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Authors: Kyo Maclear

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BOOK: Stray Love
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My heart was still beating madly when I finished reading the last letter. I ran my hand over the thin paper. Then I folded it up and slipped it, along with the others, into an old pillowcase, and returned it to its hiding place under my mattress.

One night shortly after, Oliver came into my room and explained that he had started looking for a school for me to
attend. He and Mrs. Bowne no longer felt equipped to oversee my education in the way they had before.

“Anyway, it’s probably time for you to meet people your own age.”

I panicked. Did he know about the letters? Was this some form of punishment? I pleaded with him to reconsider, silently vowing never to snoop again.

“I promise I’ll be good.”

“You are good.”

“I’ll be even better.”

He patted me on the leg. “Consider it a new opportunity.”

A week later, Oliver dragged me off to Draycott Grammar School near the posh neighbourhood of Chelsea. When we arrived, we discovered a dirt playing field and a cluster of children passing through a gate labelled Boys towards a multi-storey brick building. It was a fracas of duffle coats, grey shorts, falling socks, knobby elbows and chapped knees. We watched from the street. Before long the centre of the field was full of faces—pallid faces, doughy faces, rosy-cheeked faces. There was laughing and stomping about and attempts by the stronger boys to humiliate the weaker ones.

Oliver, toughened street crime reporter, looked on in horror, as if he were witnessing the end of civilization. He had just grabbed my coat-sleeve to leave when a skinny boy standing at the edge of the field noticed us watching and walked over.

“May I help you, sir?” he asked, stopping to brush his Oxfords with a handkerchief.

“Well, I, we,” Oliver stammered. “Would you kindly lead us to the headmaster’s office?”

“I’d be happy to, sir.”

The boy led us into the school and down a corridor, past the trophy display, past team photos and artwork tacked to a corrugated board. When we reached the office, Oliver told me to sit on a bench in the hallway and wait for him while he met with the headmaster’s secretary. The boy sat beside me on the bench and after smiling shyly at each other, we both fixed our eyes on the wall clock, its bland clock face and lazy clock hands.

As the minutes dragged on, I stood up and tried to listen through the door. I heard Oliver say that he had always planned to keep me at home with a tutor.
He’s a bright boy but … mostly adult company … But his mother believes that a social education would benefit him …

When he was finished, the boy led us out, waving as we exited the gates.

“I’ll see you again, then,” he called after us.

“I hope so,” Oliver called back.

Any concerns Oliver may have had about my entering school bobbed away on a river of courteousness.

The sun ducked behind a cloud. The mention of my mother had left me shaken, but I knew better than to ask about it.

Having lived most of my first eight years without the steady company of other children, initially I felt I was being merged into a sea of grey uniforms moving in one direction.

The world of school was a sudden ambush of sounds and smells: bells and sirens, bubbling glue pots and freshly planed wood and wet paint. I held my breath as I made my way down the hallways to the cafeteria, trying not to inhale pork drippings, boiled cabbage, floor polish, tomato ketchup and Persil washing-up liquid.

I knew I was different from other children but I didn’t know at first how much it mattered. Within days, I began to realize that I did not belong. I did not have the right sort of skin (the skin of bed linen and clouds), or the good sort of hair (the hair of fineness and flight). I did not have the right sort of parents. I listened to the teacher reading a story one morning and looked down at my desk. I saw a beige hand pressing the white pages of an open book. I raised my hand in front of me and saw the colour of my skin as something separate from myself. I turned my hand over, palm facing upwards revealing my paler wrist, then turned it back over. So this was how people saw me.

For the first week, my classmates ignored me with aggressive indifference. They moved around me slowly, a snake coiling, squeezing tighter and tighter. In my loneliness, I looked for the polite boy. I imagined us becoming friends, but I never saw him again.

A seed of uncertainty was planted in me at Draycott. Or maybe the seed was there all along and Draycott merely fertilized it. But, I was suddenly very aware of white boys in the world. Even when I was alone, I felt myself carrying their presence in my body. There were no words to name this, but I sensed that I was not the same person I had been when school began.

At the same time, I was secretly curious about white boys. At ease in the world, they seemed to follow poor rules of hygiene, appeared not to worry about proper enunciation, mumbled incomprehensibly, called each other bad names as a sign of affection. They were reckless, flighty, dishevelled. Yet their surnames—Underhill, Bridgewater, Forbes–Heathcote, Clayton—carried the weight of things accepted and traditional.

I was introduced to the school tradition of “Colours,” awarded
for academic and sporting achievement. A wooden spoon was a mock award, a disgrace usually given to an individual or team that had come last in a competition, but sometimes also to runners-up, i.e., the ones unable to throw heavy balls at people with alarming speed. The prefects, I discovered, were more intimidating than the teachers, marching around like brawny thugs, bellowing “Consequences!” whenever they saw anyone misbehaving. They could turn you in to the headmaster and get you three strokes of the cane if you weren’t careful.

I learned how to scan my surroundings, interpret everything in terms of potential risk.

Despite such precautions, there were moments of inevitable horror. For example, there was the day we read William Blake as part of a unit on verse and poetic structure. Halfway through the lesson, thirty boys turned the pages of thirty copies of
Songs of Innocence
to a poem called “The Little Black Boy.” All of a sudden, it was as if a bright cone of light had beamed down on my head.

Then there was the time the teacher asked the class to write a poem beginning with the words “Your locks.”

The boy seated in front of me read first:

“Your locks are coils of light

They bounce me to the sky

Like a clean, fluffy bed.”

When it was my turn, I read fiercely:

“‘Your locks are torture.

But I will get even. My fingers are swords.

I am the prince of air who escapes …'”

The teacher, with a face hardening into ice, interrupted: “Thank you, Marcel. That will be all. You may sit down now.”

“But I’m not done yet.” I was just about to read a line about Houdini.

“I said thank you, Marcel. That’s quite enough.”

Oliver, of course, received a call from the headmaster and a letter from the teacher asking if there was some situation at home that might explain my aggression.
They,
the teacher and the headmaster, just didn’t know what to make of it. But strangely, my standing among my peers improved for several days. The other boys walked around me with a new attitude of respect, almost admiration.

By my second month, I had garnered the nickname
Malay.
It was a mild taunt delivered with little ill-feeling. Geographically incorrect, yes, but after the racial fuzziness of
nignog–chink–coolie
(among other rude names I had heard on the street), it was almost a relief to be tacked to a map.

During my third month, there was a lice outbreak. This was blamed on the school’s Ethiopian caretaker who, despite immaculate standards of cleanliness, was suddenly accused of slapdash hygiene. Draycott Grammar School was not the only English school experiencing an epidemic of lice that year. In London, it was a virtual Lice Olympics, with athletic pests leaping indiscriminately from scalp to scalp. Across the city, bald children proliferated. At Draycott, alongside a dozen others, I had my hair shorn down to the roots. I was sent home with two brown bottlefuls of lotion and a razored skull that made me look like the lost child of Yul Brynner. Horrified, Oliver called the headmaster for an explanation and was told that I was shaved as a precautionary delousing measure. Apparently my hair’s “natural flamboyance” had prevented a proper check.

Now no one had any idea how much hair I had or what kind of hair it was—springy, wispy, stick straight, kinky.

¿Hablas español?

Bisakah anda berbicara dalam bahasa Indonesia?

Nagsasalita ba kayo ng Tagalog?

I was tired of being a beige person. I wished I had been born in a peaceful, boring country like Greenland, where people never died in wars or earthquakes. A place with exact measurements and a precise population. I longed to be able to say,
“I was born on an island, 150 miles long and 50 miles wide …”

The breaking point came one Monday morning as the class filed into school.

“Keep moving, Malay,” hissed a boy named Henry behind me.

“Shut up.”

“What’s that you said, Malay?” another boy said, flicking a pebble at me.

I swivelled around. “I
said
quit shoving me and SHUT UP! I’m not your stinking Malay, Barbuda, Mau Mau, Cherokee. Is that clear? I AM ENGLISH so you better shut your trap!”

The boys closest to me mumbled and stepped back. The ones farther away kept their distance, exchanging glances.

It could have been the wild look in my eye—the look of a boy pushed to the edge. Maybe they wondered how crazy I could get. No one seemed anxious to find out. As for me, still shaking with fear and woozy with the vertigo of holding my ground, I went to the washroom and vomited into the toilet. Then I climbed up onto the washroom’s recessed windowsill and curled up.

I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I heard was the caretaker knocking gently against the pine sill with the end of a broom.

Unazungumza kiswahili?

In the chilly days that followed, I began drawing my first caricatures. I ignored my lessons and focused on my notebook.
As soon as my pencil touched the page, I felt my heart slow down. I could have been Hogarth’s apprentice, for all the gnarly noses and fanged teeth I drew. The tip of my pencil kept snapping, I kept sharpening it. I depicted blood, brains exploding from split heads, hearts ripped open by medieval daggers and crossbows. The teacher, upon discovering my drawings, saw a dangerous revenge fantasy, a sign of violent tendencies. Again, Oliver was advised.

“Some of the children are apparently afraid of you,” he said that night.

Scared? Of me?
As bizarre as it sounded, it left me with a new perception of myself.
Was this who I was? A threat?
And why wasn’t Oliver defending me? Why wasn’t he asking,
What have they been doing to you?
Surely he had some sense of what a boy like me might experience among a class of white children.

I didn’t think Oliver would ever withdraw me from Draycott, but one afternoon, just after class photo day, the headmaster entered my classroom.

“Marcel Lawrence?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your father is coming to pick you up. He’ll be here in ten minutes. Please prepare your things.”

“To leave, sir?”

“Yes, Marcel.
To leave.”

There was a ripple in the classroom.

Oliver had discovered that I was being transferred to a class for the educationally challenged, a remedial stream. He was outraged. My time at Draycott was mercifully over.

I still have my notebook from those wretched days, page after page with drawings that lend some insight into my state of
mind at the time. The titles include:
Self-Portrait with Two Axes, Trap Door for a Laughing Audience, The Truth about Horrid-Awful Madness,
and
Picture from the Gutter of the World.
It’s not all feverish. There are a few pictures of boats, planes and buildings. Still, there is enough to make me worry for my previous self.

In the class picture from Draycott, I stand rod straight, skinny bird-bone arms hanging at my sides. I lack weight, presence. I seem darker in the photo, unmistakably black against the startling white of my classmates, and I don’t know if it’s the camera or my imagination.

I can see in that picture, in the set of my mouth, that I’ve already decided never to tell Oliver about the bullying at school. I am eight and a half and I’ve already determined that, in the future, I will hide my weakness from him until I cannot bear it. I will tend my wounds alone. Gradually, scar upon scar, that’s how a man is formed.

I was placed on a waiting list for Kensington International School while Oliver moved to Parliamentary assignments. He bought a used white Mini, a
London A–Z,
and placed a cardboard Press sign on the dashboard. He installed a radio in the car tuned to the police frequencies, which emitted staticky intermittent bulletins so that the leads were often useless. But it served his purposes, keeping him symbolically connected to London’s netherworld.

He drove like a drunk man, with lurching starts and alarming halts. I sat in the broken front seat, clutching the passenger door with my mittened hand, and tried my best to muffle my terror as we wheeled past tight corners, shaved past parked cars, and took roundabouts at top speed. At traffic lights, I soothed
myself by poking my finger in the holes of the wooden steering wheel. Sometimes, when the panic of hurtling forward was too exhausting, my nervous system shut down and I fell into a stress sleep.

While we drove around, Oliver drilled me on world capitals. “Tegucigalpa.”

“Is the capital of Honduras!”

“Accra.”

“Is the capital of Ghana!”

I had developed a habit of rubbing my temple with my thumb when I concentrated. While trying to remember the capital of Nicaragua one afternoon, I looked over at Oliver and saw that he was also rubbing his temple with his thumb. I loved these moments when Oliver and I looked and behaved a bit like each other.

Though I went along with Oliver’s pop quizzes and feigned interest in his car lectures, it seemed to me, increasingly, that Oliver’s most obvious failing was his sense of priorities. He shared facts about the war in Korea, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union—topics that might have held other boys rapt. But these facts were not the ones I wanted or needed. At age eight and a half, I was hungry for information about my mother.

BOOK: Stray Love
10.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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