The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (5 page)

‘With my help,’ I reminded him.

‘Yes. But you always knew that, didn’t you?’

‘I just wish I wasn’t such a beast. To Gran. I wish I could get along with her, stand her presence, at least. I always wanted a Gran.’

‘Give yourself time. It’ll come.’

‘The old sourpuss.’

He said nothing. I played around with my noodles, winding them around my fork. I’d already picked out all the shrimps, saving the best for last. I looked up and said:

‘I just feel so mean and nasty.’

‘You’re not mean and nasty. You’re human. And at least you’ve got a working conscience, if you feel nasty when you
are
nasty!’

I made a face at him, and he made one back at me.

‘Time,’ he repeated. He reached out and squeezed my hand. ‘And patience.’

‘She’s not exactly paving the way for me.’

‘Maybe
you
should pave the way for
her
. I’ll help you, if you like.’

‘Can you come round sometime this week? Some evening?’

‘’Fraid it’ll have to be Sunday. I’ve got night shifts all week, and Saturday I’m in Brighton with my parents.’

Sal had taken on a summer job, something in a hospital. My job was waitressing in Croydon. That trip I’d planned to the Far East: I couldn’t afford it. I mean it was my money, to do what I wanted, but I couldn’t leave Gran with Mum. It wasn’t just the money. It was everything. We couldn’t afford
any
extras under normal circumstances, and now we had Gran. From the financial standpoint, I had to wonder what Mum was thinking. But I knew. She thought we’d struggle through it. Somehow.
By the seat of her pants,
she always said. It was her watchword.

S
al had aroused my curiosity
. When I went home I mentioned the stamp to Mum.

‘Gran says it’s worth millions,’ I said. ‘Could it be true?’

‘I remember that stamp,’ Mum said. ‘It was Daddy’s most precious possession. There’s one just like it, in America I think, that’s apparently the rarest stamp in the world, so maybe she’s right.’

‘But if it is, Mum, we could sell it, and then …’

‘For millions I suppose? It’s obscene, anyone paying that much for a stamp – for anything, in fact. Think of all the starving children you could feed with those millions! Obscene!’

‘But, Mum…’

‘Inky, just stop it; right now! It’s not your stamp, it’s not mine. It’s just a scrap of paper. Worth nothing except the value some people attach to it. It’s all in the mind. So shut up about it, OK?’

And she wouldn’t speak one word more about it.

T
hat first week
passed quicker than I’d believed possible, but only due to Marion’s presence. Marion did all the cooking and all the cleaning, reducing the ever-growing pile of un-ironed laundry in Mum’s room to neat little stacks of folded clothes. The kitchen glowed; all the cupboards tidied and the counters clear and gleaming. The house had never shone so brightly; life had never been so easy.

And of course, Marion was there as a buffer between us and Gran. She was there in the morning when we left the house, getting Gran up and bathed and dressed. She fed Gran during the day, kept Gran and her bickering at bay when we both came home from work, exhausted and drained of energy, and cooked up a storm each evening, for Gran’s benefit and my delectation. That was the best part of having Marion around: the food. Mum had practically starved me all my life.

I had hoped to find out more about the mystery between Mum and Gran, but the more the week careened towards its inevitable end, the more my hope that I’d be taken into their confidence disappeared. The nearest I got to finding out was the day I walked into the kitchen to hear Marion say to Gran, in a tone of annoyed urgency:

‘Tell her, Mummy! You have to tell her! Before I leave! She has to know; Uncle Matt …’

‘Hi!’ I said, breezily. ‘Tell who what?’

‘Oh, nothing, Inky. Nothing important.’

‘Look, if it’s about Mum, you might as well tell me,’ I offered. ‘I can act as a go-between. Tell me and I’ll tell her.’

At that Gran, who had been untypically silent for the last minute, let out a cascade of cackles.

‘Inky, you ears too long! Just like me own.’ And at that she grabbed her rollator and trundled out of the room, as dignified as ever. Marion let out a long deep sign and shrugged.

‘Why can’t you tell me?’ I asked. ‘I mean it. Why can’t you trust me?’

‘It’s not a matter of
trusting
you, Inky!’ said Marion. ‘It’s just – it’s just too much.’

And with that she too walked out. The truth, it seemed, was too bitter for my juvenile ears.

O
n Tuesday
, Mum and Gran had a huge flare-up. I suppose it had been simmering beneath the surface for days, and that evening, at supper, it just boiled over. Gran had brought up the subject of the stamp once again. She had been muttering about it ever since she’d shown it to me, bringing it into conversations, hinting at how rare it was, and how valuable, and what a family heirloom. Now she was at it again, and I couldn’t help but butt in.

‘So how much is that stamp really worth, Gran?’ I asked, as casually as possible. To be quite honest, I was a bit ashamed of myself. Ever since my conversation with Sal my thoughts had drifted back again and again to the stamp. What if it was really valuable? I accepted that Gran wouldn’t sell it; but once she died? No. I shouldn’t be having such thoughts. But if – and when – she died, after all, she
would
die one day, maybe soon, and then – had she made a will? I mean, I was her favourite grandchild, wasn’t I? No. Stop it, Inky! I shouldn’t be thinking that! That was a really, really nasty thought! What a horrible person I was! I was the kind of person I hated: people who would be ingratiating to old people just to get at their inheritance. But she certainly wouldn’t leave it to Mum – what if …? But no.

How can one switch off greedy thoughts? Impossible. They just kept coming.

Anyway, the question just popped out of my lips and Gran, of course, was quick to reply.

‘A fortune!’ she said. ‘A small fortune!’ She turned to Mum.

‘Enough to pay off your mortgage, Rika!’

How did Gran know about Mum’s mortgage? Maybe Mum had told Marion and Marion had told Gran. I knew that Mum didn’t discuss her debts and her money problems with anyone, and wouldn’t have told Gran herself. She was much too proud.

But if Gran had hoped to get Mum excited about the stamp, fat chance!

‘I can’t believe,’ Mum said, ‘I just can’t
believe
that an intelligent person could get so covetous about a little scrap of paper, they’d chuck millions at someone else to acquire it. I just don’t know what to say.’ She went on to sneer about these people who paid millions for such scraps when they could be saving humanity with the same money. At millionaires who had nothing better to do than throw money at scraps of paper. At people who loved scraps of paper.

Gran listened to Mum’s rant with a neutral expression, shovelling food into her mouth and chewing slowly, her eyes on Mum, letting her speak her heart.

I myself was astonished; it was unusual for Mum to be so judgmental; unusual, in fact, for her to criticize anyone for anything. ‘People are the way they are,’ she’d say, when I brought up some human foible or the other. ‘Everyone is different. They have their desires and they make their choices, and some choices are more stupid than others. Most people find out when they make stupid choices. They find out the hard way.’

And now, here she was, practically declaring stamp-enthusiasts to be dumbest people on earth.

‘So, your father was stupid?’ Gran asked, casually.

‘My father! He was no father!’

‘What! What you saying! You had the best father in the world!’

‘I’m saying, he was no father! All that man cared about was those bloody stamps. That one stamp in particular.’ She looked at me.

‘The man who called himself my father would spend hours and hours holed away in his study peering at stamps under a magnifying glass. It just wasn’t normal!’

She turned back to Gran. ‘He loved his stamps first, and then you, and then a long space, and then, maybe, his children!’

That’s when Gran exploded. ‘How dare you! What do you know? He loved us all more than anything in this world! He adored us! He adored you! You don’t know him at all! You don’t know anyone at all! How you could talk about love! You ran away from home and didn’t give a damn what anyone thought! About your own family!’

‘You weren’t anything of a mother either!’ Mum cried back. ‘It was Granny who mothered me! She was both mother and father for me!’

‘Yes, and even she you didn’t care about! She dead and gone and you never even came to see her again!’

And so it went on, accusation and return accusation. And it was all about love. That’s the one thing I took from all the talk. Behind it all, behind all the words, on both sides, was a huge gaping hole; a hole where love should have been, but wasn’t. It was as if they were both, Mum and Gran, caught in a time-warp, a place they’d been trapped in for thirty years, from which there was no escape. Marion and I just sat there in silence. Finally, Gran said:

‘Rika, you don’t know what you saying. You just don’t know.’ Mum did not reply to that, and so Gran had the last word. So in the end, the war of words ended in silence. Nothing resolved, and the wall between mother and daughter as sturdy as ever. The truth was: they were on either side of that wall, and not one of them was capable of passing to the other side.

O
n Wednesday morning
, though, Marion made me face a different bitter truth.

‘Inky,’ she said sternly, ‘you know I’m leaving Sunday morning.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, who’s going to cook for Mummy when I’m gone?’

My voice, when it finally came, was small. A squeak.

‘Mum?’

‘Ha!’ Her chuckle oozed contempt. ‘What you think your mother gon’ cook? Alfalfa sprouts and wheat-germ burgers? No, darling, sorry. It’s you.’

I suppose I should have seen what was coming, should have seen it from the start, but sometimes I‘m as much of an ostrich as Mum.

Mum had her own definition of ‘delicious’. She was a vegetarian, had been for decades. She didn’t, couldn’t,
wouldn’t
cook meat. If I wanted meat, I had to cook it myself. If Gran wanted meat – and she certainly did: meat cooked in special, mysterious, Guyanese-from-scratch ways – it would be up to me to cook it. Mum had always known this, but never spoken it out loud. She’d left it to Marion to explain, and to teach me. And now the inevitable was imminent: a crash course in Guyanese cuisine.

I was already a tolerable cook, I’d had to be, if I wanted to eat certain things, but this was a whole new world. Every morning Marion went shopping for the exotic ingredients Gran insisted on having, and since she couldn’t get it all in Streatham, she went all the way to Brixton Market, a bus trip away, bringing back a variety of fruit, vegetables and other ingredients I’d never seen in my life, or ever even heard of. Eddoes, yams, calalloo, plantains, cassareep: the names alone made my head spin.

But I was game; I actually liked cooking, and Marion was not only a good cook, she made it fun, interjecting her instructions with funny anecdotes from back home. And the best part, of course, was the eating of it all. Marion looked on with pleasure as I devoured her creations.

‘Everything but rope, soap and iron,’ she would say, as I tried yet another of her dishes. ‘You’re a true Guyanese!’

As we cooked she talked, and in those few days I learned more about the place Mum called ‘home’
from Marion than I had from Mum in all of my eighteen years. Marion brought ‘home’ to life – made it a colourful, vibrant place filled with quirky and loveable people.

By Saturday I had learned three staple recipes with which, by a system of rotation, I could keep Gran alive and reasonably happy. Marion recommended I teach myself four more dishes, and wrote the recipes down for me. She gave me a list of dishes I could look up on the Internet, and try out myself. And on Saturday she dragged me with her to Brixton Market. Strangely, I had never been there before; Brixton was slightly outside my home territory, and I’m not really a market person. But why not? It would be an adventure.

M
arion pushed
her way through the crowded lane as if she’d done this every day of her life. On her previous forays she’d already found her favourite greengrocer, and that’s where she headed, weaving through the shoppers with me following meekly in her wake. The whole place throbbed with life; it was as if, just one corner away from the last Victoria Line station, we’d walked into a Caribbean bazaar, the very air pulsing with tropical colour and energy. Heaped up on the roadside stalls were fruits and vegetables I’d never laid my eyes on, much less eaten. There were butcher shops and fishmongers, long counters reaching deep back from the street and laden with slabs of fresh meat, whole fish, prawns and other sea creatures nestled in ice. Colours and scents and sounds a world away from London; Marion’s world, and Gran’s, and maybe Mum’s, but never mine.

Marion stopped at her favourite shop, greeted the shopkeeper with a hearty ‘Mornin’ Errol, how yuh doin’ today?’ and began stuffing handfuls of okra into a brown paper bag. Now okra, I
had
eaten before, so when Marion turned to me to tell me what it was I was able to sound off expertly.

‘Actually, I don’t like it very much. It’s so slimy!’ I said.

‘Bah! If it was slimy they di’n’t cook it properly. Okra only get slimy if you boil it in water. Wait till you try me fry-up okra tonight!’

As she spoke, the woman on my other side, an Indian woman with a plantain in her hand, leaned forward and peered across to get a better look at Marion. Her eyes lit up.

‘Eh-eh! Marion, is you? I din’ know you was over here!’

Marion looked back and let out a shriek of recognition. ‘Jocelyn Ramsingh! Oh Lord, how you doin’ gal!’

I stepped back to let them fall into each other’s arms, okras and plantains forgotten. Marion turned to me. ‘Jocelyn, this is my niece Inky; my sister’s daughter. You remember Rika, nah?’

‘Rika? Who could forget Rika Quint? Of course! I heard she was in London, her cousin Pamela told me – Pamela and me got children in de same class – but she keep to sheself, like she too good for the likes of we.’

Marion laughed. ‘No, is not true, Rika just don’t like to mix. She lives in she own world. Inky, this is me old friend Jocelyn, from Guyana.’

Well, I had already gathered that, and as I let myself be scrutinised by Jocelyn I thought yet again that the whole country of Guyana must be like one huge jolly village, where everybody knew everybody else or at least everybody’s cousin and everybody’s cousin’s business, and everybody fully expected that, when everybody else moved to London or New York or wherever, they would keep that village going and feed it with new recruits; people like me, who belonged and yet didn’t. We were born here to these villagers, yet were so far away mentally as to be strangers, except that they didn’t realise it. We were Londoners; we’d left the village for the metropolis and our lives were so much larger, so much richer.

So when Jocelyn reached out to draw me into a bear-hug I stiffened, and when she patted my cheeks afterwards – as if I were
her
niece too, not just Marion’s – I drew away with as much discretion as I could. I didn’t want to be rude, but
really,
I couldn’t let her think of me as a villager.

‘Pretty girl!’ said Jocelyn, looking me up and down, and immediately corrected that to, ‘Beautiful! Her daddy in’t no Guyanese, right? I hear Rika married an American. A white man?’

I wanted to butt in right there and declare how rude and irrelevant it was to discuss another person’s race, especially in their presence, but they were already off, discussing Jocelyn’s own husband’s race and how many children she had and how old they were and who they were married to and what race and how many grandchildren she had already, and how dark this one’s skin and that one’s. I touched Marion’s arm.

‘Why don’t you give me the shopping list and I’ll get the other stuff? The two of you can go and have a coffee, if you like!’ I would have added, ‘Or else we’ll be here all day’, but I was too well brought up for that.

Marion was delighted at the suggestion, so off I went with the list and the purse. I finished buying the okras, moved to the fruit section and stocked up on mangoes and oranges. I couldn’t believe how cheap it all was, compared to the supermarket, but remembered how Marion had complained, the first day, how expensive everything was.