Table of Contents
The 2019 Frame: Mourning and Departure
The narrative of begins in March 2019 in Glasgow, with Abena and Kodzo packing up their family home, a process laden with the heavy silence of grief following the death of their son, Elom. As they clean, every item revealed a burn on a counter, a grubby photograph of a six-year-old Elom in a Batman outfit triggers a surge of memory and sadness. Elom had moved back into the family home less than a year prior, just as his parents retired to a cottage in the countryside, and he had painted the living room a vibrant “ochre” to bring some sun inside. His funeral has passed, but the minister’s words about him being “laid to rest” provide no comfort to the family; Elom lies under the soil, trapped with the “demons” that troubled him, while Abena, Kodzo, and their daughter Dzifa are left with unanswered questions.
Dzifa, working in a hectic London hospital, remains physically distant but emotionally connected through video calls, reminding her parents not to throw out her old belongings. Amidst their mourning, the family discusses a planned trip to Ghana, which had been Elom’s final wish for them. Kodzo is initially reluctant to go, feeling that his son’s grave is his only root in Scottish soil, saying, “I walk to his grave every day… I can’t leave him”. However, Abena feels “stranded” and “stuck” in a country that is not her village, desiring to return to her people and her language after decades of planting “seeds” instead of roots. She ultimately decides to go to Ghana with Dzifa, intending never to return, while Kodzo stays behind, gifting her a bag of Scottish soil to keep her from being “blinded by that red earth over there”.
Part One: Roots in Accra and the Early Years in Glasgow (1986–1990)
The story flashes back to April 1986 in Accra, where a twenty-four-year-old Abena meets Kodzo. Kodzo is visiting from the UK, where he is studying nursing in Glasgow, and is staying with a relative named Ernest in Abena’s family compound. Abena, who teaches at a catering school, is initially irritated by having to perform domestic chores for the visiting “educated man” at her Aunt Esther’s behest. However, as she cooks breakfast for him over the course of a week, they begin to talk, sharing stories of their childhoods and ambitions. Despite her cynicism regarding men who return from abroad only to leave their local lovers behind, Abena finds herself drawn to Kodzo’s kindness and the fact that he listens as much as he speaks. On the morning she is set to leave for a training trip to Kumasi, Kodzo takes her hand and asks her to marry him; after thinking it over, she chooses the safety and possibility he offers over the control of her overbearing Aunt Esther.
By April 1989, the couple is settled in a wet and cold Glasgow. Abena struggles with the isolation of the new country, where her days are defined by household chores and the expansion and contraction of the Scottish light. She resents the fact that while other Ghanaian women in their social circle, like Afi and Maria, have benefited from education, she was never allowed to finish school, spending her youth “changing nappies and stirring pots”. She desperately wants to pursue further education in Britain to bridge this gap, but finds herself humiliated by a system that finds her primary school certificates irrelevant.
Tensions arise when Kodzo begins pushing for a family, while Abena insists on establishing stability and education first. She secretly applies for a sous-chef job at the Dundonald Hotel, hoping to gain independence and meet people. During her interview with a manager named Rory, she makes a humiliating mistake, confusing pears for plums in a poached dessert recipe, and is not initially offered the role. Shortly thereafter, Abena realizes she is pregnant with Elom, feeling trapped by the finality of it. However, Rory calls back to offer her seasonal kitchen help, providing a small “door” of air in her locked room.
Elom is born in February 1990. The birth is traumatic, as Abena’s epidural fails, and she is left screaming in pain. The arrival of the baby shifts the family dynamic; Kodzo feels bonded to the boy but becomes an “accessory” to Abena’s instinctive care. They argue over the traditional practice of circumcision, with Abena questioning why Kodzo wants to “cut” his son to make the boy look like him. Kodzo eventually wins this argument, but a later incident where Elom develops an ear infection while Abena is at work forces Kodzo to realize the heavy load his wife carries. He asks her to show him how to carry the baby in a traditional Ghanaian “wrapper” on his back, a gesture of shared responsibility that helps Abena breathe easier.
Part Two: The Burden of Care and Growing Rebellion (1998–2007)
In February 1998, Abena receives news that her mother, Akosua, has died in Ghana from complications of alcoholism and a lack of medical care. The responsibility for the funeral falls on Abena, who must navigate the “hell of organising a funeral with a pack of hyenas” relatives who see the event as a party rather than a memorial. During her trip to Ghana, she spends time with her thirteen-year-old sister, Abla, who has been orphaned by their mother’s death. Abena realizes that Abla is smart and ambitious but is being pressured by Aunt Esther to attend catering school rather than finishing secondary school. Remembering her own lack of choices, Abena uses her hard-earned salary to enroll Abla in a boarding school in Achimota, hoping to give her sister the future she herself was denied.
Back in Glasgow, by July 2002, Kodzo has become deeply involved in his Pentecostal church, seeking spiritual prosperity and “abundance”. He faces professional disappointment when he is passed over for a promotion in favor of younger, less experienced nurses. This sense of being “behind” leads him to place immense pressure on Elom, who is now a teenager at a local comprehensive school. Kodzo worries the school’s atmosphere of fights and drugs is casting a shadow over his son.
By May 2006, sixteen-year-old Elom has entered a period of teenage rebellion, secretly smoking hash and drinking Buckfast with his friends Chris and Del. During a house party, Elom gets “wrecked” on a bucket bong, resulting in a state of paranoid anxiety that is worsened when his sister Dzifa sees him. He fumbles through a sexual encounter with a girl named Kelly, feeling “stony nothingness” instead of pleasure, a precursor to his later confusion regarding his sexuality.
In March 2007, the tension between Elom and his parents reaches a breaking point. Abena discovers Elom is failing his classes, leading to an explosive argument where she accuses him of disregarding the opportunities they worked so hard to provide. Kodzo grounds him and insists he attend a Christian youth group and a summer retreat to fix his “confusion”. Elom’s mental health deteriorates; shortly before his final exams, he is found in his room standing over a broken mirror, his hand bleeding from where he punched it in a fit of nameless emotion. He requires stitches, and Abena feels a deep shame that she might have missed the signs of his suffering while she was busy with her career in a hotel kitchen.
Despite the turmoil, Elom gets into university to study engineering in August 2007, though he is one grade short of the initial offer. Dzifa excels, achieving top marks and preparing for her own path into medicine. Kodzo, though proud, still feels no relief, as his internal “knot” of anxiety continues to tighten. He suffers a panic attack while driving the family on the Kingston bridge, nearly causing an accident. This incident, combined with professional burnout and the realization that the church provides no real help for his “stress,” leads him to seek medical help and begin taking antidepressants.
Part Three: Exploration and Isolation in London (2008–2015)
In April 2008, Elom goes on a “lads’ holiday” to Magaluf with Chris, Del, and Nico. The trip is characterized by binge drinking and performative masculinity, but it is also the site of a pivotal moment for Elom’s identity. After a day at the beach where Chris has to help Elom swim back to shore, the two boys share a bed in their hotel room. In the orange glow of the streetlights, they engage in a mutual, drunken sexual encounter. The experience leaves Elom feeling more “content” than ever before, but it is followed by a week of inscrutable silence from Chris, who eventually makes a joke about them “snuggling up” to him in front of the others. Elom feels “quietly drowning” in his group of friends, terrified and humiliated by the realization that he cannot access the confidence they display.
By November 2010, Dzifa is studying medicine at Oxford, where she navigates the social dynamics of the elite university with a natural “charisma”. She is viewed by her friends, like Clem, as “enigmatic” and “unknowable,” a thoroughbred who is social but elusive. This perception mirrors Dzifa’s own internal fear that she is “shallow” and possesses “initial charisma but so little follow-through,” failing to maintain deep connections with her old friends from Glasgow.
In May 2013, Abena is working a “bloated and off-yellow” catering job at a care home, having given up her high-pressure restaurant career to spend more time at home for the children. Elom is interning at an engineering firm but announces he has been accepted into a journalism master’s in London, a move that surprises his parents but makes them proud. Abena, seeing her children have moved on, begins to wonder if it is time for her to have “control” over her own life for the first time.
Elom moves to London in September 2013, finding a room in a shared flat in Willesden Green. London provides him with the autonomy and anonymity he craves. He begins exploring his sexuality more openly, moving from “cruising the Heath” to meeting men online. He feels like a “spring being pulled taut,” discharged of energy only through the “white-hot release of sex”.
In March 2015, Elom meets Ben at a housewarming dinner. Ben is everything Elom is not: posh, easy-going, charming, and self-assured. They begin a relationship, and Elom experiences intimacy soft kisses and shared beds for the first time. Ben pushes Elom to be “honest” and “himself,” encouraging him to come out to his parents.
Part Four: Coming Out and the Breakdown of Silence (2015–2016)
Following Ben’s urging, Elom comes out to Kodzo and Abena during a Skype call in August 2015. He tells them he has a boyfriend named Ben and that he is gay. The reaction is one of shock and silence. Kodzo tells him they will “figure it out” as if he has been told his car failed an MOT, and Abena’s words of love clash with the stunned look in her eyes. They ask him not to tell Dzifa, though Elom immediately ignores this and messages her; she responds with celebration and excitement.
The aftermath of coming out is a period of conspicuous silence from his parents, who act as if nothing has happened. Elom feels “invisible” despite having left the closet. This leads him to choose to spend Christmas with Ben’s family in Surrey instead of going home to Glasgow. While Ben’s family is welcoming, and the experience is “freeing,” Elom still feels a yearning for the “kenkey on Boxing Day” with his own family.
Back in Glasgow during the same December 2015, Abena suffers a severe medical emergency during a New Year’s Eve party. She is hospitalized and has her gallbladder removed. The surgery and subsequent recovery give her a perspective shift; she realizes how “boring” and “oppressive” her care home job is. When her company undergoes restructuring, she is offered early retirement with a redundancy payout. She decides to use the money to pay off the family’s mortgage, securing their “patch to call home” while dreaming of a future that looks very different from her present one involving “warmth and sandy toes”.
By November 2016, Elom’s relationship with Ben begins to buckle under the weight of unresolved tension and a lack of empathy. Elom finds Ben’s constant need for “quality time” draining, while Ben feels Elom is “withdrawn” and only engaged when they are with friends. A specific incident in bed, where Ben tries to encourage Elom to bottom despite Elom’s physical pain and discomfort, highlights a power imbalance. Ben asks Elom if he “trusts” him, but Elom can only wince and wait for the encounter to end.
Elom later discovers that Ben’s own coming out had been “painless” and supported by his bohemian parents, a fact Ben had omitted while urging Elom to risk everything with his own “religious African parents”. Elom realizes that Ben had built him the confidence to live a queer life but had also “crushed” him with his control. Elom feels “deficient in love” and withdraws completely. At Ben’s suggestion, Elom moves out.
Part Five: Return to Ghana and Professional Strain (2017–2018)
In February 2017, Abena and Kodzo visit Ghana for the first time in thirty years. The trip is a mix of rediscovery and alienation. They spend time with Abla, who now lives in a wealthy gated compound in Legon, and then travel to Ho to see Kodzo’s extended family. However, when they reach Kodzo’s childhood village, Wutevi, he finds it “unsettling”. The forest has been replaced by cinderblock buildings, and the river where he once played is silent, dominated by the buzz of generators. Kodzo realizes his old life is gone, and he cannot build a new one there; he is relieved to head back to Glasgow, realizing that is where his home truly is.
In August 2017, Dzifa is a junior doctor dealing with the brutal realities of the NHS. She struggles with a difficult case involving an elderly woman named Flora Stiller. Dzifa tries to have a “DNACPR” (Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation) discussion with Flora’s son, Harry, who refuses to accept the frailty of his mother. When Flora eventually crashes, Dzifa is forced to perform compressions, “beating the life back into a corpse” for several rounds before a senior doctor calls the time of death. The experience leaves her exhausted and cynical about the “delayed inevitable”.
During September 2017, Elom is struggling with deep loneliness following his breakup with Ben. He is playing for an inclusive rugby team to meet people, but feels “electric, jolting, vibrating, and formless” rather than connected. He develops a crush on a “token straight” teammate named Guy, misreading Guy’s friendliness as romantic interest. After being rejected by Guy, Elom returns to cruising on Hampstead Heath, engaging in a brief, painful encounter with a stranger that leaves him feeling “tender” and “stingy”.
By May 2018, Elom’s mental health is in a state of total collapse. Working as a journalist in London, reporting on tragedies like the Grenfell Tower fire, he feels his “empathy has been dammed up behind concrete”. He feels “invisible” in his office and increasingly isolated from his friends. He experiences passive suicidal ideation while standing on a Tube platform, thinking about the “distance between himself and the train”. He ultimately asks his editor for permission to move back to Glasgow to work remotely, an “overwhelming impulse to run”.
Part Six: The Ochre Wall and the Final Swim (August–October 2018)
In August 2018, Elom moves back into his childhood bedroom in Glasgow, while his parents are settled in their new bungalow. The house is filled with the “brown tinge of sweat, sebum, and skin” that has built up over decades, and Elom is repelled by the “grime” and “dust” in the corners. In an attempt to reclaim the space, he impulsively buys tubs of “Caramelised Mountain Ochre” paint. He scrapes away the old wallpaper and spends a night painting a bright, wet wall, falling asleep smiling for the first time in months.
He is contacted by Anj, a friend of Ben’s who has moved to Glasgow. She takes him swimming at a Victorian pool. While swimming, Elom encounters Chris, his old friend/abuser from the Magaluf trip, which triggers an “intense fear” and makes him feel like his lungs have stopped working. He begins ghosting Anj to avoid seeing Chris again.
By October 2018, Elom is driving back from the Highlands when he sees a sea loch during a storm. He feels a sudden, “bold” urge to step into the water. He wades into the waves, feeling the “ache in his joints” and the “pulse of cold,” which surprisingly makes him feel rooted and calm. He laughs into the wind, feeling “totally thrilling”. He becomes obsessed with wild swimming, viewing it as a mixture of “extreme sport and meditation” that cools his mind and stops his constant ruminations.
When his journalism contract is not extended, Elom feels only “relief”. He decides to go to the islands of Mull and Iona for a final period of solitude. On Iona, the water is “perfectly clear, like molten glass, or tears”. He spends two weeks swimming further and further each day, learning to “sit with the pain” and focus on his breath.
On his final morning on Iona, Elom enters the icy water and begins to swim west, towards the “expanse”. As his breath becomes “harsher and less rhythmic,” he reflects on his life. He realizes that between his parents in Glasgow and their roots in Ghana, a “language had been lost,” and they were never able to understand each other’s ways of loving. He acknowledges that Ben “crushed” him but also gave him the confidence to be queer, and that Chris showed him both kindness and cruelty. He concludes that “love was a tightrope between freedom and control” that he could never make sense of.
Feeling that he has “always given control to someone else,” Elom decides he is ready to take it back. He rests his head in the water, blocking out the sounds of the world, and smiles in the “almost total” silence. He lifts his legs toward the surface, breathes in deep, slow breaths, and floats for the final time, implying his death by drowning.
Conclusion: The 2019 Aftermath
The book circle back to the March 2019 cleaning of the house. Abena and Kodzo are finished packing. The “ochre” wall Elom painted is one of the final things they see. In their retirement, they are parting ways geographically and emotionally: Abena is heading to Ghana to find a place where she can “live” and speak her language, while Kodzo is staying in Scotland because he cannot leave Elom’s grave, which he calls their “root in this soil”. The summary of the book ends with Abena boarding her flight, leaving Kodzo behind to “mourn our son in the place where he died”.