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me worry for my previous self.
    In the class picture from Draycott, I stand rod straight, skinny bird-bone arms hanging at my sides. I lack weight, presence. I seem darker in the photo, unmistakably black against the startling white of my classmates, and I don’t know if it’s the camera or my imagination.
    I can see in that picture, in the set of my mouth, that I’ve already decided never to tell Oliver about the bullying at school. I am eight and a half and I’ve already determined that, in the future, I will hide my weakness from him until I cannot bear it. I will tend my wounds alone. Gradually, scar upon scar, that’s how a man is formed.
    I was placed on a waiting list for Kensington International School while Oliver moved to Parliamentary assignments. He bought a used white Mini, a
London A–Z,
and placed a cardboard Press sign on the dashboard. He installed a radio in the car tuned to the police frequencies, which emitted staticky intermittent bulletins so that the leads were often useless. But it served his purposes, keeping him symbolically connected to London’s netherworld.
    He drove like a drunk man, with lurching starts and alarming halts. I sat in the broken front seat, clutching the passenger door with my mittened hand, and tried my best to muffle my terror as we wheeled past tight corners, shaved past parked cars, and took roundabouts at top speed. At traffic lights, I soothedmyself by poking my finger in the holes of the wooden steering wheel. Sometimes, when the panic of hurtling forward was too exhausting, my nervous system shut down and I fell into a stress sleep.
    While we drove around, Oliver drilled me on world capitals. “Tegucigalpa.”
    “Is the capital of Honduras!”
    “Accra.”
    “Is the capital of Ghana!”
    I had developed a habit of rubbing my temple with my thumb when I concentrated. While trying to remember the capital of Nicaragua one afternoon, I looked over at Oliver and saw that he was also rubbing his temple with his thumb. I loved these moments when Oliver and I looked and behaved a bit like each other.
    Though I went along with Oliver’s pop quizzes and feigned interest in his car lectures, it seemed to me, increasingly, that Oliver’s most obvious failing was his sense of priorities. He shared facts about the war in Korea, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union—topics that might have held other boys rapt. But these facts were not the ones I wanted or needed. At age eight and a half, I was hungry for information about my mother.
    My interest in her had grown dramatically ever since I had read the hidden hospital letters. So I began to take advantage of lulls in conversation while Oliver drove around. I began asking some simple questions. In this way I discovered that she liked bread pudding with sultanas and that she took two lumps of sugar in her tea. Her favourite shop was Kleins Haberdashery in Soho. She had long fingers, which were my fingers. She had a long flared nose, which was my nose.
    Slowly, the facts Oliver shared became more personal.
    “We were very much in love.”
    Or, “Did I mention how pleased she was when she found out about you?”
    Perhaps I made the fatal mistake of looking too eager during these conversations. Maybe Oliver began to worry that he had disclosed too much or was startled by something he recalled or feared losing me to a ghost—but one day there were no more mother facts. He turned away from my questions, changing the topic to himself. For a while, I had a strange feeling that he was trying to win me back to him.
    “I’ll make you proud, Marcel. Just you wait. One morning you’ll open up the newspaper and see my byline right there: front page, above the fold.”
    I wanted him to feel that he was still my hero, but his ambitions were strange to me. As far as I could tell, the lessons “above the fold” were horrible and predictable: war was continuous, politicians made loads of