Highlife

Chapter One: Nine Months

Joy Asante woke at ten past six, the way she had woken for thirty-four years, and lay still for a moment listening to the house.

The boiler ticked. A bus sighed to a stop at the end of Marden Row and pulled away again. Upstairs in the flats behind the garden wall, somebody's baby was crying with the particular thin outrage of a child who had not yet learned that morning came whether you protested or not. Joy knew that cry. She had spent forty years of her working life among those cries. She could tell hunger from wind, wind from fright.

What she could not get used to was the sound on her left side. Nothing. A cool flat expanse of sheet where a large warm man used to be.

She got up. She put on her dressing gown, the one with the burn mark on the cuff from the time she'd leaned too close to the hob, and she went downstairs and filled the kettle to the halfway line, because there was only one of her now and boiling more than that felt wasteful.

February light came into the kitchen the colour of dishwater. Joy took out one mug. She spooned in tea leaves, poured, waited, added milk, and stood drinking it at the counter instead of sitting down, because sitting down at a table laid for one was a thing she had decided at some point not to do.

At half seven she put the radio on for the voices. At eight she went out to the garden in her wellingtons and Emmanuel's old anorak to look at the roses.

There were eleven bushes. He had planted them over twenty-two years, one at a time, in an arrangement he claimed was accidental and which Joy knew perfectly well he had planned on a piece of graph paper. In February they were nothing, just cut-back sticks with rain on them, but Joy walked the row anyway and touched each one, and at the far end she checked the wooden gate he had made in 1998 out of the doors of a skip-bound wardrobe, with ASANTE cut into the top rail with a chisel and sanded smooth by his thumbs over the years.

"Still standing," she told the gate.

Back inside she ironed. This was the part her daughter Grace would not have understood, so Joy did not tell her about it. On Tuesdays and Fridays Joy took three of Emmanuel's shirts out of the wardrobe in the back bedroom, sprinkled them with water, ironed them, folded them, and put them away again. It was not madness. She had thought about it clearly and decided it was not madness. It was simply that the shirts had been ironed every week for four decades and stopping felt like a second death, a smaller one, entirely her own doing.

The blue one first. Then the white with the thin stripe. Then the one Ama had bought him from Berlin, which he had worn twice and declared too tight around the shoulders, and which still smelled faintly, if you pressed your face into the collar, of the pipe tobacco he had smoked in the doorway of the kitchen for thirty years while Joy shouted at him about his lungs.

His lungs. In the end it hadn't even been his lungs.

At twenty to ten the letterbox rattled.

Joy set the iron on its heel. She went down the hall, past the photographs — Grace in her graduation gown, Kofi holding baby Patrick like a parcel he suspected was fragile, Ama at eleven with a gap in her teeth and a plastic camera — and picked up the post from the mat.

A charity appeal. A leaflet for a pizza place. And a white envelope, good quality, with the council's crest in the corner and her name and address showing through the little window.

She took it into the kitchen and opened it with a knife, because Emmanuel had always opened letters with a knife and she had inherited the habit along with everything else.

*Dear Mrs Asante,*

*Re: Denford Estate Regeneration Programme — Phase Two*

She read it standing up. She read it twice, and then a third time, moving her lips like a girl at school.

The words were arranged very politely. *Extensive structural survey. No longer economically viable to maintain. Committed to rehousing all secure tenants. A dedicated relocation officer will be in contact. Demolition works are scheduled to commence in late October of this year and we therefore ask that vacant possession be given no later than the end of October, giving a period of approximately nine months in which to*

Nine months, Joy thought. That was funny, in a way that made no sound in her chest at all. Nine months was the only unit of time she had ever truly mastered. She had spent her working life counting in nine months. You could build a whole human being in nine months.

Apparently you could also take one apart.

She sat down at the kitchen table. She had bought that table in 1990 from a man on Deptford High Street who swore it was mahogany and had lied, and it had held every Sunday dinner she had cooked in this house, and there was a white ring on it near the left-hand corner from a hot pot Kofi had set down when he was nineteen and stupid, and she had never once had it French-polished because the ring was, by now, one of her children.

The house was a two-bedroom pebbledash terrace at the end of a row of six, tacked on to the back of the Denford Estate in 1968 as an afterthought, with a bathroom that flooded, a hallway that smelled of damp in April, and a garden the length of two buses. She had come to it in 1990 with two small children and a third on the way. Emmanuel had carried Grace over the threshold on his shoulders and said, in the voice he used for grand pronouncements, that they had arrived.

They had arrived. Thirty-four years later, she was being asked to leave.

Joy folded the letter in half, then in half again. She wiped the table with the flat of her hand, though there was nothing on it.

Then the telephone rang.

It was the landline, in the hall, on the little half-moon table with the doily. Almost nobody rang the landline any more except people wanting to discuss her boiler. Joy went out and picked it up because she was grateful, in that moment, for anything.

"Hello, four-double-two—"

"Auntie Joy?"

The line had that swim to it, that half-second delay. A young man's voice, deep, with the round unhurried vowels of home.

"Yes?"

"Auntie Joy, it's Kojo. Kojo Ankrah. Leticia's son." A pause. "Your nephew."

Joy put her hand flat against the wall.

She had last seen Kojo Ankrah in a photograph in a Christmas card in — 1996? 1997? A boy of nine or ten in a school uniform two sizes too big, squinting in Accra sunshine, and on the back, in her sister's cramped elegant hand, *Kweku Kojo, class three, very clever, very lazy.* She had not sent one back. That was the year everything broke.

"Kojo," she said. "My goodness."

"I'm sorry to call you like this. I'm sorry it's — I got your number from Auntie Millicent's cousin's daughter, it took me two weeks—" He stopped and started again, more steadily. "Auntie, my mother has had a stroke."

Joy heard herself ask the professional questions. When. Where. What kind. Was she in hospital, was there a scan, was she conscious, what was her blood pressure doing.

Thursday night. Korle Bu, then a private facility in Ridge because his mother would rather die than be seen on a public ward, and yes, a scan; ischaemic; the left side gone soft as a sleeping arm, the right side of her face still perfectly capable of disapproving of everybody. Her speech was slurred. She had been moved to a rehabilitation ward. She was stable.

"Stable," Joy repeated.

"She's not dying," Kojo said. "I want to be clear about that, so you don't — she's not dying. She's furious. She threw a cup of Milo at a physiotherapist yesterday."

Something in Joy's throat moved. It was almost a laugh.

"That sounds like her."

"Auntie." He hesitated. "She's been asking for you."

Joy looked at the doily. Little loops of crochet. Millicent had made it in 2004 while recovering from a hip operation and had made eleven others, and Joy had all eleven, and would not throw a single one away.

"Asking for me," she said.

"Since Friday morning. It's the clearest thing she says. She says, *Where is Joy.* She says it to the nurses. She said it to the man who came to fix the air conditioning." He exhaled. "I don't know what happened between you. I know it was bad and I know it was a long time ago and I know nobody in this family explains anything. But she's asking for you, and she has never asked for anybody in her life."

Joy stood in her cold hall in her husband's anorak with a demolition notice folded in her dressing-gown pocket and could not think of one single thing to say.

"Auntie? Are you there?"

"I'm here," Joy said. "Kojo, I'm — I have to think."

"Of course."

"How are you? Are you eating?"

He laughed, surprised. "I'm thirty-six, Auntie."

"That's not an answer."

"I'm managing."

"That's not an answer either." She closed her eyes. "Give me your number. The mobile. I'll call you."

She wrote it on the back of the pizza leaflet, and after she put the phone down she stood for a long time in the hall, and the house made its small noises around her, and upstairs behind the wall the baby had stopped crying and somebody was singing to it, badly, in a language Joy couldn't place.

Twenty-seven years.

The last thing her sister had ever said to her, in this house, in the front room with the good chairs, was: *You had a first-class brain and you gave it to a bus driver. Look at this place, Joy. Look at what you settled for.*

And the last thing Joy had said to Leticia, standing in that doorway with her hands shaking: *Get out of my home.*

And Leticia had. She had picked up her bag, and she had gone out past the roses, and she had let the gate with ASANTE on it slam behind her, and neither of them had picked up a telephone since. Their mother had died in 2005 and they had grieved her in two different countries without exchanging a word. Emmanuel had died eighteen months ago and Leticia had not sent so much as a card, though she must have known; that family always knew.

Joy went back into the kitchen. The iron was still standing on its heel, and the last shirt — the tight one from Berlin — lay half-folded on the board.

She finished folding it. She took it upstairs. She hung it in the wardrobe with the others, and then she took the letter out of her pocket and looked at it again, at the polite crest, at the phrase *vacant possession*, and she went to her bedside table and opened the Bible Emmanuel's mother had given her the week she got married, and she laid the letter inside it, and she closed it, and she put a glass of water on top of it as if it might otherwise get out.

Then she went down and started the ironing again from the beginning, all three shirts, even though they were already done.