need to tell you more about Winston because he was our Ima in link with Willie Wilkins, and Willie was a vital part of our team.
Winston looks a bit like me although he’s done his hair into some freaky style that means it’s longer on top than at the sides, and the tips are tinged with orange. He also wears giant black trainers that look like he’s gone AWOL from the marines. I know where he bought them though. Walid told me he’d seen them at the Sunday car boot sale on Station Road priced at three quid.
I could never wear second-hand shoes, could you? They could be infected with athlete’s foot or bunions.
I’d have offered Winston some tips on hygiene if I was still living around Park Road. Walid wouldn’t have said anything to him because he’s too polite and in case things rebounded on him. After all, Walid’s own personal hygiene is limited by the fact that he doesn’t have proper washing facilities and the plumbing at his place is a disaster. But I digress.
Like me, Winston is what is known these days as of African origin. If this was America, we’d both be known as Afro-Americans, which always seems to me a poor way to encourage integration and tolerance of cultures. I’m not an Afro-English or an Afro-German or an Afro-Afro. Winston and I discussed this once, and we agreed we never wanted to be called a man of colour either. We’ve both integrated. In fact, I reckon I’ve integrated so much I can’t integrate any more unless I was reborn into royalty and got to go to Eton.
So, whoever reads this stop fucking Winston and me about by trying to describe our colour without mentioning a colour Understand?
“We’re both fucking black,” Winston once told me in a rare moment of anger. “I don’t know about you, but I’m proud of it. And I don’t know anyone whose colour doesn’t lie in that narrow band that goes from snow white to black through shades of brown. Do you?”
I agreed. “The only green men are Martians nut no-one has ever seen one,” I said. “The only orange one was Donald Trump, and the only blue one was Steve Collins when we pulled him out through the ice that day in January after he tried to go skating. Not only was he blue but his teeth were rattling like castanets.”
We laughed at that and high-fived, “Yeh,” Winston said.
“After that we used to call him Blue.”
“Then there was Karen Smith with the short skirt,” I said.
“Remember how she used to turn bright red if we said we could see her white panties and looked like she was in need of a good service?”
“And we couldn’t mention the word Willie in case she had an orgasm.”
We’d laughed and laughed at that. “Karen and Steve—the only two genuine people of colour.”
“Chameleons,” Winston added to even greater hilarity.
I think what had triggered that discussion on colour and race was that Winston had talked to Willy about it. I think something had upset Winston, but he never told me what it was. He can be quite sensitive at times, although he disguises it well. Winston once talked about African genes being unique features, we should be proud of, and I think that proves my theory about Willy’s influence. Willy would often say he was colour blind except when it came to red cross-outs in homework and gold stars for achievement.
We then moved seamlessly on to superstitions. “I reckon a superstitious nature is a sign of a colourful imagination,” I said.
“Definitely,” Winston greed. “Remember that time in the church when we poked sticks into cracks in the gravestones and hollered obscenities through the holes just to irk the resident lying down below? That was being imaginative.”
Of course, I remembered. I could also remember Winston telling me that once, when he was nine and went to the graveyard alone, he shouted, “Wake up, you lazy bastard. Go and cut the grass!” through a hole in a grave of someone called William Cedric Cuthbertson, a landscape gardener who’d died in 1836. Lo and behold, five minutes later, he
heard the sound of a lawn mower coming from behind the church. Winston fled.
But despite his footwear and haircut, Winston’s another clever guy who doesn’t know his father. Once Winston hit sixteen, his mother decided she’d done enough and shacked up with one of my mother’s old lodgers, a Rasta guy known locally as Spiderman.
Winston found a room in a house on Shipley Street in which the Somali’s downstairs had a smart TV and 24-hour internet, so Winston decided it was time to get serious with his business of selling Nigerian football tee shirts and coffee mugs printed with obscene messages on eBay. The bushmeat Egyptians had then moved in, but Winston couldn’t leave because of his dependence on the free Wi-Fi.
Winston and I still chat on the phone about once a week about this and that, and he’ll always say he’s too busy to talk, but he’ll still go on for another hour before he says it’s time to go to work. Winston has a night job slicing bread and loading the delivery vans for Hill’s Bakery on the Park industrial estate.
“It’s only until the internet business turns a decent profit,” he tells me.
It was Willie Wilkins who gave Winston the idea for his business, and Willie still helps him do his accounts. I once asked Winston why he needed an accountant, and he told me he didn’t, but Willie always brought along a bottle or two of his home-made beer and made him laugh. Willie was coming up to retiring age just like Roger and Gordon, so I don’t think he cared any more, but Willie was Winston’s influence.
Whenever I speak to Winston, it’s Willie this and Willie that.
Willie, don’t forget, is an old white guy, a math teacher at Woodlands, with long grey hair he ties in a pony tail, a
button-down check shirt and shiny corduroy trousers. On the other hand, Winston’s a black guy, the same age as me with no father, but with a talent for fixing computers and smartphones.
Ever since school, Willie and Winston have been like best mates who backslap and high-five, as if Willie was fifteen.
Winston told me that Willie had once brought along a Cruiser skateboard and asked Winston to teach him how to skate down Park Road, hopping on and off the kerb to avoid pedestrians and buses. I think Willie was joking, but Winston took him seriously. “You know his latest mathematician joke, Kurt?” Winston asked me recently.
“Tell me,” I said. “I can’t wait.”
“Willie said his friend had asked him to help him round up his 37 sheep, so Willie said 40.”
I laughed out of politeness.
Six months ago, Winston told me that Willie had started calling by every other Saturday to give him an hour’s free tuition on computer hacking. The visits, Winston said, coincided with Willie having his haircut on Midland Road.
The hacking lessons didn’t surprise, but the haircuts did. “He actually cuts his hair these days?” I asked.
“No,” Winston said. “It still hangs over his ears, but he likes to keep it above his shoulders in case he’s sacked for noncompliance with the male teacher’s dress code.”
That was Willie. He’d always liked our hybrid gang that consisted of Cass, Kevin, Winston, and me. He called us bad boys, but it was only another of his jokes. Winston was our main link with Willie, and Willie was to become a vital part in our team. But you see how some teachers can become heroes and a lifetime influence, and others can destroy your desire
for knowledge and ruin forever your chances of making the most of your natural talents.
And you know something? I’ve checked around, but not one of the hero teachers is a woman. Why’s that?