By Jessica George

In African culture— Wait, no, I don’t want to be presumptuous or in any way nationalistic enough to assume certain Ghanaian customs run true in other African countries. I might in fact just be speaking of what passes as practice in my family, but regardless of who the mores belong to, I was raised to keep family matters private. So if my dad has his own bedroom or my mum goes abroad for inexplicable lengths of time, it’s common knowledge within our household that we keep that business, and all matters like it, to ourselves. ‘They just won’t understand, you know? We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently.’

Growing up, school dynamics, books and shows on TV told me that best friends tell each other everything. It was almost the sole requirement, but I had to bend this rule, knowing that the pieces of information I withheld meant I could never truly qualify as anyone’s best friend, not when no one really knew me.

Even now, none of my friends – helpfully, I don’t have many – know that every weekday I start the morning the same way. I wake up five minutes before my alarm and wait for it to go off at 6 a.m. I blink away any sticky traces of the night and tread silently downstairs, past my dad’s bedroom – now relocated to the ground floor – and into the kitchen. I close the door to restrict travelling noise and pour myself a bowl of cornflakes, eating a spoonful at a time as I move around the kitchen.

It’s a small, functional area with a gas stove (in desperate need of cleaning, but I assign that task to tomorrow evening), an oven with a missing grill door, a tall fridge, a smaller freezer filled with various unidentified let-me-not-waste-this food pieces (sorting through assigned to Saturday afternoon) and a washing machine that dances out from under the countertop when it’s on, but when empty is just light enough to push back with the weight of my body. Said countertops are a white-speckled dark grey with a dull sheen that I think is meant to trick you into believing it’s marble.

I take a container of lunch from the batch I made on Sunday for myself, then cook pasta for Dad’s lunch and leave it covered in the microwave. The rice I make for his dinner goes on a shelf in the cold oven. I cut up oranges for both our snacks – Should I save the strawberries for tomorrow? I tap my nails on the kitchen counter, considering the expiry date. Nah, go for it – and leave Dad’s in a covered bowl, packing mine into another container.

None of my friends know it’s when I’m out of the shower that I hear Dad’s carer Dawoud come in. Today he’s on the phone, likely to his wife in Yemen where he’s from – he told me about her once. She’s supposedly very beautiful.

Dawoud is a bit of a giant, well over six feet and only a little round in the middle, with grey hair on his head and several strands escaping from his ears. A smoker in his sixties, he has a loud but hoarse voice. My dad’s fifty-seven, has never smoked and stopped drinking years ago. Age is a terrifyingly inconsistent beast.

I cream my skin and pull out my Tuesday dress, navy, short-sleeved, loose-fitted and below my knees, because no one in the office wears jeans. I tune in to a prayer channel Mum likes to randomly quiz me on, whilst pulling on black tights and inserting two gold studs that were passed down to me into my ears. I set a reminder to call Doctor Appong, my dad’s GP for the last three years, at lunch for Dad’s swollen feet, and look through my emails to find that we don’t qualify for a council tax reduction.

Downstairs, Dawoud is in the kitchen making toast, and tomorrow will be porridge because the two meals alternate on weekdays. I walk into the living room and tell Dad, ‘I’ll make you pancakes on Saturday.’

‘Oh, goody,’ he says smiling, but he won’t remember the pancakes until I feed them to him on Saturday morning. That’s how his Parkinson’s works. He can remember constant, repetitive things, like mine and Dawoud’s presence, but short-term details won’t sit in his brain for very long. They literally go through one ear, settle long enough for him to reply, then go out the other. Some days his medication will assist, but other days I think the meds are too busy tackling his swollen joints or his shaking hands, his high-blood pressure or his difficulty speaking, to lend a hand.

I have a picture of my parents taken in September 1984 and in it Dad is tall and handsome with an afro and a silver chunky bracelet he still wears to this day. Whenever I look at that photo, I think of my last day at college, eight years ago. My year were having a party thrown in a bar, our equivalent of a prom, I guess. I didn’t end up going even though I was asked. By Connor . . . no, Charlie, the quiet guy in my maths class that I had no idea even liked me. I did say yes; I bought a dress, but then I had to cancel on the day. Poor Charlie. An hour before I texted him to say I couldn’t make it, my dad received his diagnosis: Parkinson’s disease. We’d all been quick to blame the ageing process for his ‘clumsiness’ or short-term memory. I mean, we’ve all put our keys down and then declared them missing two minutes later, so who were we to judge? But then one evening, Dad got lost.

I was back from school and the only one at home when he called the landline.

‘Madeleine? Maddie,’ he said. ‘I think . . . I don’t know where I am.’

It wasn’t what he said that made me grip the phone tighter; we live in London: easy to get lost, but easy to find your way back. No, it was the fear in Dad’s voice that got to me. Over the course of my life, Dad had shown himself to be many things, but afraid was never one of them.

I made him pass the phone to a nearby woman, who explained that he was only ten minutes down the road.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked her.

‘We’re definitely on Spar Lane,’ she said. ‘I live here.’

I knew then that Dad hadn’t simply fallen asleep on the bus or mistaken an unfamiliar street for a shortcut, but that he genuinely didn’t know how to find his way home using the route he’d been taking for six years.

I jogged to Spar Lane and there he stood, in front of the gate of someone’s house, looking left and right, left and right. Trying. I reached him and jokingly threw my hands in the air. ‘You walk down here every day!’

He nodded but didn’t smile, and as we walked home, the frown stuck between his brows deepened until we passed where he bought newspapers on Sundays and his shoulders sank with relief.

I now mark that day as The Beginning.

Excerpt from “Maame” copyright © 2023 by Jessica George. Published by Hodder & Stoughton (UK)

About the book: Meet Maddie Wright. All her life, she's been told who she is. To her Ghanaian parents, she's Maame: the one who takes care of the family. Her mum's stand-in. The primary carer for her father, who suffers from Parkinson's. The one who keeps the peace - and the secrets. But when she finally gets the chance to leave home, Maddie is determined to become the kind of woman she wants to be. One who wears a bright yellow suit, dates men who definitely aren't on her mum's list of prospective husbands, and stands up to her boss's microaggressions. Someone who doesn't have to google all her life choices. But when tragedy strikes, Maddie is forced to face the risks - and rewards - of putting her heart on the line.

As blisteringly funny and achingly relatable as its heroine, MAAME is an unforgettable coming-of-age story about finally becoming the heroine of your own life.

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Jessica George was born and raised in London to Ghanaian parents and studied English Literature at the University of Sheffield. After working at a literary agency and a theatre, she landed a job in the editorial department of a publishing house. She now lives in North London with an incontrovertible sweet tooth and the knowledge that she can consume half a cake by herself if left to her own devices.

You can read our interview with Jessica George here

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