Rainbow Milk

by Paul Mendez

  Gemma, whose hair was still lank and greasy, told him as he walked through the front door, “Go back out and use the staff entrance. Staff are not allowed to come in this way. And you’re late.” He wanted to say, I’m late because there was a person under a train, but he thought she might say, Yeah, yeah, black people are always late.

  He ran around to the side entrance, quickly changed into his uniform downstairs, and felt hungry; he’d left it too late to eat breakfast at the hostel. When he got back up to the restaurant floor everything was ready for service, the ceiling fans were on, some lazy old jazz music was playing—apparently for customer comfort, though he craved something more uptempo—and the French girls were speaking among themselves in their language at the front, waiting for the customers to start arriving for lunch. Jesse said Good morning, and they either didn’t hear or were ignoring him. Gemma and Vitor were sharing their own conversation at the front of the bar, broken every so often as she answered the cordless phone to tell whoever was calling that it was fully booked.

  “When do they serve the staff food here?” he asked Jinny, who was standing alone at the back of the restaurant like the new person at school no one wanted to talk to.

  “Eleven o’clock,” she said.

  “So why did Richard tell me to come in at half past?”

  “That’s when you get paid from,” she said. “If you want to eat before, then it’s up to you, but the food is served at eleven. It’s like that in most places.”

  “Why dint Richard tell me that? What was it?”

  “Eggs, tomatoes and bread,” she said. “And bare oil.”

  He finished tying his tie. He could see now that her hair was not her own but a weave. She stared straight ahead, out at the rain coming down the front window behind gilbert’s (backwards) in gold lettering, and seemed tense, as if she didn’t want to be seen with him; he wondered whether the other staff had been cussing about him behind his back à la Vitor and Gemma and the poor fet bitch.

  “How long have you been workin’ ’ere?”

  “Three days,” she said.

  “Dunt ya like it?”

  “It’s a job.”

  “Wharrelse d’ya wanna do?”

  “I’ve applied to go to drama school in the autumn,” she said, brighter.

  “Oh ar? Which one?”

  “RADA, LAMDA and Central.”

  He’d never heard of any of them. “When’ll ya know whether you’ve gorrin or not?”

  “In the summer. I’ve got through to the workshop for all three, so here’s hoping.”

  “Which one d’ya most want to go to?”

  “I’d be happy to get into any of them, but LAMDA’s got the best reputation for developing young women in theatre,” she said, as if Jesse were interviewing her for the place.

  “So you wanna be an actress? That’s cool,” he said, his mind blank to that world. He had never been to the theatre, and wasn’t allowed to watch much TV at home, so he really knew very little.

  “How about you?” she said.

  He thought about Giovanni’s Room, the way David saw his own reflection, wearing only a dressing-gown and holding a tumbler.

  “I think I wanna be a writer,” he said, out loud for the first time in his life. It made sense. He could write, to make sense of everything that had happened to him.

  “That’s great,” she said. She smiled, but didn’t seem to Jesse all that impressed. “What sort of writing?”

  “I doe know,” he said. “Poetry, fiction, novels.”

  “Aww. Are you studying?”

  “Norrat the moment,” he said. “I’m just gonna work for a bit and settle into London.”

  “Well, I hope you get what you want,” she said.

  “And you too,” he said. He studied her smooth, dark brown skin. “Where’s ya family from?”

  “Jamaica on my mum’s side, Nigeria on my dad’s. And you?”

  “Fully Jamaican, I think. I never knew me dad.”

  “Shame, me neither. He lives in Nigeria with his next wife.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Do you know Nigeria?”

  “I know a bit about the history, like, the civil war and tha,” he said.

  All the bodies in the school changing room were white or Asian.

  “Black blokes am usually all stacked’n muscled, ay they,” Luke Reid said, “but looka Jesse! Skinny li’l Biafran.”

  Fifteen other boys looked Jesse up and down and dutifully laughed, even though a lot of them were obese or out of shape, but then Jesse took his pants off to shower—rejecting the towel he would usually hide behind so that the boys who had no dick at all, just a knob on balls, wouldn’t feel bad about themselves—and the changing room fell silent. After that, instead of loafing around the school grounds with his classmates, some of whom had laughed at him, Jesse spent his lunch break in the school library, reading from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on hardly the most recent of African crises. It was a very specific insult, to be called a skinny li’l Biafran, one that showed knowledge, not ignorance. Jesse wondered how Luke Reid had learned about this corner of black history Jesse himself was completely ignorant of, and why he would then use it against him. Jesse asked himself if his real father had not died, whether he would have taught him about the black world, a history cruelly neglected by the GCSE curriculum. They said, Go back to Jamaica then when he told them he was Jamaican, not African.

  His mother had married a white man, but how could a white man raise a black boy to be anything other than white, and to consider his blackness as a disability to endure? Graham had told him repeatedly to just ignore’em. Was it the duty of the white father or of the majority-white school to teach the black son about the facts of life and the order of things, how to see a world that will only look at him a certain way? Graham had taught him nothing about anything; he left Jesse, a black man’s son, to the Bible, and doted instead on his pretty half-caste daughters.

  Luke Reid was intelligent; he and Jesse were in all the same classes together. The two boys had in common the early deaths of their birth fathers. They could, and should, have been best friends. Perhaps, even lovers. There were rumours of Luke with other boys, but he could hide behind his girlfriend. He had thick red lips, a slim body and lived in a detached house; Jesse fancied him, and Luke probably knew it. There was no need for Luke—who was good-looking, the school’s star striker, and going out with a popular girl Jesse was also friends with—to pick on Jesse, but Jesse began to understand, even then, that Luke was switching between personae in order to deflect unwanted attention from himself. In English class, Luke would say are and aren’t, yet in the changing room said am and ay; he chose when and when not to speak properly, when other boys—who knew from a young age they were going to become panel-beaters or welders—spoke badly because they refused to learn how to speak well.

  Their History class made no mention of Biafran secessionism or any other subject related to the lives and times of black people. It evangelised about the royal households and prime ministers, Britain’s naval power, its empire, and all the good it did the world. The history of black people was not a mainstream subject, and would therefore become a weapon in the wrong mouth. Jesse felt it would not have been as bad if Luke had called him a skinny li’l Ethiopian, displacing him, as white kids had all his life, in the Live Aid–triggering famine of the mid-1980s, but Luke Reid had gone all the way back to the 1960s to humiliate Jesse. The only black people on TV were criminals, sportspeople or starving Africans; and it was with the latter that white bullies identified him.

  * * *

  —

  “You should have punched him in the mouth,” said Jinny.

  “It did mek me realise how white people assume we’m all the same,” said Jesse.

  “I get stick from both sides,” she said. Jinny was not a sk
inny li’l Biafran. She was petite, with small, high breasts.

  “What do you mean?” Jesse said.

  “Nigerians are always saying Jamaicans are good-for-nothing but Jamaicans see themselves as being superior to Africans, as if they’re not from there in the first place. Because we’re not educated in black history, people don’t know that. I was at my grandmother’s house on the Jamaican side one day when I was about twelve, and we were watching some athletics on TV when a Nigerian guy came on to do the high jump, and my aunty said, not bad-looking, for an African. I told her she was African too and she told me to shut my mouth.”

  “Do mix,” Richard said to them both as he came up the stairs and walked past the bar towards the reception desk. Jesse and Jinny both sneered at him.

  “I applied for the job here under my proper name and didn’t hear a thing,” she said, when Richard was out of earshot, talking to the French girls. “Then when I applied as Jinny Redmond, with my mum’s surname, he called me straight away.”

  “What’s your proper name?”

  “Ginika Ndukwe,” she said.

  “How do you spell that?” he asked.

  “G-i-n-i-k-a, N-d-u-k-w-e,” she said, patiently.

  “I bet you have to do that all the time. Nice to meet ya, Ginika. Arm Jesse McCarthy,” he said, and they shook hands. Hers was tiny, and delicate, and he held it loosely. One of the few things Graham had taught him was that he had to shake hands like a man.

  “It’s alright for you, Jesse McCarthy just sounds white, like you’re Irish or something,” she said. “I didn’t change anything else about my CV, not even the font. I made myself sound less black, and he called me and said, Hi! So you’re gonna be a famous actress? You sound great! I’d love to meet you! It was too late by the time I came in for the interview; he couldn’t turn me away. Their shoulders must’ve dropped when another blackie turned up a day later, with an Afro!”

  “I wonder who he thought was gonna turn up?” said Jesse, flattered that Ginika would say that about his small, uncombed mound of growth.

  “Some blonde girl, like them, but English, importantly,” she said, subtly jutting her chin at the French girls. “Whereas my full name sounds like an African queen who won’t lift a finger! I should have come to my interview topless with a headdress and a stick!”

  They both laughed, and Jesse knew they would be friends.

  “Which name did ya use on ya drama school forms?”

  “My full name. In Igbo, Ginika means God is the greatest.” Then there was that pause, before the conversation took a more serious turn, which he knew only too well. “Do you believe in God?”

  “Okay, guys,” said Richard. “Gather round for the briefing.”

  * * *

  —

  There was the same immediate midday rush as the day before but this time the French girls seemed less willing to countenance his slowness. Customers barked instructions at him. He had learned the menu but not the ingredients. Vegetarians, and people with allergies, asked him questions and looked around for someone else when he couldn’t answer. These were people who had an hour to eat their lunches and close their business deals. The waitresses were busy themselves and unwilling to help, so he ran quickly downstairs to the kitchen to ask Farid, who screamed at him: Don’t ask me any fuckin’ question in the service I am fuckin’ busy you fuckin’ waiter need to learn fuckin’ menu! Of course the egg they are not fuckin’ dairy! Cow they lay fuckin’ egg? Fuckinell!

  Jesse was almost in tears when he got back to the restaurant floor to find Claudia pouring that table’s wine, having already taken their order. Then he tried to carry a tray with dirty glasses on it to the bar, with one hand, like the French girls did and Ginika was now able to, and he could see that one of them was too close to another and making it tilt, and he thought he would get there, but he didn’t, and couldn’t save several glasses from toppling and smashing on the hard tiled floor. Just like the day before with the thin woman and the gin and tonic, the whole room went silent for a moment. Dutifully, and protectively, Ginika was right there with a dustpan and brush. She gave him a narrow smile, as if to say it was alright, that she, at least, was on his side.

  Richard, who Jesse now knew spent most of his shifts down in the office stuffing his face and reading the Internet, came upstairs holding out a pair of very heavy-duty-looking black rubber gloves.

  “Wilfred’s had to leave us,” he said. It took Jesse a moment to realise who he meant. Wilfred was the kitchen porter, a Ugandan. “We need someone in the pot-wash.”

  All the girls turned quickly away and got on with their sections, except Ginika, still crouched down sweeping up glass, who looked up in concern. Gemma was at the desk, fetching jackets and umbrellas and grinning her grey buck teeth at departing guests. Vitor crouched down to check that the two glasses of red wine he was pouring were exactly the same. A snigger came from the nose of the very beautiful, flat-chested girl in a short black dress, with her legs crossed and her dangling foot tucked behind her calf, sitting at the table next to where he and Richard were standing.

  “Pardon?” said Jesse.

  “We need you to be our new kitchen porter. Temporarily,” said Richard. He had a blank look on his face as if to say, You’re doing this, or you don’t have a job. His nose was in the air like the guests who reminded Jesse of hunting dogs.

  “I applied for the waiter job,” he said, his entire body hardening as if an ancient hormone had been released into his bloodstream. There was a sense of an old workhorse being replaced, and Jesse didn’t like it at all.

  “Just until we replace Wilfred, then with a bit of training, you’ll be back on the floor,” he said. “Take the gloves, please. We need someone down there straight away.”

  BRUCE GROVE

  Chapter 1

  DECEMBER 25, 2002

  He’d wriggled out of his T-shirt, socks and underwear during the night and kicked them down the bed. The weather had been disappointingly mild and sunny for several days, and pale yellow light leaked around the edges of the slatted blind behind him. Teased by the smell of frying bacon from downstairs, he sat against his headboard smoking a cigarette, pulling the duvet high up over one shoulder. He had been dreading Christmas. He stubbed out the cigarette, but found he couldn’t remember how the last few drags had felt, and wondered if he might not light up another straight away.

  One of his housemates, Owen, a late-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of man, was also home. They hadn’t discussed spending Christmas together, but both knew neither had made other plans. Owen’s polished black boots thumped dully on the timber floors downstairs, his two daughters’ presents waiting, wrapped in blue and gold, by the front door since the night before. He had come to the house in August, and Jesse had first viewed the room in September. While Bryan, a Canadian jobbing actor with a blank smile, greeted Jesse in the hallway, Owen stood in the background smiling shyly. He was five eleven, with pale grey eyes and dark, almost black hair side-parted. He was effortlessly handsome, friendly and polite. Within ten seconds, Bryan had made the “Jesse Owens” link, and Jesse decided he would take the room. They didn’t seem to mind what he did for a job, and indeed found it exciting, unlike some of the others, whose dirtier, smaller, pricier house-shares he had viewed, and who assumed Jesse would prove unreliable.

  In the first month or so of living together, Jesse and Owen ran into each other casually, often in the kitchen as Jesse arranged his bowl of beans with an egg, or his pork chops and spinach, while Owen cooked a stir-fry or risotto. Bryan was cast in a play in Manchester, the biggest job of his career so far, so Jesse and Owen were left alone.

  Owen’s smile, which Jesse never saw him without, always made him feel welcome, and they got to know each other a little, though Jesse shrunk away from him after that man.

  Owen was from the Wirral, and had lived in London since graduating from Cambridge,
but still spoke with a Scouse accent. He wrote poetry and taught creative writing at University College London. Jesse could tell Owen liked him, but he doubted anything could develop; Owen was eleven years older than him and led a complicated life, separated from his wife. He was a laugher and a talker, often drifting from subject to subject, keeping Jesse rapt. Both admitted to moving to Bruce Grove because the name sounded like someone they wanted to sleep with. Sometimes, Owen would get drunk while marking papers at the kitchen table. He said he needed to drink to have the confidence to talk to men, despite his looks, masculinity and intelligence. He’d catch guys on Gaydar back home from clubs in Soho or Vauxhall, and drive to see them in the early hours when there was less traffic. One afternoon in an Internet café, Jesse wondered whether Owen had come across his profile, and immediately removed his most explicit pictures, saving them to a private album instead.

  They hadn’t spoken in a while, not really, since that man. Jesse heard the front door close, got out of bed, put on his dressing-gown and the pair of socks from within his bedding, went for a pee then tiptoed down the stairs. He loved being alone in this house, with its wooden floors, high ceilings and mid-century coat stand in the hallway, as then he could pretend it was his own. He opened the fridge to the gold foils of six bottles of champagne, a joint of something, some mushrooms, a Christmas pudding and various cheeses. He had some chicken thighs in the freezer to roast and eat with spinach and boiled rice. The frying pan was still on the stove, and he picked out and ate the crispy titbits of bacon Owen left behind in the oil, habitually wiping his fingers on his dressing-gown. He pulled a bag of coffee beans down from the cupboard to fill the old grinder chamber, flicked the switch and held it down to the work surface.

  A Barnett Newman exhibition guide, on top of a folded copy of Socialist Worker, lay where Owen’s car keys usually were. It was a Wednesday, but felt like a Sunday, and might have been a nice going to the Tate Modern sort of day were it not Christmas. The Tate Modern had become his sanctuary, where he would go on a Sunday, or sometimes even a Thursday, if he felt the absence of the Kingdom Hall in his life, which was often. He could hardly believe it was free to just walk around at his leisure. He never bothered with the paid exhibitions. The first time he went, he was hoping the Andy Warhol show was still on—instead, there was a Matisse/Picasso, and a Norwegian artist whose name he wasn’t sure how to pronounce. A steward gave him a printed guide, suggesting that, if it was his first time there, he might just appreciate the permanent collection, so he headed in, through the sculpture installation in the massive Turbine Hall, straight for the room called Nude, Body, Action and Steve McQueen’s Bear—the first time he had ever seen two naked black men physically engaged. It shocked and amazed him. He tried not to show it, and had to keep his mouth closed, especially when, as the camera looked up from underneath, their dicks and balls swung, catching the light in slow motion. He couldn’t understand how they didn’t have erections. He did. He was mesmerised by the teeth-baring struggle on their faces, perhaps against themselves. The presences of others watching—white women in particular—made him feel uncomfortable, and he could feel their eyes on him as he left. But then he found the Rothko Room. He sat down on a bench and it was as if all his problems, his guilt, loneliness, isolation, sloped away from him, yet he burst into tears and had to cover his mouth and make an effort to stay silent. Other people must have thought he was having an intense spiritual experience with the art. He looked into those pink, red and scab-black paintings and knew he’d delivered himself into destruction, that he’d left behind his privilege of knowing the truth and that there was no way back. He had touched Graham’s body up and down. He had propositioned Fraser Hammond. He had run away from home. He had sucked men’s dicks until they nudged his tonsils, gumming up his sinuses with cum. He had talked with his tongue root-deep in arseholes, ached to push his whole head in. He was in love with Owen, who would not want someone damaged and pathetic like him. Maybe he should leap into the canvas before him with a splash and drown himself. It had only been three years since he got baptised, left school and decided to dedicate his life to Jehovah, and now here he was, with a wound in his rectum that in healing had probably sealed in the transmission of a deadly disease, all his own fault; he felt, now, like the man in that painting at Thurston’s house, naked, bleeding and falling through the sky.