Gennadi, South Rhodes

CW: brief mention of domestic abuse, racist language

Observing my parents as we take our cryptocurrency funded family holiday (don't ask about his portfolio, it's all debt now!) in Greece.

Dad is newly very sweet and boyish until he's in pain, then he's angry. I used to not understand about the pain but we've become some kind of friends recently, and now he shows me the dark bruise on his ankle where the memory of the motorbike hit and run accidents - two of them! thirty years ago! breaking the same knee within a fortnight of eachother! - has gathered, seeped and refuses to budge. We marvel at such tenacity of memory, neutrally. One leg is inches shorter than the other where the cartilige has eaten itself up, so he's completely lopsided; on walking down from the monastery he had to jump-hop each of the 298 steps, said he was flying, even laughed! 

At the end of this same day after many such stairs he shouts at my mama in the car and won't sit next to us both. Small boy activities, but they hurt too. His leg and its pain is a neon sign in my head although confusing to read. Things are different from when I was young though, better; I am not connected to my mother like a tin-can shouting through the string, can't protect her, won't be protected either.

He's immediately brown in the sun like it's his right colour. Maybe, after all these years of attempting to divine where our grandad was from we've figured it out. Poor papa - it's only the way he holds his arms, his face, like he's always in the wrong place, that stops him slotting in anywhere distinctly.

When talking about the Black author Shola von Reinhold, who wrote the transcendent Lote and who is unfathomably now hanging out with my glorious older sister in New York, he asks abruptly "Does R think she's Black?".

No, I say uncertainly - She calls herself mixed-race. As do I. I looked at him as pointedly as I could with such little preparation. 

"But you look pretty white to me?"

Well, in London maybe I pass (even though that's not a consistent truth either) but it's different in other places and with other people. Anyway it's a factual description of the circumstances - you can't say more or less than it. 

"Mixed race - I assume we're talking about a touch of the tarbrush here? Not like, mixed as in your grandma's family are Croatian and French or whatever?"

The fact that this is one of the frankest conversations I've had with my dad about my grandfather Mohammed Hussain (later christened Derek Cox)'s origins, and my father's relationship to it, should feel momentous. And this archaic, distinctly racist term, which truly suggests that the last time he had this conversation was in the fucking 1960's. We plod on! 

And mama too. One of her quirks is that she always is looking for escape routes. She loses her keys enough that this is a useful habit to cultivate.

"Could you climb up to this second floor balcony from the ground, do you think...?" She continues without waiting for my reply, "Well, I've actually tried and weirdly the fence is way too flimsy to take the weight, a shame really." 

It's harmless, not sinister. Mostly strange to wonder where it came from, considering her artistic, comfortable, middle class upbringing. I wonder sometimes if something terrible happened to her and she's never said. She'll eat the scraps off of other people's plates - she'll wonder out loud how to find fresh water on a hike an hour in - she'll lick a wound on her adult child's leg in public like a loving dog.

I decided to call her mama (instead of the solid mum) to foster a softness in myself. You cannot be hateful while saying it, and if you are then the idiocy of the word melts that anger and turns it to laughter. The strongest you can get is pity which can be worked on quite easily, as emotions go.

Another one of her best qualities is a sheer lack of self consciousness, like an adolescent girl who hasn't been cat-called yet. Toes in hiking sandals pushed together filming a white and tailed butterfly, palm size. My mother has the big calves and small waist she's given to us three sisters, and a body serenity where it's all for use, a woman who would plow the ground with her bare arms as tools.

In a woman formed, as I have described, of service, an aspect frivolous and potent is her commitment to Scientology. My parents met in the Church and worked there for 25 years and my mother attends courses multiple times a week to this day. It is the blood of her life, dripped an uncrossable line in the sand between us.

Us three are out completely. I naively think it is resolved, but it is when she is drunk on ouzo in the Snow White themed goth bar in the tiny village that she shows her crevasse of anger and regret that her bisexual, Communist, drug-taking, promiscuous, (Wikipedia article reading, lol) children have gone so wrong as to wrinkle at the mention of her life's work. She is almost in tears, but no, we won't come back, no, no. The ease with which I can say no and the pain with which she asks makes me feel very cruel. It is more powerful to be impassive than to beg.

From the Mediterranean sea, I watched my mama get up from the deckchair, pack, move hipsly across the beach, secure that I would know even the varicose veins on her legs and wondering faintly why she was leaving so soon. But it was not my mother. How could I mistake another sandy haired woman for her? It was someone else's woman who made to go, not mine.

Although sometimes, I do think.