Love Me

by Gemma Weekes

  Five or ten more minutes, and I never have to see either of these fuckers again. I can reclaim myself. Maybe Reiki healing this time, or acupuncture, or something. There must be a special programme out there made especially for serfs like me.

  Zed begins throwing things into pans. He doesn’t seem like the type of man who’d be so capable. At a glance he might be the type who could burn water and has never done a load of laundry in his life. But he’s not. His mum didn’t completely fail at raising him. Just mostly. I take my camera out and snap snap snap. I feel empty.

  ‘There you go again,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what you intend to do with all those damn pictures.’

  When he’s done, we all sit down around the coffee table and eat in silence: scrambled eggs, sausages and toast. After the first forkful I stop wanting to retch. Even Max Crack Baby is quiet because her mouth is full. She’s really wolfing it down for someone who weighs about the same as a keyring. She takes a breath and turns her blue gaze toward Zed. ‘What am I gonna do when you go back to the States, hey?’ she pouts. ‘The time’s coming so quick! I’ll starve!’

  ‘That’s what cereal is for, my dear.’

  ‘You’re so heartless.’ Max spots my camera. Takes it. I can’t move yet, can’t believe what I just heard. The room contracts. He’s going back to Atlanta? I thought he’d had enough of life there. Max says to him: ‘Will you take a picture of me and Eden, love?’

  She leans over and puts her arm around me. She smiles, I don’t. Zed takes the picture.

  ‘You’re going back?’ I ask, before I can stop myself.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Zed. ‘First week in August.’

  ‘That’s just a few weeks away.’ I sound destroyed, even to myself.

  ‘So, you can count!’

  I push something like a laugh out of my throat. ‘So you were just gonna leave without telling me? Nice. Look, thanks for breakfast, OK? It was great.’

  He tries to say something but my ears might as well be sewn shut. I tune him out and check I’ve got my keys, wallet and Oyster card. Good to go. Sometimes I think he does this for fun. On purpose or by accident, he always knows what to do to make me hurt. He’s like that evil corner on a coffee table that’s fallen in love with your shin-bone.

  ‘Are you going back to Hackney?’ says Max suddenly.

  ‘What? Yeah I—’

  ‘Why don’t you wait a minute and I’ll give you a lift?’

  I look at Zed’s face and its habitual blankness is disturbed.

  ‘Really, it’s no trouble,’ babbles Max, ‘I’m going in that direction anyway. Going down my nan’s in Leyton.’

  ‘OK.’

  When she rushes up the stairs to get dressed, Zed stops eating. ‘For the record,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry about what happened last time you came here, Eden. If I gave the wrong impression. No disrespect intended.’

  ‘You’re a joker!’ I tell him. ‘Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’m always fine!’

  ‘I mean it, Eden.’

  ‘Just forget it, OK?’

  ‘Why can’t you just—’

  ‘Forget it.’

  I grab the remote control and turn the volume up loud over his voice and, with a snort of disgust, he begins clearing the table. It takes only a few minutes and a few times watching him wince with pain before I can’t watch anymore.

  ‘Zed, let me do it, please.’ I don’t look at him. ‘You have a fucking broken arm!’

  ‘It’s not broken . . .’

  ‘Whatever it is! Just get out of the way.’

  wait—

  Brooklyn, 3 June

  You remember Soufriere, Eden? The volcanic springs, black mud, the air hot from above and from below? Well that’s where your mother and I were born, in the very place Saint Lucia itself began life. Imagine the power of a whole island being birthed! Big magic! Fire shooting out from the belly of the earth, bubbling, spreading, going cool on the water, exploding with greenery and creatures. We have magma in the blood, Cherry Pepper. It’s not easy. We live in the shadow of the Pitons. We are the earthquake. We are the shaded soil.

  Your mother and I are so happy you wrote back with questions about your pre-history. These days the past feels very present, and maybe it is. What do any of us know on that score, anyway? Marie says it’s not as we think. And she says roots are exactly what you need to settle you, otherwise a good wind could strip you, knock you over and roll you down to the bottom of the hill. And she says you’re wrong, Eden. She loved you very, very much.

  So. Our childhood . . . Well, I was the first, as you know, and my birth was also considered a miracle, although not a happy one. If I squint, hold my breath and cast my mind back, I can remember Mama’s face when she looked at me for the first time. What a look it was! So disappointed and afraid, as if somebody must have done obeah on her and given her a devil baby. I was black, black, black at birth. Like cold volcano fire. I was black as her own father, with the knotty hair that beads at the neck, and she didn’t thank me for the memories.

  As I grew, the disappointment, revulsion and a strange kind of inside-out wonder would not leave her eyes. I was an accusation in pigtails. I was a blast from the past. She heard chains when she looked at me, she smelled coal-pot fires, pit toilets and heard barefoot workers in the field. For a while I thought my behaviour could make a difference, tried not to do anything wrong to make things worse. I was quiet and obedient. But as time passed I began to realise that I was the very thing that was wrong. I decided to taunt her instead. I oiled my skin well so it shone black in the sun. I let my hair bead in the back. I responded to her endless frowning and cursing and punishments with white, toothy, invincible grins. I turned her upside down. I looked just like her, except blacker. I learned to be angry instead of sad.

  It took a full decade for her to conceive again. Probably because she kept her legs crossed at night and faced the wall, looking away from the failed promise of my father’s light-brown skin. And that’s the only thing she ever really loved about him. But divorce wasn’t an option and eventually there was the swelling and the pushing and there was Marie. A child with the soft curls and bright skin Mama had always dreamed of possessing herself. She watched in an agony of pride as Marie’s eyes cleared to a bright, transparent hazel. Her daughter, the one she’d always wanted.

  Mama watched her sleep. She guarded her jealously from death, so afraid, loading Marie’s curly head up with ribbons and berets and bows ’til the child could hardly lift her chin, and in dresses with lace and flowers. How that girl got spoiled! Mama used to open an umbrella on the child’s head so she couldn’t get dark in the sun on the way to church and she would keep her indoors all the time like a cripple. And ‘Katherine!’ she would say to me. ‘Get out of the house and play!’ or ‘Get out of the house and hang the clothes to dry!’ or just ‘Get your black self out of the house!’

  Everybody used to say how Marie was so fair and pretty like a doll, and at nights before Marie would go to bed Mama would brush her hair and tell her how she could have anything at all, any man, even the prime minister or Elvis Presley. And then she made Marie pray and tie up her curly hair. Then she would get in bed with my father, whom she hated a little bit less because he went beyond the promise of his light-brown skin and gave her a child yellower than ripe plantain.

  She stopped hating me so much. She stopped seeing me. I faded right into the noon shadows and the night-time darkness and I think she managed to convince herself that I hadn’t come from her body at all. Me and Marie didn’t have a chance then of being close, living as we did in different countries of our mother’s mind. She kept us separate. I think she thought that blackness was contagious. And then when I was eleven or twelve she sent me away to live in Castries.

  So no, your mother and I weren’t close growing up. This is the closest we’ve ever been.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is I know what lonely feels like. I know what unloved feels like, but to me it’s like DNA. For you, I think, it’s
just an outfit you wear. So change it.

  Aunt K

  eyes forward.

  ‘SO . . .’ SAYS MAX.

  ‘So?’ I say.

  We’re in traffic near Finsbury Park. There are sirens. Emergency! Emergency! ‘Are you feeling any better?’

  ‘Not really. Think I’m just gonna go home and have a lie-down or something.’

  ‘Good idea,’ she says. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  ‘It’s your car.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She lights one up and sticks it in the corner of her mouth as the sirens speed past and fade. ‘Are you pissed off at me?’

  I blink. The blood beat does a little two-step. ‘Why would I be?’

  ‘You know.’ She doesn’t look at me. ‘About me and Zed?’ And because I don’t answer right away, she keeps talking and sucking her cigarette in nervy little puffs. ‘Because I know he’s like family to you, know what I mean? I would have told you about us before, but I s’pose I was waiting ’til there was actually something to tell.’

  ‘Nah it’s alright. I don’t care,’ I say. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.

  ‘You sure? ’Cause it seemed like you might’ve been having a bit of a row earlier.’

  ‘Yeah. No. Not really,’ I tell her, ‘more of a disagreement.’

  ‘Disagreement?’

  ‘Stupid stuff, nothing major.’ I laugh. ‘You know. Like brother and sister.’

  ‘Right . . . Phew!’ She grins a glance at me, makes a show of wiping her dry forehead. ‘Just had to check on that one, you know. You’re my mate and I wouldn’t wanna take the mick. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, feeling muddy and slightly crazed. My mate? We have nothing in common at all, really. I met both her and Dwayne at work. And I’m pretty sure it would depress the hell out of Dwayne to know the only one I had any type of crush on was Max – of the platonic variety of course. She was one of the most extreme-looking people I’ve ever met, and the Clicker likes that sort of thing.

  I was in late for work one day, and my row was already fully populated by the Undead when I arrived. One of the only free seats was next to this living cartoon, this ice-cream blonde who even sat mischievously. If beauty had a caricature, it would be Max. Improbably large, blue eyes at an improbable distance from each other in her triangular face. A high forehead and narrow, full mouth, cheekbones like razors, white-blonde hair down to her ass. Skinny as a no-fat latte, rocking a shapeless vintage mini-dress over a shrunken jumper. She was shocking to look at. She made the rest of the room look khaki drab. So I took the seat on her left, mainly to see this freakishly pretty thing up close. And then, when I was logging onto my terminal (‘terminal’ as in ‘illness’), she kind of double-taked between phone calls and said:

  ‘Hiya!’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Are you new?’

  ‘I wish.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ She laughed. I sank a bit in the middle, she was so beautiful. I wondered what it must be like.

  ‘I like your dress,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks! It was only a tenner!’ she replied and went shuffling around in her bag, one of those flimsy jobs you sometimes get free with women’s magazines. She had a super-easy manner about her, like she’d never had to worry, ever. She wore leopard-print wedges with ankle straps and purple tights. I stole a photo.

  ‘Are you a photographer or summink?’

  ‘Yeah I . . . well. Sort of. I take pictures.’

  ‘That’s bloody brilliant! I’m a model,’ she said without self-consciousness. With a promising rustle, she pulled out a packet of Jaffa Cakes and shoved them at me. ‘Go on! Be a devil!’

  I had one, we introduced ourselves and so began our little mutual appreciation society. I took some pictures of her for free over the next couple of weeks, some of my best. Her portfolio got a boost, and so did my tired routine as I began trailing her around Shoreditch on drinking expeditions.

  Well. It was fun while it lasted.

  ‘How did you hook up with him anyway?’ I ask now, fighting to be casual.

  ‘Pretty random, really. I bumped into him on Oxford Street a couple of weeks ago and we started talking.’

  ‘You hate Oxford Street.’

  ‘I had a casting.’

  ‘That big one you told me about?’

  ‘Yeah, exactly! For Gloss magazine.’ Spiteful bastard. I remember that day. Right after what happened with me, he bumped into my friend and gave her his number. ‘You’ve got a bloody good memory. Must be your little puritanical lifestyle.’

  ‘What do you mean, puritanical? I’m a drunk, if you haven’t noticed.’

  We drive in silence for a while, Max bobbing up and down to the commercial gangsta rap on the radio, singing along.

  ‘You like this shit?’ I ask her.

  ‘Not particularly. Just catchy innit?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘I didn’t get it, by the way.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That job in Gloss magazine. Bloody bastards. They took this really skinny bitch instead. Properly fucking skinny. Looked like her last meal was breast milk.’

  I look out of the window.

  ‘So what,’ she says, pushing her hair back and adjusting the mirror, ‘is going on with you and Dwayne?’

  ‘Dwayne? What the hell does he have to do with anything?’

  ‘I think he likes you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like him,’ I say, then, ‘I do . . . but not like that.’

  ‘He’s a good bloke, Eden.’

  ‘So? There’s a lot of good guys I’m not interested in.’

  ‘Well, you are too pretty for ’im, anyway.’

  ‘Damn right.’

  Max taps absently on the steering wheel. ‘Well, I like Zed quite a lot,’ she says, disjointedly. ‘He’s got something about him. Mysterious like . . . You know what I mean? Plus, it doesn’t hurt that he’s so fucking buff!’ she laughs. ‘Bloody ’ell. I told ’im he should try and book some modelling jobs.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, trying to do something acceptable with my face. Hating her: hating him: hating myself. ‘You guys look really happy together.’

  Max slides to a halt before a red light, eyes forward.

  ‘We are, I think,’ she confirms, and glances over as the light blinks from yellow to green. ‘You’re so gorgeous with that figure and those lovely eyes . . . You’ll find somebody.’

  I try to keep the weak curve of my lips intact. ‘I’m not looking, actually.’

  When we get to Clapton Pond, I ask Max to drop me off at a corner shop in her beat-up Mini. She says it’s no problem, she can wait and then take me home.

  ‘No, it’s fine. I don’t live far from here . . .’ Parole officer, I don’t say.

  ‘Well, OK.’ Max leans over and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Be safe, yeah?’

  ‘Thanks for the lift, Max,’ I reply, fake-smiling.

  ‘I’ll call you later!’

  I wait ’til she’s out of sight to wipe the bubble-gum-coloured gloss off my face. Walk really fast.

  ‘You alright, princess?’ says the Turkish guy in the off-licence, with a wink.

  ‘Give me a bottle of Jack and we’ll see,’ I tell him, just as a local nut-job walks in for his twentieth can of Special Brew. I leave quickly, before he has a chance to harass me. Take a left into Kenninghall Road where tower blocks dominate the landscape.

  My manor isn’t as leafy and clean as Zed’s upscale, Highgate neighbourhood. It’s squashed up, noisy, and full of happenings. The people all seem to be either silent or screaming, barrelling into you or standing in your way. It’s all about bald, demoralised patches of grass, stunted trees and a dirty white van parked halfway onto the kerb. It’s all about dogshit left to harden. It’s all about sweet-faced, hooded boys and running toddlers and silly tarts wearing clubwear at two in the afternoon.

  I’ve not even had a holiday in ten years. This is all it’s been for the longest: scummy London with its scarred pavemen
ts and faded sky. Oily puddles. Brazen lunatics walking endlessly, repelling gazes like the wrong end of a magnet. And they are the only ones that speak what they’re feeling because wherever you are in London, there’s no space for big emotions. Swallow it, stifle it, shut up. It’s branded into us all at birth or on arrival.

  When I look around here sometimes, I kind of understand why my mother felt that she had to leave. But if she’d made do, if she’d learned to be resigned, all our lives would be different.

  I rub my arms and walk quickly towards home, avoiding men’s gazes.

  A cloud’s gone over the sun and I feel cold in this dress.

  July

  get out.

  ‘BRAKES, EDEN!’ JULIET yells, a single eyebrow shooting up. She stops tidying her stall and gives me the look of death.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Repeat, please.’

  I sigh. The season is shockingly loyal to us this year. London summers are usually skittish and commitment-phobic. But this year it doesn’t budge. The heat hangs over all of us, relentless and heavy as a love affair in the throes of the first fizz. And Juliet is wearing a hoodie.

  ‘Aren’t you hot?’

  ‘Nope,’ she says. As usual, her tiny frame is kitted out tomboyishly in the brightest of clashing primary colours. ‘Natural fibres. Ask me if I’m fresh, funky and fly. That, my dear, will be an affirmative.’ A girl with short dreads and a poncho saunters up and looks over the merchandise. ‘Now stop trying to change the subject. Didn’t I just ask you a question?’

  Quietly I say: ‘What part didn’t you understand?’

  ‘It’s just I thought I heard something really outlandish,’ she says loudly. ‘Did you say you chucked your job in over boy trouble?’

  ‘Juliet . . .’

  ‘How much for these earrings?’ the girl asks with a snicker, holding out a pair in the shape of ice-cream cones.

  ‘Fiver.’

  ‘I’ll have ’em please.’

  Juliet makes the sale in her quick, bird-like way. ‘We have the matching medallion . . .’