by A. D. Koboah
“So how are you really?” he asked, bringing one hand up to rest under his chin.
“I’m a lot better.” I looked down at the cutlery on the table in front of me and fiddled with it before adding: “I’ve managed to stay clean.”
“Good. I knew you would though.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. The main thing is I just keep thinking of how I was during that time.” I looked up pointedly at him and it was his turn to look away.
“You weren’t yourself. Besides, that’s all over and done with now.”
I stayed silent, wishing it really was as simple as he made it seem.
“So why did you come and see me today, Peace?”
I sighed. Reaching into my handbag, I pulled out two envelopes. One contained reprints of photographs of Dante at various ages. The other contained five hundred pounds.
“I’ve got some pictures of Dante for Mohamed and the money I took from him as well. I was hoping you could give it to him,” I said and looked up at him.
His expression hadn’t changed, so I slid the envelopes over to him.
“Why didn’t you give it to him yourself?”
I looked back down and began nervously tracing my finger along the edge of the table. He eventually picked up the envelope with the photographs and put it in his pocket, sliding the other one across the table to me.
“Keep the money.”
“But I—”
“Keep the money,” he said again firmly and after a few seconds I put it back into my bag.
The waitress arrived with our meal, placed it before us, and after enquiring if there was anything else we needed, gracefully turned towards other customers. As I picked up my fork, I glanced up briefly at Jason. He was still watching me and I had no way of reading what lay behind those deep, dark eyes.
“These past weeks,” I said as I picked at the food on my plate. “I was hoping you would’ve come round to see me again.”
“I meant to, but the last few weeks have been kinda hectic.”
“Is that the real reason?”
He didn’t answer or look at me but instead picked up his fork and started eating. I watched him for a few seconds before I spoke again.
“Jason, I’m sorry about the things I said the last time—”
“I know,” he said and then added, “I knew something wasn’t quite right even from that time I stopped you in the street. But I let myself get distracted by...”
He didn’t finish his sentence.
“Look, I know there’s only so much I can expect from you, but I was hoping we could be friends.”
He didn’t answer.
We ate in silence. The food was delicious but I found it difficult to eat and had to force the food past a lump that was beginning to form in my throat. I would sneak a look at him occasionally as we ate. He had taken off his coat and jacket, loosened his tie and looked incredibly handsome. Mohamed’s words came back to me and he couldn’t have been more right.
But I had such strong feelings for Jason and I knew I had to try and see if he maybe felt the same way, even if it meant chasing another hopeless dream.
“Eva told me that you patched things up with your family,” he said breaking me out of my thoughts.
“Yeah. Something like this makes you realise how much you take people for granted. No matter what I did or how far I strayed, there’s always been a place for me at home.”
“Hm.” He nodded.
I put my fork down and looked directly at him, coming to the other reason I had wanted to see him.
“My mum, she’s going back to Ghana for good and she thinks I should go with her.”
He was still for a moment.
“I know I’ll never start using again, but being in a different environment will help me stay on the straight and narrow.”
I watched him eat wishing he would stop, look at me and tell me to stay.
“Will you be going for good?”
“I don’t know. I just want to leave this country. I don’t know if there’s anything worth staying for, apart from Eva.”
I saw his jaw clench and he stabbed angrily at the food on his plate as his colour deepened. It took him a few seconds to answer.
“I think a change of scenery’s a good idea.”
I nodded.
I had all I needed to know.
***
After dinner we walked in silence to the tube station.
“Which way are you going?” I asked.
“I’ll walk you home,” he said curtly and swept past me and down the escalators.
I followed him, feeling more than a bit confused by the way he was behaving. He was silent throughout the journey home and was so abrupt when I tried to make conversation that I eventually gave up and sat staring ahead of me, wondering why he had even bothered to go out of his way to take me home if this was how he was going to behave.
His face told me nothing as always, but the way he strode angrily ahead of me, forcing me to occasionally break into a half-walk, half-jog to keep up with him and his abruptness whenever I spoke made me think that something I had done or said had upset him.
By the time we reached my block, I was angry and almost close to tears.
“You all right here?” he asked, stopping outside the railings before the parking bays at the entrance to my block.
“Yeah. Thanks for…” The rest of the words were snatched away when I saw a white car parked behind two others. I could only see his profile from this distance, but the build and the cap Daniel always wore brought stifling fear, and without realising it, I took a step back.
“What is it?” Jason asked, sounding impatient as he followed my gaze to the white car.
“N-nothing,” I whispered and edged closer to him, trying to keep my back to the entrance. But I was sure Daniel had already seen me.
“What is it?” Jason asked again, this time with a little more concern.
“That man… I…” I shot a quick glance in Daniel’s direction. “I have to go.”
I tried to take a few steps back in the direction we had just come from, but Jason caught my arm and stopped me in my tracks.
“There’s no point running,” he said gently. He took my hand in his and started leading me toward my block of flats. “Come on.”
“Jason, you don’t—”
“Whoever he is, you’re gonna bump into him at some point, so you might as well get it over and done with. Trust me, okay.”
I kept my head down and reluctantly let myself be led toward the entrance to the block of flats.
An engine roared into life when we reached it and I looked back to see Daniel pulling out of his parking space. His features were set in a knot of anger as he drove past us.
I wasn’t afraid of him leaving the car and approaching us as Jason was so tall and muscular and Daniel, who was by no means his match physically, was not one for confrontation anyway. What scared me was his expression when he looked at me. It told me that he saw me as his property and that although I was free of the desperation that had me dancing to his tune, this wasn’t the last I was likely to see of him.
Once Daniel had gone, I pulled my hand out of Jason’s and leaned against the wall with my hands against my head.
“He’ll come back when you’re gone, I know he will. I need to call Eva.” He looked on helplessly at the apparent fear that was eating me alive. “Shit no... She’s working this evening.”
“Come on,” he said. Taking hold of my hand for the second time, he pulled me away from the block. “You can hang out at my yard for a couple of hours. I’ll drive you home later.”
We made the journey to his house in silence. I was lost in the murkiness of my thoughts, thinking about the problems I had created for myself and the many people I had allowed into my life who wouldn’t leave so easily. Ghana was my only real option for a fresh start.
We eventually got to a terraced house on a quiet residential street which had a beautifully kept front garden. He opened the doo
r and led me into a large living room with beige walls and natural oak floors. It had a large sheepskin rug on the floor and a mocha-coloured sofa corner unit. A flat-screen television had been attached to the wall above the fireplace and a large painting of a fat, dark-skinned woman hung on the wall behind the sofa. She was holding one hand up to her head to balance a pot on her head and she had a baby tied on her back.
I stared at the brown head peeping out of a mound of cloth she had used to wrap his body in, remembering the times I had carried Dante on my back like that and how my mother used to carry him like that all the time. I looked away from the painting and sat down on the sofa. Jason switched on the television and dropped the remote control in my lap.
“Do you want a drink?”
He removed his coat and pulled at his tie. I shook my head.
“Give me five minutes.”
He left the room and a moment later the sound of his footsteps running up a flight of stairs could be heard. I flicked through the television channels and settled on one of the music channels when I saw the video for a popular song burst onto the screen. I soon grew bored and so stood up and walked over to the fireplace. I gazed at the photographs on the mantelpiece, focusing on one of a baby of around six months old. I picked it up to have a closer look as Jason walked into the living room. He had changed into black tracksuit bottoms and a black T-shirt and was talking on his mobile phone.
“…Yeah all right. No, that’s not what I said... Look I’ve got to go, I’ll bell you tomorrow. Later.”
He clicked the phone off and I wondered fleetingly who he had been talking to.
“That’s my son,” he said, referring to the framed photograph in my hand.
“Really?” I said with a smile. “I didn’t know you had any kids. He’s really cute,” I added sadly as I stared at the photograph of the unsmiling baby boy.
The next question flew out of my mouth before I could halt it or find another way to ask it. “Are you still with his mum?”
“No.” He walked over to me, took the photograph gently out of my hand and carefully placed it back on the mantelpiece. He then moved to the sofa and sat down.
“So who was that guy?” he asked.
I sighed. “It’s a long story,” I said staring at the floor.
“I’m a good listener.”
I sat down on the opposite end of the sofa and looked around the room which was another symbol of Jason’s affluent, middle-class world. I realised I had nothing to lose. So I started telling him the story, finding that I would deviate and begin telling him other things, about Dante, or life after his death and how I began using. He watched me thoughtfully as I spoke. His expression didn’t change and my voice was only interrupted by the phone ringing or whenever he asked me a question about something I had told him.
I talked and talked for hours and he listened, not appearing shocked or disgusted with anything I’d said. I told him about the different things I had done to fund my habit, things I was deeply ashamed of now.
I eventually got back to Daniel.
“He was how old?” he asked, looking angry for the first time.
“Forty-three.”
“And he put his hand on you?”
I was no longer looking at him. He stood up and walked over to the fireplace, keeping his back to me.
“If I’d got to your flat earlier…” He didn’t finish his sentence.
The house was quiet. I heard none of the street noises I was accustomed to on my estate, such as people talking outside or the traffic noises I had gotten so used to that I had stopped hearing it.
“I can’t even lay all the blame on his shoulders.”
He looked at me intently. The anger I had seen before he walked over to the fireplace hadn’t entirely left him. I also saw a hint of the sadness I had seen once before when he had been unaware that I was watching him. I guessed that he probably always carried that around with him, safely hidden behind the armour he wore to protect himself. He seemed to have everything, so what could possibly be causing the sadness I kept seeing snatches of?
“I put myself in that position,” I continued. “I put myself at Daniel’s mercy. I used heroin to run away from what I was going through and what I was feeling and ended up someplace worse. When I think about some of the things I did… I feel so disgusted…so ashamed of my—”
“Don’t,” he said softly. He walked back to the sofa and sat down beside me. “Don’t go down that road ’cos it’s only gonna take you back to where you’ve come from.”
“I know,” was all I could manage.
I looked down and tried to hold in the emotion so that I wouldn’t break down in front of him. He put one hand on the back of my neck and squeezed lightly.
“You got nothing to be ashamed of. There’s a couple of people I went to school with who got themselves hooked on heroin or crack. Some of those mans are dead, the others are still hooked. You’re a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for, if you weren’t you wouldn’t be here. You’re strong. You got through this to the other side; that’s what you need to focus on. Nothing else matters.”
I couldn’t trust myself to speak.
“There’s nothing you can tell me about what you’ve done that can take away the respect I’ve got for you, for the guts it took for you to get through that withdrawal.” He gave my neck one last squeeze before releasing it.
It was a while before I could look at him. He was still watching me and at times like this, when his armour was down, I felt I could see right through to the essence of this man, though I barely knew him. After a few seconds, his gaze moved down to my lips and he reached out a hand and tenderly traced his thumb over my bottom lip before his eyes met mine again. I was unable to look away from him and he leaned over and kissed me gently and tenderly, a kiss I had been dreaming about for weeks.
I pulled away reluctantly after a few seconds but kept my eyes closed and rested my forehead against his.
The mistakes of my past were still fresh in my mind. I couldn’t keep repeating them and I needed to be sure about a man before I jumped into bed with him.
“Okay,” he said as if in response to my thoughts. “Okay,” he said again when I tried to speak and silenced me with a touch to my cheek before he kissed me on the forehead.
He stood up and went to stand by the fireplace in front of the photograph of his son. I put my fingers to my lips briefly before I got to my feet.
“I should get going.”
“It’s late. You might as well stay here,” he said glancing at a wall clock. It was nearly three a.m. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep my hands to myself,” he added with a wry smile.
Upstairs in his bedroom, I stood at the foot of his king-sized bed and stared up at another large painting above his headboard of a black man climbing the stairs to what was maybe Heaven. He was carrying a black woman on his back; she in turn was carrying a baby on her back. I stared at it for a few seconds until a large T-shirt fell on the bed in front of me.
“Have you got a bandana or anything?” I asked.
“Yeah, somewhere.” He hunted around for a few moments before a red bandana landed on the T-shirt.
“Thanks.”
Hearing him leave the room, I quickly changed into the T-shirt and left my clothes on a chair by the bed. When I slipped under the covers, I kept as near to the edge of the bed as I could without tumbling off the side.
He returned to the room a short while later, fiddled with his phone before switching the light off and climbing into bed. He immediately pulled me closer to him so we lay spooned together, keeping his arms around my waist. It seemed so right here lying in his arms that I felt safe for the first time in a long, long time.
As I lay in his arms, he pulled the bandana from my head and I felt his fingers running through my hair as I drifted into sleep and sweet dreams in which nothing or nobody was out of my reach.
Chapter 28
Two weeks of frantic preparation finally brought me to th
e day of my departure and I spent my last night in England at my mother’s house in my old bedroom with Eva. We spent most of the night talking until she finally fell asleep in the early hours of the morning. I was left alone with the silent shadows that fell across the room and the ever-present memories of the good and bad times that had been spent here.
Those memories, memories of the many lonely months leading up to Dante’s birth, the weeks I spent here after his arrival with the overwhelming sense of inadequacy I felt about my ability to care for him. And of course, the many weeks spent in this room in total despair after he was taken away from me. All of those memories were like reflections on a watery surface. They were there for me to see, and they always would be, but they didn’t have the power to control and have me trying to chase peace of mind along a scrap of foil. As the sun began to rise and the house erupted with activity, I was able to reach out and wave away those memories as I got ready to begin what was to be a momentous day.
Although I knew a fresh start in Ghana was what I needed, I couldn’t help but question whether or not I was making the right decision. That doubt stayed with me as I bathed and dressed before venturing downstairs where the four of us had breakfast as a family. Everyone else was in good spirits, but I was subdued as I thought about the many things that were about to change in my life just when I had started to get some kind of stability in my world.
I left them downstairs after breakfast and went back upstairs to linger in my bedroom and dwell once more on the day I brought my beautiful baby boy to this room. I didn’t think that leaving this house would be so difficult, but a part of Dante would always be with me in this room, and it was hard to leave that behind.
Reaching for a brush, I faced the person in the mirror.
I didn’t avoid seeing my reflection anymore as I no longer saw someone I didn’t want to be. I now saw someone who had survived the storm, someone who grew stronger with each day that passed.
Running the brush through my thick, jet-black hair, I lovingly pulled it back, enjoying the feel of the tight springy curls which resisted the brush, and my fingers, as I teased it into a ponytail. During my last trip to Ghana whilst I was getting my hair done, the woman who had been braiding it had said to me that a person’s hair was a lot like their character. Running her fingers through my hair, she had remarked that I was strong and very stubborn. I had laughed at her analysis and thought no more about it. But remembered it now as I stared at the person I had become.