? ? ?
At six the news came on. Lamin was very affected by the revelation that the people of Iceland were suddenly, catastrophically poor. How could such a thing happen? A failed harvest? A corrupt President? But it was news to me, too, and not understanding all of what the newsreader said I could offer no interpretation. “Maybe we will hear information also of Sankofa,” Lamin suggested, and I laughed, stood up, and told him they didn’t put that kind of nonsense on the evening news. Twenty minutes later, as I peered into a fridge full of rotting produce, Lamin called me to come back in. It was the closing story on the real news, the British Broadcast news as he called it, and there in the top-right corner was a stock photo of Aimee. We sat on the edge of the sofa. Cut to a strip-lit office space somewhere, with a picture of the frog-faced President-for-life askew on the wall, in front of which the birth parents sat in their country clothes, looking hot and uncomfortable. A woman from an adoption agency sat to their left and translated. I tried to remember if the mother was the same person I’d seen that day in the corrugated-iron hut, but couldn’t be sure. I listened to the agency woman explain the situation to the foreign correspondent who sat opposite them all, he was wearing a version of my old wrinkled uniform of linen and khaki. Everything had been done according to procedure, what had been leaked was not the adoption certificate at all, it was only an intermediary document, clearly not intended for public consumption, the parents were satisfied with the adoption and understood what they had signed.
“We have no problem,” said the mother, in halting English, smiling at the camera.
Lamin put both hands behind his head, sank back into the sofa and offered me a proverb: “Money makes problems go away.”
I switched it off. Silence spread through the house, we had nothing whatsoever to say to each other, the third point on our triangle was gone. Two days ago I had been pleased with my dramatic gesture—fulfilling a duty of care Aimee had neglected—but the gesture itself had obscured the reality of Lamin: Lamin in my bed, Lamin in this living room, Lamin indefinitely in my life. He had no job and no money. None of his hard-won qualifications meant anything here. Each time I left the room—to get tea, to go to the toilet—my first thought upon seeing him again was: what are you doing in my house?
At eight o’clock I ordered Ethiopian takeaway. As we ate I showed him Google Maps and where we were in London in relation to the rest of the city. I showed him Edgware. The various ways you can get to Edgware.
“I’ll be going to see my mother tomorrow, but feel free to hang around here, obviously. Or, you know, go off exploring.”
Anyone watching us that evening would have thought we had met a few hours earlier. I felt shy of him once more, of his proud self-containment and capacity for silence. He was not Aimee’s Lamin any more, but he wasn’t mine either. I had no idea who he was. When it was clear I’d run out of geographical conversation he stood up and, without any discussion, went to the box-room. I went to my mother’s room. We closed our doors.
? ? ?
The hospice was in Hampstead, on a quiet, tree-lined cul-de-sac, a stone’s throw from the hospital where I was born and a few streets from the Noted Activist. Autumn was pretty here, russet and gold against all that valuable red-brick Victorian real estate, and I had strong associative memories of my mother walking through it on brisk mornings like this one, arm in arm with the Noted Activist, bemoaning the Italian aristocrats and American bankers, the Russian oligarchs and the upscale children’s clothes stores, the basements being dug out of the earth. The end of some long-lost bohemian idea of the place she’d held dear. She was forty-seven then. She was only fifty-seven now. Of all the futures I had imagined for her in these streets somehow the present reality seemed the most improbable. When I was a child she had been immortal. I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric. Instead, this quiet street, these gingko trees shedding their golden leaves.
At the desk I gave my name and after a short wait a young male nurse came for me. He warned me that my mother was on morphine and sometimes confused, before leading me to her room. I didn’t notice anything about this nurse, he seemed completely nondescript, but when I got to the room and he opened the door my mother pushed herself up in her bed and cried: “Alan Pennington! So you’ve met the famous Alan Pennington!”
“Mum, it’s me.”
“Oh, I’m Alan,” said the nurse, and I turned round to look again at this young man my mother was smiling at so radiantly. He was short, with sandy-brown hair, small blue eyes, a slightly pudgy face and an unremarkable nose with a few freckles over the bridge. The only thing that made him unusual to me, in the context of all the Nigerian, Polish and Pakistani nurses you heard talking in the corridors, was how English he looked.
“Alan Pennington is famous around here,” said my mother, waving at him. “His kindness is legend.”
Alan Pennington smiled at me, revealing a pair of pointy incisors, like a little dog’s.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” he said.
? ? ?
“How are you, Mum? Are you in a lot of pain?”
“Alan Pennington,” she informed me, after the door had closed behind him, “only works for others. Did you know that? You hear about these people but it’s another thing to meet them. Of course, I’ve worked for others, all my life—but not like this. They’re all like that here. I had a girl from Angola first, Fatima, lovely girl, she was the same . . . unfortunately she had to move on. Then Alan Pennington came. You see: he is a carer. I never thought about that word very deeply before. Alan Pennington cares.”
“Mum, why do you keep calling him Alan Pennington like that?”
My mother looked at me like I was an idiot.
“Because that’s his name. Alan Pennington is a carer who cares.”
“Yes, Mum, that’s what carers are paid to do.”
“No, no, no, you don’t understand: he cares. The things he does for me! No one should have to do those things for another human being—but he does them for me!”
Tiring of the subject of Alan Pennington, I convinced her to let me read aloud for a while from a slim book she had on her side-table, a little stand-alone edition of Sonny’s Blues, and then lunch arrived on the tray of Alan Pennington.
“But I can’t eat that,” said my mother sadly as Alan lay it across her lap.
“Well, how about I leave it with you for twenty minutes and if you’re absolutely sure you can’t eat it just ring the bell and I’ll come and take it back? How would that be? Does that sound all right?”