Read Online Jubilee by Shelley Harris - Free Book Online Page A

which words you could use to sound cool, and which ones made you sound like a spaz. But he’d bent his mind to it; he’d been doing that ever since he arrived in Cherry Gardens.
    From the outset, displaced from Uganda, plunged into the cold shock of an English autumn, Satish had deployed his resources as quickly and as effectively as he could. He had an eye for detail, and a readiness to be flexible about things. He willed his body to get used to the latitudinal facts of life in Europe; gone was the reassuring rhythm of the equatorial day where the hours of daylight and darkness were measured with an even hand. Here, waking up in the dark, walking home from school at dusk, he could feel the night jostling him. Dampened by the drizzle – what mediocrity! – he thought sometimes of the rainstorms visited on them back home, passionate downpours that hammered the land, then were dried in an hour by the tropical sun. Later, in the aftermath, a cloud of grasshoppers would descend, the slowest of them grabbed by Satish and his friends and offered to the Africans as food. He’d watched, entranced, as they pulled off the wings and ate them straight away. Once, when she was old enough to feed herself but too young to tell their mum, he gave one to Sima.
    These losses were to be borne, but there were good things about England, too. The afternoons might be gloomy, but at least he was allowed to play outside in the growing dark, not ushered in when his mum started getting worried for him; these streets were safe. And then there was the first time he saw milk money being left out: Mrs Brecon put a pound note under an empty bottle, and he watched her front porch, peeping through the hall window every few minutes until bedtime, waiting for it to be swiped.
    ‘It’ll be there in the morning, Sati,’ his dad had said. ‘We’re not in Kampala any more.’
    In Kampala Miss Slater was a graceful oddity at Satish’s school, with her white skin and impeccable deportment. Courtesy had informed all her dealings with the class. Whatever she taught them – although Satish could not, once he had left, recall any specific academic gain – was shot through with politeness and respect.
    The adult Satish looks back on this now with a jaundiced eye; he is intelligent enough to realise how chaotic, how uncivilised was the world in which Miss Slater believed herself to be, therefore how necessary the redress of her invincible politesse . But as a child, Satish just thought she was courteous, and she was one hundred per cent of all the white people he knew. When he was told his family was going to live in Britain, he envisaged a nation of such adults, cordial and refined in all their dealings. And on that particular evening Satish remembered Miss Slater, and then he knew: of course they could leave the milk money out at night.
    Miss Slater’s legacy was short-lived. After he moved to Cherry Gardens, Satish wasn’t thrown by his peers’ behaviour; every kid is used to the casual cruelty of other children. However, sitting alone in Sarah’s kitchen one day, perhaps six weeks after his arrival in Cherry Gardens, Satish heard a whispered argument in the dining room, just the other side of the closed serving hatch.
    ‘What are you doing, Sarah? Why’s he here?’ That was her mum.
    ‘He came home with me after school. Can he …’ That was Sarah, speaking at normal volume. Mrs Miller shushed her. ‘Can he play?’
    ‘Absolutely not . Listen Sarah, Daddy and I think … I’m sure he’s a nice boy, but he’d really be better off with his own people.’
    Satish thought: does she know Uncle Ranjeet? Does she mean my cousin? Mrs Miller continued.
    ‘So I’m going to say no .’ There was a brief silence, and a sigh. ‘He can’t stay. Are you going to ask him to leave, or shall I?’
    Satish, listening, spilt an experimental bead of milk onto the work surface. He placed his glass on top of it and started moving it around.
    ‘He just came back