Black Gold of the Sun (9 page)

My mum surveyed the disorder of wax crayons, odd shoes, overturned poufs and tattered
Fantastic Four
comics that Esi, Kodwo and I had wrought on the living room. We shrugged in unison and ran upstairs before she could make us tidy up.

‘What's she got to complain about?' said Kodwo in the bedroom he and I shared. ‘It's not as if we don't do enough round here.'

The Eshun brothers nodded in agreement. It was a moment of rare accord. Since the move we'd spent much of our time arguing.

Each of us had taken the coup as a personal tragedy. I used to get 50p-a-week pocket money in Queensbury, which I spent on the
Beano
, the
Dandy
and a quarter pound
of acid drops. I had a Scalextric set, a skateboard and a complete collection of Asterix books. The Volvo sat in front of the house and the fridge was stocked with Coke and Fanta. I accepted it all without reflection. I assumed that's how you were
supposed
to live in Britain.

Kingsbury offered a different lesson. Under its inverse laws, everything that had been was no more. Apart from pocket money and Fanta, there was also the absence of electrical appliances. In place of a washing machine my mum scrubbed our clothes in the bathtub on Saturday mornings. Kodwo, Esi and I had to take over after she grew tired. When it was my turn I knelt at the edge of the tub scrubbing T-shirts, underwear and socks until my shoulders ached. If no one was looking, I turned on the hot tap, tipped the washing powder into the water and lost myself in sculpting castles and Easter Island heads out of the foam.

In recent months I had acquired an array of new skills. I could darn my socks and stitch the holes in my school jumpers. In the absence of a vacuum cleaner I knew how to sweep against the nap of a carpet with a dustpan and brush in order to work loose the grey whorls of lint. Using only the cranky manual lawn mower I could conjure an even lawn out of the unkempt back garden. I had learned how to spray the sideboards and coffee table of the front room with a can of Pledge to leave it clean and, as I was assured on the label, pine fresh.

None of these talents was a source of pride. I would sooner have been at Benny Mitchell's house making his Stunt Cycle Evel Knievel pop wheelies. Or helping Jamie
Brown build Autobots and Decepticons from his extensive collection of Transformers figures.

I collected the wet clothes from the bath, heaved them to the back garden in a basket, and started to peg them on the washing line. When I was alone I wanted to wail like a baby until someone came rushing over to tell me everything would be all right. It was an urge of almost overwhelming force.

Sometimes while I was still a toddler, I'd sit up in my bed and bang the back of my head against the wall. This is a sign of distress that I've seen subsequently on TV documentaries about abandoned infants. At the time I found it comforting. After I finished hanging up the washing I went up to my room. I sat against the wall, and bumped my head against it over and over. My hair cushioned the harshness of impact. The sensation wasn't like pain. It was as if the wall were patting my head. Each time I hit it I felt as if everything might be all right.

I hadn't cried once since we had left Queensbury. Not even on the first night, when I lay awake listening to the swish of fir trees from the neighbour's garden until the sky began to lighten. I often felt the tears gather. But I was afraid if I started to cry they might not stop. Anger felt just as dangerous. If I shouted the fragility of our new existence might collapse, leaving us with nothing at all. In place of tantrums I contrived small rebellions: a messy living room or, on the days I was consigned to washing-up duty, I'd allow a wet plate to slip through my fingers and shatter on the floor tiles with a satisfying din.

I was hollow. I was devoured by hurt.

I could see the same sadness in the rest of my family. In the evenings we sat in the living room arguing about politics, what to watch on television and anything else apart from the coup. We had been struck dumb by a combination of shame and stoicism. It was as if we each blamed ourselves for our downfall.

For every one of us there were possessions – a signet ring or an apple tree – that counted for something special. Recalling them meant acknowledging they were gone for good. So we filled the living room with conversation to avoid saying what was really on our minds. Our dream of home had come to nothing.

In the classic Stan Lee and Jack ‘King' Kirby Marvel comics of the early 1960s, the Fantastic Four's headquarters on the thirty-fifth floor of New York's Baxter Building was home to a phantasmagoria of particle smashers and ionic triangulators, their steel flanks rendered in gleaming detail by Kirby's artwork. Because those were the comics I loved back then and because, even today, I think of Kodwo as Reed Richards, the FF's prodigiously smart leader, this is how I have come to remember the bedroom my brother and I shared in Kingsbury.

The room was filled with Marvel comics, science-fiction paperbacks and Kodwo's collection of progressive rock
records – all accumulated in vast quantities that seemed to us to provide a bulwark between the outside world and our private domain. Both of us failed to anticipate the impact of the coup, however, which smashed through our defences like a boulder from a giant catapult. In the silence that overtook my family in its aftermath, the bedroom came to feel more like a war zone than a refuge. The battle that took place was internal, each of us struggling with the dislocation of moving – first from Ghana to Britain, then Queensbury to Kingsbury. Unfortunately we lacked the ability to express how we felt.

Kodwo and I shared the room all through adolescence. During that time neither of us found the words to articulate our sorrow. We settled for rivalry instead. By the time he was sixteen and I was fourteen we couldn't stand the sight of each other.

Across the room's mauve carpet, wash tides of
X-Men
and
Fantastic Four
comics swept between our beds. Crossing their surface was perilous. You could slip on the glossy cover of the
Avengers
, issue 186 (‘Enter…Mordred the Mystic!') and find yourself pitched over into an alluvial deposit of
Spider-Mans
and
Ghost Riders
. Ankles had been twisted. Tempers risked a fraying on entry. Heedless to all potential calamity, the tide rose higher each month.

What was behind our devotion to Marvel? With hindsight I see now that the attraction of those comics didn't lie in cosmological fantasy so much as with the heroes' attempts to carve normal lives out of their extraordinary circumstances. The FF had it easy. Reed and Sue Richards,
the Invisible Woman, were married. Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, was a hot-rod-driving playboy. Only Ben Grimm, the monstrous, orange-skinned Thing, was an outsider, and even his pain was soothed by the love of Alicia Masters, the blind sculptor.

With adolescence I switched allegiance to the X-Men, who lived in secrecy bedevilled by paranoias, schizophrenias and bouts of homicidal rage. In my isolation I felt a tug of empathy when I saw them spurned by the humans they'd pledged to protect. As rendered in the pages of their comic, the burden of otherness became a noble sacrifice replete with sudden, unanticipated pleasures – the secret workings of the mind as overheard by the telepath Jean Grey; New York's skyline viewed from above by the winged mutant, the Angel; the imminence of rain scented five miles away on the nostrils of Storm, the African weather princess.

Should you have turned your attention away from the room's detritus on a spring day of 1982, you would have found me lying at the far end of the room flicking through Marvel Two-In-One issue 50 (‘The Thing battles The Thing…and only one shall survive!'). Outside the tips of the fir trees thrashed in the wind. Mann Parrish's ‘Hip Hop Be Bop Don't Stop' spiralled from the wooden speakers of the record player.

The room's other occupant was absent, last sighted at lunchtime loping across the school playground. At sixteen, Kodwo had legs so long they swallowed the concrete span of the playground beneath him in one, two, three giant
strides. His beakish face was pushed out on its narrow neck like a baby bird keening for its mother. On his shoulders hung a second-hand tweed greatcoat that caught the wind and billowed behind him like a cape. Around his neck was a Dr Who scarf of serpentine proportions. Acquired one Saturday afternoon at Camden Market, it had barely left his presence since. Even at home he sat playing it through his hands. When he thought I wasn't looking, he'd tie its end into a knot and snap it experimentally in my direction to test how easily it bounced off my head.

The door swung open. Kodwo strode in, nodding to the music that hissed out of the orange foam headphones of his Walkman. He spilled a carrier bag of second-hand albums on to his bed. More additions to his collection of Yes, Hawkwind and Emerson, Lake and Palmer records. Without acknowledging me he skated across the carpet of comics, flicked off Mann Parrish and dropped one of the new records on to the turntable. Blasts of Moog synthesizer filled the room. He leaned over the turntable, inhaling the sound with a dreamy expression. From across the room I decided to make my presence felt.

‘Kodwo, this is crap.'

‘No, it's not. It's brilliant.'

‘I was trying to do my homework when you came. You'll have to turn it down.'

‘Liar. You're reading comics.'

‘I was
about
to start doing my homework, and I can't do it with that playing.'

‘If you don't like it you can get out.'

‘This is my room as much as yours.'

‘I'm not turning it off.'

‘I'm going to tell Mum and Dad.'

‘Go ahead, crybaby.'

‘What you going to do? Stop me?'

‘I will if I have to.'

Those were the limits of our conversations at the time. Occasionally they ended in actual blows – weak, careless things thrown by me in frustration rather than true malice. For the most part, the result was that Kodwo turned up the music while I slunk downstairs to watch
The Dukes of Hazzard
. Despite the enmity between us, there was a hierarchy to the room and to our relationship. Where he led I followed.

In the spaces of our room unoccupied by comics, piles of science-fiction paperbacks teetered towards the ceiling. Cold-eyed dystopias heaped on top of baroque fantasies, their nicotine-fumed pages testament to their origins in musty second-hand bookstores. Above them, the walls were coated in posters. Star-dappled fish swimming across an interstellar void, as painted by the progressive rock artist Roger Dean. Cornelius and Zira, the chimpanzee scientists of
Planet of the Apes
, dressed in spacesuits. A photograph of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters torn from a book about the Beats showed the group flower-haired and extravagantly high, clustered round a converted school bus painted in psychedelic swirls. The destination sign on the front read ‘Further'.

All of this was by Kodwo's design. He had an instinctive
notion of the uncontained universe and the room was a memorial to its possibilities – to time travel and alien races and the impossible joy of watching a superman launch himself skyward.

Instead of progressive rock I was fascinated by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Whodini, and the other hip-hop acts whose records would arrive by irregular dispatch from cousin Marcus in New York. Dressed in a silver cape and wraparound shades on the cover of
Planet Rock
, Bambaataa looked as if he'd been beamed to the Bronx from beyond the solar system. A former gang leader turned interstellar funklord, he proved it was possible to reimagine the boundaries of your existence. In his music the Bronx became a futurescape populated by dazzling creatures with names such as Pow Wow, Whizz Kid and G.L.O.B.E. Here were names that offered the tantalizing possibility of other galaxies beyond the mundanity of life in Kingsbury.

From what I could tell, Kodwo suffered none of my unease about our circumstances. Scientific by temperament, artistic by inclination, he was disdainful of the ordinary world around him. The kids at school were morons. Pop music was crap compared to the glories of Yes. Fiction mundane unless alloyed to the fantastic. Already wreathed in self-possession, the coup led Kodwo to even loftier intemperance. He would fly into a rage midway through a discussion with me about the relative merits of Black Goliath versus Luke Cage, Power Man, or
fall into a prolonged silence even while his favourite ELP album was still turning on the stereo.

I learned not to interrupt his reveries in the morning before school or late at night when he'd listen to John Peel while reading
The Drowned World
or some other science-fiction dystopia. After a while it seemed simpler not to talk to him at all. I assumed at the time that my presence in the room was enough to sour his mood. Looking back now I suspect the reason had less to do with irritation than with sorrow. Who wants to learn as a child that reality is made of something less pliant than the stuff of your dreams? This is what Kodwo discovered with the coup, when he was thirteen. The greatest indication I had of that wasn't his rotten temper, but the way I'd catch him sometimes sighing to himself with a whole shudder of his body, the sighs freighted with weariness, forbearance and the weight of too much knowledge.

By sixteen Kodwo was so self-absorbed he barely seemed to notice me. Naturally I hated him for that. With Kodwo hidden behind a book at the other end of the room, I'd find myself thinking about the disappearance of our old life. Dwelling on what we'd lost would ruin a whole evening. I could watch television, scratch at my homework, read some comics – and all the time be picturing my dad in the midnight-blue Volvo, as he slid beneath the overpass at the Museum of London. By retreating into himself Kodwo had left me alone with my own sadness. In comparison to his Reed Richards I felt as forlorn as Ben Grimm.