THURSDAY
07 NOVEMBER, 1996
ISAIAH

               It smells like it always did: of cigarettes, singed hair, and the rose water she used to apply to her skin before that, too, became too difficult.

As I stand bolted to the threshold, a new odour glides over my trainers and drenches my ankles, from where it bloats to my head, unprecedented but identified with the first inhale — death. The rotting of a corpse for three days before anybody missed her enough to come looking clings to the walls like damp. Figment of my imagination or not, it's visceral.

When I dare my first step inside, wrapping my arms around myself in the chill, my eyes fall through the living room doorway to the marigold sofa where I assume her body was found. It looks no different than when I left.

Nothing about the house looks different than when I left. I wish the patterned wallpaper would peel, the wicker chair adjacent to the sofa to rot and pulverise, for the fringe on the lampshade and curtains to burst aflame — for the ceiling to collapse. I wish the house would mourn so I might be able to.

But nothing looks different than when I left.

The living room is checkered by the same burglar bars behind the window that slice sunlight into rectangles. A framed map of Jamaica is still tilted. Though the mint green fan beside the telephone is off, I hear it hum, as though I'm standing somewhere on the precipice of the past and the present and experience both in tandem.

In the kitchen, the five o'clock sun stamps the same triangles onto the same brown cabinets that clash wonderfully with the same avocado-green fridge. In place of a toaster or kettle, neither of which we've ever owned, stands a dutchie pot because all the cupboards in our English kitchen are either too shallow or too narrow to store it. Scratches in the pattered linoleum floor glow as light fills them, scrapes from the dishes I dropped due to muscle spasms or the chair I dragged from the table to reach the upper cabinets as a child. I think I'm hallucinating when I see August 1991 on the calendar beside the door but it doesn't leaf to November 1996 when I blink. 

I hug myself tighter. Muma didn't turn one page after I left.

Did the last five years of her life blend into one never-ending Thursday? Did time stop when it no longer measured anything of significance for her too? Minutes are minutes and hours are hours but time ceases to exist when there's nothing to count forward to. We both measured the days to my departure and sighed in relief when it arrived. Unfortunately, when you reach the peak of a mountain, there's nowhere to go but down.

I stare at it, praying for grief to emerge through the smoke that infests me though I still can't identify what's burning. Nothing comes. I don't collapse with agony nor am I struck by a revelation that makes sense out of all this — of my mother, of my existence, of the point of my existence.

Because what is the point? For me to slug through a hellscape where time doesn't exist and nor do other people — or if they do, their warmth is confined someplace I can't touch? A hellscape I can only temporarily escape through violence I purposefully incite so I can watch the bruises heal and, sicker still, dig my fingers into them whenever I start to miss life?

Surely, this is Gehinnom. Scripture claims it for the dead but for all intents and purposes, I'm as dead as my mother.

Muma was right: I am just like her. If not worse, because I'd sigh at her lazy refusal to care for herself enough to lock the door at night, all the while alleging whatever I've been doing for the past five years isn't self-destruction. My men are the sons of her men — twice as homicidal.

I peel myself from the calendar and out of the kitchen to find Dorian sitting on the cement step with the door open. A wistful smile graces his face as he stares out into the yard, caressing the stone absentmindedly.

He senses me looking and snaps his head around. 'Sorry. I'm sorry.' He attempts to stifle the smile but when it refuses to wilt, he shrugs with a level of nonchalance I've never witnessed in him. 'I just like the thought of you putting on your shoes here.'

I stare at him.

I used to sit on the cement doorstep to manoeuvre my shoes on because we never had a chair in the entrance. Muma always snapped at me when I did it — "You is already ill enough. Now you want a fever too?" It was exaggerated anger that was self-aware and therefore the perfect anecdote to share with friends about how ridiculous mothers are, though I wouldn't have known to phrase it like that back then. We must have been eight. How does he remember?

Dorian reads my silence as hurt or hatred and his eyes bounce around the hallway walls that frame me. 'I'm sorry.'

I shake my head. 'You're okay.'

What I mean to say is: I wouldn't survive this without you.

My fingers itch with the urge to get a cigarette between them. I make do with rubbing my tongue against the roof of my mouth for whatever placebo remnants of nicotine nest in its ridges.

I gesture at the stairs to tell Dorian I'm headed up.

Though I denounced the will, Mr Gibson understood the chances of the city managing to find a buyer are slim to none, thus, allowed me to pick up anything I want to keep. Unofficially and off the record, of course.

I can't stand the thought of Muma's wigs and dresses in someone else's closet, not when she refused to sell them even when we ate plain toast for three months. If not by some twinge of sympathy, then because the only ties I have to Jamaica are the things she brought with her. But maybe my owning them is worse for her.

My bedroom was always skeletal but now it's lifeless. Off-white wall, bed, kitchen chair, wardrobe. My school uniform, which I never dared to mix with the rest of my attire, isn't hanging from the closet door and the clothes I wore at home aren't piled onto the spare chair I used to throw them on when they weren't dirty enough for washing but not clean either. Schoolbooks aren't piled in the corner and there are no sheets on the bed. The only trace of me is the stickers she didn't manage to peel off the paint, though, judging by several torn corners, Muma tried.

The poetry I shred myself but the postcards Dorian sent me from Cairo are gone without explanation — I thought about burning those too but, all I could manage in the end was to leave them behind. 

When I check under my mattress, I find the porn magazines I used to hide there missing. The thought of Muma fishing them out with the handle of a mop to burn in the yard at three am when none of the neighbours would see should hurt, but all I do is smile.

I died five years ago and she cleared out my room. Now, it's time to return the favour.

The light that swims through the intricate Star of David suncatcher scatters iridescent dots across the walls. I can't remember the last time Muma slept here instead of on the sofa. Is that when she really died? Is a person dead when they feel like a stranger in their own bedroom?

I drift instinctively to the tall chest of drawers on top of which she kept bottles of perfumes and a jewellery tray. I freeze before I can reach it.

A photograph rests against the familiar bottle of handmade moringa perfume. It's old but in pristine condition, unmarred by a single crease or patch bleached by the sun. The couple depicted are strangers but I know who they are at first glance.

It's a picture of my parents... from before everything collapsed.

I'm careful to hold it by the sides and sink onto the bed. It must have been captured using a makeshift tripod and a timer, judging by the tilt of the furniture and their blurred silhouettes. Muma's laugh streaks as she glances at the man who slips onto the daybed behind her. He, too, is undefined.

The photograph immortalises the exact moment their eyes met and affection radiates like a halo around them.

So this is what my father looked — looks? — like. I spent innumerable sleepless nights assembling a face, leafing through potential features like a hardware catalogue for home renovations until I compiled a dozen options — Would I like him to look rustic or sweet? A warm smile is nice but isn't it the eyes that truly make a face kind? And what about colour?

By no lack of quantity, none of my imaginations got close. The man in the photograph looks so ordinary, and consequently, so real, that my lungs constrict.

He's sturdy, and though it's tough to judge by his posture in the picture, doesn't look particularly tall. He appears the kind of man who's strong without being visibly muscular. Dark green slacks are held up with suspenders over his button-down which is open enough for what I assume is his Star of David to glint on his sternum though only the chain is visible. With topaz skin and dark eyes, he could be of Spanish heritage just as well as he could be Arabic or North African.

I turn it over. All that's written on the back is the year "1971". No name, no goodbye, no postmortem note.

She knew I would come here, she knew the poet in me — if not just the parts of me that are her — wouldn't be able to resist the urge to pick at my scabs.

I used to pester Muma about him. She refused to tell me a single thing — not a name, a favourite colour, where they met, if I ever reminded her of him — and when she finally gives me what I want, it's from beyond the grave.

But maybe that's my fault too. Maybe she would have given me this in person if I hadn't left.

As a child, I convinced myself that God Themself must have stopped my father from coming with us. Isn't that what young lovers have done across the entirety of art: ran away together? And if thwarted, never by choice, never by selfishness or greed? Surely, he had a noble reason to disappear. Surely, he must have spent every waking moment searching for her, for us... for me. He must have craved a son as deeply as I craved a father.

By fourteen, I became jaded with the concept of fatherhood. If such a thing even exists. Hardly anywhere in the animal kingdom do males stick around after conception and as far as my dad went, he probably didn't need more than a packet of Pall Malls and petrol cash to ditch.

But if that's the case, am I not just like him? I abandoned her just like everyone else in her life.

I'm an exhibition of my mother's anger and my father's apathy.

The stairs creak even when Dorian does his best to avoid noise. Soon, I sense him watching me from the threshold but don't look until he speaks. 

'Your neighbour asked me to pass on her condolences. She made you these.' He holds a reused biscuit tin brimming with coconut drops, tamarind balls, fried plantain, and gizzada, no doubt from Auntie Tamila. A blend of guilt and gratitude churns in my chest.

She's the one who found her. What does she think of me? What kind of son leaves his dead mother to be stumbled upon by a neighbour after three days of rot?

Dorian drags hesitant steps into the bedroom. 'She wanted me to tell you she wrote the card herself.' His voice is thick with confusion.

Dorian has likely never met a person fluent in less than three languages — English, French, and either Italian, Latin, or Ancient Greek. The concept of a woman who reached thirty before she learnt to read and write simple sentences must be antique and alien to him.

I gesture to the turquoise tapestry above the bed. 'What's that say?'

'"Bless this home with love and joy".' He processes the words a moment later and darts his attention to his shuffling feet. He mouths an apology to his trainers. And if he'll apologize for things that aren't his fault, I'll apologise for something that is.

'My muma's thrown out all them those postcard you sent me. I'm sorry.'

'They're only cardboard.' Dorian has never been sentimental.

Still, I regret leaving them behind for her to discard. Or maybe I regret that I didn't discard them myself.

I don't know what makes me say it. Maybe I'm terrified of how my grudge has diluted since we came here, how it won't anchor me to the bottom of the sea anymore but I've forgotten how to breathe air and the last thing I want is to be released from it. Maybe I just want to hurt him so I don't bleed alone. Maybe I just want it off my chest. Either way, my voice is frigid when I tell him, and then, just exhausted.

'I burnt all the poetry I wrote about you. Well... all the poetry I wrote.' It was all about you. Even the ones I didn't write about you always found a way to become so, the way any river eventually meanders to sea. 'I was so angry when you left.'

Dorian nods and his features water. His grip strangles the biscuit tin. He isn't sentimental and the postcards didn't matter to him, but this... this racks through him and disconnects all his bones.

Art is never destroyed to free up space. Art is only destroyed to resuscitate a soul or to condemn one.

Though guilt is still significant in my bloodstream, I'm lightened by the confession. Weapons are heavy to carry. Their cruelty lies in the fact relief can only be found if they're used. Maybe I understand my mother now.

I offer the photograph to him. 'These are my parents.'

Dorian takes a moment to process, then treads forward to sit on the very edge of the bed. With a glance to ask for permission, he takes the picture, leaving the biscuit tin and Auntie Tamila's condolence card on his lap.

For a long while — that allows me to watch him, watch our knees only centimetres from each other, watch his body move as he breathes, watch the sunlight caress the back of his neck — he studies the photo. He takes in every detail, glancing at me several times as if to say so you inherited the tooth gap from your dad or you and your mum really have identical eyes, until he hands it back.

'They look happy.'

Of all the things he could say, this is the worst and the best. Best because doesn't everyone want to know their parents were once happy even if they don't remember them like that? Worst because I ruined it.

They were so happy until I ruined it. Affairs are a norm in the transactional marriages of the upper class, a secret everyone knows but keeps shrouded nonetheless. If Muma didn't fall pregnant, it would never have become a scandal. Honour wouldn't have ruptured and she wouldn't've had to leave.

I stare at the photo. I've never seen Muma like this: joyous and adoring, light and gentle.

Though she kept to pills and tried to hide them for the first years, Muma was using for as long as she was my mother, and because it's all I've ever known it's easy to think it's all she's ever been. Here, however, is indisputable proof that she was a woman before she was a mother.

Maybe this isn't a gift. Rather than a belated admission that she loved me and wished she'd been able to tell me so, maybe this is her fatal strike — This is what you took from me.