by Paul Mendez
Jesse accepted Rufus’s lack of engagement. He could be himself in the bar, and would hopefully return to being so in the comfort of his own flat, but the shared streets were clearly a less convivial place. They were a middle-aged white man and a teenage black boy, although, Jesse—a black boy with a white father—had known the curiosity and confusion of strangers all his life. Most people had thought Graham sweet for deigning to take on a young black boy, when they saw them together alone, but when they were with the rest of the family—a white man, a black woman and three mixed-race girls—Jesse always looked the odd one out, the adoptee.
He thought about his colleagues at McDonald’s, three days into his never seeing them again, and had the sudden urge to text one of them to tell them where he was going and who he was with, but remembered with a pang that he’d changed his number and deleted all his contacts. Rufus led him past the lights and they crossed the quiet road. Jesse stood well back as Rufus pulled out his keys to a side door next to the main entrance of a public library—Brompton Library—so as, again, not to appear threatening. He looked past his reflection in the main doors along the darkened bookshelves and wondered about all the books Rufus was lucky to have such easy access to. Rufus directed him in and up a couple of floors of clean, brightly lit stairs, making Jesse nervous; Rufus’s words, uttered with the rim of a pint glass in his mouth—squashy old sofa. Or the vintage slot machine, take your pick—went through his mind. Rufus explained that, as they were directly above the closed library, they need not worry too much about noise, once inside; he’d not heard a peep from the next-door flat, he said, so they must be away. His manner, now, was cool and matter-of-fact, as if he would need to be warmed up again. He stopped Jesse in front of flat 8, unlocked it with a single Yale key and invited Jesse straight through into the lounge at the end of the hallway. He had left all the lights and his stereo on; this is a man who’s really into his black music, Jesse thought—like Graham, who often, on Saturday evenings when he was back from work and the weekly grocery shop had been done, danced with his daughters in the living room to CDs or tracks Jesse’s mother had taped off the radio.
The piercing violins and guttural funk guitars of “Forget Me Nots” by Patrice Rushen—sampled by George Michael not long after he’d been caught and arrested for cruising a policeman—could just be heard making way for the portentous synths of “Just Be Good to Me” by the S.O.S. Band, which he recalled his mother, still in her nightgown and headscarf, playing loud on her turntable in the front room one dark afternoon between the soaps and the kids’ TV shows. Jesse and his twin half-sisters sang along in their exile upstairs, pretending to perform it live on stage. He hoped it was the long version, that seemed to go on forever without threatening to outstay its welcome, not the radio edit she also had on cassette, that was cut halfway through as if at random by bored, suited white male executives in big glasses. There were no breaks in the music; it was a subtle, insistent groove. Every component of it kept rotating.
Rufus’s hallway was a gallery of framed black-and-white photographs of himself smiling and posing with women, some of whom Jesse was astonished to recognise.
“Is this Farrah Franklin from Destiny’s Child?” he almost squealed.
“Yes,” said Rufus, standing over his shoulder. “They’d been on Top of the Pops with ‘Say My Name.’ She was sacked within days.”
“What do you do?”
“I manage a jeweller’s,” he said, almost ruefully, and went into his bedroom.
There was Su-Elise from Mis-Teeq, Lisa Maffia from So Solid Crew, solo singers Michelle Gayle, Beverley Knight, Mica Paris and Gabrielle. More of these pictures led him into a lamplit open-plan room, with parquet floors and a plumply cushioned settee facing the window to the street. To his right was a good-sized kitchen, and a dining booth with seating for six. It was tempting to kick off his Adidas and slide around on the shiny floor behind the settee, lashing his hips against the beat. Tall plants in heavy-bottomed pots huddled in a corner like girls in a club.
The lyrics of “Just Be Good to Me” read differently coming from the sound system of a stranger he was about to have sex with. He now couldn’t imagine how his Christian mother found refuge in the sentiments of a woman openly permitting her boyfriend to be unfaithful, just as long as he was good to her. Back then, the door knocked loudly, causing his mother to get up and turn down the music. Jesse ran down to answer it to Brother Frank Grimes, who said he’d happened to be driving by and thought he’d pop in for a cuppa. He was wearing a tan blazer and brown trousers and shoes, with a stripy tie and tinted glasses. Lately, Jesse’s mother had missed a couple of meetings and told other Sisters she’d been feeling depressed, so Brother Grimes counselled her, as Jesse and his sisters sat at the top of the stairs listening to their conversation. What message does that send to your daughters, Val? Is that the treatment they should expect? Or to your son? Is that how he should treat women? How about that nice Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald song, “On My Own”? Have you got that instead?
Rufus’s music, of a volume just above background level, wasn’t coming from a stereo but from speakers connected to an iMac with a turquoise plastic insert. He’d not seen one in real life before. He approached it and ran his hand over its warm rear curve, a paraboloid, or so he remembered from GCSE Maths chit-chat, his being the top-top set. With everyone expected to get at least an A, he—having taken on the role of class clown—had been the one the jowly teacher warned would let down the set by getting a B, but actually, he succeeded; the one to fall short was Aiden Phillips, born in 1981 when his parents could not have predicted his peers would call him AIDS for short. The paraboloid was warm in his hand. He wondered how long it had been left on; how long Rufus had been in the bar waiting for someone like Jesse to walk in, because he was certainly decisive when he did.
“Just Be Good to Me” was partway down a list of songs burned onto a CD called Soul Divas. There were some masterpieces, classics from his early childhood, the mere titles of which brought back the smell of the Sof’N’Free products his mother used to keep her curly perm wet, before she relaxed her hair into leaf-like fronds and switched to Dark & Lovely. He wondered where Rufus was, back then. If he was forty-seven now, he would have been in his late twenties when “Just Be Good to Me” was big in the charts and the clubs. He would have been in his late twenties when Jesse was still a toddler not even at school.
Jesse wondered if Rufus had always been attracted to black men, and whether the muscular guy with the nose ring who had clocked them both in the Coleherne was a former conquest. He took off his jacket and crossed the room to fold it over the back of a dining chair.
“You’ve got great taste in music,” he told Rufus as he walked in in his shirt sleeves.
“Inside every gay man is a fabulous black woman,” he smiled coolly, gesturing to the settee. “Sit down, if you like. Beer?”
“Yes please,” Jesse said, crossing behind the coffee table and carefully perching where he wouldn’t disturb the perfectly fluffed-up pink and green damask cushions. Inside every gay man is a fabulous black woman. Did he really believe that? Jesse finally kicked off his trainers. He could now see the size and shape of Rufus as he pottered around, particularly his thick arse and thighs, bigger than Graham, whose weight was concentrated around his shoulders and chest. He wore his jeans high and belted to give himself a waist, with his shirt tucked in, and moved in an officious manner around the longweave rug, twisting shut the Venetian blinds in front and turning back into the kitchen, opening the fridge door, taking out two bottles of Beck’s and flipping off the tops with a bottle opener. Poor man’s champagne, as Graham used to greet the popping sound.
“Glass?”
“No thank you,” Jesse replied instinctively; his mother always told Graham off for dirtying glasses. Drink out the bottle, she’d say, laughing into her glass of Babycham.
“Sure?”
&
nbsp; “Ar, goo on then,” he said, tipsily sliding into real Black Country–speak.
“You haven’t told me where in the Midlands you’re from,” Rufus said, placing Jesse’s beer and glass on coasters in front of him before going back to fetch his own.
“The Black Country,” Jesse said as he filled his glass too quickly. It foamed up, so he rushed to drink the head back before it spilled over.
“Whereabouts?” Rufus filled a bowl with some nuts and brought them, along with his glass of beer, to the coffee table.
“I was born in Dudley’n grew up in West Bromwich. D’ya know the Black Country?”
“Dudley,” Rufus laughed, sitting down, watching keenly as Jesse took off his hat and unknotted his hair with his fingers. It was the la-la-la-laaaaaaa!-laaa-laaa-la-la bit of the song and he closed his eyes and nodded along. “Never been, but it is quite a famous town. Lenny Henry’s from there, isn’t he? You’ve got the castle, haven’t you, and the zoo? It used to be quite important. Sue Lawley’s from there, of course.”
“Wha? Sue Lawley the newsreader?”
“Yes,” said Rufus, pinching a handful of nuts.
“Never! Sue Lawley int from Dudley!”
“I read an interview of hers,” Rufus muttered, before swallowing, “in which she talked about what it was like when she first moved to London to work for the BBC. She was standing waiting at a bus stop one cold winter morning, and when she said, Cum on, buzz! in her accent, and the lady next to her gave her a look as if to say, Where on earth are you from?, she realised she’d have to change it if she wanted to present the Six O’clock News.”
“It’s a dump now,” Jesse said, crunching down some nuts, impressed by Rufus’s ability with the accent but unable to digest the fact that Sue Lawley was from Dudley, a ghost town where the area around the central bus station was almost completely derelict, and the high street had been routed by the Merry Hill complex a ten-minute drive out, all the key retailers replaced with pawnbrokers and betting shops.
“I can see why someone like you would want to leave. There wouldn’t be much hope of getting anywhere in life, I suppose, staying there. You must have some ambition.”
“I went to school wi’ girls whose ambition was to get pregnant so they could gerra council flat,” said Jesse. “One’s got four kids at twenty, last I heard. Started when she was thirteen and got took out o’ school. This is a tune, this is.”
He glared at Rufus, who grinned back, glad his musical choices were not lost on his young guest. The gospel handclaps closing “Just Be Good to Me” had given way to the finger clicks and 808s of Gwen Guthrie’s “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On but the Rent,” which Jesse and his mother used to freak out to on full-blast at their flat when he was very small. He remembered his aunties being round, babysitting him while his mother went out on a date with Graham before they were married, bending their knees to the descending bassline, crouching until their backsides almost touched the floor, pointing to the missing jewels at their ears, necks and wrists, and laughing, saying they would never, ever go out with a white man, unless he was very rich. He missed his aunties, but they had children of their own now and had never been able to help. His mother was their big sister, whom they loved more than anyone. Their big sister had picked them up from school and cooked for them while their parents were still working at the factories. They couldn’t see her ugliness like he could. She had been quite pretty before she started wearing glasses, and until the twins were born, when the weight gain became irreversible. She wore her Afro thick, side-parted and scooped up-and-over, with big earrings. She pouted in pictures because she hated her teeth (there was nothing wrong with them), and covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed. There was one of her and Jesse together, gold around the edges like lost time, him sitting on her lap, next to his aunts, on the settee at his grandparents’ house. He was looking and smiling at his uncle behind the camera, while his mother, who had a forearm around his waist, propped her cheek on her fist on the arm of the settee, watching him dotingly. He was probably only two or three. It was as if he was right there, even though he was sitting next to Rufus.
“Wait. You can’t remember this. Were you even born when this was released?”
“When’d it come out?”
“ ’Eighty-six?”
“I was four.”
Rufus grimaced. “You’re not supposed to make me feel so old.”
“Wharrif I like old?”
“Do you always go for older men?”
Jesse nodded and clicked his fingers, dancing sitting down like his mother did, aware of Rufus watching his mouth as he sipped his beer with a kissing sound, having forgotten to drink from the glass. He had what his old colleagues at McDonald’s used to describe, on girls, as shiner’s lips. They used to cause him embarrassment, not least when kids at school called him rubber lips or tried to mimic him by trying to touch their noses with their tongues whilst folding down their bottom lips, but they were his pride and joy now. White women were rushing out with fat wads of cash to get their pouts pumped up; the kids who used to tease him chatted shit through papercuts and smiled skeletally. Rufus had pretty, full lips with a Cupid’s bow, in a surprisingly lurid shade, like strawberry-flavoured chews. Jesse wondered about the colouring elsewhere on Rufus’s body.
“Why?” Rufus asked.
“I just fancy ya more,” Jesse said, his voice high and defensive.
“More money,” said Rufus, as if he’d heard it all before.
“I s’pose,” said Jesse, trying to sound like he hadn’t thought about it and cringing at the song’s lyrics, in which Guthrie was asking the universe for nothing less than a man who could afford to keep her financially secure.
“I’m not rich, by any means,” said Rufus, wryly.
“Good job I int here for ya money, then,” said Jesse.
“So what are you here for?” said Rufus, smoothly.
“Because you invited me,” said Jesse. “After talking to me, a stranger, in ya local pub for five minutes. I might be an axe murderer.” Graham always said silly things like that. Rufus gave him a look as if to say, So might I, but Jesse decided to trust his instincts, which had been fine so far.
“I thought you were cute and somebody I wouldn’t mind getting to know,” said Rufus.
“Past tense?” said Jesse, hoping Rufus might’ve clocked that there was more to this scrawny, doe-eyed black child than met the eye.
“I think you are cute.” Rufus laughed, and caressed Jesse’s cheek with a forefinger. “Clever, funny, sexy, and someone I’d like to get to know.”
He opened the drawer under the coffee table.
* * *
—
The seat was warm where he had been. Jesse put the spliff down, took the yellow straw and met this curious new version of himself—the same but less pathetically innocent—in the mirror flat on the table as he leaned over the line. The cocaine was twinkly and iridescent. He put his finger over his right nostril, as Rufus instructed, hovered the straw in his left, closed his eyes and sniffed along. It stung immediately, so he pressed his nostril down hard to subdue the pain.
“Don’t lose it,” said Rufus. “Keep taking it in.”
Jesse continued to sniff as if he had a cold, and swallowed. The stinging slowly abated. The coke smelled bleachy inside him. The side of his face where he’d snorted felt numb.
“How is it?” asked Rufus.
“I doe know yet,” said Jesse, looking around the room and squinting his eyelids as if everything should have taken on a different shape or colour. The paradisaical “Hanging On a String” by Loose Ends came on with its cowbell-like drum effects. It tasted of tropical juice and dried his mouth. He took a sip of beer.
“Feel free to take your clothes off,” Rufus smiled. “And give it time.”
Jesse stood up, stripped off his T-
shirt and jeans and threw them on the floor. He kept sniffing and swallowing as if a tap had opened at the back of his throat, dispensing a fluid both milky and toxic, like the semen from the man at New Street station. Rufus draped a towel over the settee, picked up Jesse’s clothes and put them with his jacket over the back of a chair, then sat down to unlace his high brown brogues. Jesse was naked but for the white Nike socks he was about to take off.
“You might leave those on,” Rufus said as he heaved off each boot and placed them next to the settee. Jesse felt sexy, his dick imposing its presence. “Will you roll a nice, tight joint? You’re probably better than me at it. My fingers are too fat. Bit like your cock.”
He stood up, unbuckled his belt and pushed down his jeans, revealing white Calvin Klein trunks. Rufus looked down at Jesse hungrily and stooped to kiss him deeply. This was Graham’s favourite song; he and his mother used to sing the lyrics to each other as the sheets blew on the line outside with the patio door open. You’re a black man in a white man’s body, Graham’s colleagues at the landfill site used to tell him. The white boys at McDonald’s were the same. Jesse realised he’d spent much of his life learning what it was to be a black man from white men. You’re like a black boy trying to be a white boy trying to be a black boy.
He was nineteen; twenty in less than three weeks. Freedom wouldn’t wait for twenty-one. He’d wanted out at fourteen. He was six when the twins were born and his overrun mother abandoned him to the Bible; one child was one, three might as well have been nine. He overheard his mother, when he was ten, asking Graham what Jesse was going to be like at fifteen, because she was already sick of him. Too clever by half. Attitude problem. Misstra Know-It-All, she called him. Don’t answer back; don’t NO me. At school he did everything right; at home, everything wrong. Graham would come home from work at six, and once he was out of his overalls he got his chest wet from tears she’d blamed her son for. Nothing’s ever good enough for him, Gray! she would tell him, not that he’d won the house points contest, or the spelling test, or the multiplication test, or the division test, or how his art teacher had told him his painting made her happy, or how he’d been chosen to be the school’s first ever black Head Boy, but of the tone with which he’d spoken to her when correcting her grammar, how he’d broken a toy he was too old to play with, how he’d muttered under his breath in complaint about the two bits of charred liver and lumpy gravy she’d given him for dinner. He leapt up the stairs two at a time but Graham had the strength to push his door open and Jesse couldn’t help but count along to the belt straps; he could hear all the kids at school counting along. Sometimes, Graham got so worked up Jesse lost count. Ruth and Esther screamed in their room, in harmony with him as his voice started to break.