BY MAT JOHNSON
FROM Drop
Friday, I opened the door for her. This little woman, too proud to even look up at me past the rib she came to. She stood, beneath layers of white skies and before wet sidewalk, a vision. A face so black it was bold, cheeks a duo of sweeping circles beneath the soft rainbow of a head wrap that contained all the colors that could scream or cry for you.
“Is this the place?”
“Excuse me?”
“Is this the place that's supposed to be taking pictures of me?” she asked. She was so much smaller than I'd been expecting, but she had to be the dancer David hired: She was too pretty not to be getting paid for it.
“Please, please come in,” I managed. I shouldn't even have been answering the door because by this time, besides clients growing and waiting for our attentions, Urgent had a secretary, too, a bony, Marlboro Light–smoking Brixton boy named Raz who should have been down here with this woman, saving me from my awkwardness. The shoot was scheduled for a half hour before, but models, David reminded, were always late. Taking in the smell of her: of violet water and hot sauce.
“Fionna Otubanjo?” She just walked by me and started heading upstairs; I couldn't tell if she'd nodded. Tiny, this one. The size of a girl but the shape and proportions of a woman, making the stairwell look cavernous as my eyes struggled to keep perspective.
After I took her coat, introduced her to the photographer, the stylist, and even Margaret, who was taking a rare intermission from her reading to make an appearance on the third floor, I showed Fionna to the bathroom that would be her dressing room for the day. Then I pulled David to a far and relatively secluded section of the floor.
“Cuz, she's gorgeous.” Somebody in the room had to acknowledge this.
“Really? A bit of a head on a stick, I thought. A short stick at that. She looked bigger on her Z card. If you like, maybe later we'll go for a curry or something, you could ask her to tag along.” David reached into the cereal box in his hand and threw a kernel into my mouth.
Golden Crowns, an old-brand cereal owned by one of several companies that realized Urgent knew how to implant hunger in even the most bloated, who understood that our work was the stuff people were starting to whisper about, the kind that would be bringing back industry awards in the year to come. Its box stood in the center of the white cove, ready for its picture to be taken, short and proud and belligerent with caloric prophecies. Golden Crowns, a combination of flour, water, high-fructose corn syrup, and yellow dye number 24, but also something so sweet it didn't need milk or morning.
“Alright, luv,” David was bellowing at the emerged Fionna. “What we need you to do is just run, leap right over the box, right? Spread your legs open like scissors, give it as much as you can. We want to capture you directly above the Golden Crowns, almost as if they gave you the gift of flight.”
“I can do that,” Fionna said, looking at me, and wasn't it immediately clear that she could do much more? That she could hold your head in her lap, rub her little palms over your face and wipe away everything else besides the blackness behind closed eyes? That if there were arranged marriages I would have had David call her family immediately on my behalf, have stood behind him smiling and jumping up and down like a horny Masai?
The photographer's tin can lights sat on the floor, hung from erected scaffolding, rested on the ends of tables and chairs, all pointing in one direction, metallic ravens holding brilliant court. The heat almost solar in intensity, pulsing away from the illumination to the rest of the space beyond, the warm touch linking all those in the room together. And within the fire, one body moving. To watch her run, to see her leap. The determined start with bare feet slamming the floor and then the jump, the seizing of space with a ferocious kick, a smile that flashed gloriously as soon as the pivot foot left the ground. How could one so short fly so high? And all this along with a bowl of glued Golden Crowns in one hand and a spoon in the other. Running and leaping and landing. The toe and ball of one foot touched back down and the rest of the body followed, the flesh moving slightly past the limits of her bones for a moment until it bounced back into structure again. David walked behind me and snapped his fingers by my ear—“Pay attention to the work”—but how could anyone with her perspiring until the midnight fabric of her leotard became even darker beneath the neck and arms, her form becoming an essay on the possibilities of blackness, a diatribe about refusing the limitations of one word? I sat, leaned against David's desk with my shirt open, my sleeves rolled, watching. Witnessing the sweat drip away from her as she ran and explode around her when she landed, giving a shine to the floor. Steaming the windows to opaque rectangles, forcing me to sweat along with her, to feel my own oily wetness and susceptibility, until, in one particularly triumphant soar (spoon and bowl held by hunger), she landed in the puddle of sweat that she created, broke the spell, and bore a new one in a helpless painful cry.
“Oh, fucking hell!”
The first to reach her, I held Fionna's back as she held her ankle. “Are you okay?”
“No, it's not okay. I'm hurt!”
“Is it broken?”
“No. I don't know. I don't think so.” Inspired by the urgency of the moment, I moved around Fionna and gently took her leg into my lap, touched her ankle with my famished fingertips, bent the joint slowly in my hands up until “Ow!” and slowly back down until “Oh!” and left “Ew!” and right “AY!” until “No, it's not broken” but damn, isn't it divine to hear you scream and imagine that the sound must be the same when pleasure motivates it?
After the food, after the drinks, after it was too late for a limping girl to ride all the way back to East London, I offered my place to her for the night. It was the perfect time to ask the question: I had finally reached that delicate plateau where I was drunk enough for bravery but not too smashed to pronounce the words. Fionna agreed that would be good, “Because I'm very tired.” When I carried her from the cab into my apartment, the driver looked at me funny: Even he knew she was too pretty for a wreck like me to be holding. I managed to get out my keys and open the door without dropping her or her overstuffed duffel bag that weighed nearly as much as she did. What's in it?
“Just some of my clothes. Lately I've been staying with girlfriends while I hunt for a new bedsit. This is your place?” Fionna asked inside.
“Yeah. This is me.”
“You live alone then? No roommates or anything? How much do you pay?”
“I don't know. David says he take it out of my salary.”
“I've been looking for a new place for months, and I haven't seen one this nice. Not one that didn't cost a fortune.” She made me feel unusually lucky.
I turned on every light in the house as I carried her upstairs to the living room, trying to destroy any shadow that might scare her. Trying also not to bang her bad ankle against a wall. The swelling had gone down in the hours since the sprain, assisted by a variety of towel-wrapped foodstuffs Margaret found for her, but it was still an ugly thing sitting above her foot.
“Were you robbed recently?” Fionna looked around like maybe she didn't want me to put her down in this place.
“No, is something wrong?”
“You don't have any furniture,” she said, shocked, staring at my apartment with nothing more than its own dust and possibilities to fill it. “How long have you been living here?”
“About nine months. I bought a kitchen table and some chairs.” Actually, Margaret had made that donation from her basement, along with some dishes, flatware, and pots and pans after the time she came by the house to offer me leftover spaghetti and had to watch me sit on the floor eating it with my hands.
“Do you like it here?” Fionna's was a new voice echoing around these walls.
“I love it. I'm not going back to America.”
“I meant the flat. There's so much room, isn't there? You should really get some more furniture, right? Some carpets and such. Make a home. It could be really nice, once yo
u get the proper things together. Then you could rent a room out or something. It's too big for one person.” Fionna took the seat on the futon I offered to her. I turned on my clock radio hoping for something romantic; it was pathetic, that tinny, cheap, monotone sound. I slapped it off again and tried to smile.
“Have you thought of painting any of the rooms something besides white?” Fionna asked.
“I like the white walls, actually. It makes me feel kind of free, for some reason. No stimuli. It's like the color of silence. It's an old place: a bit more than a hundred years, I think. You should see what they used to paint the place. In some rooms, I've actually chipped at the paint a bit, with a knife, all the way down to the wood, to see all the layers the walls were covered in before. You know this room was actually pink once,” I said, motioning around. “And light blue, too.” What the hell was that? I was making things up and I still sounded like an idiot.
Fionna looked around. Her leg hung out of her dress; you could see the light cut a perfect line down whatever angle of it was closest to you. Her toes, poking out the front of her sandals, were long and beige on the bottom, as if she'd been walking through sweet pancake batter. On one toe was a golden ring, a strip of solid metal seizing a strip of delicate skin. If I took her foot in my hand and pulled that ring off slowly, she would be more naked than the mere lack of clothes could ever provide.
“Do you like it?” Fionna asked. “It's very expensive. I got it in the town of my father. In Nigeria. I could probably sell it here for enough for a car, if I wanted one.” Keep talking. As long as we're talking I won't try to kiss you, and then things won't go wrong. There won't be that moment when you say “Please, no,” and then that awkward time after I apologize when we're both sitting here, trying to act out the scene that mirrors this perfect time before anything stupid was done.
“I've always wanted to go to Africa. I actually got David to put some of my money aside, a bit each check, into a savings account, and that's the big thing I was planning. Fly down into Egypt, go into Côte d'Ivoire, then go by land the rest of the way into West Africa. Do you go back there a lot?”
“Sometimes. I go at Christmas sometimes, to see them. Christmas, there's parties, things to do. Our house, where I was born, is very big, very old. You would like it. It was the magistrate's, when it was still a colony. Tall ceilings, and so much wood. My whole family lives there. Maybe you could visit. We could have a good time there. I want to go to America someday.”
“No, you don't.”
Fionna fell asleep on the futon, halfway through an Alec Guinness flick on BBC2. Awake, I stared at her, petrified that if I fell asleep I would succumb to flatulence, or wake up with a viscous pool of my warm drool coating us both. So I just kept looking, scared she would wake up and catch me and then it would really be over. This wasn't like with Alex; it could not be as simple as reaching out to another sibling of solitude. Fionna was of another caste, the one stories were told about and pictures were taken of, so far above my own I was surprised she found me visible. I kept looking at her closed lids as the balls swam joyously beneath them. My ear resting on the mattress edge, listening to her breath.
Saturday, a lack of blinds combined with an eastern exposure meant that, as usual, I woke up at dawn blinded and sweating. Scared that she would awake and then leave me, I got dressed and went down to the supermarket to get some food, cook a breakfast so big that she couldn't move.
At Sainsbury's I resisted the urge to stand gawking at the incomprehensibly large selection of baked beans and pork products by jogging through the aisles, grabbing at staples. Back at my front door, I became sure Fionna had already vanished, that inside was a good-bye note with a smiley face but no phone number, but upstairs she was still lying there, pulling on her top sheet with the blind gluttony of the sleeping. Back down in the kitchen, I cooked in careful silence: Shoes off, movements slow and studied, I even turned down the heat on the potatoes when the grease started popping too loud. When I finished, I could hear her above me. A repetitive, scratching sound. Probably clawing her way out the living room window. But when I climbed the steps, the sound was coming from the bathroom. Fionna was in the tub. Crouched down on her knees, working on something. Her back to me, I saw her bare legs. The right ankle was so bloated it seemed to belong to another, much larger person.
‘You don't clean the bath very often, do you? How can you take a bath in this?' Pushing all her weight into the brush in her hand, scratching at the stain I had confused for permanent.
‘I take showers,' I offered, pointing at the hose that she'd disconnected from the nozzle.
‘Well, I prefer baths,' Fionna said, and kept scrubbing. Taking away not just the dirt but the discoloration that hung beneath it. Elbow jerking frantically, purposeful, as if she never wanted to see it again.
Saturday night turned out to be Fionna's club night. Iceni, below Piccadilly: all jungle, free cocktails for the best dancers, ladies free before eleven, men a tenner at the door. I'd managed to keep her around all day (you want some lunch, a nap, have you seen this video, wow it's time for dinner) so I wasn't about to lose her to my hatred of nightclubs. Once her ankle was wrapped, I carried her on my back down to the mini-cab, and then, in the West End, through the streets and into the club to a table full of waving, pointedly attractive women the same size as herself. ‘My American' was how I was introduced, to which the response was ‘Oh, right!' with smiles and ungripping handshakes.
Everywhere fags smoldering, fags burnt out, snubbed, fags crushed and left to die at the bottoms of dark bottles. Bright fags with wet lipstick stains perpetually kissing their butts. And for all of the hunting for unspent packs and elaborate lighting rituals (which usually commenced as soon as a new man stopped by to pay his respects to their grouping), I seemed to be the only one who was actually smoking, who was actually pulling the dark cloud into me and letting it spill back, warming my nostrils and shielding me from this room. It was the perfect evening because this was the perfect arena for me to go David-less out into the world: concealed under an unyielding blanket of sound, obscured by a calculated mix of darkness and random, off-color lights. Snug within the mist of tobacco, sips of my pint-cured bursts of self-consciousness. Saved by music so loud that it made my social deficiencies irrelevant. I was actually succeeding. Everyone seemed very pleased with my presence, introducing me to strangers for no apparent reason. The other ladies bent forward to me with occasional questions or comments. Somehow they'd been given the impression I was from New York, so I endorsed this misconception with several unprovable lies that we would both forget the next morning. Fionna held tightly on to my arm as if we were lovers. And then, just when her hand was getting warm, an intro to a song came on that made everybody at the table's eyes inflate as they reached out to clasp one another's hands.
In the seconds it took for the beat to kick in, Fi's friends were gone, off to dancing. Foreplay was over. Fionna released my arm. Everyone was screaming on the floor, hands in the air, bouncing as it there was cash on the ceiling. I stood up to watch. Look at them, bumping, shaking, jerk, jounce. Fionna pulled herself up from her seat by grabbing my leg. Her head bobbed with them. On the floor, slightly below us, the crowd was spreading. These friends of hers could dance, and everyone in the room knew it. No partners: a flock of individuals, simultaneous soloists performing variations on the same work. The crowd grew still because watching them dance was more enjoyable than doing it themselves. I looked down at Fi to compliment them but her head had stopped nodding.
“Lift me.”
Thank the Lord—time to leave. Riding this mood and with a little drink to blame any embarrassments on, I could make my move in the cab home. I grabbed Fi into my arms and started heading for the exit.
“Where are you going?”
Fionna pointed to a wall. “Over there,” she said, her finger pointing toward the dance floor, that place everyone else in the room was staring at. I walked. Someone brushing past with two drink-filled hand
s banged Fionna's out-sticking foot and Fi screamed demonstratively, digging her nails into my arm as the guy cursed his spillage and kept going. “There. Over there.” I was directed to a high table covered with flyers. “On top,” I placed her rear at the table's edge. “No, on top.” I lifted her higher till she had put her good foot down and was standing upon it, where everyone could see her. Immediately, knee bent and bad ankle behind her, arms reaching out to the air for balance, Fionna started dancing. “Chris, come on, come up and dance with me. No, come on, climb up. Now.”
“I can't.” I offered a grin as I yelled back to her. I really couldn't.
“Why?” Because if I got up there they would boo or laugh or throw rocks at my head. Because I wasn't made for the pedestal, I was unsuitable for display. No crowd would ever accept Chris Jones held up above them. Philly had already taught me that, and who knew me longer than it? Definitely not the graceful Fionna, who reached out to tug my hand while still doing her one-foot shuffle. I grasped hers just so she wouldn't stumble.
“I'll dance with you down here, so if you fall I can catch you,” I told her, and she accepted that evasion, released me of the obligation of humiliating myself.
Look at the way she moves and imagine what she could do with two feet beneath her. Reluctantly fulfilling my promise, I began bobbing awkwardly below her, forwarding racial harmony by dispelling stereotypes of black grace with every pathetic jerk. But then the crowd took even that responsibility away from me. All around me, bodies stilling as they took her in. Little woman up above them moving like there was nothing you could put on her that she couldn't just shake off, radiating life so bright it might even burn your troubles, too. Whatever made us alive, whatever it was that made us more than functionally bags of blood, she had it and she was showing it to the room. A sliver of God vibrating there before us. And I knew everyone could see her the way I did because they were all trying to get a better glimpse, pushing me out of the way to do so. Knowing instinctively that I shouldn't even be there to witness this event, the crowd expelled me, shoved me shoulder by shoulder back to the dance floor, now emptied. Fionna kept going; I could make out from over their heads. I don't know if she knew I wasn't there anymore, but I knew she knew the crowd was. That they were yelling for more and she was feeding them.
Gumbo Page 75