Chapter 50
Marcus turned thirty on a Saturday in the yard of his mother's house, surrounded by the people who had made his life.
Leroy had organized it which meant Sandra had organized it, with Leroy's enthusiastic cooperation. The yard was full. Beverley had come from Wolverhampton. Priya and Tunde had flown in. The Friday writing group had come. Teachers from Pemberton. The neighbours from the yard, the ones who had known Marcus since he was a child sitting in the mango tree looking at the rooftops.
Elise, fourteen months old, walked into things and greeted everyone with the particular democratic enthusiasm of a child who had been, since birth, surrounded by people who were genuinely glad to see her.
Marcus stood in the yard that had been the world when he was five years old and was still the world, in a different sense, and looked at the faces around him and felt something that was difficult to name precisely but that included gratitude, continuity, love, and a kind of quiet amazement that this was real, that this life was real, that he had arrived here.
He gave a short speech shorter than people expected, because he was constitutionally unable to speak at length about himself and said, essentially, three things: thank you; none of this was mine alone; the work continues.
Leroy, beside him, said: 'What he means is he loves us all and he's embarrassed to say so directly.'
Laughter. Marcus nodded. Essentially accurate.
His mother sat in a chair to one side of the yard, Elise on her lap, and watched everything with the steady attention that was her signature. When the speeches were done and the food was out and the music started, Marcus sat beside her.
'Happy?' she said.
'Very,' he said.
She looked at the yard, at the tree, at the families around them.
'I wrote in my notebook last night,' she said. 'About today. About you being thirty. About everything.'
He looked at her.
'What did you write?'
She was quiet for a moment.
'That everything I did was worth it,' she said. 'That I would do all of it again. Every long day, every tight month, every Sunday phone call. All of it. Worth it.'
He took her hand.
She let him.
Elise, on her lap, grabbed both their hands together and attempted to put them in her mouth, which broke the moment in the way only small children can.
They laughed. The yard carried on around them, warm and full of voices, and the Kingston sky above was exactly the colour Mama Vie would have called a sign.