floorboards but then he had been caught out on the streets after curfew without a Rising Sun armband on. He had been beheaded right on the street corner, at the end of their road. Aunty Lies told him never to raise the subject with his mother – which seemed a little unfair as his mother brought it up herself often enough when she’d been drinking – but he obeyed the injunction, understanding you couldn’t really ask for more details of the two accounts when decapitation was the common theme.
They had lost all their belongings in the war so there were no photographs, no family records. Later, he wondered if his parents had really been married or if he had even had a father at all. The evidence for his father’s existence came only through stories that seemed to have a suspiciously mythic quality in both competing versions.
*
Some nights in Los Angeles, in the small bedroom he shared with his baby half-brother, he would dream about his father’s head. In the dreams, it would be sitting on a shelf when he opened the linen closet in the hallway, just there on a pile of towels or, once, on one of his mother’s dresses stretched across the cupboard shelf like a picnic blanket. They were not frightening dreams; the head was always smiling and friendly and would talk to him. When he woke, he muddled through to consciousness with the warm and comforted feeling that lingers after a benign reverie and, for a moment, he would feel regretful upon realising it wasn’t true.
Later, when Harper had been sent back to Holland, after what happened, he would use his father’s decapitation as playground capital, when the white boys picked on him. He would save it up, then announce it, and ask them what had happened to their fathers in the war. Everybody had war stories, of course, often involving dead or missing fathers, mothers starved or bombed, older siblings who had perished before they could be known, but other people’s stories, however tragic, were rarely as good for bragging purposes as decapitation.
Sometimes it would be the heroic fighting-in-the-hills version. At other times he would claim to have witnessed it himself, in which case the streetcorner version worked a whole lot better. His accounts became so detailed, he believed for a while that he had indeed been there. In that version, his father always had time for a few last words for his beloved son before the sword swooped down. In that version, it was quick and clean.
*
Peach-coloured lipstick: that was how he learned of his stepfather-to-be. He and his mother were in her bedroom in the tiny apartment on the top floor of the building behind the laundromat – he couldn’t remember the name of the street, just that there was a hot-dog stand on the corner called Hair of the Pup. They went there when his mother was pretending it was treat time but in fact there was no money for dinner. The hot dogs were pink sponges with skins so fine they were porous: if you squeezed the bun, liquid fat ran out like water.
Technically, the room they were sitting in was their bedroom rather than hers as he slept on a cot at the bottom of her bed, so poorly sprung and sagging that it slung him in a crescent-moon shape a few inches above the floor. His mother was sitting at the vanity unit in the corner next to the window. She was wearing a floral dress with a white collar and was carefully sculpting waves of her hair around her face with a fine-toothed comb and the occasional tsk of hairspray. When she had finished, she patted the waves gently, testing them, then opened a small drawer on the unit and dabbled her fingers amongst the lipsticks inside. She frowned. Selection made, she leaned across the vanity unit into the scalloped mirror, unwinding the lipstick slowly from a golden tube. Harper watched the lipstick emerge. He was six years old and his mother’s rituals still had that power.
‘Hey Mom, is your lipstick called “orange”?’ They had spoken English together
They had lost all their belongings in the war so there were no photographs, no family records. Later, he wondered if his parents had really been married or if he had even had a father at all. The evidence for his father’s existence came only through stories that seemed to have a suspiciously mythic quality in both competing versions.
*
Some nights in Los Angeles, in the small bedroom he shared with his baby half-brother, he would dream about his father’s head. In the dreams, it would be sitting on a shelf when he opened the linen closet in the hallway, just there on a pile of towels or, once, on one of his mother’s dresses stretched across the cupboard shelf like a picnic blanket. They were not frightening dreams; the head was always smiling and friendly and would talk to him. When he woke, he muddled through to consciousness with the warm and comforted feeling that lingers after a benign reverie and, for a moment, he would feel regretful upon realising it wasn’t true.
Later, when Harper had been sent back to Holland, after what happened, he would use his father’s decapitation as playground capital, when the white boys picked on him. He would save it up, then announce it, and ask them what had happened to their fathers in the war. Everybody had war stories, of course, often involving dead or missing fathers, mothers starved or bombed, older siblings who had perished before they could be known, but other people’s stories, however tragic, were rarely as good for bragging purposes as decapitation.
Sometimes it would be the heroic fighting-in-the-hills version. At other times he would claim to have witnessed it himself, in which case the streetcorner version worked a whole lot better. His accounts became so detailed, he believed for a while that he had indeed been there. In that version, his father always had time for a few last words for his beloved son before the sword swooped down. In that version, it was quick and clean.
*
Peach-coloured lipstick: that was how he learned of his stepfather-to-be. He and his mother were in her bedroom in the tiny apartment on the top floor of the building behind the laundromat – he couldn’t remember the name of the street, just that there was a hot-dog stand on the corner called Hair of the Pup. They went there when his mother was pretending it was treat time but in fact there was no money for dinner. The hot dogs were pink sponges with skins so fine they were porous: if you squeezed the bun, liquid fat ran out like water.
Technically, the room they were sitting in was their bedroom rather than hers as he slept on a cot at the bottom of her bed, so poorly sprung and sagging that it slung him in a crescent-moon shape a few inches above the floor. His mother was sitting at the vanity unit in the corner next to the window. She was wearing a floral dress with a white collar and was carefully sculpting waves of her hair around her face with a fine-toothed comb and the occasional tsk of hairspray. When she had finished, she patted the waves gently, testing them, then opened a small drawer on the unit and dabbled her fingers amongst the lipsticks inside. She frowned. Selection made, she leaned across the vanity unit into the scalloped mirror, unwinding the lipstick slowly from a golden tube. Harper watched the lipstick emerge. He was six years old and his mother’s rituals still had that power.
‘Hey Mom, is your lipstick called “orange”?’ They had spoken English together
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