Love Me

by Gemma Weekes

  ‘I never said I had a problem with her,’ I tell him. ‘You did.’

  ‘Eden, I see the way you look at her and talk to her. You didn’t even sit down and eat your dinner with us! You just ran up to your room. She didn’t say anything, but do you know how bad that made Ms Chanderpaul feel? She’s always making such a big effort with you! Always trying to be your friend . . .’

  ‘I didn’t ask her to do that.’

  I know when my dad’s angry because his eyes start to bulge out of his head and you could probably drive a train through each nostril. I feel oddly relieved at the familiarity of it, this dance we’ve done for so long. His contentment is the alien invader, stealing into our home and changing its dimensions, its fragrance, its rate of decay. He’s softening around the middle. The laugh lines are deepening around his eyes and mouth. He’s growing old.

  ‘Oh my gosh!’ he cries, hands thrown in the air, his bottom thrown into the sofa adjacent to mine. His movements are quicker, the bones of his face enhanced. Angry, he’s more like the man he was. ‘I don’t know how you can be so selfish and negative! I’ve lived my whole life for you and in return, you can’t even wish me happiness? For once in my life? You’re not a child anymore. You’re a big woman!’

  For once. In his life.

  ‘You have nothing to say?’

  ‘Dad, I think you’re a grown man and you should do whatever you want. And you don’t need my approval.’

  ‘You know what your problem is? You’ve never grown up properly. You got stuck somewhere and you’re refusing to move on. I didn’t raise such a brat!’

  ‘I’m not a brat.’

  ‘That’s exactly what you are. I was so ashamed after the way you acted. Like I taught you no manners. You made me look bad! If you have respect for me, you’ll have respect for Ms Chanderpaul because she’s who I’ve chosen to be with and she’s treated you with nothing but love and consideration—’

  ‘You didn’t choose Ms Chanderpaul! She chose you! She’s just the first woman who’s shown you any real attention. She’s not half as good-looking or intelligent as . . . as you are.’

  My dad’s mouth turns down at the corners and he says in a quiet, dead voice, ‘As your mother, you mean? Not as pretty or intelligent as your mother?’

  ‘That’s not what I said, Dad. Look, I just want to go out.’

  ‘Go then.’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘Get out! Go if you’re going!’

  ‘Dad, what’s your problem? I didn’t even mention Mum. You did!’

  ‘She’s the real reason you’re angry though, isn’t she? No one can live up to this person you’ve got built up in your head. Not even you!’ he hissed. ‘It’s pathetic. You dress like you’re homeless. You have no passion for life, no direction! Do you know how it feels for me to watch you waste your life?’ He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know how you can live like that. And you want to stand in judgement of Rose? She’s a wonderful person . . . why can’t you see that? All you’re looking at is the outside! Your mother couldn’t hold a candle to Rose!’

  For a long moment I can’t say anything. If I did it might get very hostile in here. ‘Whatever, Dad,’ I say eventually. ‘If you’re really set on comparing them, you need to be honest with yourself.’

  ‘It depends on what you value in a person,’ he sighs as if he’s lost all hope in me. ‘If it’s kindness, caring, morality and strength then . . . I don’t know what went wrong. I did my best with you, but you’ve grown up to be just as blind and arrogant as she was.’

  counterfeit.

  CRASH!!!

  My mum jumped when the loud noises began downstairs. That day she left us. She dropped a handful of combs that she’d been holding, all different colours, wide- and fine-toothed. Wooden ones and some that were bright, glittery plastic. They splashed up from the floor and skittered out toward the doorway. My mum didn’t move.

  I ran down the stairs and eventually I heard her come up behind me outside the open living room.

  The china and the crystal lay in shards over everything.

  The gentle china.

  The crystal goblets and animals.

  And my father wasn’t done yet for a couple more noisy minutes.

  After quiet had restored itself, she didn’t yell or cry, but the surest way to make her leave was to take away her refuge. Her beautiful things, her silk cushions, her crystal glasses, her china were the little heaven she’d built away from her ordinary life.

  And he ruined them all. Ripped, torn and smashed.

  When he was finished, she made her blank way out through the hall and back up the stairs. My dad sat on the floor in the midst of his helplessness, forcing her to leave because he couldn’t bear to beg her to stay.

  I cut my eleven-year-old foot following her over the debris of her broken refuge, but I kept walking. I knew there were only a few snapshots of her left – blood or no blood.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, back upstairs throwing things carelessly into the suitcase, faster and faster, ‘don’t you ever let a man convince you to give him your soul. You hear me?’

  I was watching her take clothes out of her new chest of drawers. She and Dad had decorated the whole place. He hadn’t known, but it was her last attempt at making her life liveable.

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘They’re very sneaky.’ Now she was crying – over her broken things, not because she was leaving me behind, I thought. ‘They say we’re the sneaky ones, but it’s them.’

  Snapshot: a hard green glance my way from her eye corners, her fingers poised behind her left ear tidying a displaced curl, her lips down-turned.

  ‘They tell you all this rubbish about how they’ll worship you! They want to plant,’ a T-shirt, a pair of trousers, ‘your heart in their own chest and water it religiously.’ Bras, tights, knickers. ‘They don’t mean it. They only want to get their hands on it.’ An unworn dress. ‘Once they’ve got it, your heart is a dishrag. Your soul is a bonfire in the back yard to burn rubbish. You better hold onto yourself, Eden!’

  I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about; all I knew was that it sounded stupid and made-up. My dad wouldn’t say anything like ‘I would like to plant your heart in my own chest.’ That was just plain fucking weird. It was all excuses.

  ‘Right. Yeah,’ I replied, but I was thinking, What about me, Mum? Am I your prison too? Am I? Am I a sneaky one?

  ‘Don’t you dare ever let some man come along and spend all of your best years like a handful of counterfeit banknotes.’

  If I’m on your side then, ‘Why can’t I come with you?’

  She stopped speaking then, for a moment.

  ‘He’s so amazing,’ she said eventually, not answering my question. I sank in the middle. She was going to leave me. ‘I . . . I met someone else, Eden. I know you don’t understand things like this yet, but . . .’

  ‘I do.’ I swam against the weight of my West Indian training – children don’t question adults and any suggestion of rudeness is a smackable offence – and I said, ‘Are you having an affair?’

  My mother looked startled for a minute, as though she’d just noticed I was on the brink of adolescence.

  ‘Affair?’ She flickered, confronted by this very hard, tabloid word. I imagine that it didn’t sound that way inside her head. ‘We’re in love. I met him a month ago, when I went to visit your Aunt Katherine in New York.’

  I’d so wanted to go. But she wouldn’t take me with her then, and she wasn’t gonna take me now.

  ‘He’s a young actor . . . you know, like me. He’s so handsome.’

  I thought of my not bad-looking father downstairs and how much I looked like him and I felt abandoned. I had his nose. Everybody said so.

  ‘Mum, you’re not an actress. You’re a receptionist.’

  ‘Only part-time! That’s not my dream, and he understands that. He supports me. He’s crazy about me.’

  ‘He must be.’

  ‘What?’
<
br />   ‘Crazy.’ I wanted to drag her down from her compassionless fantasy. She wasn’t even thinking about me, not one bit. That man downstairs weeping over all her gentle, destroyed china – that man was my dad. ‘Or maybe he just wanted to have sex with you and that’s it. At school they said adultery is a sin and you’ll go to hell if you do it.’

  ‘Eden!’

  ‘My friends,’ I say, breathless with irreverence, ‘say it means you’re a dirty slapper and you probably have herpes.’

  She was speechless, standing there with a pair of tights dangling over her arm. Really looking at me, like for the first time. I thought about the songs she would play sometimes on the stereo, ‘I Can’t Stay Away From You’ by Gloria Estefan, and how soft her face would look, and whether that was when she was thinking about him, her new man. I wondered if she and I would ever dance again to ‘Blue Bayou’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ with comic abandon. I daydreamed a life in America for short seconds, then got real.

  ‘See you later,’ I said, and then left her to pack. Went to my room for my shoes and a jacket, and down the stairs, and out. Nobody stopped me.

  I went to Juliet’s house and stayed there until I thought my mum was gone, and then I went home and helped my dad clean up.

  brick.

  THERE HE IS. Silhouetted in the window glow like a bug stuck in amber. He doesn’t see me. My feet are heavy on the uneven street, pavement cracked by tree roots. A long breath escapes the cage of my chest, my mind empties, a car thunders around the corner. No way I could have avoided this. It was inevitable as the end of childhood, and just as unthinkable.

  After the fight with my father, I should have found some easy distraction, let Juliet take me back down to the pub, or have Dwayne tell me some more cross-eyed jokes. I could have gone to watch a film. Stuffed my broken self full of chocolate-covered peanuts, hotdogs and Pepsi. I thought that was where I was going when I walked out of my front door, out into the crouching estate. I was certain in fact. What else was there? I hadn’t even thought of the alternative, but still it drew me toward it, pulling me through the deep vein of the city.

  On the bus, in the harsh glare of the top deck, I pulled a pencil and paper from my knapsack. I’m squeezed blue by love, sweating like a runner, I wrote to him, my handwriting jerky with bus movements, words pouring out like blood from a deep cut, too deep for pain. Breath shallow, chest a cave full of bats.

  I wrote until there was no more to say, and then I folded my letter and put it carefully in the pocket at the front of my rucksack. I took my phone out, and I began to dial Juliet’s number, running through my mind all the things I should do. But the word, should, fell away and down into an abyss. The word should has nothing to do with nature. I got off one bus and on to another, going to him, wanting to stay above ground. I walked up the long shallow hill that leads to the road where he lives, leaden except for the maniacal drumming in my chest. This thing I feel, the thing that brought me here, is as indivertible as a change of season. It is nature.

  I am here. The only question that remains is: what now?

  Zed moves away from the window. My mind starts up again, slow thoughts. I could leave the letter in his post box. Or I could knock on his door. But what would I say to him? All I know is that I can’t leave this patch of concrete, this moment, until everything is different. I’ve got to remind him that I exist, remind myself that I exist.

  I read somewhere that people express thoughts to each other with words, but with art they transmit feelings. Leo Tolstoy, I think. And somewhere else I read that art separates itself from everyday reality, suspended inside a frame and outside time. Like that pile of bricks heaped silently in Zed’s neighbour’s front garden. That could be art if it wanted to, if it felt like being looked at.

  I try to call Zed but he doesn’t pick up. I imagine him sitting there, staring at the phone and rolling his eyes—

  It starts to rain.

  The bricks are flirting with me. The night is wide open. My mind is still.

  I crouch and stick my hand through the neighbour’s front gate, pick one of the bricks up. Feel the weight and roughness of it. Cool and angular, dusty and absolute. A brick has no questions. It doesn’t wish it was a pile of sand or a power drill. A brick is a brick.

  My arm is supple, my wrist flicks forward with effortless ease, the brick –

  – arcs its way toward Zed’s front window and –

  – crash! –

  The glass shatters and caves and showers down into the street. Sounds like the whole street is exploding! Brain starts up again with a stutter. Quick thoughts. Me. I did that. I did it. Need to run. Can’t. Time ticks on so fast it leaves me standing here and sprints back to the bus stop without me.

  The light comes back on and Zed is swearing. He emerges at the broken window, jaggedly outlined, bare-chested and furious.

  Now he can see me.

  Zed disappears from view and I know he must be going to the front door and suddenly my feet have life and the moment crashes down and I’m running. But not fast enough. Not fast at all.

  Before I’m even halfway up the road he’s hit the pavement in unlaced trainers and unbelted jeans.

  ‘Eden, is that you? Shit! Shit. Oh my GOD! Are you CRAZY? I can’t believe . . . Damn!’

  I squeeze my eyes shut for a long moment with shame and almost collide with a tree. I stumble but don’t fall. I don’t think I thought the brick would make an impact in the real world. It was in my head. I thought it would stay in my head. Turn around and he’s on the street looking up at the window in jeans and no shirt and one arm on top of his head, swearing to himself. He runs a few steps toward me then stops like he doesn’t know what he might do if he catches me. Then he hobbles back to the patch of light outside his busted window. He still has a slight limp and it kills me. He’s just a man, after all.

  ‘FUCK!’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ I scream at him, balling the letter up in my fist.

  ‘You crazy bitch! Oh my God! I ought to call the police on your ass . . .’

  Then I run until I can no longer hear him shouting. I throw my letter in the bin outside the station.

  More than anything in the world, I want to paint him. I’d melt down the black vinyl of a Marvin Gaye record, add a measure of dark rum and paint him on raw brick with my fingers. I’d paint him naked. Him naked. Me naked. In a bright room without curtains or carpet, with a mattress in the corner covered in fur and feathers. I’d paint him while he slept, mouth ajar, mind ajar and racing with dreams. His notebooks would be stacked in a pile next to a tin of fountain pens. I’d paint him writing. His eyes hooded and unmoving from the paper, shoulders hunched, fingers urgent. A claw foot bathtub would sit in the corner opposite the mattress and I’d paint him bathing, all his hard and soft parts shiny in the water. I’d take months, years. I’d immortalise him from every angle and then I’d hang all the work in a gallery and then I’d move in and live there. With him—

  bella, what?

  ‘JULIET . . . ! I’VE BEEN trying to get you for ages.’

  ‘Eden, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Everything . . . everything. Can I stay at yours tonight?’

  ‘Yeah, ’course girl! No problem. Just calm down, alright? Calm down! How you gonna get here? It’s a bit late innit?’

  I pull the phone away from my ear and look at the time. It’s almost two a.m. I’ve been knocking back the last three or four hours with ice and no chaser, waiting to get through to her for somewhere to go, someone to tell.

  ‘You had one of your weekend studs round, is it?’ I ask her, laughing a dead laugh.

  ‘You sound mashed! Are you alright to even be travelling?’

  ‘I don’t care. I can’t go home. I think my dad just kicked me out. I’m on the bus coming up to Trafalgar Square.’

  ‘Wait a minute, bella, what exactly did he say? Are you sure you’re not misinterpreting. You’re good at that, you know!’

  ‘I did some stupid stuff tonight
, Juliet. I got back in the house and I tried to apologise,’ I struggle with all my words, ‘apologise for how I’ve been acting but he just started again and I exploded!’

  ‘Oh shit! What did you do?’

  ‘It’s been a fucking stupid night, Juliet.’

  ‘What happened? You’re not saying all of it!’

  ‘Juliet, you know you were saying you could lend me some monies?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Well, how much?’ I ask her, mind spinning yards and yards of new fabric, zig-zag patterns, back and forth. ‘How much have you got exactly?’

  August

  new time and weather.

  NEW YORK.

  There’s a taste to it, a scent I forgot I remembered, a dash for my suitcase, a buzzing in my head. La Guardia, bright and crammed with people. Expectant faces and cardboard signs held aloft. Junk food places beckon, plus trains and shuttles, jewellery, clothes. Travellers disperse into their separate lives, temporary companionship forgotten. I’m surrounded by ecstatic reunions in my corner next to the information desk. I’m so awake I can’t stand it. I’m terrified. A man – obviously sniffing around for a desperate, ignorant tourist – sidles up. ‘You want a cab?’ he says, and I say ‘No,’ and he hears maybe so he asks ‘Where you going?’ and I say, ‘It doesn’t matter because I don’t want a cab!’ and he hears maybe again. So he hovers. And I’m thinking, is my mouth moving? And I say, ‘Piss off!’ and he hears, hang around a bit.

  The language is the same but different. I might need a rifle.

  Still so vivid, the first time I flew into the Apple. I was a state. All big-eyed and shaking and couldn’t believe I was going to see my mother again. Years were more like centuries back then and it seemed like stars could have formed, supernova-ed, red-dwarfed and black-holed in the time it had taken her to send me a plane ticket.

  And mothers were supposed to cling to their children. What kind of person was she to leave without looking back? What kind of child was I to inspire a love so thin? Stiffly I went to school and came home, and to the library and home, and ate dinner and watched TV and did my homework and combed my hair. I taught myself not to expect anything, not even a phone call. I accepted that I’d been forgotten.