We had more than enough to explore right here and now, and most of all we had the running challenge of what our mother called ‘opportunity.’ Mother worked as a cleaner in office buildings and malls and hospitals. In truth, none of us, not me, Francis, or Mother, had much interest in the grey pasts of photographs. His skin was much darker than Mother’s, but we had been told that he was not black like her, but something called ‘Indian’ – although this identity seemed lost in the poorness of the photograph, or in the trowel-thick application of Brylcreem in his hair, as artificial as the black snap-on do of Lego Man. The photograph wasn’t perfectly focused, and I remember Francis and me as children looking hard into the blur of the man’s face for something recognizable. This man was our father, who was also from the West Indies, and who now lived somewhere in the city, although he had left our home when Francis was three and I was only two. Old words like suave and debonair came to mind, or at least they do now. He wore a thin light-coloured jacket, the open collar of his shirt slightly kinked up. It showed a man with a moustache groomed so carefully it looked painted on. There was another old photograph in the house, one that Francis discovered when we were small, shelved secretly in Mother’s bedroom cupboard. It was a place populated by relatives we had met only briefly, who existed now in old black-and-white photographs, ghostly images that were supposed to explain our eyes and way of smiling, our hair and bones.
Somehow, we felt that the West Indies made sense of other equally strange objects in our home, like the snow globe of Niagara Falls, or the lurking threat of Anne Murray’s ‘Snowbird’ 45. It was a place that accounted for the presence in our house of certain drinks like mauby and sorrel and also the inexplicably named Peardrax, which Francis had once fooled me into believing was bathroom cleanser. It was a place that Francis and I, both born and raised here in Canada, had visited once and could recognize vaguely in words and sounds and tastes. Our mother had come from Trinidad, in what parents of her generation called the West Indies. But before all of this, he was the shoulder pressed against me bare and warm, that body always just a skin away. His was a name a toughened kid might boast of knowing, or a name a parent might pronounce in warning.
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