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idea. And all I know is, she took it with her wherever she went. At home, it was always in her bedroom. She didn’t like it in the public rooms.’
    I pointed to the initials on the bottom right of the painting. ‘Who’s I.R.?’
    Lawrie shrugged. ‘Not my forte.’
    I wondered what Lawrie’s forte was, and whether I would ever find out, and why did I want to – and was that the reason I was feeling so odd?
    In case he could read my thoughts, I bent my head down again towards the girl in the painting. She was wearing a light blue dress with a dark woollen cardigan – you could even see the cable knit. The head she was carrying had a long dark plait, which snaked unsettlingly out of her cradled arms, towards the red earth floor. The strange thing was, even though she had no body, the floating girl didn’t seem dead at all. She was inviting me in, but there was a note of caution in her eyes. Neither of them were exactly beaming in welcome. They both seemed oblivious to the lion, which may or may not have been waiting for the kill.
    â€˜I have to go,’ I said, pushing the painting away into his surprised hands. Lawrie, the party, the poem, the Dubonnet, Cynth’s marriage, the painting; suddenly I wanted to be alone.
    Lawrie took the painting from me and closed the boot. He looked down at me, his head cocked to one side again. ‘Are you all right? Do you want me to walk you back in?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean, no. I’m fine. Thank you. Sorry. It was a pleasure to meet you. Good luck.’ I turned away and made it to the entrance of the block of flats, before he called out to me.
    â€˜Hey, Odelle.’ I looked back to see him jam his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, hunching his shoulders again. ‘I – you know – that really was a good poem.’
    â€˜It always takes longer than you think, Mr Scott,’ I said. He laughed, and I smiled properly then, nevertheless relieved to be out of the street lamp’s glow.

 
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    V
    W hen I was growing up, my mother and I would always eat lunch with Cynth’s family on Sundays. Four in the afternoon, a big pot on the hob, everyone coming in and out and dipping for themselves – and once the meal was done, we’d draw our chairs up to the radio at seven thirty and listen to the BBC’s Caribbean Voices , the only broadcast that mattered if you dreamed of being a writer.
    Here’s the mad thing: poets from Barbados, Trini, Jamaica, Grenada, Antigua – any part of the British Caribbean – would send their stories all the way to Bush House on London’s Aldwych, in order to hear them read back again in their homes, thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean. There seemed no local facility to enable these stories to be processed, a fact which impressed upon me at a very young age that in order to be a writer, I would require the motherland’s seal of approval, the imperial sanction that my words were broadcastable.
    The majority of the work was by men, but I would listen enraptured by the words and voices of Una Marson, Gladys Lindo, Constance Hollar – and Cynth would pipe up, ‘One day you be read out, Delly’ – and her little shining face, her bunches, she always made me feel like it was true. Seven years old, and she was the only one who ever told me to keep going. By 1960 that programme had stopped, and I came to England two years later with no idea what to do with my stories. Life at the shoe shop took over, so I only wrote in private, and Cynth, who must have seen the piles of notebooks which never left my bedroom, simply stopped her pestering.
    She and Sam had found a flat to rent in Queen’s Park, and she’d transferred to a north London branch of Dolcis. Up to that point, I’d never really known loneliness.