In the Queue for Ice Cream
In the queue at the cafe, four people are in front of me. All enjoying the usual delights of the English seaside when the sun comes up at the beginning of June. They all look pickled somewhere from brown to red, each wearing their comfort or discomfort in place of winter coats, each shuffling towards the curved glass to choose cake and tea and maybe ice creams in cardboard tubs. Whatever buzz from warmth that had existed has been replaced by forbearance, an acceptance that the warmth and sunshine will be here for a little longer than anticipated.
I wait in the queue, for ice cream, and listen for any grumbling about the sun’s warmth. There is nothing as well loved here as meteorological gossip and fulminations against the sun, the wind, the rain. What kind of weather these people want, my mother would ask.
Earlier, as we walked by the seaside, we grumbled about how the wind had come in and whipped the last collection of cold into our faces. I am practised now in the art of grim resilience in the face of the weather’s vicissitudes. I haven’t yet managed to learn the disinhibition that occurs when the first shiver of sun cuts through the cloud and tricks us all into believing that the gelid air is gone for another year. I just smile into whatever piece of sunshine we get, grateful for it.
I always try my best to enjoy the beach, though I find most of these beaches to be a profound disappointment. Except one. And even that might have been luck. A beach in North Wales, at the edge of a pine forest, that stretched yellow and smiling at the edge of clear saltwater. I was almost back in the Caribbean and had begun thinking about how to get a job nearby, the practicalities of buying a house near this beach, wondering about how easy it would be to get here to watch the bright twinkle on the water as the tide came in and went out. Later that day, at a fish and chip shop, the man in front of us was served in Welsh and we were served in English. Another place to be an outsider.
Still, earlier today, as we walked along the beach with the wind cutting in across the waves, I thought about admitting to her that it wasn’t working, that I thought we had come to a natural point of parting. But we were on holiday with her family. So, I looked out at the sea and wondered why it was that dull shade of brown.
The queue moves forward, the old man who has just been served teeters to a table where an old lady is sat with a dog snoring happily under the table. I think about how long this pair might have been together. It is obvious both from the tender attention that they pay to each other and the casual and accustomed silence that they are a couple. In my head I make them a new husband and wife, people in love in youth, lost to each other for years, who reconnect in old age and find that love is stronger than ageing muscle and tendon. Still, love isn’t always enough, there are stronger forces at work in our lives. What her family think about you, my mother messaged me one evening when I said I was going to meet them for dinner.
The woman at the counter smiles a nicotine smile and laughs with the woman she is serving, as if she’s given the answer to a question that only the two of them could ever know. Conspiratorial. The woman serving is all dull blond hair and positivity. I imagine she has inspirational quotes around her house that tell people to eat and to pray and to love. She thinks you attract the things you really want. I shudder and then think I’m just being unfair. What can we really know about someone by staring into their face?
An Englishman’s home is his castle, Tina’s father had said that morning, after we returned from the beach. And look at this castle!
He had opened his arms expansively to the rocks and rubble that dotted the hillside. Here, three-quarters of a wall, there something that might pass for steps, next to a section that was boarded-off from visitors in case a piece of antiquity fell off and killed a visitor. It was always funny how people could pass off dilapidation and decay as history or quaintness or tradition. I’d seen it in the boarded-up shops that filled the high street of this seaside town. People tutted about the shame of the dying high street, but they would never want this particular historic little town to change in any radical way. Even if they only came here once a year. They wanted something of the quintessential English seaside preserved eternally. I got the sense that people, much like buildings, were merely shuffling towards their inevitable ruination.
Maybe that’s why everyone here was such a committed and prolific drinker. Lean into the degradation, the collapse. Accept the inevitable. Or, perhaps, it’s to test one’s inner fortitude: are you as sturdy as this bit of wall from 1207? A bit of wall still standing from some wicked king or other’s time. Look on my works, ye mighty, and—
The line shuffles forward a little bit again and I see the line of crisps that frame the cakes that are quickly drying out on this Saturday afternoon. I look more closely at the cakes behind the counter, cellophaned in large chunks, wilting despite refrigeration. Homages to wheat and sugar. I think about the history of sugar and put it out of my mind. I’ve thought enough about history today already. Them know that you black?
There is another smile as the woman being served takes her tray of drinks to the table she is sitting at with her husband and three children. I just know it is her husband, they share a slightly defeated and worn-out glance at each other. The smallest child’s face is orange with powder from the pack of snacks he is mashing into his face. He has the contented look of a small emperor. I go to smile and see the husband’s tattooed forearm, England flag waving proudly on skin tanned deep red. I decided against smiling. I look elsewhere. For an escape route.
Who do you support in cricket? This is what Tina’s mother asked the first time I went to their house for dinner. Our relationship was old enough to be in a new place. A place where you have to reconcile yourself with the fact that you may have to learn to tolerate each other’s parents for years to come.
I told her I didn’t care much for cricket. Or organised sport generally. But if you had to make a claim, she asked, who would you support?
*
That question of divided loyalty had often raised its head in newspapers and politicians looking for a quick vote, but I’d never heard it from people I knew. Most of the people I went to school with supported more than one national team, though this was a gradual change. Like me, many of them weren’t born in the country, or, at least, their parents weren’t. When I first turned up at the airport, dazzled by strip lighting that concealed the cold and grey October sky, not many would support the English football team. Even if one or two people who looked like us were running around in those three lion jerseys.
England flags and shirts were powerful signifiers, like bright colours on tropical frogs. I would run away from enough England shirts in my teenage years to view the recent embrace of national teams with some scepticism. Maybe it was progress.
Still, Tina’s mother’s question was a test and not one that I stood much chance of passing. I could only confirm something about how she already viewed me. I would only ever be thought lacking in some important and irredeemable way. I think I laughed and smiled and went back to trying to make sense of the food piled on my plate. An under-seasoned mess of salmon and potatoes. More thought had gone into the choice of wine than anything on our plates.
*
That memory had flashed unhelpfully across my mind as we sat in rickety metal chairs outside the sandwich shop we had chosen for lunch, waiting for food to turn up. We were going to look around the gardens of an exorbitantly priced castle and found ourselves heading to the first place we came across that had a queue. I had almost made a joke about the English and queueing. I thought better of it. It could have come across as provocative or a reminder that I wasn’t from this country. Alligator lay egg, but him a no fowl.
There was, however, something about a queue that seemed to fill the English with purpose and confidence. It ranked high up there with the weather as something to comment on or complain about; queues were neutral events that could be commented on in a polite, inoffensive way. Something that everyone could take part in without revealing too much of oneself. I hate queueing.
We ordered brie and bacon, ham and cheese, cheese and salad sandwiches. I also hate sandwiches; they were another thing that masqueraded to be one thing but were something else entirely. They purport to be food but are, really, convenience calories. Things to be tolerated rather than enjoyed. There seemed to be so much about England that was about tolerance rather than enjoyment. The forbearance of the present for the memories of the past.
Why don’t you just leave? If you hate it so much. Why are you still here?
I’d been asked this before. While other, less conspicuously other people had complained about the weather, the infrequency of buses, the price of petrol, the smell on the underground, the disappearance of a much beloved pie and mash shop, the ever growing potholes in the road, the fact that January sales used to have much better deals, the skyrocketing price of beer, rising taxes, the failures of the government, the disappointing result of some football competition or other, the newness and language of the latest group of people to arrive on boats and planes and try to make another life here, the new buildings by the Thames, the existence of wind turbines, I had never heard any of them asked why they continued to live in a country they criticised.
What I hadn’t expected was to hear this from Tina. She’d said it to me as I complained about the cold on the beach earlier. I hadn’t ever heard it delivered without conscious malice. As if leaving the place I’d lived most of my life was as simple as tapping into a tube station and emerging to somewhere else. I suppose her response to my comments about living here came from a place of exasperation. I complained about the country and the people and the food often, and maybe Tina didn’t want to think about these things all the time.
Maybe I had become too comfortable and revealed how I felt living here: increasingly fearful. The national pastime was complaint, not cricket, but it was not a hobby that was open to me. I was expected to be grateful for my passport, grateful for English air and English streets. Grateful without comment. Hmph. Make me keep me thoughts to meself.
When the sandwiches arrived, the bleached white bread was heaving with margarine and the ham was thick and tasteless. I suppressed my urge to sigh. There was an oldness to everything outside the castle. But a modern oldness. This place was like when I first came here, as if thirty years had not passed and nothing much had happened in that space of time. This was an England of late-twentieth-century antiquity. Resistant to anything that had happened after the eighties.
Again, my thoughts are interrupted as the line shuffles forward. There is only one person in front of me now. He is dressed as if from a different era. Flat cap pulled low over his eyes, rolled cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth, light navy coat in case the weather changes. Before he can order, the woman serving asks him, And how are you going to vote?
The man smiles and tells her, she laughs with a faint rattle at the back of her throat and says, You’re the first to say that today. Everyone else has gone the other way. They both laugh and she takes his order for two teas and two scones. I look out the window at Tina, so inconspicuous and expected here, at the seafront in a small English town.
It’s probably where she would like to move to once she’s had her fill of London. It’s one of the things she now complains about: London. London and its loudness, its dirt, its unapologetic difference to the rest of the country.
*
Arm in arm, as we walked around the next emblematic example of Englishness, a stately garden we’d been dragged to after sandwiches by her parents, Tina had looked at me and asked where I’d like to live. She did this sometimes. Fantasised about houses in increasingly remote and rural locations. Places that were fortresses against the shifting truths of the world outside.
Hackney, I said without thinking. If I had properly listened to her I would have turned it back into a question about what she wanted. She only wanted to talk about a house she had seen that was palatial in comparison to the flat in London. Instead, she just looked sad at my response and said, London is no place to bring up a child.
We walked by an old oak tree, marooned in a sea of manicured grass. Benches, evenly spaced, gave people a chance to sit and marvel at humanity’s great triumph over nature. I heard shouts as a child was reprimanded for charging down a hill where new flowers had been planted. You could only enjoy the garden in specific, ocular ways.
I would like to live somewhere quieter. Somewhere with a bit of a garden where I could grow roses, she said.
Tina often stopped in front of estate agent windows and pointed at the houses she would like to own. Those pictures of brick terraced and semi-detached buildings terrified me. I thought they should have pictures of the neighbours so you could see what kind of trouble you were getting yourself into. I feared what was going on behind those suburban doors in a way that Tina could never understand. It was another thing I thought about and never talked about with her.
*
The man and his flat cap waddle off and I prepare myself to be questioned about my voting intention. I’d decided to give her the answer she might want to hear. The popular answer. That way I might get a trill of laughter and it would all be easier.
Yes, she says and raises a thin plucked eyebrow. No smile or question, just this yes pregnant with meaning. I mutter my order and stand there with my hands in my pockets. And with practiced efficiency, she makes a coffee, puts ice cream in cones and takes my money with only the most perfunctory of interaction. Enough to stay on the right side of propriety. My money is, after all, still money.
I carry the ice creams and coffee outside where the wind is dying down and the heat has started to recede. He returns, Tina’s dad says. I hand out the ice creams that have already begun to melt. The road ahead is filled with empty shops, so we decide to turn back for one last walk along the beach. My coffee is overly hot and bitter. I drink it without complaining.
Stephenjohn Holgate was born in Jamaica and moved to London when he was eight. He is a member of Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 writer development program and HarperCollins UK Author Academy 2023. His story “Delroy and the Boys” won a 2023 PEN/Dau prize. He lives in Aotearoa New Zealand and will be an MA candidate in Creative Writing at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington this year.