The song which had been playing when the wobble became a spill was ‘Afraid of Us’ by Jonwayne, featuring a vocal sample from a group of Black women, one of whom was Whitney Houston’s mother, Cissy. In isolation, the hum of the melody raises the hairs on the arm, raises something within you. Have you ever been afraid of what lies within you, what you’re capable of ? Anyway, when you mop up the spill and all that remains is a shiny kitchen tile and your delicate body, made soft by your tears, you stand in your living room, listening to ‘Junie’ by Solange. You raise your arms in casual jubilance, thankful to be alive. Such simplicity in gratitude. Simple progression too in this ode to funk singer Junie Morrison. Which is to say everything comes of something else. Which is to say from your solid ache comes a gentle joy. Which is to say, moving across your living room, affording yourself the freedom, to be, such simplicity in this, in the hazy, rhythmic bounce of the drums, intentional bassline, intentional and unthinking in your steps, approaching ecstasy, losing control of what you know, losing what you know. Born fresh, born new, born free. Bypassing something, the trauma, the shadow of yourself. This is pure expression. Ask yourself here, as you begin to move with quick, light steps, bare feet sliding across the floor, a delicate sweat forming: ask yourself here, how are you feeling?
The previous summer you asked the same question and found thin mist obscuring your form and detail. You found yourself in your room, unaware of the ache until you stood and felt a twinge in your side like a stray thorn had pierced you. You quietly got dressed and took a bus from Bellingham to Deptford, to a bar underneath the dim arches of the station, where musicians were said to gather and, channelling their voices through their various instruments, ask each other, how are you feeling?
You were annoyed at your own haze, at your lack of form and detail. But you made a choice, to be there, to want to shift, to want to move, and there was power in reaching towards yourself in this way. You thought about the intention of being, and how that could be a protest. How you were all here, protesting; gathered together, living easy. Spilling drinks on pavements. Two for £10. You’re all drinking now, but you weren’t allowed earlier, no, that table was reserved, all night, you just wanted a drink before the party next door, but no, your business was no good for them. You swallowed this and gathered together, easy living. Spill a drink on the pavement, the foam washing over blacktop like ocean spray.
The music drew you all inside. There’s a way to play the drums that makes hips move and feet jump. When one friend – first-timer – asked another – veteran – what it was like, she said, ‘The ancestors visit us and we let them take over.’ Maybe the ancestors are always within and you let them emerge. You saw it in the head rising above a curly mane of hair. You saw it in the hopping shoulders, the delicate curve of the spine. You saw it in the sweat pooling in the tiny waves of baby curls, at the bottom of a bunch of braids, nestled in the oiled frizz of natural hair; the rise and the fall of the Black body, no, the Black personhood, moving of its own accord, the beauty in her stamp, the nonchalant cheek on his playful features, the glint of a trumpet cradled by a dark hand in the light, an MC’s lips grazing the microphone; you were losing something, it’s not yourselves, no, but you were losing something, or perhaps it was like plunging into an ocean, the sticky tar of trauma washed away by the waves.
Dance, you said. Dance, sing, please, do what you must; look at your neighbour and understand they are in the same position. Turn to your neighbour and take one step forward as they take another step back, switch positions, move, move, move, become overwhelmed by the water, let it wash over you, let the trauma rise up like vomit, spill it, go on, let it spill on the ground, let go of that pain, let go of that fear, let go. You are safe here, you said. You are seen here. You can live here. We are all hurting, you said. We are all trying to live, to breathe, and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control. We find ourselves unseen. We find ourselves unheard. We find ourselves mislabelled. We who are loud and angry, we who are bold and brash. We who are Black. We find ourselves not saying it how it is. We find ourselves scared. We find ourselves suppressed, you said. But do not worry about what has come before, or what will come; move. Do not resist the call of a drum. Do not resist the thud of a kick, the tap of a snare, the rattle of a hi-hat. Do not hold your body stiff but flow like easy water. Be here, please, you said, as the young man took a cowbell, moving it in a way which makes you ask, which came first, he or the music? The ratata is perfect, offbeat, sneaking through brass and percussion. Can you hear the horns? Your time has come. Revel in glory for it is yours to do so. You worked twice as hard today, but that isn’t important, not here, not now. All that matters is that you are here, that you are present, can’t you hear? What does it sound like? Freedom?
8
‘I’ve been feeling low.’
‘Are you OK?’
You’re lying on your bed, feet propped up against the wall, watching the ceiling like an unmoving sky. You’re on the phone, reaching across the distance, not for the first time, nor the last. Her voice spins towards you through the soft static and you try to map its direction, imagining the soundwave drifting from a place you have never seen.
‘Can I be honest?’
‘Always.’
‘I’m very tired.’
With your confession, the truth imbues your self with form and detail. You hear her low exhale and know she understands you’re not tired in the way sleep will solve, no. You’re weary. You’re not without joy, but the pain is much, often. And like Jimmy said, you begin to think you are alone in this, until she says:
‘Me too.’
‘How do you cope?’ you ask.
‘I smoke. I drink. I eat. I try to treat myself often. I try to treat myself well. And I dance.’
‘Tell me more about that. Please.’
‘The smoking or the drinking?’
You both laugh and you hear her rearrange herself, perhaps sitting up.
‘I like to move,’ she starts. ‘I always have. Used to catch me on the playground out-dancing everyone. It’s my space, you know? I’m making space and I’m dancing into the space. I’m like, dancing into the space the drums leave, you know, between the kick and the snare and the hat, where that silence lies, that huge silence, those moments and spaces the drums are asking you to fill. I dance to breathe but often I dance until I’m breathless and sweaty and I can feel all of me, all those parts of me I can’t always feel, I don’t feel like I’m allowed to. It’s my space. I make a little world for myself, and I live.’
‘Wow.’
‘Sorry, that was a lot.’
‘No, don’t apologize. I’ve never heard anyone talk about dance like that, it’s cool. There’s a night on Wednesdays in Deptford, really close to you . . . it’s jazz music but there’s something different in that room. An energy that’s very . . . very freeing. A bunch of Black people just being themselves.’
‘We should go when I’m back in London. There’s nothing like that in Dublin.’
‘Let’s do it.’
You turn the phone on speaker and let your legs flop onto the bed. Resting your body on its side, both hands tucked underneath your head as if in prayer. Desiring peace. Your breathing eases. You hear hers too, both of you pushing and pulling, ebb and flow, the ocean separating you. Somewhere in the quiet rush, you hear a snore. You sign off quietly, hoping not to wake her.
9
‘Do you want a biscuit?’
‘Erm –’
‘Go on. Take a couple.’
Her mother places a large silver tin on the tiny table in front of you, an assortment of biscuits stacked over each other. You take a pair of chocolate digestives, and dip one into your cup of tea. The biscuit softens and one half plops into your Earl Grey.
‘What’s on at the moment?’ her mother asks no one in particular, pointing the remote at the televis
ion. Flicking through the channels, she settles on the Winter Olympics. You both watch four humans skitter around a racetrack, carved from solid blocks of ice, in a svelte vehicle shaped like a long smooth pebble.
You are here, at her house, for your hoody. You were meant to meet just before she returned to Dublin, but in this city, much will conspire to prevent meetings and appointments. It was a Sunday in February, and you both watched train after train cancel, before giving up. So now you’re here, without her presence, which is heavier in her absence. You’re here, in her house, for your hoody, which you expected to pick up and depart, back to your home, where it is just you, where the quiet is beginning to hum and buzz in a way you can hear.
When you came in, her mother welcomed you, and asked if you wanted a cup of tea. You watched her elegant yet determined shuffle, head down in concentration rather than dismay, opening cupboards, retrieving the biscuit tin.
‘Ridiculous sport,’ her mother says. The screen has changed. A woman slowly launches a stone-shaped object across the ice, letting go of the curved grip mounted to the top. Two more women, armed with long-handled brushes, scrub at the ice as if they are trying to rid a stain. An invisible path is cleared and the object glides silently across the ice, entering a target zone with a white bullseye.
‘Of course, hold on.’ You hear her shuffling elsewhere in the house; when she comes back to the living room, she lays your hoody across one of the chairs.
‘What have you been doing today?’
It’s Saturday night. Elsewhere in the city, people are rebelling against their weekly duties, filling up pubs and bars and dance floors. Whatever warmth was teased earlier in the winter must have been delusion. You spent the day indoors, the morning slipping by at your desk where you flicked through a book of images – Roy DeCarava’s The Sound I Saw – and you wrote a little, not much, but something, you wrote something. The rest of the day, a blanket draped over you, poring over the pages of a novel – Zadie Smith’s NW.
‘I love her writing,’ her mother says.
‘She’s my favourite writer. NW is the book I return to most.’ Perhaps that is how we should frame this question forever; rather than asking what is your favourite work, let’s ask, what continues to pull you back?
Last year, on a summer’s evening, you presented your battered copy of NW for Zadie to sign. A brown headwrap, gold hoops swinging from her ears, and something like knowing on her face, despite admitting earlier in the evening she was perpetually unsure. Her presence was peaceful, slow, sage-like. She could see you were a little awkward, a little overwhelmed – your friend will swear you were close to tears – and steered the conversation.
‘Where’s your family from?’
‘Ghana.’
‘Ah. My mother married a Ghanaian, briefly. You’re wonderful people.’
‘What happened? Your mother, I mean.’
‘Some things aren’t meant to work out.’
You spoke some more, and you tried – and failed – to explain what the book meant to you. That there were many similarities between your south-east London and her north-west.
‘South-east – where?’
‘Catford.’
‘My grandma lived in Catford. I spent a lot of time there growing up.’
You smiled, while she signed your book, unable to say any more. Unable to tell her you have read her book many times and will do so many more. To tell her where your breath catches, where your eyes widen. That illustrations of desire slipped into the comfort of a paragraph did not go unnoticed. You want to say when you read her essay about this novel –
The happy ending is never universal. Someone is always left behind. And in the London I get up in – as it is today – that someone is more often than not a young Black man.
– that you understood.
Her mother’s interest is piqued when you mention writing.
‘What are you writing, fiction?’
‘I dunno. Kind of. It’s just to supplement my photography, really. Trying to find another form to tell stories with. But yeah, I spend a lot of time with novels.’
‘So,’ she says, crossing one leg over the other. ‘There are really only two plot devices when writing: a stranger comes to town, or a person goes on a journey. All good work is just variations of these ideas.’
You ponder this when you leave. But what of NW, the book in which no one wins?
And what of the life you lead? Who is the stranger? Who is the familiar? And what are their journeys?
You didn’t know whether to hug her mother when you were leaving but rode an instinct, wrapping long arms around her quickly, not lingering. She smelt of petrichor and a place you might grow to call home.
Waiting for the bus in the darkness, you pull on the hoody. It smells like her: sweet like the torn petal of a flower, sweet like lavender plucked from its stem while in summer bloom. You put your headphones on and load up Kelsey Lu’s EP, Church, an album full of orchestral loops designed to reach towards a quiet ecstasy. You could be anywhere right now, your eyes closed, enveloped in her presence, which is heavier in her absence. But you are home, amongst the melody, slipping into percussive breaks, breathing easy.
10
You’re riding the Overground, from Shoreditch to south-east London, when she calls. It snowed earlier in the day, a layer of white dust bordering on disruptive. Yet, when walking to the station, the only trace was in your memory, the ground wet now, the air crisp.
‘Where are you?’ she asks.
‘I am . . .’ You look outside and latch onto the enormous Sainsbury’s. ‘Pulling into Brockley.’
‘I’m back from Dublin. Thank God for reading week.’
‘I thought you were back on Monday?’
It’s another Saturday night and the train is loud with a group of football fans talking at a level you’re sure they have normalized across the course of the day.
‘Nope, today. Who is that?’
You get up and walk towards the exit, cupping the microphone to your mouth.
‘Bunch of guys. Palace fans, it looks like.’
‘Why are you whispering?’
‘Cause it’s all good-natured but I don’t want them to think I’m chatting about them.’
‘Fair. Listen –’
‘Yeah?’
‘I think you should get in an Uber and come to mine.’
‘You think,’ you say, ‘I should get in an Uber and come to yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. I will.’
‘OK. OK. When will I see you?’
The train pulls in a few moments later. As you run off the platform and into the street, weaving towards your taxi, you experience a strange moment in which you are flung into the future, wondering how you will remember this. You would like a witness. You would like someone to stop you and ask, What are you doing?, to which you would reply, I’m doing what I feel.
‘Hey, friend.’
‘Hey, friend.’
‘I missed you,’ you say.
‘Did you now?’
‘I did.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘This is the part where you say, “I missed you too.” ’
‘Eh – kinda.’
‘Whatever.’
She beams and throws her arms around your neck, her mane of curly hair tickling your face as she pulls you close. Today, shea butter and coconut oil. As you separate, you point at her T-shirt.
‘You drink Supermalt?’
‘Absolutely not. That drink is horrid. My cousin gave me this shirt.’
‘How can you not like Supermalt?’
‘It’s like a whole meal in a bottle. So heavy. It doesn’t taste good either, tastes like . . .’ She shudders, as if whatever she is trying to recall is trau
matic.
‘The Ghanaian in me is offended.’
‘Unless you want to keep being offended, keep that drink away from me.’ You walk through to her living room, she to the kitchen. ‘Speaking of, have you eaten?’
‘Unless you count the two ciders I had earlier, that’s a no.’
‘Let’s get takeout. Pizza. Hot wings. Both.’
‘Both?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Hmm,’ you say, struggling to keep the smile from your voice.
‘What?’
‘You never finish food.’
She folds her arms and her features crumple in disdain.
‘You never finish your food.’
‘I always finish my food.’
‘No, fair.’ She shrugs. ‘My eyes are bigger than my stomach. Anyway, that means I always have lunch the next day.’
‘I’ll give you that one,’ you say, pulling up the takeout website. ‘I feel like a big part of our foundation is eating and drinking together.’
‘I don’t think those are bad things to take pleasure in.’
‘Neither, neither.’
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