Concrete Dreams E-Book

Ferdinand Dennis

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 669

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Concrete Dreams tells the gripping story of Lucas Bostock, a Jamaican immigrant who arrives in 1950s London determined to succeed — and to impose his vision of success on his family. A harsh, domineering man, shaped and scarred by survival, Lucas is no one's idea of a nice man. When his wife Rhoda finally leaves him, taking their only daughter, he's left to raise their three sons with a mix of toughness, pride, and unrelenting ambition. Lucas believes that hard work — on building sites, as a carpenter, and eventually as a landlord — is the only way to protect his family. But as his children grow up and take their own paths through boxing, journalism, politics, retail, and religion, they are forced to reckon with the cost of their father's influence. Meanwhile, the tenants in his houses add further layers to this vivid portrait of Caribbean-British life, sharing their stories of resistance and renewal in a changing city. Dennis crafts Lucas with remarkable honesty — flawed, often unlikeable, but deeply human. Concrete Dreams is both an intimate family saga and a bold exploration of race, masculinity, and generational legacy. It's a Windrush story, but one that refuses easy narratives, capturing instead the full complexity of Caribbean London and the voices that shaped it—and a narrator determined to tell his own.

Leseprobe

FERDINAND DENNIS

CONCRETE DREAMS

A NOVEL

CONTENTS

1. Lucas buys a house, 1950s

2. Lucas and a sitting tenant, some months later

3. Lucas and his family, some years later

4. Rhoda Bostock’s unhappiness, a year later

5. Lucas alone, some months later

6. Lucas brings up his sons

7. Lucas and the Georges, winter to spring

8. Rhoda and Maureen, a year later

9. Family visits, early 1970s

10. Vincent and the arrival of Horace Fraser

The narrator introduces himself

11. Lucas and Horace, 1970s

12. Vincent sees new worlds in Horace and Lenai

13. Samuel Bostock and Sylvia, mid 1970s

14. Lucas, Vincent and Horace

15. Rhoda, Maureen and her alter-ego

16. Rhoda meets Constable Macfarlane

17. Rhoda and Neil Macfarlane, a year later

18. Rhoda prepares for Irene’s visit

19. Lucas meets Jean, again, 1979

20. Samuel Bostock and a meeting, early 1980s

21. Donnette Bostock arrives at Heathrow

22. Maureen and Phil, a backstory, 1983

The narrator explains his problem

23. Neville’s final fight, 1980s

24. Lucas alone

25. Samuel, Elena and Sylvia, a year later

26. Vincent and Sam, advice rejected

27. Vincent meets Donnette, a few months later

28. Vincent and Donnette, some weeks later

29. Rhoda, at around the same time

30. Donnette and Vincent, two years later

31. Vincent heads to Heathrow, two months later

The narrator continues his story

32. Neville, taxis and the Inland Revenue, 1980s

33. Vincent meets Rachel, 1990s

34. Vincent flees back to Phoenix House

35. Lucas and ghosts from the past, 1990s

36. Samuel’s political ambitions, mid 1990s

37. Sam, Sylvia, drink and a little guilt

38. Vincent wanders London

39. Vincent encounters Pastor Neville

40. Lucas receives an invitation, and a family dinner

The narrator seeks terminal solutions

41. Rhoda, Vincent and Professor Khalid

42. Maureen meets an old friend

43. Vincent, Sylvia and a secret from the past

44. Vincent and Sam, a month later

45. Pastor Neville on an errand of mercy, around the same time

46. Vincent runs in the park, a little later

The narrator meets Cy and winds up his story

47. Samuel, Larry Haynes and politics, 1998

48. Samuel as a dutiful son, Rhoda, and a decision

The narrator signing off

1. Lucas buys a house, 1950s

On a cold and overcast Saturday in January, sometime in the 1950s, Lucas Bostock, having done a morning’s work on a Shoreditch building site, finished half-an-hour earlier than usual and travelled by bus to keep an appointment with an estate agent. The agent’s office was sandwiched between the Brighton pub and Smith’s grocery store and bore the legend “Burnham and Fosters, Estate Agents” in gold-coloured letters on the window. Lucas had a few minutes to spare, so he dusted down his donkey jacket, inspected his steel toe-cap boots, which still bore traces of concrete dust, and stomped his feet a few times before deciding that he looked presentable enough.

Lucas was a stocky 5’ 7’’ and very dark. He was competent in several construction trades and had more than once boasted that he could single-handedly build a house but described himself simply and proudly as a carpenter. For a brief period, during his youth, the boxing ring had tempted him with promises of fame and fabulous wealth. Its legacy was visible in his broad shoulders, his way of entering a room as though he had stepped into a boxing ring, and was sizing up an opponent, arms crooked at his sides, and hands clenched into fists the size of a sledgehammer.

The estate agent, Joseph Liebowski, was seated behind a vast and untidy partner’s desk and speaking on the phone. Covering the mouthpiece, he greeted Lucas in heavily accented English and invited him to take a seat, pointing with long pink fingers to a shiny oak captain’s chair.

Lucas felt too restless to sit down. Hands clasped behind his back, he walked to the window and gazed at the passers-by, women carrying shopping bags and men in greatcoats and hats, their steps slow and weary, as if they were climbing a long and steep hill in the dusk. Only a few hours of daylight remained, and he wondered whether he would ever get used to these short winter days when the London daylight, weaker than a Jamaican full-moon night, covered almost everything in various shades of grey, even the red buses.

He heard Liebowski finish the telephone conversation and turned to face him.

“You’re punctual, Mr Bostock,” Liebowski said. “A man on time is a man to be trusted.” He rose and walked around the desk; he was over six feet tall and had a slight stoop and a pronounced limp; one leg was shorter than the other.

“The buses running good,” Lucas said.

“Now to the viewing, yes,” Liebowski said.

Over the next few hours, with Liebowski as his guide and driver, the car, a Ford Prefect, toured the warren of streets north of the High Street. Lucas saw two-storey terraced houses which Liebowski, who clearly took pleasure in his knowledge of the area, called artisans’ cottages. He was driven along narrow streets of Victorian, flat, white-fronted houses that reminded him of similar but more imposing buildings in Ladbroke Grove. He saw these houses in a new way when Liebowski pointed out cornices, quoins, Corinthian columns, Gothic window arches and Italianate styles; he made Lucas aware of the disadvantages of houses with valley roofs, and the danger to houses of long dry spells in a city built on clay; he dated the houses and spoke of the city’s nineteenth century growth spurt, which swallowed what were once villages surrounded by fields outside the old city. “Then the twentieth century and two wars. Now the city must rebuild, yes. Men like you and me, we will rebuild it, yes.”

They had viewed several properties, one as far as the Green Lanes Church Street junction, when they came almost full circle to Carlisle Road, which ran off Stoke Newington High Street. Liebowski had warned Lucas that this particular property needed much work. Its former owner, a widowed, elderly Greek-Cypriot, had returned home some years before and died soon afterwards. The only son had inherited the house and wanted to be rid of it.

Liebowski had not exaggerated. The four-storey house looked like a ruin. Clumps of moss grew on the low front wall. Pigeons exploded from its roof at the sound of the rusty creaking gate; the cornices above the first-floor windows were crumbling, and from one grew a brown, leafless shrub, a buddleia, petrified in the cold. As they approached the front door, Liebowski apologised for his oversight and revealed that the house came with a sitting tenant – an old man who lived in the basement.

This disclosure upset Lucas far more than the property’s dereliction. He had come to trust the estate agent since their first encounter weeks before; his confidence in him now wavered. Nonetheless, he proceeded with the viewing. He went into the back garden and noted the damaged drainpipe and the roof gutter hanging like a broken limb. Inside, he went from room to room, saying nothing as he turned on taps and light switches, tapped the walls for blown plaster, pulled back crumbling linoleum to inspect floorboards, swung doors to see if they were warped or hung properly, opened and closed cracked windows with rotting frames. The ground and first floors were reasonably dry. But the top-floor rooms had borne the brunt of years of neglect; they smelled of guano, their ceilings were disintegrating, and one wall was infested with a fungal growth that formed fantastic patterns.

Back in the first floor room overlooking the street, Lucas paced up and down for a few minutes, lost in thought. This was the largest but worst maintained house he had seen that day. Not only was it in a strange part of London, far from Ladbroke Grove, where he had lived since arriving in Britain, it required more work than he could afford. He needed a property that could accommodate tenants immediately, as well as his pregnant wife, Rhoda, and their nine-month-old son, Samuel. Yes, his family could occupy the ground-floor rooms, which would be a huge improvement on the single room where they currently lived, and the first-floor rooms could be rented out, but the top floor rooms were uninhabitable. The roof and ceilings would have to be repaired, the rooms dried out and redecorated. Then there was the old man in the basement; a sitting tenant was not part of his calculations. He returned downstairs and found Joseph Liebowski waiting for him in the hallway, a hand on the front door latch. “Now to the basement, yes,” Liebowski said. He went outside and down to the basement. Lucas followed, hanging behind on the bottom step to scrutinise the brickwork and windows. The estate agent had to knock several times and shout through the letter box before there was any sign of life, which took the form of a sliding bolt.

The door opened and a tall, thin old man with a shock of frizzy white hair framing a narrow ashen face, and dressed in a threepiece green corduroy suit, stuck his head out like a feral creature, sniffing the air for danger. The weak afternoon light seemed to dazzle him and he blinked large rheumy eyes and retreated into the dark entranceway.

Liebowski said, “Mr Norton, I wrote to you last week about the viewing.”

“The what?”

“Viewing, Mr Norton. We have a prospective buyer for the house.”

“Oh, I thought you were Beatrice. Do you know Beatrice? No. What a shame. Still, you’d better come in.”

Introduced to the old man, Lucas extended his hand, but Mr Norton refused to shake it.

Liebowski gave Lucas an apologetic glance, signalled with nod of his head that he should go ahead, and steered the tenant into the front room.

Lucas’s inspection of the basement flat was hampered by the sepulchral light, stacks of cardboard boxes, and piles of books that spilled off crowded bookshelves. But he saw the peeling wallpaper, the rotting skirting board and discoloured ceiling, the newspapers taped to the broken windowpanes. In the damp, cold air he smelled or thought he could smell the odour of decaying and lonely age.

On his way out, he glanced into the room in which Liebowski had detained Mr Norton, then went back outside and waited. Liebowski followed minutes later. When he reached the top of the steps, he took out a handkerchief and blew his nose long and vigorously. They walked to the car and stood facing the house, its dereliction less visible in the fading light.

“You’re probably thinking I’m trying to sell you a wreck and burden you with an old man in the basement.”

“This place going to need plenty work. Plenty work. And the old man, if he’s been living there a long time, must be paying far below the market rent.”

“I don’t mean to sound cruel, but forget about the old man. I doubt he’ll still be alive in three, five years. Think about the future, think long term.”

“Plenty work,” Lucas repeated.

“Mr Bostock, when you walked into my office two weeks ago and I saw your hands, I said to myself, those are the hands of a man who’s not afraid of hard work. I will find him a house. I showed you the other places to prepare you for this one. It’s a bargain, but a bargain only for a certain kind of buyer. I believe you’re that kind of buyer. And Joseph Liebowski is seldom wrong.”

Lucas heard sincerity in these words. The other houses he’d viewed were either too small or too expensive, sometimes both.

“There’s no hurry, Mr Bostock. Take your time. Think it over.”

Lucas agreed to contact Liebowski within a week. He decided to walk to Finsbury Park tube and, trusting his sense of direction, he declined Liebowski’s offer of a lift. As he walked, the brief dusk turned to night and the temperature fell. Lucas turned up his collar as he made his way through this unfamiliar neighbourhood where curtains were being drawn, children called inside for their suppers, and from somewhere ahead of him the roar of a football stadium punctuated the air.

He arrived back in Ladbroke Grove in a sort of trance induced by turning numbers over in his mind and weighing up the pros and cons of buying the house in Stoke Newington. He hardly noticed the gathering of West Indian men outside the station; some were dressed in their Saturday night suits, others in open-neck shirts and without overcoats – defiance, bravado and mischief in their laughter.

The smell of curry and the sound of music greeted him as he stepped inside the house where he lived. Sure signs that the two Trinidadian men who lived in one of the ground-floor rooms were entertaining. A slim, brown-skinned man with a pencil thin moustache and conked hair appeared in the corridor.

“Oh, is you Bostock,” he said.

Lucas said a gruff good evening to Eric Drake, who had once told him he was a calypso singer.

“Thought it was Roy. He’s supposed to bring a bottle o’rum. If he don’t hurry, this party soon done. Come down for a glass later, eh Bostock. It have some nice skirts and we expecting more later.”

Lucas frowned.

“Oh, I forget you is a family man.”

Lucas shook his head and carried on. Drake’s mocking laughter followed him up the stairs like the whirr of a bothersome mosquito, but its bite could not penetrate Lucas’s hardened skin.

Hours later, with the party downstairs still going on, Lucas sat in the only armchair in the room watching Rhoda bottle-feed Samuel. She was sitting on the edge of the double bed that filled most of the cramped room; it was covered in a pink nylon spread. Mother and child, wife and son, and another child on the way: he had to find a larger space before the second child came. But he did not want to continue being a tenant, a paying guest in somebody else’s property. He knew of other men who had become house owners. One was a fellow Jamaican with whom he had shared a room; he now owned a house in nearby Paddington. He, Lucas Bostock, could do that too. It was just a matter of finding the right property. Not some broken down old house with an old man living in the basement.

With Samuel now fast asleep, Rhoda put the child in his cot and said in a low voice: “Something troubling you, Lucas?” She was an inch shorter, and several shades lighter in complexion than her husband. She had a high-pitched, nervous voice.

“What make you think something troubling me?”

“You’ve hardly said a word all evening.”

“Saw a house today, a mashed down place.” He had not planned to mention the house in Stoke Newington because they had almost quarrelled the last time they discussed moving. One of Rhoda’s cousins, Bertie Johnson, who had been in England since the war, owned two houses in Stockwell and had offered Rhoda rooms in one of his properties. But Lucas, determined to plough his own furrow, had rejected the offer. It was the only occasion Rhoda had disagreed with her husband.

“That reminds me. The landlord was here today, said ’im going to raise the rent by a shilling from next month.”

“What the blood…” Lucas caught himself before completing the swear word, which would upset Rhoda. When they were dating in Kingston, she told him she disliked his habit of swearing and cursing at the least provocation. Since then, at least in her company, he took care to express his feelings in less offensive words; these he often did not possess, so he settled for furious and frustrated silence.

Long after Rhoda had retired to bed, Lucas remained in the armchair in the dark room, the faint sound of music coming from downstairs. His anger at the landlord and violent hatred of the room had subsided, but he reviewed the day again, focusing on the house in Stoke Newington.

Maybe he had allowed the old man’s presence to cloud his judgement. Born in a remote mountainside village, he had craved city life from an early age. For many years, long after moving to Kingston, his sights were set on New York, but London prevailed. Today he had seen the wretched side of city life: loneliness, despair, lunacy.

He returned to his calculations with a clearer mind and did something he had not done in several years. He placed his left hand on his thigh, splayed his fingers and tried to lift the middle finger, the nerves of which had been severed in an accident with a chisel back in Kingston. It could not move – would never move, the doctors said – independently of the index and fourth fingers. In the still and quiet and cold of that London night, he concentrated on that act, concentrated on it with such intensity that when Samuel bawled and Rhoda woke up to comfort and feed him, and ask again whether he was coming to bed, and returned to bed herself, he could not give an answer because he was in some far-off place fighting unwanted memories of a night many years ago. He remembered it with doubt because he could never repeat the act – when the injured finger defied the doctors’ prognosis and gave the slightest twitch. It persuaded him to make the momentous decision to buy a piece of London.

2. Lucas and a sitting tenant, some months later

Lucas Bostock moved his family and their few possessions to Stoke Newington in late March. Among the items carried across London in a decommissioned military ambulance converted into a removal van were three battered cardboard suitcases, one of which once belonged to Rhoda’s grandmother, who had acquired it on a decade-long sojourn in Panama in the 1920s; a wooden cot bought in Portobello Road market; and some brand new bedsheets given by Eric Drake. Lucas had accepted the gift with awkward grace but refused Drake’s offer to help organise a housewarming party. There would never be a party at 72 Carlisle Road in Lucas Bostock’s lifetime.

Throughout early spring, while still working on the Shoreditch building site, Lucas devoted all his spare time to renovations. On weekday evenings, he would return home from a day’s hard labour, race through Rhoda’s mountainous dinner of mashed potatoes and beef or pork drowning in gravy, bounce Samuel on his knees for a few minutes, then hurry upstairs as if he was late for an assignation with a lover. There he would work late into the night on those tasks least likely to disturb the neighbours: fitting locks on doors, hanging wallpaper and so on. At the weekends, after a morning on the building site, he worked from Saturday afternoon through to Sunday night, pausing only for meals and brief naps. On several nights he had succumbed to exhaustion and fallen asleep on the floor, a screwdriver or plane still in his hand, wood shavings a bed, his toolbag a pillow. He was most comfortable with carpentry work but did not hesitate to transform himself into a plumber, electrician, plasterer, painter and decorator, roofer, glazer, or floor-layer. The results were not always visually pleasing – years later he wondered who had painted a room pink and purple – but they were always effective. The pigeons nesting in the loft were driven out and the roof patched with a mixture of salvaged and new slates and bitumen to create a temporary but reasonably waterproof covering. The top floor rooms were fumigated, their walls washed down with white spirits and repapered. By late April, the rooms were ready. The first new tenants, a young St Lucian couple from Castries, fresh off the boat, moved in at the end of April, and by mid-May all the upperfloor rooms were occupied by working men and women who had swapped the intimacy of tropical villages for the indifference of a city where, according to the landlord, unless they paid their rent every Friday evening and kept noise to a minimum, shop doorways or park benches would become their beds, autumn leaves their blankets, and snow their source of water.

Lucas’s direct gaze and forthrightness inspired trust and fear among these newcomers, but he found Mr Norton in the basement less tractable. He was a semi-recluse who received no social callers and only the most persistent ringing of the bell brought him to the front door. His curtains were often closed, though some evenings he could be seen through his living-room window seated in an armchair, a book on his lap, his frail figure, pale face and mop of white hair bathed in the light from a tall wooden lamp. He ventured beyond the front gate only on the last Sunday of each month to attend communion at St Mathias, the local Church of England church. The postman came several times a week, depositing a large number of letters. Every Saturday morning, a sputtering brown van driven by a pale, thin young man delivered a box of groceries, leaving the foodstuff on the doorstep. Mr Norton would usually drag it inside hours later, but it was not uncommon for it to remain there until Monday morning, when the charlady, Mrs Bradbury, who had a key, came to clean the flat.

She was Mr Norton’s main link to the outside world. She posted his letters and, at the end of her working day, brought the envelope containing his rent in the form of a cheque to Rhoda, whose working hours at Homerton Hospital and childcare arrangements meant she was home by late afternoon most weekdays. In early May, Rhoda invited Mrs Bradbury inside for tea. She told Rhoda about some of Mr Norton’s peculiar habits, the strangest of which was his habit of calling her Friday or Sancho Panza or Mrs Malaprop or many other unusual names, which, she suspected, came from the collection of novels he had been reading and re-reading over the years she had been in his employ. “He’s not all there,” Mrs Bradbury told Rhoda, “But harmless with it.”

Rhoda’s report coincided with Lucas’s decision to turn his attention to the basement flat. He had noticed several worrying signs of damp there and resolved to treat them, less out of concern for Mr Norton’s health, and more for the health of his property. But gaining access to the basement tested his patience.

One Saturday afternoon he spent an hour outside Mr Norton’s front door, ringing the bell at five-minute intervals. Mr Norton finally came to the door and, without opening it, called out, ‘Who is it, what do you want?’ Lucas explained that he had been sent through Mrs Bradbury a list of repairs that were needed in the flat. Mr Norton replied, “Geoffrey Norton is not at home right now.” A perplexed Lucas insisted that he was speaking to Mr Norton, but it soon became clear that he was speaking only to himself, because the figure on the other side of the door had retreated into the musty, dimly lit flat. To mitigate his anger, Lucas spent the remainder of the afternoon in the back garden sawing pieces of timber.

When he eventually gained access a month later and watched Mr Norton slowly negotiating his way round the crammed living room, Lucas had a rare moment of compassion. The work he had in mind would inconvenience Mr Norton. Would he survive having the floorboards lifted up? Yet the work was urgently needed; evidence of damp had risen to the ground floor bedroom where he, Rhoda and Samuel slept. Their health was at stake, as, of course, was the value of the property.

He would proceed with caution. He began by carrying out a multitude of small repairs that made Mr Norton’s life a little more comfortable. He fixed light switches, oiled rusty door hinges and replaced worn taps. Mr Norton usually stayed out of his way, but one day, as Lucas was repairing a broken bedroom window, Mr Norton remained in the room watching. He said, “And when you’ve finished that, Friday, you could see about the blocked kitchen sink.”

Lucas ignored this refusal to address him properly, but when the old man called him Friday a second time, he said, “Who’s this Friday you think you talking to, Mr Norton?”

“He’s a character from a story written by a man who lived in this neighbourhood centuries ago. Daniel Defoe.”

“And wha’ this story call?”

“Robinson Crusoe. Friday was a cannibal who Robinson Crusoe rescued and turned into his manservant.”

“So you think mi is you manservant?” Lucas had removed the pane of broken glass and was cleaning out the channels in the window frame. Mr Norton was sitting on the bed, his pale face lugubrious, the shoulders of his cardigan speckled with bits of dandruff as large as snowflakes.

“Well, mi nuh know nobody caal Friday. Mi name Lucas Bostock, Mr Norton, Where mi come from, when you tell a man your name and ’im refuse to caal you by that name and caal you something else instead, that man is looking for a fight.” Lucas picked up the new pane of glass and began to leave.

“What are you doing? You can’t leave the window like that.”

“Can’t I. Mi going to leave it like that ’til you learn some bumbaclaat manners.”

“All right, Mr Bostock, I take your point. Please accept my apologies. Offence was not my intention.”

“Accepted,” Lucas said, and he finished the job.

Lucas was quite struck by Mr Norton’s swift capitulation and graceful apology; maybe he had over-reacted to the eccentric ways of an old man. On his next encounter, Mr Norton was a model of politeness; on a subsequent visit he even insisted that Lucas call him Geoffrey, though on that same day he twice called Lucas Sancho Panza. That day Lucas also got a disturbing glimpse into Geoffrey Norton’s mind. He had noticed an armed forces service medal and remarked that Mr Norton must have seen a lot of the world in the war.

“So much so that it killed me,” Mr Norton said.

“Kill you. How? You right here talkin’ to me.”

“But you’re not talking to the young man who went to war. He died. We still correspond from time to time.”

Lucas gave him a puzzled glance.

“Look in that box.” Mr Norton pointed to a large pine box in an alcove. “Go on, look.”

Lucas removed some bric-a-brac from the box and saw that it was full of letters, neatly tied together in bundles.

“There are more in the wardrobe and under the bed. Not all from him, of course.

“Sorry, Geoffrey. Mi don’ understan’. How?”

“It’s elementary. All the letters I receive are letters written by myself to me, or to put it more accurately, letters written by my selves to my selves.”

There was no trace of humour in Mr Norton’s expression and Lucas realised that he was telling the truth. He was both sender and receiver of the copious letters that poured through his letterbox. Lucas left the basement convinced of his tenant’s madness.

Further evidence of this came when a heat wave descended in late July. On an exceptionally warm night, with a sliver of moon in a cloudless sky, a piercing scream woke up the whole house. Lucas went to investigate and found the young St Lucian couple trembling in the stairwell and repeating, “Jumbie, jumbie in the garden!” The woman, Phoebe, unable to sleep, had woken up, opened the window, and seen a ghostly apparition wandering the garden. Her boyfriend, Cedric, had seen it too.

Lucas was a practical man. He believed in things he could touch, see, smell, taste and hear, the only exception being the Almighty, and even His existence he frequently doubted. He went downstairs and out to the back garden where he found Mr Norton sitting under an elder tree, his frail, white, stark naked body almost luminous. As Lucas stood there dumbstruck, Mr Norton began to recite: “I wish I had enough breath to speak with less effort and that the pain I feel in this rib would ease just a little, so that I could make clear to you, Panza, how wrong you are. Come closer, you sinner. If the winds of fortune, until now so contrary, blow again in our favour, filling the sails of our desires and carrying us safely to one of the insulas which I have promised you, what would happen when I, having won, make you its ruler?”

“Mr Norton,” Lucas said, “you can’t go wanderin’ about in the garden at night without no clothes on. You scarin’ the other tenants.”

“Nonsense. I am merely speaking to nature without the impediment of clothes.”

Lucas went inside and returned with a blanket to cover the old man and marched him back into the basement flat.

His explanation of the ghostly figure in the garden convinced Cedric, but Phoebe refused to believe she had not seen a jumbie, and a week later, they vacated the room with only a day’s notice.

Their abrupt departure left Lucas anxious that Mr Norton’s eccentric behaviour would give his house a bad reputation. Although the vacancy was quickly filled, he returned home each evening expecting news of some new outrage. Mr Norton gave him many other sleepless nights and it was on one such night that he rediscovered the resolve to treat the basement damp, regardless of the disruption the work would cause. Mr Norton did in fact survive the upheaval – the ripping up of the floorboards, the dust caused by hacking away plaster, the sight of his furniture piled ceiling high – but, in the middle of the following winter, Mrs Bradbury found Mr Norton’s grocery on the doorstep, and he, inside, in a sleep from which he did not wake up.

3. Lucas and his family, a year or so later

Lucas Bostock, tool bag in hand, was standing at a bus stop in Kings Cross. He was tired and hungry at the end of a hard day and anxious to reach home, but unknown to him and the others waiting, a collision of several vehicles on Hyde Park Corner had reduced London’s traffic to a crawl. Bored with looking at the traffic, he turned to sifting through his mind. Getting the basement flat ready to rent, the second time since Mr Norton’s death, he had noticed that despite his earlier efforts to stem the damp, the problem would soon need attention again. Then there was Rhoda and the children: Samuel, Maureen and now Neville. He was worried about the future state of his finances because the family would soon have to claim one of the rooms currently occupied by a tenant. There was another far less tangible concern. Since giving birth to Neville in January, Rhoda often complained of tiredness, though she always found the energy to read the bible and pray before coming to bed. She now performed her wifely duty with such a lack of interest that he had rediscovered the secret and shameful pleasure of what he and his boyhood friends used to call milking.

It was more than the absence of sex that troubled him, it was something vaguer, but when he tried to focus on it and put it into words, he felt as though he was trying to identify an animal from a great distance, through a thick fog, or dense vegetation, and the more he tried to name it, the more blurred it became. Whatever it was, it seemed to him that this creature had always been a part of his life. Frustrated, he returned his mind to a project he had recently formulated – to concrete over the back garden – and instantly felt better to be back in a world where words and objects corresponded. His reverie ended when he heard his name called.

“Bostock!” a man said.

Lucas looked at the man and registered a shiny, crumpled zoot suit, the collar of his white shirt grimy, his shoes, once stylish, covered in scuff marks, his facial skin taut and dry. It was the toothbrush protruding from his breast pocket that triggered recognition and a name.

“Drake?”

“No less, no less.” The broad, insouciant grin which used to infuriate Lucas was still intact, but it had lost some of its lustre. Drake inquired after Rhoda and Samuel and the new house, and Lucas revealed that he was now the father of three children, the youngest only a few months old.

Drake pumped his hand in congratulation, then said: “Funny I should run into you, cause there’s a letter in the house for you. Been there almost a month now, but I couldn’t post it on because I’d forgotten your address.”

“Brown or white envelope?”

“Air letter. Jamaica stamp. It look like a woman’s handwriting to me.”

“How can you tell?”

“You know women, man. Fussy with their dress, fussy with their curls, plus I even think I smell a hint of perfume when it first came.” Drake laughed.

The only woman who ever wrote Lucas letters was his cousin Jean, but he had long sent her his new address and had received letters from her there. Had Jean mistakenly sent it to his old address? He found a pencil stub in his pocket and scribbled his address on a scrap of paper.

“Really appreciate it if you could send it on,” he said.

“Sure, sure, man. Soon as I get home.” Drake cleared his throat, moved closer and whispered, “By the way Bostock, I have a date later with a skirt – sweet, sweet-looking Norwegian, but things kind of tight right now. Real tight. If you get my drift…”

Lucas’s reaction was one of astonished indignation and the shutters of his instinctive meanness came down. Anyway, he was still two days away from pay day; he could not help Drake. But when he remembered the bedsheets Drake had given him, the several letters he had forwarded in the first few months, his miserliness felt compromised

“I don’t want to let this skirt down, man. She expecting me to wine and dine she. Soon as things turn round, I’ll pay you back. Fact, I’ve got a new record in the pipeline. It going to be big.”

Lucas pleaded that he was going through his own hardship, with Rhoda on maternity leave and him having to feed the household. He fished around in his pocket and found a half-crown. He handed it to Drake, and apologised, saying, truthfully, that it was the best he could do.

Drake took the coin and showered Lucas with such expansive gratitude that he thought the Trinidadian was mocking him. Just then, Lucas’s bus came and the two men parted. Aboard the bus, Lucas looked back and saw Drake spin the coin in the air and catch it in his outer breast pocket, which also held his toothbrush, and skip toward the tube entrance.

When two weeks passed and there was still no sign of the letter, the calypsonian was reinstated in Lucas’s rogues’ gallery of the untrustworthy and treacherous. The letter waiting for him at his former address in Ladbroke Grove preyed on his mind like an untraceable odour, and when a stormy day made outdoor work impossible, closing the building site early, Lucas seized the opportunity to visit his old home and collect it.

He arrived at the house around mid-afternoon, thoroughly soaked; not even the old plane trees lining Ladbroke Grove could protect him. The door was opened by a stranger, who told Lucas, in a thick Barbadian accent, that he neither had knowledge of a letter addressed to Lucas Bostock nor a man called Drake, though he admitted that he didn’t know all the other tenants as he had only been living there for a short while. He let Lucas in and invited him to knock on the door of someone who might know of Drake. It was opened by a woman in a floral dressing gown.

“I’m looking for Drake,” Lucas said.

“Drake?” she said. “You’d better wait.” She closed the door and after some minutes opened it and invited Lucas into the room. She was still in the floral dressing gown but she had tidied her hair and sprayed herself with a scent that permeated the room.

“So you looking for Drake?”

“Yes,” he said. He told her about the letter.

“That’s real funny,” she said, “cause Drake don’t live here for over a year. He comes back sometimes to collect his letters but it’s months since I last see him. Last time I hear about him he was supposed to be sleeping in Hyde Park.”

Lucas recalled the dishevelled figure and realised that Drake had used the non-existent letter as a softener in preparation for cadging money. The hole left in his pocket by that encounter grew all the larger. He was readying to excuse himself when he noticed a large suitcase with a name and familiar address: Petronia Brown, Constant Spring Road, Kingston. He had worked on a house on that road. He looked at the woman again and it registered on him that she was attractive, tall and slim and dark, with large clear eyes and full lips, much darker than the rest of her face.

There was a sudden and uncontrollable throb in his groin and he remembered the long-gone days back in Kingston when he would have acted on such a signal, but now there was Rhoda and the children and his tenants and the mortgage. He was leaving the room in obedience to those responsibilities but heard himself say: “Yuh from Kingston?”

“Born and bred,” she said. “Ah going back next month.”

“Mi work on a house near Shortwood Avenue back in ’49; big house,” he said.

“The Henriques place?”

“Same one.”

She seemed to look at him with admiration, and there was a hint of playfulness in her eyes.

“That’s something else. My uncle work there too. You must know him. Courtney Jones.”

“Yes, me knew Courtney. Big guy, a plumber, come from Westmoreland.”

It was clear that they shared a world, or rather an island and its city. They exchanged names, and when the rain escalated, beating a furious rhythm against the glass, she invited him to wait until it died down. He took a seat on a rickety dining chair and she sat on the edge of the double bed covered in a camberwick bedspread. While they continued to explore their shared island, she offered him a drink of rum from a bottle that a friend had brought for her from Jamaica, unaware that she would soon be returning because she found England too wet and cold and miserable. Lucas seldom drank alcohol because he disliked its loosening effect on his tongue, but with the rain lashing the misted windows of a room in which only the bedside lamp glowed and this lovely woman smiling at him with her fleshy dark lips and lively eyes, he accepted the offer of a glass of rum. It provoked memories of his younger, freer days that sometimes, especially on London days like this, seemed like a dream. Soon he could smell early morning mountain breeze on her breath, see the sea in her eyes, hear music in her laughter.

A heat, terrible and sweet, coursed through his body and he was aware of speaking more than usual but felt no need to censor himself. He hesitated at the offer of a second glass of rum. Rhoda, the children, the Victorian house with its tenants, entered his mind briefly, but they all seemed to belong to the life of another man. He accepted and, watching her pour the drink, he recognised that the raging heat consuming his body could only be cooled by diving into the sea.

The rain had long stopped when Lucas, adjusting his clothes, stepped out of his former home. It was after 9pm and the street lights glistened on the wet pavement and road. He bounded down the steps and made his way towards Ladbroke Grove, trying to remember when he had ever been touched, stroked and kissed with such passion. Had marriage, migration, children and responsibility destroyed the closeness between him and Rhoda? No, he decided, Rhoda had always been a little distant and aloof and those very qualities had made her attractive.

Nearing the corner of Chesterton Road and Ladbroke Grove, Lucas collided with a man, who fell from the impact. “Watch where you going,” Lucas said. Picking himself up off the damp pavement, the man, speaking in an island accent filled with fear, said: “Don’t go near the station. De white people dem gone mad. Dey attacking we. Dey attacking we cause we black.”

While Lucas was still digesting this warning, two Caribbean men ran past. One called out, “Get inside man, white people looking to kill we!” The man who had crashed into Lucas turned and ran. Lucas clenched his fists, thinking I ain’t running from nobody. But when two other men ran past, he thought again and decided to make his way out of the neighbourhood by an alternative route. He crossed over Ladbroke Grove and walked up Golborne Road, intending to weave through the backstreets until he reached Westbourne Park station.

The backstreets were indeed quieter. Lights blazed in the surrounding houses, and music and voices floated on the night air. When he passed two lovers locked in an embrace in a doorway, the night could not seem more ordinary. He relaxed a little, but still walked briskly, fists at the ready. A few yards on, approaching a corner, he saw a man whose halting, unsteady steps seemed to betray signs of drunkenness. It was a sight that filled Lucas with disgust. Men like him give us a bad name – lazy drunk, he thought. The figure passed under a streetlamp and was briefly illuminated. It was then that Lucas saw the blood. It was streaming over the man’s hands and onto his clothes and the pavement. Lucas ran towards the staggering figure and reached him just as he collapsed. He knelt down and held the limp, damp body, which seemed oddly weightless, as if it had been hollowed out, leaving only the shell of a man.

4. Rhoda Bostock’s unhappiness, a year later

After the birth of Neville, Rhoda Bostock had decided against having more children. She had left a home of elderly parents, one sister and countless cousins at sixteen, fled the quarrels over money, fights over the dinner table, long nights of empty growling stomachs and frequently-patched, threadbare, hand-me-down clothes that still carried the ineradicable odours of their former owners. The need to flee that overcrowded family house with all its unspoken secrets, and the more orderly life she experienced in the Kingston home of her kindly aunt – who one day admitted that her husband’s premature death had been a blessing, otherwise she would have probably ended up with an oversized family – these features of her past predisposed Rhoda to tread a cautious, sensible path.

Rhoda had tried discussing “family planning” – a phrase she learned off a BBC radio programme – with Lucas, but he had seemed indifferent, as if the matter, like cooking dinner and bathing the children, was her exclusive province. Without knowledge of contraception, she decided to practise sexual abstinence. She developed several recurring minor ailments – severe headaches some nights, stomach cramps on others, which, for good measure, she sought to palliate by chewing garlic before retiring.

But in the week after Lucas, his clothes caked in blood, arrived home after midnight and recounted how he’d had to hold a man’s throat to prevent him bleeding to death while he was being taken to Paddington’s St Mary’s Hospital, she relented. The incident reminded her of another night, years before, a night she and Lucas never talked about.

But even that night had not left Lucas looking so shaken.

For some days his rich dark complexion was ashen, his voice softer, less abrasive; he did no work on the house. She found this more vulnerable incarnation of her husband irresistible and one night lavished on him a loving inspired by both a desire to comfort him and sate her own hunger. A month later, her elderly, greyhaired Scottish GP, herself a mother of four, confirmed that Rhoda was pregnant again. She left the surgery feeling weighed down with a terrible sense of failure. Yet on reaching home, she closed the bedroom door, fell to her knees and thanked the Lord. Three children was practical, four divine.

It was, however, a difficult pregnancy. From the fifth month it became clear that she could not work up until the last minute, give birth, then, following two weeks’ rest, return to work as if she had merely taken a fortnight’s break. Three months before the due date, swollen joints and a persistent backache, far more painful than her imaginative effort at birth control, forced her to stop working altogether.

She was often alone in the house from mid-morning to early afternoon, with Lucas and the tenants at work, the children in school, nursery or with the childminder. At first, the house’s stillness and silence disturbed her. She had never before been in an empty house or been alone with herself. But one day, around midday, she fried a plantain, one of several Caribbean fruits now available in Ridley Road market, and went to sit in a high-back East Anglian chair at the bedroom window, which overlooked the back garden, which bore traces of Lucas’s handiwork. He had chopped down and uprooted the elder tree and several others, including a Conference Pear tree, in preparation for laying concrete. Only the wet winter and projects inside the house had prevented him from completing the task. She had protested, “You don’t have to cover the whole garden with cement.” She wanted to grow flowers and keep a kitchen garden. “Cement!” he said. “Is not cement I covering it with. Is concrete. When you mix cement and sand you get concrete. Mix it right and it will last forever.”

“Concrete, cement, all the same to me.”

“Bet you wouldn’t say cake and flour is the same. Anyway, me nevvah come all de way a England fi keep jungle.”

She had not protested further, blaming herself for failing to stake a claim on the garden earlier. But looking at the churned-up soil, the dying plants and the mound of gravel, she was angry with herself. But how could she have claimed the garden when she worked almost as many hours as Lucas and did all the household chores and looked after the children? Lucas was like concrete, as insensitive and hard as the cold, grey material he seemed determined to cover the earth with.

The colours outside and the smell and taste of fried plantain mingled to create a feeling of tranquillity, and Rhoda’s mind filled with vivid memories of another time and place. One memory was so clear that she almost felt herself to be there. It is a bright, cloudless day and she is standing on the veranda wearing a flowery, sleeveless cotton dress and her mother is hanging out clothes on a line that runs from a veranda post to a flame tree in bloom. A gentle breeze billows the clothes and the air is filled with the aroma of fried plantain. Her grandmother sits a few yards away in a rocking chair, shelling gungo peas. Her younger sister, Irene, and several cousins are playing in the yard and on the veranda. Somebody, maybe her mother, is singing and her grandmother is humming softly.

These reveries fuelled her conviction that she had never been happier than when the mid-morning sun hovered over the house and her grandmother sat in her rocking chair on the veranda. Yes, there had been relentless hardship, but it was also a place of laughter and singing, a place of joyful celebration. How she missed it! Lucas would always ensure that she and their children would be housed, fed and clothed, but she doubted both his ability to make her happy and his own capacity for happiness. He seemed all restless energy and ambition. Birthdays, their wedding anniversaries, Easter and Christmas meant nothing to him. Although the family still only occupied two rooms, he was talking about buying a car, and maybe a second house. He was a man in flight from Egypt who lacked a vision of a promised land.

The fourth child was a boy and they named him Vincent. Rhoda returned to work only a month later, but the interlude left a lasting impression on her. During it she stood her ground more often with Lucas – and recognised with brutal clarity one of his several shortcomings. Her greatest victory was to win the case for the family taking over the basement, giving them exclusive use of two floors. Two rooms for the children and they would cease sharing the bathroom with their tenants. Long after conceding defeat, Lucas was still complaining about the revenue loss.

She concentrated on trying to recreate the home she had known. She sang to her children, taught them to sing, took them to church, and on their birthdays made sure there were flowers in the house and some kind of celebration – however muted by Lucas’s solemn refusal to participate. It was far short of the ideal, but somewhat closer to what she had left behind in Jamaica, memories of which continued to be stirred by the aroma of fried plantain.

It was some years later, not long after Lucas had bought his second house – which he spent many hours repairing – that Rhoda’s world was thrown into tumult. One Saturday morning, while choosing a piece of yam at a stall on Ridley market, with nothing more on her mind than finding the ingredients for a Saturday soup, she became aware of a woman staring at her. The woman was small, brown and wiry and had a pretty but pinched face. Rhoda wondered whether she’d mistaken her for somebody else. Disconcerted by the stranger’s gaze, Rhoda returned her attention to the yams.

“Just off the boat from Jamaica, luv. Lovely yam.” The stall holder was ruddy-faced, with a bulbous red nose. Looking away from him, Rhoda saw that the woman, a smile now on her lips, was still looking at her. The yam was too old, but she bought it and hurried away, feeling unnerved.

The next Wednesday, as she was feeding the children, the doorbell rang. A wave of agitation coursed through her when she saw the same woman from the market standing on her doorstep.

“I’ve come to see bout the empty room,” she said.

“Empty room! There’s no empty room here.”

“Well, somebody tell me Mr Bostock have empty rooms.”

“Oh, you must mean at the other house. My husband’s not home yet. You have to call back.”

“When he does come home?”

Rhoda guessed that the woman came from either St Lucia or Dominica. “Different times. He’s probably at the other house now. You have the address.”

“Yes. I does know it. But I have others things to do. Tell he Juliet Basquat come to see the room.”

“Yes, okay.”

“You’ll remember, won’t you? Juliet. Juliet Basquat. Make sure you tell he. Tell he Juliet Basquat,” she repeated as she backed out of the gate, then walked away.

Rhoda thought the woman was strange, maybe even unbalanced. Her work in Homerton Hospital’s geriatric ward had given her some insight into the peculiar pathways that the mind can take. The woman had not even left any contact details. Nonetheless, she made it a point to remember the name and pass it on to Lucas. He came home late that night, as he had been doing most nights recently. His entry into the bedroom stirred her out of a light sleep into a room filled with the smell of soap and toothpaste. She knew she wanted to tell him something but could not immediately recall what it was. Only after he was in bed did she remember.

“Somebody come looking for a room, this evening.”

“Here?”

“Yes, a woman.”

“A woman?”

“Yes, a woman. She say her name was Juliet Basquat.”

Rhoda was suddenly aware of a tremor in the bed, as if an insect had bitten Lucas.

“Juliet what?”

“Juliet Beckett. Something like that.”

“She say how to contact her?”

“No.”

Lucas switched on the light, got out of bed and went to the bathroom. He was gone for what seemed like a long time. Rhoda had started drifting back into sleep when he returned and her last memory of the night was of Lucas lying beside her in bed, his left foot shaking, a sure sign of anxiety.

Her own anxiety was only just beginning. On her next visit to Ridley Market, this time accompanied by Vincent and Maureen, she saw Juliet Basquat again, standing among a group of young women on the corner of Colvestone Crescent. Her hair, recently pressed, was pulled back, making her gaunt orange-complexioned face seem leaner than before. It gave her a severe prettiness that seemed full of malice.

Rhoda hesitated and thought briefly of how to avoid walking too close to her, but with the children at her side and the crowd thronging around them, she had no choice but to continue and hope that woman did not see her. She seized the children’s hands and pressed on. But Juliet Basquat stepped out from among the group of women and blocked her progress.

“Mrs Bostock, you tell your husband I want a room?” She stood akimbo and glared at Rhoda.

Rhoda gripped the children’s hands and gathered herself up to her full height, towering over Juliet Basquat’s diminutive but menacing figure.

“I told him, yes. But you didn’t say how he could contact you.”

The young women were paying close attention to the exchange, and Rhoda felt their eyes trained on her. Juliet Basquat turned to her friends and said, “You hear that? He don’t know how to contact me. That Jamaican bastard don’t know how to contact me, but he know where to find me when he need some brown sugar, eh.”

Her friends erupted in salacious laughter. Stung by the bitter truth that she had spent days denying, Rhoda sidestepped the younger woman and carried on her way. Juliet Basquat shouted after her, “A real woman know how to keep she man.” Laughter fell on her ears like stones and pursued her through the market as if she were a common thief being chased by a mob.

Rhoda avoided the market for several months. She shopped locally until Lucas, speaking as if addressing a recalcitrant apprentice on the building site, complained about the sameness and Englishness of her meals. Then she found shops in Lower Clapton and Finsbury Park selling Caribbean produce, and used them regularly, despite the inconvenience of the bus journeys there. Sometimes, as she journeyed to and from work or shopped at this greater distance, she could not help interpreting a lingering glance or a mocking smile from a female stranger as signs from Lucas’s lovers. Once, when a woman looked at her longer than she thought proper for a stranger, she panicked, abandoned the basket of yam, plantain, pumpkin and dasheen she had gathered and fled, only regaining her composure on a bench in Finsbury Park.

When the malicious laughter and knowing smiles followed her into her bed, as she lay there alone at night, fearing Lucas’s return from whatever repairs the second house supposedly required, and there was nowhere else to run, she wandered down to the basement where the children slept, crept into their dark rooms and listened for any signs of irregular breathing. After she’d silently adjusted their blankets for warmth and comfort, she returned to her own bed, her eyes first moist, then streaming with tears for the bountiful blessing of the Almighty. And when Lucas finally came home and lay beside her, she accepted his presence as punishment for her past sin, the secret that bound them together.

5. Lucas alone, some months later

One November evening, Lucas entered his house and noticed straightaway a damp patch on the hallway ceiling. He paused to gaze at it; it was shaped like a large island surrounded by chain of smaller islands. The stain puzzled him, as the weather had been cold and dry in recent weeks. Maybe a tenant had spilled water on the landing. He cursed silently and resolved to investigate after eating dinner.

In the back room, where the family usually gathered before dispersing to their individual spaces, he found the three boys watching television, the only light in the room. They mumbled good evening but did not avert their eyes from the flickering screen. It was the darkened kitchen that first struck him as unusual.

“Where’s yuh mother?” he said.

Samuel, the eldest boy, looked at his father, and just then the television light flared, illuminating an expression that was both anxious and defiant.

“She’s not here.”

“And your sister?”

“She’s not here, either.”

“Unnu eat yet?”

“Yes. Mummy left some food for us.”

“She not here when unnu come home?”

“No. She told me she wouldn’t be here. I’d to let in Neville and Vincent.”

“She tell you… What d’you mean…?” Momentarily lost for words, Lucas noted that the boy sounded more grown-up than he had ever heard him sound, as if the tasks Rhoda had entrusted him with had propelled him closer to adulthood in one day.

Lucas went into the kitchen and found a large pot of rice and a Dutch pot of bony beef stew. He stood over the stove and shovelled some rice, then beef into his mouth. The bittersweet brown stew of stringy beef, though cold, had an immediate impact on his stomach, which had been growling over the past hour; now it purred. Although he was still hungry, he went looking in the bedroom. There was an empty space above the wardrobe where they normally kept some of the suitcases they’d brought ten years ago from Ladbroke Grove.

Then he saw the envelope on the mantelpiece above the gas fire. He snatched it up, ripped it open and read: Lucas, I can’t take this life you have made for us anymore. Please look after our sons. I will be in touch when I have found somewhere to live. May God forgive me.

Lucas’s legs suddenly felt weak but a simultaneous explosion of rage kept him upright. He squashed the note and envelope into a ball and hurled it onto the bed. Head swarming with sulphurous curses, fists clenched, he stepped over to the wardrobe, which was large and plain with a reflective mahogany veneer that gave it a deceptive appearance of solidity. He raised and pulled back his right hand, the hand he had once thought would make his fortune in the boxing ring, and slammed it into the wardrobe door. It cracked, splintered and absorbed his fist into the empty compartment where Rhoda’s clothes once hung. Jagged shards of wood penetrated his jacket sleeve, pierced his skin and sent a hot pain searing through his wrist. He yanked out his hand and unleashed another punch that was equally destructive and painful. Blood splashed on his face as he readied himself to deliver the final blow to his imaginary opponent who was, he knew, even in the most remote corner of his rage, himself.