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Praise for Luan Goldie

‘A sharp, funny, wonderful writer’

Diana Evans, bestselling author of Ordinary People

‘A timely and powerfully told tale … a new and exciting voice in fiction’

Mike Gayle, Sunday Times bestselling author

‘Luan Goldie is one to watch. Her writing is heartfelt and sublime’

Abir Mukherjee, author of A Necessary Evil and Smoke and Ashes

‘Compelling … finely crafted, compassionate’

Guardian

‘A warm, confident writer with the lightest of touches’

Observer

‘Pacey and powerful’

Mail on Sunday

‘The type of story that will stay with you long after you’ve read the last page’

Closer

‘Brilliant … touches on race, mental health and community in a fresh way’

Good Housekeeping

‘A story of hope, a cheer to the strength and importance of community and resilience. Beautiful, assured and sincere’

Platinum

‘Flawlessly portrayed … A riveting read’

Candis

About the Author

LUAN GOLDIE is a primary school teacher, and formerly a business journalist. She has written several short stories and is the winner of the Costa Short Story Award 2017 for her short story ‘Two Steak Bakes and Two Chelsea Buns’. She was also shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize in 2018 and the Grazia/Orange First Chapter competition in 2012, and was chosen to take part in the Almasi League, an Arts Council-funded mentorship programme for emerging writers of colour. In 2019 she was shortlisted for the h100 awards in the Publishing and Writing category.

Her debut novel, Nightingale Point, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. It was also a Radio 2 Book Club pick. Homecoming is her second novel.

Also by Luan Goldie

Nightingale Point

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Dedication

For Mum

Chapter One

Coffee Shop

September 2020

Yvonne

The coffee shop is one of a chain but this particular branch seems to have lost its way. The tables are filthy, the pleather seats are burst in places and two men sit closest to the counter openly making their way through a six-pack of supermarket croissants.

Yvonne finds an empty table, next to the toilets. The armrest is spotted with dried milk; it’s the kind of dirt that signals neglect, it unnerves her. The walls are lined with photographs of generic Italy, wicker baskets of tomatoes, mopeds, skinny women in large sunglasses drinking espressos at pavement cafés. The door opens and a homeless woman emerges, bulging carrier bags at her side, smelling of urine.

Yvonne doesn’t want to be here.

Deep down she hoped he would cancel, was almost waiting for it. But when he texted her in the morning it was to confirm this address and time.

He’s late.

Maybe he won’t come at all.

Then she sees him on the other side of the glass door, taller than she imagined, far from the gangly eight-year-old he was when she last saw him. His hair is long and sits in a curly mass on the top of his head. He’s wearing a pale pink sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms marked with random tattoos. He’s a man now, completely unfamiliar. But as he spots her and squints, she sees it’s him, it’s Kiama.

Her hand goes up but she feels too stunned to smile as he makes his way over.

‘Hi,’ he hovers near the table.

She stands up, ‘Hello Kiama.’ It’s awkward but she feels grateful that the furniture blocks the hug the situation requires.

He scratches at his hair, ‘Wow, this is crazy.’

‘Yes,’ she laughs. Nervous.

‘So weird to see you again.’

They stand like this, locked in the act of looking each other over, before he snaps out of it. ‘I’m getting a coffee.’

‘Okay.’

He backs away then pauses, ‘Sorry, do you want anything?’

Yvonne gestures to her cup before sinking back into the chair, relieved to be able to return to poking her Earl Grey teabag with a wooden stirrer.

Kiama joins the small line at the counter, he dives for his phone, not content to wait and waste the moment. Yvonne knows she’s in the minority of people without such a habit, without the need for continuous entertainment.

As he reaches the front of the line there is talk between him and the pretty barista, definitely more words than it takes to order a coffee. The stud in his nose catches the light and his face breaks into that smile, his dad’s smile, it’s uncanny. The barista beams too and lowers her reddening face as Kiama returns to the table. His knees knock Yvonne’s as he slides into the seat opposite. He was always a lanky child, all elbows and knees; they used to call him a baby giraffe. It makes her smile.

‘What?’ he asks.

‘Nothing.’ Yvonne looks down at the smudged table and flicks away the crumbs of previous customers.

Steam floats from his takeaway cup. Why takeaway? Is what he has to say to her so short? He catches her eyeing it, ‘I get fed up of spelling out my name.’

She’s confused, but then notices the scrawl of Kev on the side. It’s sad that he’s not proud of his name. But it was simple for her, growing up with a name like Yvonne, something everyone could spell and pronounce without a second thought.

‘Kev?’ Yvonne says.

‘It’s an easier name.’

‘But Kiama’s a beautiful name. You know it means—’

‘Course I know, light of life. But most name meanings sound poetic when you look them up. Here,’ he takes his phone back out of his pocket and types something in. ‘See, Yvonne means Archer. I don’t know what that is.’ He furrows his thick eyebrows and reads on, ‘Ah, listen, people with this name are dynamic, visionary and versatile. Any truth in that?’

Then despite the pink clothes, the tattoos, the hair, the nose piercing, Yvonne says, ‘My God, you’re so much like your dad.’

‘Lucky me.’ Kiama puts his phone on the table and sits forward in his chair. His eyes seem a darker brown now than when he was a kid, but he’s still never quite grown into them. ‘Dad asked me if I’d found any photos of you online.’

‘Photos? Why?’

He shrugs, ‘I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to see what you looked like after all these years. You do look quite different though. Especially your hair.’

Her hair? She’d had it cut last week, but has worn it in this bobbed style for as long as she can remember.

‘Funny,’ he says, ‘I can’t remember it being so ginger.’

It breaks the tension and makes her laugh.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Is that rude? I didn’t mean it.’

She rubs the back of her neck. ‘I know I’m a redhead.’

He holds his palms up, ‘I just remember it being lighter that’s all.’

‘It was. But I don’t dye my hair anymore. Except to get rid of all the grey.’

Kiama stares at her hair as he takes the lid off his drink. ‘I like it,’ he says. ‘The red. It suits you more than blonde.’

The way he looks at her, surveying and watching, it’s too intense.

Her tea is stone cold, unappetising. She raises the cup then puts it straight down. ‘Your arms,’ she says, ‘you really are covered, aren’t you?’

He stretches them out across the table, and under a tangle of festival wristbands and beads, they’re a mess of tattoos: feathers and roses, playing cards and Kanagawa waves.

‘My best mate is training, so I’m sort of like his guinea pig. He’s done all these in the last six months. A few of the crappier ones I had done when I was sixteen.’

‘That’s surely not legal?’

‘Course not. But it’s free.’

‘What did your nana say when she saw them?’

‘She cried. I stopped showing them to her after a while. When I find a good portrait artist, I want one of her face right here,’ he slaps the left side of his chest.

‘How is she?’

‘She um,’ he looks away and Yvonne knows what’s coming. ‘She passed away earlier this year.’

‘I’m so sorry, Kiama. I didn’t know.’

‘Nah nah. You wouldn’t have.’ He rolls his sleeves back down and adds four packets of sugar to his coffee. Noticing her watching he says, ‘I used to be mad into the energy drinks, but they were giving me heart palpitations, so I gave up. But you got to replace it with something.’

‘Sounds logical.’

He smiles back at her, then his face changes. ‘I’m glad you were up for meeting me.’

She takes a breath; she’s not yet ready to hear the reasons he got in touch with her, why he wanted to meet in person and talk. ‘How is your dad? Does he…’ she pauses, searching for how to frame the question, ‘I don’t even know what he does for work these days.’

‘I don’t want to talk about Dad.’ Kiama leans forward again, he’s staring at her and she can feel his energy, his nervousness. This was a mistake. She should never have come. Should never have responded to his original message, but she couldn’t ignore him.

‘Obviously, I asked you here for a reason. I need to talk to you about something.’

‘Okay.’

He moves his coffee to the side of the table and fidgets with his bracelets, rolling them up and down. ‘I’m going back to Kenya.’

It’s not what she expected to hear from him. Though, what did she expect? ‘Why?’

He wraps an empty sugar packet around his thumb and purses his lips. ‘I don’t know,’ he says quickly.

‘You don’t know?’

‘No, I do know.’ He puts a hand over his face, as if embarrassed. ‘But I don’t know how to say it.’

She waits for him to compose himself, to explain, but he stays hidden. ‘Kiama?’

‘I’m not okay.’ He removes his hand and looks straight at her. ‘I need to go back so I can deal with things properly. I can’t keep carrying this.’

‘Carrying what?’

‘What happened there,’ he says, ‘don’t you ever think about it?’

There’s no response that will do.

‘Don’t you ever think it would help to go back?’

‘I’m not sure what you’re—’ she stops. She looks away, at the men polishing off their croissants, the barista who glances hopefully at Kiama, the glass door she wants to escape through.

‘Yvonne, I have so many patchy memories about what happened. I can’t even tell the difference between what I saw and what I heard from others. What I’ve read online.’

‘Why would you read anything online?’

‘Because I wanted to know,’ he says quietly. ‘I was only eight. It’s hard to trust my own memories. And I think that’s why I’m stuck, like not able to move forward. No one ever talks to me about Kenya. About what happened there. We came back to the UK and everyone just got on with things.’

‘Got on with things?’ she almost laughs, it’s a ridiculous way to describe those months which followed their return from Kenya, the months in which Yvonne ‘got on’ with nothing.

‘I can’t talk to Dad about this. I used to talk to my nana but…’ His face falls.

Yvonne lifts her hand to put it on his arm, but pulls back. She hasn’t seen him in a decade, she can’t suddenly step in and start comforting him. It’s not her place.

‘I don’t want to do this alone.’ His voice cracks slightly. ‘I can’t. I can’t do this alone.’

She knows what he’s about to ask.

Chapter Two

Snakebite

May 2001

Yvonne

The middle step is prone to squeaking, so Yvonne carefully avoids it as she heads downstairs. She tiptoes past the downstairs bedroom. Though she doubts a little noise will be enough to stop Emma and her latest fling doing whatever it is they’re doing.

Emma squeals from behind the sky-coloured bed sheet stapled in the doorframe. The door fell off weeks ago. The hinges, like everything else in their dump of a student house, rotted, and one night Emma drunkenly slammed it too hard and it swung from the frame with a crack.

It was Yvonne’s idea to put up the sheet.

There’s a growling noise from behind it now, followed by laughter, delight. It’s too intimate, Yvonne shouldn’t be listening to her housemate having sex, but it’s that car crash thing. How can she not?

The bed creaks and someone groans, guttural, she’s not sure if it’s Emma or him. Him being SWEETBOY76, his screen name on MSN Messenger. Over the last month, Yvonne has wasted so much time in the library, helping Emma to become her sexiest, smartest self, which has mostly consisted of correcting spellings of words like risqué and licentious.

The groans die down to light laughter followed by whispering, and in a way it’s more intimate. They really need to get the door fixed.

The kitchen looks worse than usual this morning, past messy and dirty, now firmly in the realms of filthy. Fairy lights twinkle around the whiteboard, Christmas every day, the board itself is covered with doodles of lecturers doing inexplicable things to each other and Box Room Bethany’s complaints about people using all her tampons.

If someone would have asked Yvonne years ago, back when she was living in the cramped terrace house of her childhood with her three older brothers, what she imagined it would be like to live with girls, she would probably have used the word clean. But here, in this house, there is only grime. A saucepan of congealed pasta rests on the hob, surrounded by dried white froth from where it was allowed to boil over. And there, on the counter, amongst the crumbs, empty CD cases and dirty dishes sits an open takeaway box from California Chicken, a few brown thigh bones and a smear of ketchup left in it.

So, Sweetboy’s not a vegetarian then. That would be Yvonne’s deal breaker. She could never bring herself to share saliva with someone who had dead animal on his breath. She lifts the gaudy box, its slogan proclaims it to be ‘Hot and Tasty. Just the way you like it’. The smell disgusts her, but the bin is full, close to overflowing. She should take it out really, like she always does. But instead she drops the box back on the counter and grabs a whiteboard pen, scrawls a note on the board.

Clean your shit up! I’m not your slave. Y.

Yvonne dumps her notepad in her rucksack, checks for a working pen and refills a Poland Spring bottle with tap water while rereading her whiteboard message. It’s a bit strong. She drops her rucksack to wipe it off with a sleeve and rewrites.

Please can whoever cooked last night, clean it up.

Thanks. Y.

The male voice in Emma’s room says, ‘Not now.’

He doesn’t sound how she expected. But then, what did she expect? That he ‘sound black’? Her mum always says you can tell on the phone, but Yvonne doesn’t think so, or at least, she would never admit it.

Are they coming out of the bedroom? This will be awkward. She doesn’t want to meet him. Quickly, in the hallway she kicks off her slippers and grabs a battered pair of pink Dunlops from a pile by the front door. They smell. Emma’s been wearing them without socks again.

‘Dude?’ Emma whispers as she comes into the hall, a short towel wrapped around her like a toga. She grabs Yvonne’s wrist and pulls her into the kitchen. ‘Did you hear us?’ She drops open her bottom jaw and fakes a silent laugh.

‘I think I would have heard you if I was in John o’Groats.’

Emma laughs. But Yvonne doesn’t. ‘You’re ridiculous,’ she says. ‘No one likes sex that much.’

Emma pushes her black fringe from her eyes. ‘Shush, he’ll hear you.’

‘Don’t shush me. You’re the one with no volume control. And I’m fed up of this,’ she points to the sheet. ‘Call the landlord and tell him you need a proper door. No, tell him you need sound proofing.’

Emma laughs, then mouths overenthusiastically, ‘I’ve not slept all night.’ Her chest is red and her mascara is smudged making her green eyes look liquidly cold and pale. ‘Seriously, like, seriously,’ she says with the international school twang she’s never quite managed to shake, ‘I love a guy so open to trying new things.’

Yvonne fake gags, ‘Please, stop talking.’

‘Wait till you meet him.’

‘I don’t want to meet him. It’s bad enough I’m talking to you post-sex.’

Emma covers her mouth to stifle a laugh. ‘Why are you going out so early anyway?’

‘I’ve got my final tutorial at eleven. Surely, yours is today as well?’

‘Urgh, for what? So they can tell me how unreadable my last essay was? I know that. Stay home today?’

Yvonne thinks about the cost of truancy, all that student debt she’s racking up to sit on the sofa and watch Diagnosis Murder. ‘Nope. I’m going in.’

Emma frowns, ‘Well, he’s going to work so I should, like, drag myself in as well. Wait for me.’

‘No. You’ll make me late.’

‘I’ll be quick. Talk me up to him,’ she whispers.

‘No. I’m leaving.’

But Emma’s already halfway up the stairs pulling off her towel, ‘You know me, three minutes and I’m done.’

Three minutes to shower followed by an hour pottering about the house. Yvonne steps outside and closes the front door. There’s a car parked on their usually empty drive, a Volvo Estate, not the kind of car a young guy would drive. A crucifix on a purple beaded chain hangs from the rear-view mirror. Surely it’s his parents’ car, she thinks as she walks towards the bus stop at the end of the road. But then, stops, she’s left her rucksack. She runs back to the house and looks in the hall, but it’s not there. A tap is running in the kitchen, and as she goes in she sees him there by the sink, bare back and a pair of black jeans.

She averts her eyes and grabs the bag from the floor.

‘Morning,’ he says brightly.

‘Morning.’

‘I know you,’ he says.

She looks up. He leans against the kitchen counter and narrows his eyes at her.

It can’t be.

‘No way,’ he says loudly.

It can’t be. There are over eight million people in London. How is it him? The odds are impossible, they have to be.

‘There’s no way.’ He smiles widely, the smile that got her the first time around. ‘I can’t believe it’s you.’ He drops his head forwards and laughs, then stops to look up and confirm it. ‘This is messed-up. Emma’s going to freak out.’

He can’t be serious. He can’t tell her.

The shower water runs loudly through the pipes, Emma will be downstairs any minute, ready to deliver her patter about quick showers and water efficiency.

He pulls back. ‘What are the odds?’

Yvonne is aware of all she hasn’t said, but right now, she doesn’t know where to start. ‘Emma doesn’t need to know we know each other. I mean, we don’t really know each other, do we?’

He cocks his head to one side and smiles, ‘Actually, we kind of do know each other.’

The water thumps off. The time ticks.

‘Please, don’t say anything,’ she rubs her head.

‘Calm down, Evelyn.’

‘It’s Yvonne.’

He puts his hands up in mock defence, ‘Don’t get like that. It was months ago. You probably don’t remember my name either.’

But, of course she does. She remembers everything about him. How he smelled, how he danced, how he wrote down her number on the back of a travel card the next morning. How he never called. Emma can’t know about any of this. ‘Please, don’t tell Emma.’

‘I only just started seeing this girl and you’re asking me to keep a secret from her?’

‘Yes. Well, no. Not a secret, it’s not worth mentioning, is it?’

He nods. ‘Sure. I can keep a secret if you can?’

The bathroom door opens upstairs.

‘I need to go.’

When Yvonne gets home later that evening she’s greeted by the sound of the television coming from the living room. She puts her head around the corner but no one’s in there. She walks towards Emma’s room and pulls back the bed sheet from the doorway, ‘Em?’ The sheets are still ruffled and she wishes she’d never seen it.

‘Hey,’ Box Room Bethany shuffles past holding a plate of potato smiley faces, a fleece blanket thrown over her shoulders.

‘Oh, you’re in. Where’s Emma?’

‘I don’t know where that little cow is,’ Bethany says as she walks through to the living room. ‘What was she playing at last night?’

Yvonne follows her and checks the time, it’s late. This is a bad sign. A sign that Sweetboy’s maybe not kept his mouth shut.

Bethany forks a piece of potato into her mouth. ‘I don’t want to hear all that moaning and shit. And to be honest, it sounded like she was faking it. Was it the guy she met in a chat room?’

Yvonne nods.

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