Closure (24 page)

She could be Stephanie. She could be another Stephanie – marry an investment banker and live in a big house, and hire private tutors. But she wouldn't marry someone like Henry, even though he'd stroked her hand in the front hall as he said goodbye, and despite herself she'd shivered with pleasure. She wouldn't marry Oliver either. Not now. Not ever. She'd have to give him the ring back. He wouldn't want it but he'd take it, and he'd probably be relieved.

Julia descended the steps to her basement flat. She stood in the dark, damp stairwell and looked up into the misty orange light of the street. She thought of Henry, zipping his trousers and moaning. In the morning he'd be at his desk, doing clever things with money. Julia took her key from her coat pocket. For a moment she hesitated. The flat would be cold and she would be alone. She could go to the pub first and sink a few with Stevie and Tally and Louise. When you were with other people, even if they didn't really know you, you came into focus, as though you'd stepped outside of yourself and looked back in through borrowed eyes.

She slid the key into the lock. There was work to be done, and she hadn't even started yet.

KOYE OYEDEJI
SIX SATURDAYS AND SOME VERSION OF THE TRUTH

1. The Saturday she found sanctuary.

She finds her bravery that morning and tucks it into the chest pocket of her dungarees. When she sees him she asks him to open his mouth and close his eyes. He is hesitant but does as instructed. They are in the park, sitting on the mound the slide is built on. Bricks have been set into the soil on the incline and, beneath this, their BMX bikes lie on their sides. Sunlight strikes his sealed eyelids so that all he can see is red. He worries about the state of his breath. Once he feels her mouth on his, he presses his lips together. She parts his lips with an urgent tongue; forces her wet flesh inside his mouth. He smells the anti-climbing paint that clings to her, feels her sticky fingertips on his forearms. She tastes like peppermint. He feels desirable, important, even attractive. As she pulls away, he opens his eyes and asks if it is always supposed to be like that.

“Like what?” she says.

“Wet. With the tongue.”

“Wet,” she repeats. She rises and lets her momentum steer her down towards the ground. She climbs back onto her bike as though she needs more time to consider a response. She kicks the pedal up and tells him that it's what her father has taught her.

They spend most weekends together. She comes over to his home to draw, read comics or play fantasy board games. He has no siblings; she is usually the only other child in the flat. His tall, brooding and short-tempered father intimidates most of his friends. But not her; she likes his dad. Each Saturday evening she sits down for dinner with them at the Formica-topped table, drinking what he drinks and eating what they eat. A white girl who balls the pounded yam and scoops the okra as well as he does: it takes him a while to get used to the picture her presence creates, the way she listens to his father's childhood memories as though each tale held some promise – like a movie trailer offering splices of what's to come.

There are times when the boy is taunted for letting a white girl take up so much of his space, especially one whose forehead is slightly larger than average and whose skin seems to pull at her skull around the cheekbones. He knows she isn't the most put-together girl in their neighbourhood. She is deathly pale, and during summer the rosacea and broken capillaries in her cheeks burst to life. But she is ten-years-old and he is ten-years-old and it feels like everyone else their age is trying to be fifteen.

They both live in council flats in South London. He, in a post-First World War structure; she, close by on the Aylesbury Estate – a collection of tower blocks and maisonettes, all linked by a network of walkways and footbridges. He knows her building but he cannot point out her door. She never invites him to her home and he knows better than to ask. When they are not in his bedroom they are in the nearby park where all the bikers and skaters assemble. They are fascinated by the teenagers who come to the park to smoke; bewitched by their casual airs, the shrug they give the world – and impressed by the size of the tongues on their Adidas.

That Saturday in the park, she wants him to ignore the green-eyes and auburn hair and focus on the nose she pushes down with her wrinkled index finger. She tells him she has been told that there is black in her family bloodline and asks if he can see it in her features.

He thinks about the weeks gone by, how he hasn't dared to call her his “girl”. But they have been beside each other, roaming the neighbourhood together and he believes that has to count for something. He studies her now: her nails are broken, her nose is Greek and her lips are thin. She is the whitest girl he knows. He thinks it is enough, for now, to paper over her troubles with the nickname “Black”.

“Black. I see it,” he says. “I can definitely see it.”

She doesn't believe him, but his lie is enough. She looks away, breathes in, and squints in the sun. She turns back to him. “Open your mouth and close your eyes,” she says and he does as instructed.

2. The Saturday without the rehearsal.

He watches her through the side windows of the Datsun he hides behind as she emerges from the entrance of her building. She is in an apricot tube dress he hasn't seen before and it makes everything else she has ever worn seem droll and conservative. He tries to keep a safe distance as she makes her way, first to the newsagents, then to the bus stop. It's here that he wants to confront her, but he waits.

He waits for her to board the bus, climbing the steps to the upper deck as he knew she would. He jumps on after her and finds a seat at the rear of the bus, on the bottom deck. He brings his cap over his face. As the bus rolls over Westminster Bridge towards the tourist crowds that move beneath the shadow of monuments, he feels a sense of vindication. For three consecutive weeks she has spoken of Saturday rehearsals at her performing arts college in Croydon. And now, for him, “circuitous” doesn't begin to explain why they are on a bus heading toward the West End.

He has felt the threads fraying at the seams for some time now. Over the years she'd dropped her tomboy airs. The worn dungarees gave way to designer outfits. And she'd bloomed – a tall girl in a woman's body, a force to be flirted with. Older guys ask her out on dates. He has to ask himself – why is she with
him?
The anxiety grew malignant when she started attending drama school. For the first time they were students in different buildings, and while there had always been moments when she appeared distant and sullen, he frets now about the frequency of her blues and how distracted she appears most of the time. They would plan to meet on weekday evenings only for her to cancel on him to stay behind at college for workshops and master classes. Then the Saturday rehearsals began.

There are several bodies between them when “Black” alights at Piccadilly Circus. He follows her through the dense crowds of Leicester Square and the Trocadero shopping mall, keeping his distance as they climb the escalators to the Arcade centre and amusement rides on the top floor. He loses her amongst a swell of teenagers, a throng of bomber jackets and baggy jeans, aerobic footwear and high-top basketball trainers. He weaves his way between the video arcade and coin pusher machines. He spots her at an arcade game, the screen light casting a velvet-blue hue on her face. He takes in the man who stands close behind her: the olive skin and dark hair, the single stud earring, the square set of his jaw and the facial hair. His clothes are south London chic – a laundry-beaten polo shirt, straight-fit jeans and Hi-Tech squash trainers. His arms caress Black's midriff.

The boy stands there, unsure of what he sees. The resemblance could be all in his mind. But he has seen this man in and around the neighbourhood and he is confident that it is Black's father. He doesn't have the presence of mind to keep himself concealed, and just one
GAME OVER
later, Black lifts her eyes from the screen, gazes across the floor and spots him. Her features tense. She turns from him as from an unsatisfactory reflection, breaks from her father's grasp and rushes away. Her father, startled by her abrupt departure, looks around him for an explanation.

The boy turns towards the exit, puts his Walkman headphones back on. He hesitates at the top of the escalator weighing what he thinks he has witnessed. He is embarrassed by the helplessness he feels, the tears that begin to stream down his cheeks.

3. The Saturday morning in the Kebab shop with the elephant.

She gives him “The Talk” in the takeaway area of a Turkish restaurant. It is close to 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning, after their Friday night revelries. There are a dozen or so people around them, most of them exhausted. It is a ritual – an early morning kebab before heading home. They stand sharing a bag of chips at the small table in the narrow dining area and try to talk over the din. Even though music blares over the speakers, he hears her clearly when she says she's tired of his accusations and announces that “they are done”.

She has cut her hair in recent weeks, shorn on the sides but tall on the top, spray-held in a huge quiff and dyed platinum blonde. She wears fuchsia lipstick with electric-blue eyeshadow and a matching sequined dress.

“You're a bitch,” he says, “a fucking bitch.” Then he stops himself. “I didn't mean that, Black.”

“I've told you not to call me that,” she spits. For a time she'd demanded he call her by her birth name, Natalie Newton, but now she has a stage name and insists he use that. She tells him that she doesn't care what he thinks of her or what his friends have told him.

“People do that. People will talk about me, bad or good, and I'm not going to let anyone or anything stand in the way of making it.”

“And I stand in the way of you ‘making it'?”

She says nothing at first, but then tells him that they are different; they want different things and are heading in different directions.

“That's rubbish and you know it,” he replies. “I know what you're doing. What you've been doing all these years. It's disgusting. You're no better than a dog.” He calls her a bitch again as he wipes his eyes.

Her mouth hangs open but there are no words. It takes all of her will just to fling the chips in her hand back into the bag. She has sidestepped confrontation well enough over the last few years, and will not start now. She doesn't know if there is anything she could say to him even if she wanted to. She looks at him and his tears; she sees boy, she sees man, and realises that she shouldn't expect anything of either of them. She snatches her clutch bag from the table and walks out.

They'd had half-a-dozen mini break-ups since he left for Liverpool University, but he'd put them down to the difficulty of a long-distance relationship and they'd always managed to work out their differences. This, he knows, is something else. He has kicked dirt between them and roused the elephant in the room.

He wraps the chips up in their paper and tosses them in the rubbish bin. It's only then that those around him, despite their best efforts to pretend they weren't listening, return to their conversations.

She does not come to his house on Saturdays for dinner anymore. The first few weeks of summer pass by and his parents stop asking after her. He suffers her silence when he sees her in the neighbourhood. It is an excruciating silence in which she busies herself, looks past him and ignores anything he has to say to her. After a few weeks he begins to see her with the same boy – a wannabe New Jack Swing star, black with light skin and a Gumby style haircut.

He heads back to school in Liverpool during the autumn and doesn't return to London as frequently as he used to. He tells his mother, during a phone conversation, that over the break he will be doing extra hours at his job in the HMV store.

“I'm trying to save,” he tells her, and only when he says it does it feel like some version of the truth.

4. The Saturday at the Theatre
.

He is seated just a few rows from the stage, slightly left of centre. He tries, without success, to follow the onstage brothers as they come to terms with the suicide of their father. Natalie is playing the role of wife to one of the brothers, and he is preoccupied with her every gesture. He wonders how far she is from the person offstage. He wants her to fail at everything she does, just as much as he wants her to succeed. The only thing he is sure of is that after fifteen years, she still has the capacity to confuse him. The two tickets had arrived at his mother's address without warning, in an envelope marked with the Soho Theatre's branding. The note attached simply read:

Hope you can make it.

Best

Natalie Diamond
.

He had felt compelled to go. He also felt compelled to bring his fiancée along.

After the show they mingle in the bar area, waiting to thank Natalie for the tickets. She is among the last of the performers to emerge. She's in sheer tights and red high heels, in full make-up. A black dress exposes her shoulders. She spots him, throws her arms up and screams in delight. He is thrown by how excited she is to see him. She hugs him and plants an air kiss on each cheek. He feels obliged to tell her the performance was amazing when really he found it tepid. Yetunde, his fiancée, steps forward and extends a hand.

“This is Yetunde,” he says and he knows it will be a crime if he doesn't quickly add “my fiancée”. He is not sure if Natalie is rattled or if he just wants to believe this is the case. They exchange brief histories
,
and are tortured by the silence that drops into their conversation until the actor who played the alcoholic brother steps into their circle with a group of grey-haired white men and begins introductions. Natalie comes alive again, raising her arms just as she did with him, hugging people, grasping hands, leaving traces of her red lipstick on cheeks.

When the opportune moment arrives, he thanks her for the tickets.

“Thank you for coming,” she replies. Then she winks.

It stops him for a moment and, at first, he considers the thought that tonight's invitation might be part of some game she is playing with him. But then he acknowledges the truth: that wherever she is, she is always onstage and he is just a member of her audience.

5. The Saturday with the status update.

He slouches in his chair and runs his finger along the dining table's edges. His wife sits two and a half chairs away from him, sharing a seat with her girlfriend. Her laughter roars around the room, drowning out the
Bitches Brew
that dribbles from the iPod speaker system in the adjoining living room.

He has no comment to make on Miles Davis, the Iraq occupation or the 1999 bottle of port. He excuses himself, telling them he has to add some money to the parking meter, even though he knows there is credit left. He stands outside for a while and takes in the cool evening air; the road is quiet but cramped with parked cars and lit up by the streetlights. He thinks about his marriage – he always does when amongst his wife's social circle – and wonders whether love ever really exists in the way that it is supposed to, and if his parents and in-laws, as Nigerians, even believe in such an idea. He cares for Yetunde, appreciates her willingness to tolerate his fragility. He is grateful, but not content. Neither of them is content, but each is scared to give the other up. Then there is the endometriosis Yetunde has struggled with. He sympathises with her pain, but a truth he'll never admit to is that the absence of kids is a relief. He suspects that while Yetunde feels the loss of being unable to have children, she does not regret being unable to have his children.