That Autumn, Catarina was alone for the first time in her life, and it felt to her like a threshold. All this quiet. A new city as old as history. She felt a lightness in her body. She wrote for hours in the library. Words came to her like water. Decisions were easy. She would finish the new academic term and then she would move into a new apartment in the new year. She would do groundbreaking research. She would make herself a new London life. She would throw herself into the city. Every event, every exhibition, every evening lecture; she would fill her life with new words and new people. In December she messaged twenty-five different people on the spare room site, including a girl with a Brazilian-looking surname and purple hair.

Around her, outside the windows of the library, red and yellow fell, from the sky, settling on the ground. Hours later, on her way home, she would walk over the loose, dismantled firmament.

On the way home Catarina was almost singing.

Let’s walk through the park, she said when they emerged from the mouth of Mile End station.

Spring was breaking across the trees in tiny green buds that looked orange under the streetlights. The sounds of a saxophone. Cherry blossom fell too early on the ground, also orange. They followed the lilac, blue and yellow flowers down the park towards their flat.

Before the night tube started, which was in August 2016 – later than planned due to strikes by transport workers concerned about their working conditions – if you were from South London and you went to a party in Tottenham you used to have to wait till 6am to go home. The bus took two hours and a minicab cost £50 plus. Before the night tube, before uber, it was go home at midnight or go hard. Like arrive at 1am, take mdma, or ket and mix it with coke, and dance with strangers for three hours straight then smoke a spliff with strangers and dmc with strangers then fall asleep on a sofa cushion on the floor or have sex with a stranger under a cold duvet in an upstairs bedroom, people opening and closing the bedroom door, and wake up, right before the light came, mouth dry, and walk to the underground, stepping over cherry blossom on the tarmac as the sun rose, and wait outside the station with the workers. The first Victoria line train was always packed and so loud. It crashed down the tunnel; it took you to the other side of the city, SOUTHBOUND, home.

I went to a talk today

Yeah?

It was some poets talking

Uh huh

They were talking about love

Yeah?

One poet quoted another poet called Anne Boyer, do you know her?

Melissa shook her head.

She said that Anne Boyer the poet says that romantic love feels like a place where you can have healing, where you can have so many possibilities

Melissa tilted her head. Her hair held around her ears.

She had a phrase I liked, she said it can feel like a little communism of two.

Melissa smiled. She considered the phrase.

Vovô Lipo would be the leftwing governor of the State of Pernambuco three times. As history books say, in 1962 he was elected by a coalition of rural sugar cane workers, urban workers and the leftwing bourgeoise of which he was himself a member. Vovô Lipo’s great promise was land reform and literacy. Workers, who were at that point tenants of the sugar cane landowners, wanted to own their own land. They wanted to work their own land. After five hundred years of serfdom and slavery and early deaths and beatings and eating dirt to try to die (approximately: generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation) they wanted their own land. No masters and no slaves. And they wanted education. More than half of Pernambuco was illiterate. There were fires over the sugar cane fields.

When Vovô Lipo became the new governor of the State of Pernambuco he was strong in his body; thick limbed and thick furrow-browed and thirty-nine years old. For two years, he governed with his sleeves rolled up and, for the first time in the history of the state, union leaders stepped into the governor’s palace. Feet on the marble. The landowners called him a communist.

Vovô Lipo was not killed in prison. He fled for Paris, where he lived apart from his wife and his daughters for fifteen years. Vovô Lipo came back to Recife after the amnesty in 1979, which protected him from prosecution just as it protected the generals and the torturers. And, when state elections resumed in 1986, Vovô Lipo was elected governor of the state of Pernambuco for the second time. Sugar cane land. He rolled his sleeves up. He was a hero. His hair was grey. His wife slept in another room. The sugar mills had been industrialised, machines raked the earth. The unions weren’t asking for land reform anymore. It was true now that everyone could vote, although not everyone was literate. 1994 he was re-elected again.

There were many history books about Vovô Lipo and some statues of him and one street named after him. And although none of his daughters ever ran for elected office, of his nieces two became leftwing politicians at state level, and one a senator; significantly, none of them were communists either.

The house was on the hill. With one wall on the Rua do Bomfim and another wall on the parallel street. It was perhaps a century old and the veranda and the balustrades were crumbling. Woodworms had eaten the roof and it was about to cave in. Only a couple drunk on the hope and energy and optimism of democracy and sureness that things could only get better would have bought a house like that. A couple who had faced no tragedy that did not make them stronger, no grief they could not overcome. Forgiveness the size of the earth. Laura had seen the house, had spoken about it in the slow manner that she had, You should paint it blue like the sea and the sky, she had said. It looks like work, Lúcia had said and Lygia had agreed. Lamis thought they were crazy – they could have had an apartment with air conditioning and a garage for parking. But Miguel was an engineer and over two or three years he planned to rebuild it. And every wall would be painted white and every shutter, every beam, every wooden part of it would be painted blue. A house the colour of the sky that was always as blue and as bright as the sun could make it.

It was the year that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, the year he wrote his sonnets, and the year Shakespeare returned to London after he had fled the plague which killed over 20,000 people. It was the year that an English sailor called James Lancaster left the court of Queen Elizabeth of England not knowing he would return a year later, sunburnt and seaworn and bringing with him the richest, largest haul Queen Elizabeth of England would ever see. Gold and rubber and rubies and wood. Billions in today’s money. Taken from a port on the northeast coast of a Portuguese colony in the new world. A port called Recife adjacent to a bustling and wealthy settlement called Olinda.

[...]

Shakespeare was writing in the time of empire and theft and genocide and slavery and this was when the world we know was built – and therefore you must understand its machinations and its magic.

Sônia there are things I regret, that I think about at night. Can I tell you? Yes? We were at a congress, in the South at a university in the Southeast. There were three hundred or four hundred of us there. It was right before the amnesty, right when we were thinking Meu Deus we have finally done it. We are this close to democracy. I was just out of – prison. The dictatorship is this close to finished – and we have finished it. We were asking for amnesty. You know the slogan. We were asking for amnesty. Ampla. Geral. Irrestrita. We were asking for amnesty. Recíproca. We were discussing this three hundred or four hundred of us at the meeting. Many students and I was there because I had been in the South during that time, it was before the amnesty before I came home to you Sônia. And there was one man who made a presentation. He was so anxious to speak in front of us you could see it in his hands. He had to wait several hours because the meeting was all day and for hours he was there he was so anxious to speak in front of us. He had dark skin. He was older, he was shaking in his hands as he waited to speak. He wore a brown suit, a white shirt although no one else was wearing smart clothes. And then he said to us, I am from the movement of people in prison. Not political prisoners. Common prisoners. They torture us there too, they beat us, they abuse us, they starve us, they make us work, they kill us in there too. There are thousands of us. I speak on behalf of the common prisoners to ask that we are included also in the amnesty. That was what he said. That was what he asked of us. And Sônia we voted no. We voted no because common prisoners were in prison for common reasons, not political reasons, and this was a political amnesty, that would complicate things and we wanted to keep things simple because we were this close to democracy and oh his hands were shaking when he spoke

Sônia there are things I regret

Maria and Ana go to the meeting where Edivânia who used to be a union leader speaks about conditions at the iron ore mine where they work and then they go to another meeting about conditions at the factory that processes the iron where Jorge works. They print pamphlets for the meetings on a mimeograph at night in the local school which Diana who is a teacher gives them access to. The pamphlet has a list of the names of the workers who have died at the factory and the names of the workers who have died in the mine. It is also true that wages have not increased in six years while profit and productivity have doubled though they do not write this. It is also true that there are military police on the factory floor and even a room where they take people. They do not write this either. Maria knows how to work a mimeograph. Maria and Ana sit in the school together at night. They hope there are no boots outside, no knock on the door. The mimeograph makes this sound: plec plec plec. They hold a meeting in the room of their house. Edivânia who used to be a union leader is speaking. Dust in the air. Sweat on their foreheads. When the police come the first time Maria and Ana say they do not know what the police are talking about. It was a birthday party, see here are the leftover brigadeiros, would you like one senhor? When the police come the second time, they are gone and so is Edivânia and so is the blue beetle car.