Page 107 of What It's Like in Words
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. My Scottish ancestors were rat catchers.”
“Excellent.”
“Ambition is in my genes.”
The clouds move, and the room darkens for a second.
“Ruth, you don’t have to answer, but what doyouremember of my dad?”
She adjusts her bun. “I remember that holiday in the Mara.”
“Were there good bits?”
“Of course! Look, I know you, Enola. You’re going to be eager to organize your thoughts. But it’s not about deleting the good; it’s just about making room for the bad. Likewise with your mum. You must have some happy memories?”
I think about Mum at the door with a glass of water, and my eyesfill with tears. Ruth leans to hug me. “Don’t,” I tell her. “I’ll just cry. Just tell me what else you remember, Roo. Please?”
“Honestly, mainly I just remember seeing you after,” she says.
“Catherine made tacos.”
“She did.” Ruth smiles.
“I hadn’t had tacos before.”
“Enola, what do you remember of that day?” she asks softly, carefully, because she has never asked me that before.
I look at my hands.
The way a child draws hands.
“I remember the noise of the train. People telling me in Swahili that they would be here soon, and I thought the ‘they’ meant Mum and Dad. I remember the sirens and this pervading feeling that I had done something wrong. Everyone was so odd with me, especially Mum. I remember asking him if we could go for ice cream afterward.Afterward.Like he was going into the post office or filling up the car or something.”
Ruth takes my hand and circles my palm like she’s reciting that rhyme about the teddy bear in her head.
“Those train stations in England—you know the ones in the countryside?”
She nods.
“I still can’t use those. They’re nothing like where he… but I tried once, for a festival, do you remember? You were meeting me there, I think. Anyway, I had to leave the platform and catch the bus. It’s weird. I don’t remember the details but I remember the feeling.”
“Enola, there was nothing you could have done.”
“And, like, I keep thinking how far we must have driven—there are so many tracks in Kenya, but to find a working part, with that train to the coast, arriving at that time? And I would have just been sitting on the seat next to him, waiting to find the right spot, for hours, oblivious, just happy to be with my dad.”
Ruth grips my hands. “It wasn’t your fault. Okay? Your dad killed himself.”
She looks at me like she has been waiting to say those words.
“I do know that. I do.” I smile so that she knows I’m being honest. “It’s strange. I used to have this place in my head, likehome, and it’s not home, it never was. And it’s the same with Dad.”
“You can’t go home again—that’s the saying, isn’t it?”
“And it’s especially true if you lose a parent.”
The more that Ruth and I talk, the more I think that home isn’t anything real, not a place or a building or a person; it’s just a sense of something, an inaccessible realm of playing in the grass and being called in for tea, of a towel held out after a bath and ice cream dripping on bare toes.
