely! They’re deliberately leading him away from his culture and his family and his religion-’
‘Since when have you given two shits about his religion!’
‘You, Niece-of-Shame, you don’t know how I sweat blood for that boy, you don’t know about-’
‘Well, if I don’t know anything about anything, why the bloody hell have you brought me here? I’ve got other fucking things to do, you know.’ Neena snatched her bag and made to stand up. ‘Sorry about this, Clara. I don’t know why this always has to happen. I’ll see you soon…’
‘Sit down,’ hissed Alsana, grabbing her by the arm. ‘Sit down, all right, point made, Miss Clever Lesbian. Look, we need you, OK? Sit down, apology, apology. OK? Better.’
‘All right,’ said Neena, viciously stubbing out her fag on a serviette. ‘But I’m going to speak my mind and for once just shut that chasm of a mouth while I do it. OK? OK. Right. Now, you just said Irie’s doing tremendous in school, and if Millat’s not doing so well, it’s no great mystery – he doesn’t do any work. At least somebody’s trying to help him. And if he’s seeing too much of these people, I’m sure that’s his choice, not theirs. It’s not exactly Happy Land in your house at the moment, is it? He’s running away from himself and he’s looking for something as far away from the Iqbals as possible.’
‘Ah ha! But they live two roads away!’ cried Alsana triumphantly.
‘No, Auntie. Conceptually far away from you. Being an Iqbal is occasionally a little suffocating, you know? He’s using this other family as a refuge. They’re probably a good influence or something.’
‘Or something,’ said Alsana ominously.
‘What are you afraid of, Alsi? He’s second generation – you always say it yourself – you need to let them go their own way. Yes, and look what happened to me, blah blah blah – I may be Niece-of-Shame to you, Alsi, but I earn a good living out of my shoes.’ Alsana looked dubiously at the knee-length black boots that Neena had designed, made and was wearing. ‘And I live a pretty good life – you know, I live by principles. I’m just saying. He’s already having a war with uncle Samad. He doesn’t need one with you as well.’
Alsana grumbled into her blackberry tea.
‘If you want to worry about something, Auntie, worry about these KEVIN people he hangs around with. They’re insane. And there’s bloody loads of them. All the ones you wouldn’t expect. Mo, you know, the butcher – yes, you know – the Hussein-Ishmaels – Ardashir’s side of the family. Right, well, he’s one. And bloody Shiva, from the restaurant – he’s converted!’
‘Good for him,’ said Alsana tartly.
‘But it’s nothing to do with Islam proper, Alsi. They’re a political group. And some politics. One of the little bastards told me and Maxine we were going to roast in the pits of hell. Apparently we are the lowest forms of life, lower than the slugs. I gave his ball-bag a 360-degree twist. Those are the people you need to worry about.’
Alsana shook her head and waved Neena off with a hand. ‘Can’t you understand? I worry about my son being taken away from me. I have lost one already. Six years I have not seen Magid. Six years. And I see these people, these Chaffinches – and they spend more time with Millat than I do. Can you understand that, at least?’
Neena sighed, fiddled with a button on her top, and then, seeing the tears forming in her auntie’s eyes, conceded a silent nod.
‘Millat and Irie often go round there for dinner,’ said Clara quietly. ‘And Alsana, well, your auntie and I were wondering… if once you could go with them – you look young, and you seem young, and you could go and-’
‘Report back,’ finished Neena, rolling her eyes. ‘Infiltrate the enemy. That poor family – they’ve no idea who they’re messing with, have they? They’re under surveillance and they don’t even know it. It’s like the bloody Thirty-nine Steps.’
‘Niece-of-Shame: yes or no?’
Neena groaned. ‘Yes, Auntie. Yes, if I must.’
‘Much appreciated,’ said Alsana, finishing her tea.
Now, it wasn’t that Joyce was a homophobe. She liked gay men. And they liked her. She had even inadvertently amassed a little gay fan club in university, a group of men who saw her as a kind of Barbra Streisand/Bette Davis/Joan Baez hybrid and met once a month to cook her dinner and admire her dress sense. So Joyce couldn’t be homophobic. But gay women… something confused Joyce about gay women. It wasn’t that she disliked them. She just couldn’t comprehend them. Joyce understood why men would love men; she had devoted her life to loving men, so she knew how it felt. But the idea of women loving women was so far from Joyce’s cognitive understanding of the world that she couldn’t process it. The idea of them. She just didn’t get it. God knows, she’d made the effort. During the seventies she dutifully read The Well of Loneliness and Our Bodies Ourselves (which had a small chapter); more recently she had read and watched Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but none of it did her any good. She wasn’t offended by it. She just couldn’t see the point. So when Neena turned up for dinner, arm in arm with Maxine, Joyce just sat staring at the two of them over the starter (pulses on rye bread), utterly fixated. She was rendered dumbstruck for the first twenty minutes, leaving the rest of the family to go through the Chalfen routine minus her own vital bit-part. It was a little like being hypnotized or sitting in a dense cloud, and through the mist she heard snippets of dinner conversation continuing without her.
‘So, always the first Chalfen question: what do you do?’
‘Shoes. I make shoes.’
‘Ah. Mmm. Not the material of sparkling conversation, I fear. What about the beautiful lady?’
‘I’m a beautiful lady of leisure. I wear the shoes she makes.’
‘Ah. Not in college, then?’
‘No, I didn’t bother with college. Is that OK?’
Neena was equally defensive. ‘And before you ask, neither did I.’
‘Well, I didn’t mean to embarrass you-’
‘You didn’t.’
‘Because it’s no real surprise… I know you’re not the most academic family in the world.’
Joyce knew things were going badly, but she couldn’t find her tongue to smooth it out. A million dangerous double entendres were sitting at the back of her throat, and, if she opened her mouth even a slit (!), she feared one of them was going to come out. Marcus, who was always oblivious to causing offence, chundled on happily. ‘You two are terrible temptations for a man.’
‘Are we.’
‘Oh, dykes always are. And I’m sure certain gentlemen would have half a chance – though you’d probably take beauty over intellect, I suspect, so there go my chances.’
‘You seem awfully certain of your intellect, Mr Chalfen.’
‘Shouldn’t I be? I am terribly clever, you know.’
Joyce just kept looking at them, thinking: Who relies on whom? Who teaches whom? Who improves whom? Who pollinates and who nurtures?
‘Well, it’s great to have another Iqbal round the table, isn’t it, Josh?’
‘I’m a Begum, not an Iqbal,’ said Neena.
‘I can’t help thinking,’ said Marcus, unheeding, ‘that a Chalfen man and an Iqbal woman would be a hell of a mix. Like Fred and Ginger. You’d give us sex and we’d give you sensibility or something. Hey? You’d keep a Chalfen on his toes – you’re as fiery as an Iqbal. Indian passion. Funny thing about your family: first generation are all loony tunes, but the second generation have got heads just about straight on their shoulders.’
‘Umm, look: no one calls my family loony, OK? Even if they are. I’ll call them loony.’
‘Now, you see, try to use the language properly. You can say “no one calls my family loony”, but that’s not a correct statement. Because people do and will. By all means say, “I don’t want people to, etc.” It’s a small thing, but we can all understand each other better when we don’t abuse terms and phrases.’
Then, just as Marcus was reaching into the oven to pull out the main course (chicken hotpot), Joyce’s mouth opened and for some inexplicable reason this came out: ‘Do you use each other’s breasts as pillows?’
Neena’s fork, which was heading for her mouth, stopped just as it reached the tip of her nose. Millat choked on a piece of cucumber. Irie struggled to bring her lower jaw back into alliance with the upper. Maxine began to giggle.
But Joyce wasn’t going to go purple. Joyce was descended from the kind of bloody-minded women who continued through the African swamps even after the bag-carrying natives had dropped their load and turned back, even when the white men were leaning on their guns and shaking their heads. She was cut of the same cloth as the frontier ladies who, armed with only a bible, a shotgun and a net curtain, coolly took out the brown men moving forwards from the horizon towards the plains. Joyce didn’t know the meaning of backing down. She was going to stand her ground.
‘It’s just, in a lot of Indian poetry, they talk about using breasts for pillows, downy breasts, pillow breasts. I just – just – just wondered, if white sleeps on brown, or, as one might expect, brown sleeps on white? Extending the – the – the – pillow metaphor, you see, I was just wondering which… way…’
The silence was long, broad and malingering. Neena shook her head in disgust and dropped her cutlery on to her plate with a clatter. Maxine tapped her fingers on the tablecloth, marking out a nervous ‘William Tell’. Josh looked like he might cry.
Finally, Marcus threw his head back, clapped his hands and let out an enormous Chalfen guffaw. ‘I’ve been wanting to ask that all night. Well done, Mother Chalfen!’
And so for the first time in her life Neena had to admit that her auntie was absolutely right. ‘You wanted a report, so here’s a full report: crazy, nutso, raisins short of a fruitcake, rubber walls, screaming-mad basket-cases. Every bloody one of them.’
Alsana nodded, open-mouthed, and asked Neena to repeat for the third time the bit during dessert when Joyce, serving up a trifle, had inquired whether it was difficult for Muslim women to bake while wearing those long black sheets – didn’t the arm bits get covered in cake mixture? Wasn’t there a danger of setting yourself alight on the gas hobs?
‘Bouncing off the walls,’ concluded Neena.
But, as is the way with these things, once confirmation had arrived nobody knew quite what to do with the information. Irie and Millat were sixteen and never tired of telling their respective mothers that they were now of the legal age for various activities and could do whatever, whenever. Short of putting locks on the doors and bars on the windows, Clara and Alsana were powerless. If anything, things got worse. Irie spent more time than ever immersing herself in Chalfenism. Clara noticed her wincing at her own father’s conversation, and frowning at the middle-brow tabloid Clara curled up with in bed. Millat disappeared from home for weeks at a time, returning with money that was not his and an accent that modulated wildly between the rounded tones of the Chalfens and the street talk of the KEVIN clan. He infuriated Samad beyond all reason. No, that’s wrong. There was a reason. Millat was neither one thing nor the other, this or that, Muslim or Christian, Englishman or Bengali; he lived for the in between, he lived up to his middle name, Zulfikar, the clashing of two swords:
‘How many times,’ Samad growled, after watching his son purchase the autobiography of Malcolm X, ‘is it necessary to say thank you in a single transaction? Thank you when you hand the book over, thank you when she receives it, thank you when she tells you the price, thank you when you sign the cheque, thank you when she takes it! They call it English politeness when it is simply arrogance. The only being who deserves this kind of thanks is Allah himself!’
And Alsana was once again caught between the two of them, trying desperately to find the middle ground. ‘If Magid was here, he’d sort you two out. A lawyer’s mind, he’d make things straight.’ But Magid wasn’t here, he was there, and there was still not enough money to change the situation.
Then the summer came and with it exams. Irie came in just behind Chalfen the Chubster, and Millat did far better than anyone, including he, had expected. It could only be the Chalfen influence, and Clara, for one, felt a little ashamed of herself. Alsana just said, ‘Iqbal brains. In the end, they triumph,’ and decided to mark the occasion with a joint Iqbal/Jones celebration barbecue to be held on Samad’s lawn.
Neena, Maxine, Ardashir, Shiva, Joshua, aunties, cousins, Irie’s friends, Millat’s friends, KEVIN friends and the headmaster, all came and made merry (except for KEVIN, who formed a circle in one corner) with paper cups filled with cheap Spanish bubbly.
It was going well enough until Samad spotted the ring of folded arms and green bow-ties.
‘What are they doing here? Who let in the infidels?’
‘Well, you’re here, aren’t you?’ sniped Alsana, looking at the three empty cans of Guinness Samad had already got through, the hotdog juice dribbling down his chin. ‘Who’s casting the first stone at a barbecue?’
Samad glared and lurched away with Archie to admire their shared handiwork on the reconstructed shed. Clara took the opportunity to pull Alsana aside and ask her a question.
Alsana stamped a foot in her own coriander. ‘No! No way at all. What should I thank her for? If he did well, it was because of his own brains. Iqbal brains. Not once, not once has that long-toothed Chaffinch even condescended to telephone me. Wild horses will have to drag my dead body, lady.’
‘But… I just think it would be a nice idea to go and thank her for all the time she’s spent with the children… I think maybe we misjudged her-’
‘By all means, go, Lady Jones, go if you like,’ said Alsana scornfully. ‘But as for me, wild horses, wild horses could not do it.’
‘And that’s Dr Solomon Chalfen, Marcus’s grandfather. He was one of the few men who would listen to Freud when everybody in Vienna thought they had a sexual deviant on their hands. An incredible face he has, don’t you think? There’s so much wisdom in it. The first time Marcus showed me that picture, I knew I wanted to marry him. I thought: if my Marcus looks like that at eighty I’ll be a very lucky girl!’
Clara smiled and admired the daguerreotype. She had so far admired eight along the mantelpiece with Irie trailing sullenly behind her, and there were at least as many left to go.
‘It’s a grand old family, and if you don’t find it too presumptuous, Clara – is “Clara” all right?’
‘Clara’s fine, Mrs Chalfen.’
Irie waited for Joyce to ask Clara to call her Joyce.
‘Well, as I was saying, it’s a grand old family and if you don’t find it too presumptuous I like to think of Irie as a kind of addition to it, in a way. She’s just such a remarkable girl. We’ve so enjoyed having her around.’
‘She’s enjoyed being around, I think. And she really owes you a lot. We all do.’
‘Oh no, no, no. I believe in the Responsibility of Intellectuals… besides which, it’s been a joy. Really. I hope we’ll still see her, even though the exams are over. There’s still A-levels, if nothing else!’
‘Oh, I’m sure she’d come anyway. She talks about you all the time. The Chalfens this, the Chalfens that…’
Joyce clasped Clara’s hands in her own. ‘Oh, Clara, I am pleased. And I’m pleased we’ve finally met as well. Oh now, I hadn’t finished. Where were we – oh yes, well here are Charles and Anna – great-uncles and aunts – long buried, sadly. He was a psychiatrist – yes, another one – and she was a plant biologist – woman after my own heart.’
Joyce stood back for a minute, like an art critic in a gallery, and put her hands on her hips. ‘I mean, after a while, you’ve got to suspect it’s in the genes, haven’t you? All these brains. I mean, nurture just won’t explain it. I mean, will it?’
‘Er, no,’ agreed Clara. ‘I guess not.’
‘Now, out of interest – I mean, I really am curious – which side do you think Irie gets it from, the Jamaican or the English?’
Clara looked up and down the line of dead white men in starched collars, some monocled, some uniformed, some sitting in the bosom of their family, each member manacled into position so the camera could do its slow business. They all reminded her a little of someone. Of her own grandfather, the dashing Captain Charlie Durham, in his one extant photograph: pinched and pale, looking defiantly at the camera, not so much having his picture taken as forcing his image upon the acetate. What they used to call a Muscular Christian. The Bowden family called him Whitey. Djam fool bwoy taut he owned everyting he touched.
‘My side,’ said Clara tentatively. ‘I guess the English in my side. My grandfather was an Englishman, quite la di da, I’ve been told. His child, my mother, was born during the Kingston earthquake, 1907. I used to think maybe the rumble knocked the Bowden brain cells into place ’cos we been doing pretty well since then!’
Joyce saw that Clara was expecting a laugh and quickly supplied one.
‘But seriously, it was probably Captain Charlie Durham. He taught my grandmother all she knew. A good English education. Lord knows, I can’t think who else it could be.’
‘Well, how fascinating! It’s what I say to Marcus – it is the genes, whatever he says. He says I’m a simplifier, but he’s just too theoretical. I’m proven right all the time!’
As the front door closed behind her, Clara bit her own lip once more, this time in frustration and anger. Why had she said Captain Charlie Durham? That was a downright lie. False as her own white teeth. Clara was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Hortense was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Probably even Grandma Ambrosia was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Captain Charlie Durham wasn’t smart. He had thought he was, but he wasn’t. He sacrificed a thousand people because he wanted to save one woman he never really knew. Captain Charlie Durham was a no-good djam fool bwoy.