by Gemma Weekes
I go straight into the kitchen where I know I have a bottle of something hot that’s not coffee. I drink it straight – no ice – at the crooked table, nibbling dejectedly at a packet of crisps. I pour out some more Jack and pretend I don’t hear when Zed walks up and stands in the doorway.
‘What’s up?’ he says.
‘You tell me, Casanova.’
‘Eden, I . . .’
‘I guess it’s kind of serious with her too, hey Zed? Nice to see you have no problem getting serious with girls. Max is lucky you get so much practice.’
Without answering, he pours himself a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and sits at the table. I refill. ‘I just . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘It was just a thing. You know what I mean?’
‘Not really. Why don’t you explain?’
‘What’s the point? Would anything I say make a difference to you, right now?’ I shrug. He takes a bite of cereal. ‘So how was that show the other night?’ I hate when people speak with their mouths full. It’s disgusting. ‘Spanish and his guys?’
‘He’s a genius.’
‘Indubitably.’
‘We didn’t fuck.’
He stops chewing for a second and I look up from my glass. He stares.
‘I didn’t ask you that.’
So I put the empty glass in the sink and take the bottle with me.
‘Good night, Zed,’ I say.
the biggest leap.
HARLEM, TEN YEARS ago.
Zed didn’t look at me while he unlocked the door to his dad’s apartment. I listened to the breath stop in his throat. I watched the warm, salty curve of his neck. He was just a boy then, sweet and unfinished. His ears were still slightly too large for his head, his neck too skinny, his cornrows beginning to unravel at the temples. But he was already towering and broad in stature, with quick slanted eyes and hard cheekbones. He thought he might be handsome. He wasn’t sure yet.
He jiggled the keys once more in the lock and it seemed to me that the door gave – finally – with a sigh. I felt as if I were hurtling toward a precipice. I can’t remember if we spoke or not. I can’t remember breathing, but I know that I must have. Every part of my body was chiming like a bell. We laughed to mask the tension, walked into the small, neat living room, sat on the forest-green couch that yielded to us with a leather squeak. We were very young and dwarfed by the event that lay before us. I knew I’d never be the same again. I’d already begun to change irrevocably, and now the only way to move was forward. The inevitability of it seemed tangible. It made everything from the couch to the remote control complicit in our inelegant mating ritual. The TV only thickened the silence. Then he said: ‘You wanna see my room?’
‘OK,’ I replied, half-strangled, embarrassed for us. We were not smooth.
I remember that it was a small room, and that it was opposite the bathroom. The carpet and curtains were dark blue. There was a bookshelf and no TV and a Wu Tang Clan poster on the wall.
‘Dominic said you write poetry,’ I ventured, thinking back to a conversation me and my step-dad had weeks before in a diner.
‘Yeah . . . sometimes,’ he said bashfully. I liquefied. ‘You wanna, uhm. You wanna hear some?’
He reached down under his bed and his arm brushed mine. He pulled out a Nike box full of notebooks. He began reading to me. The blood roared in my eardrums. I heard nothing. I felt tremendous weight pushing down from all around me, toward him.
He stopped reading. Looked at me. ‘What do you think?’
‘Beautiful,’ I said, but I think he knew I’d not been listening to his poem. ‘Zed, what I said the other day. I wasn’t kidding.’
I’m ready.
‘I know,’ he said, putting his long fingers to my cheek. It seemed to take days for him to reach my face with his own. A kiss is the biggest leap you can take to reach another person; the space is interminable. And I’d been so far away from everybody for so long. When his lips touched mine I felt like I was part of the world, and like a woman, and like I had another chance to be worth something to somebody.
His tongue soft in my mouth, his arms around me. We fell back into his bed and he hit his head on the wall. We laughed at each other then, and the moment was infinitely more tender. I pushed the notebooks to the floor.
‘Are you sure about this?’
‘Yes.’
We undressed. His body was dark and firm and covered me completely. I reached down and touched him through his shorts, feeling electrified, a thousand little shocks from every place he kissed me. He took off the shorts and was heavy in my hands, and warm. I was scared. He told me not to be afraid, as if my thinking was loud enough for him to hear.
‘I’ve never done this before either,’ he whispered.
‘You’re a . . .!’
‘Yeah.’
‘But you said—’
‘I lied,’ he told me. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said, feeling even softer for him. ‘It’s OK.’
And he pulled the sheet over us, struggled into the rubber that had probably been sitting in his wallet for a few years. It was really going to happen. I clutched at his neck and shoulders, ran my hands over his hair.
‘Ouch!’ I cried. ‘OUCH!’ And it really hurt.
‘It’ll be cool, just let me . . .’
‘Ouch!’ My insides. Everything opening out to receive him . . . reluctantly. It felt different from the way I thought it was going to feel. An entire universe of nerve-endings came awake.
‘OK . . . OK.’
‘No don’t stop . . .’
‘I thought you said—’
‘No. Keep going,’ I said. ‘Keep going.’
After the pain ended, mostly my mind was empty. For the first time, I had no mind – only a body. But in a moment of laughing self-consciousness, I thought about everyone waiting for us at the house, Marie and Paul and Aunt K, and us over here in Harlem.
I smiled, Zed smiled and some of his sweat dripped in my eye.
these dreams.
Mama – if I climb inside myself
Can I take you with me?
Mama – I can’t breathe, I can’t speak
Mama – I can’t sleep through these dreams –
She like a tight-rope –
being shaken at both ends like –
Drop, sucker!
It’s a knot
I been picking at lately
Love supposed to be this soft descent
like snow, like confetti like –
But what if it’s more like falling off the back of a moving truck?
Getting up 100 yards away
With a concussion
All the skin scraped off your left side?
And did he fall or
Was he pushed?
She want artery blood
She want
I can’t hear myself through her handwriting
Is such an inky mess
She a garden full of weeds.
A garden full of overripe
Flowers, thorns and bugs;
Roots tunnelling under ground.
Everything edible, everything poison.
She a garden humming with too much.
Mama – if I climb inside myself
Can I take you with me?
Mama – I can’t breathe, I can’t speak
Mama – I can’t sleep through these dreams –
She got eyes like church shoes on a beggar
Collecting tears
Fat mouth spilling with poem
Overripe body
Black lashes
Red-coloured and not yellow
Bright and sharp as summer concrete
Sharp in the knees and in the elbows.
A kiss would be like drinking pepper sauce
Through a straw, mama
Her sweet-sweet garden smells
Her bubble-gum breath,
Her incessant talk.
She never shuts up,
Even when she’s silent.
>
Even when she’s gone.
But she’s never gone and
And look.
Here she comes
A blind tourist walking
My dark alleys armed with
A flashlight and a fruit basket
Like she fully intent on saving the world
And I’m it –
Crazy, beautiful girl
Mama – if I climb inside myself
Can I take you with me?
Mama – I can’t breathe, I can’t speak
Mama – I can’t sleep through these dreams–
I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep
Through these dreams
I can’t sleep
I can’t sleep
I can’t sleep –
September
hungry.
FIVE SUNSETS ’TIL Labor Day and September hasn’t taken the heat down one degree.
The basement is an oven that tips me half-baked out into the Brooklyn streets. No cooler out here, but there’s light and people, air, movement; some terrain outside the blasted landscape of my own mind.
Out on Fenimore Street I give my clicker an assignment, twisting it this way and that in my damp palms. I want to steal pictures of summer’s official last days, the kids doing their best to pack every second to bursting with mischief as the new school year approaches. I snatch pictures of high-heeled, Technicolor sandals and contrasting toenails. Of men profiling in convertibles. Tree on sky, sneaker on pavement, summer in the city. I capture covert images of women sitting outside in their mas camps, laughing together and hand-stitching bright costumes for the Labor Day parade.
I creep closer. The costumes are fabulous. Feathered, glittered and shiny. All colours, all shapes. I’m starting to wish I had a costume too. An excitement has begun inside me that I can’t name . . .
‘Hey!’
I’ve been caught.
‘Sorry! Sorry . . .’ I lower my camera.
‘What you doing?’ says a big woman with hair a bright, sewn-in myriad of colours. She stands up. ‘You taking pictures of us?’
‘Erm . . .’
‘What are you? A spy or a photographer?’
‘A . . . a photographer,’ I tell her. ‘I’m visiting from London. I’m sorry, I should have asked first.’
‘Yeah you should have!’ says peacock head, then she flashes a smile for the first time. ‘But it’s cool. You just gotta send us a copy of the photos, OK?’
‘Yeah! Yeah. Thanks!’ I say, relieved. ‘No problem!’
The four women all huddle together, smiling big and clutching their fantastic creations. All of their faces have that particular quality I’ve seen everywhere lately as we head toward a change of season. Every moment aware of its imminent death, every moment electric.
‘Are you going to J’Ouvert morning before the parade as well?’
‘Of course!’ they say and, ‘You best believe it!’ and ‘Hell yeah, I’m going!’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Every year,’ says a woman in a bright headwrap and chunky jewellery, ‘I can feel my ancestors at J’Ouvert. I imagine how it must have looked, that first sunrise after slavery finally ended. A new beginning. You make sure you experience it while you’re here, even if you don’t make it to the actual parade.’
‘I will,’ I tell them, making myself a promise. I’m going even if it’s a solo expedition – a scenario that seems more than likely at this point.
Aunt K still isn’t back. Brandy doesn’t want to go out much. She’s either at work, or upstairs with Violet helping out with Eko. And Zed, for what it’s worth, got a job in a bar near Prospect Park. What about your music? I asked him, angling the question sharp, to wound. He laughed. What about it? You think I’m Jay-Z or somebody? I blew all my savings in London and there ain’t much I can do with a microphone if I’m dead from hunger, he shrugged.
Now we avoid each other even more, if that’s possible. And there’s no sign of Spanish, either.
In fact, the only man who calls me is my dad, who tracked me down through Juliet. He’s doing the ‘come back, all is forgiven’ routine, but it’s probably just because he thinks it will look un-Christian if there’s a rift between us. Plus he wanted to break the news of his engagement to Old Chanders, who wants to put me in God knows what kind of fuchsia atrocity of a bridesmaid’s dress. I may have to stay in New York for ever just to avoid the indignity of it.
‘Thanks, ladies! Enjoy the parade,’ I say, wishing I could stay with them. They all tell me I should do the same, and one of the women writes down her email address and hands it to me with a flourish. ‘I’ll send the pictures soon,’ I promise them.
‘When your aunt gets back,’ says the woman with the head wrap, giving me a small nod and smile of recognition, ‘tell her Ms Beatrice said hello, and that I’ll be over soon.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I squeak. ‘How did you know?’
She just smiles, eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘Make sure you go out and dance. Young people,’ she says, ‘should dance every night, while the flesh still permits.’
I scuttle back up to my end of the road, feeling chased, excited and restless. Drop my keys trying to get through the door, almost falling down the basement steps. My mind itches as I upload the fresh pictures to my laptop. I barely register all the brightly-coloured frames and hard shapes. The woman’s words have mobilised me for a plan I didn’t even know I was forming all day. Longing for action. Humming the theme tune from M.A.S.H.
And it doesn’t take me long to find him. Reckless Gods has a website, and a quick look on it lets me know that they have a gig tonight at a club called the Knitting Factory.
I’ve got to find out what’s wrong with me. Maybe if I can figure out why Spanish hasn’t called me since the sleepover two weeks ago, it’ll shed light on my general lack of appeal.
An hour later I’m strutting down Leonard Street like it’s a catwalk, trying to conjure some confidence, some weight, some power.
I’m on time and I’m ready. I’ve no bag to search at the entrance. All I have in my pockets are banknotes, a Metrocard, keys and my kohl pencil. I pay without seeing the cashier and walk down a plush hallway into the back of a red and black room. The walls are burgundy against the maroon carpet of the stage, which is flanked by jet curtains. The exit signs gleam tomato. I can see neither the beige boy nor his band. Instead a wild-haired compere in a Black Rock Coalition T-shirt is introducing a documentary screening.
‘Excuse me . . .’ A bald girl with a nose ring looks at me expectantly. I ask her: ‘Are Reckless Gods playing here tonight?’
‘I don’t know, hun, I’m just here for the film . . .’
‘Yeah they are,’ a friend of hers in space-age eye make-up says. ‘I saw it on the flyer. They’re awesome.’
About two thousand years later the film ends and the compere announces that the band will be on shortly. I listen to them tuning up. No Spanish. There’s a man trying his saxophone, and a tiny guy wielding a hefty double bass with inexplicable ease.
I’m strung high between the awkward layers of sound. The strings and the horn, the dull mournful cry of the bass. Underneath, the tinny pre-recorded music is rendered futile. There is chatter, people drawn tight around candlelit tables.
Where’s Spanish? Maybe I got it wrong and there are two bands with the same name. That would be fun. The saxophone spills over the top of the DJ-spun music and oozes down the sides of the room, a disjointed soundtrack to my nerves. My eyes keep twitching toward the door, but it’s not him for a solid ten minutes.
Then, suddenly, it is.
And I’m reminded how hard and skinny and weird he is. The rips in his jeans, his cinematic bones, that angry walk. There’s something about the injured angle of his shoulders that understands me. And maybe being understood is the closest any of us can ever get to not being alone. He looks neither right nor left on his way past, steps up onstage and drapes a guitar over his slim body.
‘I brought in some friends to jam with us,’ he says. ‘Thanks for another chance to experiment.’ All his stern confidence is startling. Attractive. And then he’s singing: Don’t fight just let them do it to ya/ Break you open, get into ya/ Like a poison swimming through ya/ Black boy in your funhouse mirror/ Black girl in your funhouse mirror . . .
He does song after song, thickened by the bass and the sax. The people clap and cheer and feel understood and tired and stretched, and then eventually it’s the end and I make my shaky way to the front.
‘Hey!’ I croak, shaking. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ This time I’ll ask the hard questions. He can say Because I didn’t want to! and it won’t kill me, will it?
‘Eden!’ he says, shocked. ‘Hey!’ He leans over and hugs me hard. RJ and Sub nod at me with smiles and I go soft with relief. Eden still. Not just some would-be groupie they don’t remember. The only person who isn’t smiling is the female standing next to Spanish with bad skin and slightly dopey eyes. I think I’ve seen her before round the park on a Sunday.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I say again, stronger.
‘I wanted to but . . .’ he trails off. He looks nervously at Bad Skin. Have they fucked before or something? Well I don’t care. I don’t care if she’s his wife. I’ve made it this far. She eyeballs me steadily, a cheap romance novel of a woman hanging off him.
‘You wanted to . . .?’ I raise my eyebrows at him in encouragement. ‘What?’
‘I couldn’t find the number.’
‘Oh.’ I laugh. ‘OK.’
Dopey Eyes then decides to put her arm around his waist and interrupt. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but Spanish hasn’t looked away from me once. She rolls her eyes like I’m a run in her stockings.
‘Oi! Can’t you see that this is a private conversation?’
Oh Lord. I said that. I’m gonna get in a fight and get bloody deported. Spanish’s eyes flick between us like he can’t quite believe what’s happening either. But it’s too late to back down.
‘What?’
‘I said. This. Is. A private. Conversation.’
She lets go of Spanish and steps towards me. ‘Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?’ Squares her bony shoulders.
‘I’m trying to talk to Spanish.’