1975. Shirley dreams that she’s at her job, working behind the counter at a small bar called the Devon in the seaside town of Hartlepool, wearing a white T-shirt with a Penny Farthing bicycle on it. A handsome guy walks in with a lovely smile, brown skin, and jet black hair. They talk for a while, until she wakes from the dream. A few weeks later, Shirley sits behind the counter at the Devon, wearing the same white T-shirt, only this time she’s awake. That’s when the man of her dreams walks into the place and asks her for a drink. They talk for a while, until he and his crewmates are called back to the ship, and he leaves to set sail once again.
The man of her dreams, otherwise known as Big Manny, comes back to visit Shirley occasionally. Eventually, he makes her a present: a Penny Farthing bicycle made out of nails driven into a piece of wood. She loves it, and soon enough, he comes over to stay with her and the son she’s been raising by herself. They live together, but not really; he’s away most of the time, cooking delicious meals for hungry sailors adrift on the merchant ships. When he’s back home with her, they go to the disco together, boogieing all night to Earth, Wind, & Fire, the Stylistics, and Donna Summer. They’re spectacular dancers; they can do the Bump, the Hustle, they can Rock the Boat, and everything in between.
Today, Shirley is still a spectacular dancer, but she tells her grandson that nobody could dance like her husband used to. Her grandson wishes that he’d inherited some of their dancing genes.
~
1977. Shirley and Big Manny have a child together: a chubby, white, red-haired boy whom they also name Manny, otherwise known as Little Manny. Five years later they have another, a brown-skinned girl with black hair whom they name Maria. They carve out a life in Hartlepool, with Shirley taking care of the kids and Big Manny continuing to live out at sea, coming home for one month out of every year. Hartlepool isn’t always kind to their family, being one of few mixed race families in the town. One time, a boy throws a brick at Maria’s head and calls her the N word, and Little Manny fights back by throwing several bricks at his head and beating him up. Little Manny gets into tons of scraps with other kids, but most of them are with his older brother John, who torments him — and loves him — like no one else. John can beat Little Manny up all he wants, but as soon as anyone else so much as lays a finger on his younger brother, he shows up to break that finger, as well as maybe an arm or two.
Little Manny also has many girlfriends growing up, but his first true love, the one he’ll someday meet and bear a child with, is all the way across the Atlantic, in a country he’s never even heard of.
~
1986. In the third-world metropolis of Belize City, there lives a woman named Vianney who is raising her daughter Melanie and her infant son Sergio. Melanie is a feisty young girl, running around the city with her younger cousin Camille. The city is their oyster, and yet it is also a dangerous place. This is a city where old men carry crocus bags and use them to try to catch young girls, which almost happens to Melanie and Camille one day. This is a city where watching a woman almost drown in the canal is nothing unusual, at least not to the wide, curious eyes of little Mel. And worst of all, this is a city where Tataduende, the dastardly dwarf with backwards feet and a penchant for stealing children's thumbs, is believed to roam from time to time. Melanie often conceals her thumbs within her fists when she walks about. This is a city of peril and poverty, yet Melanie only sees the wonder of it all, especially in the big, gaping eyes of the kittens she and Camille find at the corner store. They bring the kittens back to their great-grandmother Mims, who had asked them to get her some tea bags, not these adorable kittens. Mims explains that Melanie and Camille have failed to consider the fact that they are very, very poor. How are they going to feed these kittens?
~
1989. Shirley and her family decide to move to the United States of America, on the Northeast coast of New England. That’s where most people who left Big Manny’s homeland of Cabo Verde have wound up, and it’s where his two sisters and most of his brothers call home. Little Manny, Maria, and John all enroll in school, where Little Manny is scolded for staying seated during the Pledge of Allegiance. “I don’t pledge allegiance to this country,” he says to the teacher. They do American things, like going to McDonald’s, where John tells Maria to give him all of her fries because he heard that “McDonald’s supports the Irish Republican Army.” Little Manny makes lots of friends, who come to know him as “English Manny,” and his accent makes him a catch with the girls at his school. He and his friends live on the edge, riding their dirt bikes through abandoned factories and going toe-to-toe with each other in bareknuckle street brawls.
Shirley misses England dearly, and later admits to her grandson that she never wanted to move to America. When she returns to her home country for the first time in twenty years, she finds that it’s no longer the England she remembers.
~
1989 (still). The same year Shirley and her family move from England to the Americas, Vianney and her 9-year-old daughter, Melanie, move from the Americas to England, while Sergio stays behind with his Dad. Melanie is excited, her little Caribbean mind imagines England as the land of fairytales and royalty. When she gets there, there aren’t any fairies, and she doesn’t meet any princes or princesses, but she does find things like clean sidewalks, dentists, rubbish bins, and street sweepers — luxuries that didn’t exist in her home country of Belize. They’ve moved here because her mother has married an English army man, who hits her and calls her names. He is sent to Iraq for months at a time, and Vianney and Melanie savor these months without him.
Vianney begins to know England as home, much more so than Belize, which is slowly becoming a much-desired tourist destination for its beautiful sandy cayes. While talking to her grandson many years later, she laments that the Belize she knew as a child is gone, and that the Belize where snotty American tourists spend their winter holidays is not the Belize she wants to return to.
~
1997. Little Manny, who is no longer little anymore, travels back to England frequently, attending raves where DJs play techno, trance, and house music as a pulsating sea of people dance. At one of these raves, Manny lays eyes upon the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. Manny approaches the girl and asks her name, which she says is Melanie. They strike up a conversation, and he asks her if she’s seeing someone. She says she’s seeing a guy named Danny… who just so happens to be Little Manny’s best friend. Nevertheless, they form a friendship that blossoms over the years.
Manny spends his early 20s living many lives. He lives one life as DJ Synista, renowned in the Providence nightclub scene for spinning techno records that transform empty Brown University halls into living, breathing dancefloors, where college students boogie their cares away. He lives another life in Tenerife, a married life, one that somehow survives for some time after his pet ferrets devour all of his wife Eleanor’s gerbils but still ends in an unceremonious divorce. Eventually, Big Manny’s son moves back to Rhode Island, where he continues his usual escapades with beautiful women — all of whom he completely drops after convincing Melanie to come fly back across the Atlantic to the States, where she’ll live with him.
In the meantime, Big Manny takes up work in the restaurant business. He becomes the head chef at Cantina di Marco, a cozy Italian restaurant in Cumberland, RI, of which he will soon become the sole proprietor. He’s finally found a home for his five-star cooking after many years traversing the globe on merchant ships. Cantina di Marco becomes a second home for Big Manny and his family, a second home populated by strangers who come through its double doors to dine, drink, and mingle. These strangers don’t see the inner workings of Big Manny’s crowded kitchen, where chefs toil over stoves and chopping boards, but the savoury flavor of his signature prime rib or his alfredo linguini speaks volumes to the culinary brilliance hiding behind the kitchen’s swinging doors.
~
2025. Manny and Melanie are no longer together, but they have an unbreakable bond that’s lasted twenty years and looks a bit like both of them, with his mother’s hazel eyes and his father’s round head. Their son, Maison, was once a wide-eyed little boy with an afro, sitting on his father’s knee as Manny recounts the moment he met his first true love. Now, he’s a young adult, carrying the stories of his parents and their parents with him wherever he goes. His grandad, Big Manny, lives on in his memories. He remembers Cantina di Marco as though it never closed down, remembers sitting in a trolley with a big grin on his face as Big Manny pushed him around the parking lot, remembers chilling at home with Big Manny as they munched on bananas and pretended to be monkeys.
As a young adult, Maison will one day find himself writing a creative nonfiction piece about how his family came to be. He will write this piece in his now-retired grandmother Vianney’s back garden as she reminisces in the kitchen with her daughter, laughing about Melanie’s escapades in York. He will write this piece while sitting next to his mother Melanie and asking her what her life in Belize was like. He will write this after having spent several weeks with his father Manny, who’s back in England after all these years, now living happily with his second love Chantelle. He will write this for his family, a family which is, quite literally, beyond the wildest dreams of a young English girl working at a bar in the quiet seaside town of Hartlepool.
Sole Magazine