The White Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a bit upset herself, but Kojo had such lovely manners. ‘Well you can’t really say he’s not normal, can you?’ she tried, but tentatively, not wanting to annoy. ‘You bloody women,’ he’d raged at her, Alfred who hardly ever swore. ‘First performing monkey turns up in a suit, you’re practically begging him to take our daughter –’ ‘No,’ she had said. ‘But I liked his suit. I always did like men in suits.’ ‘I’ve never been good enough for you, have I …?’
    He went to their wedding because May said she would never forgive him if he didn’t, and sat in a corner, he and Dirk, only talking to each other, morosely drunk. He never visited when Kojo got ill; she went alone even when Kojo was dying. Alfred only cheered up when he found out about the will, and she’d thought that then he would acknowledge at last that Kojo was responsible, a good provider, but he just said, ‘Well that explains it, doesn’t it. That’s why Shirley married him.’ And he’d softened to his daughter, briefly. And then she had taken up with Elroy, and May knew Shirley would never be forgiven.
    But I’m her mother, and there’s nothing to forgive. I’ve read James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King …
    I loved Kojo. And I like Elroy. They’re not so different, when you get to know them. I don’t care what colour people are, thought May, looking at the glorious red of some enormous daisy-like flowers on a bedside table far down the ward. Flown in from unimaginably far away. Some beautiful, amazing part of the world I never knew existed then, when I was young, when Alfred was courting. He would have felt embarrassed, bringing flowers.
    Though he did have nice manners. Which she liked, in a man.
    She had tried to teach her sons nice manners.

7 • Dirk
    Dirk stared out of the window of the bus at the windows of the big houses by the Park, very nice houses owned by people with money, white people, nearly all of them, though a few Paki twockers had wormed their way in … One day he, Dirk, would make money.
    He would raise himself. He would better himself. He would prove to his father that he had backbone. He would be … someone … a gentleman … like some of the officers were in the war, though Dad said most of them were donkeys … he would make his father proud of him. One day he would own a house like that. The sunset light on the window-panes winked back at him, encouraging him.
    He would go far. Farther than the others. Then he could do something for the family. First he’d make Darren and Shirley look small. Then he’d be kind to them. Give ’em a leg-up.
Maybe
he would, if she changed her ways.
    He would be … an international businessman. The net was the answer. He would do it that way. And buy a mansion for his father and mother. And they would be grateful. Fucking grateful. And Mum would have to be nice to him, not laughing at him because of his crewcut, not sneering at him because of his friends. Head in a book, what did she know? Did she notice anything about what was going on? Did she know that a battle was being fought, on the streets of London, Liverpool, et cetera? – Bristol. That was the other one. The other spot where they’d gone in force. According to
Spearhead
. (Dirk had never been to Bristol.)
    One day he’d travel. He’d like to travel. To parts of the world where things were still all right. Not that there were so many of them left. South Africa had fallen. Had been sold out. It was a black day for whites, when they sold out. It used to be paradise. He’d read about it. He tried to imagine it. Fucking paradise. He closed his eyes. Lions, tigers. Sort of pink blossoms, lots of them. Boogie-something. Boogie blossoms. And – swimming pools. And strong white men. Muscular. Toned. Working out in the sunlight. Short haircuts and – brick-hard buttocks. Press-ups flipping over into sit-ups, and fuck, they all had enormous hard-ons, and most of the men round the pool were black