The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q by Sharon Maas

Author:Sharon Maas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781909490598
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2015-01-29T23:00:00+00:00

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Two weeks following the arrival of The Chair, Neville invited Gran to visit him for a week. Gran didn’t even think twice. That very evening she instructed me to pack her suitcase, and the following Saturday Mum drove her up to Birmingham. I breathed a sigh of relief. The house without Gran felt like swimming out into the ocean after escaping a pond full of sharks.

That week, Mum and I did all the mother-daughter things we’d missed lately. We went to the cinema, we went out for a meal, we went for a walk in the park, and, the night before Gran’s return, we had a long, cosy talk, both cuddled against a heap of cushions at each end of the sofa; we hadn’t done this for years.

Mum was not a talker. She was the most private person I’d ever known, and even to me, her own child, she’d always been more a silent yet solid backdrop, rather than a proactive guardian, assuming I knew what I should know without her having to tell me. A natural ascetic, she was as strict with herself as she was laid-back towards me, and left me to raise myself, trusting somehow in my own wise judgement. Somehow, by a process of trial and error, it had worked. It was as if, without lectures on her part, I’d discovered right from wrong, and even when I failed myself – for instance, in the nasty matter of smoking – I knew that the strength was there to overcome it, and all I was waiting for was the right motivation.

But now we had all this time to talk, and there was something I had to ask her.

Mum had never spoken to me of her own childhood. Not one word. I’d grown up a London child, all family roots buried within her memory and my genes, invisible and unknown to me. I had no relatives, no family to speak of, beyond Mum, and I was very much bound to my home territory. I’d never thought of leaving it more than for a short holiday. Certainly not forever.

And here was Mum; she had left her territory at only sixteen! Gone out into the wilds, never to return! How had she done it? How did she feel? Did she miss it? Was the very texture of Guyana merged into her consciousness, as South London was in mine? Did she deny that sense of home; push it away from her awareness; and if so, was she somehow damaged, stunted, broken? Who was she? Maybe that was why Mum always came across as weird. Maybe, deep down inside, she missed that sense of home. And family. I mean, who were all these people Gran constantly talked about? Humphrey Quint and Freddy Quint, Aunty Agnes, Lurleen, Mabel, Uncle Mervyn, Wolf, Uncle Matt? Gran’s arrival into our life stirred all them all into my awareness. I was curious.

Mum only shrugged when I asked. ‘I don’t know all of them. Granny, of course.

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