White Soul Star

His drunken mum had no inkling – when she fobbed him, newborn,
to the Trinidadian-Tobagan called Lauren downstairs, for to
sink gins with bingedrinkers in the legion – that our Lauren, still
grieving a stillborn, still lactating, wet-nursed his suckling lips.

His cells thrived on her hot-chicken soul; he was rocked and
patted to sleep to a rocksteady beat, wafting in the air, colliding with
jerk sauce and spices. His output awash with traces of rum ‘n’ ginger
cake. His temple, baked all day beside the dub-bass pulse of her big,

black heart. It matters not where the autobiog chose to start:
fostered, adopted, five years later by do-gooders of colour. For
they liked opera, drove Volvos, worked for the Man with objectives,
and goals. Nobody knew, neither he, his ghost writer, his number-one

fans; his mother, now inside. Lauren kept mum till the day she died...
that, by the time he could crawl, he was a milky-bar kid with a rich
brown centre, turning the air turmeric, with his gurgling, whining,
screaming out to us all, that melancholic tone, that sweet soul music.