Mr. Loverman

by Bernardine Evaristo

  and he bought for you (over a nine-month period) a Swiss cheese plant, rubber plant, spider plant, yucca tree, and money tree, which you put on the window ledge to catch the sunlight in the afternoon

  in between the gold-framed photographs of Donna in her graduation gown and the one from four years ago of Maxine beaming on her first day at the Skinners’ Company’s School for Girls, which you was so relieved she got into rather than that dreadful Kingsland School

  and he bought you so many boxes of Milk Tray you joked he should arrive by helicopter next time and parachute in through your office window like in the adverts

  and slowly over time you

  started looking forward to his presence, the way he spoke so nicely to you, his big-bearness, the way he was so obviously charmed by you, and you was surprised by your confident argy-bargy debates with him about Maggie Thatcher the Milk Snatcher, who you quite admired in a funny way, actually, not her policies but as a woman in power giving those private-school toffs in the cabinet what for

  although he argued she wasn’t a champion of women’s rights

  you replied no, she wasn’t, but she was still a role model, showing how a woman could have it all

  surprised you wasn’t intimidated by a man who’d studied politics at Leeds (only getting a Third, because he said he preferred the student union to attending lectures, thereby ruining his chances of a research job in Parliament)

  and you couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to kiss a leftie heathen Englishman with a beard and when he said, Hello there, Carmel, you started hearing

  I want to make love to you, Carmel

  when you teased him about shaving, he did

  when you teased he should buy a smarter suit, he did

  when he turned up in leather lace-ups without prompting (instead of scuffed Jesus Creepers)

  you knew there was no turning back

  even the idea of a pinkish-olivey (what color would it be?) willy became quite attractive, though the idea of stroking such a strange object filled you with excited terror

  and he was in your mind when you woke up, his bear hands caressing your thighs, when

  you showered he was soaping your breasts and buttocks with your patchouli bath oil

  so that by the time it was lunchtime at work you couldn’t wait for him to slip into your office for a cup of tea and eateries

  rolling the sugared wheat of marrow cake . . . mango sponge . . . coconut-and-lime cheesecake

  around your tongue until it dissolved

  inside your warm, salivary, and tea-wet mouth

  and you was grateful, so grateful, that there was your massive desk as a barrier between him and you

  with your brand-new Smith Corona Typetronic typewriter plonked in the middle of the desk

  and an erect regiment of foolscap lever-arch files lined up on the front line

  to protect your moral decency

  along with bound sheaves of the Housing Committee minutes piled up

  with directives from the chief executive’s office, ramming home the points about the council’s

  problems, solutions, strategies, statements, assessments, internal audits

  and council pamphlets on policy

  thick reference books with hard knobbly spines to run your fingers down

  a dictionary overwhelming you with temptation . . . seduction . . . betrayal of your wedding vows

  and . . . God never sleeps

  your address book, its silky red-padded cover

  so touchable

  your fingertips like palpitating pads, feeling so tactile

  the tray of letters to your right, waiting to be replied to

  solid metal of the staple gun, shooting out staples with a masculine ferocity

  and when even the hole puncher assumed erotic overtones you knew you was done for, lady

  what with the bundle of brown manila envelopes licked down and lapped up by your moist tongue

  aroused ready to be fffffffffranked in the post room

  your big black diary, two pages spread

  wantonly widely open

  every single nerve sensitized

  and you was truly beyond help when the fffffffax machine suddenly whirrrrrred into action

  blatantly, orally, outrageously, orgasmically disgorging

  incoming data and statistics from Finance

  insistently splurging endless liquid streams of white paper into the room

  without decency or restraint, without decorum

  and you knew you had to switch it off or lose all self-control

  under his steady, knowing, warm gaze

  not letting up, because, after nine months’ patience

  he wasn’t making no bones about what he wanted no more

  so you tried

  you tried really hard to concentrate on the harmless insipid gray notebook

  the bland and harmless gray index box

  the old-fashioned metal sharpener

  screwed on . . . fastened

  to the desk’s lip

  two boxes of boring harmless Tipp-Ex

  dotted over your breasts by his hands like aboriginal art

  the way he was looking you was wondering if your nipples was showing beneath your blouse

  your gold Jesus on the cross (died for you to do this?), dipping on a chain just above your

  melted chocolate cleeeeeee vahhhhhge

  knowing you’d switched the Panasonic telephone-with-answering-machine to mute

  you fiddling nervously with the pens and pencils in your Charles and Diana commemoration wedding mug, which you’d good-naturedly defended from his republican barbs when he first started popping in

  and when he got up and went to the door and turned the key slowly

  listened for a second to voices passing in the hallway outside

  you was thinking of starting up that argument again, about how you won’t have nobody slandering Diana, who is such a sweet, beautiful, well-mannered lady and very good for the Royal Family too, and Charles was lucky to get her

  but before you knew it he was touching you there and there and then everywhere

  and you felt your

  self becoming someone else

  someone you’d never been

  your self

  you was carnivorous, you was omnivorous, you was rapacious, ravishing, ravaged

  feeling the nape of your neck, your earlobes ticklish, underarms, belly, belly button, armpits, behind your knees, spine, your magic triangle, clavicle

  his bites

  the meat of your large womanly hips kneaded

  and there, Reuben, here . . . Reuben, here, Reuben, here and there

  against the filing cabinet with the legs of the spider plant hanging off the top of it

  up against the Sasco wall planner—1985 . . . 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989

  on the regulation heavy-duty gray-ribbed carpet used throughout the town hall and all municipal offices borough-wide

  there, on your front, on your back, on your side

  and you

  was

  a n i m a l

  12

  The Art of Family

  Tuesday, May 18, 2010

  Maxine a sight to sober up even the biggest booze-head, as I feel myself returning to the human race, having spent X days in the animal kingdom.

  She is towering over me, wearing some kind of extravagant head tie, spider’s legs instead of eyelashes, and she must be wearing heels so high they give her ten feet of giraffe-osity.

  “Dad, wake up!” she’s shouting like a lunatic.

  I become aware I’m in the bath with all of my clothes on, same ones I was wearing when Daniel departed this abode.

  I feel myself returning to the human race.

  A can of Dragon Stout is floating on top of the scum, along with bloated slippers resembling dead fish and a cigar unraveling back to its first incarnation as tobacco leaves.

  Maxine helps me out of the bath, strips
me down, pushes me into the walk-in shower, and shoves me naked onto the stool.

  Now . . . this is what I call shame, Danny-boy.

  As the warm water hits my legs, they start to reactivate themselves.

  I realize I must have befouled myself by what I see disappearing down the drain as she hoses her father clean.

  All I can hear coming from her is “I don’t believe it” and “Oh Christ!” and “Trust you.”

  She bundles me up in a big white towel that is positively, welcomely wombic and leads me to my bedroom to get dressed.

  I want to tell her I can dress myself without anyone’s help, thank you, seeing as I been doing it for the past seventy-odd years, but my mental-verbal connection a-dead. Maybe she can read my mind, because she goes to leave but not before she lets out a groan, pulls the sheets and pillowcases off the bed, bundles them up, holds them at arm’s length in front of her, and leaves the room with an expression of gross distaste.

  Once dressed and decent, I ease my way down the stairs, one foot at a time, and walk into a maelstrom of arms and legs in the kitchen—washing up, clearing up sick, hurling things in the bin.

  “What day is it?” I ask, clearing my throat, a stranger to myself.

  “I don’t believe it. Tuesday.” She shakes her head.

  I am so fed up with people shaking their heads at me.

  “What time is it?”

  She looks at her big black designer watch with a picture of Minnie Mouse on the face that is age-appropriate to a five-year-old.

  “Eight thirty.”

  “Eight thirty?”

  She stands behind me, steering my head and shoulders toward the window.

  “Yes, eight thirty in the morning. Look! See! Daylight!”

  “Oh yes.”

  It is indeed a beautiful spring day—clear sky, getting sunny a-ready.

  “Sit,” she orders.

  Maxine fills a jug of water and tries to funnel it down my throat.

  I desist; she insists.

  “You must be dangerously dehydrated, you idiot!” she yells, welling up.

  “Put the damned water in a glass, then. I am not a pot plant. And mind your manners, I am still your father,” I croak back, tears in my eyes too.

  “When did you last eat?”

  What does the Seaweed Queen know about eating?

  I screw up my face up as if trying to remember . . .

  She starts rummaging in the fridge and cupboards.

  “I don’t believe this . . . cardboard pizzas, tinned crap, biscuits. Ever heard of fruit and vegetables?”

  She heats up a tin of Heinz tomato soup, butters cream crackers, puts chunks of cheese on them, fills up a tall glass of milk.

  “Now feed. I’ll get some proper food for you later.”

  She sits down while I start to eat, taking it slowly.

  “You’ve got to tell me why you’ve been on a bender, Dad? You could have died, and where would that have left me? Over the edge, mos def. I mean it’s not like you to lose the plot completely, although you did get so off your face at the Dorchester they threw us out, if you remember?”

  Me? She blaming me?

  “I thought something was up then. And why haven’t you been answering the phone? Donna’s been ringing too. Yep, you’d better batten down the hatches. Miss Thang is back.” She watches me eat. “Right, then, now that I’ve just saved you from death by dehydration, I’m going to wake up Little Lord Fakeleroy. Donna put money on it for him to text her and apparently he didn’t do it, not once. Nor has he, or you, answered the phone all week. Surely he’s not starting to undergo a belated teenage rebellion?”

  Maxine arises herself, but I rest my hand on her arm.

  “Maxine, don’t bother. He not here.”

  “Where is he?”

  I look at her.

  “At a friend’s? The shops? Where?”

  “Mi no know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “He gone, Maxine. He gone.”

  I can feel the waterworks getting ready to sprinkle again.

  “Yes—but—where—has—he—gone?” she replies, talking to me like I am a retard or a foreigner.

  I reply in kind: “Like—I—said, I—don’t—know.”

  “Try again. Not good enough. What happened?”

  Seeing as I don’t know where to begin, I . . . don’t.

  She sits back, cross-legged, cross-armed. “You’d better come up with some answers soon, because if you look at my face, you won’t see a happy clown smile painted on it.”

  She does this circling thing around her face like a mime artist.

  How old am I?

  Then she starts spasming her crossed-over left foot, shod in monstrous wooden clog stilts that must weigh more than her skinny-jeaned legs.

  “It’s not just you, Dad. Before she left, Donna asked me to check up on you and the son she infantilizes, but I’ve been rushed off my feet with networking.” She gazes up at the sky through the window. “Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be brilliant if we could stop time when we felt like it, catch up on stuff, and then slip back into it?”

  I work my way through the crackers.

  “Yes, you carry on eating and I’ll speak for both of us.” She thrums one set of black tiger claws on the wooden table. “Did you see me in ES magazine last Friday? Almost standing next to Anna Wintour at a party? No, I didn’t think so. Don’t worry, I picked up twenty copies outside Bond Street Station.”

  I carry on eating, feeling better with each bite.

  “Whatevs.” She shrugs. “Anyway, when Donna rolls up, we can expect a scene of Jerry Springer proportions. Are you ready for that, or do you want to tell me where Golden Boy is, so that I can mollify her before she arrives?”

  One thing at a time. She told me to eat. First things first.

  She sits there twitching, staring at her nails. Then she gets a brainwave. “Hang on a minute: how do you know he’s not here?” She levers herself up and stands, wobbling on stilts. “You’ve been out of it since Godknowswhen. Have you actually been into his room?”

  Before I can stop her, she’s clambering up the stairs, yomping in and out of bedrooms with as much noise as a battalion of soldiers before stomping back down again.

  She appears back in the hallway and, before I can stop her, opens the door to the front room, freezing as she surveys the carnage inside, tantamount to the Sistine Chapel being spray-painted with railway graffiti.

  I ain’t been in there since the Night of Satanic Boys.

  It is a dark, dangerous monster’s lair.

  Before she can storm back into the kitchen and wrestle me to the ground, forcing me to admit to having murdered Daniel, the doorbell rings, a key turns, and Miss Donna steps over the threshold.

  Hang on a minute: who gave these girls keys to my house?

  Donna stands in the hallway with an expression befitting a Soviet commandant in deepest Siberia who’s walked into a hushed, terrified dormitory of prisoners.

  She clocks me first, down the end of the passage sitting not too regally on my throne. Actually, I could probably be mistaken for a long-term resident of the asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  Miss Thang-awanga swivels her head to her left and locks onto Maxine in the act of slowly closing the front room door while trying to look as if she’s really pleased to see her elder sister.

  “Where’s Daniel?” she asks Maxine, who turns helplessly to me, as if I am the font of that particular piece of wisdom.

  Donna swoops her concentration-camp searchlight beam onto me, but I have escaped into the forest and am pathetically trying to hide behind a thin birch tree.

  She puts one foot on the stairs and screeches, “Danyellll!” the way some parents do, calling their children like dogs. I never shouted at my daughters like that. Carmel neither. Donna became autocratic the day Daniel born, and she realized she had absolute power over another human being. In a few hours she went from being
a daughter to a parent, a status some folk let go to their heads.

  “Where is my son?” she asks again, her voice splintering, as if it dawning on her that we been waiting to tell her face-to-face about a terrible tragedy that has befallen her only child.

  “I don’t know,” Maxine replies, swallowing her words. “I’ve just got here myself. Dad doesn’t know either.”

  Donna leans against the wall, rolls her head against it, and closes her eyes, like she’s trying to stop herself from fainting.

  “What have you done with him?” I can hear the beginning of a whine. “Is he dead? Is my baby boy dead?”

  Well, she certainly acting like he is already.

  Maxine follows Donna as she barrels down the hallway in a red-velvet tracksuit and hair still spiky and mussed up from the flight.

  “You have to tell me what’s happening,” she says, standing right over me like she goin’ lunge.

  I am so fed up with people about to lunge at me.

  Long, short, and tall of it, I have no choice but to tell my daughters about the events leading up to Daniel’s departure, conveniently omitting certain key elements.

  Even talking about it makes me want to lubricate my vocal cords again. But if I did that, Maxine would bash me over the head with the bottle.

  Soon as I reach the denouement, Donna is on her mobile speaking to some woman called Margot, asking for some boy called Eddie, who gives her the number of some boy called Benedict, who’s out with Ash, who passes her on to Steven, with whom, she soon discovers, Daniel is staying.

  Next thing I know she’s cooing down the phone, asking how her “little soldier” is feeling and wanting to hear his side of the story. “I know it wasn’t your fault, babycakes,” she whimpers, crawling right up his arse. “At least you realize now that alcohol is bad for you.”

  Pause.

  “Is that a Yes, Mum I hear?”

  Pause.

  “Good boy.”

  Maxine can’t believe what she’s hearing either. Keeps making faces at me.

  “All right, then, pumpkin. I’ll be over to collect you when you’re ready. Just give me a call.” Donna snaps her phone shut like a castanet. “Thank God my son is alive!” she booms, like she making a public announcement over a Tannoy system. “No thanks to either of you, especially you.”

  I look over my shoulder, because surely she’s not talking to her father so rudely.