6. THE SIXTH KISS

THE TALE OF SEVEN KISSES (6)

PROLOGUE

It was the nineteenth century and people didn’t often trust or like Sammy Winston because Sammy was different from just about everyone else in her part of town. She was black and they were mostly various shades of white unless they cleaned chimneys, when they were a sort of smudgy dark grey.

She didn’t know why she was black. Her mum and dad were both black and they had arrived in the land of whiteys, as they referred to London, from a place the other side of the world where most men, they said, were also black. It was all confusing to her and she didn’t know why it should be because weren’t people just people and why did they have different shades of skin?

Most of the time the other kids were all right to her but there were always some who called her names because of her difference, and she hated that and wanted to call them names back, but she was always very, very outnumbered and sought silence as a form of self-protection.

Today, though, was a different day among so many days that were usually boringly the same as each other, and despite name-calling she was determined to enjoy it. She looked at her face in mum’s looking glass and was happy at what she saw because, truth to tell, she was a pretty child in anyone’s eyes.

“Don’t youse start getting all proud,” her mum advised her, “remember who youse are and no queen is goin’ to say you is white!”

And she went out to cheer with everyone else as the young and remarkably pretty queen made her slow way from the palace to the cathedral. She ran and skipped her way to Hyde Park Corner and waited. She was pushed about as she tried to edge her way to the front, where she’d be able to see the procession as it moved slowly along, going from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. But it seemed that nobody was happy for a child to get a better view than an adult, and least of all a little black girl, not matter how pretty she might be.

But she writhed and struggled her way along and got banged about and spat at, but she was used to that. Eventually she sensed she was getting close enough to see something, and she tried to slide forwards six more inches in order to make sure.

She found herself between a group of grossly overweight ladies who probably didn’t even know that the scrap of life that was Sammy Winston was there and they certainly weren’t aware when they squeezed the very life out of her with their gross bellies as the queen’s carriage rattled past in all its majesty and they screamed their love for the young woman, who waved back. Sammy screamed for life, but her screams went unheard.

It isn’t recorded, but Sammy blew a kiss towards the royal procession, or if it wasn’t a kiss it was the last gasping breath of a precious child who shouldn’t have died that day.

THE TALE

I don’t think that Cyril will ever understand. In fact, he probably thinks I’m some sort of lunatic, the way I ran from his flat in what must have looked like sheer terror and only because he called it a garret. But then, he doesn’t have my memories to contend with, or if not memories, the memory of memories. I wonder if he is haunted by any reflection of past lives like I seem to experience, little moments that precede an ancient death and give me cause to pause a little in the life I live. Only a little, mind you, for there’s no way a living soul can change the dead past.

Is there?

I was deep in such thoughts when the door was knocked. I’m getting a little wary of the door being knocked, but at the back of my mind is a little bit of a hope that it will be Cyril. He had knocked in the past and asked if I’m well, then gone, almost shyly, back up the stairs to his own little flat as if he wanted to know more and learned less.

I opened the door and I didn’t come out with my usual monosyllabic and rather imperious well? Instead, I stared in amazement and a kind of horror because I instantly knew the child who was standing there.

I knew her very well, because she was me.

Right, let me be plainer. I’m a Caucasian old women in her seventies and she was a black child of ten. But in a flash from somewhere or nowhere I remember holding a mirror in front of my face and seeing the reflection, smiling and happy, and that reflection was standing on my doorstep and looking up at me.

“Why, hello my dear,” I said when I’d recovered my wits because I was attacked by a sudden burst of common sense and logic and knew that whatever my memory tried to suggest, I had never been a black child. It was a physical impossibility, but it did cross my mind that if I had ever been this child I might not be such a grumpy and lonely old woman now.

“I’m on my way to see the Queen,” she said, smiling.

But what was she doing on my doorstep?

“Really?” I stammered.

Then I remembered, quite sharply, what it felt like to be squeezed and squashed between two or maybe three very large ladies with bellies that seemed to ripple, all as excited as everyone else to see a new monarch, and a queen at that, go by in her splendid carriage. They were pushing this way and that, and with a sudden gush of thoughts I’d never had, not in this life anyway, I remembered how suddenly I was terrified for my life as my breath was squeezed out of me.

I could hear the cheering of the crowds moving towards me like an audible Mexican wave, and reaching me with the excited shrieking of the women between whose gross stomachs I was being crushed. I could feel the way my chest seemed to explode as the noise became deafening and if I cried out I knew nobody would be able to hear what I shouted.

I could remember dying.

And I could remember that I blew a kiss at the Queen as she passed, just a flicker of carriage between a thousand legs, just as the world turned black.

“Don’t go,” I whispered to her, “please don’t go...”

And I bent down and dropped a real, genuine kiss onto her pretty curly black head and then ruffled her hair.

She looked up at me, and smiled. Were teeth ever that perfect, ever that white without getting the Hollywood treatment? Hers were.

“I’m going to see the queen, misses,” she said gleefully, and pulling away she skipped down the stairs.

And she tripped and fell.

There were not so many steps leading up to my first floor flat, but enough to steal the life from an excited child who suddenly wasn’t there. I stared at where her flesh should be, but there was nothing. No sign of her falling. No sign that she’d ever visited me.

“Is that you, my dear?” called Cyril from the landing above mine, “that I can hear? Have you a problem? Is there trouble brewing?”

“No. No. It’s all right,” I replied, but my voice came out as a whisper as I looked at my hand and the curly black hair that was trapped between two of my fingers. I held on to it, I had to, I needed to preserve it for all time.

And as I turned to go back in the theme music of CORONATION STREET whispered from my television set.

© Peter Rogerson, 15.03.20