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At least Fionna, after a dry stretch that had lasted as long as I knew her, finally got a job. The unexpected pregnancy of Topsy in the West End’s musical revival of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
meant that the company was desperate for a dancer who was both small and black enough for the role. Fionna now had a gig six days of the week, including matinees on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, sucking up cash every time she put a toe on the stage. It was a sign. Everything was going to be all right now. After Fi came back from the audition, after they called and left their news on the machine, we danced across the living room like it was Juneteenth, shucking and jiving around the kitchen table as if legal tender was raining on us. The part wouldn’t start for another month and a half, when the now-Topsy went into her second trimester, so Fi had time to practice the role before taking it over. It was work, something I hadn’t seen Fi get much of, something I wasn’t getting at all.
So to celebrate we were going to eat food, restaurant food, where we would sit dressed fancy as heavy plates were laid before us. ‘This will make you better,’ Fionna told me. Since it was decided that true celebration means having someone else at the table, she invited one of her oldest friends to join us. Devina, whose wedding I’d attended a few months before, was the friend Fi had finished her A-levels with, the friend Fi called when she had good news. Her husband was a rich thug, but Devina seemed cool. It was Fi’s day; I didn’t care as long as there was something to eat.
Fi said, ‘Meet me at seven-fifteen at Kentish Town tube station. I’m going to come straight from rehearsal; the reservation is for half-past seven. And bring a bottle of wine, a red. Or a Champagne, if you can get it cold.’
I couldn’t get it cold: I couldn’t even get my ass there before seven-fifty. I overslept and then a bomb threat at Kings Cross meant that I didn’t even make it past Holborn Station, and then I was stuck in the back of an underachieving black cab, staring at the meter, trying to make sure it didn’t go past the amount I had on me.
When Fi saw me walking down the block towards her she turned around and scissored those little legs in the other direction. Jogging, leather soles down wet cobblestones, I caught up to her.
‘You didn’t even bring the wine!’ Fi said.
‘I got stuck. A bomb threat, y’know? Blame the IRA.’ No laugh. There was an off-licence a street ahead. Fionna turned and started walking to it.
‘Babe, I blew my cash on the cab to get here. You got any money on you?’
‘No. I asked today; my first check is next week.’ There was a cashpoint across the road, so I skipped through traffic to get in the queue. By the time it was my turn, Fi was saying, ‘We’ll tell them I was held up at the theater. We’ll tell them rehearsal went long, that I had no control.’
I put my card in, as always. Tapped my code into its screen, trying to shield the keyboard with my body as my finger poked around. I selected the amount: enough to buy a wine so good that Fionna and Devina and her hubby would forgive all tardiness, enough to pay for the whole dinner if necessary, enough to put us in a taxi home after the meal was done. I was expecting that cash, too, that thank-God flutter of the machine counting my dough before it coughed it up, pushing those multicolored pound notes my way. That’s what this world had given me time and again when I put my plastic into the insert-here hole. So when, instead of the familiar cash delivery, the machine sent an error beep screeching out into the street, it was immediately clear something was wrong. Fi jumped like a deer after the hunter’s first shot.
Insufficient Funds
. Startled, I looked back to the screen, at the out-of-place, out-of-land Philly message staring back at me. Lighting the whole street blue in the glow of its letters.
‘Oh shit, we’re broke.’
‘What?’
‘That’s it. We don’t have any money.’
‘What are you talking about,’ Fi asked, pushing into my side to read the electric declaration.
‘I don’t have any more money. Game over.’
‘What are you saying, you don’t have any more money. Wasn’t there money in there?’
‘There was. I think we used it.’
‘How can that be, Chris?’ Fi asked, looking at it again. ‘Don’t you check? Don’t you know what you have?’
‘I didn’t think of it. David always just filled it up. There was so much in there.’
‘Then how are we going to get the wine?’ Fionna asked, annoyed.
What we had: four pound seventy, counted out in loose, lint-laden coins pulled from the bottom of her pocketbook. Not enough for Fi to go alone, lie about my absence, order a salad, and go home, but enough for two tube rides back to Brixton.
We stood on the platform in silence, me following her to the far end, staring at the tracks until the train arrived. The car was crowded. The only reason Fionna stayed next to me was that there was nowhere else to sit down.
When we got home, I went to the study and Fionna went upstairs to the living room. Better to be in different rooms than in the same room not talking. That night, I could hear her making calls, watching TV, banging on the floor as she practiced for her role. I sat at my drafting table, head resting on its cool white angle, trying to think my way around my obstacles. My visa would be running out soon, and technically it was only valid if I was working for Urgent, so I had to get something going on. I needed to call up our old clients, get replacement samples for my book. At least Fi got a job; money would be coming from somewhere. After a particularly heavy thump from above, the bulb broke. An electric pop gave sudden movement to the room, leaving me in the darkness, listening to the wind swim over the treetops in Brockwell. Feeling my feet get cold, I thought, Someday, if I get up, if I ever find the energy or motivation to, I’m going to turn the heat on.
Fionna came down about an hour after she turned the TV off. I heard her opening the door. My back to her, I could feel her placing her hand upon my neck, and then her lips there. I remained as I had been for hours. On the floor, Fionna crawled under the desk, awkwardly unzipped my pants, and took me with cold hands into the warm wetness of her mouth. When I finally got erect, Fionna rose and led me by the hand to the bedroom. For a second there was only flesh in this house, no worries. Sweating, naked, I wasn’t even cold any more. Alive for the moment inside her.
The next morning, at eight o’clock, I went to get the paper, but since I didn’t have any money I just circled the park and came back. When I got home, Fi’s cuz Dio was carrying the last of her suitcases into his car. She was already in the front seat, waiting for him. Rolling down the window Fionna said, ‘I’ll call you.’ Dio was trying to shut the trunk, making sure to fit everything so they didn’t have to come back for more.
When I heard her keys in the door it all seemed silly: the crying, the whole not-going-out-for-days thing, the feelings of despair and destitution, the hopelessness, the eating of dry cereal and cheese because cooking just seemed too much the bother. A click in the door and that whole period was just comedic absurdity. Pointless drama. Now the reality that fostered it was gone and my Fi had come back to rescue me. When the doorknob turned, there was even this insane moment when I regretted her reappearance, where relief was replaced by indignant fury, a flash of self-respect and optimism where I knew she was a cancer best removed. The door swung open and I saw Margaret standing before me.
‘Oh, Christopher, I’m sorry. I thought no one was home. I rang the bell, didn’t you hear?’
‘I thought it was the Witnesses.’ Margaret was different: wrinkle lines had fallen smooth and her long bangs had been trimmed above her ears. She wore a jumpsuit that was baggy and white, and when I fell to my knees before her, grabbing her legs in my arms, I could feel how soft the material was against my unshaven face. On the ground, hugging Margaret’s calves, the material ate my tears as I cried, ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ into them.
‘Chris. Up. Get up. You’re being silly. This is too much.’ After she pulled away and past me, I rose, followed her inside, wiped the snot and tears on my sleeve as we entered the kitchen.
‘How about I make some tea?’ Margaret asked nervously, refusing to face me, instead charging to the cabinet.
‘Yeah. I’m so sorry.’
‘Stop. You don’t have anything to be sorry for Chris. Really.’ She closed the cupboard and quickly grabbed my wrist, nodding each word into my face. ‘You don’t. Nothing at all.’ She was a merciful liar.
‘Can I have a cigarette?’ I asked. Margaret let me go.
‘No, because you don’t smoke. And I don’t either any more. Have a seat. Milk?’
As we talked, Margaret was surprised about all the wrong things: the news of Fi’s leaving caused little more than a side-of-the-mouth, eye-rise shrug, but the fact that the loss of David also meant the loss of my career credibility seemed a surprise.
‘Don’t overestimate David’s weight. He was an odd one in that world. Did he ever tell you on what grounds he was dismissed from the Patterson Group?’ I nodded no. ‘Embezzlement, right? The senior partners said they were investigating David for stealing over thirty thousand pounds.’
‘David wouldn’t do that.’
‘That’s what he said, of course. That it was just an excuse to “kick the nig-nog off the job”. Their last chance to keep him away from senior management. I almost wish he
had
stolen it now. At least we wouldn’t have gone so deep in debt to start Urgent. We wouldn’t have had to get so many loans. The bank wouldn’t have seized the house. I wouldn’t be in this situation now.’
‘What do you mean, they seized the house?’
‘Not much of a coup, the state it’s in now, but they’re taking all of our holdings until I can cover the back payments. I’m working a double shift just to get myself out from the hole I seemed to have been left in. I won’t even have David’s old flat at the end of the month. The bank’s taking control of that, too.’
‘My flat? The one I live in?’
‘I know, Chris. Really, I do. I wish I could do something about that. Four weeks, then they’ll have it.’ My house. Margaret looked at the table, at the nicks and grooves it held. She was waiting for me to say something but I kept my mouth shut.
‘Chris, you know what you’re going to have to do.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You’re going to have to back to America.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘I know.’
‘Fine. I’ll just go to New York, get a job on Madison Avenue for a year, and then come back again.’
‘Don’t worry about coming back, just go home. And move on. If you go back you’re going to have a life there.’ Margaret reached for my hand. ‘You’ll find new loves, you’ll get a lease, obligations. Life will go forward. Don’t fight that. You’ll never be fulfilled that way. You just have to accept it.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘It’s the way of life, Chris. My father came here to work for one year, and after that he planned to go back to St. Kitts. He was adamant about it. Thirty years later he’s still in Camberwell. And I know he was miserable till he accepted that reality.’
I nodded yes because she was someone whom I respected and cared about, but I wasn’t accepting shit. This was the place where my life was supposed to happen. I wasn’t losing that. If I had to leave, I’d just go someplace where I knew I could never get comfortable. Someplace I knew I could never stay.
Down at her Fiat, Margaret gave me a kiss, a hug, and twenty fifty-quid notes for my furniture. I tried to tell her she could take it, use it to replace her own, but she folded the paper into my hand, saying, ‘It’ll get you back, get you settled. I was going to give it too you anyway. Do what you need to do.’ Margaret got into her car and closed the door; I kept standing there, trying to think of something that would prolong her stay. After she fastened her seat belt, she rolled down the window but didn’t say anything. She just stared at me long, as if she wanted to remember what I looked like.
I followed her taillights down the street, and after she turned I kept walking. End of this block, end of this pavement, end of this world. Looking around, just a bunch of row houses on a wet street of a dark city, but to me everything I’d ever hungered for. A place without guns, where most violence was limited to the arm’s reach, where it took them a year to murder what Philly could disposed of in an up week. My home. A city
in
the world as opposed to hidden from it, a land whose intersections led to every continent floating. Success was defined by how far I’d run from the place I’d been born to. And that’s what I would lose by going back there. But it was pointless: I could already feel the other place pulling on me, the familiar tug of a gravity I’d thought I’d conquered. Rubber band delusions, all it was, because now the tether had reached its limit and was tugging vengefully back at me. You go up, you go down, boy. Dogs shouldn’t forget their chains. Fighting to remain on this London curb, I stared down and could already see the terrain of pain that awaited me. It said, Did you think you had unfastened me? No, I answered. Then I began falling.
Visibility was clear. I knew exactly where I was going.
50,000 feet. Nothing but a slab of asphalt embedded with diamonds, rivers of tin wires leading into a sea of melted mirror glass. Highways were faint white hairs, barely visible at all. A white slate of cloud hung between us, too weak to catch me. Planes seemed nearly still as they floated above the ground, each at a different altitude. Slow targets as I plummeted to the earth between them.
20,000 feet. Gray stalagmite skyscrapers rose out of its earth to meet me. Miniature versions of buildings gave me orientation, reminded me where I was, like falling into a living map. A city of roofs: the long, linked tops of row houses, the brick boxes of schools, the swimming pools on Center City penthouses. The small green and tans of baseball fields linked together by deliberate straight roads. Toothpick bridges stitched Pennsylvania to New Jersey, trying to close the wound of the Delaware. The Schuylkill, a snake laying on trees. The forest of Valley Green was just a head of broccoli.
