Love Me (10 page)

‘Zed's going?'

‘Yeah, 'course.'

My face feels really hot and I bang my fist on the side table and it hurts because one of my thick metal bangles is on there. ‘Fuck!'

‘Whatever he did can't have been that bad . . .'

‘Look Max, I've gotta go.'

‘What?'

‘Bye.'

‘Wait! What's got up your arse, girl? You've been acting all weird for ages!'

‘No I haven't.'

‘You have! We haven't even spoken since you left. Come out and I'll buy you a drink and we can—'

‘Piss off.'

‘Alright, alright! I'm just trying to help.'

‘You're not helping! Just leave it alone. Don't think you can stomp into my life and start telling me what to do! You don't even know me! Why don't you sort yourself out? Bloody anorexic crackhead.'

Silence.

Then she says, ‘Why are you being such a penis?'

‘I'm not. If I was one, you might try and suck me for a fiver.'

‘You know what? You're bang out of fucking order!' she shouts, angry at last. ‘What is bloody wrong with you?'

‘YOU! Calling me all the time! Can't you take a hint? You get on my nerves and I can't stand you!'

‘You're such a . . .! You know what? I called you 'cos I knew you'd just be moping around on your own like a miserable old fucking cow 'cos you don't even have a life and all you do is run around taking the piss out of anyone who's stupid enough to care about you! It makes me sick, Eden. You're such a—'

Click—

I'm going out. I need air.

‘
EDEN? CAN I
talk to you for a minute?'

Dad's at the bottom of the stairs wearing ‘concerned' on his face.

‘I'm going out, Dad,' I say, stopping on the middle step, wishing I could fly right through the roof. How would that do for some witchcraft? ‘Gotta go.'

‘You wait a minute! I'm really worried about the way you're acting!' he says, moving so I'd have to walk through him to get to the door. ‘I just heard you screaming down the phone at somebody in your room.'

‘I was just chatting to Juliet. You know how we like to catch joke—'

‘I really don't understand your attitude these days. All you do is sit in that pigsty watching TV when you should be looking for a job!' He sucks his teeth. ‘I can't bear to see you this way, after all this time, just destroying yourself slowly. Drinking too much and dropping out of school and planning trips to New York you can't even afford. Why can't you move on, Eden?' he pleads, as if for his own freedom. ‘What's wrong with you?'

‘Nothing.'

‘This is about my friendship with Ms Chanderpaul, isn't it?' He lowers his voice so Old Chanders won't hear – even though she's singing so loud amid the soap suds I doubt she can hear a thing. She even washes up loudly.
Clang, clang, clang!
go the plates and her voice fits and starts like a dodgy engine. ‘Eden, this . . . This is the first time I've felt
anything for someone since,' he pauses, ‘since your mother. Aren't you happy for me?'

I just look at him.

‘Eden? You mustn't think . . .'he sighs. ‘I'm not trying to replace her or anything like that.'

‘
Course
I'm happy for you, Daddy. Don't I
look
happy? Can't you feel the excitement and joy emanating from my pores?'

‘You better come into the living room.'

‘I said I'm going out.'

‘Eden, don't make me tell you again. Come now!'

So into our old-fashioned living room we go. It has a few touching little modern details these days. An Ikea lamp next to the bookcase, overflowing with modern thrillers and Christian literature. Wooden blinds instead of the old velvet curtains. A stripy rug. But I could be eighteen years old, or thirteen, or ten, sitting here waiting for my lecture. I'm twenty-five years old! My dad tells me to sit down.

‘Right!' he says, rubbing his hands together with a business-like air. ‘How can we fix your problem with Ms Chanderpaul?'

‘I never said I had a problem with her,' I tell him. ‘You did.'

‘Eden, I see the way you look at her and talk to her. You didn't even sit down and eat your dinner with us! You just ran up to your room. She didn't say anything, but do you know how bad that made Ms Chanderpaul feel? She's always making such a big effort with you! Always trying to be your friend . . .'

‘I didn't ask her to do that.'

I know when my dad's angry because his eyes start to bulge out of his head and you could probably drive a train through each nostril. I feel oddly relieved at the familiarity of it, this dance we've done for so long. His contentment
is the alien invader, stealing into our home and changing its dimensions, its fragrance, its rate of decay. He's softening around the middle. The laugh lines are deepening around his eyes and mouth. He's growing old.

‘Oh my gosh!' he cries, hands thrown in the air, his bottom thrown into the sofa adjacent to mine. His movements are quicker, the bones of his face enhanced. Angry, he's more like the man he was. ‘I don't know how you can be so selfish and negative! I've lived my whole life for you and in return, you can't even wish me happiness? For once in my life? You're not a child anymore. You're a big woman!'

For once. In his life.

‘You have nothing to say?'

‘Dad, I think you're a grown man and you should do whatever you want. And you don't need my approval.'

‘You know what your problem is? You've never grown up properly. You got stuck somewhere and you're refusing to move on. I didn't raise such a brat!'

‘I'm not a brat.'

‘That's exactly what you are. I was so ashamed after the way you acted. Like I taught you no manners. You made me look bad! If you have respect for me, you'll have respect for Ms Chanderpaul because she's who I've chosen to be with and she's treated you with nothing but love and consideration—'

‘You
didn't
choose Ms Chanderpaul! She chose you! She's just the first woman who's shown you any real attention. She's not half as good-looking or intelligent as . . . as you are.'

My dad's mouth turns down at the corners and he says in a quiet, dead voice, ‘As your mother, you mean? Not as pretty or intelligent as your mother?'

‘That's not what I said, Dad. Look, I just want to go out.'

‘Go then.'

‘Dad . . .'

‘Get out! Go if you're going!'

‘Dad, what's your problem? I didn't even mention Mum. You did!'

‘She's the real reason you're angry though, isn't she? No one can live up to this person you've got built up in your head. Not even you!' he hissed. ‘It's pathetic. You dress like you're homeless. You have no passion for life, no direction! Do you know how it feels for me to watch you waste your life?' He shakes his head. ‘I don't know how you can live like that. And you want to stand in judgement of Rose? She's a wonderful person . . . why can't you see that? All you're looking at is the outside! Your mother couldn't hold a candle to Rose!'

For a long moment I can't say anything. If I did it might get very hostile in here. ‘Whatever, Dad,' I say eventually. ‘If you're really set on comparing them, you need to be honest with yourself.'

‘It depends on what you value in a person,' he sighs as if he's lost all hope in me. ‘If it's kindness, caring, morality and strength then . . . I don't know what went wrong. I did my best with you, but you've grown up to be just as blind and arrogant as she was.'

CRASH!!!

My mum jumped when the loud noises began downstairs. That day she left us. She dropped a handful of combs that she'd been holding, all different colours, wide- and fine-toothed. Wooden ones and some that were bright, glittery plastic. They splashed up from the floor and skittered out toward the doorway. My mum didn't move.

I ran down the stairs and eventually I heard her come up behind me outside the open living room.

The china and the crystal lay in shards over everything.

The gentle china.

The crystal goblets and animals.

And my father wasn't done yet for a couple more noisy minutes.

After quiet had restored itself, she didn't yell or cry, but the surest way to make her leave was to take away her refuge. Her beautiful things, her silk cushions, her crystal glasses, her china were the little heaven she'd built away from her ordinary life.

And he ruined them all. Ripped, torn and smashed.

When he was finished, she made her blank way out through the hall and back up the stairs. My dad sat on the floor in the midst of his helplessness, forcing her to leave because he couldn't bear to beg her to stay.

I cut my eleven-year-old foot following her over the debris of her broken refuge, but I kept walking. I knew there were only a few snapshots of her left – blood or no blood.

‘Listen,' she said, back upstairs throwing things carelessly into the suitcase, faster and faster, ‘don't you ever let a man convince you to give him your soul. You hear me?'

I was watching her take clothes out of her new chest of drawers. She and Dad had decorated the whole place. He hadn't known, but it was her last attempt at making her life liveable.

‘Yes, Mum.'

‘They're very sneaky.' Now she was crying – over her broken things, not because she was leaving me behind, I thought. ‘They say we're the sneaky ones, but it's them.'

Snapshot: a hard green glance my way from her eye corners, her fingers poised behind her left ear tidying a displaced curl, her lips down-turned.

‘They tell you all this rubbish about how they'll worship you! They want to plant,' a T-shirt, a pair of trousers, ‘your heart in their own chest and water it religiously.' Bras, tights, knickers. ‘They don't mean it. They only want to get their hands on it.' An unworn dress. ‘Once they've got it, your heart is a dishrag. Your soul is a bonfire in the back yard to burn rubbish. You better hold onto yourself, Eden!'

I didn't know what the hell she was talking about; all I knew was that it sounded stupid and made-up. My dad wouldn't say anything like ‘I would like to plant your heart in my own chest.' That was just plain fucking weird. It was all excuses.

‘Right. Yeah,' I replied, but I was thinking,
What about me, Mum? Am I your prison too? Am I? Am I a sneaky one?

‘Don't you dare ever let some man come along and spend all of your best years like a handful of counterfeit banknotes.'

If I'm on your side then,
‘Why can't I come with you?'

She stopped speaking then, for a moment.

‘He's so amazing,' she said eventually, not answering my question. I sank in the middle. She was going to leave me.
‘I . . . I met someone else, Eden. I know you don't understand things like this yet, but . . .'

‘I do.' I swam against the weight of my West Indian training – children don't question adults and any
suggestion
of rudeness is a smackable offence – and I said, ‘Are you having an affair?'

My mother looked startled for a minute, as though she'd just noticed I was on the brink of adolescence.

‘Affair?' She flickered, confronted by this very hard, tabloid word. I imagine that it didn't sound that way inside her head. ‘We're in love. I met him a month ago, when I went to visit your Aunt Katherine in New York.'

I'd so wanted to go. But she wouldn't take me with her then, and she wasn't gonna take me now.

‘He's a young actor . . . you know, like me. He's so handsome.'

I thought of my not bad-looking father downstairs and how much I looked like him and I felt abandoned. I had his nose. Everybody said so.

‘Mum, you're not an actress. You're a receptionist.'

‘Only part-time! That's not my dream, and he understands that. He supports me. He's crazy about me.'

‘He must be.'

‘What?'

‘Crazy.' I wanted to drag her down from her compassionless fantasy. She wasn't even thinking about me, not one bit. That man downstairs weeping over all her gentle, destroyed china – that man was my dad. ‘Or maybe he just wanted to have sex with you and that's it. At school they said adultery is a sin and you'll go to hell if you do it.'

‘Eden!'

‘My friends,' I say, breathless with irreverence, ‘say it means you're a dirty slapper and you probably have herpes.'

She was speechless, standing there with a pair of tights
dangling over her arm. Really looking at me, like for the first time. I thought about the songs she would play sometimes on the stereo, ‘I Can't Stay Away From You' by Gloria Estefan, and how soft her face would look, and whether that was when she was thinking about him, her new man. I wondered if she and I would ever dance again to ‘Blue Bayou' and ‘Wuthering Heights' with comic abandon. I daydreamed a life in America for short seconds, then got real.

‘See you later,' I said, and then left her to pack. Went to my room for my shoes and a jacket, and down the stairs, and out. Nobody stopped me.

I went to Juliet's house and stayed there until I thought my mum was gone, and then I went home and helped my dad clean up.

THERE HE IS
. Silhouetted in the window glow like a bug stuck in amber. He doesn't see me. My feet are heavy on the uneven street, pavement cracked by tree roots. A long breath escapes the cage of my chest, my mind empties, a car thunders around the corner. No way I could have avoided this. It was inevitable as the end of childhood, and just as unthinkable.

After the fight with my father, I should have found some easy distraction, let Juliet take me back down to the pub, or have Dwayne tell me some more cross-eyed jokes. I could have gone to watch a film. Stuffed my broken self full of chocolate-covered peanuts, hotdogs and Pepsi. I thought that was where I was going when I walked out of my front door, out into the crouching estate. I was certain in fact. What else was there? I hadn't even thought of the alternative, but still it drew me toward it, pulling me through the deep vein of the city.