Black Gold of the Sun Read Online Free PDF

that’s enough for me any more.’
    â€˜You don’t want me?’
    â€˜I just want to know what you want.’
    A cloud of cigarette smoke from across the room drifted past me. I noticed the ceiling was the colour of spoiled milk and the table was embedded with the ancient rings of beer glasses.
    We’d had the same conversation several times before. In response to her questions, I used to tell Hannah I couldn’t recall much about my childhood. The truth was different, though: I just couldn’t remember anything I wanted to talk about. When I looked up at Hannah, her face seemed indistinguishable from childhood enemies such as Kevin Dyer and Dwayne Hall – the kids who’d conspired to humiliate me when I was at school; she was doing the same now.
    â€˜What do you know?’ I said. ‘You sit there like you’ve got all the answers, but you don’t know a thing about my life.’
    I said a lot more, most of it made incoherent by anger and shame. Hannah simply let me speak. When I finally exhausted myself, she sat for a while, twisting a lock of hair between her fingers.
    â€˜That’s exactly my point. If I don’t understand, why don’t you try talking to me? I won’t laugh at you or whatever it is you’re scared of. I just want you to be yourself. Help me understand.’
    The choice couldn’t have been plainer: trust Hannahenough to take her into my past or turn away into solitude. At the time it felt as if there was only one possible decision. Even years afterwards, when I’d recall the curve of her hips in bed beside me or the depth of her brown eyes, even then it didn’t occur to me I might have done anything other than leave the pub that night by myself.
    I’ve had relationships with several women since Hannah, but solitude remains more familiar to me than intimacy. I live by myself in a flat near the City of London. After the office workers have left for the night, a stillness takes hold of the streets, one that’s punctuated occasionally by the sight of a vixen, two cubs yowling behind her, as they make their way to Bunhill Fields burial ground on City Road, to lie together near the grave of William Blake.
    Nearby on Brick Lane, immigrants have been coming to make their home in London for hundreds of years. French Huguenots, Jews, Somalis, Bangladeshis – all in turn have built a community there and left an indelible mark on the neighbourhood. That’s not my way. I prefer the in-between places – a flat above a row of shops; a cul-de-sac; the anonymous expanse of a council estate. Some place without an identity of its own where no one asks where you’re from.
    Yet I still woke up the morning after the incident at the store weighed down with the sense of my aloneness. I rang my sister Esi from the balcony outside my bedroom. When I first decided to return to Ghana, she talked about comingwith me. But the more we discussed it the less enthusiastic she became. Esi is a year older than me. Her memories of the place were more vivid. She said she wasn’t ready to go back to them.
    â€˜I never felt at home there,’ said Esi, down the phone line. ‘Do you remember that set of flats where we lived in Accra? Community One housing estate, Block O. With a big O painted on the side. These two boys would chase me around the courtyard there. I guess one of them liked me. But they called me “Guinness”. I didn’t understand what that was supposed to mean but there was obviously some racial undertow to it – I didn’t have the right accent or I didn’t fit in. And they used that against me.’
    A mosquito buzzed around my head. I smacked it away and set off a ringing in my ear. Static surged along the phone line. For a moment Esi was submerged beneath its waves. Then her voice bobbed back to the surface.
    â€˜There was a funeral for an auntie of ours. She’d died of septicaemia after