A Shadow of Myself. Mike Phillips

should go,’ Joseph said.

      ‘No.’ Radka stretched her arm out along the back of the sofa and put her hand on his. ‘Please stay. If you leave now it will be bad for George. And for me. Waiting to see you he has been like a cat on a hot tin roof.’ She frowned as if conscious that there was something wrong about the expression. ‘No. Cat on hot bricks. Right? You must wait.’ Her eyes were fixed on his with an intensity which gave him the sense that there was something more beneath the surface of her words. Something she wanted him to know without her having to say it.

      Joseph sat back against the cushions. The truth was that he wanted to stay with Radka so much that the feeling frightened him.

      ‘Tell me about George’s mother,’ he said.

      Radka gestured as if trying to gather the words up out of the air.

      ‘She loves three things in life. Her memories of Kofi, George and Serge. She told me this. Without George she would have been glad to die.’ She paused. ‘She lives in the past, I think. I don’t know if she always did this, but now she speaks to Kofi as if he was there next to her. She talks about what happened during the day and what she thinks about her son, as if he was sitting on the other side of the room. She’s not mad. Her brain is still good. She cooks, she cleans the apartment, her appearance is good, she watches TV and she votes. Everything. It is just that her companion is her memory of Kofi.’

      Hearing his father spoken of in this way gave Joseph an unpleasant feeling, and he felt the urge to reply sharply, to utter some kind of sarcasm. These people talked about Kofi as if he belonged to them. You know nothing about him, he wanted to tell her. You have no right. At the same time he had the uneasy feeling that somehow he was the interloper. It struck him, also, that his feelings about Kofi had always been ambiguous. ‘A slippery customer’ was how he had often heard his mother refer to him, and he realised now that this was how he had always thought of his father. Looking back to those times thirty years later he understood that his attitude had largely been shaped by the things his mother had said. ‘I threw him out,’ she would say to her friends, and, ‘I couldn’t put up with that shit any more.’ Sometimes, overhearing this, he thought that he hated her, but the worst times were when Kofi was late picking him up on Sundays, or when he didn’t come at all. His mother would telephone various people, her voice either low and complaining or shrill and angry. Once she had made him telephone a woman who sounded irritable and puzzled when he started asking to speak to his father.

      As Radka spoke he was remembering one of these Sundays. Ten years old, he was sitting in the single armchair in Kofi’s room. It was somewhere in Kentish Town, facing an adventure playground, where they would usually wander listlessly for half an hour before going back to the room to watch television. In normal circumstances they spoke very little, largely because neither of them could think of anything to say. Kofi busied himself making tea and sandwiches, which Joseph would nibble politely, because although he never said so, he disliked the food his father gave him. Somehow it didn’t taste right, and, listening to Kofi bustling about at the end of the room he was flexing his stomach, nerving himself to bite into the thick triangles of floppy white bread.

      ‘I’ve been there,’ Kofi said suddenly, coming up behind him and pointing at the TV. In the picture Joseph half recognised the onion-shaped domes, although he had no idea who the men were, filing across the square in front of it. ‘Moscow,’ his father said. ‘I’ve stood there. Before you were born. Many years ago.’