A Life Elsewhere

by Segun Afolabi

  I’m thinking about different things: Stella in London; big Bryant doing his best, trying to live a life; my exasperated father; Mrs Drexel and her children. I’m trying not to think of the coast or beyond that: the next day, the next week, the next whenever. The road ahead is clear and life seems suddenly so open, and I feel tired. I rest my arms on the steering wheel for a moment. I lay my head against my arms and close my eyes and try to think of something that will make a difference. I hear the tyres roiling against the road, and the roar of the wind through the windows. It sounds like the earth careering through space. My mother used to say I made the ugliest child in the world whenever I lied. I believed her, so I must have felt ugly quite often. Thinking of this, remembering, makes me laugh. I lift up my head. The road in front is clear and I’m still alive.

  Next day I’m at the pool, same time, but no one’s there. I clean quickly and tidy, then drive to the nursing home. Same thing happens the day after, and for a nearly week I’m the only one at the pool apart from Mr Callisthenics on Saturday morning.

  Bryant and I go bowling at the weekend with Mona, the mystery girlfriend. She’s a shade lighter than Bryant. Call it almond, call it fawn. She could be Cuban, Puerto Rican or just mixed. I’d imagined someone hideous, deranged, but she’s pretty, kind and she laughs a lot. Bryant has altered in a way I find difficult to pinpoint. Like he’s lighter, physically, more carefree.

  In the Land Cruiser on the way to where Mona lives, I lie in the back with my feet up, trying to visualize the journey, the streets.

  Mona says, ‘So Leon, what plans do you have for when you get back?’

  ‘When I get back? Um. . . I don’t know. I could get a job or something. I could go back to school. I’m thinking that’s what I might do. Take my A-Levels, maybe go to university.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Bryant says. ‘You said it, not me, remember. I’m going to remind you every week.’

  They both get out of the vehicle and walk towards Mona’s apartment building. I sit up and watch them talk for a while. Then Bryant reaches in to kiss her, and misses her lips. They both have their eyes closed so contact wasn’t guaranteed to happen, but they manage it the second attempt.

  Bryant bounces back to the car, humming. ‘You want to sit up front?’ he asks. But I stay in the back, lying down, talking to him, looking up at the stars.

  In the morning Mrs Drexel is back at the pool. ‘Did you miss me?’ she says.

  ‘No. Where did you go?’

  ‘Didn’t go anywhere. We were right here, honey.’ She waves a hand towards the apartments. ‘My, it’s warm.’ She doesn’t say anything after this, just sorts through her magazines and smiles, reaches down for her cup of tea.

  Another woman arrives, also in a towelling bathrobe, and walks to the loungers diagonally opposite. Mrs Drexel waves, but the woman keeps walking, sunglasses on, as if she has not seen us.

  ‘Mornin’!’ Mrs Drexel calls. She waves again.

  ‘Oh! . . . Oh, hi!’ The woman turns. ‘How ya doin’?’ It’s one of the ‘fighters’, the wife of Mr Callisthenics. Actually, I don’t know if they’re married. She lifts her shades.

  ‘Doin’ good,’ Mrs Drexel replies. She too raises her sunglasses. There is a small bruise on the side of her face, very close to the eye. ‘Hot, though. Darn hot!’

  The woman nods and smiles to herself and carries on to claim a lounger. Mrs Drexel arches her eyebrows. ‘Life is like that,’ she says. ‘You have to make the effort sometimes.’ She gets up to swim and I carry on cleaning.

  When I reach Mrs Callisthenics on the other side, I slow down so as not to disturb her. Her eyes are hidden behind the sunglasses and I don’t know whether she’s watching. Unlike Mrs Drexel, she keeps her bathrobe on. Her hands rest on her slim, hidden stomach. I push the scissored mop across the concrete by her feet and move along, but she says, ‘Oh, you can clean under here. It’s dirty.’ She pauses, perhaps to think about what she has said, then adds, ‘Those kids at night – you’d think they could pick up after themselves.’

  By the time I’m back at the beginning, Mrs Drexel has finished her swim and is thumbing through a magazine. I realise I will be late for the nursing home.

  I say, ‘I can’t see Mr Ferreira angry somehow. He’s more under the surface, you know? He won’t say anything for ages, then “boom” – he’ll start complaining about something minor that has nothing to do with it. Deviant.’

  ‘I know the type,’ Mrs Drexel says. ‘You don’t mean devious, do you?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ I’m going to tell her about after the nursing home. About how I’m driving the car back to where I found it. No scratches, nothing taken. I won’t mention the dog. I’ll take the bus back here. I’ll tell Bryant I’d like to go back, could he talk to our father, say that I was well behaved?

  I’d like to return to school. I miss Stella. It’s easy to talk to her, Mrs Drexel. Easy to tell her things.

  There’s a scream from the pool and when we look, Mrs Callisthenics is attacking the water. ‘A frog! There’s a fucking frog in here!’ she shrieks.

  I smile and Mrs Drexel says, ‘Oh, honey,’ and then gives out her sea-lion laugh.

  I fetch the net and scoop up the frog, which is floating upside down. Mrs Callisthenics watches me closely to make sure I’m doing my job.

  ‘There could be more of them in there, did you check?’ She’s clutching her bathrobe at the neck, kneeling on the concrete, peering into the pool.

  ‘There’s nothing there. But I’ll do another sweep if you like.’ I roll my eyes, sift the entire pool again. When I’ve finished I call, ‘It’s frog free. It’s clean,’ and Mrs Callisthenics waves from the safety of her lounger. She is not going to swim today. It will be days or weeks.

  ‘Have a good day, Mrs D,’ I call after I’ve put away the net. I look at her for a moment, asleep on the lounger. Her magazine has fallen to the floor knocking over her beaker of tea. I look at the other woman across the pool. She raises her sunglasses and peers at Mrs Drexel. Neither of us moves.

  In twenty minutes from now there will be an ambulance, neighbours watching from their balconies. There will be a race to the hospital, but it will be too late. I thought she laughed. Maybe it wasn’t a laugh. More a gasp or a cry for air, for help, for the pain in her body.

  It’s Marlow and Grace I think of. The confusion, the sudden loss. When they are twelve or eighteen, even forty-one, they will stop whatever they are doing. They will be in a quiet place and they will ask, ‘Am I doing okay, Mom?’ But there will be no reply, no knowing for them. But they will ask this nonetheless, relentlessly.

  The car goes back and I intend to take the bus, but I end up walking all the way to the apartment. My clothes are damp with sweat and I’m weak from the heat and humidity. One day I will miss all this: Bryant, the pool, the escape into air-conditioning, the long roads, driving to who knows where.

  Bryant and Mona drive me to the airport and I’m amazed at how familiar everything has become, now that I’m leaving.

  Bryant says, ‘You’re a good kid, Leon. Remember that. You come visit whenever you want. You get to college, you phone me. No postcard, okay?’

  I promise. I have no idea whether Mrs Drexel told him about what I was doing. It doesn’t matter now anyway.

  On the plane I think of nothing. I sleep and eat and watch snippets of Out of Sight. Years from now I will write a letter. I will say, I often think of our conversations in the mornings, with fondness. I couldn’t tell you how happy they made me, those moments by the pool. But I won’t post it; who would I send it to? I’ll write it, then throw it away.

  It’s overcast in London. There is no heat. The airport seems overwhelmed with arriving flights, and I put down my bags to rest. There is no one there. No one I recognise. I had been hoping for something familiar, something solid. The tannoy booms, ‘Passenger Lefebvre, recently arrived from Montreal, please contact the information desk.’

  Montreal, I think. I like the so
und of that. It sounds like a new place to visit. I pick up my bags and the suitcase, and when I straighten up she’s there, smiling. Stella.

  THE WINE GUITAR

  HE TOOK THE stairs, two at a time, to meet the woman he had paid for. The muscles strained as he moved. Once he thought he might fall, but he held on to the rail. He glimpsed a flash of canary yellow on the landing and the skin beneath the cloth and lost his focus and tripped on the final step.

  ‘Blimey!’ the woman in yellow called to her colleague. ‘Damaged goods coming yer way.’ Her laugh was throaty and wild, but it was not malicious.

  The old man rubbed his shin where he had fallen. He brushed away dust from the front of the black suit that had carried him through weddings and funerals and the times when he had sung in front of audiences of hundreds. He no longer sang now; he played the palm-wine guitar because his voice was thin and cracked. Sometimes he sang quietly to himself in his room as he practised the instrument.

  The canary tittered once more as he made his way towards the room, but he ignored her. Up close, under the weak landing light, the skin around her eyes was puffy. A greasy sheen on her face made her seem unwell or tired. He was glad he had chosen already. He came to the door, but before he entered, she reached out to his shoulder.

  ‘It’s Mary, love,’ she said, even as he was drawing away. ‘For next time. Don’t keep ignoring me for Agnes.’ She gave a brittle smile and it seemed to him he had misjudged her.

  He saw Agnes sitting on the edge of the bed, reading a letter, the raven hair falling onto the page. Her mouth moved as she focused on the paper, but she did not make a sound. He took in the room – the thick crimson carpet, the dusty net curtains, the armchair with the coat slung across, the double bed that sighed and squeaked. She looked up at him suddenly, as if she could not imagine what he was doing there. He realised she had been completely absorbed in what she’d been reading. He thought he saw tears in her eyes.

  ‘It’s you again,’ she smiled and dabbed her face with the palm of her hand. She folded the letter four times, tucked it into one of the coat pockets. She patted the bed for him to sit next to her. When they were side by side she noticed he was panting from his journey up the stairs.

  ‘Don’t listen to Mary,’ she said. ‘She talks too much. She doesn’t mean anything by it.’ She didn’t seem to hear her own words as she spoke them. Her eyes kept straying to the coat.

  He wondered what she was thinking, what news the letter contained, whether Mary was still standing by the door, listening. Snickering. ‘Is it all right today, for this?’ he asked. He touched the edge of the bed between them, squeezed gently.

  ‘For what? Oh, for that,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’ She rose and removed her slip and stood unabashed before him.

  His eyes travelled from the bare feet, across the soft flesh to the young face and the eyes that were almost Oriental. He did not know where she was from, only that she was young and he was old. They seldom spoke. As his eyes danced over her body, his mind wandered back to how he had spent the day. The struggle. It was evening now, the time when he came alive, but for him the day was a dry well he could not fill. He thought about the next day, where he would go, what he might do, how he could stretch a task so the time would not seem so infinite. He was grateful the woman did not fidget as he gazed at her. She was used to him now. She could drift into her own reveries. He liked her face, the contemplative eyes, because she did not seem bored by him. He could never guess what she was thinking.

  After a while she reached for the slip and pulled it over her head in one movement. ‘It’s time,’ she said. She smiled so he would not be too disappointed. Sometimes she allowed him another few minutes because he was gentle and he never made demands, but today she had seen the letter and now she wanted to be alone.

  Outside, the other woman, Mary, smoked a cigarette as she leaned against the wall. When he emerged, she glanced at him, but she did not speak. He only nodded to her as he passed. He held the rail as he descended, taking one slow step at a time. At the last moment she stubbed out her cigarette and went to the edge of the landing to watch him. ‘Mind the stairs, love,’ she cooed. ‘You don’t want to fall.’ She laughed quietly, but the old man did not hear.

  *

  There was a restaurant in Tooting he frequented nearly every day – Mama Yinka – where he ate his dinner or had the food sealed in plastic containers to eat later. The lighting was poor, the tables wobbled, the taped music scratched in its monotony. He sat at his usual table to be away from the traffic of other customers and the constant to and fro of the kitchen. It was often noisy – he did not eat there at weekends – and it was some distance from where he lived. But he found himself drawn there despite the shabbiness, despite Mama Yinka’s squawking and the irritating tapes. He found he could not help himself; the foods he had learned to love no longer gave him pleasure. He who had once tasted every single dish on the menu in an Indian restaurant. Or his long affair with Mexican food, with Italian and Thai, his family’s obsession with dim sum. The hunger now was for the food of his youth, all sophistication and learned habits washed away. He could eat only akara and bitter-leaf stew, eba and egusi, the okro soup his mother had made. Mama Yinka would fetch him a copy of the Vanguard or the Tribune to read while he waited for his meal. He could not focus on the tiny print under the dim lights, but he scanned the headlines and gazed at the pictures and found it satisfying.

  In the evening he went to the club where they played music as the young ones danced. Sometimes it was Latin American, sometimes Congolese or highlife – the music he had loved as a young man. Every night he stood at the back of the hall in Covent Garden with his old friend Salbatore as they watched people trickle into the room. Around one o’clock the place would be packed with revellers. He stayed at the back with his guitar close to hand; they would call him to join them sometimes – the old man and his wine guitar, Salbatore with his honeyed voice. Usually he was not needed, but he was content to remain there, sipping pineapple juice, listening to the music.

  ‘Why do they play like this?’ Salbatore shouted in the old man’s ear. ‘Who can dance to this music when it’s so damn fast?’ His face was a rind of lemon forgotten in the afternoon sun. Desiccated. Wrinkled. Sour. He touched his palm to his forehead for a moment and shrieked, ‘It’s too loud. Why must they play the music so damn loud? It will make us all deaf!’

  ‘I am deaf already!’ the old man shouted back.

  Salbatore shrugged and looked at the dancers, at the musicians on stage. He adjusted his tie and reached out to hold his saxophone, for luck, and then released it. He was certain they would play tonight.

  A woman from behind the bar approached them with two drinks: a pineapple juice, a Red Snapper, and a bowl of pistachio nuts. ‘Compliments.’ She turned and pointed with her chin towards a man behind the bar.

  ‘You are very kind,’ the old man said. He raised his glass to the barman who was smiling at them.

  ‘The other one, he never gives us anything,’ Salbatore said to the woman. ‘I dread it when I arrive, when I see the miser’s face. I know I’m in for a dry night then. You tell this one, Salbatore says salud. We’ll play you a tune if they allow us on stage.’

  The woman laughed and returned to the bar as the two men sipped their drinks. It was a good night, a good omen. The old man thought he might play his guitar after all.

  He remembered his courting days, he and his wife, the first time he had taken her to a dance. He held her close so he could smell her scent, and when the pace of the music changed, he flung and twisted her, but he would not let go. He remembered her words at one point: ‘A man who cannot dance!’ and then her giggle. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ But she had been delirious in her happiness – they both had – and they did not notice each other’s faults then; they saw them only as endearments.

  One of the musicians approached the edge of the stage and chanted, ‘Olha que belo!, Olha que belo!’ again
and again. The crowd provided the echo until they became one voice and it seemed they were all related in some way; the backing singer the sister of the man in the plaid shirt who was moving with such vigour in the centre of the dance hall; the sweat-soaked drummer the father of the rowdy students at the front. The old man wondered about his own children, whether this was a place they might come to relax. He thought not. They were too serious, too determined for this kind of revelry. He could not imagine them, not one of them, able to let go.

  When she turned, he could see her plainly. Agnes. The Oriental eyes had widened with make-up and the long hair was coiled like a Danish pastry at the crown of her head. He could feel the vitality of the evening draining away from him. His heartbeat quickened. He wanted to be away from there, or for her to be away so he could play the guitar in peace. He was sure they would call him tonight and he did not want to miss the opportunity.

  Agnes danced with a man who looked no older than thirty, and when she turned he held her hips from behind as she quivered and waved her arms in the air. She turned again and pouted, making a serious face, before breaking into laughter. She held the man against her, tight, and they moved gently for a while until the music changed. The old man watched with fascination. He could not reconcile this wild creature with the placid woman in the brothel, the letter in her hand, the tears. He shelled a pistachio and threw it into his mouth.

  ‘You’re an old dog, Kayode,’ Salbatore jeered. ‘Push your eyes back into your ancient head. She’s too young for the likes of me and you. She’s lovely all right, I’ll say that.’

  ‘It’s getting late.’ The old man glanced at his watch, irritated. ‘If they don’t break soon, there’s no way we have a chance tonight. We may as well pack up and go home.’

  ‘What!’ his friend shouted. ‘On such a night, with the drinks flowing free and this atmosphere? Go home and do what – face my wife? We’re not going anywhere.’ He had forgotten his complaint about the decibels. The alcohol affected him easily and he swayed his old body and tapped his white plimsolls together in his merriness.