by Diana Evans
When Pauline got home the flat was empty. It was well past nine. She felt something. Something was wrong. She’d felt it on the bus, a flip in her stomach, an inexplicable dread, and now again as she turned the key. She had the sensation that she was turning it into an emptiness that would never stop turning, and once inside the silence was ominous. Where was the sound of the television? Where was Justin? The sky seemed a strange colour tonight, an end-of-world kind of colour, black and red mixed together. And there was no moon. It was hidden by the clouds. She called Ethan’s phone and he did not answer. Justin had lost his phone and she hadn’t replaced it yet. She went out again and walked by the courtyard and up and down Paradise but did not see them. Instead she saw Mrs Jackson who again could not find her house, and was wandering up and down in her thin green dress and slippers. Pauline did not have the patience for Mrs Jackson tonight. Her heart was bulging. Her ribs were snapping. Mrs Jackson, it’s number eight! she shouted. Have you seen my boys? Have you seen my boy? But Mrs Jackson did not know what she meant. Mrs Jackson allowed Pauline to lead her back into her house, then Pauline went back home and waited.
And how Justin loved his mother. Pauline had no idea how much Justin really loved her, how he wanted to look after her when she was old and walk with her for the longest he could until there was no further to walk and he would have to say goodbye. He never wanted to say goodbye. She was in his thoughts now as he walked around the park looking for Ethan, along the tunnel of trees leading up to the tower blocks whose windows were lit up with the many evenings of disparate people and always made a beautiful sight. The traffic was swishing by on the high road. The tattoo parlour and the barbershop were closed but the bright red lights of TM Chicken were on. He went into the courtyard where he’d hung out with Ethan recently. He walked around to the green at the front. No one, none of the pack, no one who called him The Singing Professor. Ethan, actually, by now, was miles away. He had been dragged into a car and taken away, and they were going to fix him, really fix him. That’s what happens when you cross this one, this baddest one from Catford, when you get too close to the devil. You get fixed indirectly, in ways you might never have imagined could happen to you in your life, in your family. They hurt you by hurting what you love, by taking it away, by destroying it.
So Justin walked out of the courtyard back on to the dark green, singing to himself because he felt nervous. There were people gathering amidst the trees, their thick jackets and loose strides. They were prey-conscious, metallic. There were blades in the pockets of their denim. They were alert, existing at the very edge of themselves. Justin thought he recognised someone from the pack and he went towards them, but as he got closer he sensed danger, he turned in the other direction, soon he was running, and when the time was high they leapt for him, jumping, their silver toys flashing, get him, they said, while across the road the chefs at the chicken shop were putting more oil in the vat and they were restocking the chicken and the place smelt burnt because they’d had a little fire in the back just now, a spark of a flame that started suddenly, from nowhere. They had doused it in time and now they were making more chicken. They were both wearing TM Chicken caps and red polo-shirts. It’s quiet tonight, one said to the other, Yeah, it’s always quiet on Tuesdays, the other said. Aadesh said he was glad he wasn’t working tomorrow, Wednesday was his day off. What you doing? said Hakim, poking at the chicken with the long fork. Taking Lakshmi out, innit. Is it, I heard it’s gonna rain tomorrow. Shit, said Aadesh. Then they heard someone shouting. They looked towards the door. A figure was coming across the road, a falling, running, crazy kind of walking like he wouldn’t make it to the other side. A car swerved by him and beeped. The figure came closer. He was clutching his side and feeling the air with his free hand. His heart was beating faster than it had ever beat. He was living in just this one single moment, and in this moment there were memories, pictures, his mother was in this place, in this one single moment. She was waiting for him in the flat and he wanted to go back to her, to his first country, to his mother who was his first country, and walk with her to the end of her life for the longest he could. At no other time had he wanted this more strongly than now. He tripped. He stumbled. He saw the red light of the TM Chicken banner. He saw the strange bright haze over the street, the final gold, everything had a shine on it. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die. He was crying because it hurt so much and he didn’t want to die.
That was the other big thought, aside from his mother. Pain. They had found him, they had clocked him, the brother of Ethan. They found him in their midst among the trees and the chosen one went for him with her small girl hand. The blade crunched through the spine. Pain unfolded. It spread through him like a storm, like flames. It flung out, hot searing rips right through him. It hurt so much that he could see it, the wide gold shine, the red, the distant stars, he looked up as he reached the curb and at that moment Pauline stood up in her living room and looked out at the night, an unbearable thought, a heartbeat missed, she held her stomach, she walked out of the room into the hall, towards the door, opened it.
There was hope right up until death. Hope is the last thing that dies. Justin staggered across the pavement to the red door of the chicken shop. He grabbed the doorframe and with a last strength hauled himself forward. Help me, he whispered (he felt so quiet, like he was dreaming). Oh shit, Aadesh said. Shit, Hakim said, Oh my god. They went to him, just as he fell, half in the shop, half outside the shop. He was bleeding so much it was just pouring out of him like an ocean all across the pavement. The yellow T-shirt was soaked through, his jacket over it. His final thought, the one after his mother, the very last sensation, was that he was freezing cold, even though the place he felt himself entering was full of heat. A door was open. He went inside and the door closed behind him. It was too late now for anything. Even for Pauline, who was running down Paradise Row to cradle him on the wet, red floor.
The blood continued to run into the mortar around the paving slabs outside the chicken shop. It would never quite rub off, through all kinds of weather. It was there if you knew it was there.
*
‘Hello?’
‘Hey, it’s me.’
‘Me who?’
‘Michael.’
‘Michael … Oh, Michael, what …?’ There was a sleepy pause. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
It was 2.15 a.m., and Michael had been staying at the Queen’s Hotel in Crystal Palace for three and a half weeks. It was a vast, cream-coloured building in the colonial style set away from the parade along the road to Croydon, the Beulah tower to its right, the Crystal tower to its left. There were flags of the world adrift on the roof, a red path leading up towards the entrance, but inside it was not so grand. The reception desk had the feel of a motel or an airport stop-off. There was a murky fish tank in the seating area where people watched music videos on an overhead screen. The carpets, the same throughout, a pattern of navy blue and beige, were curling away from the skirting boards, and there were passing smells of body odour and detergent. It was not the kind of place he wanted to come home to, but it was close enough to the children and it meant he could avoid his parents’ questions.
His room, where he was now, lying flat on his back on the carpet, was at the front of the building on the fourth floor. To get there he had to take a tiny lift up, containing that same dichotomous smell, then walk along a series of corridors, through a door into a stairwell, and up a short flight of stairs on to a secluded landing. He always felt like he was entering a labyrinth, until he went inside and the room opened out to him. It was big and bright by day but sad and sepulchral by night. He had two huge windows looking out over the crystal hills towards the park, where the palace had been (the edge of the gravelled platform where the main transept had stood was just in view). There was a sunken armchair in the corner where he threw his coat and bag on entering, and there were two beds, a queen and a single. He slept on the queen and used the single as a sofa, but at night h
e imagined it as Ria’s bed – a wisp, a thought of her slept there next to him in the dark, when he missed her so much that he could almost hear her breathing. He did not like this absence of himself in his children’s nights. It made him feel absent in himself. He wanted to carry Blake downstairs in the morning, to descend into breakfast with him. He wanted to feel Melissa’s incidental presence nearby, doing her hair, reading her Hemingway. All of this pathos and loneliness he needed to express to someone. He had tried both beds tonight but neither of them were working, he couldn’t sleep, so he had decided to try the floor. This also was not working, and he had been fighting the urge to call Rachel for over an hour. Would she mind? Was it too late? Might she be lying there likewise unable to sleep, hoping that he might, maybe?
‘Sorry. Did I wake you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry. It’s all right, you go back to sleep.’
‘What is it? What do you want?’
The hard edge in her voice made him feel bad. He hadn’t expected annoyance, only sympathy. He wanted to hang up but it was too late now.
‘I can’t sleep,’ he explained. ‘I thought I’d call you, to chat …’
‘To chat …’
‘Yeah.’
She sighed. ‘I’ve got work tomorrow.’
It had occurred to him to call Rachel when he’d first checked in, once he’d cleaned his room with bleach and unpacked. He could spend whole nights with her here. He could be with her fully, spread out on the queen. They could be magnificent together before these windows, this wide open sky, but he had decided not to out of loyalty to Melissa. It seemed important, not least for his conscience. So instead he had gone down to the hotel bar and had a whiskey and Coke. It slipped, ice cool and copper, down into the region of his heart, down into his boomerang light. He had followed it by another and then gone out for a walk, away from the high road into the steep streets leading off it, turning corners, coming out into silent crescents and clusters of greenery. It had become a habit, this whiskey and walking in the evenings, right into Fox Hill, left on to Tudor Road, left again on to Cintra Park, along the curve of the pavements, through the pools of the street lights. This evening he had gone into the little park near the hotel and sat down on a bench, faintly inebriated and craving another whiskey. On the next bench there were two pink drunks drinking from cans of Asda beer. They looked at him. Their coats were dirty. There was a thin space. A very thin space.
‘You can’t just call me in the middle of the night like this,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s not OK, OK?’
And she was right. It wasn’t. There are very few people you can call. He had one more drink and fell asleep around four.
*
‘Tell me how to make the stew,’ Melissa said. She was on the phone to her mother. It was late afternoon in Bell Green.
‘I’ve already told you.’
‘I know but tell me again, I forgot.’
She had her pen and paper ready.
‘Take the Oxo,’ Alice said. ‘Pour it in and mix. Then, bitter leaf. At last the chicken.’
‘The chicken at the end? When do I put the Maggie in?’
‘Any time. Doesn’t matter. Make sure you mash the eba properly. Put water.’
‘OK.’
It was probably going to be another failure, but she’d had the urge to make eba, yesterday on the high street passing the plantain shop. You could buy three plantains there for a pound. The fat man at the meat counter put them in a blue plastic bag, and then she had added the yam, on a whim, some chicken and some okra, there was gari at home already. It seemed like a comforting thing to do, a way of being somewhere else. She wanted to escape from these dark British streets, their haggard, downtrodden faces, their meanness and menace and the stifling air.
‘Is Michael come home yet?’ Alice said with concern and determination in her voice.
‘No.’
Now the lecture on the imperative of the male presence in the parenting household delivered with traditional Nigerian outrage.
‘You cannot manage on your own. You must let ’im come back. What about the children? You know men must live at home with their family. Don’t leave him away. If you do that he will start to drink and and and smoke and go to nightclub. That’s what they do!’
‘Mum —’
‘Women cannot do without husband. All that time I stay with your daddy because of you children, I cannot manage alone. I take, take, take. Parent must be together, until the children grown up. Tell Michael to come home this week on Friday. I don’t like him to live somewhere else. It worry me.’
‘All right, Mum,’ Melissa said. ‘I’m going now to make the eba.’
‘Listen to me!’
‘I am listening.’
‘Put water slowly and mash it properly.’
‘OK.’
‘Tell Michael to come home,’ she repeated.
Every few days he did come, to see the children and put them to bed. Then he went back to the hotel. Sometimes he had dinner with them. He was coming again tonight, and Melissa decided, as she was stirring in the Oxo cube, that he must also have some eba and stew. He had been looking quite thin.
Since yesterday the flowers for Justin had amassed at the entrance to the park, as they would continue to amass in the coming days and weeks. There were balloons and bouquets. There were pictures and candles on the pavement while the traffic went on back and forth past the chicken shop. In the evenings his school friends gathered and sat around weeping. It became a pretty site of early death, and a common site. There were other flowers, for other children who had gone too soon, which were wrapped around the lamp posts, around the railings by the sides of the roads. The flowers would be replenished, most of all by mothers, again and again, becoming less bright, less shiny, until one day even the mothers would let them die, withdrawing and sealing the love, all the memories, finally within themselves.
‘Did you hear what happened?’ Melissa asked when Michael arrived.
‘What?’
‘Dad-dy, Dad-dy, Dad-dy!’ went the song.
‘Hold on, darling. What?’
‘Another stabbing.’ She said it quietly so that Ria couldn’t hear. ‘Down next to the library.’
She had seen it, a dimension of it, a component in the project of the death, though she did not know that she had seen it. When Ethan had walked down Paradise in the twilight towards the park with his blade in his pocket and his cap sideways on his head, he had never made it there. Before he had reached the bottom of the road, Melissa had heard a car screech to a stop outside, and she had looked out of the window of the master court where she happened to be changing Blake. Two men got out of the car carrying clubs. They dragged the boy wearing the cap into the car. Then they got back into the car and it sped off again with the devil inside it, and now they were going to really fix him. It had made her shiver. It had made her stomach twist, because it was clear to see right there in the street with her baby on this side of the window and the devil on that side that a boy somehow was going to die tonight and nothing was going to stop it. She had walked away from the window, into the inner recesses of the house.
Michael said, ‘No,’ his shoulders dropping. ‘Another one?’
‘Another one.’
He seemed deflated, exhausted. His black coat was loose around his shoulders and he was stooped slightly, a faint bow, a salute to age. A melancholy was creeping into his face and changing its atmosphere, which was frightening, from the outside as well as from the inside.
‘You look mashed,’ she said as he dragged off his coat.
‘Thanks.’
‘I didn’t mean that horribly.’
‘I didn’t sleep well last night.’
‘Why?’
‘Are you staying here tonight, Daddy?’ Ria said. She missed him so, especially at night, and in the early morning.
Both these questions he answered without really answering. He stared into the children’s faces with a warm and frowning int
ensity, studying their noses, their chins. Melissa watched them from the kitchen as she was pounding the eba. There was an extreme rightness in his presence, in the four of them together like this under one roof. She had felt it every time he’d come, and a wrongness every time he’d left. All of them were being deprived of something that belonged to them, an aspect of home.
‘Do you remember the boy who sang at Ria’s school?’ she said. He had come into the kitchen. Nina Simone was there in her baritone with her friend Mr Bojangles. ‘Justin, his name was. He couldn’t sing to save his life, remember? – well, literally.’
‘It’s him dead?’ Michael said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus. That’s fucked up. He was only little bit.’
‘I know.’
The eba was lumpy. Melissa carried on mashing it like her mother had said, and added a little water. The stew was simmering on the cooker, along with some okra in a smaller pan next to it to add for gooiness. Michael poured himself a drink, still knowing this kitchen, inhabiting it. Every so often he moved past her and touched her gently, almost subconsciously, in the small of her back. She realised that she missed him doing that, the possibility of him doing it.