by Jacob Ross
“What?”
“Grew up with four bigger bothers. Played cops ’n robbers, football and trains. Then at ten, I wanted dolls. At fourteen, I chucked my brothers’ cast-offs. My parents joked about having a new girl around. I took to smoking. Only a joint or two. Didn’t worry them. Part of the scene, a typical teen.”
“Mine would’ve cracked. Didn’t yours want a girl?”
“Expect having a tomboy suited their pockets. Couldn’t last. Buying dresses knocked them. At eighteen, I moved out. Selfish, just when I started to earn.”
“You make it sound simple. Growing up, leaving and that.”
“Oh yeah. Me, Misha, late-starter. Show-off, wanting to be different. Maybe why I like the old sexy garb I sell in my vintage boutique.”
“My dad’s a director in banking,” admits Ellie, “and Mum’s always been home. Knits, organises church bazaars, does committees. We don’t speak much. When we do, it’s not personal. Doubt you’ll like them.”
“Will they like me, Ellie?”
They laugh. Agree that a holiday at one hundred fifty quid’s a breeze. Palma Nova third-class, cheap booze and anoraks. No matter. Chuck a bag together and fly.
Ellie can’t swim. Dressed in baggy Bermudas, she dangles spindly legs over the edge at the deep end, while Misha strokes five lengths, holding her head above water. Her bouffant must last the week; karaoke in the bar, discos till dawn, wacky waiters.
Then on the third night. Stuffy June zoomed into the thirties. Misha fell into the room, flipping off her size eight stilettos. They laugh about that, taking the same size shoe. But why does Ellie always change in the bathroom? Misha thinks it’s to do with being an only kid. A ma and da in Basingstoke. Grim. Not like her rappin, laughin Leytonstone home.
Later that evening, sitting in front of the mirror, Misha sucks in a whispered breath. Lifts green fingernails. There’s a scrape of untaping. Pulls it off. Pops the wig on her vanity case. Ellie stops gawping. Picks up the sparkly afro-comb. Taps it in a perspiring palm. Tenderly, she strokes Misha’s scalp, hair sparse like black peppercorns.
Steady grey meets Ellie’s wet, brown eyes in the mirror. The hush expands in the night heat. Ellie moves close to her back, leans forward to get a brush. Misha feels a knot. In the small of her back. She tenses. Is it? Could it be? Flat eyes hide the tremor. The mirror’s baiting, watching, waiting.
Misha stands, dropping the shoestring sheath. Steps from the silk puddle. Smooth. Practised. Unsnaps her bra. Freed.
Ellie unzips her dress. Its skirt of cotton sunflowers flops to the floor. Bares shy, pink-nippled peaks. Stands pigeon-toed, like a gawky teenager.
Slowly, they tuck thumbs into briefs. Stripping pretence. Face the mirror, jolt through its crack. Plunge to the carpet. Blot out the looking. Spiralling toward the fluorescent. Fumbling. Falling. Floating, caressing each other toward bed.
Funny, they never chat about that night.
Now in the cab, the lullaby shushes. Misha noses into the nook of Ellie’s armpit, sprayed in gardenia perfume, fingering Ellie’s stringy hair.
“We going to that do down Camden next week? You think…” Ellie says
They peck.
“What, Poppet?”
“What I think is, your auburn’s better than the blonde,” Ellie says.
“Uh-hah? What about Camden?”
“Ok… if we leave your wig at home.”
“Uh-huh?” Misha hoots. “Why look at you, Poppet. Wearing the pants.”
“We can start with the wig,” Ellie says.
“My-my. That’s not a start,” Misha says.
“I would hope it’s not the end.” Ellie says to the driver, “Here’s fine. Thanks.”
The cab tootles to a halt and they tumble out. Ellie digs for cash in the sulphurous streetlight. They climb the steps to the murky Victorian building. Ellie’s about to stick the key in the lock. Misha clutches her hand. Murmurs, “Been thinking awhile. High time we go see your parents. It’s six months. Tell them. We’re an item. Course, I won’t need no damn wig.”
Ellie doesn’t answer as they enter the dark, narrow passage into the flat. Fumbles for the bedroom switch. Amber light pervades, mirrors reflecting from every wall. Dresses, shoes, stockings trail the floor. They collapse onto the unmade bed, tremble and sigh.
Misha leans on an elbow, kisses Ellie’s lips, neck, breast. “You need me to move in here, Poppet. I’ll take care of you.”
“Uh-huh?” Ellie leans up, spreads the duvet over them. Slips under the covers, pulls Misha down, “Shush now. Crucial I get sleep, I have a project meeting early tomorrow.”
Ellie curls away, feels the flip of the duvet. “Misha, lie still. Leave the lamp, you know I like sleeping in amber light.”
NANA-ESSI CASELY-HAYFORD
FROM WHERE I COME
I had not expected to be contacted by them again, not here, so far from home, in my Aunt Zorani’s place, buried in a row of decrepit Georgian houses in Leeds. But then, why shouldn’t they contact me here? My grandmamma always reminded us that everything has a spirit and if we looked and listened hard enough, we could communicate with them, wherever in the world we found ourselves.
Aunt Zorani was downstairs watching Black Girls Rock! on the Sky BET channel. I was upstairs getting ready for bed, and missing home. A soft rain was misting the window. Outside was the growl of traffic and the raised voices of late-night revellers. For a while the carefree laughter of young women distracted me. I imagined myself with them, out there having a happy time. Then I heard my name. I’d heard that voice many times before – distant, yet present, as familiar to me as a member of my family – calling me to the front door.
I left the bedroom, went downstairs and opened the door.
Aunt Zorani must have heard me, or felt the draught. She was suddenly at my shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
“The spirits,” I said, “they are calling, and I…”
“What spirits! At this hour, in England! What heathen nonsense is this.” She spat the words at me. “We’re all aware you miss back home, but that’s no reason to make up stories and act them out! You stupid girl. How dare you!”
Aunt Zorani shouldered me aside, slammed the door and turned the lock.
It was a Friday night. The sound of the revellers in the streets outside took me back to Okampi Village. It would be the coming-of-age ceremonies this week. I visualised the outfits: slits, kabbas and abotre cut and sewn from wax prints with exotic birds against a patterned sky. I saw the rich, brocade-like materials worn by the wealthier folks – the yellows, the blues, the terracottas and oranges shimmering in the late-evening sunlight. Then, of course, the girls and boys arrived in the village square, dressed like colourful birds with decorative patterns stamped all over their skins. Like real birds they would be thrown high in the air, perform somersaults and pirouettes, before being caught by the laughing crowd.
I missed the tables laden with jollof rice, fish, meats and vegetables.
I wanted to remind my aunt that we were all guardians of the spirit world, regardless of where we lived or worshipped, but I knew it would only end in insults and put-downs.
“Zenobia! Why do you have to carry on with such backward rituals?” she asked next morning, as she shoved a small plate of beans on toast in front of me.
“Backward?” I said.
“Yes, backward,” she snapped, pointing at the morsel of food I’d placed beside my plate. “All this nonsense about giving to ancestors before you eat. I’d prefer it if you kept these things to yourself. In fact, I don’t want any of this in my house.”
By the way my auntie’s Christian friends looked at me I guessed that she’d told them about my “backward” habits. I refused to go to their church gatherings. I became cautious of the people around me. I desperately wanted to return home and take my chances there.
I was taking advantage of the sunshine to hang out the clothes Aunt Zorani had told me to hand-wash when I heard he
r shout. I left the basin on the grass and hurried into the house.
She was in the guest room, banging at the walls with a broom. Flies – a thick, dark cluster of them – had settled on the ceiling and the walls. Just hearing them buzz made me itch.
“My God, Zenobia, it is an infestation.”
I said nothing.
She sprayed them. They did not die. She tried smoking them out by burning incense. This only served to agitate them. In two days the walls of the room were black with flies.
Now there was a heaviness in the house that had not been there before. The smell of wet forest earth mixed with jasmine hung about the rooms. I wished I could have told my aunt that it was the ancestors announcing their presence.
At the end of the fifth day, I couldn’t hold it in anymore.
“They are here to deliver a message,” I said. “They will not leave until we acknowledge them… Respectfully,” I added, looking her directly in the eyes.
“What lies are you fabricating now? Are you trying to embarrass me again?”
“When did I embarrass you? I am telling you the truth. They will leave once they know the message is understood. Yesterday I saw a hen harrier at the bird table in the garden.” I pointed through the window. “It was there again this morning. Two omens in two days, Aunt Zorani…”
“Go! Fetch the Bible, foolish girl. Open it at Mathew 8:28-34. Contemplate what you read. Now, out of my sight! I have to prepare for Zuma!”
Zuma was my older cousin. He and his Masters Degree in Fine Arts were all Aunt Zorani talked about to anyone who did or did not care to listen. He came home at the end of every month to a houseful of his mother’s friends, and a table-spread of guinea fowl soup, palava sauce, blue crab and flaked salt-fish.
On the day when Zuma was due to arrive, I laid out platters of browned kingfish, bowls of ox-tail stew and jollof rice in front of Aunt Zorani’s over-indulging, overdressed friends.
I went upstairs to change my clothes. I listened to the voices down below and tried to distract myself by thinking of the food I’d soon be consuming, but I could not get the bird of prey out of my mind.
I knew when Zuma arrived because I heard the usual commotion at the front. Through the window I saw Aunt Zorani hurrying towards the gate, welcoming her son – her voice loud and boastful.
My cousin was a tall, smiling, light-skinned young man – in a shade, which my auntie reminded me at every turn, I wasn’t so blessed with. Perhaps it was my Asante blood. Despite her disapproval of my colour, I liked Zuma. He was the first to welcome me when I arrived. He folded his arms around me and called me his lovely cousin. Auntie Zorani was always kinder when Zuma was around.
Auntie Zorani opened her arms to hug him, but he did not seem to see her. He swung his body sharply left, and walked along the edges of the flower garden towards the patio.
It was then that I noticed something different about him. It was his shambling loose-limbed gait, his eyes focused somewhere above our heads. His lips were moving as if he were in agitated conversation with himself.
Auntie flung her hands up to her face, as if her son had struck her. Zuma’s godmother, a senior Mother of their church, rose as briskly as her size and weight allowed and stepped forward to greet him. The hostility in his eyes froze the woman. Zuma kissed his teeth and entered the house.
Murmurs of disapproval rippled through the gathering. It wasn’t long before my cousin strolled back out into the garden to gasps and murmurs of consternation. He was in his underwear. Aunt Zorani held onto the patio doors to steady herself. Though my chest began to hurt and I found that I could barely breathe, I dashed towards the washing line, grabbed a sheet and wrapped it around Zuma.
Two of the women assisted Aunt Zorani indoors and guided her – weeping – to the sofa in the living room. I followed Zuma across the yard, as he pulled at invisible things in the air and flung them about him. At one moment he was stomping the earth and brushing his body as if he were covered with ants; at another, he was scrubbing at his skin, as if wanting to scrape himself clean. Then he sat on the grass staring at his hands.
I had seen something like this before. The week before I left for London – two months after my mother’s passing – my eldest sister, Szoraya, who’d cared for our mother up to the end, began speaking to herself, shouting answers to questions only she was able to hear. My grandmother said it was our mother wanting to take Szoraya to the spirit world with her. It was her duty to wrestle my sister back from my mother’s selfish grasp – to keep her in the world of the living, where she belonged. My grandmother lost the battle; my sister left us. Then I fell ill.
“She will not have you too,” she said. “You will cross wide water where she cannot follow you. I will send you to your aunt in England.”
Before my grandmother sent me off, she steeped my body in sea salt. She stripped me naked and covered me with the leaves of neem, pimento, giant cow-foot and those from the plant of life. She did this on a Tuesday – the deity day on which I was born. Then the older women of the family each laid a hand on me and chanted me to sleep. When I woke, I was cured.
Maybe Zuma’s illness was not all that different. I asked him once what it was like to be working at a famous university, and all he talked about was his struggle to fit in. Or perhaps it was that other thing that he could never tell his mother. The last time he visited, I’d overheard him on the phone in his room next to mine, his voice desperate and sobbing, explaining to someone why he could not tell his mother about them.
Zuma was on the phone until the sound of Aunt Zorani’s Fiat Uno reached us in the house. My cousin cut short his pleading, rushed to his bedroom door and locked it. I replayed his desperation in my mind and wondered who Michael was.
Maybe I could do something at last. As my Grandmamma said, there are lots of things in life that can take us out of ourselves, leave us empty and wandering like ghosts in the world of the living. It was not madness. Madness was anything a westerner did not understand. There were ways of re-uniting us with ourselves. She had called me to her side and said she wanted to pass on her gift to someone in the family and she had chosen me.
I went into the house and knelt beside my aunt. I reminded her of the omens: the flies, the hen harrier. I asked her why it was so hard to accept these things when she had grown up with grandmamma too, and knew about my mother’s passing and the way she took my sister.
Aunt Zorani looked at me. Her lips were trembling; her eyes swollen red, and raw. “Help me,” she said.
“It is you who have to help me,” I told her. “It won’t work if you refuse to help.”
She shook her head impatiently and became my old quick-tempered aunt again. “Don’t speak to me in in parables, girl. I do not understand you. What do I have to do!”
“You have to put love first, Auntie,” I said.
AKILA RICHARDS
SECRET CHAMBER
Tina sits up in bed, gulps down a glass of water with two fizzing Alka Seltzers. Her next gig is in two and a half days. She’ll rip the roof off the sky. But first she’s got to set things right.
In two hours, yeah; exactly at 9.45 a.m. things will be back to normal.
She slides her feet onto the red shag-rug and feels a cashew nut between her toes.
She dislodges it in disgust and starts to feel queasy.
Last night’s gig was off the hinge before it turned to shit. Her smoky voice was fuck-off enough for blue-haired boys and girls to chant, “Tina, Run! Tina, Run, Run!” Then, mid-break, Cosmos had trashed his guitar and stormed off, sulking like soggy bread because he caught her kissing his younger sister, Sherbet. He called them sluts. She called him a wannabe pimp.
“You can’t have both of us,” he said.
“I don’t,” she said. “You were a mistake; I was outta my head. Drunk! Besides, that was months ago.”
In fact, it was eleven weeks ago. Exactly. She remembers because, right now, look at the shit it’s got her into. Last night she was puk
ing after only one vodka shot. Then she got emotional. Unheard of!
Tina shudders. Cosmos a dad? Never!
She would jog to the clinic. She loves running; the best songs, the coolest riffs come to her when sprinting through graffiti-lined back roads and grimy unlit streets.
She attacks the hill, is sweating when she arrives. Only the top letters of Priory Clinic are visible above the white surrounding wall.
A large glass panel slides open in front of her. She bends down, hands resting on her thighs, breathing noisily. Fucking awesome run.
On top of the double-decker, Ornella shifts uneasily. The top should be reserved for the young and their secrets. At forty-seven she was too old for this.
She breathes in deeply, counts to ten, then lets out a long airstream through her nose. She looks around self-consciously. Two boys with big earphones lounge at the back. They nod rhythmically. For a moment her heart stumbles; a small current of panic spirals up her throat. Is it, is it? She squints at the familiar red cap. No, it’s not my son. Sweat beads trickle down her nose.
She takes out the Rescue Remedy and empties a full tube on her tongue. Instead of calming her, it makes her want to cry. She suppresses a sob. She does not want to get there bleary-eyed.
She’d told Alton that she’d be staying with her best friend, Shannon, for a spa weekend in Sussex Manor. “About time, Ornella,” he’d said. “Stop worrying about me.” But she saw him pushing the food away with emaciated hands. In the last seven months her husband had lost four stones. They’d hugged delicately before she left for Priory Clinic.
Ornella takes out her round hand-mirror from her bag, redraws her lids with a touch of eyeliner. “Lying eyes,” she mutters at her reflection. She stuffs the mirror back into her bag and squirts another tube of Rescue Remedy under her tongue.
Padma’s designer shades almost eclipse her immaculately made-up face as she cruises her Saab up the hill. She plays her favourite song, “Wishing On A Star”. This place with its market stalls along the pavement is worlds apart from Docklands where her apartment overlooks the Thames, offering a breathtaking nighttime view of lit-up London. She’s a stockbroker, made a million or two but is bored with it. She grew up on a road like this. She still likes to visit the little shops in Neasden, close to the Hindu temple, breathe in spices that remind her of Mamiji and home.