Look At You E-Book

Amanda Smyth

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

Seitenzahl: 297

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This powerful novel in stories follows its young narrator, growing up in a divided family. Shifting between Trinidad, England, and Ireland, she must learn to make sense of herself, and take her place in a world full of contradictions, cruelty and temptation. Look At You grabs the attention elegantly, with sharp dialogue, acuteness of observation, and the joy of meeting complex characters. The frank and engaging narrator, recognising the independent otherness of the people she writes about, has an alert eye for moments of epiphany, absurdity, sadness and comedy. 'Amanda Smyth writes like a descendant of Jean Rhys...a born novelist' ALI SMITH 'Smyth's writing is as lushly beautiful as the landscape she describes' THE TIMES 'Like Alice Walker, Smyth vividly and empathetically re-creates gender and racial tensions' ELLE MAGAZINE 'Hypnotic and heartbreaking... this may be Amanda Smyth's best book yet.' PAUL MURRAY

Leseprobe

AMANDA SMYTH

LOOK AT YOU

CONTENTS

Prologue

Ann

Alan

Sandra

Roxy

Mano

Magician

Della

Sam

Charlie

Arnaud

Ann

The Woman

Joe

Ray

Helena

Father

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

— Anais Nin

PROLOGUE

I am looking at a photograph of my father. We are in Trinidad. His blond hair is cut short, and there’s no trace of a beard. His eyes are closed, and he is lying very straight and stiff on the pale sand. He could in fact be dead. Only you wouldn’t expect a man, tanned, and so young to be dead.

“Look at you,” Luke says, and points to a tiny child kicking at the edge of the clear water. Luke isn’t there, but he is there in the next photograph. He is young and staring up at a white sky; snow is falling. He is wearing a party hat and holding something, but it is difficult to see what this is. I can make out a blurry shape, and then I remember that it’s a remote-control plane. Something is written on the back of the photograph. I read aloud, “Christmas 1972.” Luke says “Jesus,” and looks hard at the picture.

I push my hand into the bottom of the cardboard box and find my father standing outside the Town Hall in Leeds. His hand is raised as though he did not want to have a photograph taken. He is wearing a knitted cap and a sweater with patches on the sleeves. It’s hard to tell exactly how old he is because of his beard. This photograph was definitely taken after my mother had left him. “You’d never know it was the same man,” I say to Luke, holding up the photo taken of him in Trinidad. He leans over and examines the two images, and then shakes his head.

In a square snap, my Trinidadian grandparents are perched on a bench, and, to one side, miraculously reflected in a shimmering lake, are the silver pipes of the refinery and a lilac flame shooting out into the bright blue sky. On the left, Helena is in uniform and standing beside a pram. I wonder who is in it and if it could be my mother. And if it is, I wonder if there is a little seed called a “donkey eye”, which they say brings luck to a baby, hidden under her pillow. My mother says she never had much luck, but I don’t think that’s true.

There’s Alan, my mother’s boyfriend. I can never imagine him young, and why should I. My memories of Alan are exactly like this photograph: a tall, broad man with grey hair and big hands. He is standing outside his house, leaning up against the gate. I know it is winter because the trees are bare. I wonder who took the photograph, and guess that it might have been my mother; he has a particular, tender look.

Here is my father again. This time sitting on the doorstep of his back-to-back house in Leeds. The sun is pouring down on to his face, and the tilted face of his second wife who is cradling a tiny baby, my half-brother. They look very happy. In the background, an older woman is waving at the camera. Shadows from washing lines stretch across the street, and I remember that the house where my father lived didn’t have a bathroom.

Next, Alan and me are sitting in a restaurant. I am wearing a white dress, and I am young, twenty-one, perhaps. I also look awkward. Alan has his arm around my shoulder, and he is very thin. “My God,” I say, “that was taken just before he died, at The Ivy,” and I give the picture to Luke, who passes me a photograph of him, me and Roxy sitting on the fuselage of an aeroplane. An image so clear it might be a postcard. On the back, I recognise the name of a photographer’s studio in San Fernando. I think of how many times I have flown across the Atlantic. And how I will probably continue to do so for the rest of my life.

Now, my mother and father are together in black and white on a grassy bank at a place I recognise at once. In the background there is an abandoned car and I can just make out the rough sea. The wind is pushing down the grass and blowing out my mother’s hair. She has her arms around my father’s neck, and she is staring right into his eyes. I have never seen my mother look at anyone in this way. I would call that love. But my father, he seems to be leaning backwards, and with a dark almost comical expression, pulling away from her, as if he knows something she doesn’t know. My mother must be seventeen years old and therefore not yet my mother. I look at this photograph for a long time.

ANN

I liked to watch her face breaking through the surface in the pool, the big blue pool at the club where I played every day during summer holidays. Helena, my grandmother’s housekeeper, sat beneath the coloured parasol, while I swam with Luke, and the other children who lived on the refinery camp: swam, and ran about on the hot concrete, and threw coins in the water and dived down to find them, and jumped from the tall diving board.

From there I could see the refinery, the burning lilac flame. I could see the dark green places full of clumps of bamboo. I could see the shimmering lake and the brown bank where vultures made a black crowd. Before we hit the water, we yelled out our names or the name of someone famous who we’d like to be. Sometimes we screamed because the diving board was a skyscraper and the pool below a faraway city. Helena would look up from her bible and say, “Stop that noise, be quiet.” And we’d stop for a while, but then someone would throw a coin into the pool, or push someone in, and we’d start shouting again. This would go on all day, until we were told to come in for lunch, or it was time to go home. By afternoon, my skin was wrinkled like an old person’s.

I knew Ann was older, by at least three years. Mostly, she sat, in her orange bikini, in a wrought-iron chair, her legs propped on another chair, reading a book. Sometimes, she walked to the edge of the pool, made a steeple with her hands and dived in. Or she swam to the other side, or to the other side and back again. But she never stayed in the pool for long. If we were playing in the deep end, she swam in the shallow. And if we were playing in the shallow end, she swam where the water was deep.

Her name was Ann Sanchez. I would never have spoken to her if I hadn’t found her necklace. I was looking for a tencent piece when I saw it lying on the grate at the bottom of the pool. I knew it didn’t belong to any of us. When I held it up, it sparkled in the sun. Someone said I should keep it. I didn’t know what to do. Luke thought I should ask Helena or take it home and ask our mother.

Then I saw her standing by her chair. One hand made a shade over her eyes, the other held on to her hip. Her skin shone like liquorish.

“Hold on a minute,” I said to the others, and climbed out of the water. She wrapped a towel around her waist and walked towards me. When I asked if the chain was hers, she looked in the cup of my hand and cocked her head like a bird.

“I’ve been looking for that for the longest while.”

Her voice was soft, tinkling and gentle, like the voice of a stream if a stream could speak. When I dropped the chain into her hand, her full mouth grew wide in a smile, and I thought how large her teeth were. I was about to go back to the shallow end when she asked where I was from.

When I told my mother I had met a girl called Ann at the pool, she asked, as they always ask in Trinidad, if I knew the family name. Sanchez, I said. My mother and grandmother spent the whole evening talking about the Sanchez family they had known when my mother was a child.

So I heard about Mona with the Coca-Cola figure who won a competition for the most beautiful girl in South Trinidad. I heard about Mona’s uncle, a teacher who never got married. I heard about her father, who was killed in an automobile accident, and how her mother tried to kill herself by hanging from a light fitting, but someone heard the chair fall, and the rope broke because it was old and frayed. I heard about her mother’s lover who lived in Barbados and how he took all her money and threw it away in running a failed fast-food restaurant. This is what happens in Trinidad. You say one name and, next thing, they’re talking about the family for hours.

Everyday while the other children played, I sat with Ann. We talked about all sorts of things: music, fashion and film stars. Sometimes I talked about Ireland. I talked about the town where we lived and the rainy beach with coppery rocks. I told her about my father and how he couldn’t come to Trinidad because he was starting a new job in a textile company, and that he played drums in a jazz band. Ann said music was good for the soul. She could play the piano up to Grade 4.

She had never had a boyfriend and didn’t want to get married until she was at least twenty-five. Her older sisters lived with her mother in London, and they were already talking about getting engaged. She had been to England three times and hoped one day to study music at the Royal College of Music in London. She wanted to compose music for musicals and films. When she talked about this, she moved her hands a lot and her words came in a rushing, energetic way. She liked reading novels, too, novels by Charlotte and Emily Bronte. When she said she wanted to walk on the English moors, walk and walk until it was so dark you couldn’t see anymore, I said, it’s much too cold. Ann said she couldn’t care less if it snowed.

Sometimes we sat on the steps and dangled our legs in the water, or we lay on towels by the side of the pool. We lay on our fronts and faced each other so our words fluttered over the grass. Or we lay on our backs with our arms by our sides and our words went up and seemed to get stuck in the thick, hot air. Sometimes we kept our eyes closed and didn’t talk at all.

Ann went home for lunch, but every now and then, when her stepmother, Rosa, was away, and her father, Dr Sanchez, was working at the hospital in Port of Spain, she stayed at the club. Helena said it was okay to go up to the snack bar with Ann. We ordered hamburgers or hot dogs and fries and sweet drinks and brought them back to the table and ate them under our parasol.

One day, we were lying by the pool and Luke was sitting on the diving board eating an ice cream. Ann said she didn’t like ice cream but she liked chocolate, especially English chocolate.

I said, “Maybe I can send you some when I go back.”

Ann opened her eyes.

“I can put them in one of those special padded envelopes. Mars bars, or Milky Ways, Galaxy, whatever you like.”

Ann sat up, and her back made a curve like a bow. She said, “When are you going back?”

I said I wasn’t sure but probably sometime soon. I said it in a casual way.

Ann walked to the edge of the pool and dived in. I watched her shape glide through the water to the other side and thought of an arrow passing through air. Then I thought how quickly the summer had passed and how, if I could only wind it back like a movie, I would wind it back to when we met.

That day we went home early. Over lunch, Luke and I listened to my mother and grandmother talk about all the things we had to do before we left. The guava jelly, pepper sauce and pastels had to be made. We had to visit relatives in the city and drive east to see the old house and take pictures of it before it fell down. We had to see the dressmaker, the dentist, a dying aunt I’d never met. There was so much to do. Luke rolled his eyes, and I knew, that like me, he didn’t want to do any of those things.

Suddenly Helena was clearing the table, and my grandfather was going to rest. I was thinking about the book I had borrowed from Ann, and wondering if I should read in the verandah or beneath the mosquito net, when my grandmother said, “Why don’t you invite her for tea?”

“Who?”

“The Sanchez girl,” she said, as though to say, who else could it be? “The Sanchez girl you see at the pool.”

So, I rang Ann from the old black phone in the hallway. I said, “Listen, why don’t you come for tea?” And she laughed because she was going to call and ask if I wanted to come and have supper at her house. She was going to call, but thought that maybe she should leave it until later, because all now we might be having a rest and she didn’t want to disturb us.

“Ann,” I said, “you come here because they would all love to meet you. I’ve been talking about you so much; they can’t wait to meet you. It’s Ann this and Ann that. And they want to know about your family!”

So, she said yes, but not yes in a way that was polite; she said yes as though it was the most important thing in her whole life.

I was hanging around the kitchen waiting to lick the bowl from the sponge cake when my grandfather came home. He said something about the lazy men on the refinery and how they were only good for two things: making love and dancing. My grandmother made a sshhh sound and put her finger to her lips. In the back room, Helena cleared her throat. I wondered what she thought when she heard him talking like that. I wondered if she hated him, and that, if she did, maybe he should be careful, because Helena knew things my mother and my grandmother didn’t know.

Sometimes, when the sky was red, as if the sun had been bleeding, we walked by the long grass and the shimmering lake and Helena told me stories about a terrible woman with a hoof for a foot, and how she took away your soul while you slept. If she took away your soul you might have to spend your whole life looking for it.

“This what make some people restless,” she said. “They looking for their soul.”

I asked her if that’s what made Grandpa that way; that maybe he was trying to find his soul. Helena said no, and then she looked at me in a way I will never forget.

“No, miss,” she said. “Your grandpa never had a soul, so how anybody could anybody steal it?”

Luke said Helena was trying to frighten me and I thought he might be right. But I also knew that even if she was, it didn’t mean that she was lying.

When the cake was cool, my grandmother covered it with chocolate buttery icing. Then she made a jug of lime-juice from the limes I’d collected in the yard that morning. My mother filled bread rolls with ham and cheese, and there were little pies with mince inside, arranged on a tray. In the dining room, Helena dressed the table with a crocheted cloth and placed a thick group of lilies in a white vase. Above, the old fan was spinning and making its familiar, humming sound. I wondered if Luke was playing cricket in the yard next door. I could hear voices.

I pulled back the net curtain and looked out at the yard where the light was pale gold and thought how lucky I was to have Ann coming for tea. Who knew, maybe we would write to each other for a long time. Maybe she would come and visit me in Ireland! I imagined her in a winter coat, a knitted hat and boots, the two of us lying on a mountain of heather looking up at the Irish sky. And I thought how lucky I was to have a grandfather who sent me a ticket every year, so I could come to Trinidad and make new friends like Ann Sanchez. I felt annoyed with Helena for saying what she said.

*

I sang while I bathed. Then I dressed in my favourite purple top and matching shorts. I combed my long hair and decided to leave it loose. When I first arrived, I was so pale I could trace all my veins like rivers on a map. Now I was a dark reddish brown and the whites of my eyes were like the whites of eggs cooked in a pan. Ann said my eyes were the prettiest eyes she’d ever seen.

“No, Ann, yours are the prettiest,” I’d said. “They remind me of night.”

I heard the car in the driveway. Then my mother called to say, Someone’s here! Running down the stairs, my Trinidad slippers made a loud clacking sound. In the kitchen my mother was shaving ice, and my grandmother was sprinkling hundreds and thousands over the cake.

“Take your time, take your time!” my grandmother said.

I ran out, and into the yard and up to the top of the driveway where Ann was waiting. She looked different. She was wearing a white frilly dress and white stockings, and her shoes were shiny with buckles, like shoes I might wear in England. Her hair was parted and bunched with coloured bobbles. She looked younger, too; and her skin seemed smoother and darker in the fading light.

We walked around the front of the house. I showed Ann the swing my grandfather had made, the cuckoo nest with the tiny eggs, and the place where Buddy was buried. Then I took her into the verandah, where she admired my grandmother’s plants and the marble table my uncle had brought from Argentina. Climbing into the green, striped hammock, I noticed her flowery scent.

From this low place, I could see the clear sky and the tops of the coconut trees at the far side. Their fronds were moving like fingers, playing in the silvery light.

“Do you ever wish you could be somewhere else?” Ann said.

“Not right now. I’m happy here with you.”

“You’re lucky to have two worlds,” she said and I didn’t quite understand what she meant.

I didn’t hear my mother come into the verandah, but when I looked up she was there. I knew at once there was something wrong; and I wondered if she was annoyed that I hadn’t brought Ann inside to meet her. Or perhaps she was annoyed that we were both in the hammock at the same time. She always said the hammock couldn’t take the weight of two people.

“This is Ann,” I said, pointing at my friend, who, with her arms all loose and her stockinged legs flopping over the side of the hammock, must have looked like a cloth doll.

“Hello, Ann.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Ann said in a polite voice.

“I know we shouldn’t both be in the hammock at the same time,” I said, struggling to climb out.

But my mother didn’t hear me; I saw her figure disappear into the dark house.

In the dining room, Helena placed a jug of water on the table. She was wearing her green apron and a matching hat that kept her hair back. The table looked impressive.

Ann sat opposite me and placed a napkin on her lap.

“Try the mince pies,” I said, “they’re delicious.”

Ann said everything looked delicious. We ate the sandwiches, and popcorn; we ate cheese straws and corn curls and salty, oily peanuts. There were little guava tarts with powdery sugar on the top and marshmallow squares in pastel shades. We were too full to eat the cake, so I said we could wait a while and eat it later. The lime-juice was sweet and cold, and we drank so much it made us bloated. Ann said it was the best lime-juice she had ever tasted.

“You must tell my grandmother that,” I said, “she’ll be pleased.”

I knew my grandmother was still in the kitchen. When I called her and she didn’t come, I excused myself from the table.

My mother and grandmother were standing by the screen door.

“Ann likes your lime-juice,” I said. “Are you going to come and say hello?”

My grandmother looked troubled; her pale face was worried and suddenly older. I thought something had happened.

“Is everything all right?”

My mother looked at me in a strange way. Then she looked away at the clock above the stove.

“Your grandfather will be back soon,” she said. “Go and look after your guest.”

In my room, I showed Ann my favourite clothes: the striped top and matching skirt I wore when I travelled on the plane, and a glittery strapless top my mother said was much too old for me. Ann ran her hand over the tiny sequins. Pulling down the top of her dress, she held it up to her chest. In the mirror she turned to one side and back to the front again. I thought how sparkly and fancy it looked against her skin.

We sat on the floor and looked through some English magazines. I told Ann I might be a model one day and make lots of money.

On the old tape recorder, I played her my favourite disco tune and showed her the special dance moves my friend had taught me. Ann thought they were funny, but she tried to do them too, and soon we were both jumping up and down and wriggling our hips and swinging our arms as though we were waving flags. Ann showed me a three-step which she said was a typical Trinidad dance.

From the window, I saw my grandfather parking his car in the driveway. He looked up and I waved in the same dancing way, and Ann looked down and waved at him too.

Tired, we lay on the bed. A wind blew the curtains and made them swell like sails.

“I will write, you know,” I said.

Ann said she knew I would, and she would write too. Then she looked at her watch and said her father would soon be here.

“Let’s go eat the chocolate cake,” I said and jumped up from the bed.

I heard his voice from the landing. I could hear the voices of my grandmother and my mother too, but mostly it was his voice, rising above theirs in a way I knew meant he was angry. I made a face at Ann and ran quickly down the stairs. Then I closed the kitchen door so she wouldn’t be able to hear.

“Go and wait in the verandah,” I said. “I’ll bring the cake outside.”

I don’t know if she heard him say “pickney”, and “I want the pickney out of my house.” But I’m sure she didn’t hear him say he would never bring his granddaughter back to the islands again if all she could find to play with was some pickney from the pool, because by then she was outside. I could see her sitting in the hammock.

“I’ll send her somewhere else for holidays; somewhere she can be with children like her.”

Ann hadn’t finished her cake when her father pulled up in the driveway. She said she must say thank you to my mother, but I told her it didn’t matter; they were all busy inside talking about a family problem and I would tell them myself on her behalf.

I kissed her on both cheeks like they do in Europe. Then I said goodbye, and that, if I could, I would try to see her at the pool before I left.

When I turned to go back to the house, Helena was standing by the door. I knew she was going for a walk because she was wearing her afternoon dress. She didn’t look upset, but there was something in her eyes that made me feel ashamed.

Upstairs, I folded my clothes and put away the old tape recorder. Then I straightened up the magazines and closed the curtains. On my pillow I could smell Ann’s flowery scent.

ALAN

When Luke started to choke, I thought that was the end of him, the end of my life as I knew it, and also, perhaps, my father’s life. We were sitting at the dining table with the glass top in the front room; in the middle of the table was a large candle that my mother had forgotten at the back of a cupboard. For some reason my mother never liked to use things up. You could look in her cupboard and, chances are, find exactly whatever you wanted like new and still in cellophane.

“Red is a lucky colour,” I’d said, “let’s put it on the table.”

There were Christmas cards strung above the windows, a plastic, flashing Santa on the wall and, in the far corner of the room, a real Christmas tree that my mother and I had bought in the village. I remember how we stood around in the cold, waiting, until a young boy unloaded a new batch and lined them up at the front of the shop. She pointed to the tallest tree which, when untied, sprung into a broad and shaggy shape. “Just think,” she said, as we were driving through the fields towards the house, “if we didn’t have this big car, we couldn’t carry it home.”

Alan had found some old decorations in the garage. My mother said we could keep the tinsel, but there was no point in using old baubles – you could buy such pretty ones now. “We’re starting over,” she said, when Alan went inside. “May as well do it properly.” So we got in the car and drove to Schofields’ department store where, while my mother looked for lights, I found baubles and a sparkly angel for the top. She bought crackers to put on the branches and cotton wool to wrap around the base. When Alan saw the decorated tree, he clapped his hands. Then he stood away from it and ran his fingers through his grey hair. “That’s the best Christmas tree I’ve seen in years.”

“Do you know how lucky we are?” my mother said, looking around my newly decorated bedroom at the floral curtains and lilac walls. We were standing at the full-length window, which opened onto a small balcony. From there, we could see the bare apple tree and the huge pine tree at the end of the sloping lawn. Later, I thought, I might collect some cones and spray them silver and gold. A light snow was falling and landing on the grass like flour.

“Who’d have guessed?” she said, smiling and shaking her head. I thought how pretty she looked, her deep brown hair tied up, in her jeans and casual shirts, more like an older sister than my mother.

Luke’s room was smaller, and the view was different. You could see the square patch of grass and a thin path that led to the gate. It made a creaking sound, especially when someone left it open and the wind blew. Luke had a desk and shelves where he could keep his books; there were coloured beanbags on the floor. That same day, I sat on one and showed him the striped tie I’d bought for Alan, and lavender oil I’d bought for our mother.

“Is that it?” Luke asked.

I said, “Get something else, then,” and threw the change onto his bed. He counted the coins.

“There’s enough here for some rope.”

“Rope?” I said.

“So she can hang herself. Either that, or a red bulb to put in the light.”

I don’t think my brother knew what he was talking about. Sure, he had heard about prostitutes, but he didn’t really know what they did or how they made a living, any more than I knew. I told him: whatever he said came straight out of our father’s mouth.

Once a month, my mother put Luke and I on a train to Leeds. We passed through mining villages and big open stretches of land where there were little farms and cottages, and tiny roads like veins. Everything seemed to be brown or green or somewhere in-between. As we approached the centre, we saw grey ugly cubes that were part of an industrial estate, rows and rows of dark terraced houses, and flats in high tower blocks. Sometimes I’d look up at them and think, thank God we don’t live there. When the train pulled into the Victorian station, our father was waiting on the platform – usually leaning up against a post or sitting on a bench checking something in the paper.

It was awkward at first. After we said hello, the three of us often walked along the station road in silence like strangers. But then he would take us to the Royal Oak pub over the road from where he lived, and in no time he was chatting to people, and having us meet his friends. My brother played songs on the jukebox, and pushed coins in the fruit machine, and when they ran out our father gave him more. Now and again the fruits made a winning line and Luke cheered. Then our father shouted, “Drinks on you, Luke!” I thought his Irish accent was strong and I wondered if anyone else thought so too. We ate fish and chips and if we were lucky, as a special treat, he bought us an ice cream from a Mr. Whippy’s ice cream van parked up on the corner of the street. Sometimes we got a Chinese take-away and went to his house.

On the way back to the station, he would talk in a loud and sentimental way. “Tell your mother, once she’s stopped fooling around, to give me a call.” I’d want to say, How can she give you a call when you don’t have a telephone? Or he might say, “One of these days, I’m going to come and get you. Tell your mother to be ready with her bags.”

If our mother had known how we spent the day, she would never have let us go. What’s the point in telling her, Luke said. She would only get upset, especially if she knew some of the things he said about her. Like that time we were at his house, and I was trying to figure out a way that I could move things around to make more space, and I heard him talking to Luke in the kitchen. “She sold her soul for a posh house,” he said. “How’s that?” my brother asked, his voice flat and awkward. “In some ways, your mother’s a whore, Luke. A lovely whore, but a whore nonetheless.” I pulled back the bamboo beaded curtain that separated the two rooms and Luke looked up, and then he looked at our father who didn’t seem to notice I was there and carried on dishing out the Chinese rice. Then he gave Luke a fork, patted his blond head and went into the living room.

In the street where my father lived there were washing lines strung between the houses. I had never seen houses like these before. Red brick, back-to-back, with three rooms and a toilet. When I asked him where he bathed, he told me he used the public baths in the city centre because it didn’t cost anything and you could go anytime. He said he washed and brushed his teeth in the old kitchen sink. I must have pulled a face because he said, “Don’t start getting all high and mighty on me.” The streets around there had similar names. Queen Street became Queen Avenue, or Queen Place, Queen Road, Queen Drive, Queen Terrace, and so on. I could never remember exactly where he lived. When Alan took us away to southern Spain for a vacation, I wrote my father a postcard, but didn’t know where to send it, so I took a chance and put “road.” And by some small miracle it turned out to be right.

My mother came back from the Spanish resort with a dark tan and an assortment of leather goods. I had never seen her so happy. It wasn’t the kind of happiness she had when she was in Trinidad, the kind that comes from a sense of belonging and sure footedness. It was quite different, and it made her seem alive and hopeful. For the first time in years, apart from Luke, she didn’t have to worry about a thing.

When Luke came home from school, he stayed in his room or watched television in the den. During mealtimes, he hardly spoke, unless (and this was very obvious) our mother mentioned someone he used to know or a place we used to visit. And then he talked in a free and open way. But if she asked him a question about anything to do with our present life – his new school or a friend in the village where we now lived – he gave clipped one-word answers. Now and again, I saw Alan looking across the table at my brother as though he wanted to say something harsh. I told Luke: whatever you try to do to break them up will only bring them closer together. This, of course, was not true. There were times, rare times, when Alan raised his voice at my mother, and it was usually because of something Luke had or hadn’t done.

Luke shouted in his sleep. I couldn’t understand what he said, but when I went into his room, he was often thrashing about, as if he was having a fit or a fight with someone. Every now and then he talked about running away.

“How far do you think you’ll get before the police find you? You might make it into town, and then what?”

“I could stay with Dad,” he’d say.

“The authorities will only bring you back.” He knew that was true; social services would not have allowed him to live in our father’s house.

“I can always ask Grandpa to send me a ticket and I’ll go and live in Trinidad.”

“You’re twelve years old,” I said. “When you grow up you can live where you like.”

Sometimes I looked at Luke and I remembered a small child, in Sligo, playing on a beach with his father. And my mother and I searching for razor shells on the other side