I’ve never smiled again like I did on my sixth birthday,
looking into the camera while my foster mother guides
my hand through a symbolic slashing of years. I can feel
the failing elasticity in her hand and smell the dissolving
lungs on her breath. My foster dad, a quiet favourite, dozes,
tired from a job I’ve never known him to have. Some kids
are only here for summer. I watch them, unconsciously
thumbing my singed skin, a scar from separated kin, a
melding with warmth severed too late, and remember
what loss feels like, deciding to stay around faces await-
ing the same school as I am. I’ve crunched through
several chocolate cornflake cakes before I remember I
have presents to unwrap. I walk to the gifts, eager but
satisfied, tonguing the soft cereal stuck to my teeth.
I notice the handwriting on the first present and retreat
to my foster mother’s leg. ‘All right, dear, we’ll open this
one later.’
/
My mum carried around the ultrasound now come to
life – an image swollen with my future – to show me
nothing’s black and white. I imagined a fragile sticker on
her stretch-marked stomach and always walked behind
her as she climbed the stairs. We’d fall asleep together,
me supposed to be watching over her but getting caught
up in the lethargy of her movements. I would wake before
her and lift the kente from her stomach, the cloth getting
acquainted with who it’d hold up, and imagine the smile
of my soon-to-be sibling. And as I’d fall back to sleep I’d
ask the bump for their name and glide my fingers over
stretches and paths, trails to a world and a body’s resist-
ance to the light. Dribbling in the womb became spittle
in a bucket, only my hands touched it, and pouring it out
was simply wiping the baby’s mouth. When my father
walked out, I walked in, with a Cornetto in one hand
and my pocket smelling of Deep Heat. Then my mum
grabbed my hand so I could feel the kicks, but as I touched
her stomach I knew it was a palm trying to connect with
me through the skin, and my bond with my brother
touchingly began.
/
I watch a little black boy standing outside a shop, pre-
tending not to be bothered by his white friends inside
spending money. I walk over and give him a two pound
coin and remind him to eat whatever he buys before he
gets home. My mum wouldn’t approve so I know his
mum wouldn’t either. Wide, his eyes look like mine and
I fall in love with how grateful everything about him
becomes. ‘Safe, man!’, he says. He smells like cocoa but-
ter and DAX and I follow his scent up to the door and
watch as he stands in front of the colourful sugars with
snappy names. I know he’s savouring being spoilt for
choice; I’m sure when he takes a bite of whatever he buys
I too will be satisfied. And a memory comes back to me
of the first time I held a pound coin, given to me by a
stranger who smelled like cigarettes and Blue Magic.
/
We sleep in the same bed long after I should have grown
into my own. I kneel on the mattress cornering my
mum, asking why she sent me away, why she allowed me
to be raised by people whose lives were so different from
our own, people she didn’t even know. My side of the
bed is still tender with my silhouette. My mum reaches
over to my indent and tells me not to speak ill of the
dead.
She trusted me to keep her alive, to deify, to render her
an immortal that cancer couldn’t metastasise. Thousands
of stacked monitors going out one by one, a memory on
each and then darkness to close the scene. Most of our
loves die lying – dropping out of time, leaving broken
promises behind. Mum, I thought you wanted to stay.
But instead, when I turn back, I see, you were like me
but you did it by smoking twenty a day. Why choose to
die? I could have saved you, with my towel safety-pinned
around my neck, a Boy Wonder wondering how to defeat
the evil smoke monster rising to the ceiling. Lose a mem-
ory and you’ve lost a life – so hands stretch into the
darkness to bring our living thoughts to the light. Shak-
ing the limbic like a Polaroid until the image is clear,
I stare at the face I think I remember, confused as to why
you’re not here. If I forgive your absence, then you have
to forgive mine, forgive me for not showing up and for
struggling to keep you alive. And though we’re not in
contact, you’ll always be my mother; we’ll meet again
because we never said goodbye.
Book Club questions:
How do you feel about the style of the writing? Why do you think the author chose to write in this way?
What can you tell about the narrator’s relationship with his mother from just this extract? What questions do you have?
Which of the above four verses sticks with you the most? Why?
That Reminds Me by Derek Owusu is published by #Merky Books, hardcover £12.99. Buy now from Amazon or your local bookshop.