by Gemma Weekes
Paul and his two brothers bounced in the door at sunset with airy excuses for their mother and wide, happy grins. He was the one closest to me in age, although a couple of years younger, so we became fast friends. The games we used to play! Ticky tock with stones out on the sidewalks, and marbles, and tag. We’d race each other to the end of Coral St and back, laughing all the way.
Paul’s niece lives here now, with her husband and children. It’s changed less than I thought possible. The smell is the same, of wood expanding, of the drains, of food cooking, of time rolling out slow and fragrant. Enough time here for almost anything. Seems like there’s an hour for every minute in America. The walls must be thinner between people. I can’t help but wonder if Paul visits sometimes, now that he has no need of a plane ticket. Out of the corner of my eye, I almost see him standing at the window, looking out.
Being back here is another knot unpicked. I remember how strong I was, how determined to shed my eleven-year-old wounds and start fresh. Be something new. And here I am now, a grown woman, half a century later with my friend gone. But I’m not old, I realise that now. Youth is not in the age of a body, but in a person’s willingness to start! And start again. And again. And again . . .
Soon,
Aunt K
every shot, flawless.
I WAKE UP to a guitar and the hot, dry sound of a man singing ‘Redemption Song’. A fancy cushion is rough under my damp face, my legs are thrown over the side of the living room couch. I feel far from rested. For three days I’ve knocked around this barren house and these bare neighbouring streets. Bare of Zed. Falling in and out of blue-black naps all day long, up at night watching game shows and porn. The basement oppressed me today. I felt all the weight of the house pressing down. I came up to the living room needing a change of scene, up to where my grandmother would sit at the window and watch the world before she died. The patch of world I could see through the glass was uneventful. I fell asleep again.
Cautiously I open one eye and Spanish is sitting cross-legged on the floor. He’s wearing a velvet jacket in the eighty-degree heat but looks, if anything, as if he might be cold. He stops when he sees me looking at him, guitar cradled like a pet in his lap. I fuss with my rumpled clothes.
‘Aren’t you hot?’ I ask him. My voice is hoarse.
‘No,’ he says, scratching his head through the wild curls.
‘But it’s boiling in here.’
He shrugs. ‘I’ve been fasting. Everything changes when you fast for long enough. It’s like the body gets quieter and quieter.’
‘Well that explains why you’re so skinny.’ His face: with all its starved, tortured angles. His lips are flushed, his eyes golden syrup against the beige skin. His hair is dirty, jeans cut haphazardly at the shin, exposing bony knees. His All Stars make my oldest, most disgusting pair look brand new.
‘What have you got against your body, anyway,’ I say, pulling myself into a sitting position, ‘that you’re trying to make it shut up?’
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘I just want to hear what my soul has to say.’
‘Right.’
‘Yours is like rock music,’ he says.
‘Huh?’
‘Your body.’
I say nothing to that because I’m not sure if it’s a compliment or an accusation. There’s a chuckle. ‘Thrash metal.’ Zed’s voice from a deep corner of the room jerks me utterly awake. I didn’t know he was here. Was half-convinced I was dreaming Spanish. They look impossibly staged. Zed almost invisible, sitting on the floor in the crevice between a sofa and the bookcase. Spanish sitting closer, pale brown washed gold by the sun through old curtains. I pull a cushion to my chest. ‘She’s like thrash metal, dog.’
‘No, not thrash. Psychedelic rock, like in the seventies, man! Flowers and LSD,’ says Spanish, slowly.
‘What time is it?’
‘’Bout three thirty.’
It’s still light, so that means it’s the afternoon. I wouldn’t be sure if it wasn’t for the windows.
Spanish starts singing again, softly this time.
‘What’s your real name, anyway?’ I ask.
He says, ‘That don’t mean shit. A real name is an oxymoron. A name isn’t real. It’s just a symbol.’
‘Is that why you’re fasting? Is your body just a symbol too?’
‘I’m fasting because freedom isn’t free.’
‘Freedom,’ I repeat. It’s a word that always seems to swell and hover when you say it. And today the meaning eludes me completely. I chase it around my mind as if it’s a helium balloon with the air escaping.
‘Freedom?’ Zed’s laugh is very slightly vicious. ‘You need to liberate your damn stomach, man. It ain’t right. A free man doesn’t choose to starve. Crazy-ass . . .’
‘You’re only saying that shit ’cause you’re a slave. That’s exactly what I’m talking about! Too many of us these days are a slave to our nuts or our stomachs. Usually both. You’re just too close-minded to see that.’
Zed laughs again and then we’re all silent. Spanish lightly plays his tune, round and round. So natural he may not even know he’s playing. His fingers are quick on the frets.
‘So when did you get back?’ I ask Zed.
‘About half an hour ago. I went to a party that just kept on going.’
‘Right,’ I say, anger leaden in my stomach. I can barely look at him. ‘Good, was it?’
‘Bananas.’
I spent a lot of my time awake today looking at Zed’s website. I don’t know what I was looking for. Clues? The URL should be www.needlesstorture.com.
There were images in his ‘gallery’ from performances he’s done, face shiny black and swirling with coloured lights. Mic clutched tight in his hand. I kept thinking about all the people who were looking at him that moment. Anyone could. They could be using him as a screensaver, waking up to his face every morning. Printing him on T-shirts. Jerking off. There were so many girls with their little soft-porny thumbnail pics and vapid comments that I had to leave the site or risk submitting to my darker urges. I felt like leaving a comment of my own: Zed, please stop rapping, you’re terrible at it and ugly and how’s your herpes, by the way?
I didn’t, though.
And just for the extra kicks, I found Max on her model agency website. She had an online portfolio and was unblemished in every picture, unassailable. In this one, a femme fatale. In that one, an ingénue. A leggy alien. Every shot, flawless. She can be anything she wants, to anybody. I dared not Google my own name in case it just came back as Bible stories. Eden who? Indeed.
‘What? Did you miss me?’ laughs Zed. ‘Looks like you been sucking on limes.’
‘Why don’t you,’ I say, evenly, ‘go suck an exhaust pipe?’
I swing my legs off the couch and almost catch Spanish in the head. He barely flinches. I think that odd word – freedom – again. I look at his clothes, wonder idly if he’s had a shower today.
‘My band’s playing at a bar downtown tonight,’ he says to me quietly, his voice husky and sincere. Zed’s phone rings and he answers it and I wonder who it is but I don’t really care. Spanish says: ‘We gotta go do a sound check, get ready for our set.’
‘Cool,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’
‘What?’
‘I said, let’s go.’
Glance over at Zed, grinning into the phone, the long shadows of his eyes. Bastard.
Spanish smiles. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Yeah. Good. You know . . . I think it’s gonna matter what you think of us. The guys are gonna drive down there in the van so we gotta take the subway.’
I go to the small shower a few rooms down, next to the one Zed sleeps in, and wash off my all-day funk. My head is full of plots.
In my towel, I go to the living room and say, pointlessly, ‘I won’t be long.’
‘K,’ says Spanish. Zed smokes and stretches.
In the basement I pick my short shorts up off the floor. They need a wash and I don’t usually wear them outdoors,
but whatever. Braid my hair sternly away from my face. The colour is washing out again, back to the sandy brown it was before I dyed it. I go back to the living room and Spanish is alone. He’s moved from the floor to the armchair and looks me over carefully. I wish I’d put on more fabric.
‘Ready?’ he says.
‘Yep.’
We sit close on the subway, en route to Spanish’s sound check. I feel liberated! Zed-less on purpose. Spanish idly strokes his battered guitar case and looks perfectly happy with our lack of conversation. Personally, I think that’s a luxury of the properly acquainted.
‘You know what?’ I say to the side of his face. My clicker likes him, squealing in excitement at the play of light on his cheekbones and jaw, at his careful way with the world, his lovely hands.
‘What, Ms Photo Obsessive Soul-stealer?’ he says to the row of empty seats opposite. I snap them too, and then his eyelashes, his moist, translucent gaze.
‘I think the subway is where sinners go when they die.’ He gives me a quizzical glance. ‘Seriously. It’s like corporal punishment down here. The platforms are one hundred degrees and you’re cooking like a pig on a spit, then on the train they freeze your ass off.’
‘I guess you wish you had on a velvet jacket right now too, huh?’
‘Very funny,’ I laugh.
‘You guys don’t have air-conditioning on the trains in London in summer?’
‘No.’
‘And you prefer that?’
‘No. I complain about that too.’
Spanish shakes his head and laughs.
‘What?’
‘I think you like being unhappy.’
rock and roll.
SPANISH LUGS HIS instruments out of the van and up to the front door of his building, a two-family house in Bed-Stuy. I watch his walk from the back: straight-backed but loose. His jeans drag in the dirt. All around is New York at full volume, full of happenings outside every store-front, on every street corner, shouts of hostility and laughter. Sirens. Music. Just like the movies. The moon gives us only one cool half of its face, an eternity away from these dark, hot streets.
We pour single file into the musty communal hallway. His two band-mates bring up the rear with their languorous, giggling banter. Neither Spanish nor I say very much at all. I feel stiff all over and uncoordinated, tripping up on a bicycle that’s leaning against the wall. It clatters to the ground.
‘Shit!’
‘You OK?’ asks Spanish, whipping round, steadying me. I can feel the warmth of his fingers through my T-shirt.
‘Yeah,’ I say, trying to lift the bike back into place but making it worse. ‘Crap. I’m such an idiot . . .’
‘You’re not. Accidents happen. Nobody died.’ Quickly, he restores order. ‘See?’ he smiles. ‘Good as new.’
I nod. And finally, when he’s reassured of my good spirits, we go upstairs and round on the landing to where he lives on the second floor. The walls are purple, the floors stripped and bright. There are achingly vivid paintings leaned up against the walls that can’t seem to make up their minds if they’re abstract or not. Twisted perspectives. I feel excited and a little bit ill looking at them. An upturned wooden crate serves as a coffee table and old sofas are covered in faded, once-colourful throws and cushions. Scattered around the room are various instruments including several guitars, bongo drums, a keyboard and some funky world music-y looking ones I don’t know the names of. There are books stacked in a corner next to a small television poised on yet another upturned crate. The windows are dressed in long swathes of velvet.
Despite the Bohemian styling, nothing appears out of place or dusty. Not a stray cup, CD, or discarded item of clothing can be seen anywhere. I follow everyone else’s example and take my shoes off.
‘You shouldn’t wear sneakers without socks,’ says Spanish.
‘Right,’ I reply.
We sit in near silence while the bassist and the drummer recline on beanbags, rolling their zoots. Spanish remains standing, staring at us all with a thoughtful look on his face. It occurs to me that I really don’t know these guys. Especially not Spanish. He wafted, alert and critical, through his sound checks at that little bar in Tribeca. But the minute he launched into his set two hours later, I realised that nothing I’d seen of him so far was represented, none of that gentleness. Fronting his band he was a different animal entirely. He was violent, strutting, hoarse, cruel. His music was by turns ethereal and hellish. I almost ran away. And I’ve known his band members for exactly four hours.
‘Why so blue, Spanish?’ says Rasta Jesus. The drummer.
‘Ain’t shit.’
‘Whatever, man. You got that look on your face.’
‘I wish ya’ll wouldn’t smoke that garbage in my house.’
Sub and Rasta Jesus just look at each other and keep smoking. I think they catch my bemused look ’cause the drummer, who has this sweet, pore-less face like the nickname suggests, says, ‘Don’t worry. He always says that. Forgets it was the green gave him the first seeds of his inspiration.’
I sit alone on the couch wondering where Zed is and thinking that maybe I made my point back at the house. I’ll just wait for a good opportunity to drop it in the conversation that I’m leaving. I should have gone back after the show. Don’t know why I didn’t.
‘I’m past that. Ya’ll fuckers are still locked in the beginner’s class,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘You smoke, Eden?’
‘No,’ I lie. Well, sort of lie. It’s not like I’ve ever bought any.
‘Me neither.’ He glances at his band members. ‘Weed is poison. It’s a lie. It’s been promoted in hip-hop like it’s our culture. But really, it’s just a trick to start kids off smoking so young they’re completely numb.’
‘What’s up with you, amigo? The show was pretty perfect today.’
‘You,’ Spanish jabs the air with his finger, ‘were playing too fast.’
Rasta Jesus shakes his head and shrugs.
‘I think the shit was immaculate,’ Sub comments, rubbing an almost black hand over his bleached blond hair.
‘You want anything to drink, Eden?’ Spanish asks me.
‘What you got?’
‘Water.’
I laugh; he doesn’t. ‘OK.’
He jumps up with sudden force and disappears out of the room. Rasta Jesus and Sub both sort of shrug at me with their eyes and keep smoking. There’s a funny unpredictable feeling to everything here. I wish someone would put on some music or the TV or something.
Spanish returns with a bottle of water, two glasses, and a look on his face, like he just tasted something bad. He pours it out for us and puts the bottle on the table.
‘I’m mad we don’t see more black people at the gigs,’ he says to the others, waving his water around so it spills over the sides of the glass. Some lands on my leg and I watch as a single drop races down my thigh. ‘Sorry!’ he says, and wipes it away without thinking.
‘It’s OK.’
‘Sorry!’ he says again, snatching his fingers away from my flesh.
‘I’m just happy we have anyone come and see us,’ says Rasta Jesus.
The bassist is examining his fingernails like he’s heard it all before.
‘But this is our shit, RJ,’ says Spanish with quiet intensity. ‘It’s ours. I hate the way we act like we can’t be nothing but rappers and RnB androids . . .’
‘You just gotta give it time. Life is all about seasons and cycles.’
‘It’s a plan to lock us into tiny boxes where we can’t breathe like free men.’ Spanish wipes his mouth. ‘They’ve made it out like blackness is this small thing. Some kind of fashion statement. It’s a crime . . .’
‘But Spanish—’
‘It makes me so mad ’cause people come up to me and they like the music but they act like it’s some kind of weird alternative to the bullshit mainstream.’ His face has actually gone a bit pink. ‘You know what I mean?’
‘Not really,’ I say, feeli
ng contrary. The others snigger. Spanish stops for a moment.
‘It’s not alternative, Eden. It’s ours,’ he repeats, sitting beside me. ‘The first beat of the drum in Africa. The shamanic out-of-body experience. Inter-dimensional music. Experimentation, improvisation, the fucking blues. That’s ours. How’d we get so small?’ He’s nodding, staring at all our faces. ‘A clown, a whore or a savage,’ he says, and I wonder if he’s being general or specific. ‘That’s all we’re supposed to be. You know what I say?’
‘What do you say?’ I murmur. His face is close and beautiful, his breath scentless.
‘Suck my biro, cracker.’
I choke with laughter. Sub shakes his head and smiles. Rasta Jesus blows out smoke and says, ‘Crazy half-white motherfucker.’
‘No such thing as half-white, RJ.’
‘God!’ Sub exclaims languidly. ‘Shut up for a minute, Malcolm Mohammed Martin Luther Farrakhan. Let the girl relax.’
I laugh, but Spanish continues to glow with evangelical fervour. ‘I like you,’ he says to me suddenly. ‘Do you need anything? Are you hungry? I don’t have much food here, but I think there’s pasta . . . or I could go and get you something . . .’
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘Be right back,’ says Spanish, gone again.
‘Interesting,’ observes Rasta Jesus with a puff and an arched eyebrow.
‘It was a good show,’ I say for want of something coherent to say.
Sub wanders over to the stereo and puts some music on, then he and RJ talk about its technical proficiency and whether or not it lacks soul. It becomes clear to them quite quickly that I don’t have an opinion.
‘Here.’ Spanish shoves a tall glass full of pink in front of me. ‘I had some, uh, organic berries in the freezer so I made you a smoothie. I put some honey and wheatgerm in there for you as well.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘You’re welcome. It’s,’ he scratches his curly head, ‘really good for you. You know. Just in case you were hungry.’
He watches while I take a sip. ‘It’s lovely,’ I tell him earnestly.