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Chapters (35)

Title Page
Dedication
LARA DA COSTA FAMILY TREE
Epigraph
Part One
PROLOGUE
Sugar cane, damp musky earth, saccharine vanilla
CHAPTER 1
Oh Mama! Your pride when I boarded the Apapa
Sam says this country is like fishermen’s bait, Mama
My nickname is Bill now, after William the Conqueror
Winter’s arthritic tress lace evening’s broody sky
Ellen thought British boys danced like ironing-boards
Ellen wanted to marry the Heavenly Bridegroom
The supreme test of submission to the Will of God
You will go to your husband as an uncrushed flower
CHAPTER 2
Baby Ellen was the cherished, cuddled, coddled
I pour dreams onto Ellen like syrup on treacle tart
My husband Leslie walks like a subaltern on parade
Peggy invested in the future, the past – a pit to fall down
Emma was delivered into her mamaí’s dying arms
‘They want to make us suckle Sasanach words’
Sure it’s a peat hovel, but it’s our home
I awoke cuddling a chilly bough
CHAPTER 3
Chintz, carpets, mahogany, marquetry
I’m the scullery maid, the skivvy, the flunky
Only way to escape is through marriage
I’ve already won some green ribbons at the staff fair
The miracle of his wet tongue in combat with mine
He was so dashing marching in the parades
CHAPTER 4
The sweaty armpit of London: the seven septic
Everything’s all right
‘Henry Robbins of Brackley, Northamptonshire’
Twenty of us last time in the Black Maria
One hundred children in this classroom and still
My hands are crab’s claws
No pleasing the narky wife
Sebastian Aloysius Burt
CHAPTER 5
Mary Jane and Sebastian got hitched in Holborn
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Mary Jane stitched food into her children’s mouths
The past framed itself into a child-crowded doorway
‘The sky’s a bowl of dirty washing-up water’
CHAPTER 6
The sirens sounded, an eerie deafening wail
I was in the kitchen slicing ham for afternoon tea
Dew shivers on wild grass blades, tremulous tears
Redcurrant, blackcurrant, blackberries, gooseberries
Visitors glide through the folly like woodland fairies
Dear mummy and daddy, thank you for the choklate
Dear Gerard, London is full of broken buildings
Dear Gerard, I am now at St Joseph’s Convent
CHAPTER 7
The year Lizbet is crowned, Everest conquered
My dear boy, praise the almighty that you are safe
I burn up all night. I burn up
Tears are for sissies, women and Nancy-boys
‘Oh! He’s not too dark, is he?’ Edith grimaced
A workman’s drill reverberated in Ellen’s head
Hope rises with the sun over London’s spring streets
Two veiled alabaster Madonnas reside as mantelpiece
Gossiping locals are incensed. A nigger! A darkie!
Sky rips its sagging grey hymen with a fingernail
A rainbow flashes the exhausted sky
Peggy’s duck pillows become ponds when Ellen visits
‘And how many wives do you have, Bill?’
Disloyalty slimes into my kitchen like slugs at night
CHAPTER 8
‘Was born in a fog and been in one ever since’
Came into this world covered in boils
Peggy’s such a dainty, doll-like little thing
My wife and my mother can’t stand each other
So when Ellen brought this coloured fellow home
CHAPTER 9
Louis Wilkening felt like a Teutonic titan
Robbed of his clogs, rats chewed his toes, bats
The Asylum for the Houseless Poor
Sugar baking is ze chit vurk of ze devil
Ich bin ein Master Baker, Louis would proudly declare
Edwin and George Huxtable, my chums next door
A man is not a man until he has produced sons
Gladys dreams of a Royal Doulton flushing toilet
When hoardings declare war with Germany
One sticky summer’s night Woolwich seethed
I am a man not a nation, Louis was given to say
Part Two
CHAPTER 10
‘Ellie, marry me soon, you are of age now’
Snowflakes sprinkled down that cold Christmas eve
My hands cup two creamy breasts
I shot into creation as sperm from my father’s penis
I got two big googly eyes an’ tufty hair
A fizzy-eyed beauty with Ovaltine skin, Juliana,
173 Eglinton Road, ‘Atlantico’, sits like a fat Victorian
If I were a poet, Ellen muses, I’d say life’s a mangle
A cats’ chorus rains onto corrugated dustbins
CHAPTER 11
Dawn released London from anonymous night
My children will not swim in a lake of lost dreams
The key turned, the front door
He called me downstairs, potatoes were boiling
I want Mummy Cake! I want Daddy Cake!
By the sloping woods daffodils bloom in the spring sun
Notre Dame’s regime was run by Mother Superior
Nineteen Sixty-seven, our father is crying
I am a strong man but pain is a warrior too
CHAPTER 12
An emerald Raleigh cycled through Lara’s childhood
Lara’s skin oozed honey in late summer’s oven
Tank tops, Curly Wurlys, blue mascara, Top 20
‘Wanna bite, Soos? Wanna bite, La?’
‘Wish I had hair like yours, Soos. It’s so nice’
Beneath the squawking eaves of her attic retreat
‘Where’re’you from, La?’ Susie suddenly asked
‘You didn’t do it with him, did you?’
His hairy tentacles grope under a silver lurex halter
Groovers Disco shimmied with skinny teenagers
Home. I searched but could not find myself
CHAPTER 13
The National Front juggernaut braked in our street
Thor Heyerdahl’s books sailed me to Fatu Hiva
O to cartwheel knickerless into spring
‘Don’t say hello then, you miserable lot’
Evening hit the skyline, diffused the light
‘Yes, you can yawn all right, it suits you’
‘If your Uncle Sam was alive he’d have a story’
CHAPTER 14
Laudate Dominum, Mozart’s quavers were brown
I stand for hours, still Madonna, lachrymose
Hidden in the moist entrails of Atlantico
‘There was a child went forth every day’
‘My tribe is Yoruba, that is my language’
As Lara approached the terraced box, she chucked
No da Costa photos memoried the mantelpiece
Your mother should have married Stephen Brown
Sunday’s winter powdered suburbia with snow
CHAPTER 15
I began to dip into my skin like a wet suit
Josh, your limbs were waves. I swam
I was jelly, you were my mould, yet
‘You’ll not marry a Nigerian if you can’t obey me’
Lautrec posters, blue lamps, Portobello pub
Fury rode me. A wild buckjumper
Ablaze with the sharp and the syrup, yeh
I nightmare, damply scream into silence
‘You’re an undressed genius, Lara.’ Trish unwraps
It’s pissing down out the jeep, out the door, pissoir
Empty roads guzzle us up, frazzled tarmac
He smelt of the sea. Hakan. And fish
CHAPTER 16
I was her daughter for fifty-four years
Drizzle. Reluctant Wednesday. Smoker’s sky
When Nana died the sea began to surge
CHAPTER 17
Lara descended fearfully over desert into Lagos
Sliced dodo browned, crisped in hot oil pans
Central Lagos. December ’93. Sweltering
Dazzling. Whitewashed. He leans on the balcony
‘Dead bodies in the streets for days, open sewers’
Henrique Oliveira’s cottage is dead
CHAPTER 18
Lagos Island cooking. It simmers all day long
No wind. No air. Red-necked lizards crawl up walls
Far from her Sowemima family in Abeokuta, Zenobia
The twins grow into podgy little puddings
Kehinde will die young, like a butterfly
Gregorio, a face serene as a Benin bronze
White square room, plastered walls, curtains drawn
Cruel harmattans conquered the south, sweeping
I am a boy, I go like fire, why walk when you can run
Sea-black, wave-curved lips and decayed yellow teeth
CHAPTER 19
The gods born me on a fazenda in the hills of Brazil
Children forget what is too painful to remember
Ten blistered summers raised me on that remote fazenda
Like a sun-dried tobacco leaf, prematurely aged
When Africans came from the coast, I dreamt the ocean
We were emancipados, with papers to prove it
I took off for the jungle where I could lose myself
‘Candomblé has always been in my blood’
My son swam into this world, cooked in Joana’s juices
Was this the land of my great-grandmother home?
CHAPTER 20
Shakespeare, Keats, Socrates and the Romans’
Gourd-belled, guava-sweet, crisp as custard apple
Sometimes a child drowns in a storm drain
She stood there, in her best blue wrapper and head-tie
EPILOGUE
Corcovado, Christ the Redeemer holds flirty Rio
Salvador grips its Yoruba mother like a shawl
I cross the state line into Amazon country at 4 A.M.
A rainstorm hammers Manaus, rivering streets
GLOSSARY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
Copyright