by Jacob Ross
She was sharing the mood with a youth-man who floated across to her side. He didn’t say hello. Just looked her in the face, smiled as if answering something she was thinking and picked up her rhythm. He was clearly on a similar kind of high.
A couple of hours later – she couldn’t remember if they even spoke – they stepped outside together. Nothing heavy. Just taking in the chill out there because, with that kinda high, she knew it would feel like mint on her skin.
The trouble came from behind her – a thickset, pink-haired young woman in red jeans that clung to her ham-sized calves like lycra. Girlchile grabbed herself a fistful of her hair, spun her round and started to diss her. Kisha could still see that face: thick and tight with hatred because her man had decided to step outside with another woman to take some flippin fresh air. Make matters worse, the girl was brandishing a knitting pin. With intent!
Without pausing to draw breath, Kisha reached out, smashed her knuckles in the girl’s eyes and, before red jeans could steady herself, she followed up with a knee in her gut. It was later, after the police came, that Muriel told her the girl was pregnant.
Kisha had left the scene by then. Was four hours out there in the cold on a bridge above the Thames before heading home. When she got to her flat, Muriel was parked outside. She’d stayed behind to check out the drama, she said, and when the police asked, she told them she’d never seen the ‘assailant’ before.
But one of the girl’s friends, she said, had described her in detail. Especially the way she had her hair.
‘Got it down to a T, Kisha – the way you sew them silver threads through it.’
Throughout that night and the days that followed, it felt as if London was spilling over with police sirens. Muriel helped her pull out the silver threads and she, afraid to step out of her doorway, sat in her flat for a month while Muriel brought her the things she needed.
It was Muriel’s idea to cut her hair – hair that was thick and strong and raven black. It never moulted. It never thinned or dried or cracked – the kind of hair that bounced back from the assault of hot combs, creams and gels and perms used to curl it, twist it, clip it, snip it, tress it and distress it.
In the times when things were really bad with her, she neglected it completely, sometimes for months. It was the first thing her girlfriends touched when they examined her. They always knew how she was doing by the way she had her hair.
Muriel did the job herself. At the end of it, her sister stood back, the scissors in her fist, staring at her baldness in the mirror. A half-smile had softened Muriel’s mouth.
There’d been a look of wonder in Muriel’s eyes – that and something else, which after all these years she could not put a name to – as they both stared at the hair in a thick nightfall on the floor.
This, above all else, was the memory that stayed with her: the eagerness of her sister’s fingers and the ease with which they’d moved around her scalp that night.
She’d never grown it back.
She’d even learned to like her semi-baldness. People look at her, check themselves and look again. If it’s a man, he never holds her gaze for long.
The headache has taken over completely by the time she gets back. Muriel is sunning herself on the sloping bit of grass that passes for a back garden, her loose flowered skirt pulled up to her knees.
The young man is stretched out on a long plastic chair beside her sister, his eyes covered with one arm. They’ve brought out a bottle of Calvados and a small basket stuffed with baguettes, cheeses, slices of veal, and the foie gras he’s taken a liking to.
‘Want something?’ Muriel queries sweetly.
‘Sorry?’
‘You hungry?’ Muriel gestures at the basket.
‘Nuh.’
Kisha sits slightly behind her. From here she can see the houses that these sprawling fields support. A sunset like a bale of kente cloth is spread above their heads. She watches waves of quarrelling birds drift across it, their wings scribbling darkly against that glow and shine.
These little houses are a far cry from the tall, indifferent boxes that stand above Hackney’s streets. In fact, from here, after just three days, London feels like an unreal and distant Legoland.
‘Whyd’ju bring me here, Muriel?’
‘You mean, why did you accept my invitation?’
Muriel fingers her dark glasses up to the top of her forehead and rolls her eyes.
‘Well – perhaps I’m being silly. But I didn’t expect it to be so, sort of, well… y’know – so…’
‘So?’
‘Well, tight – I mean, closed. We been here three days and it’s not as if it’s just the two of you. We don’t talk. We don’t eat togever; we don’t check out the place togever. Just this… this… Dunno, man! A little bit of…’ She wants to say respect or perhaps consideration, but somehow the words sound more appropriate in her head than if she were to say them.
Muriel levels steady brown eyes at her. ‘What you getting at, Sunshine? You didn’t have to come, you know.’
It is the Loans Manager voice. Kisha hunches her shoulders against it. ‘You asked me, didn’t you?’
‘And I didn’t have to, Keesh. Because I already paid you.’
Muriel replaces her Ray Bans, her mouth tensing in a halfsmile. ‘Better learn to live with it.’
Kisha surprises herself by smiling. This, she thinks, is the real Muriel. The one who ties you up so tight you don’t even have a free finger to scratch yourself.
Apart from what Muriel told her, she has only a sketchy idea of where they are. France was Paris, not endless fields of half-dead poppies and cows wherever you rest your eyes. They are in a converted barn between some place called Forges-les-Eaux, and Neufchatel, and a good few miles from Dieppe. That’s all she’s bothered to register.
She stares at her sister for a long time, then at the boy who’s fallen asleep in the deckchair. Something shifts abruptly in her mind. It lifts the headache nibbling behind her forehead and makes her look about her. It suddenly feels as if she’s just arrived.
‘Going to catch a nap,’ she says, and leaves them there.
She’s in a coffin of a space with a single mattress thrown over a palette made from rough board. Muriel and the youth have the bigger room on the other side of the partition.
From here, their tossings fill her nights – the growling of the youth like the bulls in the fields that hoof the grass and stare at her; Muriel’s sighs and pleasure-sobs that slip so easily into giggles. Eventually, Kisha drifts off to sleep, but when she wakes in the morning, her body feels as if it has been soaked and spun and tumble-dried.
Another woman, she thinks, would keep her well away. She would do all the little, nasty things that wimmen do to prevent someone from ‘distractin’ her man. Not Muriel. Her sister has to bring her here, grab her by the neck and bury her face so deeply in her shit, she can barely breathe.
For some reason, these two are dragging her back to her time with her mother, who never said a word to her without a sneer, whose eyes stung her with a million awful statements, until she – skinny, dark and gangly-limbed – felt herself being reduced to nothing.
For the first three mornings here, she’s been walking the track that leads to the little mound in the middle of the fields she now calls Rasta Hill. She spends an hour there, or sometimes longer. When she returns, Muriel is out on her own ‘personal time’, which is a joy-ride through the sleeping country lanes that lead out of the village. Kisha often glimpses the top of the yellow Mercedes gliding like a bright metallic insect between the tall hedgerows.
Now, she doesn’t much feel like taking a walk. She eats a light breakfast – or rather, picks at the grapes and bits of cheese and bread, and places finger-daubs of raspberry jam on her tongue, along with dollops of fiery mustard that feel like small explosions in her mouth and nostrils. She enjoys the sensations more than the food.
With Muriel gone, the youth takes up no space. He sits at the table, hi
s legs hidden in its shadow, his hands on the wooden surface. His head is always slightly down, as if he’s studying his fingers, so that all she sees are the lids of his eyes. It’s as if he’s put all the life within him on hold. Doesn’t even look like he’s awaiting Muriel’s return.
This is a bloke who moves only when he’s got to, she decides, who keeps his real self hidden behind those half-shut lids. A boy who’s mastered the trick of biding his time.
Toni said the same thing about her too.
And yet Muriel said he was a ‘street bwoy’ – one of those youths who learned to use a knife before he could walk. His hands, she realises, are like his voice. They don’t belong to him. They are older than his face – older than his age. She sees that Muriel hasn’t started on his nails yet. She wouldn’t be able to do much about the scarred thumb, or those high-ridged tendons at the back of his hands, which give those spidery fingers a life of their own.
Kisha doesn’t know why, but she begins to make him do things. First, it is to fetch a cup for her which he rinses before he hands it over. Then it is to put the kettle on, which requires him to fetch the matches, light the stove, fill it and place it on the hob. Requests that demand of him a whole series of movements.
To pull the window shut he needs to unwind his legs, straighten himself out of the chair, cross the floor and stretch his full length up to reach the catch. It is the same to drag the heavy, beech-wood table a little further from the wall.
His strength is almost casual; like his voice and hands, it seems to have no connection with his body. He simply does what she orders without a single utterance.
Maybe she wants to catch a glimpse of the life he is so careful to conceal from her and Muriel – or to see something of the intent and the danger she thinks she notices in those ‘knifeman’s’ hands. Maybe she just wants to break through that carapace of reticence.
When it happens, it does so with a laugh and a drawl that catches her off-guard and sends a shiver down the skin of her arms.
‘Why you doan come out with it,’ he says.
‘Sorry?’
‘You waant me. But you doan know how fe say it.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Yuh hear me firs time.’
With a jerk of her hand, she knocks the cup off the wooden table. It hits the stone floor and fragments like a small grenade. She feels the hot liquid on her feet and winces. His trouser ends are soaked but he does not move.
‘How dare you? You…’
‘Me not wrong. Me never wrong ‘bout dese tings.’
‘My God! What kind of person are you?’
‘Me do what me haffe do.’ Now the voice belongs entirely to him.
His eyes are directly on hers; his gaze is not threatening, just quiet and assessing. ‘Wha mek yuh sister hate you so, den?’
‘She told you that?’
He laughs. ‘It doan have no love between you two.’
She finds she cannot look at him.
The throbbing of Muriel’s engine reaches them. The youth lowers his shoulder. A limpness comes over him.
Kisha steps out for a walk.
With Muriel out there mid-mornings, burning rubber on the road, the youth makes two cups of coffee and hands her one. Sometimes he places a bowl of grapes before her, still dripping with tap water. He says nothing; nor does she. And even if Muriel’s arrival cuts short their earlier confrontation, somehow it feels as if their conversation is complete.
She’s imagined it happening differently – him following her out there, the awkward talk, the ugly slug of words between them that – despite their challenge and abuse – would make it easier for her. But he is there before her, on her stone, in one of those sleeveless T-shirts.
He’s drawn his knees up to his chin, arms straight down beside him so that he looks like an oversized ‘N’ perched on the massive ‘O’ of the stone. With a start, Kisha realises that he must have followed her to this place before.
His presence makes the hill feel different. She notices for the first time the hints of rust in the purple moss that covers the sloping earth, the patch of darkness just beyond them where the lower branches of the trees tie themselves together in a sort of cave. She can smell the sweaty dryness of the fields below and hear the hollow humming of the land beyond. She knows that she will never want to set foot on this hill again.
He smells of the meat he’s been feeding on every day, and of the fierceness with which she lets him take her. He is too confident, too sure of his effect on her for it to be any good. There is neither ugliness nor pleasure in it for her. Just fact.
Near the end, when his body begins to tense and shudder, she arches herself high and hard and throws him off.
He is still gasping when she straightens up. She’s heard it said that men, brought to that point and abruptly let down, become violent or docile. He is none of these. There is something both chastened and defiant in the way he looks – not at her, but at the grass between his feet.
They descend the hill. She leads the way. Half way down, they meet the conspiratorial eyes of a short, wide man, his face brown and rugged as bark. He barely pauses from swinging the small scythe at the roots of the grass that he is gathering.
She wants to say, to the man – or to the youth – that she’s never done this sort of thing before. She isn’t the kind. Never knew she had it in her.
As soon as their feet hit the path, she feels his hand on her arm. ‘You nice,’ he says.
With a surge of irritation, she swings her head to face him. ‘Can’t say the same about you.’
His jaw hardens. The danger she sensed in him, which a short while ago had in some way been confirmed, washes over her like a mustard bath.
‘Me leave ‘er fuh you.’ he says softly. The urgency is in his grip.
‘Why?’
‘Is how me feel. Here.’ He touches his stomach where his navel would be beneath the shirt.
‘Kinda quick, innit?’
‘Me do what me have ter do.’
She wonders what he means by that, decides she knows and smiles.
‘Well… we’re married. So, technically…’ She runs a hand across the prickles on her head, thinking that she would have to cut them back as soon as she gets to London. ‘Fact is, though, I don’t want you. Never did. But you wouldn’t understand that.’
He mutters something, the tail end of which is, ‘crazy…’ It brings a small smile to her mouth.
Her sister’s car is parked almost in the doorway when they walk into the yard. Muriel is sitting at the table. The heels of her hands are propping up her face. Kisha has a quick impression of the bulk of her sister, her dark solidity against the bright backlight from the window above her head. Kisha steps into a silence so thick, she feels as if she is wading.
Her eyes quickly scan the space: the small basket of wild black berries and pears; the four loaves of bread that Muriel invariably brings back with her; the heavy bread knife – the handle of which is touching Muriel’s elbow; her sister’s heavy breathing.
‘You! Get in here.’ Muriel’s voice erupts from her stomach. Kisha feels the young man brush past her. His hands are stuffed down his pockets. He places his back against the wall.
Muriel swings her head towards her, her lower lip pulled inward, her eyes bright with hatred.
‘I thought you weren’t into men. I thought you were a bloody…’
‘Say it, Muriel! Say it: Lez? Dyke? Say it!’ Kisha feels an old and deadly anger stirring in her blood.
‘That’s why, that’s why Mother threw your black arse out. Frickin’ African.’
Kisha leans a shoulder against the doorway. ‘Senegalese, actually,’ she says, her eyes fixed on the spot where Muriel’s elbow meets the table. ‘Wolof. He didn’t know she had me. She told him she wasn’t going to; then she kicked him out; yes, like she kicked me out. She told you who your father was, didn’t she? She never told me mine. I found out though. Like I found out that girl – all them years back – w
asn’t carrying no child. And no fuckin police came.’
With quivering lips Kisha turns her gaze fully on the boy. ‘Funny, Muriel, innit? The only thing we got in common – me ‘n you. We’re not into men.’
Muriel moves like a small eruption. She grabs the knife. Kisha stoops almost at the same time and straightens up with the brick they used as a doorjamb. But the youth is already between them. She notices with a quiver of disbelief that the knife is in his hand. She’s never seen a person move so quickly.
‘Done it, Muriel,’ he says. ‘Me say, done it!’
Muriel tries to fight her way past him, but wherever she turns, she finds him in front of her. She strikes out at him, sobbing. The only time he dodges her swing is when she lashes out at his face. The rest he takes unflinching. Then, as if her whole body has deflated, Muriel slumps back in the chair.
Kisha drops the brick. ‘He saved your life, Muriel Martin. Now you’re both even. I’m getting outta this… this cowshed.’
She is in the room and back out in an instant with the bag she packed the night before. Muriel follows her movements, as if her eyes are attached to her by a string.
Kisha strides through the doorway, eases herself around the car and pauses to contemplate a clutch of starlings skidding over the clean-shaven fields, and the brown crosshatch of farm roads.
The main road is ten miles or so away, perhaps further. But someone will stop for her. There will always be people – a farmer on his tractor, or some driver passing through who will be struck by her strangeness in this landscape and want to get a closer look.
She is counting on that to get her home.
TELL NO-ONE ABOUT THIS
Ara is smiling on the ride down the escalator from the seventh floor. She wants to get home quickly, lock her door, throw herself on her bed with her phone pressed against her ear and listen to Rasheed.
Ahead of her the hi-gloss marble floor is a clatter of hurrying heels as her workmates slap their passes against the sensors, flash their IDs at Security and flounce through the sliding doors.