Travels with my aunt

Yasmin Alibhai Brown is the writer's paternal aunt.

Yasmin lived in her head, where it was safest. She wrote and read a lot, plays mostly as they offered a gateway from the torment she thought she was suffering. She caused a scandal when she kissed the black Romeo as Juliet in the school’s play. I don’t believe the invective she describes in her largely fictionalised autobiography. My family is too uptight for public outcries. Our rage is expressed behind closed doors, where it has the potential to be more deadly. She wore square framed Elvis Costello glasses.

I learned, early on that anger is a great weapon. Mine was more potent than his, and scarier, coming out of a teenage girl. I dealt with him differently. As a child I was aware of the power my temper had over my parents so we played a cat and mouse game of tolerance and when I had had enough of him, I would take the long tube ride to Ealing Common where Yasmin lived and still does, in a sprawling, damp-smelling flat on Gunnersbury Avenue, which faces the park. It was bought with a loan she never repaid from my father who paid the deposit. When Yassi and Sky moved into the flat in Ealing Common she asked Jena to move in with them to help with the new baby. I liked being around them, they presented the united couple, the front my parents had given up. But that was nuked into meltdown, thanks to my father’s own brand of protean destruction.

Sky was athletic and handsome, he was a lecturer of Zoology at London University and she taught English to foreign students in a salubrious street off Holland Park at an expensive private college. I watched her, then, in the embryonic stages of becoming the great media controversialist she became but is no longer. She fitted well into the automatic authority that words and teaching lent to her as she imparted phonetic wisdom to her students. She used to be petite and pretty, but she had become podgy. Middle-age spread her out too early and at some point in my mid-teens, her jealousy crept in.

The smell of damp had permeated her, it was in her clothes and she tried to disguise it by dousing herself in scent, like the fake Moroccan, tawdry, smell of Opium....

Sky started to take courses which meant he was away a lot of weekends and Yassi was left in splendid isolation. She couldn’t drive, she didn’t learn till much later. It was part of the lifelong dependence on men, which she pretends to rail against because that is her game. She went from my father’s house to her husband’s and shed one skin for another, overnight. From being defined as younger sister she became the young bride. She didn’t like her father, my Kassam. The most awful things I have heard about him have come from her. She never forgave me for taking the focus off her. That was when she fell under the radar of my father’s attention. She became and has been, since my early childhood a non-entity in my family....

Years later she came to stay with me in New York, when I was an art dealer. She’d lost too much weight and the flesh had fallen off her bones except where it gathered under her eyes from too much grief, to form circles of mourning. Ari was still a great, buoyant child. We were watching him play in the kids’ playground near NYU and I tried to listen while she unburdened her pain. She still blamed my dad, she was convinced that he had been committed to ruining what they had had because he could never have it with my mother. I couldn’t explain that my parents, for all their dysfunction and the unhappiness that encircled them, were content. They had made compromises and settled themselves to accepting them. They were perfect at it, they didn’t know anything else.

It transpired later that Sky’s weekends away were an elaborate cover-up for another life which he had created with one of his young Zoology students, Zoë. They had set up a home. Zoë had his child. Yasmin was inconsolable for years; the life was gone from her. She couldn’t understand how he could sacrifice what they had, what she thought was real love, for someone else. Coming from where we came from, it was only natural that we should fall into bear pits of tragedy and messy relationships. How could we possibly define love and nurturing when we had never known it? That was when I fell out of love with the aunt I had loved so much. She was wrecked, like a picnic ruined by an unexpected summer shower. She became too human and tragic. She knew I had fallen out of her magic circle of power and later she did things to hurt me, because if she can’t have the thing she loves, or if she feels love has betrayed her, she has to kill it.

That’s how we handle pain, to lash it outwards at others, particularly those we once cared about the most. When we know we have killed the opponent, they are no longer able to hurt us, like the satiated lion that licks the blood off his lips after the kill, we can saunter off and never look back at the mess and destruction we leave behind. More

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