White ribbons blowing in the breeze around the chicken shop. The police in the road. The song of the sirens. Apart from that there was a hush. The air was slow. The sun was incongruous. Last night the streets had felt the lifting of a boy. His blood ran down and his soul ran up. No one knew who he was in the first hours except for those who had lost and those, less so, who had killed. By morning everyone knew. His name was Justin. The boy who couldn’t sing, the boy who had crucified Angels.
A woman on the corner said, ‘I never go to that park. Now you see why I never go to that park.’
Another said, ‘They chased him, like a pack of dogs. Animals. They’re animals.’
It was possible to get the story by walking up the street. Further on by the church, ‘It was Pauline’s boy, the younger one.’
On the next bend, ‘He ran to the chicken place for help …’
‘… the ambulance was too late …’
‘… thirteen years old …’
‘I am so angry. I am so angry,’ a mother said, leaning against a garden wall, one hand on her pram, a flush of early white roses behind her. ‘When I heard the news I just had to pray.’
‘Yes. Yes,’ another one said.
‘You know the kind of prayer – I prayed and cursed at the same time. God is so cruel. Why does he let this happen? My faith is shaking.’
‘It has to stop.’
‘Too many of our children are dying.’
What happened was this. Justin had an older brother, Ethan, and Ethan was Justin’s beacon in the world. It had always been so. When Ethan ran, Justin ran. When Ethan rode his bike at high speed down the park road to the roundabout, Justin wanted to do the same, though his wheels were smaller, and his legs were shorter. He wanted to be as tall as Ethan, as fast as Ethan, as cool as Ethan, with his cap sideways on his head like Ethan, and his jeans slung low on his hips like Ethan, to walk like him, a broad, soft, cat-like tread, his trainers smooth and neat and guarded on the pavement, knowing of it, every turn and crack of his manor, owning it. And watching them, Pauline had always worried. She knew that there were limits to her power, that Justin would always go with Ethan, he would always follow him. Ethan had not finished school as she had hoped, so all the hope she had left for her sons was in Justin, who had always been good, capable, hardworking, a good student, she pictured him as a lawyer one day or a professor, tall and proud, in a smart suit. Ethan liked to hang out with the boys around the way, the boys who also did not finish school, who smoked on the corners in the moonlight, in the courtyards outside the flats, in the deserted children’s playground, who had nothing special to do. The things they did, they were shady things. They slung weed, hustled skunk. They aimed for Ferraris that way, not the other way, the right way, which was too hard, too long, too compromising. In this kind of life there were distant hierarchies and contentious postcodes. You could step into Dulwich and be doomed. You were barred from Peckham, from Camberwell. There were showdowns, between these young postcode armies, with silver-blade weaponry and sometimes gunfire. And last night, there was one such showdown in the park next to the library opposite the TM Chicken joint between the tattoo parlour and the barber shop not far along from the bottom of Paradise Row, because Ethan and his crew had had a fight with some people from Catford about a gun he’d asked Justin to hide for him and that Pauline had found and taken to the police, who had then traced it back to the owner, and now that crew from Catford wanted blood, specifically, at the hands of their newest and youngest member, a fourteen-year-old girl, who happened to have not yet earned full initiation into the crew with a bad enough act.
Aside from asking him to hide the gun (which originally hailed from Berkshire, where there is a gun factory), Ethan had also let Justin hang out with him a few times in the courtyard, after school when their mother was still at work. But mostly he told him no, you have to do what Mum said and do your homework. Last night as well he told him no, standing before the mirror in his room putting on his cap and his studded belt and assessing himself overall to see whether he looked like a hard enough man. In the mirror he could see Justin sitting on the bed behind him, still wearing his white school polo-shirt and black trousers, saying, I wanna come with you. Justin liked the feeling of being Ethan’s young partner in the pack. He liked the way they all called him Little Man but treated him like a big man. They also called him The Singing Professor, because of how much he studied and how much he liked to sing and listen to music, all kinds of music, especially his mum’s old soul records. Come on, let me come, Justin said to Ethan. No, Ethan said again. Well I’m coming anyway. You can’t stop me. I can walk where I wanna walk. You best stay here, man, I ain’t joking with you now, Ethan said. Just stay here. I’ll soon come, all right? All right? All right, all right, Justin said, and he went into his room to change his clothes, jeans and a yellow T-shirt, his favourite T-shirt, a T-shirt he felt was down, because he was surely going out to the park tonight no matter what Ethan said. Justin was getting to an age where he felt he could almost equal Ethan, where Ethan’s word was almost level with his own word. Plus he was worried by something, the tone in Ethan’s voice just now, the sudden frightened flash in his eyes. In the mirror Ethan took one last, long look at himself, and put a blade into the pocket of his jeans in case he would need it. It was a small, sharp Swiss brand, small enough for discretion, large enough for defence. He took one more last look, knocked his brother’s shoulder with his fist in the living room, left him there watching TV, and went cat-like in the twilight down Paradise. The day had walked into night without a look back. The clouds were thick. They had joined themselves and made darkness.
When Pauline got home the flat was empty. It was well past nine. She felt something. Something was wrong. She’d felt it on the bus, a flip in her stomach, an inexplicable dread, and now again as she turned the key. She had the sensation that she was turning it into an emptiness that would never stop turning, and once inside the silence was ominous. Where was the sound of the television? Where was Justin? The sky seemed a strange colour tonight, an end-of-world kind of colour, black and red mixed together. And there was no moon. It was hidden by the clouds. She called Ethan’s phone and he did not answer. Justin had lost his phone and she hadn’t replaced it yet. She went out again and walked by the courtyard and up and down Paradise but did not see them. Instead she saw Mrs Jackson who again could not find her house, and was wandering up and down in her thin green dress and slippers. Pauline did not have the patience for Mrs Jackson tonight. Her heart was bulging. Her ribs were snapping. Mrs Jackson, it’s number eight! she shouted. Have you seen my boys? Have you seen my boy? But Mrs Jackson did not know what she meant. Mrs Jackson allowed Pauline to lead her back into her house, then Pauline went back home and waited.
And how Justin loved his mother. Pauline had no idea how much Justin really loved her, how he wanted to look after her when she was old and walk with her for the longest he could until there was no further to walk and he would have to say goodbye. He never wanted to say goodbye. She was in his thoughts now as he walked around the park looking for Ethan, along the tunnel of trees leading up to the tower blocks whose windows were lit up with the many evenings of disparate people and always made a beautiful sight. The traffic was swishing by on the high road. The tattoo parlour and the barbershop were closed but the bright red lights of TM Chicken were on. He went into the courtyard where he’d hung out with Ethan recently. He walked around to the green at the front. No one, none of the pack, no one who called him The Singing Professor. Ethan, actually, by now, was miles away. He had been dragged into a car and taken away, and they were going to fix him, really fix him. That’s what happens when you cross this one, this baddest one from Catford, when you get too close to the devil. You get fixed indirectly, in ways you might never have imagined could happen to you in your life, in your family. They hurt you by hurting what you love, by taking it away, by destroying it.
So Justin walked out of the courtyard back on to the dark green, singing to himself because he felt nervous. There were people gathering amidst the trees, their thick jackets and loose strides. They were prey-conscious, metallic. There were blades in the pockets of their denim. They were alert, existing at the very edge of themselves. Justin thought he recognised someone from the pack and he went towards them, but as he got closer he sensed danger, he turned in the other direction, soon he was running, and when the time was high they leapt for him, jumping, their silver toys flashing, get him, they said, while across the road the chefs at the chicken shop were putting more oil in the vat and they were restocking the chicken and the place smelt burnt because they’d had a little fire in the back just now, a spark of a flame that started suddenly, from nowhere. They had doused it in time and now they were making more chicken. They were both wearing TM Chicken caps and red polo-shirts. It’s quiet tonight, one said to the other, Yeah, it’s always quiet on Tuesdays, the other said. Aadesh said he was glad he wasn’t working tomorrow, Wednesday was his day off. What you doing? said Hakim, poking at the chicken with the long fork. Taking Lakshmi out, innit. Is it, I heard it’s gonna rain tomorrow. Shit, said Aadesh. Then they heard someone shouting. They looked towards the door. A figure was coming across the road, a falling, running, crazy kind of walking like he wouldn’t make it to the other side. A car swerved by him and beeped. The figure came closer. He was clutching his side and feeling the air with his free hand. His heart was beating faster than it had ever beat. He was living in just this one single moment, and in this moment there were memories, pictures, his mother was in this place, in this one single moment. She was waiting for him in the flat and he wanted to go back to her, to his first country, to his mother who was his first country, and walk with her to the end of her life for the longest he could. At no other time had he wanted this more strongly than now. He tripped. He stumbled. He saw the red light of the TM Chicken banner. He saw the strange bright haze over the street, the final gold, everything had a shine on it. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die. He was crying because it hurt so much and he didn’t want to die.
That was the other big thought, aside from his mother. Pain. They had found him, they had clocked him, the brother of Ethan. They found him in their midst among the trees and the chosen one went for him with her small girl hand. The blade crunched through the spine. Pain unfolded. It spread through him like a storm, like flames. It flung out, hot searing rips right through him. It hurt so much that he could see it, the wide gold shine, the red, the distant stars, he looked up as he reached the curb and at that moment Pauline stood up in her living room and looked out at the night, an unbearable thought, a heartbeat missed, she held her stomach, she walked out of the room into the hall, towards the door, opened it.
There was hope right up until death. Hope is the last thing that dies. Justin staggered across the pavement to the red door of the chicken shop. He grabbed the doorframe and with a last strength hauled himself forward. Help me, he whispered (he felt so quiet, like he was dreaming). Oh shit, Aadesh said. Shit, Hakim said, Oh my god. They went to him, just as he fell, half in the shop, half outside the shop. He was bleeding so much it was just pouring out of him like an ocean all across the pavement. The yellow T-shirt was soaked through, his jacket over it. His final thought, the one after his mother, the very last sensation, was that he was freezing cold, even though the place he felt himself entering was full of heat. A door was open. He went inside and the door closed behind him. It was too late now for anything. Even for Pauline, who was running down Paradise Row to cradle him on the wet, red floor.
The blood continued to run into the mortar around the paving slabs outside the chicken shop. It would never quite rub off, through all kinds of weather. It was there if you knew it was there.
‘Hello?’
‘Hey, it’s me.’
‘Me who?’
‘Michael.’
‘Michael … Oh, Michael, what …?’ There was a sleepy pause. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
It was 2.15 a.m., and Michael had been staying at the Queen’s Hotel in Crystal Palace for three and a half weeks. It was a vast, cream-coloured building in the colonial style set away from the parade along the road to Croydon, the Beulah tower to its right, the Crystal tower to its left. There were flags of the world adrift on the roof, a red path leading up towards the entrance, but inside it was not so grand. The reception desk had the feel of a motel or an airport stop-off. There was a murky fish tank in the seating area where people watched music videos on an overhead screen. The carpets, the same throughout, a pattern of navy blue and beige, were curling away from the skirting boards, and there were passing smells of body odour and detergent. It was not the kind of place he wanted to come home to, but it was close enough to the children and it meant he could avoid his parents’ questions.
His room, where he was now, lying flat on his back on the carpet, was at the front of the building on the fourth floor. To get there he had to take a tiny lift up, containing that same dichotomous smell, then walk along a series of corridors, through a door into a stairwell, and up a short flight of stairs on to a secluded landing. He always felt like he was entering a labyrinth, until he went inside and the room opened out to him. It was big and bright by day but sad and sepulchral by night. He had two huge windows looking out over the crystal hills towards the park, where the palace had been (the edge of the gravelled platform where the main transept had stood was just in view). There was a sunken armchair in the corner where he threw his coat and bag on entering, and there were two beds, a queen and a single. He slept on the queen and used the single as a sofa, but at night he imagined it as Ria’s bed – a wisp, a thought of her slept there next to him in the dark, when he missed her so much that he could almost hear her breathing. He did not like this absence of himself in his children’s nights. It made him feel absent in himself. He wanted to carry Blake downstairs in the morning, to descend into breakfast with him. He wanted to feel Melissa’s incidental presence nearby, doing her hair, reading her Hemingway. All of this pathos and loneliness he needed to express to someone. He had tried both beds tonight but neither of them were working, he couldn’t sleep, so he had decided to try the floor. This also was not working, and he had been fighting the urge to call Rachel for over an hour. Would she mind? Was it too late? Might she be lying there likewise unable to sleep, hoping that he might, maybe?
‘Sorry. Did I wake you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry. It’s all right, you go back to sleep.’
‘What is it? What do you want?’
The hard edge in her voice made him feel bad. He hadn’t expected annoyance, only sympathy. He wanted to hang up but it was too late now.
‘I can’t sleep,’ he explained. ‘I thought I’d call you, to chat …’
‘To chat …’
‘Yeah.’
She sighed. ‘I’ve got work tomorrow.’
It had occurred to him to call Rachel when he’d first checked in, once he’d cleaned his room with bleach and unpacked. He could spend whole nights with her here. He could be with her fully, spread out on the queen. They could be magnificent together before these windows, this wide open sky, but he had decided not to out of loyalty to Melissa. It seemed important, not least for his conscience. So instead he had gone down to the hotel bar and had a whiskey and Coke. It slipped, ice cool and copper, down into the region of his heart, down into his boomerang light. He had followed it by another and then gone out for a walk, away from the high road into the steep streets leading off it, turning corners, coming out into silent crescents and clusters of greenery. It had become a habit, this whiskey and walking in the evenings, right into Fox Hill, left on to Tudor Road, left again on to Cintra Park, along the curve of the pavements, through the pools of the street lights. This evening he had gone into the little park near the hotel and sat down on a bench, faintly inebriated and craving another whiskey. On the next bench there were two pink drunks drinking from cans of Asda beer. They looked at him. Their coats were dirty. There was a thin space. A very thin space.
‘You can’t just call me in the middle of the night like this,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s not OK, OK?’
And she was right. It wasn’t. There are very few people you can call. He had one more drink and fell asleep around four.
‘Tell me how to make the stew,’ Melissa said. She was on the phone to her mother. It was late afternoon in Bell Green.
‘I’ve already told you.’
‘I know but tell me again, I forgot.’
She had her pen and paper ready.
‘Take the Oxo,’ Alice said. ‘Pour it in and mix. Then, bitter leaf. At last the chicken.’
‘The chicken at the end? When do I put the Maggie in?’
‘Any time. Doesn’t matter. Make sure you mash the eba properly. Put water.’
‘OK.’
It was probably going to be another failure, but she’d had the urge to make eba, yesterday on the high street passing the plantain shop. You could buy three plantains there for a pound. The fat man at the meat counter put them in a blue plastic bag, and then she had added the yam, on a whim, some chicken and some okra, there was gari at home already. It seemed like a comforting thing to do, a way of being somewhere else. She wanted to escape from these dark British streets, their haggard, downtrodden faces, their meanness and menace and the stifling air.
‘Is Michael come home yet?’ Alice said with concern and determination in her voice.
‘No.’
Now the lecture on the imperative of the male presence in the parenting household delivered with traditional Nigerian outrage.
‘You cannot manage on your own. You must let ’im come back. What about the children? You know men must live at home with their family. Don’t leave him away. If you do that he will start to drink and and and smoke and go to nightclub. That’s what they do!’
‘Mum —’
‘Women cannot do without husband. All that time I stay with your daddy because of you children, I cannot manage alone. I take, take, take. Parent must be together, until the children grown up. Tell Michael to come home this week on Friday. I don’t like him to live somewhere else. It worry me.’
‘All right, Mum,’ Melissa said. ‘I’m going now to make the eba.’
‘Listen to me!’
‘I am listening.’
‘Put water slowly and mash it properly.’
‘OK.’
‘Tell Michael to come home,’ she repeated.
Every few days he did come, to see the children and put them to bed. Then he went back to the hotel. Sometimes he had dinner with them. He was coming again tonight, and Melissa decided, as she was stirring in the Oxo cube, that he must also have some eba and stew. He had been looking quite thin.
Since yesterday the flowers for Justin had amassed at the entrance to the park, as they would continue to amass in the coming days and weeks. There were balloons and bouquets. There were pictures and candles on the pavement while the traffic went on back and forth past the chicken shop. In the evenings his school friends gathered and sat around weeping. It became a pretty site of early death, and a common site. There were other flowers, for other children who had gone too soon, which were wrapped around the lamp posts, around the railings by the sides of the roads. The flowers would be replenished, most of all by mothers, again and again, becoming less bright, less shiny, until one day even the mothers would let them die, withdrawing and sealing the love, all the memories, finally within themselves.
‘Did you hear what happened?’ Melissa asked when Michael arrived.
‘What?’
‘Dad-dy, Dad-dy, Dad-dy!’ went the song.
‘Hold on, darling. What?’
‘Another stabbing.’ She said it quietly so that Ria couldn’t hear. ‘Down next to the library.’
She had seen it, a dimension of it, a component in the project of the death, though she did not know that she had seen it. When Ethan had walked down Paradise in the twilight towards the park with his blade in his pocket and his cap sideways on his head, he had never made it there. Before he had reached the bottom of the road, Melissa had heard a car screech to a stop outside, and she had looked out of the window of the master court where she happened to be changing Blake. Two men got out of the car carrying clubs. They dragged the boy wearing the cap into the car. Then they got back into the car and it sped off again with the devil inside it, and now they were going to really fix him. It had made her shiver. It had made her stomach twist, because it was clear to see right there in the street with her baby on this side of the window and the devil on that side that a boy somehow was going to die tonight and nothing was going to stop it. She had walked away from the window, into the inner recesses of the house.
Michael said, ‘No,’ his shoulders dropping. ‘Another one?’
‘Another one.’
He seemed deflated, exhausted. His black coat was loose around his shoulders and he was stooped slightly, a faint bow, a salute to age. A melancholy was creeping into his face and changing its atmosphere, which was frightening, from the outside as well as from the inside.
‘You look mashed,’ she said as he dragged off his coat.
‘Thanks.’
‘I didn’t mean that horribly.’
‘I didn’t sleep well last night.’
‘Why?’
‘Are you staying here tonight, Daddy?’ Ria said. She missed him so, especially at night, and in the early morning.
Both these questions he answered without really answering. He stared into the children’s faces with a warm and frowning intensity, studying their noses, their chins. Melissa watched them from the kitchen as she was pounding the eba. There was an extreme rightness in his presence, in the four of them together like this under one roof. She had felt it every time he’d come, and a wrongness every time he’d left. All of them were being deprived of something that belonged to them, an aspect of home.
‘Do you remember the boy who sang at Ria’s school?’ she said. He had come into the kitchen. Nina Simone was there in her baritone with her friend Mr Bojangles. ‘Justin, his name was. He couldn’t sing to save his life, remember? – well, literally.’
‘It’s him dead?’ Michael said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus. That’s fucked up. He was only little bit.’
‘I know.’
The eba was lumpy. Melissa carried on mashing it like her mother had said, and added a little water. The stew was simmering on the cooker, along with some okra in a smaller pan next to it to add for gooiness. Michael poured himself a drink, still knowing this kitchen, inhabiting it. Every so often he moved past her and touched her gently, almost subconsciously, in the small of her back. She realised that she missed him doing that, the possibility of him doing it.
‘I heard it was a gang initiation, a dare. That’s what someone said.’
‘Where’d you hear that?’
‘Just round the way. Apparently it was a girl who did it.’
‘A girl?’
‘Fourteen years old.’
Michael tried to digest this information. He had to sit down to do it, on the paprika step, shaking his head. A long, beaten sigh came out of him. ‘What is happening in this country, man?’
He often walked past these kids on the high street, standing outside the chicken shops, smoking by the park, looking out at the world and refusing it. He always wanted to say things to them, to tell them how enormous one person’s capacity was to achieve, how intrinsic we all are to the mechanisms of this world, and the reason why it didn’t work properly was that we lacked the crucial combination of power and hope. He wanted to slap their faces and tell them that the world did not owe them anything, it had only led them to believe that it did by taking away their power, and by expecting some compensation, some consolation for this theft, they were continually forsaking their power. It was unjust, but it was so.
‘I love you,’ he said.
Melissa paused, her hands raised to her waist. She was separating the eba into chunks, arranging the bowls for the stew. It was a comfort to watch her, to witness her smallest gestures and movements, which in some way seemed to take place inside him, to be connected to him. Despite the frustration and dismay he was feeling, there was a supreme sense of balance in his body as he watched her.
‘Love you too,’ she said softly, without looking at him.
They carried on talking. She told him about the car and the men with the clubs outside and the boy being dragged away. ‘I mean it now. We need to move away from here. It’s not just about this house, it’s this whole area. It’s not safe. I want the kids to live somewhere safe.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, and he liked that she was saying ‘we’, as if this ‘we’ were not contested. ‘Move where, though?’
‘I’m not sure – Sussex, maybe? Kent? Somewhere near the coast?’
‘What, you mean leave London?’
Michael was having images in his head of the children playing on an empty beach in foul weather, with lots of white people in the distance.
‘We could …’
‘I’m not leaving Londinium,’ he said adamantly. ‘I need to be around brown people.’
At this Melissa felt a familiar tightening sensation in her face, the cold hand squeezing around her mouth. Michael’s reliance on brownness was a prison, hers as well as his. It cut him off from other possibilities, from certain unknown skies and distant blue grasses. He did not want to go to France because his race-detector read high levels of fascism. He did not want to go to China, to Australia – too backward, too white. But what about the sunsets there, or the mountains, the canyons, the particular lights, and other beauties? Colour was in his way of all the other colours. It had given him a script for his life, or forced it upon him, and he was compelled to follow it. If the script were taken away, who would he be?
‘London is not the only place,’ she said, spooning the stew into the four bowls. To each she then added the okra. ‘Ria and Blake are more important than what we need. It’s about what they need. I don’t want them to get killed by a stray bullet one day just walking to the shops to buy toothpaste.’
‘They won’t be, stop exaggerating. You sound like Stephanie. They need brownness too, you know. I’m not only thinking of myself. If everyone started packing their bags every time something like this happened, there’d be none of us left.’
‘But they are their brownness. It’s inside them. It’s part of them. God, why are we even talking about this? It’s so basic.’
She shoved past him with two of the plates. Blake was crawling across the room away from the TV towards Michael to try and stand up by holding on to his back. It was that same old predicament. He did not understand who she was. He would never understand, because they were different creatures. When Melissa tried to see the world through Michael’s eyes she could not see all of it. It was half closed. Yet as she brushed past him again on the step, his wide shoulders taking up most of the doorway, Blake grasping them with his thick infant fingers, she still saw a home for herself, a place that she could inhabit, somewhere to sink into. She was being pulled away from him and towards him at the same time.
He went on, persisting with his point. ‘I want my kids to see black folk around them, not just feel their blackness inside.’ Those words, blackness, black people, whiteness, they were crude, contagious. The children would be infected by them, dragged also into this prison, this malady, this towering preoccupation, robbed also of a love for canyons, for particular lights. ‘The less they see it around them,’ he said, ‘the less they’ll feel it inside.’
‘No, the more they’ll feel it.’
‘Yes, but in a bad way.’
There was a brief silence. Melissa said, ‘It wasn’t like that for me, though, Michael, the way it was for you. I had other things to worry about when I was a kid.’
They ate, the four of them, at the dining table under the white light. The eba calmed them, it soothed them. Like Alice, they ate it with spoons, dipping it into the stew, adding some chicken with a fork or curtailing the goo of the okra. Blake used his fingers, Melissa helping him. It was good chicken. The taste went right down to the bone. The chicken essence that had once lived in Melissa’s neck seemed to Michael now to live more widely, to have caught her hands that made the chicken, that stabbed it, seasoned it and cooked it. Whenever he ate her chicken he still thought of her neck, and the hollows of her collarbones …
‘The eba’s still not right,’ she said. ‘It’s too grainy.’
‘I like it,’ said Ria, who did not yet understand the nuances of eba consistency. She ate two more helpings, saving a wing for the end, pulling it apart with her hands.
‘Do they sell gari in Sussex? Plantain?’ Michael joked as they were clearing away. Then Ria called him into the living room and they danced there together the two of them in that way she liked where he held her and they twirled slowly and at the end he bent her backwards over his arm and looked down at her with his eyes full of adoration. Melissa watched them from the kitchen doorway. That very slight limp in her left leg, it was still there.
Afterwards he went upstairs with Blake, beneath the skylight, past the birds of Tanzania, past the indigo dancers on the wall of the master court. He was glad there was no onion or garlic hanging around any more – it was true, it wasn’t about the house, it was more than that and he was glad she could see that now. Standing by the window, he was aware of the street below and the darkness of it, thick with vengeance and violence. There was unrest in Bell Green. The skies were rich with sirens. He had a yearning to be back on the other side of the river, the other side of the divide, where he knew the people better, where he understood them more. People in the south were too rash. They would take something further than it should go. There was a sharper edge, a lawlessness in the air.
‘Maybe we should cross back over the river,’ he said.
She had heard him coming down the stairs, the sound of his weight on the timber, the tumbling as he took speed. She missed, too, that tumbling sound of him.
‘It happens across the river as well,’ she said. ‘It’s everywhere. This whole city is infected.’
There was a song playing on the system by I Wayne, Living In Love, lamenting the fighting among his people, the bloodshed. It made them think of Justin and the blood on the pavement, and the children north and south who were dying in this war. It seemed an endless war. The weapons were becoming more deadly. The children were getting younger and younger.
‘You know what the worst thing is?’ Michael said. ‘I don’t understand my people any more. The things they do, how their minds work to make them do those things. I don’t know my community.’
She couldn’t help it any more. She could no longer suppress the desire to be in the place inside his arms, that warm country. She remembered something Carol had said on the phone the other night, that if there is someone in this world whom you love, whom you think you can share a life with, it is important to hold on to them, to work to do what it takes to keep it strong and good. She stepped into him, where he was sitting on the bench, stood between his knees and brought his head to rest easily against her, and his arms came up all the way around her. Octopus.
‘You know me,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ He looked up at her. ‘I know you. You’re my woman.’
She liked the sound of that, the ownership in his voice. It was sensual, the same supreme sensuality that had drawn her to him in the beginning. Maybe love was ownership, she thought as she was kissing him. All the things she had avoided for as long as she could remember: safety, settlement, home, surrender, a step away from the spiky demands of the self into sweetness; a reduction, yes, but an opening. Was there so much shame in belonging to someone? Could it imply not weakness, but sheer strength, the risk of it?
This kiss was like another first kiss. In fact it was an advance on that kiss because of everything that had come since, all the absence and distance of the past few weeks and months. Desdemona was present, in full effect. So was Angelina. And like before, those thirteen years ago by the sink, he slipped inside the armholes of her dress so that his hands could roam her skin.
‘We’re Londoners,’ he said, as another siren rang out and the night sky flashed blue.
He was aware that he was supposed to go, back out into that blue, back to the hotel. He didn’t want to go, but he needed to be forgiven.
‘I’m sorry, for everything,’ he said.
‘Don’t say sorry. Stay with me.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. I don’t want to be by myself. This is no time to be alone.’
So he lifted her and went with her to the rug, her smallness in his tallness, and they lay down there before the window twins. All he knew was that he needed some part of her in his mouth, in his hands, against him, in every moment. She pulled his work shirt away, pulled him out of the world that detained him. He lost himself in the kingdom of her body and they moved into the safety of one another, until she was swirling in her river and dancing low, and this time when she approached the top of the mountain she did not fall back down just before the summit but went right high over it and fell down the other side, the right side. This time it was not erasure. It was addition, fullness, completion. Now they were travelling, high over Bell Green, high above the towers, away from the city, further and further out towards the ninth cloud of Legend.
‘I didn’t know we could still be like this,’ she said when it was over.
He was still lying on top of her, their arms wrapped around each other. She basked in the weight of him.
‘Let’s go away somewhere at least. I need to get out of here. I need to get off this island.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Where d’you wanna go?’
She was thinking of Jamaica, how much she’d loved it there. She had felt so at home, the warm air, the bright colours, the black country, the lack of inner questioning.
‘Somewhere pretty,’ she said. ‘Completely different from here. Somewhere where there’s no English people.’
‘I’m with that.’
‘And soon.’
Outside at the top of Paradise Row, the light in the living room of Pauline’s flat remained switched off. She was inside, listening for the newly historical sound of one person’s breath.