‘I can’t.’ I offered a grin as I yelled back to her. I really couldn’t.
‘Why?’ Because if I got up there they would boo or laugh or throw rocks at my head. Because I wasn’t made for the pedestal, I was unsuitable for display. No crowd would ever accept Chris Jones held up above them. Philly had already taught me that, and who knew me longer than it? Definitely not the graceful Fionna, who reached out to tug my hand while still doing her one-foot shuffle. I grasped hers just so she wouldn’t stumble.
‘I’ll dance with you down here, so if you fall I can catch you,’ I told her, and she accepted that evasion, released me of the obligation of humiliating myself.
Look at the way she moves and imagine what she could do with two feet beneath her. Reluctantly fulfilling my promise, I began bobbing awkwardly below her, forwarding racial harmony by dispelling stereotypes of black grace with every pathetic jerk. But then the crowd took even that responsibility away from me. All around me, bodies stilling as they took her in. Little woman up above them moving like there was nothing you could put on her that she couldn’t just shake off, radiating life so bright it might even burn your troubles too. Whatever made us alive, whatever it was that made us more than functionally bags of blood, she had it and she was showing it to the room. A sliver of God vibrating there before us. And I knew everyone could see her the way I did because they were all trying to get a better glimpse, pushing me out of the way to do so. Knowing instinctively that I shouldn’t even be there to witness this event, the crowd expelled me, shoved me shoulder by shoulder back to the dance floor, now emptied. Fionna kept going; I could make out from over their heads. I don’t know if she knew I wasn’t there anymore, but I knew she knew the crowd was. That they were yelling for more and she was feeding them.
I went back to the table we’d been sitting at, picked up a drink I was pretty sure was mine. The other seats were deserted, so I commandeered a dark pocket in the corner, against the wall. For the remaining hours, I sat and played shepherd to the jackets and lighters the dancers left behind. The club made snakebites and the waitress didn’t care how many I ordered, as long as she could keep the change from the tenner each time. So by the time the music ended and the only sound was my ears buzzing, I felt prepared for the solitary night bus home. But, as I struggled to get up again, there was Fionna, hopping back from the light to greet me, tugging on my hand once more.
‘Why you come back for me?’ I managed.
‘Because we need each other.’ Fionna giggled, hugging my waist tightly (or was she keeping a drunken man from falling down?). Propping me against a pillar and hopping back off again to call us a mini-cab out of there. Having the bouncer help me out to the car. Waking me up in Brixton by giving a pinch to my cheek and delivering the words ‘Christopher, we’re home.’
Sunday, my day-after embarrassment evaporated when Fionna walked into my bedroom, sheet wrapped around her, and said, ‘Chris, I have a bag of clothes already packed at my last bedsit that I’ve been meaning to retrieve. Maybe you could pick that up for me?’ Immediately, fueled by hope, I was on the tube to Hornchurch, riding all the way out to the East London address she’d given me. The trip took as long as my last flight to Amsterdam, regardless of how close it looked on the Underground map. Maybe, if it was a large bag, she might stay the whole week.
The landlord was a big woman and a cop, dressed in a uniform when I got there. Her jacket was off and I could see her bra hugging her fiercely underneath the white shirt, her back looking as if it needed to be scratched. Smiling, I said I was here to pick up a bag for Fionna.
‘Well, I’m sure you are, but first, let’s see the money. Mind you, I told her that from before.’ There was a cashpoint a mile back by the tube station, so it didn’t take me long to gather up the £180. When I got back the lady was standing at the door behind six suitcases, big enough to hide bodies and heavy enough to make me believe they did. I took a cab back to Brixton, paying the driver nearly forty quid for the ride. From the car I walked to my door with three cases in each hand, letting the handles try to break my bones as the weight hammered my legs with each step.
At my front door, the odors – fried onions, sausage, hot pepper, and olive oil – all coming from my property. Inside, I stood at the kitchen door, luggage still in hand, looking at the place settings Fi had laid out on my table. ‘Try this.’ Grinning, she came towards me, one hand holding a spoon and the other guarding underneath it. She was wearing one of my T-shirts as if it was a dress; she’d even found one of my ties was a good belt for the outfit. My hands still caught inside handles, Fionna put the spoon’s tip in my mouth and lifted it up so it could pour in. It was some kind of chili, I could taste the salt and the crushed tomatoes. When she pulled the spoon away, excess sauce dropped onto my bottom lip, sliding down to my chin. ‘Sorry,’ Fionna told me, and she reached forward and grabbed a dick that was already hard for her, pulling me down to her eye level. Slowly, with the end of her tongue, Fionna retraced the drip’s path along my chin up to my bottom lip. When she reached it, Fi surrounded mine with both of her own, catching me in her teeth and sucking my flesh clean again. Oh, to put my hands on her, to hold her to me as hard as she was now biting, but at my sides my swollen hands were now stuck in the luggage handles, which made things even more difficult when Fionna started pulling me down to the linoleum. Her teeth released, and I wasted precious time trying to maintain contact with those lips before I realized that she really wanted my face to drift away.
‘Talk to me,’ she demanded, and my words began pouring confessions of attraction, instant love and des—
‘No. Talk to me black,’ African woman said to me, and neither one of us thought she meant Swahili, Yoruba, or Twi. Black. And not the black I coveted, not the one I was walking to. The other one. That was her price, the cost of this fantasy. Lady, do you know what you ask of me? Do you know what this payment says about my desire? Take it. So I gave that to her: released the ownership of my tongue to the sound it had been meant for. Oh, and wasn’t that sound happy to be free again, eliminating prepositions and conjunctions with its loose grammar and curving my sentences into its drawl? Reveling in its parole and scheming for permanent freedom? Give ear to me, Fionna. Hear the voice of the life I want to smother. Listen to what the niggers on the corner have to say to you. Her fingers traced the moving lips that spoke to her until those same hands went to my neck and pushed my face lower, down to a place I wouldn’t assume clearance. Lips to lips once more. ‘Keep talking,’ Fionna demanded as my tongue took on additional duties.
My hands still stuck in suitcase handles, my arms outstretched above me like a gull in flight, I continued to rap my ghetto garble. As Fionna’s moaning grew, I spoke louder. Wet words wandered within her. Fionna’s fingers slipped to the back of my head and stayed there.
Fionna moving into my life was an easy thing because the space was already there for her. My days became Fi’s hand lightly shaking my shoulder hours past dawn, my own name whispered along the slope of my ear from her tongue. I rose, dressed, cut through Brockwell Park and listened to my own feet moving, the clack of brown soles on a black asphalt path amid rolling mint hills, mums with arms and legs crossed on benches smoking Silk Cuts and watching children in primary colored clothes hang from metal bars proportioned to their size. Joggers with pink faces and blank eyes and ears attached by wires to radios. Dogs with and without owners, chasing things that moved, sniffing the ground for objects to bite and chew and then let fall to the earth again where they could look at them. I stuck to the asphalt path, walked towards the lido, past the tennis then football courts, onto Brockwell Road and down to David’s.
At his door I pressed the bell. Once to wake him up. Another to get him to rise with purpose. With time came sounds from the window ten feet above my head, the snap of a metal latch and the creak of old hinges, and then I stepped back from the gate to watch him (squinting eyes, the snarl of a confused, belligerent animal, shirtless regardless of the weather, look at the belly on that one). When the glass was open, his keys would come down like a flightless metal butterfly and I caught them with two hands, reaching high and then letting my fists flow low with the momentum so they didn’t sting my palms.
Keys in my hand was the best part of the day because there it was, physically, in my hands: David’s world, heavy and jagged and multiplicitous, held together by a ring attached to a black plastic duck. Everything he had was contained within its weight and I stood on the street alone with it, unprotected, unguarded.
I would find the brown, round-head key, slide it in the door, then walk up the stairs to the kitchen where I heard him yell, ‘Make us a cuppa’ which meant pour the old water out of the electric kettle and add cold water for the new. Lay mustard on the white bread and cover that with cheddar and put it in the grill hung above the stove.
While water boiled and cheese melted and brown man spat and farted in the bathroom beyond, I read the newspaper that Margaret would place on the table after she left for work hours before (always
The Guardian
and always placed back in order, section within section, without crease or jam stain, just like new although she had surely read it over breakfast hours before). When the sounds of his shower had ended I went back to the kitchen and poured one inch of milk into a mug that held one gray tea bag, then laid the steaming water on top of it. David would appear, in long pajama bottoms and still no shirt but maybe a towel across his thick shoulders or on his head like a frustrated boxer. He would sit hunched over, a few feet from the table, so that his head was nearly level with it as he held his tea mug close to his mouth with both hands. Sipping was the only treble. For bass, he might moan.
When Red Rose had burnt away the encrusted syllables he might begin with explanations of the night before (‘After you left, I really tied one on, got right pissed’) or show me a souvenir of his travels (‘See this sign? I pulled it off last night. Right off a stone wall with my hands, right? I was mad, pissed out of my head. I used to chat up this girl that lived on Thorncliffe, number seventy-four. Lovely, you should have seen her.’) or passionately reveal his latest fascination (‘Mushrooms are the fruit of the soil. It’s like eating the earth when you eat them. That’s what it is.’). Then a walk to the third floor. David would get the messages from Raz, and we’d go down the blackboard in the center of the room, figure out the agenda and schedule whatever in-house or client meetings were needed.
But how long could that last? Particularly when the spritz of lager cans being opened marked the top of the hour better than Margaret’s antique grandfather clock (the German one, with the thick oak sides, and the two brass pendulums)? Inevitably there came five-thirty, a time to pick up the downstairs before Margaret came home. A time to pull up empty and half empty cans and the ashes of fags and spliff, for the list of chores to be executed while David hit the shower again, this time destined to arise with more clothes than his pajama bottoms. Was the work done? No, but as long as people were contacted, meetings were kept and deadlines were met, I could do all the work I needed to do that night, downstairs in my study, complete now with the drafting table, lamp and file drawers that Fionna’d gotten me to buy, the only distraction being her calling me from upstairs to tell me when something good was on the telly (‘Christopher, you’ll like this one, come.’). As long as David was there every morning, guiding me, massaging the clients, creating the designs, Urgent could keep going. David took care of the business, dealt with the people, I birthed the ideas. I was good at my job. I liked working. I liked working for him.
If the pre-Margaret chores were quick (get vitamin C, cod oil, and ginseng from Boots, renew the subscription to the
Voice
, mop kitchen floor) I could make my disappearance before six having taken care of things. If the chores took too long it was just ‘Do what you can do, I’ll take over when she gets here. Wake me when you hear her keys in the door.’
‘Are you going to wipe his arse, too?’ Fi asked me. I was late. Only a little, but she had been waiting for me down by the ticket machines in Brixton tube station and that short homeless brother with the busted lip and the lobotomy scar had yelled at her. We had opera tickets for the Royal Albert: I’d never gone and she was excited she was going to show me.
‘You know it’s not like that. He takes care of me also,’ I told her, going down the escalator.
‘David takes care of himself.’
‘David pays my rent, he pays my bills, everything. He got me here. That’s how he takes care of me. He’s my boy. Without David I would have nothing.’ And without David, I would be nothing. Lady, you don’t know it, but without him propping me up, you wouldn’t even be standing next to me.
‘That man will suck as long as you let him, and then when there’s nothing more he will fly off like a bloated bat. By then you will be too weak to even swat him down.’ Fionna stared forwards while she said this, as if she were watching this unfold. For a second she wasn’t a beautiful woman, someone who looked just the way beauty was supposed to. For a moment Fionna was just a skinny little black girl, hair straightened, lipstick done, trying to look cute in a dress she had no hips to be wearing. She could be from Nicetown maybe, East Mount Airy or Ogontz.
‘Fi, really, don’t worry. David is cool. Just because he needs me doesn’t mean he’s using me.’
‘Chris, who am I? I’m the one who loves you, the one who will always be here for you. I am the woman holding your hand.’ Fionna’s hand was a light thing, impossibly soft, even at the palm. The thin veins on top could barely be traced without looking. Later, when we got to the show, I held it during the entire performance, letting my hand explore hers as she led me through the sound.
The opera was a story about an old guy who married a young chick and then she cheated on him, and they all suffered, but that didn’t matter; I was a Phillystine and didn’t care about that silliness. What mattered was that we sat close enough that you could see the spittle shooting out of the actors’ mouths, that the voices of these performers were so strong, their sense of the emotion so complete, that when they sang I could feel their sound upon me, vibrating the hairs in my nose, as loud as when you’re waiting for the sub at Fairmont Avenue and the express roars by. What mattered was that here was a plain old Philly boy, costumed in a suit and actually enjoying the sounds of this world. The only one under these ornate ceilings who knew what malt liquor tasted like, what to do when someone starts shooting up a party or how to open a Krimpet without letting the icing stick to its plastic bag.