He stopped at the door to wait for us with the key in his hand, glancing up at the window. Busola and me looked at each other, and got up on our stilts to show our mum and dad how good we were. We walked towards them along the pavement, taking tall strides because we’d grown up and they hadn’t been there to see it.

Tribal Scars

‘Your dad’s got scars on his face,’ Wilf said, backing away from me at the door. I didn’t know what he was talking about. We’d been playing out and I wanted to go in for a drink.

‘What?’

‘Your dad’s got scars,’ he said, ‘all over his raas claat face!’

I looked at him funny because his mum and dad were West Indian and he dropped his voice deep sometimes to speak like them, but I never heard them say that.

‘What scars?’

Both his mum and dad were nice to me, especially Mrs Aarons, who looked down at me seriously with a long-drawn-out face that had those Deputy Dawg marks going down from her nose to the corners of her mouth. When she smiled, the lines lifted up under her cheeks and her eyes sparkled with fun. She said she liked me because I was a clever boy and I should please teach Wilf how to be brighter than he is and better behaved, because even though he was good at sport you can’t spend all your life running.

His dad was a carpenter for the council and always shook my hand using both of his which were huge and soft, with short stubby fingers. He looked at you and sized you up and made a note in his mind before moving back quietly behind his wife, from where he fiddled with bits of wood to be doing up their house with.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘leave the boys, they have things to do.’

We got water from the tap in the back kitchen where they always sat, and you could see as you passed the open door of their front room there were lots of frilly things in pink and blue with glass bowls and plastic yellow flowers.

‘What’s in that room?’ I asked, and his mum looked at me like it was a secret I shouldn’t be asking.

‘Curious, eh?’ she said. ‘And you would like to find out?’

I still had the cup in my hand, it was empty and I didn’t know where to put it, so I nodded.

‘Still fixing up,’ his dad said, ‘but you could go in.’

‘Always fixing, never finish,’ she said, and took the cup from me with a wink. ‘Wilf could a learn some a dat.’ She was shaking her head at me with her face long, ‘Always finish, never fix – dash and done.’