TAPE II, SIDE B

A spark had been ignited in Manny. The writing took over: on napkins and paper bags, spilling out of coat pockets and from under mugs of tea. She was submitting her papers with a ferocity that she hadn’t before. And the gimmick paid off. Under Ezekiel’s name, her pieces were picked up almost immediately, by two journals and a small paper.

‘Every successful person on this earth shares one thing in common,’ she told me, blotting ink from her pen. ‘A good story. And what does every good story need?’

She picked up the pen, waggling it in her fingers like a conductor, I her orchestra. I waited for the rhetorical question to be answered, and she raised her baton as if to hush me, as if to hush the whole room, and said slowly, cheekily, with a bonfire light in her eyes: ‘One charismatic storyteller. I mean, goodness! You look fabulous and drink solidly for a decade, and then bang, suddenly Evelyn Waugh writes a novel about you. This is how the city works.’

Ezekiel Brown had become the storyteller, the perfect cover for Manny’s story. But what was mine? Watching her there, scribbling away, I was overcome with a sick, weakening fear that my sister was leaving me behind. Her dedication set alight something inside of me, though, and I kept my own aspirations pinned at the forefront of my focus — a stage tour show, my grandmother the guest of honour. And her granddaughter someone to be proud of.

What would be my story? I constructed a character for myself to spur me on: a run-away who had fled the constraints of public school to live her dream in the salacious streets of Soho. My tale would be one of perseverance. I’d be painted as the next Evelyn Dove or Josephine Baker, independent and headstrong. To mimic them, I started cutting and pressing my hair straight and sleek, rigid waves framing my face. The finished look was something a little boyish, a little mischievous, and we all agreed it matched my personality rather well.

‘There’s something in this,’ Sam and a Half said when he saw me. ‘Something big.’

Together, in the early hours of the morning, we constructed a new solo routine. It was a vaudeville show, a little more camp, a little more theatre than the routine the Hot Chocolates performed at the Shim Sham. It wasn’t as glamorous, but it was something all mine. I sewed the outfits myself after hours at Madam Baumann’s, had a say over each and every detail. With my hair short, I looked quite like a brown Jessie Matthews in First a Girl, and we began to play around with the plot of that movie in our routine — dancing as a girl pretending to be a man who performs as a woman.

This caused a bit of a riff with the Hot Chocolates, who knew I was the favourite. Whenever we rehearsed together they would huddle apart from me like penguins, eyeing my steps from over their shoulders and giggling cruelly together the instant I made a mistake. I had no tolerance for it, and would roll my eyes right back at them, scoffing. I thought, if I just manage one proper good little number then I could leave them altogether. My grandmother’s refusal to take my calls had spurred me on, and I understood I would have to become a truly spectacular performer were I to beg her forgiveness. The Hot Chocolates were barely relevant to me now: I had a solo cross-country tour in my sights.

So when Sam and a Half was given reign over Thursday nights at Frisco’s, I begged him to put me on as opening act.

‘Thursday is always comedy night,’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘And, sorry to tell you darl’, I don’t think the owners know women can be funny.’

An idea came to me then.

‘Well put me on with Ezekiel!’ I suggested. ‘He can play trumpet for me, do a few impressions on stage for the interlude, and schmooze about Manny’s writing after.’

Sam and a Half agreed it was not a bad idea, so all that was left was to convince the man himself. As far as I could gauge, Ezekiel had not played on stage much since his band had gone to Europe. But I did not let that deter me.

‘Nobody but you has asked yet,’ he said, agreeing to my proposition. I grinned with excitement, my legs giddy.

Our first show premiered in the new year and my goodness, did it go well. Just as good as when I saw him at the Florence Mills that first time. His impressions were received week after week with belly laughs and salient applause, a perfect warm-up for me to skip on stage with my long high kicks and Charlie Chaplin mimes. He was everywhere, suddenly, and I was delighted. I lived for our strange little stage habits — how we never used the middle-left peg in the dressing room for our hats and coats, as superstition ruled it would end in a poor show. How we drank hot water with honey half an hour before open. How we linked our pinkies for good luck before we went on. We were comrades in the arts — he was something to me now. Oh, I didn’t know exactly what. But he was something.

For my sister, though, he was something else entirely.

‘What is our view today?’ he would ask, putting his trumpet away for the night, ready to assume his next role on her behalf. I wondered who he was doing the greater favour for, myself or my sister.

‘You can read it if you like,’ my sister would hand over her notebook.

He’d smile at her naughtily, trying to balance the notebook on his index finger until it dropped and fell in his hands. ‘But oh it is so much sweeter,’ he’d say, ‘when I hear it from your mouth.’

She’d brief him on whatever it was she had written that week so he could expound the ideas over club tables, and I would come off the stage from my performance and watch his from the sidelines. He schmoozed and confabulated, morphing into a magnetising raconteur, as bull-headed and assured of his opinions as Garvey himself. He kept up his role fantastically.

‘A guy with talent, wit, charm, and the sense to write it all down,’ I overheard a man whisper to his companion after Ezekiel had whistled past his table. ‘Won’t he hold a little back for the rest of us?’ Silently, I agreed with him.

Though, that’s not to say it had all been smooth sailing. It had got sticky at points, what with ‘Ezekiel Brown’ and, well, Ezekiel Brown, being two rather different beings. One evening, a man had approached Ezekiel after one of our shows where he did a little trumpeting, keen to hire him as a session musician for a proper studio recording. He hadn’t caught Ezekiel’s name before we had gone on, and Manny had to rush over and halt the conversation before Ezekiel revealed his name. It turned out that this same man had, just moments before, been swinging drinks over a table in fierce debate about the work of this ubiquitous ‘Ezekiel Brown’ and whether his ideas and abilities warranted any of the attention they were getting. Manny knew this because, naturally, she had been staunchly in Mr Brown’s corner, arguing right back at the man.

‘This is Mr Manny Powell, a quite brilliant musician,’ she’d said, introducing the pair to each other, glaring at Ezekiel urgently to go along with it.

‘And your name, miss?’ the man said. ‘I didn’t quite catch it.’ Of course, she couldn’t be Manny too, that really would be nonsense. So she said her middle name instead, which was Rosa.

Meanwhile, I had just come off stage after performing my bit, only to find the real pantomime playing out in front of my eyes — Ezekiel being Manny, Manny being Rosa, and all to disguise that Manny was also Ezekiel. What a farcical mess we three had got ourselves into! Still, the man booked Ezekiel-as-Manny to play on a record, Ezekiel’s first time in a studio, and Manny-as-Ezekiel continued to climb the ranks as a successful writer.

Sam and a Half was also taken by Ezekiel’s act. He saw dollar signs above the man’s head, and off the back of his short skits at Frisco’s, thought Ezekiel could develop his impressions into a proper comedy show if he wished, be the next Scott and Whaley.

‘You could do a whole bit with the trumpet,’ he pitched. ‘No need for a house band, you just slip on a banana peel and …’ Sam and a Half mimicked the sound of a sad trombone. ‘Plus the impressions, too? It’s a winning formula,’ he waggled his eyebrows at Manny and me behind him. ‘All this guy needs is a tub of paint and he’ll have every minstrelsy in this country out of business.’

‘Paint?’ Ezekiel had queried. ‘No, I am a black man as is.’ But Sam and a Half just waved him off.

‘Aren’t we all, kid. But you want to get on the BBC, don’t you?’

Not long after this, Ezekiel’s enthusiasm began to wane. When the applause washed over him — and it always did, he was always ten out of ten — instead of soaking in it, he would bow bashfully and then slink into the background, unable to bask in this grand reception. And as Manny’s success continued, and Ezekiel found himself pestered more and more frequently by those who had read his mot du jour and wanted to discuss it with him, he eventually stopped performing his impressions altogether.

‘I ran out of material,’ he would shrug when I asked, only turning up at Frisco’s now to be my accompaniment.

Despite my pressing, he never elaborated further.

I would tease him about it even. ‘You just enjoy playing for me too much, is that it?’ But he would simply shrug and smile weakly, humouring me, but never letting me in.

‘What do you think it is?’ I asked Manny one evening, after a night where we were both working at the Shim Sham. I was sitting on the edge of the stage, watching Manny collect glasses, the rest of the girls long gone because they always left without me now.

‘Look, this club is full of businessmen,’ she sighed, sitting herself at the table in front of me. ‘And what I have learned from businessmen is that they never have a personal judgement on the product, as long as they can make the sale. Do you think the vineyard owner does what he does for a love of drunks? No, of course not! He loves the profit. Do you understand?’ I stared at her blankly. ‘Let’s just say, Ezekiel is not a businessman,’ she said, heaving herself up to go back to glass collecting.

I pondered this on my way home. Being the face of Manny’s writing and the accompaniment to my show, perhaps Ezekiel needed something for himself. They often needed session musicians to stand in for the big bands on the West End circuit, and I asked Sam and a Half to put in a good word around town.

‘You think I don’t offer every Thursday when I see him play with you?’ Sam and a Half said. ‘It’s not that the kid couldn’t do it. It’s that he won’t.’

The next day, over breakfast, reading her most recent article printed on the third page of a local chronicle, Manny came to the same conclusion as me.

‘You know, I wonder if he needs his name back,’ she said to me, baby Joyce gurgling in the corner in agreement. ‘I’ve made my point well enough. My next article will be the last under Ezekiel Brown. And I think it’s about time we take him to Bath.’

So as we entered the spring of 1937, the three of us found ourselves on a train on a weekend holiday to Bath. Manny had left her job at the Shim Sham, leaving me alone with the Hot Chocolates, and this was a double celebration for her. We were feeling very smug with ourselves, and had dressed up. Ezekiel wore a new suit, and I was in posh floaty trousers. I had a beige satin scarf tied around my head and round, obnoxious sunglasses to cover my eyes, as if I was a film star trying to hide from picture-takers outside the Ritz. Manny was looking uncharacteristically feminine in a long cream dress. Like triplets, the three of us had big matching brown coats.

It was my very first time travelling to Bath. Manny had brought along a guidebook from her publishers about things to do, which I flicked through on the train. Whoever the words were intended for, they were for those much wealthier than us. There was nothing useful in it about travelling as a coloured person either, so we weren’t sure what to expect. What I did enjoy was the myths, about the Romans and the springs, and one fantastic little story about King Bladud.

‘Will you read it to us?’ Ezekiel asked, so I read it to the carriage with gusto, standing up as the train rattled and swayed through the countryside, gesturing with my arms and projecting as if I was at the Globe. The story was of a prince from Athens who contracted leprosy and was banished from his kingdom to England, doomed to live a nomadic life as a pig herder. Then the pigs, his closest companions, contracted leprosy too, for everything that he held dear would be cursed by his affliction. The poor prince-leper roamed in solitary with these ailing pigs because nobody would go near him, until one day he came across the hot springs. He knelt at the edge, his body tired and close to surrender. Beyond him, the pigs dove in headfirst, rolling and splashing in the fresh spring water. When the pigs emerged, their leprosy was cured entirely. So Bladud bathed himself, crawling his body across the bank and into the springs, baptising it in the hot, healing waters. When he came up for air, he was healthy from head to toe, cured entirely. He was invited back to his kingdom and returned from his monomyth triumphant, pledging to build the springs into a spa so everyone else could experience their healing powers too. The city was named Bath in their honour.

‘This is true?’ Ezekiel asked when I was finished.

‘Oh, my dear. It doesn’t matter if it’s true,’ Manny said teasingly. ‘What do I keep telling you? You can always stretch the truth if it serves to better tell a story.’

‘Right enough,’ I said. ‘In some versions, it says here, he’s even a necromancer.’

Manny laughed and Ezekiel looked over at her softly, my narration not enough to steal his attention for longer than a moment. I settled back into my seat, watching the world whizz past out the window. The tale had heightened the feeling that we were going on a pilgrimage of sorts — to see Selassie, to visit healing waters. We even thought we might go bathing in the baths ourselves.

But when we arrived, we found the city closed off to us, surveilling us, like animals in a zoo. In London, we knew how to carry ourselves, where to go, and where people who looked like us lived. We knew where we were welcome and we knew the places we were not. But in Bath … there seemed to be no rulebook at all. We were utterly visible, everywhere. Yes, there was hostility, as one might find anywhere, but it was the curiosity I couldn’t stand. The fascination. How everybody’s eyes were on us at all times, this persistent gaze. It made me feel sick.

We had booked ourselves a bed and breakfast to stay in, and the landlady was Jewish on her mother’s side. She had volunteered this to reassure us, I think. ‘All I’ve seen going on with the Nuremberg Laws with your people and my people, just know we don’t believe in such a thing here,’ she said warmly, dimples pinching into two rosy cheeks. ‘We accept all foreigners through our doors.’ We murmured in solemn agreement, though I was too polite to say that I didn’t consider myself foreign at all.

Manny immediately retreated to her room and prepared herself to write, taking out her notebooks and papers and clicking her knuckles. Ezekiel tried to coax her out with us to enjoy the sights, teasing by waving her inkpot around in the air and making her grab for it. She played the game with him, grinning, steadying herself with a hand on his chest as she tried to jump and reach it. The pair of them were out of breath from laughing as they jerked and ducked around each other, and I turned away unable to bear it. Still she couldn’t be convinced. She wanted rid of the burden of Ezekiel’s name herself, and this final piece would be what ended it all, settled all scores: the big reveal, it was she all along. She spent the day in the communal lounge, scribbling away so quickly that just watching her made my wrist ache.

But it meant I had Ezekiel to myself. We made the most of it, bouncing through the thin stone alleyways and skipping down the wide Roman roads as if we were children playing hide-and-seek. We had not spent prolonged time in each other’s company before, us two together, away from the hustle and bustle of the Soho clubs. Away from my sister.

His nature delighted me. He was a calm stream of questions, about anything and everything, pointing at every bird, tree, building, as if in a never-ending game of I-spy. Are the springs running under our feet right now? How many days’ walk from here to London at a guess? Do you think Selassie’s house is made of this same pale stone? Do you think he likes to live here? He asked me these questions sincerely — though I had no answers to them — but I felt warmed to be included in his inner thoughts.

He was just as inquisitive with the locals. Wherever we went, Ezekiel would lead with questions about Selassie, and the locals would puff out their chests, proud to hear us ask about him.

‘Oh yes, the king! Great honour for us to have such a man amongst us,’ we heard in many variations, almost always followed by ‘Are you from Ethiopia yourselves?’ We would say no at first, until we realised what that made us: regular coloured folk, and thus something for them to be wary of. So we would lie and say yes, we were, and the locals would lean in and wink, keener to continue their gossip. I had always expected kings to be private, hidden-away types, but almost everyone seemed to have a story about Selassie. The park ranger who had greeted the family after a morning browsing the museum in Sydney Gardens, the attendant at the Pump Rooms who had served him spring water at a charity event. Allegedly, it was not uncommon to spot him roaming about Bath’s countryside walking his dog Rosa. This made my eyes widen because that was Manny’s middle name. Rosa. Our Rosa.

‘He’s not shy to wave or have a chat with anybody on his dog walks. Good that in a king, I reckon. Humble, wouldn’t you say?’ That was the opinion of the bread seller in the market, though he had more to say about Rosa than the great man himself. ‘She’s a really friendly dog and all.’

We nodded knowingly at this information. It seemed like secret knowledge, something that our peers back in London would feel envious to hear we’d acquired.

We ended that first day sitting by the river, our legs dangling above the water. The weir rippled in front of us like a waterfall, deep blue reflecting orange, pink, purple as the sun began to set. Ezekiel had a penknife in his pocket and slipped it out to peel an apple. He gave the skin to the ducks, and sliced chunks off to share between us.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ I said, made confident by the dusk light creeping in. ‘Why do you not want to be on stage anymore?’

‘Is that not a thing I want?’ he returned, raising his eyebrows at me and grinning.

‘You could be on any stage of all of London,’ I argued. ‘Yet you only do it to accompany me.’

‘Ah. Maybe I only like doing it for you,’ he said, handing me another slice. Our fingers brushed as I accepted it. We watched the ducks float leisurely in front of us. Ezekiel sighed and leant back on his elbows.

‘I love my trumpet,’ he said, puncturing the silence. ‘Though, I’m not so smooth with improvisation. I can watch a master play his instrument, make my hands follow what it was his fingers did, and produce the same sounds myself. I can hear a melody and feel out note and note until it’s perfect. But I can’t make it up on the spot. I am not so good at knowing what notes should follow other notes unless I have seen or heard it exactly.’ He looked at the apple solemnly, as if he was personally disappointing me with this information. Then he laughed. ‘It’s like my fingers get tongue-tied.’

‘Is that why you did not go to Paris?’ I asked.

‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘I knew it was not going to be forever.’

Jazz and calypso were what the audiences yearned for, genres that required someone with a knack at improvisation. It would make sense that the band replaced him quickly with someone who could keep up. Off they’d gone to the mainland without him. And there was Ezekiel, stuck in London with us.

Knowing this, I felt soft inside, and wanted to reach over and rub his shoulder earnestly.

He was a baby still, really. Not yet twenty. Not so much older than me. But he seemed wiser than his years. The way he spoke was always so particular, as if he had rehearsed every sentence in his mind before speaking. I always wondered if this was how his brain worked, why he was so good at mimicking everything — accents, instruments, perhaps other things we weren’t yet aware of too — because inside he was constantly rehearsing for the world around him, practising the steps over and over as if every interaction was a performance, and he never knew for which he was going to be judged.

I wanted to ask him — what is so different about me? Why do you still play for me? But I was shy to get the words out. Shy to hear the answer in case it was not the one I wanted.

‘But why not the impressions?’ I said instead. He wrinkled his nose, and then threw the apple core into the canal. It bobbed for a moment, a flurry of ducks causing fast ripples in the water as they glided towards it. But it had sunk by the time they reached it, their necks disappearing under the water to try to peck at the last of it. Ezekiel stood then.

‘Come,’ he said, offering out his hand to help me up. ‘The day will be dark soon enough.’

I dreamed of Ezekiel that night, dreamed of us swimming under hot springs, of him playing trumpet, the music wafting towards me in haunting warbles, water bubbles floating upwards from within the bell. I woke up with his name under my tongue.

But Manny also sought his attention that morning. She had knocked on his door early hours, me hovering behind because I had nothing else to do on this holiday and it was on the way to breakfast. He had opened it in his undershirt and slacks, loose and unfastened so that they hung off the slim V of his waist, exposing the faint ripples of muscle across his torso. His shoulders filled the whole width of the door. He yawned wide, kneading fresh sleep from his eye.

‘Can you spare a few hours?’ Manny said, matter-of-factly. ‘I’d like to read you what I have so far.’ Ezekiel smiled lazily and opened the door wider, leaning against it as he rubbed the back of his head. I followed a vein that ran from his armpit, around the muscle of his bicep, all the way down towards his elbow.

‘The Baby and I had plans to see more of the city today, so …’ he said, nodding at me. They both turned their attention to me, and I had to relearn how to make eye contact, became acutely aware of Ezekiel’s eyes reading my face.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ I said, meeting his gaze and hoping I had hidden my thoughts well. ‘That’s fine. Another time, then.’

He smiled graciously at me, and turned to Manny. I watched his grin grow across his face unabashed, more teeth than seemed possible to fit in one mouth. That was a smile that had run away with itself.

‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘I will meet you at breakfast.’

So I ventured out on my own that morning, and found the city morphed into an entirely different thing. The stares were less curious, more friendly. I reasoned it was my glasses, my silk scarf, my impression of movie-star quality. In this little town, the other side of the country from the capital, perhaps I really was a foreigner. But a foreigner who could be mistaken for a somebody. And whoever she was, I liked being that somebody.

The journeying about the city was less fun without Ezekiel’s commentary. I struggled to muster the same enthusiasm about the buildings or the different way locals spoke and moved. Instead, my mind turned over the thought of Manny and Ezekiel at the lodgings together, the intimacy of them huddling over a notebook, Ezekiel’s large hands tentatively turning a page. I thought about that smile Ezekiel had given my sister at his door, and felt a dizziness wash over me.

I clung on to the first solid thing next to me, which turned out to be a newsstand. Unconvincingly, I pretended to be browsing the papers, waiting for my breath to settle. Gosh, the world was run by these papers! Spain, Italy, Germany — little men and their little disagreements and all dragging the rest of the world with them. I was sick to the back teeth of hearing about it, wanted to rip the pages out so that none of it existed. I flicked through the pages blindly, my eyes unfocused, accepting nothing of any of it.

‘Snow White,’ a voice said behind me.

‘Excuse me?’ I said, feeling the presence of a man hovering just behind my shoulder.

‘The newest Walt Disney. Amazing work, feature-length and every frame drawn by hand — just unbelievable stuff.’

I squinted down at the open page, the words becoming solid, readable things, and saw that it was indeed a review of the film. When I looked back up, I took in properly the owner of the voice, and was confronted with a young blond man in a taupe suit — a gorgeous suit in fact. It hung off his shoulders at two perfect angles, fell in at his waist in a way that looked easy and sharp both at once.

‘Do you work in the business?’ I asked, taking off my glasses.

‘Oh no,’ he said, grinning bashfully. ‘I could not act if I tried, my face hardly hides a thing.’

I believed him, because the way he was looking at me reminded me very much of the way Ezekiel had looked at Manny this morning, and just like Ezekiel he didn’t seem shy about it at all.

‘And what about you?’ he said. ‘You look like a star yourself, if that is not too bold of me to say.’

‘Thank you.’ I ran the arm of my glasses against my lip and considered the question. Could I be on the big screen? Many dancers had gone from small theatres to Broadway and then to the pictures before. I was caught suddenly by a memory of my grandmother. Her favourite pastime was a night at the pictures — she loved romances best. I remembered how, for months after seeing Top Hat, she would hum ‘Cheek to Cheek’ to herself over the dishes in the kitchen sink. I would join in by dressing up in her long dresses, pretending to be Ginger Rogers, skirt flying in the wind, the two of us laughing at each other’s silliness. These moments, covered by the magic of the moving pictures, were where the two of us found a common ground.

‘No,’ I answered the stranger honestly. ‘But perhaps I should like to be.’

‘And I’m sure I should like to see you,’ he said, cheeky grin fixed. ‘On the screens,’ he followed up hastily. ‘Is what I meant.’

Listening to him fumble over his words endeared me to him. Attention like this was new to me, in an arena away from my sister. I enjoyed it.

‘I am fond of your suit,’ I said to him. ‘I am a dressmaker myself, so I appreciate good tailoring.’

‘Is that so?’ he replied. Without shame, his eyes wandered the length of my outfit, starting at the bottom, lingering a half second too long on my waist, ending on my face. ‘Wait here, just a moment.’

He picked up the paper in front of us and bounced into the newsagents, light on his feet like a puppy. When he came out again, he had already ripped out the Snow White page and was scribbling confidently in the margins.

‘If you go here,’ he said, tapping at the address he had written. ‘They tailored it for me. They do the men on one side and the women on the other. And here—’ he pointed to an array of numbers ‘—is my telephone number. Just in case you struggle to find it. Or for anything else. Anything else at all. Don’t hesitate to call.’

I thanked him and folded the paper up neatly before slipping it into the pocket of my coat. It sat in there warmly like a secret – my secret – one more thing that I would not share.

When our third day in Bath rolled around, I felt emboldened with a new kind of confidence that comes with being openly admired, and hopped down to breakfast eager to make the most of our last full day. But I found my sister restless and frustrated, emitting one-word answers and snapping when I asked her what was wrong. Ezekiel and I ventured out early to get out of her hair, but his own mood was similarly off kilter.

‘What did you do to her yesterday that has got her so … such a way?’ I asked.

His jacket was slung over his shoulder, and he was walking with wide strides, like he owned the streets, and I had to double-step not to fall behind.

‘Must I have done something?’ he said, not slowing down. ‘So she reads to me. I give my opinion, but I’ve not got much to add. She says I should sit with the words, read it in my own time, digest it a little—’ he was talking over his shoulder, and the wind kept snatching at the words ‘— I say: “Nothing to digest if I’ve already heard it come straight from your mouth.” Then Manny, she says she reckon I don’t believe in her word, getting herself upset about it.’ He stopped abruptly in the street, stared up at the sky. I halted a step behind. ‘But course I believe in it,’ he said quietly. ‘It got me here, now.’

He stood there for a moment, watching the clouds. Then he readjusted the grip on his jacket and looked straight at me. ‘Not that I see Selassie, so who knows what good it does me.’

And off he was again, setting pace. I wanted to do something nice for him then, something to cheer him up where I couldn’t find the words. I thought about the newspaper with the address hidden secretly in my pocket, and decided I would treat Ezekiel to a new tie for his new suit. Though perhaps, in truth, there was a small, silly part of me that hoped the stranger from yesterday would be there. I hoped Ezekiel might see me desired by someone else, and realise that I could be a person who was desirable too.

When we got to the shop, he went off one way and I went the other to look at scarves. My hair was freshly cut, and I had it slicked down smooth with a scarf tied around it; I thought I might find one that better suited my coat. Spring had only just approached, and I wanted to find something bright. Something to call in the sun.

There I was, looking at the scarves, and there Ezekiel was, looking at ties, and then we came back together to pay. He was holding this really fun tie, cream coloured with a tattersall check, and he leaned in towards me, to ask if I could slip his wallet out of his jacket pocket. But before I could, the shop girl had slid in between us, an urgent face on her. She pulled me towards the hat stand and said, quite seriously, ‘Is this man bothering you?’

My immediate inclination was to laugh, because of how stern an expression she wore. ‘No, of course he’s not!’ I barked, pulling my elbow in towards my chest so that she dropped her hand from me. The shop girl looked at him, and so I looked at him. Ezekiel’s face was hardened. Powerfully so. The force of the look itself I felt could wind me. And I realised, a beat too late, what Ezekiel had seen all along. That I did not look so foreign after all. Not here. In fact, I blended in just fine. I looked like I belonged when, to the shop girl, Ezekiel did not.

He left the shop with the door swinging in his wake. I apologised profusely, said we should complain to her manager as if that would have any doing. But Ezekiel was elsewhere after that, rubbing the back of his head in little circles. I pleaded with him for us to forget about it, just carry on with our day, but he had no energy for that, no energy for me. Each time I approached him he would step back, making sure there was always a stride’s length between us, and settle his gaze on his shoes.

‘Home time, now,’ he said, gently. He wasn’t cruel, but there was no misunderstanding. It was clear that he meant home time only for me.

I returned to the bed and breakfast and spent the rest of the day pacing, packing and unpacking my belongings, trying to keep my body busy to distract from how much I was silently chastising myself. Lunchtime passed. And then dinner. Ezekiel still wasn’t back. By ten, my chastising had turned into deep worry.

You think the worst, don’t you? You think all he has to do is turn down one wrong alleyway and bump into one wrong person. He wasn’t going to find many allies here if trouble came his way. And I had seen how fast the weir moved, how the river split the city in half like it had been drawn with thick marker pen. Because if I had learnt one thing from my parents it was this: I knew how easy it was to lose someone in a body of water.

My fretting became silly, erratic, knee tapping uncontrollably in the armchair. I clenched and unclenched my fists so many times that my nails began to scratch blood from my palms. And when I could not keep the worry inside my bones anymore, I told my big sister what had happened, looking for reassurance. I collapsed in a pool next to her chair, holding on to her knee. She stroked my hair and instructed us to bed, dressing me in my nightgown and cradling me against her bosom until I was breathing slowly and evenly again and she left me to sleep. She said she was certain he’d return by the morning, and then kissed me on each eyelid and once on the nose for good luck. I was still awake when the birds started, turning in the hard bed, praying that all was well.

He didn’t come home that night at all.

At just shy of six a.m., he knocked on our door. It was Manny who was roused from her bed to open it. I wished to get out of bed too, but felt too much to join her — relief that he was alive, but still mortified from the day before — so I pretended to be asleep. She let him in and, though they were speaking quietly, I could hear that she was scolding him viciously, her whispers sharp and pointed. Mid-sentence, she stopped abruptly. I peeked an eye open to see what had happened, and saw Ezekiel’s head nestled just below her shoulder, Manny’s arms tight around him in an embrace. In the glare cast from the morning sun, I noticed his cheeks glistening, damp.

I had never once seen a man cry before. It was so irregular to me that it sent a shiver from the nape of my neck right down to the small of my back. I felt as though I was suddenly able to feel each spin of the earth, whizzing so fast through the universe, and I expanded outwards from myself, out across this country to Europe, to the Americas, to the rest of the world, and I saw very clearly for the first time how precarious everything was, how deeply everywhere was crying, the total chaos our countries were hurtling us towards and where it was all spinning to. A giant apocalyptic hand of doom pressed me down into my bed so that I couldn’t move. I knew I should have made a noise, or turned so they knew I was stirring, but I was frozen.

Manny sat Ezekiel down at the bottom of her bed and they both leant against it, Manny holding his shoulders robustly while he wept silently into hers. When he finally stopped, the words stumbled out of him like a tap. They conversed for an hour, perhaps longer, and I heard all of it. He explained what had happened after the shop incident. How he had gone walking aimlessly, half-heartedly, up into the hills in the hopes that he might bump into Selassie walking his dog Rosa like we had heard. Or maybe that was why. He wasn’t sure himself. But he walked further and further, deep into the countryside through parks and into woodland, high, high up on hills where you could look out and see the whole city beneath you. And when he reached this spot where the view unravelled in front of him, he felt that he could not leave. The sun went down. And still he felt rooted. So he laid his jacket down and he decided he would sleep under the stars. He had slept under stars before. He had spent whole lifetimes under stars, he said. And this was a mild April night, so he thought nothing of it. There, amongst those trees, with the city down below him … he said it was the most at peace he had ever felt in this country.

‘I always believed I have no place,’ he told Manny. ‘Up there, I knew I have no place,’ he spat out the word harshly, like he was angry with it. ‘And accepting so made me feel at once free.’

Ezekiel had not come to England the way most did. He was here by accident, and his life had split into parts because of it. On one side, the musicians and the writers and the artists, the folk that Manny delighted to be amongst, where it was, ‘Oh? You play trumpet? As do I. Who was your mentor?’ and when he told them he had none, had been gifted the instrument at a church and copied from others he saw on stage, they lost interest. Told him, ‘That’s not really the same.’ And when it wasn’t that, it was the men at the docks: ‘You came here to be a musician? That’s not like us. When we want to escape our lives, we go to see you play. We are lucky to even get a seat.’

Manny seemed ill-equipped to comfort him. She gushed over her words, thought she needed to show him all the ways what he was saying wasn’t true. ‘But you are a brilliant trumpeter! You have an excellent skill as a mimic!’

He shook his head, wiping at his cheeks with his sleeve.

‘I am going to tell you something, and I need you to listen,’ he said. And then for the first time, I heard him share a little about his childhood. He told my sister how he used to sneak into theatre shows as a child and once saw a comedian by the name of Cupidon who was infamous for his impressions. The man would dress up as anybody and everybody, was unafraid to speak in the voice of his countrymen, use the same patois and dialects that the streets used, that Ezekiel used. And Ezekiel had been fascinated.

‘So I start to follow the man,’ Ezekiel said, ‘watch him perform and change on stage to be anybody. Once I even watch him play as a woman. And you know what happen? The crowd stand every single time, clap and clap and clap though they know just like I know that is a man they clap for. So I think to myself, that is how to make good inna life. If I can use my mouth and turn it into somebody else, I can reach a stage just the same.’

But then he had come here and found a city full of stages, was doing these impressions at the Florence Mills and elsewhere, trying to do what this comedian back home had done, speaking the way he had always spoken. And the audiences would keel over laughing. They loved it. Requested it, even! But it was cruel laughter, as if his voice itself was the joke.

‘But it was my voice!’ Ezekiel cried out. ‘And my people, the ones who might call me brother and who I might call sister, sitting there watching me and they are laughing at my voice. Same way they laugh at Kentucky Minstrels on the radio, like it’s something funny about we from the country. Like we deserve the mockery. And now, I have no voice that is my own, because I spent so long trying to speak as everybody else.’

He sighed then, laborious and long, as if exhaling the breaths of all these different sides to himself. ‘So maybe the stage is not for me after all. Even you have more claim to Ezekiel Brown’s voice than I.’

Manny got up then, flustered, and brought out all her notebooks. She laid them out in front of him, every page that she had written in his name, including her most recent, the one that would end it all.

‘I’m sorry I brought you into this all,’ she said, squeezing at his shoulder. ‘Read it. It’s the end. After this you can have your voice back. I’m so sorry Ezekiel, about all of this. I didn’t know you felt this way, I didn’t think … I didn’t … I didn’t know.’

Ezekiel picked the notebook up in his hand, and nothing was said for a very long time. And then I heard his voice, quietly, softly, into the dark of our small room: ‘Manny, I can’t read this.’

‘Of course you can!’ she gushed. ‘It’s nearly finished. Please. I’m asking you to,’ she urged, pushing the notebook towards his chest. And although I couldn’t see his face from my bed, I imagined Ezekiel giving her the same tired, disappointed look that he had given me inside the tailors that day.

‘No,’ he said sternly, ‘I can’t.’