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I wondered what my heaven would be full of. But then I thought that I probably wouldn’t get a choice, bearing in mind the communal aspect of the project.
I prefer the word paradise to heaven, a word which joins us all the way from the Greek paradeisos, giving us one of my favourite ever adjectives – paradisiacal – a word which nobody actually uses.
My grandmother Nellie (who gave me her middle name, and her straight dark hair and skinny limbs) said that in heaven we’d be in white, wearing crowns and waiting around, like in the carol. I knew I didn’t want to wear a crown and I hated waiting around. So I hoped she was wrong. I still have no idea how it works, and I’d like to find out. Like we all would, I guess.
Julia said that heaven would be full of roses and waterfalls and flocks of white doves, which were three of her favourite things.
‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest,’ said my grandmother, who liked to talk in bible verses, set off by a word or a thought or a curse on somebody she didn’t like. She particularly liked to divide people into sheep and goats, popping my goat grandfather into the jaws of hell at every possible opportunity because he had gone off with his secretary soon after my mother was born.
My grandmother would sit in the corner of the lounge on Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons, commenting on our lives like a one-woman Greek chorus, whilst also playing with the silver crucifix which she wore around her neck. It had a little Jesus Christ on it, permanently dying. It bothered me.
To make room for the magical Asda Development, the terraced houses on the main road were being taken down, with the residents compensated, very generously, everybody said. The way they did it looked like slicing a rectangular block of Wall’s ice cream, one oblong at a time, and I thought that this was one of my best similes (bearing in mind the name of the brand of ice cream), though nobody else in the family appreciated my brilliance.
Mrs Venditti, who was married to the ice cream-van man, cried as number 3 was sliced, and my mother explained that this was because her baby had died inside that house of cot death. I’d heard this was to do with lying babies on their front, and I asked my mother if Mrs Venditti had done this, by mistake, but my mother said, ‘Can we change the subject?’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Because I don’t like thinking about dead babies,’ she said.
My father added, ‘Mrs Venditti is also Italian.’
I said, ‘What do you mean?’
He said, ‘Stop asking questions all the time.’
A driver in an old Renault 5 crashed into a minibus of school children because he was watching number 8 fall down, but nobody was badly hurt. A sign went up saying, ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ except you had to take your eyes off the road to look at the sign. Sometimes, I thought, adults just don’t think things through.
My mother let me wait on the main road in the evenings to meet our father on his way home from work. It made her feel that everything about our life was utterly perfect. Like the families in her second-hand Ladybird books, which continued to proliferate along the shelves of the somewhat over-varnished pine dresser.
The Greens’ house was the last to come down, and all six Greens stood on the opposite pavement watching, as I waited for my father, who soon came walking past, whistling, on his way back from Stanley Hope Uniforms.
‘This must be a very sad day for you,’ he said to Mr Green cheerfully, as if the thought of Mr Green’s sadness made him feel safer inside his own happiness.
‘It’s only bricks and mortar,’ said Mr Green, with his hands in his pockets.
‘It’s a home,’ said my father.
‘That’s sentimental, Stanley,’ said Mr Green.
My father didn’t seem to be able to find an answer for that.
‘Aren’t you worried?’ said Mr Green to my father as his old house crashed to the ground.
‘Why would I be worried?’ said my father.
‘Too much worry, Jilly,’ my father would say when my mother suggested owning a dog, or going on an aeroplane, or having another baby, which was her favourite suggestion through the years.
‘School uniform!’ shouted Mr Green over the noise of the crashing bricks, jerking his head at the place behind the hoarding where the biggest Asda in the whole universe would be.
‘School uniform?’ shouted my father back.
Then the crashing stopped for a moment.
‘Asda sells school uniform,’ said Mr Green very slowly and very loudly as if my father had special needs. ‘Lots of it. And cheap. The whole shaboodle.’
I watched my father’s face, and I saw, for a tiny fragment of a second, a crack run across it, a hairline fracture, like on a china pot. I looked down at the pavement. I didn’t like to see my father’s face break like that. When I looked up, the hairline crack was gone. But my father’s face was covered in a layer of sweat like see-through Uhu glue, which I hoped might mend the crack, although I knew the truth, that cracks grow and split rather than shrink or mend. I had a premonition of my father’s face splitting in two.
‘Better be on our way then,’ said my father to Mr Green, and he shot his arm up in a wave to Mrs Green and the four bored children.
‘What’s a shaboodle?’ I said, thinking I had a new word to add to my S page.
My father didn’t answer Mr Green, and he didn’t answer me. He practically ran home, whereas normally we walked along together, talking about how my day had been at school. His fingers were trembling, and I could tell he wanted to see my mother really badly.
‘Peas in a pod,’ says my mother – still, despite, or maybe because of, everything. ‘That’s what marriage is. For better. For worse. In sickness. And in health.’
‘I need to talk to you, Jilly,’ said my father, with his key still in the door, and I noticed he was panting with worry. I took up my position underneath the serving hatch (an arched hole in the wall) on the lounge side, which enabled me to listen to all their kitchen conversations.
‘Oh, darling,’ said my mother, laughing. ‘Asda can’t compete with Stanley Hope Uniforms!’
‘Really?’ said my father. ‘Really?’
‘It’s the personal service,’ said my mother. ‘Who’s going to measure the kids up at Asda? Who’s going to sew initials onto their shoe bags at Asda?’
‘Really?’ said my father again. ‘So nothing to worry about?’
And he walked into the hall saying under his breath, ‘Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about.’
‘Were the Greens sad to see their home come crashing down?’ said my mother when we were eating supper.
‘Mr Green said it was only bricks and mortar,’ I said.
‘How heartless,’ said my mother. ‘It’s where they brought up their children.’
‘Mr Green told Dad he was being sentimental,’ I said.
My father blushed.
‘I like you sentimental,’ said my mother.
Julia and I looked at each other, waiting for my mother to kiss my father on his head, on his sweaty hair – which she did. I always found that my father’s hair smelled a bit funny.
‘We have something to tell you, Daddy,’ said my mother.
‘Oh yes,’ said my father, spearing his fifth sausage with his fork.
‘Julia has come home with the Poet of the Week certificate,’ said my mother. ‘It’s a very special award from school.’
‘Well done,’ said my father, before adding, ‘I’m sure Augusta’s poem was good too.’
‘Julia is going to read it to you,’ said my mother to my father.
‘The title,’ said Julia, glancing at me, slightly flushed, as, strictly speaking, poetry was my thing, ‘is “My Mother’s Name”.’
‘Everyone’s title was the same,’ I said, by way of information, though my mother took it as a slight against Julia, and left her eyes on me that fraction too long.
‘Fire away,’ said my father.
Julia stood up, and she started to read, though she wasn’t excellent at reading out and tended to stumble a bit, which made me clench my jaw.
‘My mother’s name is Jilly
And she likes things that are frilly
In summer she can be silly
And in winter she’s rather chilly.’
‘Bravo,’ said my father, laughing, ignoring the stumbles.
‘She’s just got me, hasn’t she?’ said my mother. ‘Down to a tee. I do like things that are frilly, don’t I, Stan?’
I was so happy that Julia got the Poet of the Week certificate, and I loved the way her little nose wrinkled like a rabbit when she read it, but I knew that this was not a good poem. Either the teacher had no idea about poetry or she had some other motive like balancing out the awards.
My mother and father laughed for some time together after Julia read the poem, which made me think they must be losing their minds. Even if you liked the rhymes, the poem was really not that funny.
‘I do get chilly in winter,’ laughed my mother, wiping her eyes, ‘and I am a bit silly in summer.’
Summer was coming, and my father would close the shop on 30 or 31 July (Julia’s birthday) for two weeks because so many people went away, and because my mother required that we too took a fortnight’s holiday.
My mother spent fifty weeks of the year planning our two-week holiday, which would be the only one my father was prepared to take because he never liked anyone else to run the shop, the way some mothers won’t pass their babies around. He had a sign in the window showing the whole calendar year. OPEN, it said in luminous ruled capital letters, with a single spindly pencil line through his holiday fortnight.
‘Six months until we go away,’ my mother would say.
‘Five’
‘Four’
‘Three’
‘Two’
‘One’
When we left for our holiday, my father would leave lights on timer switches around the house, mimicking our family routines, and he would go around checking them about five times before we left, and then one for luck. I told him that I’d never seen any burglars lurking about in Willow Crescent, and he said that they didn’t carry swag bags and wear striped T-shirts – burglars could be anyone, even people we knew and liked, even neighbours in Willow Crescent.
‘Even Barbara Cook?’ I said.
‘Obviously not Barbara Cook,’ he said.
‘You’re the Neighbourhood Watch man,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t you have found out if any of our neighbours are burglars?’
‘Don’t worry your father when he’s so busy,’ said my mother, with her holiday glow, hoping my insolence wouldn’t make my father’s fingers start shaking, as it sometimes did, particularly on the day we left for our holiday, when he was taut with tension.
My mother started her trips to the travel agent in the autumn. She kept an eye on the newsagent board. She scoured the Sunday papers. She also used the school magazine where people advertised holiday homes and caravans.
Julia’s poem ended up being published in the school magazine. My mother cut it out and framed it, and my father nailed it to the hall wall. Julia put a chewy Werther’s toffee under my pillow with a note saying, ‘You are the real poet in the family.’
I chewed it with great humility as Julia said (not incorrectly), ‘My poem is actually quite bad.’
I wanted my mouth to make the words, ‘No it isn’t.’ But my mouth didn’t seem able to make those words, and, if it had, Julia would have known it was a total fib.
That’s the thing with being a twin, and maybe it’s the same with all brothers and sisters. You know the outside of each other, the body you bath with every night of your life, until you become too big to fit in together. Then one of you sits on the toilet lid and chats to the other in the bath until you run some more hot water and swap around.
You know the little splodge of birthmark on Julia’s right upper arm and the dark freckle on her left ring finger that helps her tell her right from her left, and you know her inside too just the same. You feel her tears before they fall – and you want to stop them, you so want to stop them, though you can’t, that’s the truth of it. You hear her laugh before it comes, and hearing her laugh makes you laugh too. Her lovely bright laugh.
In this way, your twin is your home.
Or mine was, anyway.
Far more than my home was ever my home.
What a word it is – home – a million meanings packed up in a giant handkerchief and hanging from a pole which we carry across our shoulder.
‘Didn’t you write a poem, Augusta?’ said my mother.
I nodded.
‘You must show me it,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said.
‘I will worry,’ said my mother, which meant I had to go and get my English exercise book although I really didn’t want to.
‘Here it is,’ I said. ‘Miss Rae didn’t especially like it.’
‘I’m sure she did,’ said my mother, who obviously couldn’t be sure she did, especially as I could be absolutely sure she didn’t.
I opened the exercise book at the right page.
This is what my mother read:
‘My Mother’s Name’ by Augusta Hope
‘My mother’s name is Jilly
Which (apparently) is an affectionate
Shortened version of Jill
Although it is longer by y
Which makes me ask y
You don’t call a pill you love
Such as aspirin
(which removes head-aches)
A pilly
Or a hill you love
Such as Old John Brown’s
A hilly
Or a window sill you love
A window silly
But that would just be silly.’
Underneath, the teacher had written:
‘This is quite a strange poem, Augusta, and your rhyme pattern is not regular. Well done!’
My mother stared at the teacher’s comment.
Then she stared at the ruled grey line underneath. She was trying to read the indentations, and she was also trying to think what on earth she could say to me about my weird poem.
Underneath the teacher’s comment I had written:
‘I didn’t actually want a regular rhyme pattern FYI’ (which I’d discovered meant for your information). Then I’d rubbed it out because I knew that, though it was true, it was also a bit rude – and precocious.
My mother went on straining her eyes to read underneath the rubbing out.
‘What did it say here?’ she said.
‘I can’t remember,’ I said.
‘It’s …’ said my mother, and she couldn’t think what to say.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to like it. I know it’s a bit strange.’
‘Sometimes I wonder what is going on in that little head of yours,’ said my mother.
She did not frame my poem.
Parfait
My mother was called Aurore, which means dawn.
And my motherland, still waiting for its dawn, is called Burundi.
Burundi carries its poetry in the hummingbirds drinking from the purple throats of flowers, the leaves glistening green after a night of rain; in the cichlid fish which flash like jewels deep beneath the surface of Lake Tanganyika, where crocodiles slumber like logs, still and deceptive, and hippos paddle downriver, in a line.
It carries its spirit in the dignified faces of all who are willing to forgive in the belief that Burundi will one day be beautiful again.
Dignified faces like my father’s.
I was his first son, and he prayed that by the time I was grown, we’d be living in peace.
‘You were born smiling,’ he told me. ‘And you were so perfect. Everything we’d ever dreamt of.’
‘So we called you Parfait,’ said my mother.
‘Parfait Nduwimana,’ said my father (which means I’m in God’s hands).
‘You were the most beautiful baby,’ said my mother ‘with those little dimples in your cheeks.’
‘Why would dimples be beautiful?’ I said.
‘Just because!’ she answered, hopping over to me on her wiry legs, and stroking my left-hand dimple with her right hand.
She reminded me of a bird, my mother.
I loved to spot birds when I was out and about: the hoopoe, or the Malachite kingfisher, or my favourite, the Fischer’s lovebird – a little rainbow-feathered parrot which used to bathe in the stream up above our homestead.
‘That bird is so …’ I said.
And my father said, ‘Unnecessary.’
Which I suppose is what beauty is.
Yet later I found I couldn’t live without it.
Then my father said, ‘Unnecessarily extravagant.’
I said, ‘What’s extravagant?’
He said, ‘This is,’ turning in a circle and pointing all around him, at the sky and the trees and the water running, clear, over the pebbles.
My family went on washing in the stream, like the birds.
There were nine of us in the beginning.
The girl twins: Gloria and Douce, who liked to dress up in the shiny bridesmaid dresses brought down the hill by the Baptists in plastic sacks.
The boy twins: Wilfred, named after an English missionary who lived (and died) on our colline, and Claude, named after a French one.
Pierre was strong and stubborn, and you couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
Zion was the baby, and you could. Even from when he was tiny, he wore his heart on his sleeve, as they say in English.
My father’s face always had a glow about it as if he had a candle inside him, shining light through his eyes. I see his smile, so wide it seemed to reach from one earlobe to the other, and I hear his laughter, bubbling up from some mysterious source inside him. I see his fingers sculpting a whistle from a stick, or fashioning a football for us out of coconut and twine.
I feel my mother’s arms around me, the slight damp of her armpits on my shoulders, the warmth of my cheek against her soft chest and the deep shiver of belonging running down my spine to the soles of my feet.
All of us would sit around the fire, the twin girls singing; the twin boys tied together at the ankle and refusing to separate; Pierre quiet and brooding; the baby in my mother’s arms, with something still of heaven about him.
‘We’ll call him Zion,’ said my father, as my mother pushed him out between her legs to the sound of gunfire in the homestead on the left.
The women tied the umbilical cord into his navel.
‘Yes, Zion!’ said my father. ‘And we’ll all keep dreaming of the city that is to come!’
Augusta
On the last day of 1999, the last day of the twentieth century, the last day of the old millennium, a day full of potential drama, there was a New Year’s Eve party at the Pattons’ house, number 13, the only detached house on the crescent, which was empty except for several towers of identical beige cardboard boxes in every room, each labelled in black marker pen with strange vowel-less codes on them like R1/shf or R3/cpd, which made you think that Mr Patton was a member of MI5.
The point of the party, whilst allegedly to celebrate the new millennium, was in fact to have lots of musical performances by the Patton children, practically every five minutes. Cello, violin, clarinet and a recorder ensemble, and then the whole lot all over again, until the rest of us nearly died of boredom.
Then it was 1 January 2000 – Julia and I were nine and a half years old, and the sci-fi millennium was here.
It made me hopeful. As if something monumental was about to happen. As if a battalion of silver robots was about to walk around the crescent. But actually, the next day, 2 January, in the rain, a grand piano rolled down the pavement. Because the Pattons (who were, as you’ve seen, very musical) were moving out of Willow Crescent. We saw Tabitha Patton through the window in an entirely empty house practising her violin amongst the boxes. She was ten years old and doing Grade 8. She went to private school, where apparently everyone is a genius.
Grade 8!
‘It’s cruel,’ said my mother.
‘Or brilliant,’ I said (to be oppositional because, to be honest, I couldn’t stand Tabitha Patton).
‘Do you always have to disagree with me?’ said my mother.
Next thing we knew, a huge removal lorry arrived, with foreign words down its side, and the removal men started bringing out carved benches and jewelled cushions, antique bird cages and hat stands, and cardboard boxes in bright canary colours.
But better than any of these things was the appearance of a dark-haired boy, who could carry four boxes at once, easy as anything.
Julia and I went and hung around in our raincoats, pretending to have lost something on the roundabout, and we spied on him from behind the ragged branches of the willow tree, which were actually pathetic for spying because they were too thin and straggly, and only covered us down to our waists.
We walked over and started looking for our lost thing on the wet pavement outside number 13, and we found out that the boy’s name was Diego, and then we completely forgot about our lost thing, and when Diego asked us the next day if we’d found it, we had no idea what he was talking about.
Looking back, Diego was a chubby twelve-year-old, but he was three years older than us, and we thought he was the bee’s knees with his dark Spanish skin and his black eyes. His sister was called Paloma which means Dove, though she wasn’t at all bird-like, and this possibly wasn’t the right name for her.
‘Which animal does she remind you of?’ I said to Julia.
‘I’m not saying,’ she replied.
But we burst out laughing anyway.
Then we felt bad, and Julia said, ‘She has a lovely face,’ which is what people say about fat girls.
My mother made a large dish of lasagne for the new arrivals, as was her custom. My father was the Neighbourhood Watch man, and she considered this the least she could do. She handed it over at the front door, looking up the hall, hoping for an invitation.
‘It was quite bare inside,’ she said on her return, ‘from what I could see.’
‘They have only been there an hour,’ said my father. ‘Anyhow, they’ll have different customs.’
‘Yes, but I imagine they’ll have furniture,’ I said.
A few days later, Diego’s foreign mother committed the error of not returning my mother’s lasagne dish, one she’d bought on holiday in Brittany in 1998, which said along the bottom, Quimper, Bretagne.
‘You don’t expect that of a new neighbour,’ said my mother, who didn’t have the necessary imagination to understand people.
Julia went to number 13 for the missing lasagne dish, with her smile. On the way back, she put a little sprig of yellow wintersweet flowers from our garden in the dish for my mother, so that when she came through the door, the kitchen smelled of petals. She just had that way with her. I could have thought for a hundred years and I would never have thought of putting yellow flowers in my mother’s lasagne dish.
As I write my story here in La Higuera in the south of Spain, though Hedley Green is over two thousand kilometres away, I can smell the wintersweet flowers in the front garden of number 1, to the left of the front door, and I can smell Julia’s soft fair hair, washed with Timotei shampoo, still wet, over her pale pink dressing gown, waiting to be dried. We’d sit, legs apart, us two, and sometimes Angela Dunnett from the crescent, and Julia’s slightly dizzy school-friend, Amy Atkins, drying and plaiting and crimping, and taking turns to be the person at the back of the line who had nobody to play with her hair.
‘If Angela Dunnett wanted to frizz her hair, she would need quimpers,’ I said, looking at the lasagne dish from Quimper.
‘She can’t help having a speech impediment,’ said my mother. ‘So don’t be a clever clogs.’
I felt ashamed – but I also found it a bit funny that Angela Dunnett, who was so full of herself, couldn’t say her rs. She was only two years older than us, but she acted like she knew everything there was to know about the world.