by Gemma Weekes
Pause. ‘Um, not much. You?’
‘I’m cool,’ he said, letting his eyes drift back to the TV. He wasn’t mean, necessarily. But the look said, She’s just a kid. If I’d set those words to music, it would have been the soundtrack to my life back then. I wasn’t a sexy fifteen-year-old.
‘Aaron! Stand up in the presence of a lady,’ Uncle Paul barked at his son, stepping abruptly into the room. It wasn’t hard to see where Zed got his looks from. Paul – a childhood friend of my aunt’s – was a very symmetrical man, upright and handsome. He had an old-school nobility about him, none of his son’s wily twinkle. The boy popped right out of his seat, and me almost out of my skin. I wiped my hands on my shorts, struggling to regain my composure.
‘Eden, this is my son Aaron. Aaron, this is Aunt Katherine’s niece, Eden. You guys are a similar age, so I thought it would be a good idea for you to meet each other.’ He gave his boy a hard look. ‘It would be nice for Aaron to make some new friends. He can show you around New York the way I used to do for your auntie. Be useful for a change.’
Aaron said, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and pulled his oversized jeans up, something that would turn out to be an endearing little tic of his. Uncle Paul looked at his son like he needed either a hard slap or Jesus Christ and he wasn’t sure which one. Maybe both.
When Paul left again, Aaron said that he went by the name Zed these days.
‘Zed.’ I tested it. What a weird nickname. ‘Aunt K kept talking like . . . talking like you were,’ I stuttered, ‘gonna be a little boy.’
The not-so-small boy grinned. ‘No, not little,’ he said. He already had an air of worldliness about him, of cheerful, wolfish corruption. He sat down, spreading his legs as wide as they could go. ‘I’m sixteen. Why you still standing in the door? You scared of me or what?’
‘’Course I’m not scared,’ I said, sitting next to him, sweating, inspired, inexplicably different. I was thinking that he probably only messed with teen princesses; mini-women with tight clothes and inked-in lips. I decided not to get my hopes up. Just looking at him, my hair felt more messed up, my kicks felt more beat down, my chest felt less breast-y.
I asked him what it was like to be a teenager in New York, and was it true there were shootings every day and that everyone was in gangs. He said yeah, there are shootings, and yeah, there are gangs. But there were other things too and that it wasn’t like the movies. ‘Does everyone,’ he asked, ‘in England drink tea with their little finger poked out?’
‘No.’
‘Exactly. What’s it like living in London?’
‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘It’s weird. English people hate young people and then some of us have the nerve to be black too.’ He laughed, surprised. Disappointment had made me precociously cynical. It’s ironic really, because these days I think that disappointment is what’s keeping me teenaged.
He turned slightly in his seat to pound fists with me and it made our knees touch. I missed the first time and almost punched him in the neck. I went hollow. It was the beginning of the lesson I was going to learn about all the ways your body can betray you when you’re in love.
I told him I was going to the bathroom and fled upstairs to my room, trying to work out what had just happened to me, shaken at my sudden and violent bout of emotional indigestion. The rap star sag of his jeans. The nonchalance of his posture.
I threw myself across the bed and thought of him, this boy as sudden as a knife-cut to your fingers whilst peeling fruit. The pain. The instant red. He made me want to know what my mother knew, do things I didn’t know anything about (yet).
chasm.
MY FIST ON Zed’s bedroom door is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. Tap, tap, tap.
‘Zed?’ I say, then a bit louder, ‘Zed? Hey. Are you awake?’
Tap, tap, tap. He’s taken the room that used to be my grandmother’s: the small, box-shaped one next to the kitchen.
I push the door ajar and he’s passed out horizontally across the disordered mattress, light slanting across his face from the hall behind me. There are pages of his heavy, angular handwriting scattered over the bed and the floor. I stand in the purgatory of the open doorway feeling like an intruder. Which I suppose I am.
‘Zed?’ I say again, so quietly that he probably wouldn’t be able to hear me even if he was up. Instead of leaving, like I should, I sit gingerly on his bed and examine the planes of his face. Sweat is shining on his neck and gathering in tiny beads on his forehead. The heat is almost unbearable. I’m close enough to feel it radiate from his skin but there might as well be light years between my body and his. The space is infinite. Every time I look at him, I stand teetering on the edge of the chasm where my obsession ends and his indifference begins, stretching away and away and away. His face is relentlessly peaceful.
‘Could you turn the light off?’ he says suddenly, eyes closed, and I think I just had a stroke.
‘Shit! You’re awake?’
‘Yeah. I’d prefer to be called Zed, though.’
‘Ha. Ha.’
‘Go on.’
‘What?’
‘The light,’ he says. ‘I’m getting a headache.’
When I return, he’s turned over onto his back and moved closer to the wall. I try not to stare at his chest.
‘So what’s up? Are you here to put a pillow over my head? Finish the job?’
‘Come on! No, Zed.’ I pause. ‘Look, I want to pay for the window.’
‘I already did.’
‘Then what can I do?’
‘Nothing, Eden. Just let it go.’
‘But I want to make things better,’ I tell him, ‘I wasn’t . . . myself. I didn’t mean to do it. There was just so much going on in my head . . .’
‘Look, you’re creeping me out standing there. Sit down or go away.’
For a moment, we listen to what sounds like a drunken fight somewhere outside. Then I slowly begin to collect his writing into a pile so there’s room for me to sit, but he grabs it from me and jams it haphazard on the bedside table. I take a seat.
‘Listen,’ he says eventually. Faint light from the window colouring his face blue. ‘If you think that we’re gonna somehow be instantly cool after what you did, that’s not gonna happen.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘I’m just being straight with you.’
‘That’s it for us, isn’t it? You don’t even want to be friends anymore.’
‘What did you really expect? Did you think I was gonna buy you a thank-you card?’
‘I can understand that,’ I say, exhausted. ‘I can understand that. It’s just a shame after everything we’ve been through, after all of this time.’ He scratches the top of his head, adjusts his position. ‘So,’ I say with masochistic abandon, desperate to numb myself. ‘So. What about Max? What happened with her?’
Shrug. ‘Well, I guess we’re still kind of seeing each other.’
‘Wow. Didn’t know it was serious like that. So you guys are long-distance now?’
‘Well, I like her a lot. Plus seeing how her career is going, she’ll prob’ly get work over here at some point.’
‘Right. Well. That’s nice. That’s nice.’ Picture a broken elevator speeding down the shaft, crashing at the bottom. That’s my belly. After several moments I ask him, dying: ‘Do you ever think, like, what’s the point of all this?’
‘Of what?’
‘Everything. I mean, sometimes I just don’t understand any of it.’
‘Here we go.’
‘I just think that dissatisfaction is the one constant in the human condition. It makes practically everything you do meaningless.’
‘You know what I think?’
‘What?’
‘I think you should go to sleep.’
‘Good idea,’ I say. ‘Zed . . . do you hate me?’
‘Hate is a strong word.’
‘I’ve been having nightmares about my mother and then it all just keeps leaking into my awake time. You kno
w, the mood, and the colours. They stain me all day. Does that ever happen to you? Do your dreams leak?’
‘They used to. I don’t dream anymore.’
‘Everybody dreams.’
‘Not me,’ he says. ‘I just . . . Look, I’m tired. Let’s talk tomorrow or something. Close the door on your way out.’
‘What were you gonna say?’
‘Good night.’
I get up and go two steps toward the door before he stops me.
‘Eden,’ he says softly, with that particular inflection of his that makes me a brand-new thing. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘What?’ I ask, knowing.
‘The brick.’
It seems to me that my answer could change everything, past as well as present as well as future. I’m swallowed by fear. ‘I don’t know.’
He lies back down. ‘Good night,’ he says, colder this time.
turn around.
I HAVE THESE dreams lately where I’m on a staircase grabbing handfuls of my mother’s gypsy skirt and the staircase ends in darkness and I can’t even see the landing and I can’t even see the steps all I can see is my mother’s skirt and she won’t slow down no matter how hard I pull and her feet are bare hitting my tiny face and shoulders and my little fists are straining trying to stop her walking up the steps and no matter how hard I shout we are both enveloped in silence not even her steps are audible and then the delicate fabric keeps tearing off in my fists and I leap and grab hold again and she’s almost at the top and the fabric keeps tearing and I can’t hold on and it’s like she doesn’t even know I’m there and she won’t turn around she just keeps kicking me with every step and the fabric tears and I fall down the steps all the way to the bottom head over foot over head over foot and it hurts and I cry silently and scream at my mother but there is no sound and she’s already completely disappeared into the thick darkness at the top of the steps—
gone sunset.
AROUND EIGHT IN the morning I give up on oblivion and stand in the shower for a while. The temperature is lukewarm. Trying to sleep with Zed in the house is a trial. I’m spent. Every time I start to drift off, I remember he’s here and my mind is like a drop of water in hot oil. Carefully I shave my legs and armpits. When I’m clean, I put on a really nice lotion I stole from the Body Shop on a day I felt particularly invincible, file my feet smooth, paint my toenails orange. Peasant dress. Waist belt. Flip-flops. I painstakingly shape my brows the way Brandy taught me to and tug my hair into French braids with a handful of shine gel, praying no one lights a match within ten yards of my flammable head.
But when I get upstairs, Zed’s room is empty.
The bed is made with barely a wrinkle. All his poetry is gone. No shoes beside the bed. No bags. It’s only nine thirty. He didn’t even say goodbye.
I sit on his bed for a moment to collect myself. It still smells like him in here. I feel ridiculous and bereft. I’m all dressed up with no one to show.
‘Hey,’ he says, appearing in the doorway.
I jump to my feet.
A white T-shirt is stark against his skin; a duffel bag hangs off one shoulder.
He says: ‘What are you doing in here?’
‘Zed!’ I tug at my clothes, tell him I thought he left.
‘No,’ he says, ‘not yet. I was out on the front steps wakin’ and bakin’.’
‘Oh.’
‘I thought it was good manners to knock first.’
‘I did knock.’
‘Did I answer?’ He raises an eyebrow. I laugh, defeated, face gone sunset.
‘Where you off to so early?’
‘I’ve got a session.’
‘Right,’ I say, trying not to sound distraught. ‘Like, in the studio?’
‘Yep.’
‘Cool.’
He hesitates. ‘You?’
‘I. Uh. I don’t know, really. I was just gonna drift around a little bit. See the sights or something.’
‘Alright.’ He gives my little makeover a subtle exploration with his eyes. I tingle.
‘Well, see ya,’ he says, heading for the front door. ‘I’m out.’
‘Zed . . . wait,’ I say to his back. ‘You going to the subway?’
He turns around, flickers momentarily. ‘Yeah,’ he says and I try not to look desperate. ‘Yeah,’ he repeats. ‘Come on.’
here and go.
‘OMEGA!’ A GRIZZLY bear of a man dressed head-to-toe in oversized, heavily branded clothing pulls the door open. He grins, one gold tooth catching the light. ‘What’s good, alphabet geek?’
‘Everything! You know I’m a contented son of a bitch,’ says Zed. The bear laughs high-pitched like a girl or a velvet-wearing pimp. ‘Hey, Bleak, this is Eden. She’ll just be here loitering ’cause her time is obviously pretty cheap right now.’
‘What’s good, ma?’
‘Not much.’
The bear laughs again. He and Zed smack palms and we’re ushered into a low-lit, messy apartment with black leather sofas and black heroes framed on the walls, from Mohammed Ali to a big-haired Angela Davis. It smells like years of daily marijuana abuse and the musky odour of people sleeping in their street clothes. A widescreen TV displays mute booty-shaking.
‘Omega?’ I enquire.
‘I go by many names, precious,’ Zed replies and his manner is slippery. I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. We didn’t talk much on the way here, too close for small talk and too guarded for anything else. On the subway, he gave me directions for some good art galleries in Manhattan and Harlem, and for the Statue of Liberty in case I was feeling mainstream. After he’d finished his tour guide impression, I asked him where the studio was.
‘Queens,’ he said.
‘I’ve never,’ I struggled, ‘I’ve never been to Queens.’ Zed smiled and shook his head almost imperceptibly. I was like a gambler hoping that eventually my luck would change if I just stayed in the game. I should have fought myself harder, but maybe I’d managed to convince myself, as we took our silent trip under New York, that if we didn’t speak, he wouldn’t notice that we’d failed to part ways.
And now, apparently, my ‘time is cheap’. I don’t know if that’s a bad reflection on him or on me.
Bleak offers me some Koolaid. I decide that drinking anything unsealed in this apartment is probably a bad idea.
‘No thanks.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he grins knowingly. ‘Well, come on through and listen to some of these beats.’
He leads us into an even dimmer room, which likely housed a bed in a former life but now is rigged up with a computer, mixing desk, and countless other unknown gadgets. Zed takes a seat in the leather swivel chair furthest from the computer. Bleak lets me sit in the one directly in front of it.
‘Just for a hot minute though, ma. Only the captain gets to sit at the helm, you feel me?’
Bleak flicks a switch and the apartment is flooded with repetitive, beat-heavy music, dark and discordant. Zed magicks a spliff out into the open and lights it, head nodding in time.
‘You feelin’ that, son?’
‘It’s marvellous.’
‘You got something for it?’
‘Any second now.’
‘Alright, I’m gonna let you hear some of the other shit I’ve been working on.’ Bleak looks at me. ‘So now you gonna have to scoot over onto the amateur’s chair, baby girl!’ he says, pointing one giant finger at a worn little two-seater sofa in the corner of the room. I go over there and perch like a canary. ‘Perfect.’
‘What time is Nami coming through?’ Zed asks, mid-toke.
‘You know how she’s always late, man! It was supposed to be an hour ago, but who knows?’
They smoke so hard that after forty minutes or so I’m starting to lose any little cognitive ability I had to begin with. They don’t speak to me. Bleak plays some different beats and Zed scribbles intensely in a tiny notebook, mumbling. He carries himself differently here and it’s like he’s a stranger.
‘
London girl! What you doing?’
I lower the clicker. ‘I was, um, just taking a couple of pictures. Is that OK?’
‘You a narc?’
‘No.’
‘CIA? FBI? SWV?’
I laugh. ‘No!’
‘Then you good, ma. You cool. You got skills?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Well, let me see them photos when you done. We need some shit for the site.’
In five minutes I’ve captured it all. The heat and the smoke wring every ounce of will out of my body and I lay my head on the arm of the sofa, giving in to the inevitable. I wake up when a door slams and there’s suddenly a very loud woman’s voice in the room.
‘Zed! Damn you are one good-looking motherfucker! Make me scared to look in a mirror.’ They both laugh. I open my eyes and the girl’s bum is at eye-level in jeans so tight that the little flesh she has spills over the top. I try to press back into the wall, terrified that any moment she’ll sit on my head. ‘Shit, Bleak, what you lookin’ at? You know your ass always has been and always will be ugly. Can’t have everything, huh, playa?’
‘Shut your pie-hole, fish face.’
I figure the only way to avoid being crushed by denim-butt is to stand. She jumps and turns, gives me a brazen look head-to-toe.
‘Hey! Didn’t see you back there!’ she says and she’s pretty enough. A Demerara brown girl with big sleepy eyelids, a long fake ponytail and equally fake nails.
‘Yeah. Nice to meet you.’
‘Nami.’
‘Eden.’
‘What kinda accent you . . .?’
‘I’m from London.’
‘London, England?’ She flicks her ponytail.
‘Yep.’
‘Oh snap!’ she says, laughing. ‘They got sisters over there now?’
‘A few.’
‘OK. Welcome to Queens then, Ms Black Princess Dian-a.’
‘She’s dead.’
Nami smiles and winks at me, turns back to her banter with the guys. I sit back down. Bleak plays her the first beat he put on when I came in.
‘We think you should put one of your dirty hooks on this one, fish face.’