and then she’s still on the floor holding her face and he kicks her twice.
They call security and the bouncers run over and I can’t believe it. Everyone is fawning over him, apologizing; he gets a bottle of champagne on the house. She gets fired. She is holding her rib cage under her breast. There is blood in her mouth as she limps away. But it isn’t my business, I repeat to myself. She’s nothing to do with me, not really.
Everyone goes back to what they were doing. I go and sit down with O’Connell and his eyes are glazed with a red film and he leans his head back like nothing has happened and says,
Dance,
and I do . . .
and in my head I am dancing the lambada, rhumba, merengue
and the polyester curtain that is pulled around us is made of silk and his hands are the applause . . . hard, strong, everywhere,
and my sweat smell is the night air in the tropics—the beach and the sand and the yellow moon.
I am suddenly more tired than I’ve ever been but I’m a professional, so I keep on dancing, you know, even though he is not a man among men at all.
I am spinning, smiling, sinking. All of the waves in me are crashing
while upstairs, at the same time, Angela is crossing the road. This is where everything hardens.
I am still downstairs preparing to take more of O’Connell’s money because the bastard can’t get enough,
he is foaming at the mouth.
Later, the doorman is sitting on the step, whiter than usual.
He says Angela just stepped into the road looking right at the
oncoming traffic like she meant to get hurt.
He says she didn’t look good. She didn’t look good at all.
That is when I realize that she might as well be family. There is a wound in my chest, harder than a cricket ball.
I go back downstairs. The cricketer wants another dance. Sade plays again; I hear my heart in my ears.
Of course I keep on dancing. Time is money.
heaven 1.5
I look in the mirror one night;
the moon is too thick. And I see other things.
I look in the mirror.
I cut off a lot of my hair tonight.
A red wine decision. Red home, red house, red, red wine. I bind up my chest. I breathe out. Better.
heaven 2
The person I take home tonight smells perfumy. Like nothing bad but nothing particularly good. Also, they have plenty of wispy, long hair. It’s all very upsetting.
We met tonight in a club called Heaven. I sank two cheapish bottles of red before I left the house. Easy, easy, and warm, warm.
My two going-out friends, as usual, were not drinking half as much as I, or nearly as fast. I can’t imagine socializing sober. They are from a different planet, perfectly content to be out without liquid protection. Last night I couldn’t hold a conversation with either one of them because my eyes were darting around the room, dizzy, searching for the brightest distraction. They rolled their eyes at me (they are forever rolling their eyes) and told me to take it easy. Slow it down, they said.
I thought,
What the fuck for? We’re young only once
and it’s easy for you both to say. My world needs cushions.
I kissed someone
because they said I smelled good
they said I was beautiful
the walls were getting tighter
and it was too hot and dark and full of strangers and I wanted to feel something. Red wine,
a hot prayer,
was making me feel deliciously larger than myself. You can always rely on wine.
There was nothing stopping me, as always. I was free. My friends left. I went back with the stranger,
the usual story (I hate it and hate it but can’t face myself alone some mornings). This person was talking at me all the while about how they don’t normally do this.
I thought, Please just be quiet,
and kept on my T-shirt and socks.
Also
Marcia visited in my dream just now, saying:
I am sorry. I am definitely sorry.
I did not die, per se. How would you still be able to talk to me in your dreams? Can’t you see that by now I am entirely fact and entirely fiction?
Pull yourself together. You are an African, the most magical kind of human there is.
I am somewhere else now. I am part human, part metaphysics, and I still haven’t worked out which parts of me are which. I love this new form. I can feel space traveling through me. I am porous and wondrous and bold.
And Marcia said:
It’s not that I loved to leave,
rather that staying was always completely impossible.
You are 80 percent water. Stop getting so wasted. Please.
You should have married the kind one.
This searching, searching for nothing, will kill you.
Hardly breathing, I go to creep out the door.
“I wish you wouldn’t leave,” the stranger says, facedown in the bed. “I think you’re beautiful.”
“I’m sorry, I have to go . . . work,” is all I can manage.
“Nice,” they say. “Well, you seem in a hurry.”
I must be. I’m already in the street, gone.
The following days are tight, without peace. I buy a fifty-pound Naomi Campbell–style wig—long, black, with the fringe—and return to work at the club. I am quietly wondering about Angela.
Also, I don’t have the energy to put up with the men or their requests, or their hands. One of them seems hell-bent on asking about my parents.
“How do you think your mum would feel about you doing this?” asks a customer, who no doubt fancies himself a psychiatrist.
“She died two months ago,” I say, deadpan.
“So, my question still stands,” he says.
Fucking smart-arse. I grit my teeth; tuck in my claws. When he asks me to dance, I do.
Little Roo
On the phone
our cousin is saying
your brother
tried to end
your brother tried
to end
tried
to
end with a leather black belt
and his girl
stopped him
a belt
a thick
black/brown one
they say
some girl
he was seeing
or maybe
just some girl
stopped him
his room smells like an ashtray
they say
there are cups and plates under his bed
they say
there are holes in the walls in our mum’s house. (He can’t keep a house. We cannot keep our houses
no matter how far apart we are
we are bound by fail
failing
hearts failing—we need to sell the house, man.)
They said it was a thick black rope/cable
that Little Roo
sorry
Roo
used around his neck.
I am on the phone.
I can’t get hold of him
I down half a bottle of vodka from the person’s fridge and nearly run out into the night
but whoever I’m with says
you drank too much
come back to bed. There is
nothing you can do from Brixton
I say,
“That’s where we are?”
and they look at me.
I try Roo all morning
I get hold of him finally at 12:56 p.m.
and he says
I’m fine now
I get these
feelings and they pass. I’m fine now
but I know and he knows
everyone is a long way from FINE. Roo says
last week I decided to die
arrogant, but it was my choice to make.
Roo says
remembering everything that has happened
I promptly forgot God’s name
Roo says
do you know
i . . .
i
i
ah, it’s cool, never mind.
They say it is a belt
a thick black one
or cable
or whatever. I cannot swallow detail these days.
I go up North. We sit at the doctor’s.
I tap my leg in the waiting room. I want to hold Roo’s hand but I don’t.
He goes out for a cig and the doctor comes and I say do you want me to come in with you
and he says
yeah.
And Roo’s eyes are glazed
blackshining
and Dr. Melling (now gray gray gray
and no longer of interest to me) makes notes
and we’re thinking we can’t wait this long
to get healed. We’re thinking, skin heals.
Why can’t we? We’re thinking, how long do we have
to travel in blistering rain, exactly? We’re thinking,
does life owe us anything. Did we get it wrong? And time is
an animal, man. The years. Time
is killing us
it has us in its teeth
and Dr. Melling prints out papers
and says to Roo, “How long have you been feeling like this?”
Shit. Who can answer a question like that?
We put the papers down (I think we sign them or something)
read them, or something
pick up a prescription, or something
but I can’t be sure;
I’m under.
And out of nowhere, in the car, Roo says
I’m into grime music
these days.
See. An outlet.
Wanna listen?
He passes me the earphones,
he’s good, of course,
and that’s the tragedy. Roo says
I’m not taking those fucking antidepressants.
I don’t want to bury you
I say.
He says
you won’t.
It won’t happen again.
I want to say,
yes, you’re brilliant.
Yes, it hurts. Or
come away with me. But I know he won’t.
I say,
So, stop living in her house.
The walls are black
the insides are coming away
it looks like a crack den
let’s get this place on the market.
We have to go to Grandma’s cos we’re right there.
We sit there at Grandma’s
we eat her food
he doesn’t say much and neither do I
he stares into his potatoes and chicken and macaroni and cheese.
Grandma’s house hasn’t changed since he was tiny
sitting in the same chair, eating dinner. Maybe the feelings haven’t changed either.
Finally,
we make our excuses and escape into the night
no one will let us in any of the bars so
we sit in a parking lot across from the precinct.
He smokes a blunt. I drink rum out of the bottle
I’m fucked up.
Where are we? I say
The North of England
he says
unicorns don’t exist
I say.
Roo
says
yeah they do
remember the garden?
Things that I could tell you about Little Roo
One. A genius, my little brother.
Two. He was playing with his toy cars and tried to close
up his throat.
Three. His father is a wild, wild huntsman, from
a different world.
Four. We rarely talk, but he’s my best friend.
true lies
What do you do when all the certainties diametrically oppose each other? When the paradigms can’t agree? When the contradictions and horrible info are warring?
Fact. Marcia is beautiful. Fact. Marcia is whole. Fact. Marcia is dead. Fact. Marcia appeared to me as a pregnant Asian girl on the bus clutching her belly and an old Rasta, who smiled at me when he saw that I was reading a book on Jamaica and its politics.
Fact. Roo doesn’t care about anyone. Fact. Roo cares too much, about everything. And it’s too much for him. Fact. I need to call Roo. He needs to call me. Fact. I hardly do. He never does.
Love/Money
One morning I wake up and understand many things.
Henry Parker is lying beside me making irritating little noises, snoring and grunting and gurgling. I think about covering his head a little with the pillow to drown out the sounds. But it’s his bed and his house and I wouldn’t want to scare him. It is ten minutes to six and I can’t get back to sleep. We are south of London, in Surrey, in his lovely, low-ceilinged country house with two wings and nine bedrooms. Surrounding the house are two large, very well-kept gardens. Henry lives here alone among all of this space and beauty. It is a muggy August morning and the air in the room is still. Well over half of the year has gone by already, which is a worry. I wanted to make something of myself this year. There’s still time, I think. Definitely some time.
The bed is large and quite comfortable in theory, with a soft mattress and heavy floral bedspread. It is covered with lots of red and white peonies on a pink background.
The difficulty of being a guest in someone else’s house is that you can’t just go and get yourself something to eat. I change position to see if that will help. He opens his eyes and says I seem disturbed and I say tell me something I don’t know and he chuckles, gurgles and then falls back to sleep. He sleeps with his mouth open. The elderly and babies share similar traits, I notice. Sometimes I am not sure who is taking advantage of whom. I have been here four times now and he always hands me a cream-colored envelope the night before so that he doesn’t forget and so things aren’t awkward in the morning. An envelope with my name neatly written across it in thick cerulean ink. When we met in person for the first time we discussed our arrangement over sea bass and brandy. I needed the brandy or I wouldn’t have had the courage to talk him up a little, because his first proposal was much too low. We were talking about a whole night after all and I agreed on a fee that was lower than I’d like but better than not having the work at all.
Henry was a history lecturer. He hates anything written in the present tense. I wonder what that says about him. Last night we went out for dinner and I had steak for the first time in ages and he had the same. We drank a shot of brandy each. People are always very interested in us, which can become embarrassing because he is short, old and bald.
I think all young people should spend time with somebody much older, although obviously not in these circumstances. Last night in the car we got onto the subject of fatality. He is aware, he said, that he is nearing the end of his life. I, on the other hand, am closer to the beginning of mine. He used the old hill metaphor, which got me to wondering which point exactly I am at on this hill. If I live till I’m eighty, for example, that makes me now just over halfway between the base and the highest peak;
anyway, hills don’t have peaks. Mountains do.
I don’t think that I’ll live a particularly long life. It doesn’t bother me.
You gather speed when you’re descending.
> Henry says he isn’t scared of death. It’s just as well.
I don’t like it when he talks about the kids. We could be getting on all right and then he starts talking about the children, as if I really want to know. There are many pictures dotted around the house. His “girls” are horsey and plain-looking.
Girls.
His girls.
Both of them are at the peak of the mountain and have been supported well and funded throughout their precious lives.
It makes me giggle when I wonder what would happen if the girls found out what their father gets up to in bed with a girl my age. It makes me damn near hysterical, but not because it’s funny.
The clock says six o’clock.
Time crawls when you are not having fun.
I do imagine the gravity of what I’m doing. I do consider soul damage. If the very physicality doesn’t get you,
it’s the paranoia. What would people think?
What would people think of this? What would anybody think?
This catches up with me in the night, or strangles me in the small hours of the morning. I wonder about the outcome of it all. Will I ever be able to tell anyone what I have been? My mind is wandering into dark pockets. I want to jump off the roof.
I open my eyes.
To my surprise he is fully dressed, in a tweed jacket, slacks and green shirt, and is shaking me awake. “You need to wake up,” he is saying. “My daughter is on her way round to check in on me. And you’d hardly pass for the nurse.”
The clock radio says 9:30 in large red figures.
But Marcia is trying to talk to me. She is trying to talk to me, forever at inopportune times. Deep into the morning and way too early at night. It is often a Wrong Time for the two of us.
I say,
Mum, I can’t talk. I’m at work. Tonight maybe?
But there is no point making appointments with her. She comes when she comes when she comes and all I have to do is not test the light switches and hope she comes alone.
Marcia says she hasn’t met Jesus yet, can you believe it?
The Terrible Page 10