Mr. Loverman

by Bernardine Evaristo

  “Cool, then, and I’ll get some pies for tomorrow’s lunch.”

  The tea is pepping him up, enabling the swift transition from study mode to social interaction mode.

  “Hey-up, I thought you was goin’ cook for me this week,” I remind him, calling his bluff. “I still waiting.”

  “Um, yes . . . I’ll make amends soon.” He pauses, thinking. “How about a warm salad, Grandy?”

  Oh, lovely. Can’t wait. Boiled lettuce? Microwaved cucumber? Toasted celery?

  “I’ve brought a recipe that I got in a Sunday supplement that I’ve been waiting to try out,” he says overenthusiastically, to compensate for my obvious lack of it.

  Yes sah, I blame those newspaper supplements. All of them food-obsessed. Same with the telly, and then everybody’s wondering why the whole country getting fatty.

  “I’m not sure my imagination can stretch to all of that,” I reply honestly. “You know I is a rice-and-stew man at heart.”

  “Or,” he says, unfazed, grabbing a handful of ginger biscuits and raising them to his biscuit-crunching machinery, “how about a soup that’s, like, entirely locally sourced?”

  You know, Donna’s biggest fear since Daniel born is that he will end up a statistic: gangs, stabbings, shootings, and all of that stuff they do in the inner cities—stuff that would make Martin Luther King and those civil rights activists turn in their once-segregated graves at how the enemy from without has become the enemy within; how murder by racialist thugs has been superseded by internecine fratricide; how if you live in certain parts of this country you fret your son won’t reach adulthood.

  Take Young JJ, Jerome Cole-Wilson, now buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Relative. He was one-a we, one of our family. Daniel could-a been a role model for him.

  As for Daniel, Donna really needn’t worry. If her son is a statistic, he’s in an elite category of one.

  “Locally sourced?” I quip back. “You mean baked rat, or fried cat, or how about worm sandwiches, or spring onions marinated in pigeon excrement?”

  Daniel looks up from his drink and shakes his head in a blatantly metaphorical tut-tut.

  Where’s the boy’s sense of humor?

  Later, after we’ve eaten our fish and chips, I’m looking forward to another evening sitting with him watching the CSI crime dramas with all of those forensics experts dressed like glamorous supermodels instead of like scientists who have to scrape blood off walls. He gets up and starts to clear the table, then declares out of the blue that he goin’ party at some school friends’, will be back late, and I shouldn’t stay up for him.

  My gut reaction is to tell him he can’t go in case, well, in case he ends up dead.

  “You want me come pick you up when you done?”

  “No thanks, my friend’s got a car.”

  I refrain from snapping, Your friend got a name?

  “You got a girlfriend, Daniel?” I ask, all innocent, like I ain’t been dying to ask him this since he arrived.

  “Don’t tell Mum, but yes, Sharmilla. She’s really hot but really clever too. Doing her A-levels at Woodford County High a year early, but she’s at a wedding this week in Coventry.”

  “Well, you go and enjoy yourself, because you need to blow off some steam, ehn? Strike some poses on the dance floor.”

  Boy, you really sucking up to him. But is it “strike some poses” or “shape some dance moves”?

  “Exactly! I knew you’d understand,” he says, scraping a pot with what looks like a hairbrush. I always wondered what that was for. “Mum asks me a million questions whenever I want to go out at night and does everything she can to dissuade me. She wants me to be a boring swot with no social life. I’m surprised I haven’t ended up with serious mental health issues myself living with her.” He purses his lips. “I tell you, Grandy . . .”

  You’ve told me, Danny . . .

  He keeps doing the dishes, as he does every evening, a whole day’s worth. Mrs. Morris, the Original Domestic Goddess, would approve.

  Sometime later he is upstairs changing when the doorbell rings. Before I’m off my chair, he vaults downstairs at such a speed that I don’t think he actually touches them.

  I stand in the hallway hoping I can get a peep at his friends. Daniel turns round to say goodbye, quite transformed from the slouching, studious scruff he’s been all week. He’s wearing a pink polo shirt, cream chinos, loafers, and two fake, I assume, diamond studs in each ear. It might well be fashion, but if it’s not effeminate, you could-a fooled me.

  As he hurries out, I hurry to the window in the front room, hoping to see who’s in the car, a Toyota Cruiser. All I can see is him edging himself into the backseat, and I want to fling open the window and shout out, Don’t look at any roughnecks the wrong way, Danny-boy, or they might shoot you!

  I was never sorry I only had daughters. And I do like the females, so long as they’re not mentalating or Mother Superiors.

  Donna’s gone to extremes to protect her son, but, as Mr. Socrates himself acknowledged, “Of all animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.”

  With Daniel gone, I shorten a long evening by entertaining my good friends Mr. Whiskey and Mr. Rum, who, I have to say, are exceptionally demanding company tonight, all the while trying to memorize some sonnets, until the words start to bleed into each other, and the pages begin to pulsate in my hands like beating hearts.

  Several times I think I hear the phone about to brrring.

  When it don’t, I go into the hallway to check it’s not off the hook, because maybe the police are trying to get through about Daniel, who might be goin’ cold on a mortuary slab with marbling skin and a single slash across his throat. Or Morris might be calling, sobbing, distraught, regretful, threatening to throw himself under a train if I don’t forgive him.

  Eventually I crawl up to bed, because for some reason mi legs won’t hold me up.

  But I keep listening for the sound of Daniel shutting the front door behind him.

  I must-a nodded off eventually, because the rumble of a train vibrating underneath my bedroom wakes me up. I put on my reading glasses and look at the extralarge illuminated numbers on my digital bedside clock. It is 2:37 a.m. precisely.

  I listen again as my still woozy mind tries to focus itself and says in my ear, Barry, you don’t live above a tube line so is not a train you hearing, yuh know.

  Once out of the bedroom I recognize that ragga music, loud enough to vibrate on my chest. Giap next door must at this very minute be assembling another firebomb.

  I stagger onto the landing, and the acrid stink of sensi gusts up my nose; at the same time I hear lyrics thumping out the front room: something about killing a nasty batty boy.

  Oh Lord, it’s party time in Carmel’s precious inner sanctum, and that Buju Banton fella is being played inside my house?

  My house . . .

  I try to dash down the stairs but almost end up flying headlong, so I take it slowly, and once I reach solid ground I pause to restabilize myself. How much I drink? Must be, what, five or six solid hours of companionship with the spirits? You eedyat, Barry. How you goin’ manage this situation when you still off your face, ehn?

  I open the door carefully. What is this? Three youths plus Daniel laid out on the sofa sleeping.

  The room is a fug of sensi so thick it chokes me up. One of those iPod things plugged into portable speakers is playing on the mantelpiece, and Carmel’s beloved ornaments are all messed up. I feel outraged on her behalf, surprising myself.

  One of the youths is doing some kind of arm dancing while lying down with his feet up on the glass coffee table.

  Another one is lolling about in an armchair, holding my bottle of Captain Morgan, eyes closed, spliff in his mouth, head nodding.

  Another one is doing some kind of hip-hop gyrating in the corner next to the radiogram, except he ain’t no hoodie but looks like a skinny private-school weed trying to copy cool dance moves he’s seen on that MTV or whatever it is.

 
All three of them are Justin-and-Crispin types, with their hair spiked up, and attired in Daniel’s gay-golfer style. The gyrating one sees me enter and greets me with a stoned nod, like everything’s normal, then does a double-take.

  The one on the coffee table sees me, freezes.

  I stumble over to Daniel and shake him. He don’t stir. I shake him again, then walk over to the mantelpiece, extract the iPod from its base, throw it on the ground, and try to grind the damned thing into the carpet.

  At this point the armchair one must-a opened his eyes, because he jumps up all rugby-sized, like he ready to knock my blocks off. Let him try, though. Let him try. They might be young bulls but mi no care. I go take them on. Kamikaze Barry kicks in, the one I ain’t felt since Frankie got a thrashing. If these hooligans want start something, this time I go finish it. This my home. I no outlaw lurking in the municipal bushes this time. No sah. This . . . my . . . home.

  “What yuh think you doing here?” I shout angrily, with the arm movements to match. “You in my house uninvited, smoking it up, trashing it. You trespassers get the fuck out of my yard right now!”

  The armchair one pushes himself into my face. “How dare you damage my personal property?” he says, like I’m the burglar. “We have every right to be here. Dan invited us.”

  He can’t even stand up straight with his posturing.

  “Daniel don’t own this house; I do.” I thrust my head forward, ready to take him on. “Now get out and take your . . . homo . . . homophobic music with you . . .”

  Even as I speak, I regret it.

  “Excuse me?” he says, taken aback, blowing his boozy breath into my face. “So why would that bother you . . . unless . . .”

  He’s off his head, but even so, I see a subtle shift in his eyes, his body language, some kind of recognition, like he can tell, in his drunken madness, that in my drunken fury my face just admitted something.

  “You are, aren’t you?” he says quietly, sinisterly.

  Something in me snaps, the way it does when folk hold things in so long they start acting beyond common sense, beyond reason.

  “Yes, I am a cocksucker,” I reply, just as quietly, just as sinisterly, not quite knowing how those words exited my mouth.

  “Granddad.” I hear Daniel, urgent, close by.

  The armchair thug is gob-smacked; his mouth opens and closes, but nothing comes out of it. This is even better than giving him a box-down.

  “Yes, it’s true,” I say, directing my attention to Daniel, who is now right next to me, his face humiliated, disbelieving. Then I swing back to the frat-boy thug. “I am a cocksucker.”

  He looks so scared it’s laughable, like I goin’ throw him on the floor and stick my cock-fucking cock into his cock-sized hole.

  Daniel approaches closer. “You are joking, right, Grandy?”

  “Do I look like I making joke?”

  I feel like one of those gangbanger lifers rioting in one of those hellhole maximum-security prisons in America or South America that they always voyeurizing on TV. Deranged.

  I will disembowel the next person who crosses me, with my bare hands.

  “But you’re disrespecting me,” Daniel pleads faintly, like we don’t have a rapt audience with perfect hearing.

  “All-a you youths go on about being disrespected all the time because you pussies. Acting all tough on the outside and saying batty man have to dead when inside you is pussies. Pure and simple. Pussies.”

  “You’re shaming me, Grandy.”

  “And you have shamed me, you rass punk. Now take your friends out of my yard. Go on, get out. Gwarn, no! Gwarn, no! Y’all leave now, because I calling the police. Aryou goo way!”

  His friends exit fast like I just got my cock out and started chasing them. Daniel hovers in the hallway.

  “My things, I need my things.”

  He’s up the stairs and down again in no time.

  I slam the door behind him.

  Goo way, bwoy. You as rotten as your daddy, you a loser like the rest-a dem, bringing all-a this badness into the home of your seventy-four-year-old grandfather, who’s been looking after you nicely.

  Then I collapse on the hallway carpet and lose myself.

  11

  Song of Desire

  1990

  you started losing your old self and gaining a new one in 1985, when you finally began noticing what Joan, Theresa, and Mumtaz been telling you for years

  that among Hackney Council’s thousands of employees there was plenty of attractive middle-aged fellas (even the English ones)

  who was polite, single, educated, and perfectly decent specimens of mankind

  such as, in no particular order

  Elroy from Planning and Development; Norbert from Environmental Health and Consumers; Mathew from Parks and Open Spaces; Christopher from Arts and Entertainment; Julian and Mike from Street Trading and Licensing; Winston from Leisure Services; Ahren from Social Services; Elroy from Baths; Luciano from Finance . . . to name but a few

  except you’d been blind to them all in the seven years you been there

  and one Friday night in the Queen Eleanor after work

  after Joan had been boasting about her latest conquest—a dancer (no less) in Starlight Express

  and after Theresa was telling y’all she loved her husband so much she dreaded him goin’ out of the house in case he had a car accident and didn’t come back

  after Mumtaz was swooning over her chartered accountant boyfriend who took her off on weekend breaks to Lisbon, West Berlin, Madrid, Brussels . . .

  you then confided the awful state of your marriage, but they just shook their heads sagely and Joan said, Carm, did you think we didn’t know? We’ve been waiting for you to open up

  and after you had a little cry you complained how you was an invisible frump compared to the womanly curves of Joan, say, poured into black sheath dresses designed for career women with style

  and they all shouted you down

  You are a very attractive woman, Carm, but you must stop wearing clothes two sizes too big and put on some lippy, love

  and so you traipsed to Marks & Spencer up at Angel next Saturday morning and bought yourself your first underwire brassière and you began to

  unbutton your blouse just before entering the town hall in the morning to show off

  what Mumtaz (who’d started a poetry-writing evening class at Chats Palace) christened your

  shimmery melted-chocolate cleavage

  that Joan said any man would be happy to bury his head in and slurp up, which would-a shocked you only a few years earlier, but you was used to her bawdiness by now

  knowing the Ladies’ Society of Antigua would never approve of your boisterous, fun-loving mates

  especially Merty, still stuck in a rotten cleaning job with her grown-up sons now getting into police trouble and badgering you all the time to get her transferred to a better council house, even though you told her it was corrupt

  and what with Drusilla working sixty-hour weeks to pay for the house she’d finally bought on Rectory Road on one person’s salary

  and Asseleitha’s breakdown during a talking-in-tongues session at church when she started shouting about how she daddy raped her from when was little and took her baby girl away four days after she born—Clarice

  the baby she thought about every day since 1956

  Clarice

  who would be a middle-aged woman in her fifties now

  and y’all had to hold her back from running out into the road and throwing herself under a No. 30 bus on Mare Street

  and, terrible as it was, none of you know how to raise it with her, so she’s disappeared even deeper inside herself

  but thanks God Candaisy was okay, because Robert was good to her and she had a nice house, good job, nice daughter, Paulette (and a good son-in-law and three nice grandchildren), but even so you wouldn’t tell Miss Candaisy about your heathen friends

  under whose influence your work shoes go
t a tad higher, your tights got a tad darker, your black skirts slightly tighter, your walk got a wiggle and a waggle

  and when you freed your hair from the scraped-back bun and got it relaxed and conditioned on a regular basis instead of yearly at Justine’s on Dalston Lane

  the girls decided your transformation was complete, and one Friday night in the Goring Arms after work Mumtaz officially declared you

  sassy yet sophisticated, voluptuous yet with an air of virtuousness

  which y’all toasted with another bottle of Beaujolais nouveau and already you’d begun to notice the waves of desire you created among the gray suits in the corridors of local government, parting like the Red Sea at your approach, for you was now a town-hall vamp at the grand ole age of forty-one, wasn’t you, Carmel?

  not that you was planning on becoming a cheating scumbag like Barry, no matter how many times he denied he was seeing other women

  but then the girls started teasing you that Reuben Balázs from Town Planning (divorced, thirty-six, raised in Barnet after fleeing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956)

  had a major crush on you, because they’d all noticed he was a leftie loudmouth in the staff canteen selling copies of the Socialist Worker, but when you joined the table he became uncharacteristically awkward

  when you spoke, letting people know they wasn’t the only ones with opinions, because you could be quite vociferous in the workplace yourself these days (especially since your promotion from housing assistant to housing officer)

  Reuben listened, mutely

  and Mumtaz said if you was both in a cartoon there’d be

  a trail of little red hearts pumping out of him to you

  which made you notice him differently, but still, he was one big hairy bear who needed to shave off his beard, trim his great bush of Sephardic locks, and generally smarten up to compete with the others who’d caught your eye

  but it was Reuben who kept popping into your new single-occupancy manager’s office, asking if you was all right, staring at you like you was the most gorgeous woman in the whole world