Instead, the day came when I saw the man pull his son out from the sea, and the night came when there was a knock on the door. Two heavy, dull beats, the gap between them slightly too long.
‘That’s not Davey,’ Ma said. She turned to me. ‘It isn’t Davey, is it?’
I shook my head. We were on the sofa. It felt like we hadn’t spoken in so long. And then it happened: the sound of a key sliding into the lock.
My body tensed. She froze too. We both turned to the door.
His face was in a tunnel.
Around it, the brim of a cap and a hoodie, despite the heat. He pushed both off.
He stood in the doorway to the living room, filling it, a shaven head now. It was Kole. Alive, with new scars, standing there like he thought we would run to him and hug him.
Ma did, though. She ran to him, ran as best she could, and hugged him. Straight away she started to cry, and then, when he finally put his arms around her, she turned her hands into these kind of cartoon fists and started beating on his chest. It made a sound but didn’t look like it hurt. She said his name again and again. For a while, he let her do it, then he grabbed her wrists. He stared at me the whole time.
‘Why’s her voice funny?’ he said.
‘You beat her half to death,’ I said. ‘That close.’ I was standing by then. The floor unsteady under my feet. I’d stood up too fast.
‘Stop that.’
‘Where have you been?’ Ma said. Her skirt had ridden up. I don’t know what had bruised her like that, all down her thigh.
‘Why are you here?’ I said. My fists were clenched too. I could feel my heart beat in my palms. ‘Why didn’t you come back before?’
‘’Cos what the fuck is here, Chance? What the fuck is left here?’ I wanted him to let go of her wrists. ‘I’ve been fighting,’ he said. ‘We been out there. Doing things.’
‘Who’s we?’ Ma said.
He brought one of her fists up to his mouth and kissed it. This rough kind of kiss.
‘Is there someone else?’ she asked. ‘Is that what it is, Kole?’
‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘He beat you, took everything. Walked out. And now you—’
I’d forgotten how quickly Kole could cross a room. He dropped Ma’s hands, pushed past her and came at me. Grabbed my head.
‘You don’t know the things I’ve seen.’ His breath was hot. I remember it smelled of metal. ‘You don’t know shit, Cha.’
The muscles in his arm were twitching in that way they do when you hold a press-up. But I couldn’t not look at him. The rosebud on his neck from a broken bottle. I’d always shut my eyes when he’d come to see me in the night, pretend to be asleep. But I looked at him now.
Ma came from behind and hugged Kole like he was a mountain. She shut her eyes and, for the quickest second, it was like years and years were scrubbed off her face. She was saying things into his shoulder blades I couldn’t hear. But also, you’re back now, you’re back now.
He pulled her round so he was facing both of us. Squiggles of veins pushed out the skin above his ears. It almost looked like writing.
‘You’re not getting it. Neither of you.’ We looked at him. ‘I got there. I fucking been there.’
‘Where’s there?’
‘London. Anywhere I want.’
We stared at him. ‘Like shit,’ I said. And nearly at the same time, Ma said, ‘Cha – don’t.’
‘But why did I bother to come back? For this shit. For you two’s rubbish.’
‘Exactly. If you got there, you never would’ve come back.’ I looked around at the flat like that was proof. It was proof. I’d been sleeping on the sofa. The sheet looked like it had been stained with tea. You could see the shape of my body. Tidemarks.
Kole pulled a small square of plastic out of his pocket.
‘What’s that then, you little shit?’ he said.
He handed it to me. Ma was still hugging him. I wanted to pull her off. Have us stand together, not need to lean on him. This energy she had, though. Where did it come from? Why hadn’t she had it for me?
Kole’s small square looked like an old credit card, but with a third cut off. There was a smaller square inside it that looked like glass, a hologram, rainbow thing, dancing inside it. There was a photo on it too.
‘That’s not you,’ I said. ‘And your name’s not Adebayo Akinto…’ It was a long name.
He snatched it back. ‘They don’t look, they just scan it. It’s a bar square, isn’t it? It’s the future. What’s wrong with you?’
‘You haven’t been to London. I know you haven’t,’ I said. Kole shrugged Ma off. ‘You just stole it from some dead guy’s pocket, or even dumber, you paid money for it.’
‘Shut it, Cha.’
‘Paid for it like an idiot.’ I kept going. I couldn’t stop. I hadn’t spoken to anyone else but Ma for days. ‘So don’t come back here playing the big man.’
‘Say that again and I’ll fucking break your neck.’
‘I’ll break yours—’ I got halfway through the sentence before the skin between his thumb and finger hit my windpipe. His other hand went low and I thought he was going to grab between my legs, but he took a handful of material, the zip of my jeans, the button, and picked me up. I was so thin by then – I’d had to cut new holes on my belt – the only strain in his face was about making his grip tighter and tighter around my voice box. He pushed me up against the wall. The seam of my jeans cut a deep line in between my legs. My feet were off the floor.
Ma was saying, Don’t Kole, don’t Kole, but she wasn’t doing much about it.
He roared in my face. His metal breath was hotter still and sour and it hit the back of my open mouth. All the oxygen was gone from it. Then suddenly he let go, both hands at once, and I bent in half, crumpled to the floor. ‘It’s not you I came for,’ he said. ‘You look like shit now, anyway. Where’s my boy?’ Kole walked in the direction of his room, and Ma ran round, to stand in the way.
‘We need to talk to you,’ she said. ‘That’s why I wanted to talk.’
He pushed her over, too. He disappeared into Blue’s room. ‘Come out, kiddo,’ he said. We could hear him opening cupboards. We heard him lift the bed. Wood breaking. He shouted again. The sound of his palm slamming down on a wall.
When he came back into the living room, it was Ma he got to first. He shouted in her face – she tried to turn away but it made the sound worse, right in her ear – ‘Where is he?’ he shouted. I managed to make it to my feet. It felt like my throat was concave, that he’d pushed it in on itself. Like the top layers of flesh had been scraped away with a blade. Kole put the crook of his arm round her neck.
‘I will kill her, you know. I’ll break every one of her matchstick bones. Tell me where he is.’
Ma was saying she didn’t know, and begging Kole, and her foot was kicking out, flicking up and down. She couldn’t breathe.
‘It wasn’t her,’ I said. ‘It was nothing even to do with her.’ It was hard to get the words out. They came half in coughs at first. ‘I did it,’ I said. I put a hand out like I might be able to block him. The veins around his pupils looked like they’d spread, multiplied. Redness like a web.
And then he leaped. Kole pushed my face into the carpet to stop me from breathing. Dust filled my mouth. I tried to spit and my teeth hit the hard of the floor underneath. This is it, I thought. And suddenly I felt okay with that. Better Blue is there than here. Wherever he is, it must be better. Better that he doesn’t have to see this. In my head, I told him I loved him.
And then I felt the full force of Kole’s body land on me. Huge lead weight. That broke one of my back teeth. Then his body was rolling off me. He lurched back, took his arms off me and I turned around to see him reaching behind himself, reaching towards his back. He made this sound. Awful sound. Then he started to slump onto his side, and fell backwards which was the thing that finished him off. It was Ma who had done it. Ma who’d got the knife. Ma who saved me. She did this time.
I looked at Kole. He was sitting up now. His T-shirt had ridden up and the tip of the knife poked through his tummy, just above his belly button. His back was a little arched. He looked at us. He tried to reach either side of him.
‘What have you done?’ he said. ‘What the fuck did you do?’ His blood poured into his hands like water. After that, for a moment, his hands moved, like he was making fists, then letting them go, and then the whole of him went still. His eyes were open.
‘I couldn’t pull it out,’ Ma said. ‘I can’t.’ Her hands fell off the handle and into her lap.
She made this tiny sound at first, and then was silent, which was worse.
She’d used a serrated knife, one of the ones for bread. In the whole time we’d lived here, we’d never used that knife before. It was in the flat when we got here. Both of our hands were on the handle, trying to pull it out. I thought of the cuts of beef the chef would get at the Pearl – these fibres running through it, like rope, never easy to cut.
His blood continued to bubble out. Some of it was thin and fast, but there were heavier bits too that held their shape.
Ma came back from Blue’s room with his blanket. I shook my head. She took my sheet from the sofa instead. All of this happened without either of us saying a word.
Afterwards, when we’d got our breath back, Ma looked through the bag Kole had left by the door. Her feet were in the same place they were when she was hugging him, but then her back slipped down against the door frame. She threw some things in my direction – a protein bar that looked trodden on, a broken compass. She put a spare T-shirt in her pile, between her legs. She held it up to her face to smell it before she did that. She walked to the sofa and lay down.
‘Do you think he did?’ was the only thing she said to me.
‘Get there?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Do you think he did love me? Ever once?’ She looked up at me. ‘Or did he stay all that time for you?’
Kole lay there in our living room for the rest of the morning. We’d pushed all the sheets we had in the house under his body to soak up the blood. He almost looked like he was on a cloud. Or in bed. Like he might wake up at any moment. Ma tried to shut his eyes, but they kept coming back open, or at least one of them did. That made her cry. It was hard to wash our hands without soap, so we had to use our nails. Our skin stayed red from the rubbing.
When we heard creaking in the stairwell, I wondered if anyone had known Kole was coming to see us, but no one came to the door. It wasn’t hotter than any other day, but we noticed it more, and it wasn’t long before the smell of blood was thick in the air. Iron, these dense waves of it. It was when the flies came, not many at first, then more and more, finding places on his body to settle, that we knew we had to get rid of him.
We waited until it was getting dark and the tide was high, until it hit, then filled, the bottom of the building. He was too heavy to lift, even with both of us trying. We could get him off the floor, but not high enough to go out of the window. In the end, we had to get him up on a table first, legs and arms hanging off. I had to hit the window with a hammer five times to break it, and with each smack, Ma flinched like she was the one being hit.
‘Can you stop that?’ I said. ‘Please.’
I realised what it was when I went to turn him over. Face down, Kole’s shoulders made me think of JD, and I was suddenly filled with, I didn’t mean to be, but I was suddenly filled with… it wasn’t affection. It wasn’t that, but – his shoulder, his arm. I used to know you, I thought. It was as simple as that. You used to be alive.
The pane had a sheet of plastic over it on the outside, so it didn’t smash. I kicked it out. It hung there, half off, like a plaster with only one side sticking. We started to roll Kole out. We’d tried to wrap him up in all of the sheets, but we didn’t have anything to tie it up with so parts of him kept slipping out.
Ma tried to hold him back at the last minute, but her fingers weren’t strong enough. The water was deep enough for him to splash, but he also hit, with a muffled thud, the road beneath. Ma didn’t look, but I did. I looked out to see if anyone else was watching in the half-dark.
It was an hour after that that she started crying again and shaking and saying things about whose fault it was, and me. I played with a shard of glass from the window and accidentally cut myself. I looked for something to hold the blood in but we’d used every scrap of material we had in the house.
Ma had Kole’s T-shirt on her lap, and she continued to put it up to her face every few minutes. I pulled his bag over and opened it. There was a can of beans, with writing that had dots over the o’s. There was a plastic pack of frankfurter sausages. He’d eaten two of them, but the last four were rolled inside the packaging, sealed with a hairband. I ate half of one. Put the other half next to Ma’s hands. It tasted okay.
Kole didn’t have much, but at the bottom of his bag, wrapped in a different T-shirt, I found a gun.
I’d never held one before. Not even Caleb’s. It was black metal that had been in the sun, near sweat, the steel underneath was coming through the paint. There was cross-hatching over the handle. I scratched my nail over it.
I turned it from one side to the other. The weight of it surprised me – it was heavy as a brick. How the fuck was I supposed to use this thing? I held it out in front of me. I put it down. I put a cushion over it for a second. I picked it up again.
It was loaded, brass inside the black. It smelled of empty tins. I moved the cylinder around. Clicking sound. The safety lock looked like it had been hit off with a hammer. The things it must have done.
After Kole was gone, for the rest of the day, and for days after that, the smell of everything upset me. I could smell milk. Old milk that had gone dry around the bottle top. I could smell it everywhere. Bile flushed into my mouth, and I spat it out of the broken window. I kept on feeling the weight of his flesh around the knife.
I told Ma I was going to bed, and took Blue’s blanket back to our old room. I hadn’t been in there for a while. At first I went in all the time. Every morning, every afternoon. But I missed a day, then two, then felt so bad, I just stopped.
I curled under Blue’s blanket. I kept my feet off the bed so I didn’t make stains. My soles were black, and one toe was bleeding too, from all the broken glass from the window. Blue had left a toy in the bed, a plastic train that had been stuck back together with Sellotape. I felt its edges. Felt them so hard I hoped they’d break my skin.
Where are you now? I said that out loud into the room. How many times had I asked that. Where are you?
I pushed my face into the pillow. I wanted to find Blue somewhere there. But the bad milk smell was everywhere. There’s something about lying still enough for long enough. At some point, I fell into a hot, cold, dreamless sleep.