Lost River

Fry knew better than to talk about the Asian community round here. If you looked for an Asian community, you wouldn’t find it. Instead you’d see a whole series of Asian communities – Pakistanis, Bengalis, Hindus. And even within the nationalities, the complexities of caste and locality were impossible for an outsider to sort out. In some parts of the country, there were entire populations who had come from a handful of villages in one small region of Pakistan. The more you learned, the more you realized how undiscriminating the very word Asian was. It was a pretty big continent, after all. And she knew that no one around here would readily call themselves Asian. It was an outsider’s term.

And everyone knew there was a pecking order among the different ethnic groups. The cycle that had played itself out in Perry Barr over the years was repeated in other parts of Birmingham. Newly arrived immigrants lived in the poorest streets, until they could to move on to better areas and bigger houses. These days, the leafy avenues of Solihull were full of Hindu millionaires.

Once an Asian parent had explained it to her:

‘In the old days, we thought we would come here, send some money back and eventually go home. But the new generation don’t see it that way. A lot of people don’t consider this the host country any more, they consider it their home.’

‘But sometimes the old country is home, too, isn’t it?’

He smiled. ‘Yes. Sometimes when people say “home” you have to ask which home they’re talking about.’

Alice Bowskill looked frail. She wasn’t that old, really. But time hadn’t been kind to her. Nor had the years spent worrying over other people’s children.

Fry hugged her.

‘Mum.’

Jim smiled at them both, delighted to see them together.

‘Do you still support West Brom, Diane?’ he said.

‘Me?’ said Fry. ‘I never did, not really.’

‘It was just because the boys did,’ said Alice with a sly grin. Fry almost felt like blushing.

‘Not the Blues, surely?’ said Jim, missing the significance of his wife’s comment.

Of course, Jim Bowskill was another Villa fan. She wondered if that was part of the reason for the Bowskills moving to Perry Bar, so close to Villa Park? There were pubs round here where a Blue Nose would be torn apart at first sight.

But she wasn’t a Birmingham City fan. She wasn’t actually from Birmingham. She wondered how long it would be before some Brummie looked at her sideways and uttered the immortal phrase: ‘A yam-yam, ain’t you?’

There was no point in trying to deny it. People in these parts were acutely sensitive to the differences in accent that marked you out as Black Country. In a way, she was as much of a foreigner in Brum as she was back in Derbyshire. ‘Not from round here’ might as well be permanently tattoo’d on her forehead.

The Black Country was the name given to the urban sprawl west of the city of Birmingham. It encompassed old industrial towns like Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall. And many smaller communities, too – like Warley, where Fry had lived with her foster parents, and which was nothing but a string of housing estates tucked between Birmingham and the M5 motorway.

In some ways, those small Black Country communities were far worse than the estates of inner city Birmingham. Some of them were completely cut off, isolated by the collapse of the manufacturing industries from the affluence evident in the new apartment blocks, the new Bull Ring shopping centre, stacked to the roof with consumer goods and designer labels. It was in places like West Bromwich, rather than Birmingham itself, that the BNP were getting a foothold. It was there they found the disaffected white working classes, desperate to find a voice.

Jim sighed. ‘Moved allegiance altogether, I suppose. It’s Derby County, then. Tragic’

‘Dad, I don’t even like football.’

There weren’t many people like Jim and Alice, who would be willing to take on other people’s children, especially when many of those children were deeply troubled and disruptive. It took a lot of dedication and commitment. A lot of love.

She wondered about some of the other foster children who’d passed through the Bowskills’ lives. There must have been many of them. She supposed that most of them kept in touch better than she ever had. It had been too easy for her to forget the debt she owed them. She’d been too quick to put everything behind her when she moved from the West Midlands, cast the good aside with the bad when she started a new life in Derbyshire.

Fry remembered the Bowskills reluctantly producing her birth certificate when she needed to register at college. They themselves had obtained it from her social worker, by special request. Only her mother’s name had been on the certificate, the space to record the father left blank. It seemed her parents had never married, so the surname she carried was her mother’s, not that of an adoptee.

Then she thought about the one child the Bowskills had adopted. Perhaps tired of saying goodbye to those they’d cared for over the years, they had fought to keep one particular boy, a few years younger than Fry. He was called Vincent, a quiet boy born to an Irish mother and a Jamaican father. He had been with Jim and Alice after Fry had left to set up home on her own and pursue her career in the police. The Bowskills’ last commitment, the one final object of their love.

The children’s charity Barnardos had said recently that there was too much focus on trying to ‘fix’ families, when it would often be in the best interests of the children to put them up for adoption straight away when there was a problem. And by ‘straight away’ they meant at birth. Parents who’d failed to care properly for older children would not be allowed to bring up younger ones. It seemed to Fry that there was a definite logic in the argument.

And yet, Vincent Bowskill had made the wrong friends, been attracted to a way of life the Bowskills deplored. Something had still gone wrong, despite their best efforts. Despite what the experts said, could there be some genetic influence that would always flow in the blood? Blood, they said, was thicker than water.

Or maybe it was because there was no easy way for a boy like Vince to fit into a society that liked to put everyone in a category.

Fry knew that mixed-race people were an elephant in the room – the fastest-growing ethnic minority in Britain, more numerous than black Caribbean or black African. Yet it was only in the 2001 census that they were given an ethnic category of their own. They were obvious to anybody living in a large British city, yet invisible at a political level. In multiculturalism Britain, the fact that more and more people were having children across racial divides was an inconvenient truth. It didn’t fit with the concept of neat communities of black, white or Asian.

And that could be a problem for boys like Vincent Bowskill. These days, black and white kids tended not to call each other racial names. But the mixed-race kids got it from both sides. Many of them were fated to spend their entire lives searching for an identity.

‘So how is Vince?’ she said, as Jim sat down with her.

‘Oh, you know – fine.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, to be honest, he’s always been a bit of a worry to us. But he does his best. He’s a good lad, at heart.’

‘He isn’t involved with a gang, is he?’

‘No, no. Well, we don’t think so.’

Fry realized Jim Bowskill might find it difficult to tell what sort of circles his adopted son moved in. When Vincent came here to visit, he wouldn’t be displaying his gang tattoos and waving a gun around. He’d be well behaved, polite.

And maybe…just maybe, he’d actually turned his life around and moved on. It was possible to do that.

‘Should I look him up while I’m here?’

‘Vince?’ Jim looked doubtful. ‘Oh, you don’t have to, Diane. But –’

‘I’ll see if I have time.’

‘All right.’

She knew she had to broach the one subject they hadn’t touched on, the one the Bowskills were shying away from.

‘You know why I’m here in Birmingham, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes, you told us. The case.’

‘You’ll let us know how it goes, won’t you?’ said Alice.

‘Don’t stay out of touch, Diane.’

She sounded even frailer than she looked. Fry hoped Alice wasn’t worrying herself too much about something she couldn’t do anything about.

Fry looked out of the bay window into the street. All the people passing were Bengalis. She hadn’t seen a white face all the time she’d been here.

‘Dad,’ she said, ‘what’s Surti Ravaiya?’