his mother died two weeks ago but he just got the letter.’

I feel queasy. Do I have to feel sorry for him then?

‘All right, kiddiwinks, go inside and wash. Bedtime.

Go on!’ Juliana orders, but falters, her power expended.

Our eyes mock. I cross my arms. Our feet grow roots.

‘Hop it!’ she shouts, but we hear the plea in her voice.

‘Mummy’s orders. Scram!’ We saunter up to the house.

I AM A STRONG MAN but pain is a warrior too.

The pit I build for grief this time will be infinite.

Be strong, Taiwo, your life depends on it.

A letter arrived this morning from Nigeria.

The sea carried it here. She died May five,

went midday, her last breath, ‘Taiwo, Taiwo’,

like a mantra she kept calling him, her boy,

she could not get over losing him to England.

All gone now – Baba, Papa, Mama, Kehinde.

How will I survive in this refrigerator?

I must erase their memory.

They are waiting for him but we have no money.

He won’t talk to me, give voice to his thoughts,

but thank God he is crying and how, for the first

time, I see my husband broken down.

I must return prosperous or be shamed.

You cannot go to Europe and return a poor man.

When the roots of a tree die, its seeds are re-born.

My children are my seed. This is home now.

CHAPTER 12

1970 –

AN EMERALD Raleigh cycled through Lara’s childhood,

ever new, three gears, she rode her imagination

around the garden for hours, hop, push, skip on, skip on,

pretending to freewheel down country hills

or puff victorious in the Children’s Olympics.

Expeditions in books borrowed from the library

liberated her from the enclosure of Eglinton Road,

for when fog vaporised the dark, lamp-lit street,

she became the beautiful Maisie in The Orphan Girl,

a story she’d made up, just like Dickens: poor, she

was pale, parentless, persecuted, pitiful, plebeian,

puny, poxy, proud, pensive, polioed, placid,

powerless, pathetic, piss-wet and shivering outside

the mansions of ‘them rich oose Christmas trees

dripped diamonds and oose turkeys glittered gold’.

And when snow transformed Lara’s hilly vista, she

escaped first light, donned duffel coat, balaclava,

mittens, struggled to open the basement’s frozen

lock and enter the Antarctic as Captain Scott,

a brave lone figure conquering the desolate white.

She ceremoniously stuck a stick in the snow, for England,

then became self-conscious, searched the windows

for a sibling laughing. Nothing stirred, not even wind.

Cold, she dashed back to the gas fires of home.

LARA’S SKIN oozed honey in late summer’s oven,

lounging amid triffid grass where dandelions fainted.

Diseased apples were decimated by maggots, wasps

sucked the sugar of bleeding cherries. She languorously

gorged purple flesh, her lips stained Midnight Mauve.

Lara’s sepia cheeks rouged with the heat of summer,

sunk into a ripped deck chair, she bathed, tired