After Nothing (20 page)

Kane paused a moment before saying, ‘He shouldn’t have done that. He didn’t know you were mine.’

‘So you got no problem with him doing that to other girls?’

The look on Kane’s face hardened.

He won’t touch you again. He won’t even look at you like that. Anything else ain’t your business.’

‘It’s not my business that your friend is probably a rapist?’

Kane was suddenly on his feet, closing the distance between us. He came so close I could smell the beer on his breath.

‘You want to know about Bey, Natalie? Bey saved my ass when my stupid bitch of a girlfriend broke her own fucking arm. I had business that night, Nat. Important fucking business, and when I didn’t come through, I was done. You hear me? Bey, he put himself between me and the gun that was gonna put a bullet in my head. He paid my debt and then some. So that’s Bey. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead.’

I heard the words even though he didn’t say them:
because of you
. He’d be dead because of me.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said stiffly. ‘And why haven't I met him before?’

‘’Cause of shit like tonight.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘Fuck!’ roared Kane. ‘You fucked up. You gotta take some responsibility for what happened tonight.’

‘Because of what I wore?’

‘’Cause Callem could have been hurt.
You
could have been hurt, and given the chance you would have made everything a whole lot worse. Up until now you ain’t lived this life, Nat. But this is what things are like. Shit goes down and you gotta be smart.’

‘I am smart.’

Kane turned from me, going to sit back down on the bus stop bench. ‘You ain’t smart, Natalie. Right now, you the stupidest bitch I know.’

That morning the hate came. For a while I just thought I was filled up with nothing again. Like before I met Kane. Sitting on the bus beside him as the sky started to lighten into a new day, that’s what I felt – nothing. When we got home though, to that unwelcoming cold house, and we went to bed and he tried to kiss me, that’s when I felt it.

I told him.

‘I hate you.’

‘I’m still getting some.’

I didn’t return his kisses, or his caresses.

‘For fuck’s sakes, Natalie.’

I didn’t reply.

‘Get on your front then.’

I moved over onto my stomach, and let him take what he wanted without giving him anything.

The bruises Kane caused on my arm were such a dark purple that they were nearly black. He felt bad about them. Really bad. He apologized to me. I told him to fuck off.

I think for the first couple of weeks he thought it was only about that night. That night that he had completely humiliated me in front of so many people, and I’d found out about gang connections he’d never mentioned before.

By the time the last of the bruises on my arm had faded away he was getting pretty frustrated. I was refusing to have sex with him – refusing to touch him at all – and every time he reached out to me, I’d freeze him out.

How do I explain what I did to him? Why I did it? It’s how I felt. Life just kept getting more and more crappy, and he was the only constant. Always there, always not working while I was pulling double shifts so we’d have enough money to keep the power on. He was there, in front of me, and I kept freezing him out, and he kept letting me get away with it.

My mother was gone.

I’d gone to the house on my seventeenth birthday. Not to see my mother, but just to look at where I’d once lived. There was a realtor sign outside the house with a big red and white SOLD sticker on it. Just like that. SOLD, in big block capitals. The house looked shut up, but that was how it had always looked. I peered in the downstairs windows and all the rooms were empty of furniture.

I could hear the low hum of Kane’s clippers when I let myself into the house.

I stood in the bathroom doorway and his eyes met mine. He was bare-chested, his jeans hanging low on his hips. Just the sight of him caused my chest to tighten in anger.

He put the clippers down, and, running a hand over his head, turned to face me.

‘Hey,’ he said.

My eyes went to what was left of his hair.

‘I said I’d do that,’ I snapped.

‘It’s done.’

‘You going to clean up your mess?’

‘What mess?’ said Kane, because he never saw it. The towel on the floor, his toothbrush lying beside the sink instead of in the holder. The clippers I knew he wouldn’t put away. I knew the bathroom hadn’t been cleaned in three days because that was when I’d last done it, and Kane believed a bathroom didn’t need cleaning more than once a week.

‘You said you’d clean up your mess.’

‘You were talking about our bedroom.’

‘
Your
bedroom. If any part of it was mine it wouldn’t ever be a mess. It’s not a hard thing to do, Kane. Put your own shit away. It’s the only thing I ask. I do all the cleaning and the cooking.’

‘Who asked you to?’

‘I’m not going to live like a pig.’

Kane folded his arms across his chest. His head went to the side, and his dark eyes stared at me.

I hated when he did that. No speaking, just staring me out. He knew I couldn’t hold his gaze the way he could hold mine.

I turned away and went into his bedroom, and then stopped short.

The room was spotless. Bed made, every drawer closed, every surface cleared except for Kane’s phone charger on the dresser we shared and the sketch he’d given me for my birthday.

Kane rarely drew people; he didn’t like it. But he’d drawn me. He’d made me more beautiful than I was, and happier. When I said it didn’t look like me, he’d shrugged.

‘It’s how you look sometimes.’

When he’d gone out with Chuck the next night I went through his sketchbooks until I found what I was looking for.

Over a dozen sketches. All of me. Hours and hours of work. All variations on the one he’d finally gifted me.

‘I got a job,’ said Kane, coming into our bedroom.

‘Where?’

‘Actually, it’s an apprenticeship, so kind of a job. It’s at an auto repair shop.’

‘You’re going to be a car mechanic?’

‘Need to do something. Nigga says he’ll keep me off the books until I get my shit sorted. I don’t have a social security number, or even a legit birth certificate, ’cause of Wayne taking me when I was a kid.’

‘It’s not going to pay enough. It’s not going to pay enough for years.’

‘It’s better than nothing,’ said Kane defensively.

‘Keep looking.’

‘There ain’t anything else out there.’

‘We need money, Kane.’

‘Stop fucking talking dollars all the time,’ yelled Kane in frustration. ‘You think I want to spend the next three years of my life doing that fucking shit? I’ve been taking cars apart and putting them back together since I was a goddamn kid. I don’t need to do a fucking apprenticeship – but that’s all I’ve got going for me right now. And just so you know, it was your priest who organized the whole thing. You want me to throw it back in his face ’cause it’s not enough money? At least it’s some fucking money, and I’ll keep looking for work, okay? I’ll take a second job as soon as one turns up.’

‘When have you been talking to him?’ I asked coldly.

‘Who?’

‘Reverend Joe. Who the fuck else?’

Kane narrowed his eyes at me and then took a deep breath, exhaling slowly.

‘Sometimes he rings me.’

‘Why?’

‘He just does. You ain’t been at church, and he heard about the chop shop getting busted. He’s been at me to stay straight.’

‘Why does he care about you?’

‘I don’t know.’

But already things were clicking in to place. Phone calls late at night, Kane’s coded responses. Me hating him too much to ask who it was calling.

‘You’ve been turning down work. The chop shop is up and running again, isn’t it? Kane, all this time you could have been working.’

‘Nat –’

‘I can’t fucking believe you. I’ve been working. I’ve been the one paying for everything, working double shifts, working fucking weekends to keep us going, and you’ve been turning down work?’

‘I ain’t going down for a job.’

‘Since when? Since Reverend Joe told you not to?’

‘Since I decided I ain’t gonna spend my life doing time.’

‘You’re a coward.’

Kane looked taken aback. He looked away, and then went over to the dresser, pulling open a drawer and taking a t-shirt out. He pulled it on. He didn’t close the drawer.

I walked over and slammed it shut for him.

‘What do you want, Nat?’ he said quietly. ‘My fucking soul?’

‘You don’t have a soul,’ I replied, and left the room.

Kane was only his first week in to his apprenticeship when Wayne told him that he and his girlfriend were getting a bigger place and he couldn’t afford to put in for our rent anymore.

Without that money Kane and I couldn’t meet the rent and eat. We had to shift.

Kane found the place. It was closer to both the bakehouse and his work, so I didn’t ask too many questions. Not until I saw it, anyway.

I’d never been in a house that was uninhabitable before, but I was certain this place met all the criteria. First of all, it stunk so badly I had to hold my shirt over my nose and mouth as we walked through it. The house consisted of a bedroom, the smallest bathroom I’d ever seen, a living room and a kitchen. Everything was old, and it looked like it had never been cleaned inside or out. The windows, the walls, even the ceiling, were coated in grime. The only thing going for it was that it caught the afternoon sun.

‘You can’t expect me to live here,’ I said to Kane as we stood in the backyard arguing.

‘It’s all we can afford.’

‘It has to be illegal for it to even be rented.’

‘It’ll be alright,’ said Kane with absolute certainty.

‘I’m not living here.’

‘Yeah, you are. It just needs cleaning. It ain’t gonna leak and we won’t freeze.’

‘I said no.’

I’ve already signed the lease.’

It was just another layer of anger to lie on top of all the other layers.

‘Don’t fucking look at me like that, Natalie. You didn’t want to have anything to do with looking for a place, and now it’s too late to change your mind. Trust me, this is the best we can afford.’

I didn’t reply because in my heart I knew he was right.

Then I saw
him
. Bey’s deformed face, his missing teeth, as he smiled and called out to Kane. Then he jumped over the fence of the neighboring property. He and Kane did their handshake and shoulder bump. I got a nod.

‘Hey, Nat.’

‘You live next door?’ I said in disbelief.

‘Yep.’ said Bey, glancing back toward his house before giving me an uncertain smile.

‘Bey told me about the place,’ said Kane to me.

‘Ancient nigga that lived there jus’ died,’ said Bey. ‘Had a heart attack in the yard. Reesey found him.’

I folded my arms and glared at Kane. He ignored me and kept talking to Bey.

It was then that a tall, slender figure with long black hair falling in waves down her shoulders came out of Bey’s house. All she was wearing was a white fitted tank, a long pale yellow skirt and brown sandals, but you would have thought she’d stepped off the page of a magazine. The closer she came, the more evident it was that she was pregnant, her stomach rounded in a small bump.

She smiled at me as she joined us, and even though I was feeling the complete opposite of friendly, I felt myself smiling in return.

‘Hi,’ she said.

Kane introduced us. Reesey, Bey’s girlfriend.

‘Welcome to our street,’ said Reesey.

I nodded uncertainly.

‘I told Kane you’d hate it.’ She looked at Kane. ‘I told you.’ She looked back to me. ‘You can come stay with us if you like, until you find somewhere else.’

‘He signed the lease.’

The same smile that had enticed one of my own lit up Reesey’s face again.

‘I’m sorry to be happy. I’m desperate for you to live next door. Kane always talks about you. We’ve missed a whole year of knowing you ’cause he’s so protective of you. I get it. We just moved a few months ago. This is a better neighborhood for us.’

‘You ever shut up, woman?’ said Bey.

Reesey ignored him.

‘Do you want to come join us for lunch?’

I glanced at Kane. He stared back at me, waiting.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

I just felt that Kane had been such a fucking asshole about it. He could have told me we’d be living next door to Bey, not to mention that the previous tenant had died in the place. In all the time we’d been going out, he could have mentioned Reesey. And he could have told me that he and Reverend Joe had some sort of dialogue happening.

Mostly though, he could have told me about the fucking rats before we moved in.

It was Reesey who told me, when I came across rat droppings in every kitchen cupboard, that the old man who had lived and died there used to throw his food scraps under the house.

‘He was a bit crazy,’ she said, almost apologetically, as if it was her fault that rats had made their home not only in the crawl space under our house, but in the walls and ceiling as well.

After I’d spent a day cleaning Wayne and Kane’s house while they shifted furniture, Kane and I lay awake at night in that filthy house listening to rats running around above us and scratching away in the walls.

‘I knew there were rats,’ said Kane. ‘Bey told me. I thought some rat bait would sought it, but there’s a fuckload of them up there.’

He turned his head toward me in the darkness. ‘I think we should sleep with the light on. Rather see one that feel it.’

I had not grown up in a house that had ever had problems with rats, or even mice. I didn’t know how to cope with the information that we were tied into a twelve-month lease. I didn’t know how to express to Kane the horror that I was feeling. I didn’t know how to tell him that I’d rather sleep in a bathroom at Burger King than in a shitty hole of a house where some fucking rat might climb into bed with us.

So I just went silent on him. He dozed. I didn’t sleep at all.

I ignored the ache in my shoulders and arms as I used a stepladder, borrowed off Reesey and Bey, to clean the ceiling. Then I cleaned every wall in the house. I spent a good five hours cleaning the kitchen, and two in the bathroom. It quickly became evident that there were rat droppings in every room, grimy marks from where they had rubbed against the skirting boards, and stains on the tiled floor from where they had been urinating. In addition to this, there was mould in every corner and cupboard of the bathroom.

I continuously aired the house, and the smell lessened. Part of me did find it rewarding when I wiped layers of grime and dust from the window frames, revealing their original white paint.

While I was inside cleaning, Kane was underneath the house and on the roof. Even though I blamed him for the situation we were in, I also had a moment of admiration – and revulsion – when I went outside and saw the number of dead rats he’d pulled from the crawl space. He was laying bait and traps as he went, and looking for holes into the house to stop up with filler.

‘Can you get me a drink, Nat?’ he asked, as he opened a trash bag to throw the dead rats in.

His hands were gloved, and there was a mask hanging from an elastic band around his neck. His clothes, shoes and hair and all his visible skin were filthy.

In my head I said ‘Get it yourself,’ but I didn’t want him coming into the house that dirty. I went inside and filled up a water bottle. Rather than hand it to him, I left it on the top of the back steps. Then I went and filled a bucket with hot water and disinfectant so I could scrub the floors.

‘That’s all of them,’ said Kane. He was standing directly in front of the television, flicking through the channels available to us. He paused on the news; politics, and then war. I turned my face away from the images of dead bodies.

Kane noticed and switched it off. His smile was strained when he said, ‘You want to christen every room in the house? There are only four, but if you want we can go twice in each.’

I was sitting on the lower end of the old broken couch – the one Kane had had in his basement bedroom when we first met – unpicking the hem of a miniskirt. It was late, and I had to get up in a few hours. I was unpicking the hem of the skirt because, although I’d washed all of our curtains, I’d forgotten to wash the pants I normally wore to work. The skirt was too short to wear to work as it was: not because I’d gotten any taller, but because I’d put on so much weight. Where it had once sat low on my hips, it now sat high on my waist.

‘Nat?’

I ignored him.

‘Nat, say something.’

I didn’t reply.

‘You think I don’t know what you’re doing?’ said Kane. He moved closer so he was standing over me, filling our box of a living room with his height and anger. ‘Thing is, Natalie, I know you. I know you got plenty to say, so say it.’

I kept my head down, focusing on unpicking the thin line of cotton in front of me.

‘Stop acting like your bitch mother and say something –’

I threw the pick at him. Straight up into his face. It hit just below his eye and immediately drew blood.

Kane’s hand touched his face. He drew it away and saw the blood on his fingertips.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he yelled.

‘Telling you to stay away from me.’

‘I have been. I’ve been doing everything I can to give you what you want.’

‘You don’t give me what I want.’

‘Nat, we gotta survive, and you’re killing us.’

‘No, this rat-infested hole in the worst fucking street in the city is what’s going to kill us. We’ll die here.’

‘It ain’t the worst street. Not even close. And I know the house is a shithole, but it’s what we’ve got.’

‘Go back fighting and win some money.’

Kane wiped at the droplet of blood that had reformed on his face. ‘You know I ain’t ever gonna do that.’

‘Then steal some cars, or go back and work on stolen cars. I don’t care, just get us out of here.’

He came toward me, tried to draw me up out of the couch. I wouldn’t let him. Told him he wasn’t getting anything from me until we lived somewhere else.

Neither of us slept properly that night. And one rat sure as hell didn’t. I could hear it running around on the floorboards in the living room.

The house had no insulation. When the temperatures dropped dramatically at the beginning of fall, I went to Goodwill and invested in some cheap blankets. As I hauled them home on the bus I thought of Lisa’s down comforter, and wondered who was sleeping under it now.

I woke up shivering in bed. The Goodwill blankets lay heavily over me, oppressive rather than warmth-inducing. I could have cuddled against Kane; the heat his body provided would have warmed me in no time. Instead I got up and took one of his jackets from the closet. I put it on, wrapping it tightly around my body, and then got back into bed. The house was quiet. Just the sound of a car driving up the street and Kane’s quiet breathing beside me.

Kane had been vigilant with the rat bait and traps. We knew they weren’t gone, because always in the morning there’d be droppings in the kitchen cupboards. I don’t know how they got in. Kane said our rats were contortionists. He didn’t say it to me. I overheard him joking with Bey.

I managed to doze for a bit in the warmth of Kane’s jacket, but then woke before my alarm. I got an extra half-hour sleep now that we’d moved closer to my work. I told myself it was the only good thing about the house.

Kane got up when I did. Neither of us spoke.

It was just before four-thirty in the morning as we walked to the bus stop. There was no one else around: a few lights on in some of the houses, and that was it.

I snuck a look at Kane, and waited for my body to react to the sight of him. There was nothing. I didn’t feel a damn thing other than hate. In the light from the overhead street lamps I could see how exhausted he was, how unhappy. I could see that his clothes were hanging off him even more than they usually did. He’d always been so big. Someone who ate well and exercised like crazy. He still ran; sometimes he’d go out for two hours and just run. But as far as I knew he never went near the gym.

It was unfair. I’d put on twenty pounds, and he’d probably lost close to forty.

I wondered how he saw me. Fat. Bulging out of my old ill-fitting clothes. I wondered how the expression of hate assembled on my face when I looked at him. How could he not see it? How could he not see how much I couldn’t stand him?

He waited with me at the bus stop.

‘We’ll get a car some time, huh?’

‘With what money?’ I snapped.

‘Nat, I know things have been fucked up lately, but you gotta stop doing this to us.’

‘Or what?’

‘Or I don’t fucking know, okay? But I ain’t gonna live my life miserable.’ Kane kicked at a stone. ‘Look, baby, I know you’re grieving your dad passing, and your mom disappearing on you –’

‘It’s not them,’ I snapped. ‘It’s you.’

Kane folded his arms, his jaw tightening as he rocked back on the heels of his shoes.

‘What exactly about me?’

‘You’re pathetic.’

‘Yeah? What else?’

‘You want a list?’

‘Yeah, a list would be good.’

I heard the bus before the lights came into view around the corner. ‘I’ll write it all down,’ I said to Kane.

‘You want to be like your mom? Fine. But I ain’t your dad.’

I froze, my bus pass halfway out my pocket. Kane reached for me and pulled me close. He looked straight into my eyes as he spoke.

‘I ain’t gonna stick around through all your shit, Natalie, so sort it out.’ He stepped away as the bus doors opened.

‘You can go to hell,’ I said, getting on the bus.

‘Bitch, I’m already there,’ replied Kane.

The bus doors closed and I sat down, taking out my cell phone. I messaged him every mean thing I could think about him. Cutting, wounding, horrible horrible things. Things that were ten times worse than what he’d said to me the day he abused me at school. I didn’t get a reply.

We didn’t speak for two whole days. The rats began making noise in the house again at night. I noticed Kane doubled the amount of bait and traps in and around the house, and I didn’t thank him. I made him dinner both nights and he didn’t thank me.

Wednesday night everything went to hell.

It started when he came home from work and had a shower.

I was cooking dinner: rice and chicken with a few measly green vegetables. Our tiny kitchen was all steamed up because there was no window, let alone an extraction fan. When Kane came out of the shower all this steam came out with him, and I just knew he hadn’t opened the window set high up above the washbasin.

Usually, Kane always wanted that window left open. It had a security latch on it, and even if someone broke the latch the window wasn’t big enough for anyone but a three-year-old to fit through. But I didn’t like being alone in an unsecured house, so when I got home from work in the afternoons I always shut it.

I didn’t mention the condensation building in our living room from the steamed-up bathroom and kitchen combined. Instead, I screeched at him from the kitchen. ‘We can’t afford for you to have showers that long!’

Kane came into the kitchen, just a towel around his waist and drops of water still on his body. That made me even more irrational with anger. How hard was it for him to run a towel over his skin? I’d just washed the floors two hours earlier, and now he was dripping water on them, marking my clean kitchen floor.

He opened the refrigerator door. Left it wide open, and stood there in front of it as he drank straight from the milk carton.

Then he wiped his mouth, all casual like.

‘I had a longer shower ’cause that’s how long it took me to jerk off.’

‘Get the fuck out of my kitchen.’

Kane put the milk back, shut the refrigerator door and left me in the kitchen, with drops of water on the floor, condensation running down the walls and the dinner I was cooking him frying loudly on the stove.

When I came into the living room ten minutes later, he was sitting on his broken couch, fully dressed and watching television.

I threw his dinner at him. An entire plate full of rice, chicken and beans.

He was up for the fight. And he was fast. Tension and anger were wound so tight within him they pulsed through his body and into mine as he grabbed me and pushed me back against the living room wall.

I struggled against him, but it was so easy for him to grab my wrists and pin them above my head.

‘What do you want, Nat?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘What do you fucking want? I’ll give it to you.’

‘Let go of me.’

‘Tell me what you want,’ he yelled right in my ear.

‘I hate you,’ I screamed, and there were tears rushing down my face. Because I wanted him to hit me. I wanted him to force his way inside me. To pull out clumps of my hair and tear at my skin. To rip my heart out. I wanted him to make the pain go away. But he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t even rip my heart out for me. He wouldn’t take my pain. He left me with it every day, and I hated him for it.

Kane released my wrists. He took a step back. He was doing it again: leaving me with my pain.