by Ananda Devi
His real name was Jeremiah Phillips. He kept on looking at himself in the mirror, unaware that he was copying his sisters’ seductive posture, their hooded gaze, their pout, their enigmatic smile. The girls he walked past in his neighborhood, with their bare midriffs and long legs, weren’t who he was thinking of so much as the older, white women in the chic pockets of London, protected by their armor of silver. He saw them in restaurants, their fingers gripping the long thin stem of a champagne glass, their legs caressed by the silky, practically invisible veil of sheer stockings bearing practically no relation to the opaque tights his mother wore, huge leather handbags as supple as cloth and set on the floor by their feet or on a chair next to them. He envied them their elegance, their affluence. Their modulated voices, their discreet accents so unlike the shrill shrieks of the neighborhood girls, whatever their race. He wanted them to notice him and look at him, to look at him and want him, and to know that there would be a price to pay. At night, he dreamed of them, their long curved bodies, their red lips, their pale complexions, their soft genitals. A prince, he thought, I’ll be their prince. They’ll be kneeling before me. They’ll be my way out of Brixton.
He became a man at breakneck speed, and that delighted him. Turmoil churned deep in his belly, tormenting him, filling him with joy as his sex swelled. But with his willowy height and his angelic face, his skin demanding to be caressed, a mouth that sent frissons down the backs of men and women alike, it was his seeming innocence that made him so dangerous.
The smell of something burning reached him well before his mother, Wanda, shouted, “Will one of you turn off that damn oven? I’m on the phone!” His sisters and his brother paid no attention to her words, but Cub, whistling, shook his dreadlocks like a girl, stepped out of the bathroom and went to turn off the oven and throw the charred burgers in the bin.
“Mum!” he shouted. “Can we get some Chinese?”
“Fine! Take the money in my handbag!”
He opened his mother’s old handbag and took out a twenty-pound note. Looking at the bag he’d seen nearly all his life, the brown, worn-out plastic, the seams coming apart, the lining torn, he felt a kind of pity. If I get some money, he thought, I’ll buy Mum some nicer clothes. And a handbag and shoes. He felt disheartened to be taking so much and not giving anything back. It was time to be a man, he thought.
He peeked into the living room. Wanda was lying on the sofa, holding the phone to her ear. The soles of her feet, propped up on the back of the sofa, were yellow from standing for hours at the supermarket where she worked as a cashier. Management had suddenly decided that the cashiers would have fewer back problems if they stood rather than sat. So all the cashiers’ chairs were taken away. But now, at the end of their day, their legs were swollen and their short breaks didn’t give them enough time to relax or to lie down. They had weakly protested, but the doctor hired by the company had rubber-stamped the decision. Because they needed this work more than they needed their health, the cashiers had kept quiet, even though every morning they felt like they were being sentenced to forced labor and every night they walked like old women, with small, shaky steps.
Wanda was listening to Bob Marley while talking on the phone. “No Woman, No Cry” reverberated through the flat. While Wanda was saying, despairingly, “If he doesn’t pay maintenance this month I’m getting a lawyer!” Bob was chiming in that his feet were his only carriage, that he’d have to push through, but everything would be all right, everything would be all right. Of course.
Cub watched his mother and saw her tightly clenched jaw, her red fingernails, her fiery eyes.
Wanda had always been a fighter; she hadn’t given up, even after her man had abandoned her, even with four kids, even with all the money she needed but never had. Still, life kept slipping out of her grasp, age was taking its toll, the shop was wringing its cashiers dry and everything cost more and more. Including her kids. Especially her kids who were growing, who kept on asking for money, and she scowled as she painted her nails crimson because she knew she’d run out of luck, there were no fairies or miracles in store for her. She held on to the flat that she rented at a low rate from the local council, but there, too, the future wasn’t on her side. The council was in the process of taking back flats and selling them on at market rate to young professionals all too eager to gentrify decaying corners of London such as Brixton. Everything’s gonna be all right. Bob Marley had no idea what he was talking about. All the families thrown out on the street because they had the right to low rents even though their flats were worth their weight in gold knew that everything wasn’t gonna be all right—far from it, in fact.
Wanda hung up and lit a cigarette. Her eyes met Cub’s through the smoke. For half a second, Cub was sure she was about to cry. But Bob Marley sang Oh little sister, don’t shed no tears, and Wanda’s face hardened, and Cub knew this woman wasn’t the sort to cry. On the contrary, Wanda smiled and turned up the volume, shrugging regally.
Once Cub was out of the building, he’d made his decision. Wanda wouldn’t be alone anymore. His gait changed. Never had he seemed so much like a young lion—a lion Cub with sharp teeth, with a small, metallic fury in his belly that just kept on growing.
“In this bright future,” he hummed, pausing briefly to jive before going on his way, “you can’t forget your past, so dry your tears, I say.”
After he’d brought the Chinese takeaway home, he left again to meet his friends at King’s Cross. Then, he told himself, he’d go to see the old lady.
Was that really how it had happened? Mary’s memory seemed to have erased the moment when her life began. Should she have gained so much happiness there and then? She tried to reconstruct it, filled with regret that her distraction had robbed her of such sweet, precious moments.
When he came back and rang the bell (or knocked? Did he knock? Or bang?), Mary ought to have looked through the window mistrustfully, since nobody had paid her a visit in such a long time; even the occasional missionaries and salesmen had learned to skip this house where both their prayers and their wares invariably came to naught.
She had come down the stairs, her heart pounding, overcome by a fear she couldn’t place even as she ran her hand through her somewhat unkempt hair and smoothed her rumpled old dress, all too aware of how her bones showed through her thin skin. She had decided not to open the door. But she needed to know who had gone to the trouble of climbing the few steps up to the front door when there was nothing to catch a passerby’s attention: the window displayed only a few dusty corpses.
At first she hadn’t seen anything. Then, lowering her eyes, she must have noticed the yellow-and-blue wool cap perched atop the thick hair, and she recognized the child from the previous evening, and, without expecting it, felt a painful twinge of happiness deep within her bosom, an emotion so forceful that she reeled and had to steady herself on the door handle.
It was him, that child whose hand she’d held, who was now standing in front of the door almost without any expectation. What was this inexplicable new feeling swelling up as she turned the lock, almost frenetically, and opened the door? They stood immobile for several seconds, facing each other, as she urged her heart to stop pounding so wildly and tried to regain the breath his presence had stolen away.
Cub, examining her face, seemed to sense the intensity of her joy. Had he realized that his return to the house was a miracle she hadn’t dared hope for?
She led him to the kitchen, asked him if he wanted hot chocolate or orange juice. “Orange juice,” he said, and he watched, astonished, as she took a tin of red powder out of the cabinet and poured two spoonfuls into a glass she’d filled with tap water. The water took on an almost purplish tint. She held it out and he nervously sipped a little. As he’d expected, the chemical flavor that filled his mouth was unpleasant. He set down the glass, and then, under Mary’s anxious gaze, drank another mouthful.
She babbled about the work that needed to be done on the house. He nodded as if he wer
e a professional handyman even though he’d never changed a single light bulb. But his eyes lingered on the green kitchen cabinets, the worn linoleum, the Formica furniture from another era. He took in the space and realized the extent of her poverty, saw how she was filling the silence between them so as to keep him from leaving.
He wasn’t sure what made him decide to stay and eat the disgusting meal she made him. She took a packet of turkey slices that smelled like plastic out of a practically empty refrigerator and added a shocking-green sweet mint jelly the likes of which he’d never tasted before in his life. He swallowed it all unthinkingly and got up to fix the bathroom window with the rusty tools she’d found under the sink. It made him happy to know that he’d succeeded at this first job. In the end, because it had started raining outside, he accepted her offer to sleep in a tiny room that served as a storeroom.
He had no idea what he was doing. He was used to following his instincts. If he had to explain it, he would have told himself that there was enough space here that he’d feel less cramped than at his mother’s, and that the quiet was nice. He would have told himself that the old woman would give him more money than his work was worth and that he could finally start helping his mother. He would have told himself that this was the first time someone seemed to need him.
But there wasn’t any real explanation. Only an instinct toward life and maybe toward death, only the gleam that had shone in Mary’s eyes when she had opened the door, only the feeling of a single-minded process that neither she nor he had the power to alter.
He spent the night in Mary’s house and, despite the smallness of the room, he slept well. He wasn’t awoken by angry women yelling at drunken men, or by wailing babies, or by fists pounding on walls, or even by the brief, mortal blast of a firearm. Nothing of the sort happened on Portobello Road. This almost-unreal calm amazed him. When he woke up early, with the damp, weak light filtering through a small window high up, he lay outstretched on his mattress and realized that this was the first time in his life that he had slept alone.
Later that day, as he got ready to leave, Mary asked him if he would return that night. He said yes without even considering it. And so he did. The days became weeks. Cub was always there.
Mary, wild with joy, went out to discover the color of her city.
The sonorous, luminous, blossoming gleam of the large parks amid a world of chaotic hives and nighttime bursts of steam. The metallic, cold sheen of the City where everything was tallied up and calculated in the guise of rigid conformity, where billions were traded away and, in a single second, with the tap of a keyboard button, the futures of the poorest were ground down to rubble. The weathered, jaundiced, gray glare of the suburbs, houses arrayed in their gloom, united in their ugliness, shoulder-to-shoulder in their determination not to fall, practically imprisoning their inhabitants with their lifetimes of debt, sentencing them to dreary streets that nobody explored anymore. The face of the run-down areas, where the dregs of humanity sucked on whatever they could to extract the sticky, mind-numbing substance that substituted for life.
When she was young, there were basement rooms where the only horizon that could be seen was the feet of people walking by outside. They had nowhere to go. Sometimes those feet had looked like those of stocky animals ready to stomp their souls flat. Babies were born already suffused by the damp that never disappeared from the city. They grew up spongy and died spongy, the women with swollen ankles, the men with bloated bellies.
As Mary tried to craft a life on Portobello Road and as she focused her energy on clay, her thoughts overwhelmed at every moment by Howard, the world she had known vanished. Half a century faded in her blurring eyesight, in her aching hands. She hadn’t seen these changes happening, but when she opened her eyes again, the horizon itself had changed.
She had believed that she could go on as she had before, because she lived in a bubble where the transformation wasn’t so total just yet. And, in this street, the past remained stubbornly alive. The skyscrapers still seemed distant. She didn’t realize that the devastation wrought on her face, her body, her increasingly unsure fingers meant it was too late for her to nurture other hopes.
Poverty, too, had taken on other guises, and tried to hide itself behind mobile phones, massive television screens, dazzling cars that conjured up a fog of illusions all too easily shattered. Nobody let their misery show through. But the creases around their eyes and mouths betrayed them, the fissures that opened up at the smallest failure. They clung by their fingertips to the edge of survival.
Mary walked down these streets, convinced she was dreaming. She didn’t consider herself part of such an ordinary reality because it seemed inconceivable that anyone could go on living there. And she wasn’t walking so much as she was haunting this city. Ever since she had met Cub, she had gone looking for him everywhere. He had burst into her life and left so many questions in his wake. Where had he come from, what was beneath that dark skin, what had his past been like, what did his future hold? Cub was an incandescent presence in Mary’s house, but he seemed to have come from nowhere, as if he had been created out of nothing with no obligation to anyone, or had come out of some fantasy Mary had unwittingly nourished. From the moment he had appeared, it had seemed inconceivable to Mary that he might not have existed. He had always been there. He would always be there. And she had to have him, all of him.
He had opened the shutters of her mind and her body; the light that shone through was as unsettling as it was devastating. Because that light was above all a condemnation. Like the house itself, Mary had believed that she was graceless, and that she was long past the point of no return. But Cub had shaken her resignation: he would be her oxygen.
And for that reason, in order not to lose the smallest bit of him, she had gone out to see where he lived. She had done her research. She had dug up his address. She had the audacity to go to Brixton and had followed him to the Hillside Estate, where she had gazed, her mouth agape, her head raised up, at those immense blocks of concrete poured in the sixties as if to close off the sky and the space, where thousands of people were piled up and silence was no more. She had seen, at a distance, his mother, his brother and sisters, the void of a nonexistent father, the worry and suspicion inherent in those who have grown up in a space that would always, in their eyes, be usurped.
It was the first time she’d entered this world. Mary’s
England had stayed monochromatic for so long. Only now was she taking stock of the incredible range of hues visible around her. She could have been on another planet. She had never felt any need to take that necessary step toward those who had populated her city without her noticing, not by choice but because the walls of her life had hidden them so efficiently.
She had crossed a boundary and was now somewhere else. She discovered pockets, open spaces that each group had appropriated and where she felt like an intruder. The pointed glares and closed-off expressions were a stern warning that she ignored anyway with a courage that astonished her. Even the aromas changed: guavas, paprika, smoked meat, dried fish, blaring music, rose and orange blossom extract, the detritus of joints from who knew where, bits and pieces of civilization thrown in a bag and mixed together energetically without actually combining them, violence clashing against violence, these momentary alliances engendering dizziness—the foreigner she was entered at her risk and at her peril. The noises and colors assailed her as well, from reggae to rap, rock to bhangra, as she walked down High Street, and the faces and clothes seemed equally covered with floral and tropical patterns, except for when she walked past a veiled woman floating by in silence.
In spite of the fear that seized her as she got on the 159 bus, she kept going. She followed a group of women to the local market, watched what they were buying and picked up the same things: plantains, chayotes, yams, pili-pili, dried prawns, coconut milk, and copied their way of weighing the vegetables, checking their thickness and firmness, holding a melon up to her nose to inhale its scent wh
ile squinting. When it was time for her to pay, she reached into her wallet for her savings. But this was for Cub, this was her way of keeping him near and making sure he wouldn’t disappear as quickly as he’d arrived, and she went home with her purchases, her arms overextended, her fingers wrenched in pain, her palm cut in half by the heavy plastic bags, feeling a new sympathy for those women who had shown her the other side of life, Cub’s life.
She came home, her back hunched from their distrustful stares, and tried to prepare a meal Cub might have eaten, unaware that he never ate fried plantain or paprika chicken, that he subsisted on endless burgers that he gulped down mindlessly, and that his mother had no idea how to cook those things either because nobody had ever taught her.
Cub greeted these pathetic attempts with indifference, with the strange silence so characteristic of him. He ate a spoonful because she begged him to, won’t you please, sweetheart, you need to grow: he swallowed without tasting. Then he went out, as he always did, without telling her where he was going. Sitting alone at the kitchen table, she finished the rest, ate the last crumbs off Cub’s plate, ate with his fork as if in a way she wanted to swallow him as well and keep him within her, entirely inside her, never to let him escape ever. But her fragile stomach could not tolerate any of these heavily spiced dishes and, much later, seized by waves of indigestion, she contorted with pain in her bed.
One night, he came in and saw her on the landing, bent in half by those spasms. He helped her to get up and took her to her bed. He brought her a cup of hot tea that he slowly, gently made her drink. He sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her forehead paternally.
He was astonished by her weakness: he was used to warriors in his neighborhood, where nobody would go down without a fight. His mother, even though she looked so frail, would never concede defeat even if she was threatened with eviction for not paying rent. So much weakness for no reason, he thought as he watched Mary. Life didn’t seem to have done anything to her, didn’t seem to have taken anything away. She alone didn’t know what to do or what to make of life. And she was crying about that.