Someone knocks on the door, knocks so hard it booms. I twitch
(it is nothing to do with the door)
and that makes Aaron twitch. He checks the sitting-room clock and tells me, ‘It’s Amy Eleni’s boys.’ He rubs my arm, Don’t worry. He shouldn’t do that; my hysteric is the boring girl in the corner that you ignore — if you talk to her, she won’t shut up.
The boys crowd in, these are people’s sons. Their heads are close-shaven to expose peachy nicks on their scalps. They’re wearing Timberland boots and heavy-cut jeans that crash down to their toecaps. A uniform always prepares me for a crowd, so that at first I think there must be more than three of them. They look around, elbow each other, refuse my offer of tea, and crow, ‘This is boom digs! Sonic boooooom, know what I mean?’
Aaron introduces them as Kobe, Kweku and Kevin, his voice fitting smoothly around the Ewe names. Kevin shuffles his feet and wearily insists, as if continuing an argument that started before his birth, that it’s not his fault his parents gave him an English first name:
‘The teachers jump on it as soon as they see it in the register; they ignore “Akwasi”,’ he says. ‘I think they’re a bit relieved not to have to say it, really.’
Aaron manages to locate his coat, picks up his camcorder carry case and says a few words to them in confident Ewe. They look at him with flattered, embarrassed smiles and reply with accents less certain than his. Aaron’s accent, normally a quirk unique to him, now makes a skewed kind of sense. Somehow that hurts me; better for the accent to have stayed a quirk.
When Mass is ended and we have genuflected towards God, I tell Mami I’m going back to Habana. She is confused. She waves and smiles at other friends who are trickling out of the church, presses the Father’s hand, indicates that she can’t stop to talk today. She says, ‘Oh, but Maja, you can’t go.’
I touch Mami’s face, I ask, ‘Why not?’
‘Better talk to your Papi.’
Mami and I walk home holding each other’s hands tightly. Chabella is wearing big furry gloves, and I am not. Chabella insists that my hands are cold. I say no, but she keeps lifting my hands to her mouth to blow warmth onto my cracked palms.
Chabella says of Tomás, ‘Somehow he is just too tender. I know some will think that isn’t how a black boy should be. I am afraid that the other boys will punish him for it, his tenderness.’
I can’t find it in me to tell her not to worry. She should worry.
When Tomás was nine or so, I sometimes babysat him and his friend, Jon. At that time they were intense about conker wars. They waged their wars under the kitchen table, both lying flat on their stomachs, heads bowed towards each other as they struck each other’s forces in skirmishes and temporary sorties from behind fortresses, strategising with shrivelled conker soldiers. Tomás’s strategy was probably immaculate; all his work is, his diagrams and graphs and essays. But Jon won every game because it seemed that Tomás’s overall strategy was to let him win. Jon, his hair falling into his eyes, got frustrated with winning and swung with more force, harder and harder, his conker smashing against Tomás’s knuckles. But Tomás just winced and let him win and win.
These days after school Tomás comes home with a group of raggedly uniform boys who live around the way. Tomás walks amongst them with his hands in his pockets, smiling and shaking his head as they whoop and hang off lamp posts. He is careful talking to the other boys; he is kindly. It’s as if he’s trying his best not to let the others know that they are not real, that he is talking to himself.
Some schools think being quiet is a sign of genius-level intelligence. Last year Tomás’s school put him on the Gifted and Talented programme to help him get to a top university. His friends were annoyed; they were losing him to books and extra homework, and he was getting to be a good striker. But Tomás found that in his Gifted and Talented classes his hearing became so faulty that he couldn’t understand anything except for the end-of-lesson bell. He couldn’t hear, and he panicked and froze. Chabella worried that he would become completely deaf. I worried that he would become completely deaf. His teachers said it was frightening, uncanny, unheimlich; that they could shout out his name within five paces of him and, unless he was looking directly at them, he didn’t turn a hair, or show any understanding.
Chabella withdrew him from those classes after a meeting with his Gifted and Talented English Literature teacher, even though Papi pointed out that it was most curious that Tomás could hear well enough to watch Pinky and the Brain on TV before dinner. Tomás’s weekends took their old shape once again; he went back to playing striker on the local football team, a position that Jon had kept warm for him. He also resumed his post as Papi’s book assistant, lying on his back in Papi’s study shuffling through notes with a fluorescent marker, typing out references when Papi’s fingers felt too stiff.
But even if he is Papi’s boy, there are things that Tomás will only ask of Mami. It’s the same with me. Sometimes there are things that you need to say, and you know that the right person to say them to is the person whose logic works two ways; the person who can sit through Mass without staring sardonically at the boy in the dress who waves incense in their face.
Chabella was making guava pasteles, hands working a mass of pastry and sweetener when Tomás came back from football huffing and sweating, the collar of his tracksuit top turned up around his neck in a funnel. He looked urgent, the way he used to when he was smaller and would come to Mami during an argument with another boy, tug at her arm and say, ‘Tell him.’
He sidled up to the counter and tore off a hunk of dough. Chabella clucked, ‘Tomás, why? You’ll only throw it up.’
I laughed, ‘What’s the point of feeding him at all, then?’ and Tomás ignored me and said to her through a sticky mouthful, ‘Chabella, it’s getting stupid. We’re supposed to learn our names really early, no? Like, a few months after being born we’re supposed to respond to our names or whatever.’
I was leaning on the counter, reading and breathing in Chabella’s sweetened steam. I looked up and said, ‘Are you trying to tell us you’re retarded?’
Chabella flung a handful of sweetener at me, and she missed. ‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t say these things, they’ll come true!’
Tomás plucked more dough out from under Chabella’s hands.
‘Listen, Chabella, really it’s getting. . I don’t know. When someone nearby calls a name, I have this thing where I look round at them as if they’re calling me, it doesn’t matter what name they call out. Just now on the road this boy shouted out “Oi, Jack!” and I turned round to him and looked him in the face and he said in some properly nasty voice, “Oh, are you Jack?” And I said, “No, sorry —”’
I called out to Tomás, ‘You should have put your hand in your pocket and said, “Who wants to know?” Or you should have said “Depends who’s asking. .” and then put your hand in your pocket. Then you should have narrowed your eyes and made a clicking sound with your tongue.’
Tomás rolled his eyes, ‘Yeah, standardly I should have said that. And then he would have pissed himself laughing. This boy was tonk, trust me. Anyway I said, “No my name isn’t Jack,” and this boy was all like, “Well don’t watch that, then,” and I was thinking, but this happens all the time, it happens all the time — I just keep looking round when someone calls, as if I haven’t learnt my name or something. One of these days I’m going to end up smeared into a wall.’