Kitabı oxu: «The Name You Once Gave Me»

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE WEEK BEFORE Daniel and his girlfriend’s wedding his life changed forever. The problem wasn’t marriage because he and Louise had lived together for three years since leaving college. Getting married would not change much.

The big change was instead due to something which Daniel simply could not have foreseen: a sudden shock. Before this he thought of himself as just a normal person, living a normal life. And if anyone had asked him what ‘normal’ meant the answer would have been simple. To Daniel ‘normal’ was his own way of life.

On the other hand, this was only half the answer. From his first day in school Daniel had known that he was different which was why, his mother had said, the bullies picked on him. Daniel agreed. There was only one way to keep out of trouble, he thought, and that was to pretend to be just like the rest of them. Normal.

He was twenty-six, the same age as his girlfriend, Louise, and taught at a comprehensive school in North London. Louise was also a teacher, and they lived together in a ground-floor flat. At the weekends, they normally went out to the cinema, or for dinner with friends. During the summer they sometimes drove down to Devon to stay with her parents.

By this time doing the same things as most of his friends seemed like second nature to Daniel. Sometimes he did feel that he was living under a sort of disguise but also he couldn’t really work out how to change things. He couldn’t even guess what he wanted them to change to. On the surface, his life was happy but deep inside he still felt angry and confused. He shared most of his thoughts with Louise, but this problem he found impossible to explain to her. Going out with Daniel was the only thing that had marked her out from her family and friends. Apart from that, Daniel realised that they lived in much the same way as her sister and cousins. She called it a normal life, where living with Daniel was a stage, after which getting married was the right thing to do. And Daniel agreed it was what a normal couple would do.

But there were still some people who regarded Daniel and Louise as an odd couple. Louise looked a lot like Daniel’s mother in that she was tall, blonde and pretty, with pink skin which flushed easily. Daniel, meanwhile, was just the opposite, with a light brown skin and curly black hair.

He often wondered about his father. Perhaps he looked like him, but there was no way of telling as Daniel had never even seen a photograph of him. He only knew that his father had come from Nigeria, and had died before he was born.

After they decided to marry, he tried to tell Louise about how this made him feel. ‘I wish my father was here,’ he said.

‘Why? Do you miss him?’

‘No. I never knew him, so I can’t miss him. He was struggling to find the right words. ‘But there is something missing.’

He knew a lot about what he was missing. Part of it was a feeling of safety. In primary school, he had stood his own ground against the bullies in the playground. Mostly, not having two parents did not matter. It was different, though, when other kids’ dads turned up to watch them playing sports or to take them home. When that happened, he sometimes had felt a rush of longing so strong that he could hardly control the tears springing behind his eyes. And when other kids teased him the way they were always doing to each other, he had the same crazy thought: You wouldn’t do that if my dad was here.

As he got older, he stopped thinking like that. Instead his absent father gave him a new problem. Many of the people he met seemed to think that the colour of his skin gave him some kind of special access to what they called ‘black culture’. Mostly it didn’t matter. He got tired of explaining that he had been born and brought up nearby, and that he knew nothing about African drums or voodoo or the blues. It got really boring when he had to say that to kids he had known for most of his life, but most of his friends weren’t that stupid. It was the teachers who kept on about ‘his culture’ who annoyed him.

The teacher who got on his nerves most was said to be an expert on black culture. When he talked to the black kids he always seemed to be talking about the Carnival and rap music. Daniel was known as a quiet boy who studied hard, and he became one of the teacher’s targets. After a while, though, Daniel began to get the idea that the man seemed to know about his absent father, and saw him as some kind of social problem. Sometimes he came home seething with rage after one of the teacher’s talks. ‘He thinks,’ he told his mother, ‘that if you’re black you have to be some kind of rebel. And as far as he’s concerned, being a rebel means wearing a hood and rapping. And if you’re really cool you can go to jail or walk the street, without a job.’

At school Daniel hid his anger. He knew by now what kind of future he wanted. He knew also it would count against him if he was seen to reject the man’s attempts to teach him about ‘your own culture’. The issue came to a head at the start of the sixth form. Daniel chose to study a book of classic English poetry, instead of the black poet who had visited the school. On the day Daniel made his choice the teacher gave him a sad look, as if he had been badly let down.

Sometimes Daniel thought that this was one of the reasons he had chosen to become a teacher. At least, that is what he told Louise when she asked him about it.

‘I want those kids to be able to do anything they want to do. They don’t have to be what other people expect them to be.’

That was what he felt when he started. Three years later he wasn’t so sure about anything. On the day his life changed his father was the last thing on his mind. Later on, though, it struck him that this meeting had always been waiting to happen.

It was a routine part of Year 10 work on a local history project.

The project involved visiting the libraries or the local museum, and looking up the history of old buildings. Daniel’s pupils enjoyed this, partly because it got them out of the classroom.

On the first day of the project someone suggested talking to old people who had lived in the district for a long time. Daniel said it was a good idea and he would think about it. What he didn’t tell them was that, a couple of years before, a few of his pupils had turned up without notice at a nearby home for the elderly. The result had been mayhem. One of the staff, taking them for muggers, had called the police. Daniel spent most of the day getting the group out of the police station. Then he’d had to explain to their parents; and after that he’d had to placate an irate head teacher.

‘Never again,’ he’d said, but now he found himself thinking that was unfair.

During the break that day he discussed the problem with Judy, the head of his year.

‘The thing is to choose a few people.’ She paused. ‘With care. Talk to them first, then you let the little horrors loose on them.’ She laughed and made a funny face. ‘The last thing you want,’ she said, ‘is not being able to get to the altar because you’re getting the kids out of jail again!”

She winked. Daniel sighed. He had been teased without mercy for the last couple of weeks. The closer the date of his wedding came, the worse it got. It was the reaction of his women colleagues which surprised him. He had known nearly all of them for a couple of years. Most of them had never been more than friendly, but almost as soon as he announced that he was to get married, a few had begun to flirt with him. The fact that he didn’t know quite how to respond made them even more wicked. Something about weddings, Daniel thought, made people excited.

Judy hadn’t reacted in the same way as most of the others. Instead she had made a dry comment about how young he was. She was only about thirty, not much older than Daniel. On the other hand, she had been married and divorced. No one knew the details, but it gave her the status of a cynic, who could speak her mind without offence. She was friendly enough to Daniel, but sometimes he wasn’t sure how much she liked him.

‘Why don’t you get them to talk to old Brownjohn?’ Judy suggested.

‘Who?’

‘John Brownjohn. He was deputy head and he’s lived around here for years. He won’t mind.’

That was true enough. Daniel telephoned and was invited to drop in after school. As Judy had predicted, Brownjohn seemed more than pleased to help.

He was about sixty, thin and fit. His head of grey hair was going bald, and he had a deep, friendly voice. Daniel guessed in the first minute that the pupils would like him. Even better, he seemed to know every fact there was to know about the district.

Daniel relaxed, preparing himself to sit and listen politely to Brownjohn’s memories. The last thing he expected to hear was a memory which would change everything he knew about himself.