The Club by Takis Würger

Author:Takis Würger [Würger, Takis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802146816
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2017-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

Charlotte

My mother wasn’t like my father. She believed that unearned wealth could corrupt a child’s soul. When I was fourteen she got me a job doing a paper round, although I hadn’t asked her to and would far rather have spent all my days riding and eating lemon tarts.

It wasn’t actually newspapers I was delivering, but leaflets advertising a Caribbean restaurant that belonged to my nanny’s brother, and because hardly anyone living in Chelsea had a taste for black beans I distributed these leaflets once a week in East London, in an area where, back then, there weren’t yet any hipsters. I got three pence per leaflet. At first I walked these eastern streets with a pounding heart, but after a few days I lost my inhibitions, and when I finished work I would sit with the big black women in the restaurant kitchen eating all that was put in front of me, listening to reggae and plucking the little feathers from chicken wings, which the women then slid into bubbling fat.

By the time I was sixteen I had plucked countless chickens, slept with the restaurant owner’s son, and learned that life had more to offer than lemon tarts. The white façades of Chelsea began to bore me. When I left school I wanted to cut sugarcane on a farm in Jamaica, then study in London and live in the East End, all the things you imagine doing when you’re young and think it doesn’t matter where you come from.

Then my mother died. In the last days of her illness she couldn’t move her arms or legs any more. A few weeks before the end, when she could still speak, she called me to her bedside one evening and said she was happy with the life she’d led, and could die in peace only if she knew I’d look after my father. He was so alone, she said. I cried for a long time and sat beside her bed all night because I didn’t want to let her die. The next day I promised to look after him, and she died less than two months later.

After that my father more or less stopped speaking. The only times he really talked to me were about studying at Cambridge. He told me about the big ball at the end of the academic year and how he would dance at it with me.

I wanted to make him happy again. I applied to Cambridge, and when we heard I’d been accepted I saw him cry for the first time in my life.

I resolved to steer clear of the snobs and lead a normal life. I thought that this was doable.

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