Love Me

by Gemma Weekes

  ‘Cool.’ I’m still examining his/her bone structure. He’s prettier than me. She. When she’s ‘Brandy’, she’s a she. Gosh. My brain.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, smiling in encouragement.

  We lift the bags and go through a door next to the kitchen, opposite Granny’s old bedroom. I glance at the closed door as we go by, trying simultaneously to remember and forget the sound of her pottering around inside, her low radio turned to the news. Somehow it’s stranger for someone to be gone when they’d never really made an impact on your life. I don’t know how to feel about her being gone, I suppose she always has been. We walk down some steps and emerge somewhere completely removed from the rest of the house. The basement appears to run almost the entire length and breadth of the ground floor, painted in earth tones and furnished with a bed, sofa and mini fridge. The furniture only takes up a small portion of the available space; besides that there’s a washer and drier, numerous boxes and bookshelves. Fresh paint scents the air, a smell that calms me for some reason. It’s a new world down here, a space where I’ve never been before. This used to be the most forbidding part of the house and now I think it’s the only part where I can bear to spend my time.

  ‘You see how bright it is down here? There’s some natural light coming down through this special, um, refractive tube.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what your aunt said when she heard how much it was gonna cost.’ She laughs. ‘You got a TV too . . . it’s ancient but it works. Plus we got WiFi.’

  ‘A microwave and a canvas and I’d probably never have to leave this room.’

  ‘You don’t,’ she says. ‘You’re safe. You’re safe with Umi.’

  When Brandy leaves, a panic starts in my chest, the full weight of the house pushing down on me. I sink down on the bed and find a note there. Purple handwriting on rough, cream paper.

  note.

  Cherry Pepper,

  Breathe. You are exactly where you need to be.

  I hope you enjoy the basement. I thought of you while I decorated it, knowing you’d return to us, so make yourself at home. Brandy’s in the ground-floor front bedroom, the one that used to be the dining room. Violet and her baby live on the second floor. Baba lives up there sometimes too, in the front, second-floor bedroom. You go to him if you have any practical problems, if anything breaks or fails or has to get fixed. If he’s around, you can ask him for a ride if you need to get somewhere.

  For now, you’ll find me at the top of the house but don’t worry too much if I’m not around. My people are your people. Go to them if you need them.

  Take time, niece. I’m glad you’re here.

  Aunt K.

  make believe.

  I WAKE UP to light streaming down through the ‘refractive tube’. And for a bright, clear second, I have no clue where I am, or when, or even who. The gelatinous heat settles into all my creases, eager to welcome a new victim. I’m a pile of sweaty limbs and a mouth of carpet, heavy as a bucket of water from toenail to split end. I can’t believe I made it.

  Last night, Violet cooked catfish and fried chicken, rice and greens and banoffee pie for dessert. I got the impression that it was a cherished event to have Aunt K and her niece at the table. She flitted and fussed, smiling her sweet, dimpled smile. I ate every scrap I was given and kept my trap shut. Let others talk. The timbre of Violet’s rich voice – even speaking – slumped me in my chair, interweaving as it did with Aunt K’s alto and the bass of Baba’s untraceable accent. Soon there were no words, only a running harmony of tones and the dark behind my eyelids.

  My aunt led me, half-blind with fatigue, down to my bed. She tucked me in like a child, saying she’d be busy today but that Brandy would happily reacquaint me with the city.

  Sure enough, this morning there’s a note slipped under the door. Brandy tells me in her round, curly handwriting about the muffins on the counter, waffles in the freezer and syrup in the cupboard for breakfast. She had to run out for a beauty appointment but will be back real soon for our ‘diva excursion’. Get fly! she writes. Later! Brandy xoxo.

  Get fly? I ball up the note and fire it into the nearby waste basket. Sigh. I stare back at my jet-lagged self from the mirror pasted to the wall. I’ve come all this way but still, here I am. Just the same as always. I don’t think I even know how to be fly (pretty, tarted, groomed, slick, exclusive). I feel distinctly un-airborne. Ankle-weighted, in fact.

  After an exasperated shower, I dress in my neatest shorts and T-shirt and fight my hair into a ponytail, but by the time I’ve done that, I’m practically drenched all over again. Feels like I’ve done a day’s worth of manual labour.

  ‘Brandy?’

  No sign yet. It’s quiet as I climb the stairs up to the kitchen, a silence flavoured by the merest suggestion of a children’s television programme wafting down from Violet’s floor. A paper bag full of muffins sits on the counter just as Brandy said. The sweet, fresh-baked smell of them is so America, a scent that jolts me back to the first time here. I remember the sweetness of being fifteen, even angry as I was then, the sweetness of absolutes and brand-new places. I will never be back there again, at the beginning of that summer. I avert my gaze from the window and its view out into the back yard. I don’t have to look out there to know it’s crowded with ghosts.

  I go out and sit on the sun-blasted front steps to wait for Brandy with my muffin, a book, and my camera. The odd car goes by, light sparking against the metal, music blaring from the speakers. Some kids across the road are embroiled in a raucous tiff. Click, click, click goes my clicker. A girl poised inelegantly between childhood and adolescence stands with arms akimbo, hundreds of little braids in her hair, yelling at a boy with a potbelly and cornrows. A shorter girl in pigtails looks on gleefully. Your mama! – Don’t you talk about my mama! – Why? – Whatchoo gonna do about it? – Oooh! Are you gonna let her talk to you like that? Are you?!

  A guy comes out of the house next door to the kids and walks up toward Flatbush Avenue. Not as flash or as tall, but he reminds me of Zed – the New York swagger of him. It makes my heart do the fandango. I remember Zed as a teenager, us walking up this same street, sitting on these steps. Makes me miss him so hard it’s an anguish of the bones, blood, muscle – but that’s nothing new. I’ve always missed him, even when we’re together, because no amount of belly butterflies or sleepless nights can help a person reach past the limits of the skin, or the boundaries of their mind. No matter how much we wish we could know a loved one’s thoughts, we’re deaf to them; and no matter how much we love somebody we can’t stay with them. If life fails to steal them from us, then death will do it.

  What a blind headfuck of a thing it all is.

  ‘It looks,’ says Brandy, suddenly in front of me, resplendent in a white summer dress, ‘like you got a lot going on inside that brain of yours, girl! Don’t hurt yourself!’

  ‘Nothing useful,’ I tell her.

  ‘Well, you need to wipe that sour look off your face and smile, honey dip! It’s a beautiful summer day in Brooklyn!’ She sweeps her arm out like a model on one of those American game shows. Look at what you’ve won!!! ‘The question is, what do you wanna do with it?’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t know,’ I tell her. ‘I’m all yours.’

  We walk to Prospect Park station and buy Metrocards from the machines, go through big metal turnstiles, down the steps to the platform. The subway is moody like I remember it, the light a dim yellow, the air blistering hot. A few moments later we get on a cold train full of slightly weird characters you’d be afraid to make eye contact with. Brandy and I ride in near silence, jolting quietly through the underworld. I stare at all the boys staring at her and try not to laugh. She is quaintly oblivious.

  We emerge above ground at Atlantic Avenue to electric blue skies and sidewalks thick with noise and people.

  ‘Do you mind if we stop here for a second? I just need to get a couple of things, and then we can go up to Manhattan, do the tourist thi
ng?’

  We cross over the street to the mall, push through the double doors into the welcome air-conditioning. All the families are out shopping. Children are yelled at and cuddled, teenagers skulk about looking embarrassed or full of themselves depending on who they’re with. The women look mostly harassed, the men unperturbed.

  We hang around examining the stalls and going from store to store, Brandy yacking about bargains and body types. I finger stretchy T-shirts and rhinestone-studded jeans and tiny, bright dresses. No wonder Zed thinks I’m a slob. New York girls don’t waste a single curve on excess fabric. Or even New York boys dressed as girls.

  ‘I bet London shopping is ten times better, right?’

  ‘I dunno . . . Kind of, maybe.’

  ‘More individual?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose. But a lot of us are “individual” in exactly the same way though, ya gets? Hand built by robots.’

  ‘Funny!’ she laughs.

  ‘But, as you can see,’ I say, gesturing at my outfit, ‘what I know about fashion could fit inside the average pimple.’

  ‘Nah,’ says Brandy with a rapid, surreptitious glance, ‘you alright, girl. Nothing wrong with you.’

  She goes off to the till point to pay for some dangly earrings and two tank tops. I catch her up at the door.

  ‘Are you serious? There’s nothing wrong with me?’ I look from her blinding white dress to the ragged thoughtlessness of my outfit and back again. ‘You don’t have to be nice just because I’m a foreigner, you know. I’m a mess!’

  ‘Damn,’ she laughs. ‘Why I always gotta end up somebody’s fashion guru?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. With talent comes responsibility, right?’ she says, waving her dainty hand in dismissal. ‘You’re not a mess, Eden. People always start talking like that when their mind has changed but their fashion hasn’t. What’s your problem with how you look? It’s not working for you anymore?’

  ‘I just . . .’ I say helplessly, dangling like a hooked fish. ‘I don’t know.’

  She smiles. ‘Probably all you gotta do is take that look of yours and throw some glitter on it, you know what I’m saying? Your aunt is always complaining that women these days don’t know their power.’ She taps one long pink nail thoughtfully against her lips. ‘Come on, let’s go. I’m gonna take you to my favourite store. Maybe we should be tourists some other time.’

  We go back out into the faint-worthy, horizon-distorting heat.

  ‘I don’t feel like I’ve got any at all,’ I say eventually.

  ‘Any what?’

  ‘Power.’

  Brandy sighs and shakes her head. The smell of melted cheese floats out of a pizza place. A group of teenaged boys walk toward us, broad as cowboys, talking animatedly about basketball.

  ‘Everybody’s got absolute power over themselves, girl,’ she says. ‘The question is, what do you do with it? You decide what to wear and how to walk and whether or not you accessorise. You do all of that with, like, a goal in mind, either consciously or subconsciously.’

  ‘Really, though?’

  ‘Yep.’

  We walk along for a while, her wearing a look of schooled nonchalance on her face and me fighting myself. But eventually I have to ask the obvious. ‘Well, what do my clothes say about me, then?’

  Brandy stops right in the middle of the street and flips her hair out of her eyes, gives me the head-to-toe. Like every one of her gestures, it’s an event in and of itself. ‘Turn around,’ she commands, ignoring the hard stares people throw her way. I do as requested and she shakes her head. ‘You got issues, honey,’ she says and starts walking again.

  I roll my eyes. ‘Oh, well, thanks for that! What are you? Psychic?’

  ‘Just kidding,’ she laughs. ‘Are you ready for the real?’

  I nod.

  ‘Well, from what I can see,’ she glances at me, ‘you’re working an arty, creative look. But it has an edge on it, like you’re trying to keep people at a distance, you know what I’m saying? Not bring them in. The shapes aren’t that flattering. You play your body down rather than play it up. Your posture is horrible, like you’re afraid that if you took it up a notch and were sexy and feminine, that you actually wouldn’t be able to compete with other women.’

  ‘Damn. OK.’

  ‘But,’ she says with a narrow-eyed smile, ‘at the same time, I look at your wrinkled, frayed clothes and it’s like you want somebody to see all the cracks and take care of you. Give you a hug and a glass of milk.’

  We stop outside a shop with a naked mannequin in the window. She doesn’t ask me if she hit a chord. She has complete confidence.

  ‘Anyway, you have to see this place. It’s the best thrift store in Brooklyn and you were born for vintage.’

  ‘I don’t even like milk,’ I tell her, but she just smiles and waves me through the doors. The bell tinkles and immediately there’s a camp roar from the back of the shop.

  ‘MS GORGEOUS!!!’

  ‘JAY!’

  A rustle of hangers and a small, pretty man dressed in a slim black shirt, black drainpipes and a white belt darts out from behind the till and air kisses her with gusto.

  ‘How you doing? You look ridiculous fine, girl!’

  ‘You too. Working that little Emo look you got going on! You met somebody new, huh?’

  ‘Girl! You like the psychic network in a Wonderbra! Holla!’

  They dissolve into giggles. ‘So,’ Jay says eventually, giving me my second head-to-toe of the day. This one less forgiving. ‘Who’s your friend?’

  ‘This is Umi’s niece over from London. Eden, Jay, Jay, Eden.’

  ‘You’re kidding! Oh my God . . . wow! That woman is true royalty. How you doing?’ he says, throwing his hand out.

  ‘Hey,’ I say and shake it.

  ‘How you like New York?’ he says to me, leaning against the cash register. I marvel at his voice and manner; he’s like a teenaged black girl trapped in a twenty-something white man’s body.

  ‘Cool so far,’ I say. ‘Well, bloody hot. But cool.’

  He laughs. ‘How long are you here for?’

  ‘I dunno . . . Three months at least.’

  ‘Wow, that’s a long trip.’

  I shrug and nod.

  Brandy sighs. ‘Yada yada yada. Enough small talk, pretty boy! What you got to show me?’

  ‘Weell . . .’ Jay smiles. ‘It’s a very good day in thrift store land! Come on through. I just got these in today . . .’ They walk off between the aisles. ‘That dress is hot, by the way! You tryin’ to hurt people’s feelings out here or what?’

  The store is brightly lit and orderly, not like I expected at all. It doesn’t smell of mothballs or the elderly. There’s so much stuff I’m momentarily paralysed.

  ‘Hey, Eden!’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What you doing over there, girl?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That’s the problem! Go look at some threads! That’s what we here for.’

  It seems like just seconds later that Brandy is squealing at me from the back of the store. ‘Come see my outfit!’

  I follow the squeal and she’s stood in front of an antique standing mirror, smoothing a sixties mini-dress down over her narrow hips.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I say.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yeah, definitely.’

  ‘Hear hear!’ yells Jay from the other side of the store where he’s arranging the handbags.

  ‘This would look really good for my shows,’ she says to herself and then goes back to a colourful rail. ‘You gotta try this on,’ she says, bundling an eighties prom dress into my limp arms. ‘It’s gonna look majestic on you!’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Try these on too.’

  I just stand there.

  ‘Eden, step into my office,’ she says, hustling me into a purple-curtained fitting room. ‘Now look, I’m not trying to tell you what to do, or how to think.
But one thing chicks like me,’ she places a hand to her padded chest, ‘recognise, is that being a chick takes work. That’s the problem with you guys. Getting all depressed ’cause you don’t look like a supermodel first thing in the morning? Damn! At least ya’ll ain’t gotta deal with a five o’clock shadow!’ I laugh. ‘I’m being serious, chica! To get a little bit deep, you gotta look at femininity as a construct, you know what I’m saying? I’m writing a paper on it right now! Femininity takes work and it takes maintenance. And don’t waste my time saying you don’t care, ’cause it’s damn obvious that you do! Otherwise you wouldn’t be coming around like, “Oh Brandy! Help me pleeease! Save me from myself!”’

  ‘Shut up! I don’t sound like that!’

  ‘I am telling you the damn truth, girl, and you can’t take it!’

  ‘Look, I’ll try on the bloody things, OK? Are you happy now?’

  ‘I got you smiling, though,’ she tickles me. ‘I got you smiling!’

  The lacy and sequinned prom dress cheers me up despite myself, and I can’t help but laugh at the riotous applause from Jay and Brandy when I strike a pose.

  ‘You need to put on a fly pair of sneakers with that and you are good to go!’ says Jay, looking me up and down. ‘Dunks maybe. Or even some Chucks like what you got on.’

  ‘You don’t think I need to wear heels?’

  ‘Nah! You ever hear that song by Prince, when he sings,’ Jay adopts a startling falsetto, ‘I’ve never seen a pret-ty girl look so tough, baby! You got that LOOK!’

  I laugh. ‘Yeah . . .’

  ‘Well that’s you, baby. Born to do it!’ he snaps his fingers. ‘Hey! I’m gonna put that album on right now!’

  Brandy tells me to try the peasant dress, all billowy and romantic. She takes a belt and pulls it tight around my waist. ‘I love waist belts!’ she says. ‘Isn’t that a sexy feeling?’ She takes a step back and studies my body. ‘Jay! Come check out this ridiculous hourglass figure!’

  ‘Bitch, I am jealous!’ Jay says, bopping his head to eighties Prince, ‘Little Red Corvette’.