The Grand Scheme of Things, page 2
“You always say I’m beautiful,” I responded.
“I mean it. You’re stunning.”
I kissed her, sliding my fingers through her night-colored coils of hair. “Look at you. You put just as much effort into today as I have.” I gazed at her outfit: an off-white ruched blouse paired with peach-colored cropped trousers. She was wearing the gold-plated amazonite chain necklace I had bought her for her birthday a few months prior. It sat so gloriously on her chest. I really, really did love her.
“You mean how you always put in so much effort when you turn up to any of my gigs, no matter how big or small?” she chuckled. “It means the world to me.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I smiled.
“I’ll be in your position next year. Getting ready to put my graduation hat on and all that.”
“You mean mortarboard?”
“Okay, I get it. You know fancy words. Let’s have breakfast before we start running late.” She kissed me on the cheek before opening the bathroom door, and we walked down into the kitchen, where her parents were making food for us. Her father was playing Alton Ellis’s rendition of “Workin’ on a Groovy Thing” while her mother bopped along, flipping pancakes. I remember how I felt that day: so happy. But I was also in so, so much pain. I never knew rejection could feel so visceral until this point. In an alternate universe, I was dancing around to music with my mother, but not in this one. This pain—the pain of rejection, the pain that came with being turned away for just being exactly who I was—holy shit, Hugo.
There was more to come.
* * *
When Queen Elizabeth made a visit to Botswana in 1995, it was raining. The locals saw it as a sign; the rain was something the queen brought on. They nicknamed her Motlalepula, which means “she comes with rain.” On my first visit to the country in nearly three years, the rain was torrential, which was quite an eyebrow raiser for a semidesert in the winter. An uncommon occurrence. I’m not leaping to any conclusions, but one could assume that I brought the rain on. Of course, nobody would think that. I’m not British royalty.
We were greeted by my aunty Yarona and my cousin Tshiamo outside Sir Seretse Khama Airport, before hurrying into their car under the shelter of semi-functioning umbrellas we clutched tightly with our free hands. We were lucky our suitcases weren’t more soaked through by the time we thrust them into the boot and slid into the backseats.
I had felt so uneasy on the whole journey from England, knowing that my mother was sitting on a Pandora’s box of information that she was either ready to open up to chaos and familial scrutiny, or keep sealed shut. I’d had no time to delve into searching for theater work between leaving university and flying to Botswana, so I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell my relatives when they hounded me with questions. I definitely wasn’t sure what I was going to say when they asked me if I was any closer to walking down the aisle. Nosy aunts always think they have a stake in the workings of your private life, like a listener’s commitment to a podcast conversation. I didn’t need a dissection of my life, a poking and prodding at my goals and aspirations. Being the first child in my mother’s family to be raised outside the country meant that every return was like Neil Armstrong bringing remnants of the moon back with him, with everyone clambering for a piece. Only, I wasn’t so sure they’d be as impressed with the remnants of my truth.
“So how is London treating you?” Tshiamo asked as we took a long walk around the block after the rain had passed in the late evening. We had stopped at a tuckshop, where she bought us some Fizz-Pop sweets and bartered for some cheap cigarettes for us to smoke on our walk. She had perfume in her handbag to cover ourselves with once we’d finished smoking. It brought me back to the summers I used to spend with her, when she took me under her wing once she noticed I was the outcast cousin who others were reluctant to interact with. Naturally, I started sharing less and less in common with my distant family as time went on, but she’d make sure to bring me along to house parties and car-park functions so I could get a piece of the fun. We’d stagger home exhausted, sneaking into the yard in a mask of body spray to cover the smells of debauchery that clung to our skin and hair.
“London’s okay,” I sighed. “I’m sure you know I’ve just graduated.”
“Arts, right?” She sucked in the nicotine. “Congrats.”
“Playwriting. Thanks.”
“Nicholas has just finished his freshman year, akere? I forgot what he studies. Why didn’t he come with you guys?”
“He’s Interrailing around Europe with his friends. And yeah, he finished his first year. Business and management at Queen Mary.”
“Queen this, Queen that.” She laughed. “Who even is that? I didn’t know there was a Queen Mary.”
“She was King George V’s wife, so she wasn’t an actual queen.”
“Eish, it’s too complicated, man. Anyways. Are you looking forward to your grad party next week?”
“No,” I answered honestly. “I’d rather be anywhere but here.” She was oddly silent after my admission. I sensed she knew something she wasn’t supposed to disclose, so I elbowed her lightly, asking her what was up. “Ke eng?”
“I overheard my mother on the phone a week ago. I think she was talking to your mother. Wa re, something about… I don’t know, I couldn’t fully make out everything they were saying. But I think they were talking about you.”
My heart stopped. “What could you hear?”
“Ba re, they expected you to marry a lekgoa at the most, but they weren’t expecting you to be with a kgarebe.”
“They thought I’d marry an English man before I got with a girl?” I repeated, breaking out into a nervous chuckle.
“Eeh. My mother said it’s just a phase. Maybe you’ll snap out of it.”
“Do you know the girl I always post on my Instagram? That’s the kgarebe.”
“The yellowbone? Ke a itse. I thought she was just your best friend.”
“No. She’s the girl I love. She’s not a ‘phase.’ She’s the only person in this world who I can be around and be myself.” I stubbed out the butt of my cigarette, suddenly feeling nauseous. A stray dog trotted along the red sand, blanketed in night, on the side of the road.
“O seka wa bolelela ope that I told you. You haven’t heard anything from me, okay?”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
Tshiamo turned to me. “My mother said that England must have corrupted you. Your family went there for a better life, and this is how you respond, by falling into the wrong circles.”
“Bathong! I’m not exactly moving blow around the boroughs. I’m not part of a gang. Why do people think they know me? Nobody knows me. Nobody gets me.”
“Ga gona mathata, Naledi. Don’t worry. It’s just elders being elders. Parents being parents. Speaking of parents, when are you seeing Uncle Karabo?”
“Ideally, never. Realistically, in a few days. I’m absolutely dreading it, though. Especially with all this… newfound information.”
I knew that visiting my father would be a stressful ordeal. He moved back to Botswana when I was ten and had since been running his own trucking company there. To my dismay, he was still a devoted member of a religious sect called God’s Living Angels (a cult, to put it frankly). He’d ended up falling into it during our annual trips to Botswana, and my parents divorced shortly after, having different ideas about where Nick and I should be raised. My father had wished to return to his roots and live out his life as a committed man of God, away from the corruption of secular society. But my mother had been reluctant to follow suit. It will hinder Naledi’s and Nicholas’s studies, she had told him. It will stunt their chances for better opportunities. So she’d decided to stay in England with me and my brother, fraying the tethers that held her to my father. At the time, I had a vague understanding that there had been a gradual clash of religious beliefs, but I knew now it had been more than that.
Before my father left the UK for good, he had been made redundant from his third job, and he was struggling to find a new one. A better one. My mother’s jobs as a nurse and hairdresser were comfortable enough, but my father wanted to be hired into a position of authority, or at the very least a job in an office. He was tired of working as a taxi driver, a bus driver, a warehouse worker. He wanted to wear a white collar. But no matter how many applications he put in, no matter how much education and work experience he had, he got nothing back. It was Radio Silence. Mr. Karabo Moruakgomo was stumped. From the bottom of my heart, I believe that was the real reason he’d moved back to Botswana, although he would never admit it.
Tshiamo took out her perfume and gave us both a spritz. “Can I come back to London with you? Life is too simple here. Ke batla go live my best life.”
“I’m not even sure I’m living mine.” I huffed. “Seriously, though… an English man? They really thought that? I’ll be dead before I even associate with any kind of man. End of story.”
I think back a lot to that statement I made, Hugo. I’m sure you can see the irony in it now.
* * *
When I eventually went to visit my father in Francistown, I wasn’t shocked to find out he was still steadfast in his belief that my mother had made the wrong decision by keeping us in the UK. He ranted on about how Nick was the saving grace, the one who could prove her right. He’d become the potential moneymaker, the one worthy of the citizenship we held. My father made this loud and clear, harping on about how I’d abused my chances in a better world. I’d followed the corrupted, the hippies, the artists, the kind of lifestyle that only a lekgoa could afford to live. I had sabotaged my citizenship, according to him. I didn’t deserve the opportunities I had been given abroad. I was not worthy of them.
But this time, I didn’t feel as dejected as I usually would during his degrading, irrational, holier-than-thou, condescending lecture. Instead, it actually gave me a second wind. Then and there, the accumulating pressure to make my family less ashamed of me became the inspiration for a new script idea. I was going to write a play, and I knew exactly what it was going to be about. I was going to title it The Worthy, and it was going to be a near-future dystopia that explored national identity, citizenship, and capitalism. I needn’t say any more because you know the play very well. But that was where the idea stemmed from, how the script blossomed. It was birthed from a rant my father showered over me, two months before I met you. A rant that concerned my supposed lack of belonging, my lack of worth, in the only place I called home.
iii The Worthy
January 2016
As per my prediction, I completed my first draft of the script in early January, three months after my conversation with you in the café. Every now and then I’d think back to the kind words of a stranger who saw potential in my work before I had even finished it. Remembering that I had you on social media, I searched through my friends list on Facebook and scrolled through your profile, finding nothing surprising. Photos at the Royal Ascot; a fancy date night at the Berkeley with a blond-haired, cobalt-blue-eyed woman who I assumed was your girlfriend; UCL graduation pictures; a family trip to Hong Kong. Cheers for the well-wishing, I thought to myself as I sat in the suffocatingly tiny bedroom of my childhood home.
Though I had completed my play, I kept the entire plot to myself. I told nobody—not Blue, not my university friends, not anybody. I wanted to surprise everyone with a viewing of the play in person, whenever that might be. If ever that might be. But I guess I also believed in the superstition of the evil eye—that the less I spoke of what I was aiming to achieve, the better the chance I had of achieving it. I didn’t really have strong connections to the theater world, despite my degree, though one of my lecturers had been an actor in the West End before he turned to teaching, and I built up enough of a rapport with him that I could use him as leverage once I began sending my play off to agencies and contests. I thought that might have helped, as well as my first-class degree from one of the best drama schools in the country; and the collegiate creative writing award in my second year, in which I won third place; and the local script-writing prize for BAME applicants that I won halfway through my third year, after handing in one of my assignments on a whim. I had the credentials. I had what it took to break through. There was just something missing, and it hurt to consider what that something might be. The nagging notion that it might have had nothing to do with my credentials or how hard I worked, and more to do with everything I couldn’t change, was never lost on me. I just had to hope for the best in my situation; I couldn’t succumb to the frustration. The road to success is slippery, you see. It’s a nebulous wonder. A pain in the arse.
I had secured a Christmas temp position at Lush near Monument Station, and my contract had expired in the first week of the new year. There was an interview scheduled at a Byron Burgers restaurant near the Cutty Sark in Greenwich a few days later. The hours would be enough to allow me to travel around the city and contribute towards the bills and the groceries. My mother was getting older; her hands were starting to ache due to the repetitive strain she had endured from years of hair-braiding, so she couldn’t take on as many clients anymore. Nurses wouldn’t be given pay raises anytime soon, and I didn’t want to be another financial burden she had to consider. Though she might have been ashamed that I hadn’t found full-time work, I know she secretly didn’t want me to move out. If I were to break out of the nest, she’d be left with nothing but cable TV and her own thoughts. She seemed to have warmed up to the concept of Blue being more than just my friend, though it pained her to admit it. She knew Blue was a good person who had shown nothing but respect for my family, despite their reservations. Still, I started spending more of my time at Blue’s house, and Blue started spending less time at mine.
“Why won’t you just tell me what it’s about?” Blue moaned one evening as we sat smoking a joint in her bedroom. The perks of living in a liberal household meant that she could consume as much weed as she wanted, and her parents would chip in on the dealer’s offers instead of kicking her out of the house.
“I just don’t want to. Don’t ask me again. Just wait and see.”
“Fuck’s sake. Fine.”
“Let’s stop talking about me. How’s the band going?”
“It’s not doing too bad.” She shrugged. “We’ve bumped practice from two to three times a week now. My Sundays aren’t as free as they used to be.” She was in her final year of music at Guildhall. Two years earlier, she had joined a five-piece jazz fusion band called Ego Birth, assembled by some of her uni mates. In the time they’d been active, her band had cultivated a following in London’s underground music scene. We had met through a mutual friend at one of her shows at the Windmill in Brixton, and from the moment we locked eyes, the rest was history. From that day forward, I was Ego Birth’s most devoted groupie, attending nearly every show and some studio rehearsals. The mastering of their second EP, Learn to Swim, was finalized, and they had an upcoming gig in Kentish Town to celebrate the release. The evening she’d tried quizzing me on my secret play, she was nonchalantly practicing one of her band’s songs on her bedroom keyboard in preparation for the show. Eventually, she had got so high she gave up playing and put on Anderson. Paak’s new album. She lay next to me on her bed as we sank into the soft melody of “The Bird,” the opening track.
“You’re going to be famous one day. I can feel it in my bones,” I whispered to her, running my thumb across her cheek. “You’re going to go on world tours with Ego Birth and win all the Grammys, all the Ivor Novellos, you name it.”
“I’m not striving for fame, Eddie.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s about getting the recognition you deserve. Your music is amazing. You’re amazing. I know you’re going to make it out there.”
“How do you know?” she whispered, looking at me.
“A bird with the word came to me.” I smiled, repeating the lyrics of the song that was playing. I looked right into her eyes. She had her mother’s—big, brown, and angular, with enviously thick lashes that curled out from under her soft hooded eyelids. She had a button-shaped nose and full lips with a sharp Cupid’s bow. Her smile was the warmest. When I first met her, I could never quite tell if she was Southeast Asian or black. Her hair texture and skin tone said one thing, and her facial features said another. It turned out she was both.
She switched her position on the bed, propping her elbows on the pillow, and looked down at me as I stared longingly at the ceiling. “What does your name mean in English, Ed?” she asked.
“Naledi? You already know. I’ve told you before.”
“I know. I just want you to say it.”
I sighed. “It means ‘star.’ ”
“So your name literally means ‘star,’ and you’re telling me I’m the one who’s destined for fame?”
* * *
I wanted to believe Blue so badly, but after twelve weeks of pitching my play to different agencies and competitions, I wasn’t getting any responses. It was disheartening because I was so, so sure I had hit the jackpot with this play. It was the third one I had ever written, and I knew that it was a thought-provoking, intense, and heartfelt manifestation of all the blood, sweat, and tears (and qualifications and credentials, for fuck’s sake) it had taken me to get there. I didn’t need anybody to tell me that. But paradoxically, I did need someone to tell me that. I needed someone to tell me, and then tell everyone else. I needed someone to give it a chance. There was only one problem: the Brexit referendum was slowly creeping closer, and it had ripped an invisible chasm through the country. A play about immigration and national identity might have been a bit too on the nose at the time. A little too sensitive for a Divided Kingdom.
In The Worthy, it wasn’t birthright or naturalization that determined citizenship. Instead, there was a points-based system, which meant that anyone could be exiled if they could not contribute towards the economy or the fabric of society. Of course, in real life, these are arbitrary concepts, and this was quite a far-fetched idea. But in this world, it would tear families apart, leaving hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Families would all be awaiting the National Sweep: an annual interview that every individual had with citizenship officers, determining whether or not they would be forced to leave the country and seek asylum elsewhere. In the wake of the turn politics took that year, it might not have been the most appropriate premise for a play. But fiction is fiction is fiction, is life, is art, is life, and life imitates art imitates life.
