and not in the mirror, my demon, my love

which faded my brownness to a Bardot likeness.

Seasons of youth stirred in my cooking pot,

a spicy mix of marinated cultures, congealed into cold,

disparate lumps, untended, festered.

The grandfather in the hall measured hours, days, months,

a resonant metronome resounding up to my eyrie

where I dragged my brain, a stubborn rhino

into The Odyssey, revolutions – Industrial, Agricultural,

French, British royal lines learnt by rote.

Pigeons nested, jabbered, copulated, fluttered off.

Cocooned under sloping ceilings,

my temple of youth, posters of those to die for, escape

from the madding crowd of brothers, deliberately

polluting the Best Room with relentless, noisy farts,

show-time telly, gas fire’s hiss.

Escape past the lofty Front Room, unused, jumbled, home

to two broken pianos, a three-legged rocking horse,

moonshone bay windows, up three flights

to the roof where in the silence of the sky, I longed

for an image, a story, to speak me,

describe me, birth me whole.

Living in my skin, I was, but which one?

CHAPTER 13

1974 –

The National Front juggernaut braked in our street,

offloaded two teenage brothers at No 49, swastika

tattoos, shaved heads, crombie coats, Union Jack braces.

Our windows were smashed in soon after, nothing new.

My father spent my childhood chasing those bastards

who’d missiled our windows and skedaddled down the alley.

Daddy grew wings, swooped after them, claws grabbed

dingy collars, hauled to homes, they were deposited

in exchange for formal apologies, financial recompense.

He chased a boy who called for me once, a Trinidadian

in a trilby. He Jessie Owen’d him up Herbert Road

where the boy escaped on a passing 53 bus to Oxford Circus.

I panicked when the skinheads’ DMs approached,

crossed the road, and when I saw my father, hid

behind others, turned back, detoured, slid out of view.

It was bloody embarrassing having a black dad.

THOR HEYERDAHL’S book sailed me to Fatu Hiva,

Bora Bora, Raroia, Tahiti. Stony Easter Island

was my destination when I boarded the Woolwich Ferry

on Saturday afternoons for a free ride across turbulent

seas to Silvertown, coconut palms and coral reefs.

I walked around the industrial estates on an expedition

to discover stone adzes, idols, caves full of skulls.

I watched the Thames drift into the South Pacific void

as trade winds guided my balsa raft from the Americas

to the remote Marquesas when I caught the ferry home.

Books enlarged my world. I ate, shat and fucked them.

Words seduced me: xenophobia, melancholia, oscillation,

osmosis, metamorphosis, mulatto, etymology, fellatio.

I stored them in my piggy bank, sought reassurance

from my busy mother, usually marking homework,

for she was now a teacher at Eaglesfield Boy’s School

up the road. ‘The truth. Am I pretty or not?’

‘It’s in here that matters,’ Ellen tapped against her heart.

‘Rubbish,’ I exclaimed. ‘Am I pretty? Yea or Nay?’

‘Look, Lara, your looks come and go but your