Stray Love (30 page)

I had a mother who one day disappeared out of my life. For an interlude of years. Her name was Philippa (“Pippa”) Nowak.

I was born between worlds, between eras. My birth father was a stranger to this country. A dreamer. In 1950, at the age of twenty-one, he came to England to make a life for himself that was impossible at home. London was full of young immigrant men looking for bedsits, men doing odd jobs, working for the National Health Service or public transport organizations.

The day Pippa met him, she had spent a lonely afternoon wandering the streets of London, puzzling over her marriage to Oliver, a man who seemed unable to enjoy the pleasures of ordinary life. She was drifting alone with her thoughts, walking and walking, when she realized she had walked too far. She hopped on the bus but when she looked in her bag, she discovered that she had forgotten her change purse.

The brown-skinned man who boarded behind her worked for British Rail. He was lugging his tools around in an old metal box. When the bus conductor told her to get off, he put his tools down with a thud and offered to pay her fare.

“Well, thank you,” she said. “I was just heading home. Can I offer you an orange? I have two right here in my bag.”

She asked his name and told him hers. Eating the oranges, they talked about the weather and how he missed eating fruit from home and how she sometimes missed the snow of her birthplace, Montreal. Ignoring the looks they were drawing from other passengers, she asked about the book he had in his jacket pocket, a copy of a Chekhov play. She hadn’t read that
one but she liked another one of his. He smiled and told her he remembered liking that one too, but it had been so long since he read it, the sister characters were a bit hazy.

“I want to write plays,” he said.

She nodded.

“What are my chances, do you think?” he asked. “Good,” she said.

She instantly liked him. The dimple that appeared on his cheek when he smiled. His curly dark brown hair and casual readerliness, the way he put the book into his metal box as if it were no more or less important than any of his tools.

When he jumped off at Waterloo Station, she jumped off after him. “May I walk with you to work?” she asked. Within a few minutes, she found herself walking in step with him, the two of them matching strides, slowing down to stretch the time.

They started to meet regularly, before he went to work in the afternoon. They discovered all the secret places around Waterloo Station. They strolled through neighbourhoods she had never been to before, looking in on other lives, past metal-gated mansions, half-demolished buildings, recently built prefabs and rundown tenements where new immigrant communities were forming.

At the end of each visit, they chose a time and place to meet again. On rainy days, they met at the Boots photo kiosk inside Waterloo Station.

“You are a remover of loneliness,” she told him.

And he said, “There are a lot of lonely people in this city. I should buy a lorry.”

As time passed, she began to feel guilty.
What was she doing? How could she deceive Oliver this way?
She resolved to tell Oliver the truth about the man she had met. But when she
told him, his reaction surprised her. He insisted she had been led astray, that she had lost her bearings because this man had tricked her. She was helpless, he said,
a victim.

In the days that followed, Oliver tried to anchor her. He came home with a new apron and a set of heavy pots. He wanted her to imagine herself a married woman standing happily in her own kitchen, patiently stirring soup. She left the pots in their boxes and folded away the apron and went out again.

When she finally confronted Oliver and told him that their marriage was over, pleading with him to accept the truth, he still wouldn’t listen.

That week she was too ill to meet the man as they had arranged, so she sent Stasha to the Boots kiosk to deliver a note with her phone number. Stasha left the message with the shopkeeper, who promised to pass it on.
Please call me as soon as possible,
the note said.

And he did call.

Only she wasn’t awake to answer the phone.

Having heard no word from her lover and believing he had not received the note Stasha left, and knowing now that she was two and a half months pregnant, Pippa went looking for him. She visited all the places they had been together. She sat on a bench in St. James’s Park where they used to sit. She returned to their favourite sandwich shop and their preferred bookshop. Finally, she went back to Waterloo Station and discovered from the man at the Boots kiosk that her lover had picked up the note the day it was left.

“Why hasn’t he called?” she brazenly asked Oliver that night.

“I don’t know.”

“Where has he gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know why?” She slid off her chair onto the floor. “You don’t know where?”

“I said no!”

Had he gone back home? He had mentioned that his mother was ill. Had he returned to her?

She went back to the park. She walked around with her coat open the way her lover used to do when he was hoping for warmer weather.

Pippa had no idea that there had been a call and a letter, nor that both had been intercepted.

Desperate to connect with her, a month after they had lost touch, her lover had tracked Oliver down at his office. He arrived wearing his British Rail work clothes and carrying his metal box. He believed in the idea of a man honouring another man and wanted permission to leave with Pippa.

But Oliver would have none of it. He told the man that if he really loved Pippa, he would leave her alone. He told him never to call again.

“You have no secure means to support a family. Your position in this country is precarious,” he said. “Don’t you understand? She doesn’t want to hear from you any more.”

As her pregnancy advanced, Pippa became despondent. She lay in bed for hours, looking blankly at the ceiling. Oliver forced her to take walks, reassuring her that she would recover after the baby was born. They would return to the way they were before.

He said he would help her raise her baby. He listed all the ways he would be a good father. He would be patient and tender.
He would always come to the rescue. He would not indulge in irresponsible bouts of drinking. He would be mature.

In his twisted fashion, Oliver was a deep romantic. When he realized he’d lost the love of his life, he did everything he could to get her back.

“Your mother loved you,” said Pippa, that first afternoon.

“Pippa,” I replied. “You are my mother.”

When I looked up, her face was shiny with sweat and soaked with tears. I had been staring at my knees, listening so carefully and feeling so shocked and disordered by what she was saying, I didn’t notice that she had been crying. I was aware suddenly of her ragged breathing. It was hard labour, pushing out the long-unspoken.

“There’s something more I need to know,” I said, trying to swallow. I felt my throat swelling, closing.

My father arrived in England from South America knowing no one. His name was Wilson Fredericks. He was twenty-three years old. I don’t know if he found the British betterment he hoped for. What he found was hard labour of another sort, and the racket of railway development on the miles of track between London and the South End. He travelled that line in a special train working with eight other men on a unit for earth-boring. The cutting blade was diesel powered and danced into the earth, making holes three feet wide and twelve feet deep. Slowly, the special train inched its way through the quiet countryside, planting steel masts secured with concrete. Surrounded by clouds of smoke and steam, he spent most of his days in the middle of nowhere, dreaming of being a writer.

Beyond his name, which is recorded on my birth certificate,
I know that he was born in New Amsterdam in what is now known as Guyana. From Pippa (never one for common details), I know that he swirled his tea without ever clinking his spoon against the side of his cup; had beautiful penmanship; always arrived early for an appointment; was slim and elegant, but felt insecure about his boyish good looks and once tried to whiten the hair at his temples with paint.

Pippa never got over him. Three years after I was born, following a brief stint in a psychiatric hospital, and then a stay in Paris to recuperate, she found him. He had married a woman from Trinidad and there was a baby on the way. He was living in Tooting in South London. He rode his bicycle everywhere.

“I still want you,” he said.

Still in love, she moved back to London to be close to him, but when he wouldn’t leave his wife, she returned to her tiny studio apartment in Montmartre, Paris.

He died in a bicycle accident when I was seven years old.

To this day, I picture him meandering around on his bicycle, drawing lines that traverse the lines created by others, lines more errant and true than anything I could create on paper.

“You look so much like him,” Pippa said, taking my hand.

She was almost finished telling me about my father when Oliver returned to sit with us. I knew he had been listening from behind his bedroom door.

“I loved you,” he said quietly, taking a seat beside Pippa. “I just wanted to take care of you. All I ever wanted was that everything work out for us.”

Pippa touched his face and said, “You can’t keep feeling guilty about it, Oliver. You need to live your life now and stop worrying about what happened.”

We all put on coats and went to Eel Brook Common, walking one behind the other, Pippa, then Oliver and then me. We needed space and quiet for our own thoughts. It was late afternoon and a golden orange light shone behind the leafless trees, black silhouettes that from a distance looked like paper cutouts. We walked over the submerged brook, through the still air. There were no bomb bits for Oliver to step over, no frightening doctors for Pippa to avoid. The paths were remarkably even. I watched our shadows join together on the ground.

What were we?

A family?

It struck me at that moment that what connected Oliver and Pippa was their brokenness. Her suffering coddling his. His loss pampering hers. Both aware of how instantly the pattern of everyday life can be shaken.

We stopped and watched a swirl of leaves and paper dancing busily in the street. Pippa reached her hand out for mine.

“Is it too late?” she asked.

I said nothing, just tilted my chin at the birds in the branches.

I was thinking:
It is better to be a bird and have no story.

What a shock it was for me to realize that after finding out the truth, I would want my old false notions back. That after having all the gaps in my story filled, I would crave some fog, some not-knowing. No matter how many times Oliver and Pippa tried to explain or insist that their lies and concealments had a noble purpose, were meant to protect me, their apologies fell all around me like doomed snowflakes, melting instantly.

In the months that followed, my behaviour plunged to new levels of wretchedness. I entered rooms like a tornado, bursting with the slightest provocation into a temper or tears. I challenged
their judgment at every opportunity. One particularly bad night, I smashed Oliver’s typewriter to the floor while he looked on fearfully. (“You taught me language,” said Caliban to Prospero, “and my profit on’t is I know how to curse.”) I ate with my hands. I let my hair grow wild and strutted down the street, daring clean-cut boys to say anything. I got into fights, came home with black eyes and bruises, skipped school, took up smoking and drinking, became a surly teenager.

Of course, days and weeks passed when I was all right to Pippa and Oliver. But for much of the next five years, I was a moody terror.

In the newspapers, I saw myself in the dark gleaming faces of guerilla soldiers moving through the jungle; children languishing in refugee camps; protestors marching in discontent. I dreamt of all my counter-lives. I read everything I could find about Vietnam and Guyana. I embraced a revolutionary blackness to offset the many times I wished I was white and ordinary. I felt my small and private rage swell into something large and world-shattering.

“Why are you so angry?” Pippa asked on my fifteenth birthday.

“WHY DO YOU THINK I’M SO ANGRY!”

I came to resent goodwill. Goodwill could not conquer the resentment I felt at being lied to and poorly loved. In shedding the gratitude of the orphan, I hurt people I did not intend to hurt, including Mrs. Bowne, who called me a “beast” when I threw a birthday gift from Pippa at the wall. It was a copy of
The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov, the play my real father had been reading when she first met him riding the bus.

My family—the various people who partially raised me—watched the decline in my behaviour and appearance with
disappointment. Despite my self-absorption, I noticed a new affection developing between Oliver and Pippa, a quiet unity. It angered me even more, to watch the two people who had betrayed and hurt me now aligning.

I stopped drawing. I decided that drawing was an anesthetic. I spared no one, not even myself.

In the middle of trying to make myself as unwantable and miserable as possible, at the point when I had nearly cemented my status as a dangerous outsider, I finally sought Kiyomi’s help.

It was October of 1968. I had confided in her over the years but I had been so trapped in my blinding rage that on the one occasion she tried to offer her opinion, I exploded, accusing her of disloyalty and of siding with Oliver and Pippa. From then on, she put up with my misdirected rants with wary patience, somehow surviving the strains of being friend to an emotional tinderbox.

Now, at age sixteen, I could see that I had become an angry young man, a man destined for loneliness, who walked through life feeling misread, who found it increasingly difficult to trust anyone or to speak about things that mattered to him. If I did not want to end up like Oliver, I realized, I needed to do something. It was that fear that finally brought me to Kiyomi.

“Is it catching?” she said when she saw me on her front step. She took several steps back from the door.