and wore his black hair in lots of long plaits. He’d been born in what he called a shithole on the outskirts of Brussels and started out making graffiti.
‘Can you make my hair like this?’ I asked Gloria and Douce, pointing to his photograph.
‘Who are you getting yourself so handsome for?’ said Gloria.
I shook my head.
They got to work on my hair, with Amie Santiana who lived on the homestead next to us and knew all about hairdressing.
As I walked out of the hut the next day, I found I was standing a little taller. Because, if Sami Terre was raised in a shithole but went on to be famous and written about in books, it could happen to anyone. It could even happen to me.
The African mourning doves were calling in the acacia tree opposite the hut – krrrrrrr, oo-OO-oo – as I took the photograph of my parents’ wedding out of the Memory Box. In it I found the little card my father had given my mother on their wedding night.
‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,’ it said. ‘The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.’
It made my mind up.
This was something I could change.
The place we lived.
I did have the courage, I knew I did.
I began to paint a portrait of my parents, falling into each other on their wedding day, my father in a dark suit and my mother in the shiny wedding dress lent to her by the Baptists.
‘Tell me I’m right to go,’ I said to my father’s photograph, but it didn’t answer.
I worked at the painting hour after hour, covering it with an old mat, telling everyone they mustn’t look at it, not yet.
Even when my arms ached from banana-picking, I still painted.
Then it was finished.
Víctor came down on his bike, and the rest of them gathered around, and, feeling suddenly shy, I took off the mat to reveal the painting.
‘You’re a genius,’ said Víctor. ‘A total natural! Stay here and you’ll become a famous Burundian artist.’
The rest of them stared at our mother and father, perhaps hoping that they might walk off the page and come and live with us in the hut again.
‘This is how we’ll earn money as we go,’ I said to them all. ‘By painting portraits.’
‘I’m not coming,’ said Pierre. ‘I’m going to stay here and fight.’
‘Fight?’ I said. ‘Fight as in struggle?’
‘Fight as in anything it takes,’ said Pierre.
My father’s twinkly eyes and his cheek, his turning-the-other-cheek, stared out at us from the easel and stopped twinkling for a second.
‘What would Pa say?’ I said.
‘And what good did it do him? Refusing to retaliate? Breaking the chain?’ said Pierre.
Wilfred sat staring.
The girls looked sad.
Víctor said nothing.
‘When are we leaving?’ said Zion.
Then, one by one, we all walked quietly away from the easel where my mother and father stayed laughing love into each other’s eyes.
‘Patience, Little Bro,’ I said, and I tried to cheer myself up by dancing about with him, the way I imagined flamenco dancers might dance, though, looking back, it was some other way altogether.
‘Come and join in!’ I said to the girls. ‘You sway your hips like this, and you lift your arms and twist around – and the girls wear bright-coloured dresses like butterflies.’
‘You can shout out Olé whenever you feel like it!’ said Zion.
But Gloria said, ‘You dance, boys. I like watching.’
Douce nodded.
Whenever Zion and I found ourselves alone together, we’d say Olé and do our special up-down high-five as a way of believing in the journey we would make.
‘Olé Olé Olé Olé.’
My mother was starting to circle possible destinations for the summer of 2004 in red biro, and I asked Mr Sánchez whether Spain would be a good place for a holiday.
‘I’d avoid the Costa del Sol, Augusta,’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘It’s full of English people!’
Then we both laughed like conspirators, as if we knew how boring English people were, and I started to wonder if I were actually Spanish and the stork (ha ha) had dropped me in the wrong place. I obviously knew quite a bit about sex by now – and not only from the scenes in An Instant in the Wind. No, the internet had arrived – at other people’s houses. My parents continued to favour paper. My mother had bought us a book on sex, and she threw it into our hands, keeping the focus on how special it was to have babies, a great privilege for every woman, she kept saying.
‘Not for every woman,’ I said. ‘Some women can’t have children.’
She gave me the you’re-being-difficult look so I didn’t bother to bring up the way the privilege could also be suffering, or the way Barbara Cook loved and suffered every day of being a mother so that the two things became one. I didn’t bother to talk about the fact that love might be the hugest word there is in the world and that we would never, across a whole lifetime, work out what it meant. I didn’t say that if we put love on one side of the weighing scales and suffering on the other, we might change our minds and decide suffering was bigger. Then I found myself wondering if actually love and suffering were on the same side of the scales. And you couldn’t have the one without the other. Then I couldn’t decide what was on the other side of the weighing scales. But I didn’t say any of this aloud, and my mother went on running through her list of warnings against the use of tampons, in particular the risk of toxic shock syndrome.
‘But, quite apart from that,’ she said, ‘they can be extremely painful when you put them in your. Put them in your. Put them in your.’
She never found the word.
‘Vagina,’ I said.
My mother squeezed the new packet of extra-thin sanitary towels she was holding in her hand at the shock of the word said aloud, and she started to talk about holidays instead, putting down the sanitary towels and picking up her holiday spiral notepad.
‘Spain is supposed to be very safe,’ I said. ‘And I would also be able to practise my Spanish like we practised French in Brittany.’
Spain, my mother wrote, underlining it twice.
The Alvárez family’s Spanish house wasn’t on the Costa del Sol, but on the Costa de la Luz, I told my mother. In a village by the beach, called La Higuera. Which means fig tree. Higos are figs and you don’t pronounce the h.
The next year, in August, Diego’s family would be going to Argentina for a family wedding so we could (possibly) rent their holiday house with fig trees in the garden for a much-reduced price. They’d be going at Christmas for the special festivals.
My father said, ‘It’s all very different out there. Apparently, Lola sunbathes without a swimsuit on in the garden. They probably all do that sort of thing over there. And it’s jolly hot, you know, in summer. Sweltering. It may not suit us.’
He was right.
It didn’t suit him.
Yet