The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q Read Online Free PDF Page A

fun to take a trip to the West End or Notting Hill or Brighton, or even America. But here is where I feel at home; where I get the sense of belonging. Yes, this was home. When people ask me, ‘ Where do you come from ?’ (and they do, because they think I look ‘exotic’. Christ. I hate that word!) I say Streatham, and stare them down. Because that’s where I’m from. Not this foreign place across the ocean, just because my mother grew up there. Not Guyana.
    What did I care about some half-baked ex-British colony in South America? A country that can’t get its ass off the ground, its act together enough to make itself known, like Jamaica or Barbados? I wouldn’t have minded telling people I was from Barbados. Or even Grenada. A lovely Caribbean island, where everyone wanted to go. But Guyana? No one had ever heard of it. They all thought it was Ghana. A country at the very Edge of the Known World, and most probably a dump. Mum had hinted as much often enough. Not a place you could be proud of.
    But I couldn’t tell Gran that. I knew what she meant; something nebulous, subtle; home being where the heart is, that kind of clichéd stuff. I nodded helplessly. She let the silence thicken between us, and then once again cut through it with a different voice, a different mood.
    Gran fumbled in the big suitcase again and emerged with a bottle of some yellow liquid. The label on the bottle said ‘Limacol’ . She splashed some on her hands and patted her cheeks and neck with it, then handed it to me. I took it and looked questioningly at her and at it. ‘The Freshness of a Breeze in a Bottle,’the label stated.
    ‘Go on, go on! Use it!’ she said. So I did as she had done. It was like Eau de Cologne, fresh, tingling but in this case, limey. I quite liked it, but now I knew where Gran’s distinctive smell came from.
    ‘You mother was always a queer one,’ said Gran. ‘She was a Quint, a real Quint. Eccentric, them Quint boys, all a bit loopy. ‘Cept one, me husband Humphrey. And Ma Quint, of course. Granma Winnie. But she wasn’t no Quint.’
    I felt something soft, smooth and warm press against my calves. It was Samba. I bent down and picked her up, placed her upon my thighs and stroked her shiny black coat. Usually, Samba would snuggle into my lap, meow gently to ask for affection, and, when it came, show her appreciation by purring. Today, she simply stood up and padded slowly over to Gran’s lap, where she circled three times and settled into a cosy ball. She didn’t even have to ask; Gran’s hand was already there, sliding over the sleek black fur.
    ‘She never goes to strangers!’ I exclaimed.
    The only response was Samba’s smug and steady purr as she contentedly kneaded Gran’s thighs. Gran stroked her absentmindedly, and didn’t reply. She pointed to a red, much older album. ‘That one.’
    I handed it to her, and she opened it at the first page. There was only one picture on it, a sepia photo of five young women standing in a row, five beautiful young women in long dark skirts and white long-sleeved blouses, the buttons up the front rising into stiff high collars. It could have been a photo of Victorian students from a Ladies Finishing College – except that all the women were ebony-skinned.
    ‘Me mother and she sisters,’ Gran said. ‘Mother in the middle.’ She pointed to her mother, then, one by one, to the four other girls. ‘Henrietta, Josephine, Penelope and Elizabeth. The Williamson girls, my Aunties. All dead.’
    She turned the page. ‘Me and you mother,’ she said of herself holding a toddler in a white frilly dress. ‘Me eldest child. And look, me and your Grandad, with your mother.’
    She and a handsome, fair-skinned young man were sitting next to each other, a baby on her lap. The man wore a dark suit and a bow tie; she wore a white dress just covering her knees. Hemlines had obviously shot up drastically between photos.
    Then it was her, Granddad, and Marion, followed by