Chapter 8. A Miracle
This is the final 12-words chapter.
- Personal
Title: A Miracle
Object: Gravestones
12 Associations
1. Headstones
2. Pam
3. The Last Supper
4. The fight
5. Val £200 doesn’t turn up
6. Shagging my boyfriend
7. How does it feel now mum
8. Is he ready
9. Freedom
10. Colour/race
11. Leading me here
12. My Mum is White
A Miracle
On Tuesday, just gone, 04.02.26, the day before my dad's 104th birthday, Elaine, who is not sentimental, sends me a photo of our mum and dad’s headstone.
Then she writes, 'I found Angie’s don’t know why it popped up in my head at least that’s being cared for as well.'
The following day Elaine writes, ‘It made me sad to see Angie’s grave yesterday purely because she still ended up on her own not in Ireland not in Jamaica and still separated from her mum.’
The miracle to me is Elaine has no way of knowing I am writing about mum, dad and Angie. It is as if the Universe is saying to me it is all right to write about this. It led her there. It is leading me here.
I am so scared of this chapter. I am so scared of it being in bad taste. I am so scared of getting into trouble from my sisters. Why every time I want to write do I write about them? Peggy and Bas. Bas and Peggy. What a selfish pair of twats. How the fuck could you actually leave both sets of kids and think it is gonna be all right? But I don’t have to judge them. They got away with fuck all. Oh, my God, the story is so sad. I’m gonna have to start from another angle. Washing your laundry in public. Wow. For a few sheckles? Yeah, for a few sheckles. I’m amazed I didn’t tell this story in MY MUM IS WHITE. I did. I told it to Sol. I told it to Sol, our photographer, quickly.
My dad is lying like Lindow Pete. He’s squashed flat with cancer, death, and fear. ‘You have to come now,’ the care home says. She is in another home. Her mind is gone. Holes in her brain. We have seen them. But, yet, when we turn up, Me and Elaine, she says, ‘Is it time? Is he ready?’ He’s ready, mum.’ She already has her coat on.
For the first time ever she is calm, she is useful, she is the matriarch in his little room off his care home garden. It is the nicest place he has ever lived in. His jumpers are hung up. His caps. His pipe is on the side. And now he is dying. The patriarch. For the first time it is all going the way society would plan.
Then Pam, the sister after Elaine, goes to the shop. Once she puts the whiskey on the tree stump, I know the peace will come to a stop. My mum doesn’t touch a drop. But Pam, who comes from the same womb, from the same trauma, but unlike me, it includes mum’s drinking, fills her glass.
The next thing Pam is screaming in my dad’s face. In my dying dad’s face. These are the last words he will hear on his journey to the other world or wherever you fucking end up. ‘She fucked my boyfriend, dad.’ Now Pam is chasing her family between my mum, who is still staring at the love of her life leaving this world — and a man who has long, empty, seconds between the breath he is clinging to.
Pam is chasing her whole family around the garden with her handbag. Like Dick – fucking – Emery. And Angie, while she’s got the chance, and she thinks no one is looking, no one is listening, leans to her mum’s ear and asks ‘How does it feel now, mum?’ Wow.
Val, the youngest, who comes from the same womb, from the same trauma, which unlike Pam includes daily painkillers now, takes the £200 we send her but doesn’t turn up to his funeral. ‘She’s chasing the dragon,’ Mum's having a lucid moment. Followed by, ‘Look at his fucking handles.' We look at his fucking handles. They are bronzed carvings of The Last Supper. Pam is burying the Pope in style.
We don't need freedom because of our colour or race. We just need the freedom of peace. Demonstrated in the other photos Elaine has been sending me this week. Of her stylish sideboard, and her graceful drop-leaf table, and their positioning. Building her new, solitary, peaceful, country home. And my comments of encouragement because I am the eldest. Building my solitary, peaceful, country home.
- Final 12-Words Muscle Memory
· Your title: A Miracle.
· What object do you see?
· List the 12 things you associate with your object.
· 20 minutes to write. Include object, and 12 associations. Under your title.
3, My Discoveries
First, my triumph. This week, I hold onto Saturday night, Sunday morning, as my writing retreat. Saturday night, so I relax, and don't have any residual trauma on Sunday morning. Which, I have learned, living my life, can be anything when you have been brought up traumatically, cos nothing registers normally or in a low key.
Second, drum roll, 10 years ago in an Arts Council England application for a Royal Court play I write, 'It will show both sides of me — my mum is white.' Immediately after, I write, 'But no one will believe me — to the world I am black.' Through the delivery of 3 major art projects, The Reno — memoirs, excavation, The Reno @ the Whitworth exhibition; In the Ruins of the Big House, Factory International; and MY MUM IS WHITE, HOME, I am beginning to see why protecting my mum's true identity is important personally and politically and what it means.
I am touching the void of my proof of concept. Yeah!!!!! The importance of my mum is white is beginning to make sense to me. Though, it is still a slippery eel.
- Your Discovery
I want you to declare now, to yourself and to me, what is the real reason for your memoir. Our entire 8 weeks together have been giving us clues. Don't panic if nothing comes to you. Explore this question in your journal in your dedicated daily hour in your dedicated safe place. Don't worry if you become more and more desperate to know what it is, and you get woken in the middle of the night to work it out. But I'll tell you this, you will know it when you see it. You will feel it. Like when you are in love. Or when you are in labour. Hahahaha. And even if it still doesn't seem glaring, our next mission 8-stations will drag it out. In the nicest of ways. See you next week. We are gonna do something fabulous.