He waits for his father to finish reading his Daily Mirror, and empty the second pot of tea, before he suggests that rather than watch television they might go out for a walk.
‘Where?’ asks his father, who now looks again at his newspaper.
He stands and begins to collect up the cereal dishes and stack them in the sink.
‘Just to the park.’
‘You want me to go walking in the park with you?’
He decides to do the dishes later, and so he wipes his damp hands on the front of his jeans and looks across at his father, who is now staring back at him over the top of the newspaper.
‘Look Dad, I want to talk to you.’
His father lowers the Daily Mirror, but he doesn’t say anything.
‘I’m not suggesting anything drastic or bad, Dad. I’m just saying that we should talk, okay. Let’s just go for a walk and it’ll give us both a chance to stretch our legs.’
The park is empty, considering what a pleasant day it is, but he also notices that it seems far smaller and scruffier than when Brenda used to bring him. He understands that one’s memory plays tricks, and that the park is exactly the same size, and just as unkempt as it always has been, but he is still disappointed. The pair of them sit side by side on a wooden bench by the small boating pond and he decides to tell his father about the situation with Yvette. He explains that she works for him, and that they started to see each other, and once he broke it off she began to make things both difficult and ugly. He doesn’t stray far from the facts of the story, and he tries not to complicate things by mentioning either Clive Wilson or Lesley.
‘The woman sounds like a bitch.’ His father speaks without turning to look at him. ‘Are you blaming yourself for this situation? Is this why you’re telling me about it?’ He sucks his teeth and doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Man, women can be treacherous, but I suppose at this stage of your life I don’t have to tell you, right?’
He wants to ask his father about Brenda, and why he still can’t accept that she did what she thought was best for both of them. He also wants to ask his father about the women who seemed to drift in and out of his life during the few years he spent in his father’s house before university. And why, for that matter, does he think it’s all right to call Yvette a ‘bitch’? She isn’t his favourite person, but he wouldn’t call her that name. Across the other side of the pond, a boy is trying to fly a kite, while his somewhat desperate mother attempts to help by pointing in the direction that she thinks the wind is blowing. However, the wind is gusting so she keeps changing her mind, and the boy seems to be getting the string in a tangle. He sneaks an oblique glance and notices that his father is also watching intently, as though this sideshow relieves both of them of the responsibility of continuing their awkward exchange. And then his father slowly turns to face him, and he can see that his eyes are red and damp.
‘Boy, you’re not feeling the cold? You’re like a true Englishman able to sit out here without a hat or scarf and acting like the weather ain’t bothering you at all.’
‘We can go if you like. I just thought it would be nice to have a walk.’
‘Have you finish whatever it is you want to say to me?’
‘I want to talk to you about how you’re living, Dad. I just don’t think that it can go on for much longer. I hate to say it, but I don’t want to get some phone call telling me that they’ve found you passed out in front of the television set, okay?’
‘So this is what you want to talk to me about? I thought you come up here to see me so you can tell me about the girl at work.’
‘To tell you the truth, Dad, I’m not even sure why I came up here to see you. Maybe I did want to tell you about Yvette. I haven’t really had a chance to talk to anybody about it.’
‘And you think that I might be able to give you some advice, is that it?’
‘No, that’s not it. I just needed to get out of London, and I wanted to see you too. But now that I’m here, and I’ve seen how you’re living, I’m worried. Do you want me to pretend that I’m not?’
‘You ever have people who tell you that maybe you should mind your own business? Well?’
He looks at his father, whose shrinking frame seems small and inadequate beneath his big, heavy, overcoat.
‘Look, I cold. If you want to keep talking then maybe we can walk and talk. I tell a few of the boys that I will see them down at the centre.’ His father gets to his feet. ‘You want to come with me?’
The Nelson Mandela Community Centre is essentially an old people’s home, although nobody calls it this. Above the dayroom, with its television, its CD player, and its neatly stacked puzzle books, dominoes, packs of cards and unused board games, are twenty-four one-bedroom flatlets from which the residents occasionally appear if they feel like being sociable. The management is sensitive to outsiders, but they don’t mind one or two people coming in during the period between lunchtime and six o’clock in the evening, which is when dinner is served. His father is clearly a regular visitor, for he appears to be on a first-name basis with the staff and residents alike. ‘You all remember my son, Keith.’ His father sits with his three friends at a Formica-topped table and waits to be dealt into a dominoes game with Ronnie, Baron and Boysey. The three men barely look up from their dominoes as they nod and mutter greetings in his direction. His father claims to have known these men since arriving in England nearly fifty years ago, and it amuses him to see them now, at this juncture of their lives, still finding the energy to revel with what he imagines to be the spirit of their Caribbean youth.
‘He say he come back home to keep an eye on me. I look like a man who need somebody to keep an eye on me?’
The men all laugh, and his father winks playfully at his son. ‘Keith don’t know how to relax and just enjoy himself. Which don’t make no sense now that he get rid of the wife.’
Baron looks up at him and arches his eyebrows. Of all the men, he is closest to ‘Uncle Baron’ who, when he was growing up, seemed to be the most sensible of his father’s drinking pals. More importantly, he was the only one who ever remembered his birthday or bought him a present.
‘Keith, you get rid of the nice white lady?’
He shrugs his shoulders. ‘She’s still a nice lady, but you know how it goes. Sometimes you’re just not seeing eye to eye. It’s difficult with women, particularly if they’re the mother of your child.’
Baron laughs. ‘Man, I have a few of those knocking about the place.’
‘Mothers or children?’
‘Both, man, both. They come together like a package deal. Trouble always like company.’