4

4 Amma walked to her house in the dark, still grateful she'd become a homeowner so late in life, at a time when she was practically homeless first of all Jack Staniforth died and his son Jonathan, who'd been chomping at the bit for years at his father's simply scandalous decision not to financially capitalize on the King's Cross regeneration scheme that would one day run trains direct from London to Paris gave the Citizens of Freedomia three months' notice devastated, Amma nonetheless had to admit she'd had a spectacularly good run as she'd never paid a single copper penny in rent in what had become one of the most expensive cities on the planet she cried when she left her former office with its jogging sized dimensions and windows overlooking the trains that rolled into the station from the north of England she couldn't afford commercial rents and wasn't eligible for subsidized housing Amma sofa surfed until she was offered someone's spare room she'd come full circle then her mother died, devoured from the inside by the ruthless, ravenous, carnivorous disease that started off with one organ before moving on to destroy the others Amma saw it as symptomatic and symbolic of her mother's oppression Mum never found herself, she told friends, she accepted her subservient position in the marriage and rotted from the inside she could barely look at her father at the funeral not long after, he too died of heart failure in his sleep; Amma believed he'd willed it upon himself because he couldn't live without her mother, who'd propped him up since his early days in England

she surprised herself at the strength of her grief she then regretted never telling him she loved him, he was her father, a good man, of course she loved him, she knew that now he was gone, he was a patriarch but her mother was right when she said, he's of his time and culture, Amma my father was devastated at having to flee Ghana so abruptly, she eulogized at his memorial, attended by his elderly socialist comrades it must have been so traumatic, to lose his home, his family, his friends, his culture, his first language, and to come to a country that didn't want him once he had children, he wanted us educated in England and that was it my father believed in the higher purpose of left-wing politics and actively worked to make the world a better place she didn't tell them she'd taken her father for granted and carried her blinkered, self-righteous perspective of him from childhood through to his death, when in fact he'd done nothing wrong except fail to live up to her feminist expectations of him she had been a selfish, stupid brat, now it was too late he'd told her he loved her, every year on her birthday when her mother was alive, when he signed the card she bought and sent for him her successful older brothers kindly gave her the greatest share of the family home in Peckham which paid for a substantial deposit on a small terraced house with a box garden in Railton Road, Brixton a place to call her own.