The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q

P
ublished
by Bookouture

A
n imprint of StoryFire Ltd
. 23 Sussex Road, Ickenham, UB10 8PN, United Kingdom.

w
ww.bookouture.com

C
opyright © Sharon
Maas 2015

S
haron Maas
has asserted
her
right to be identified as the author of this work.

A
ll rights reserved
. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

T
his book is
a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Extract from ‘The Book of Mirdad’ by Mikhail Naimy, reproduced by kind permission of Watkins Publishing.

F
or the women
in my family.

M
y mother
,

Eileen Rosaline Cox

1918-2014, in loving memory.

A
nd my late grandmothers
,

W
innifred Albertha Westmaas
née  Richardson

a
nd

M
iriam Ruth Cox
née Wight

A
nd my daughter
,

S
askia Alisha Westmaas

I
’m Inky
; comes from ‘Inka’, a creative spelling of ‘Inca’. Mum’s the creative type; she named me in memory of her meeting Dad on a bus from Huancayo to Cusco back in the late sixties, a sixteen-year-old runaway passing through Brazil and Peru on her way to India. She ended up in England. If that seems a roundabout way of doing things, well, that’s Mum for you. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The whole story came out when, thirty years later, she and Gran decided to put an end to their cold war. Gran was coming to stay with us in London, which was why we were there that day at Gatwick.

‘Here they come!’ said Mum, and stiffened visibly in anticipation. She’d been nervous all morning, which with Mum meant she’d been even more silent than usual, responding to my meaningless chatter with the vague
ummms
and head-nods that told me she was hearing without listening. Now even the head-nods stopped and she just stared, fists clenched in anxiety as the glass doors slid open.

A new batch of passengers ambled into the arrivals hall; at first just one or two forerunners, then little clumps of them, pushing loaded trolleys or tugging bulging suitcases. Gran and Aunt Marion had changed planes in Barbados and these were mostly returning tourists, which was obvious at first glance. They radiated laid-back cheer, holiday glee; women with stringy blonde hair in disintegrating cornrows and men in shorts and flapping sandals, faces lobster-red or baked golden, smiling and waving at familiar faces in the waiting crowd. The aura of Caribbean sun and white sand still clung to them; you could almost smell the salty air wafting around them, tingling and cool. I swore I could smell coconuts. You could almost hear that calypso beat, the steel-band pulse, feel that lapping aquamarine sea. They almost danced in, to a reggae-rhythm, waving and cooing to friends and family in the waiting crowd.

Among the holidaymakers, a few naturally brown passengers strolled in. The locals: Bajans and other West Indians. I craned my neck, peering between the tourists for Gran. A hazelnut-brown little old lady in a wheelchair should be easy to spot. We waited.

A few last stragglers came through, and then – nothing. I looked at Mum.

‘Do you think they missed the plane?’

‘No – Marion would have rung me up. Maybe she had problems at Immigration? I hope her visa’s OK. I jumped through all the hoops about sponsoring her, but …’

We continued to wait. And then the doors slid open one last time and there they were.

My grandmother. Spitting nails. A crotchety old bag.

She wasn’t even looking out for us; for me, the granddaughter she’d never seen outside a photograph, and for Mum, the daughter she hadn’t seen for thirty years. This, I’d imagined, was supposed to be the momentous Grand Reunion, the Big Day when we all fell into each other’s arms weeping with joy. But it wasn’t to be; Gran was far too busy lambasting the neon-yellow-jacketed airport assistant pushing her wheelchair to look out for us. Her upper body was half-twisted backwards, all the better to look the poor man in the face, her own face distorted with fury. She jabbed the air with an admonishing finger and though we couldn’t hear a word, she was obviously bawling out her victim for some unknown transgression. So right from the inauspicious start, I understood that Mum’s guarded description of Gran was probably an understatement. Gran was a good deal more than ‘‘a bit difficult’’.

The assistant looked desperate, his relief on seeing us palpable. Just behind them, Aunt Marion came, pushing a baggage-laden trolley, her expression a mixture of embarrassment, anguish, and sheer exhaustion. Mum called out her name and waved wildly. Aunt Marion looked up and waved back, relief flooding her features too, and a moment later she and Mum flung their arms around each other. So at least
they
had a Grand Reunion.

The assistant dropped Gran’s wheelchair handles as if scalded, mumbled a few words about a missing suitcase to whomever was listening, and scurried off.

Gran and I looked each other up and down, silently; Gran still frowning as she surveyed me, her unfulfilled rancour still hanging in the air, looking for a place to land. It found me.

‘You look just like you mother at you age,’ she said. ‘Too thin.’

Her frown deepened.

She couldn’t pronounce her
th
’s. ‘Mudder’, she said for ‘mother’, and ‘tin’ for ‘thin’. I smiled to myself, in spite of the brusque greeting. It wasn’t often I got to hear a Guyanese accent. Mum had lost hers over the last thirty years, most of our friends and relatives from back home likewise. And yes, Mum still called Guyana
home
. I didn’t.

Mum herself had never returned, never seen her parents again. Her father died a few years ago, leaving the Georgetown family house, and Gran, to Aunt Marion. And now Marion, who had selflessly cared for the two old dears all these years, was also leaving home. Her own daughter, living in Canada, married, pregnant, and about to give birth, had invited her to come and help look after the baby. Who could blame Marion for jumping ship?

Aunt Marion’s last daughterly duty was to deliver Gran into Mum’s care, and here they were, the two of them. Poor Mum. Much as I looked forward to Gran coming, I’d been sceptical from the start. Mum couldn’t even look after herself; how would she cope with an invalid? But she’d been adamant. It was her
duty
. It was
her
turn now. Marion deserved a life. Mum herself needed to tie up a few loose ends with her mother, sort out some unresolved matters. Make peace. It was the right and honourable thing to do. It would be hard, she’d warned, but together we could do it.

I knew exactly what that
we
meant. I knew Mum. I knew she’d bitten off more than she could chew, and that once more she’d rely on
me
to pull her through. Trouble was, this noble task she’d taken on was open-ended.

I wondered casually how long Gran had to live before she, too, popped off; and then I caught her eye, just for a second. The lines of her frown relaxed, her eyes sparkled, the severity of her lips spread into a smile. Guilt flashed through me. It was as if she’d read my wicked thought. But then, still looking at me, she pointed to the wheels of her chair.

‘How you like me round legs?’ She cackled at her little joke, and clacked her dentures, the top row hanging loose for a moment. Without waiting for me to respond, she turned away, looked at Mum for the first time, and poked her in the ribs with a long bony finger.

‘The child too thin,’ she repeated, by way of greeting her long-lost daughter. She stretched out that skeletal finger again, this time to poke
me
. I took a hurried step back.

‘Bag o’ bones. You don’t feed she proper, or what? I know you can’t cook but when you got chirren to raise …’

Mum let go of Aunt Marion and spun around.

‘Rich, coming from you! When did you ever cook even
one
meal for us? Talk about pot calling the kettle black!’

Gran ignored the admonition. For my part, I was stunned. I had never, ever, in my whole life, heard Mum speak to anyone in that tone of voice: accusatory, resentful, and rude. It was a revelation. So Mum had an Achilles’ heel after all, and it was Gran.

‘I hope she ain’t a scatterbrain like you!’

‘Don’t
you
dare
tell me how to raise my daughter!’

They glared at each other. Something passed between them. Even I, an innocent observer, could tell that a dark cloud of history hovered over their heads. I willed it to dissolve.
Please, please, don’t make a scene. Not here, in public.
This was supposed to be the Big Moment. The Great Reconciliation. They ought to be clasping each other in teary boo-hooing, exclaiming, ‘Oh, it’s been so long!’ and ‘Oh, how I’ve missed you!’

The menacing moment passed, and history fell between them with a thud; an invisible and impenetrable wall. Mum’s voice was mild on the outside, cold as ice on the inside.

‘Mummy, Inky is eighteen, not a child any more. She feeds herself, believe it or not! Anyway, welcome to England!’

She bent down to formally kiss the old lady. Gran sucked her teeth, pushed her away, and turned back to me instead. She leaned forward and stretched out for me again, this time with both hands, scrawny fingers waggling to beckon me nearer.

‘… and she in’t got no manners or what? Come child, give you ol’ Granny a big hug.’ Claw-like fingers closed around my forearms as she pulled me down. What could I do? I let myself be pulled in, leaned down and reluctantly pressed my cheek to her face. It was dry and wrinkled like old leather, yet soft as silk to the touch; dark as mahogany, it smelt of face powder mixed with something biting, lemony, old-lady-ish. She let go of my arms, placed those scraggy hands around my face, and looked into my eyes again. This time for more than a glance. Our gazes locked; hers held mine. I could not look away. These were not the eyes of a life-weary curmudgeon with one foot in the grave. Fire was in those eyes, and life; and, to my astonishment, an amused twinkle, as if she were enjoying a private joke, as if she read me through and through. Condescension fled. But I had no time to think, for Aunt Marion was pulling me away from Gran.

She folded me into her soft and generous body, kissed me on both cheeks. She smelt of stale perfume and perspiration; it had been a long trip, lengthened by the task of looking after a cantankerous old mother. We exchanged words of greeting. I vaguely remembered her; we’d met before, when I was about ten. She’d come to visit us in Streatham, just after Dad died. She’d comforted us and cooked for us; delicious Guyanese meals I’d never in my life tasted before, and won me over.

Gran was quite right; Mum wasn’t much of a cook. She was deeply and passionately into health foods and had raised me strong and healthy on a variety of whole grains, organic vegetables and healing herbs. But I hungered for good traditional food, and Aunt Marion had shown me a whole new culinary world: ‘good Guyanese cooking’, she‘d called it. But the memory of Aunt Marion and her luscious menus had faded over time, and today she was practically a stranger.

But not for long. As we walked the long corridors to Short Term Parking, me pushing the luggage trolley, Aunt Marion and I swung into easy conversation; and by the time we reached the lift it was as if I’d known her forever. Behind us, Mum pushed Gran’s wheelchair. It was a brand new one, state-of-the art, bought for her by Uncle Norbert, sent to Guyana especially for the trip and her sojourn with us. Mum had told me all these little details over the last few weeks, trying to fill me in on years of family history, yet doing so as vaguely as possible. She’d tried to describe the complicated web of relationships between her, Gran, Aunt Marion, Uncle Norbert and Uncle Neville; who got on with whom, who wasn’t speaking to whom, and so on. I’d been intrigued, but I could tell that this was only half the story; that what was left unspoken was the
really
interesting part. Mum was an expert at leaving important things unspoken.

Now, she and Gran were engaged in a boisterous quarrel and it lasted all the way to the car. That is, Gran was doing all the quarrelling; I could hear her tirade from several yards behind. It seemed that one of Gran’s cases had indeed gone missing, the one with all her valuables, and that was what she was so cross about, and she blamed everyone, including Mum, for its loss. Mum merely murmured calm rejoinders. She seemed to have regained her equilibrium, and that was a good thing. She’d need it with Gran.

‘They’ll find it,’ I heard her repeat, over and over again. ‘They always do. They’ll deliver it home in a day or two. You’ll see.’

But Gran was beyond calming. It was as if the Crown Jewels were in that case. In a sense, as I was later to find out, they were.

W
e reached home an hour later
. The first thing we discovered was that there was no way Gran could use the wheelchair in the house. The doors were too narrow, the hallway too confined. The rooms too small, too cluttered. Later, we learnt the term ‘‘turning circle’’, and that there just wasn’t such a thing in our home. Gran would need a rollator to get around. We had to park the wheelchair outside the front door.

We’d rearranged the house so that Gran could live in the former dining room, on the ground floor next to the kitchen. But there was only one bathroom in the house, and that was upstairs, so she’d have to climb the stairs to get to the toilet. Mum thought there might be some help available from Social Services in getting either a stair-lift built in or an extra bathroom added downstairs, but in typical Mum fashion had not actually made any enquiries. There was the question of whether such help was also available for new immigrants; Mum didn’t think so, but she was still convinced that everything would work out for the best, somehow, if you just stayed positive and lived in the here-and-now, stress-free.

Mum was brilliant at philosophy and positive attitude, bad at paperwork, bureaucracy, accounting, and other pesky details of mundane daily life. Somehow, we always got by, on a wing and a prayer. As for the huge debt she’d inherited from Dad: if there was anyone in the world who could smile with a noose tightening around their neck, it was Mum.

Dad’s ghost still hung over us. It was his liver. In his youth, he’d had hepatitis while travelling in South America, and then the alcoholism of his final years. Liver cirrhosis in your early forties isn’t a pleasant way to go. He’d left the chaos of his financial mismanagement for Mum to sort out. She’d been struggling to do so ever since, and it seemed to have no end.

G
ran was bursting for a wee
, and naturally Mum had not yet bought the potty she’d said she would. She seemed to think these things would materialise out of thin air. So our first challenge presented itself: to get Gran up the stairs to the bathroom. She could shuffle slowly on level ground with a stick or an elbow to cling to, but stairs were a major problem. Mum and Marion each took one arm, and with Gran squashed between them, began the slow climb upwards.

I lugged the suitcases into Gran’s room. When she was halfway up Gran stopped, called my name. I stepped back into the hall. Gran was looking down. She hooked her eyes into mine again.