by Jacob Ross
In their bedroom he finds three condom wrappers squeezed into a bog roll in the bin. He imagines her tearing at them with her tiny teeth. Imagines her in their bed, rocking her hips against someone else and the bile rises to his throat.
He strips the sheets from the bed, then looks in the cupboard for clean ones. Typical, he thinks, the only time the bloody bed gets made is when she fucks someone else.
Akeem hears the front door bang as he smooths the sheet across the mattress. He’s still trying not to think of what happened here.
“Keemy, you back, then?” Zoe shouts up the stairs.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” he calls. His heart is thudding.
The dirty sheets are in a crumpled pile on the floor. He hopes the sight of them will shock her.
Zoe is drunk. She wobbles towards him, swaying her hips from side to side. Her hair is wild and unbrushed. Her sea-green eyes are framed with thick black lashes that are not her own.
“Where are the kids?” he asks, imagining the two children forgotten somewhere by the side of a main road.
“Where are the kids?” she mimics. “They’re with your mum; she’s giving them their tea. Stop being such a boring old woman and come and give me a kiss.”
She sways into his arms, stands on tiptoe. Akeem feels her mouth sliding across his. Her breath, the whole of her, stinks of alcohol. It is seeping through her pores. Her fingers stroke the back of his head. He can feel the thinness of her shoulders under his hands. She’s getting too thin, even for him. He wonders when she last ate anything. He doesn’t want to want her.
“Who’s been in my bed?” he says.
Zoe laughs, then curls her lips and for a split second she’s ugly.
“Well, you weren’t fucking here, were you? I was drunk anyway. You shouldn’t have left me!”
“You told me to go,” he says.
“Well, you shouldn’t have listened to me. I didn’t mean it. I need you here; the kids need you.”
“Were they here when you…”
“They were fast asleep. What do you think I am?” She looks at him indignantly.
She breaks away from him, dances across the sitting room and trips. Laughing, she gets up, goes to the drinks cabinet and sloshes vodka into a cracked pint glass. She sloshes some down her throat.
Akeem thinks of his dad, drinking for days on end. He would take him and his brother down to the pub and they’d play on the beach late at night while their old man sat spilling pints in the beer garden. Then he’d stumble out and find them. They’d walk home, one on either side, holding him up.
He remembers his mum crying and telling his dad to leave. Their angry voices waking them at night. The sound of his dad hitting her. He wants better for his kids.
“This has got to stop,” he says. “This has got to stop!”
Zoe laughs as if it’s the funniest thing he’s ever said to her.
“What? What’s got to stop? What the fuck you on about, mate? Chill out, will ya?”
“Will you fucking listen to me! You need help. You’ve got to stop drinking and getting mashed up. If you don’t stop, I’ll leave, and take the kids with me.”
Zoe freezes. “Don’t fucking shout at me, Keem! You going to raise your fists next, yeah? Think you’re the man, do ya? Fuck you!” The glass she is holding makes its way towards his face. Akeem can’t move. He feels it hit him, feels skin and glass breaking together.
When he opens his eyes her face is china-white and still.
He touches the wetness on his face, stares at the bright red on his fingers. He still can’t move.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, you asked for it,” she slurs, “winding me up about taking the fucking kids. You’ll never leave us. You haven’t got the balls.”
Reaching up, she wipes the blood away with her sleeve. Her voice is soft now. “Do you want me to clean it up for you, baby?” Without waiting for an answer, she goes to the kitchen.
He hears the tap running; she comes back with a piece of wet kitchen roll and wipes gently at his face.
Akeem stares at the broken glass on the floor, its jagged pieces splashed with blood, the way it reflects the light, like sun-dappled water. Something inside him switches off. The hair-like thread that bound him to her snaps. He thinks of the drinking, the other men, the late nights and knows now that he can leave her.
“I’m done here,” he says. He clears up the glass. Hunts for his wallet and keys.
He opens the green front door with its peeling paint and steps out into the night.
DESIREE REYNOLDS
WORKS
She cried dry. The tears did not come but bubbled and boiled inside her, making her belch loudly; they did not drip down her chin and fall onto the empty floor; they did not streak her face and make her eyes red. She cried dry. She was hunched over, low, as if she was carrying the world on her back. People bumped into her in the market.
“Moderfuckers,” she muttered wandering from stall to stall, looking at the roundness of tomatoes, feeling the joy in the colour of carrots, squeezing homesick mangoes, letting her fingers remember the taste of them, staring at the sheer beauty of cabbages. “My works, wonders to perform.”
She looked at the arguing men, the laughing women, the beggars, the lost and soon to be lost, the undecided lovers holed up in doorways, letting bus after bus pass them by.
“Boomboclart dem.”
No one paid any attention to her. The body she inhabited appeared old, and age had rendered her dead to them.
She remembered everything. Her own cross – the cry of lonely children, the moan of grief-stricken fathers, the eyes of women who would never feel their bodies whole again. She remembered the smell and look of undiluted terror and absolute power, and he that came in her like a snake, vomiting eggs so that the world could be born. She shuddered – glad she didn’t have to do that again.
Her left armpit was itching. That usually meant someone was going to challenge her existence, seriously. Something was going to be discovered that would tell the world she had forgotten them – that she was nothing but a small, cold flame kept alive by people’s desperation.
“Fuckin Jesus pan di cross.”
Some people stopped what they were doing and looked up, not seeing her but recognising the word “fuck”in the wind that passed over them.
She didn’t know who to listen to. Voices fought for attention – all wanting the same thing. Then she saw him. The smell of sweat and new desperation caught her. Yes. She’d listen to him, as he walked through the market, his phone to his ear. She would listen for the millisecond it would take that would stretch across thousands of years, adding to her age, adding to the age of the world.
“Yes, Lester, you fuckin dick-head, where the shit have you been?”
“Sorry, fam. I looked for you before I left the club. You know me, catch gyal innit.”
A man wanting to be a boy was working his lies hard.
“You’re joking, right? Hold up! You ditched me for di white gyal dem. C’mon man, I told you bout dem!”
What did he mean about di white gyal dem?
Aaahhh, she saw them – the ones that would tear the skin off her bones with a beautiful little silver-handled whip; who would have her drown in her own milk, never destined for her own babies; who would shout, “Black bitch” or “Nigger” as she wiped their diseased backsides in the care homes; who demanded she rescue them, yet treated her as a child needing guidance and instruction – all those who expected the past to be forgotten because they weren’t there, and yet relished the rewards; those that would be her friend, beg her to forget herself, for them. They would turn her body into a house in which they felt entitled to reside.
She really didn’t know why she had created them.
“Uno gweh! Need to backside move from me!” She said this out loud and the sound rushed around time and space. Somewhere a volcano erupted and the sky met the sky.
Her big toes rubbed on the edges of the slippers she h
ad forced her feet into. She felt corns coming.
“Just not rarse right.”
She relaxed into looking around. A black woman was walking, looking in shock at the dying shops where christening gowns could no longer be bought, where once Auntie had got her second wedding dress. These were shops crammed with old materials forced into new styles, wigs and hair, and make-up that never washed off.
This woman sat at a table by herself outside a café, trying to remember when the market had once been filled with black noise. What she was looking for had already gone and she was not yet aware of what she needed. She was like the rest of them – those black women always needing something they can fix, something outside themselves that they can pour into, onto or over. They didn’t want whole men; they preferred broken ones so they could delude themselves that they could fix them with love or sex or soup. There was nothing more attractive than a broken man.
Dem mek ah woman feel powerful, hoping dat di teeth widdin dem could fool a man, trap him, bine him wid her legs to keep him in her forever. They were the ones who save up all dere tenderness for their men but could not give it to their children, feeding themselves on longing and fear, fighting their sisters tooth and nail with words and hips, all for men they didn’t really want – men who lied about who they were, where they came from and where they were going. These were women who could carry shopping, children, men, family, in a tight, tight, bundle on their backs but forget all their names. Sad bitches. They were her and She had made them in Her own image.
“Hidiats, dyam fools!”
She did not know why she had created them.
“Fuckin rarse!”
A plague of ladybirds suddenly settled on the market. Delighted by their smallness and their brightness, squealing children gathered them up and stuffed them in their pockets, bags and socks. Stallholders shouted, waved their arms and scraped them off the fruits and vegetables. Walking sticks and prams crushed them. She blinked them out of her eyes. In another universe, a crack appeared under the sea, sending a wave the size of Earth to wash away whole cities. A woman, clinging high in a tree, gave birth to a child who would never put his feet on land.
She shuffled across the street. The market had cleaved into two distinct parts. The white side – high ceilinged, with room to pass – was filled with expectation and entitlement; the black side, a dark rabbit warren of shops selling plastic flowers, battered tins of nostalgic fruit and vegetables, a sense of loss. Bodies recognised each other, trying not to touch. Didn’t they know, didn’t they all know what it would come to: catching their own piss in a bag they’d have to walk with?
“You will see, you will know thyself, wooiiiisah!”
Her gaze found a man so pretty it crossed her mind that creating a world with him could be joyful. She laughed at herself. The sound stopped a scream from mouths already hopeless. It started another somewhere else.
“So you girls from here?” He was tall and dark-dark, his locks in a pony at the back. She always did like a locks man.
“Oh yeh. It’s shit innit?”
“Is OK.”
“What’s your name?”
“Mightier.”
“Ooo!”
“Haha! That’s a silly name!”
“Ha! Yes, it is.”
“Where you from?”
“Angola.”
She watched him standing by the Iceland store, talking to two giggling blonde girls, laughing too hard.
“You talk lovely.”
Mightier smiled. They wouldn’t see that his hair needed oiling or his teeth needed brushing or his skin needed creaming or hear the noise of his hungry belly. They would see what they wanted to see. Now she was no longer sure.
She curled her lip, used her tongue to dig something out of her teeth, where excuses lived. She didn’t like men like this one was revealing himself. Pretty and deadly; wanted but not liked. She shook her head and wondered at this type of man – one who had a mouth but refused to use it. A sulker, slammer of doors and puncher of walls; a crier who with snot and noise and hot baby tears would divert a woman’s attention from herself, would possess rather than let be. He was one of those who swore love but boxed a woman in the mouth; who claimed to understand but all he really understood was what he wasn’t getting. Who watched her grow weaker, as he got stronger. The white ones, the black ones – the liars and cheaters, the lazy ones, the ones who would revert to childhood before her very eyes. A woman with him would find herself nursing a grown man.
“What ah waste ah fuckin time!”
A memory of the smell of blood and bleach came up from the market floor. A man strode through it, pushing past people, shouting the football scores of 1958. The sun was turning to rest by her feet. The middle-aged white Rasta, on Electric Avenue, hair wound round and round his head, danced and leapt and danced and danced to the music from the chicken shop. His shirt was off and his pale, thin body moved like water. He had been there so long, had danced so much that his soul had spread out from him, attached itself to the pavement and walls and only this dancing thing was left.
She looked skywards. The day-hovering moon bowed to her. As she had always done and always would. On and on, in and in, the cracks only showing when she looked hard. Another annoyance. Another strain to bear, another lamentation to hear. Hunchback sister moon was always in need and her emptiness was her burden.
So what had she created? What was this that had come out of her? Where were the upfull sounds? Where were the thanks? In the minds of people who took the words and changed their meanings?
“You ah go neva overstand.”
She wanted the praise, the songs and the sacrifice. But where was the fear?
“Yuh are bline to youselves…”
That man, weh him name? Who wrote that song? He was right. But they lived like ants on a hill, only seeing the path beneath them, the light lost.
An old man with a turban on his head and a beard that touched his chest was talking to a group of black women. He sidled up to them and pointed into their faces.
“You are lucky, your husbands is not lucky. Every time you try to do something, you fail because another woman has put a spell on you! I know the names, come, let us drink tea. We can go to McDonalds.”
Ha! Ah weh di arse? Dis man can see? Beyond himself? Or this man is a clever trickster, waiting to ask for money? He could be both. It was he that had the spell on him. Or could it be Him? But He went, unable to fix what he had broken, taking it with him, in the heat of his mouth. He would come again, so would She, but She was tired of his falsehood.
Bullets were fired in her name, guns held, holding. The urge to stretch her jaw was too much and she yawned and another creature died, the last of its kind, that no one had ever seen. Noise and song, scream and laugh, collected forever under a nail.
“But what di rarse ’ave dey done, eeeee? Cho!”
As with her other children, she had to find a way to loosen her grip and watch, watch as the that, that was Her and Him move away from her sight, for another to take its place. Naming dem names.
She felt a small, bright, pin hole, widening in the bone at the bottom of her spine. That meant movement and soon her sight would change, space would heave itself away from her. She looked up at the quiet sky and let the hole spread, the swelling openness that would change her. It was time to go. She was tired. This constant listening. It sometimes drowned out her own feelings and thoughts. She resented it. Nothing should take you away from yourself. She just wanted to put down the world for a moment. The need to feel empty rocked her backwards.
She let the openness close her in.
AYESHA SIDDIQI
THE TYPEWRITER
The room had been empty for five years. It had grown dark and dusty in spite of the occasional half-hearted attempts at airing it out. She was determined, though, to turn it into a home office. She set to work with duster and broom, bin liners and sponges. She removed layer upon layer of dirt, threw out mattresses and cushions,
and carefully placed silk saris, camisoles and petticoats into a large black suitcase.
It had been her grandmother’s room when they first arrived. Her Nani had cheerfully endured the goodbyes and the packing up, the long journey and the slow unpacking. Like the soldiers who survive hard years of combat only to return to the safety of their homes, then shoot themselves in the head, her grandmother had passed away in the night, three months after they had moved.
The girl cleaned, wiped, and scrubbed, not paying much attention to the trinkets or the books and photographs she found. She replaced the floral printed bedsheets, which reminded her of another home, with some more fashionable ones from the high street. The delicate glass figurines and the perfume bottles from the dressing table she enfolded between the clothes in the suitcase. She moved the two bedside tables next to each other, facing the window. She put her laptop on this makeshift desk. By the time she’d finished cleaning, the room looked little like its former state.
In the top shelf of the cupboard, behind a box of shawls and scarves, she came across an old typewriter. She hauled it out and placed it on the desk beside her laptop. It was a metallic blue – the colour of the sky in a brighter place. Instinctively, she knew how to use it. She fed a sheet of paper into the roller-shaped mouth, and turned the silver wheel on the side of the machine to make it swallow creakily. She struck a key. A metal lever rose and hit the sheet with a satisfying tap. No mark appeared, only a soft indentation that vanished after a few seconds. The ribbon needed ink. There were some letters missing too. Absences between the stained silver buttons, like gaps in an old person’s smile. She searched online and found only one typewriter shop, a half-hour train journey away. Never before in this city had anything she needed been more than a few minutes’ walk away. She would go there that weekend.
The narrow door was sandwiched between a halal butcher’s and a mobile phone store. The sign above it was rusty and missing several letters. Inside was a cavernous, tunnel-like space. Typewriters hung from nails on the four wood-panelled walls. There were old Victorian typewriters that looked like two-storey dollhouses, the keys spread out invitingly over the front like elaborate staircases. There were newer ones with electronic display screens and modern keyboards. Others were imposing metal boxes called Remington or Underwood that seemed heavy enough to bring the wall down. They hung next to dainty, brightly-coloured things with handles, that could be carried around like briefcases. Wooden tables were scattered around the room and each held boxes with pins, wheels, levers, and letters of all shapes and sizes. Some were arranged alphabetically: As in one box and Ys in another; others were mixed up, perhaps by brand or value.