Chapter 19
Noah and Heather wandered across the lawn towards the two huddled ‘outhouses’.
Noah was excited to get started, but unusually for him, he felt awkward in Heather’s presence.
He supposed he must have met lesbians before, but none so …
explicit as Heather. She wore her vividly red hair in an upright streak down the middle of her head.
The sides were buzzed short. She wore jeans that were wide and scuffed at the bottom and a leather jacket, even though the sun was shining.
She didn’t make small talk, and so Noah had a go.
‘Must have been a long journey down for you last night?’ He wondered if they were allowed to walk diagonally across the lawn as they were, especially in those heavy boots that Heather was wearing.
‘From Glasgow?’ Her tone was dry. ‘Yeah, man, it’s a pretty long way.’
He nodded and looked down at his own feet. His boots were less sturdy, but they still left a path of flattened blades in his wake.
‘Sorry.’ Heather spoke so quietly that Noah wasn’t convinced she was addressing him. ‘I’m not used to, I don’t know, socialising? I tend to spend days on end in my fucking freezing studio with only the mice for company.’
Noah smiled, a little triumphant, at having cracked through the resistance. ‘No worries, man, I’m pretty used to being out the loop. I usually spend my Saturday nights at home with my mum.’
Heather laughed. It was a softer sound than Noah had expected. ‘Bit of a mummy’s boy, are you?’
‘No, no, no, not that.’ Noah had hoped to sound dismissive; instead it came out defensive. ‘Just too broke not to live with parents, you know?’
‘How old are you?’
Noah wondered whether he should lie. When he did lurk in the corners of parties he’d gate-crashed he usually said he was twenty-five. It sounded sophisticated, more worldly somehow than his measly twenty-two years. Other times he said he was eighteen so people might mistake him for a prodigy.
‘I’m twenty-two,’ he said finally.
‘A wee bairn,’ Heather remarked teasingly, and Noah didn’t bother to ask her to translate.
‘So what kind of stuff do you do? Any ideas for the first … assignment?’
Heather scoffed. ‘You make it sound like homework.’
‘Well it sort of is – for Mistress Fairfax! And I imagine this is what a boarding school would look like.’
‘I mean, I’m only here because of the money; I can’t decide how much I hate myself for getting mixed up in all this bourgeois bollocks, but who can say no to seventy-five grand?’
Noah decided, then and there, that he liked Heather. He himself was a far cry from ‘no-nonsense’ but he appreciated it in other people.
‘What would you do with it?’ he asked.
‘Oh fuck, I don’t even know. Get some central heating installed in my studio? Buy my mam a wee place, go on holiday somewhere.’
Noah nodded. He wondered if he’d done enough to invite some reciprocal curiosity. They walked in silence for a moment.
‘What about you?’
Noah smiled at another small victory. ‘I would go to the King’s Road and get a suit made, from scratch, in red velvet, and then I’d go to Camden Palace and buy everyone there a round.’
‘Got to dream big, I guess.’
Noah wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret her tone, so he just kept talking. His father had often told him it was a bad habit, and his mother would tell his father not to ‘diminish’ him.
‘I’m going to make a sound and scent scape based on my birthplace.’ Noah liked to hear himself say things like this out loud. He’d recently been introduced to the word ‘scape’ and he planned on using it extensively over the next six weeks.
‘Well anyway, I’ll be getting on.’ They’d arrived at a small patio, which straddled both small buildings. ‘Must have been a stables once …’ Heather mused aloud. Noah tried not to feel snubbed by her lack of follow-up questions about his scape.
‘I’ll see you at lunch.’
‘I doubt it. Once I get in the zone, I’ll work ’til nightfall,’ Heather said as she closed the door to her new studio behind her.
Noah wasn’t quite ready to shut himself away yet. He stood and surveyed the scene. The house was even more magnificent than he could have imagined. He counted the windows he could see, each latticed with thin strips of iron framing dozens of smaller diamonds of glass. There were twenty-four.
It was hard for him to comprehend this kind of wealth.
How must it feel to wake up behind one of those windows every day and know that they belonged to you?
That they were always destined for you? What did it feel like to share the same name as the walls you lived between?
To have the kind of ownership that reached beyond legal deeds, but rather dealt in bloodlines and birthrights.
His first piece would be about the opposite feeling.
Of alienation from home, and from the idea of home.
His first memories were of bright red clay roads, and rampant bougainvillea.
Of white walls topped with cast-iron swirls, the smell of jasmine and mango trees.
Now he thought of home as the smell of cumin clinging to heavy carpet, the hiss of the gas fireplace signalling the relief of warmth, the sound of the neighbour’s dog barking at the milkman.
He wondered if the romanticism he imbued to the first home was real, or whether it had been rendered its storybook quality by his infant mind. Maybe things always seemed sweeter once they were taken from you.
Now of course he understood what had happened.
His parents were tight-lipped about life in Uganda but he had gone in search of answers once he was old enough to start caring about things like ‘his roots’.
He’d stopped telling people at school that he was African.
They thought he’d meant black, and he eventually got bored of correcting them.
But he wanted to know for himself. To try and decipher the parts of his own childish memory that were steeped in history.
It was in the local library that he began to piece together the story that laced together the fragments of his parents’ offhand remarks.
Coup d’état, he must have heard a handful of times, but until he read the letters on that page of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he hadn’t realised it wasn’t a single word.
With a gun to his head he might have spelled it as ‘coodetah’.
He cross-referenced the years in the book to his age: 1971.
That’s when Idi Amin had come to power, and he would have been seven.
When he thought back he was sure he could recall that shift in atmosphere, the time when his mother became anal about him playing out in the streets of their compound without supervision.
When she began to impose a curfew at nightfall.
Before then he would often stay at Adnan’s house overnight without bothering to run home and tell her.
It was also the time that his parents took down the framed photo of the queen that had previously sat on their mantelpiece.
They sold their car and brought a new one, except it wasn’t newer, it was older.
They fired their staff, and his mother began cooking all their meals.
He did remember that it had felt a more gradual change than what he would eventually read about.
A year was a long time for a seven-year-old, but that summer, when it was coming to the end of the dry season and the rains began to loom, it had happened quickly.
He’d run home, from where he wouldn’t recall, but he had been eager to recount the day’s adventures, the way that he always did when the hours hadn’t been interrupted by school.
His parents had been huddled around a radio, his mother heavily pregnant then with his long-wished-for younger sister.
His older brother was sat cross-legged at their feet, the book he was usually engrossed in lying open in his lap.
The moment he’d walked into the parlour – and it was still strange to think that he used to call a room in their home a parlour – he’d known it wasn’t the time to regale his mother with the day’s activities.
Her face was glum, scared even. His father had told him to go to his room.
He’d tried to protest that Ishmail was allowed to stay but only feebly.
He’d sat on the edge of his bed trying to make out the burble from the radio.
He must have fallen asleep because when his mother came in to explain, it was dark outside.
They would need to leave. His childish mind had not been able to understand the word.
Leave? The house? The street? The town? No, his mother said, leave the country.
Where would they go? England, she’d said, and he’d been excited.
But then the packing had started, almost immediately – the next morning in fact.
And his father would be out often, leaving before Noah woke up and coming home after he went to bed.
He was sorting their passports, his mother said, and he hadn’t known then what those were.
The journey itself was a blur of busy train stations, full of families that looked like his, carrying too many bags.
And then the airport, and an aeroplane, which had at first also been exciting until the flight dragged on.
When they’d landed at Heathrow, the only thing he could think about was the cold.
Now he knew what his mother and father had heard that day on the radio: that Asians were no longer welcome in Uganda. That they had ninety days to get out, carrying everything they could on their backs and leaving everything else behind.
Standing here now. Noah felt something like resentment, that someone like Opal Fairfax would never be asked to leave her home like that.
Because unlike him, and his parents, she would always belong.
If his plan came together, though, and he could work his magic, she might at least be able to feel what that might be like.
He turned to his own ‘studio’ and opened the door.