Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

  12

  You would like to talk about the suppressions.

  You are walking along Battersea Bridge. Leaning over the edge, the water choppy, the phone line clear, the words urgent, the language flimsy and insufficient, the feelings honest. You’re standing on Battersea Bridge, watching the water ripple, and you wonder what caused the first ripple in this situation. She’s at the airport, waiting for her flight to Dublin, asking the same question, re­­tracing to the first night you met. She’s trying to understand what passed between you that night, and simultaneously understanding that she cannot comprehend. She’s thinking about your drunken excursion, from central to ­south-­east London. More immediately, the ­five-­day stretch in which you have barely left each other, in which nothing really happened but two friends sharing a bed and knowing an intimacy some never will. That is to ask, what is a joint? What is a fracture? What is a break?

  ‘We’re going round in circles at this point.’

  ‘OK, well shit, lay it on me,’ she says.

  ‘We both know that something has happened in the past few days, something we can’t ignore.’

  ‘Nothing happened.’

  ‘But that’s the point. It would’ve been easier if we’d slept with each other. What happened was, I dunno. A bit more real.’

  Her breath is thick as the silence down the line.

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘I am running from this.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I can’t do this. There’s too many factors, there’s too much on the line. You’re my friend. You’re one of my closest. And my ex? Samuel would have a field day with this. Nah, this is too complex.’

  ‘What about you? What do you want to do?’

  ‘I have to go catch my plane.’

  The next day, you can barely hear her on the phone over the clatter of cups in the café. You take refuge on the street, pacing in the small patch in front of the shop. Brick Lane is quiet, even for a weekday. You’re wearing a ­T-­shirt because spring is showing flashes of summer, cloudless blue, orange corona high in the sky. You’re laughing and joking, and it’s easier to do this, to open a box and close it quick, seal it with sharp quips, that is, ­until –

  ‘I cannot wait to break this dry patch, you know.’

  ‘Uh-­huh.’

  ‘Hoping you break yours soon too.’

  ‘Oh. Erm.’ She sniffs. ‘Yeah, it’s a little late for that.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I, er, yeah. I broke mine already.’

  ‘But you only went back yesterday?’

  ‘Yeah. It happened yesterday.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ you lie. ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘This is weird.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘But it’s not like I owe you anything. We’re just friends.’

  ‘You don’t. We are.’

  ‘I think I should go.’

  ‘OK.’ And she hesitates for a moment before signing off and hanging up.

  You stand for some time, an unmoving car ploughed into from behind.

  The same day, you leave an ­Uber – the walk from the station to your friend’s house was too far in the darkness that fell quick and full. You have taken two or three steps. Your friend’s house is in sight. You could throw a stone and it would shatter the window. You’re thinking of an evening with a glass of wine, a record spinning in the background. You’re thinking of good food and better company. You’re in a memory of something yet to happen, when they stop you, like a moving vehicle edged off the road. They tell you there has been a spate of robberies in the area. They say many residents describe a man fitting your description. They ask where you are going and where you have come from. They say you appeared out of nowhere. Like magic, almost. They don’t hear your protests. They don’t hear your voice. They don’t hear you. They don’t see you. They see someone, but that person is not you. They would like to see what is in your bag. Your possessions are scattered across the ground in front of you. They say they are just doing their jobs. They say you are free to go now.

  You make it halfway up the path to the door. You are hollowed out, like it was not just your bag they emptied. You are no longer in control of your limbs. You don’t know how long you’ve been standing in front of the door when your friend calls, asking where you are. You tell them something has come up, that you won’t be able to make it. You call an Uber and go home.

  You tell no one about that incident, like you told no one about the time they stopped you, hard. Your friend was driving, one hand on the steering wheel, the other gesticulating as he preached. You remember talking about having faith and God and beauty and that which cannot be explained. You remember speaking of religion and power and Blackness. You remember making a joke which prised open his serious features, laughter rumbling from his chest. You don’t remember the contents of the joke, but you’re sure, like much of your humour, it was quick, sharp, rooted in all you can explain and all you cannot. You remember the silence was heavy with all that was not said, all that goes unsaid. The moment stretched and held, and you knew both of you wanted to say you were scared and heavy, but reticence was a song you both knew by heart. Instead, you said you were hungry. He pulled over and that’s when you heard a ­screech-­squeal-­scream of tyre.

  Second time this week. Don’t you get tired?

  Drowned by ­screech-­squeal-­scream of get out of the car get out of the car get out of the car. They ordered you to the ground for symbolic purposes. Playing dead. You let out a skinny whimper sharp as a butter knife. You heard the sound rattle in your chest, pressing shut unserious features. Total eclipse. When you came to, you were beside yourself. This is what it means to die, you thought. Total eclipse. The sky turned black. Ha. You looked in one of their eyes and saw the image of the Devil. He had an index finger gripping the trigger, like he was holding onto a lifeline. He looked scared, behind the crumpled forehead, the hard eyes, he looked scared. He looked scared of what he did not know, of what was different. He looked scared because instead of questioning himself, of interrogating his beliefs, of not filling in the gaps, he continues to look at you as a danger. You fit the profile. You fit the description. You don’t fit in the box but he has squeezed you in. He looked scared. They all did. You wouldn’t accept their apologies, nor their extended hands, because even these are weapons in the darkness. Easy mistake to make. Second time this week for your friend, playing dead. Let’s ask anyone else who has ever fit a description: you ever had to play dead? Have you ever not been seen? Are you tired?

  But when it happens to you for a second time that week, you have to tell someone, even if it is yourself:

  I was just walking home. Usual route, cut through the park. I’m what, thirty seconds away? If that. There’s a car stopped at the intersection. It’s weird, cause it’s late, ­pitch-­black out, the headlights are off, but the car isn’t parked, there’s a driver and a passenger. It’s only when I really squint that the headlights flick on, full beam. Blinding. And then the car comes towards me, real slow, snail’s pace, man. I could jog faster. Anyway, I start moving faster, but I know the car is gonna reach me before I get to my door. And when it does, the driver winds down the window, but doesn’t say anything to me, neither of them do, just drive by real slow. It’s weird, I didn’t even notice the police markings on the car until they had pulled away.

  It has only been a week since she called you and suggested that when you disembark from the DLR, you get an Uber to her house. You have spent the time tumbling. Today, on Saturday, you wake late in the morning. Your mother and father are already awake. It has not been long since they returned from Ghana. Something is not right. You can feel it. You enter their room, and your father is sitting on the edge of his bed. His shoulders have slumped inwards. He has slumped in
on himself. A stale trail of tears runs down his cheeks. You pull him up and hold him close, letting him breathe in the comfort of your arms.

  ‘Your grandfather is dead,’ he whispers.

  Grief rattles about your mind like a loose pebble in a shoe. You can’t see where you’re going. You call her. Despite everything, you call her, your closest friend, tell her that you’re tired, in your spirit, that you have made peace with dying but it hurts all the same. And she sits on the phone while you weep, remains on the phone in silence when the tears have stopped, distracts you with her raucous humour, and when the conversation has run its course she reminds you that she’s there, always there for you.

  But even here, you are hiding. You cannot tell her about when your father walked into your room one evening, holding out the tiny black phone he uses for international calls.

  ‘It’s Grandad.’

  Your body stiffened. The phone was still there, in your father’s hand, the static on the line audible from a distance. You know of the man on the other end of the line: you speak a few times a year, ask each other customary questions about your lives, your health, but custom is where it stops. He is family, yes, but you don’t know him. You take the phone to your room.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Oh. You don’t call me?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You don’t call me. I never hear from you. I don’t have long left. You have to call me more often. I could go any day now.’

  ‘OK,’ you said and, dashing out of your room, returned the phone to your father.

  Coming back to your room, the shame you were experien­cing gained distinction. He was right. You didn’t call him. He was in his eighties and, after several strokes, required assistance to live.

  In your kitchen, you wonder what your tears are for: the loss of him or the loss of yourself ?

  To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression. That suppression is indiscriminate. That suppression knows not when it will spill.

  What you’re trying to say is that it’s easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulner­ability. Not better, but easier. However, the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate.

  At some point, you must breathe.

  13

  Several months after the fever breaks, you are walking from your house in Bellingham to your friend Imogen’s place in Gipsy Hill. It’s May now. You see an extension cord trailing in the grass like a loose thought as a woman slices a blade through overgrown hedges. A man walking past, coming downhill, carrying his daughter. Tiny gold hoops in her ears. She grips on his shoulder, straddling either side of his torso; his arms around her waist. Sunlight chasing them down the hill. You walk on.

  In her garden, you sit with the family. Two brothers, her father, Imogen. Her older brother fetches you a beer, the neck perspiring. You unpluck a button on your shirt, feeling a few beads of sweat release themselves from where they were trapped between material and skin. You all sit, basking in the first hints of summer sunshine, the lazier heat which rests and doesn’t shift. Time slurs. You’re holding an empty beer and Imogen is slurping at the dredges in her glass.

  ‘Let’s take refuge,’ she says.

  Indoors, you and your oldest friend share a sofa. Imogen tucks herself close and it’s not unfamiliar. When you were at school, it would be she, waiting, patient, legs crossed, neck boughed over her phone display, when you emerged from basketball training in the evening. She would catch sight of you with her kind, attentive gaze and already be in motion.

  ‘Good session?’

  Murmured, breathless answer, growing into something coherent, finding form. Walking towards the enormity of the fields. Covering the circumference with a slow, measured trudge, once, twice. Time losing shape, dragged back by your parents wondering where you are. Departing from one another, tucking her tiny frame into your chest; declining the lift, wanting to walk, to carve out something coherent, to find a form.

  On the sofa, she studies you with the same attentive gaze.

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know if I should go meet my friend.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just have a bad feeling.’

  ‘Then don’t go.’

  ‘But I want to see her. She’s only back from Dublin for a few days.’

  ‘Just go with your instincts.’

  You’re not a prophet but you should trust yourself more often.

  You leave Imogen, take the number 3 bus snaking down to Brixton, where you meet her and the poet. It’s like the fever had never broken, it’s like you have returned to that evening where you shared a table at dinner, the three of you. As before, when you’re departing, the poet who sees you and her, saw the ripple and the sinking stone, tells both of you to stay out of trouble.

  From Brixton Nando’s to the Ritzy Cinema. To the bar. You order a whisky and she pulls a face. She, a sweet cider. There’s a balcony, where you sit at a wobbly table and drink quickly, lest they spill. You’re set back from the edge so it’s screaming you hear first, followed by the smashing of glass, accusations being thrown, an anger, a hysteria. Feelings are heightened in these moments. You peer over the balcony, joining in with the rest of Brixton to view too many policemen for one woman. A knee on the woman’s back. The small crowd on the balcony weigh in with their own heavy conclusions or, in one case, despair at their own hopelessness.

  ‘I just wish there was something I could do.’

  A stranger consoles another stranger. ‘You can’t. People like that, people who have been in Brixton for years, they’re a lost cause.’

  And you feel anger, a hysteria, feelings heightened in these moments, but your vision is clear, an unfrosted window, you see the woman with the policeman’s knee on her back not being seen.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asks. You shake your head.

  ‘Finish your drink, let’s go.’

  You walk through Brixton, passing a Caribbean fete. Eyes follow her loose languid figure. When she gets into stride and a smile cracks open her features, you wonder if what people see matches what is. You suspect it does. You had that drink too quickly, you realize, but you don’t think as you both walk into a Sainsbury’s, and buy a bottle to split, both drinking too quickly, both drunk too quickly. Spillages. Spillages on the bus. Spillages on the path to her flat, where you both pause to question each other, but gloss over. It’s easier this way, for now.

  ‘I heard you bumped into Samuel.’

  You hesitate. ‘Who did you hear that from?’

  ‘Samuel. I saw him yesterday, both got off at the same station.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He asked me if anything was going on with us. I couldn’t give him a straight answer.’

  Neither could you. You had met Samuel in a similar fashion the week before, alighting from a train at Elephant and Castle, meeting on a platform. It was the first time in several months you had seen each other, and he was short, sharp, curt with you, before getting to the point.

  ‘Are you and her together yet, then?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t treat me like an idiot,’ Samuel said.

  ‘We’re not together.’

  ‘But you want to be?’

  ‘Where is this coming from?’

  ‘I said, don’t treat me like an idiot. I saw the way you looked at her when you first met. I saw the same look when I came over to hers that time, in December. I heard how you spoke about each other. It’s whatever, bruv. You’ll probably end up getting married. You’re both adults, but shit, be honest about it. I’m tired of people lying to me. It’s bad enough having to watch two people you care about fall for each other. But to not say anything? That’s rubbish. So tell me what the deal is?’

  ‘Honestly,’ you said
. ‘I don’t know.’

  Except you did know. To give desire a voice is to give it a body through which to breathe and live. It is to admit and submit to something which is on the outer limits of your understanding. To have admitted it to Samuel would have unfurled the folds of longing which he witnessed the beginning of. To have admitted it to Samuel would have been asking him to renounce you of your guilt. It would have let the resistance fall away and given you the freedom to act. It was easier for you to remain silent and hold the desire to yourself. Samuel waited expectantly, waited for more, and when it wouldn’t come, walked away from you.

  As you walk the path to her flat, wobbly, drunk, you ask, ‘Are you mad I didn’t say anything?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not really.’

  ‘So you are.’

  She smiles. ‘When he told me, it felt weird. Felt like you were just looking out for yourself. I know it was just a chance meeting, but still.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Just tell me next time,’ she says, winding an arm around your waist. ‘Man, I’ve missed you.’

  ‘Me too,’ you say. ‘Me too.’

  Inside, you’re sitting across the room. You’re both talking to a young man lodging in her flat, aware that the third addition warps the dynamic. She nudges you with her eyes, and gestures at the empty spot in front of her. Why are you over there? she’s saying. Come. So you go. Perch on a bare patch of carpet where her legs are trailing and lay your hand on her bare skin. Is this OK? you ask. It is, she says, it is, and so you’re here, you’re drunk, there’s already been a spillage but you mopped it up. She runs a hand over your shorn head, tracing lines. The conversation moves, flows, swoops, boughs, but when he retires to bed, it’s evident you’ve been waiting to be alone.

  ‘You can’t stay today. The lodger is staying in my room, I gotta sleep with my mum.’