Chapter 19
The summer Marcus turned seventeen, something shifted in the atmosphere of his life. He had returned to England from that first visit home to Kingston with a kind of ballast he had not known he was missing. The island had filled in spaces that England, for all it had given him, could not reach. He went back to Auntie Beverley's house in Wolverhampton and sat at the desk in his small room and felt, for the first time in years, fully himself.
Sixth form began in September. The school looked the same. The corridors smelled the same floor polish and old books and something vaguely like a gym changing room. But Marcus moved through it differently. He was no longer translating everything, no longer running a constant background calculation of how much space he was permitted to take up. He took up his space. He sat in the front row not because he was eager to please but because he wanted to see everything clearly.
His teachers noticed. Mrs. Alderton, who taught A-level English Literature, stopped him after class on the third week to say that his essay on post-colonial identity in Caribbean writing was the most original thing she had read from a student in six years. She said it the way Mr. Okafor would have said it as information, not flattery.
'You have a particular vantage point,' she said. 'Don't waste it by trying to sound like everyone else.'
Marcus thought about that on the bus home. A vantage point. He had spent years thinking of his in-between-ness as a deficit something to be managed, translated, apologized for. The idea that it was the opposite, that it was a position of seeing, was not new to him theoretically. Mr. Okafor had gestured at it. Leroy had said as much in his own terms. But hearing it from someone who taught literature, who spent her days in the company of writers who had grappled with exactly this, made it land differently.
He wrote in his journal that night for two hours without stopping.
He also started running competitively that year. The school had a cross-country team. Marcus had been running for years as a private thing early mornings, the familiar route along the canal, the cold pressing at his face and the rhythm of his own breathing filling his chest. But now he joined the team, partly because a boy named Daniel who ran the team approached him after seeing him on the canal path, and partly because he had decided to stop managing his edges so carefully. To let more of himself be visible.
The team was eight boys. They ran three times a week in the grey mornings, through parks and along towpaths, the city waking up around them. Marcus was the fastest over distance. Not from any particular training system he had never had coaching but from the years of running alone, which had built in him a particular quality of patience: the ability to hold his pace when others went out too hard, to know the shape of his own endurance.
'You run like you're thinking,' Daniel said one morning, matching Marcus's pace on the return leg.
'I am thinking,' Marcus said.
'What about?'
Marcus was quiet for a few strides. 'Everything,' he said. 'Running is when I sort things out.'
Daniel nodded as if this made complete sense. It did, to people who ran.
The year unfolded in the way that formative years do not in dramatic events but in the slow accumulation of small shifts. Marcus read widely and voraciously, no longer just the texts on the syllabus but everything adjacent to them: the criticism, the biographies, the arguments between scholars about what literature was for. He began to have opinions. Strong, grounded, specific opinions. He stopped qualifying everything.
His mother noticed the change in the Sunday calls.
'You sound more certain,' she said one Sunday in November.
'More certain about what?'
'About yourself,' she said. 'About what you think.'
He considered this. 'I spent a long time not being sure I was allowed to think things,' he said. 'Like my thoughts needed permission.'
'And now?'
'Now I understand that my thoughts are what I have. They're mine. Nobody gave them to me and nobody can take them away.'
His mother was quiet for a moment. 'That's right,' she said. 'That's exactly right.'
He sent her a copy of his essay on Caribbean writing. She called him the day she received it. She had read it twice. Her voice did the thing it almost never did something fragile at its edges.
'You wrote this?' she said.
'Yes, Mama.'
'About us. About where we come from.'
'About all of it,' he said. 'The leaving and the staying. The carrying.'
She was quiet for a long time. Then: 'I'm going to put this in the notebook,' she said. 'Right beside where I wrote about the day you were born.'
That was, Marcus thought later, the best thing she had ever said to him.