Love Me (15 page)

‘What?'

‘Atlanta!'

‘I never said anything about Atlanta, Eden. You know I've about had enough of living with my mother. It was going to be New York after London.'

I gasp for air.

‘Sit down. You are such a drama queen!' His forehead glistens. He drags first the front and then the back of his hand across it. ‘Sit!'

I sink down into a chair and he – none too gently – empties some junk food on the kitchen table and then stuffs the paper bag over my face. He's wearing a black T-shirt over a white one and there's sweat in the hollow of his neck. He's always what I've just been thinking about, even if I was thinking about something else. And now he's here. In the corner is a massive black holdall with the airport tags still stuck on it. That must be what I heard being dragged across the floor.

‘Zed, I'm sorry . . .'

‘Where's Aunt K?'

I avoid the question, keep my head down, breathe in, out, in, out. ‘How the hell did you get in here?'

‘She sent me a key.'

He begins walking off in the direction of the living room. I get up and follow.

‘Zed!'

He stops to turn around and I crash into him.

‘I honestly didn't know you were coming here. How could I?' I tell him, pushing into the front room. He sits down, I don't. ‘Seems like you must be the one doing the stalking! And why did you get in touch with Juliet anyway? Were you thinking of hooking up with her too?'

‘Please!' he says, sending an evil look my way. ‘Be serious! After what happened, I didn't know what you were capable of. You better be glad I managed to track her down because
your dad was about to report you missing to the cops. How could you leave without telling him? Are you out of your mind?'

‘Shit! The police?' The adrenaline starts up again. ‘So
now
he cares what happens to me, right?'

‘Grow up, Eden. He's your dad.' He sighs. ‘I really just don't understand you.' He leans back in his armchair. ‘Why are you here?'

I stare at him. The question grows fat between us. I don't really know. ‘Aunt K started writing me letters at the beginning of the year,' I tell him eventually. ‘It just felt right to come here. I was worried about her. Everybody was saying she'd gone bonkers.'

‘Has she?'

‘Maybe. I arrived here and about two days later she went to Saint Lucia.'

‘Are you serious? She said she wanted to hang out and hear my new music. Play some trumpet on it.'

I shake my head. ‘Well, she's gone to spread my grandmother's ashes. She was keeping them in a rum bottle, if you can believe it.'

‘Damn. Maybe the old lady did lose her mind!' The irreverence of it surprises me with a giggle. People around here don't ever talk about her like she's a regular person. ‘Ms Katherine . . .' He shakes his head and laughs. ‘That woman always does her own thing, man. For two years after your grandmother died, she wouldn't let me come round here. I could barely get in touch with her at all. And then I get this letter saying “Where have you been? Come on over whenever you want!” Then I come and find you here.'

He peels off his damp-looking T-shirts to reveal a white tank underneath, the tufts of black hair in his armpits. I swallow.

‘It's good,' I say before I can stop myself. ‘It's good to see you though, Zed. How long are you staying?'

‘Thanks,' he says without reciprocating. ‘I don't know. Not long. I need to find an apartment.' He digs a packet of Zig-Zags and a dime bag out of his pocket and starts rolling a spliff on the coffee table, filling the air with that earthy, pungent smell. He is so sure in all of his movements, so complete. ‘Max says hello.'

‘Right. Yeah. OK,' I say, my face heating up. ‘Do you think you should be smoking in here, Zed? It's kind of disrespectful,' I tell him. In this dull room, his skin boasts a rude shine. The scent of his aftershave, sweat and drugs cuts through the dust. I imagine that if furniture could feel emotion, the old-fashioned chair he's sitting on would shiver with indignation. This is still an old woman's haunt, from the days when my grandmother lived here. Dark wood, knick-knacks and doilies. Sepia photographs. He's too big for this room. ‘Where did you get that from? Don't tell me you smuggled it on the plane.'

‘Uh . . . yeah, Eden. That's exactly what I did. 'Cause they don't sell weed in New York.' He makes a fed-up noise. ‘Let's just stop talking now, alright? I'm tired.'

‘Why is it always
you
who decides when we stop talking?'

‘Somebody has to.'

There he goes, smoking like he wants not a single wisp of marijuana lost to the air. He only looks at his two careful fingers and the spliff clutched snug between them. I draw my knees up to my chest, feeling locked in a room outside a room.

‘When Aunt K comes back, her house is gonna stink.'

He blows smoke out of his nose.

‘Zed?'

Nothing. Just his deep inhale, his small exhale. I've been dismissed.

I go back to the basement.

WHEN I MET
Zed for the first time, I was fighting down the massive realisation that just because my mum had invited me to New York, didn't mean she wanted to spend time with me. She'd pretty much abandoned me to the care of chubby, quiet Aunt K, only dropping in for the occasional condescending visit. I hadn't expected Zed. I came back from a listless walk to the corner store and found Uncle Paul in the hallway talking to my aunt. I greeted them both but they were pretty irrelevant to me at that point because they were, after all, old.

And then in the next moment, walking into the living room, my heart had reset itself, rebooted.

I didn't curse much back then, aged fifteen, but—

Who the
fudge
was this work of art, this shiny-sexy boy perched nonchalantly in my spot on the couch? He looked just like a condensation-beaded glass of lemonade on a steaming hot day. And it was a steaming hot day. He was sitting there, all
finished
. . . like there'd be no space for anyone else, not even on the chair that was empty. I stood all hot and squirmy in the hallway. I stared.
Ba-doomp, ba-doomp
. My heart was louder than the TV.

He was skinnier then, less distinct, but he was still more of a man than any of the other boys I'd met who were his age. Neat, intricate cornrows hugged his scalp, while his clothes were so oversized that we could probably both fit inside them, no problem. And I wouldn't have minded that at all.

‘Hi,' I said eventually.

‘Whassup?' he replied, and his accent did things to me. The afternoon sun was coming in warm from the street and I had a vision of the summer holidays coloured deep with romance and tragedy.

I had no idea.

‘What?'

‘What,' he enunciated, ‘is going on?'

Pause. ‘Um, not much. You?'

‘I'm cool,' he said, letting his eyes drift back to the TV. He wasn't mean, necessarily. But the look said,
She's just a kid
. If I'd set those words to music, it would have been the soundtrack to my life back then. I wasn't a sexy fifteen-year-old.

‘Aaron! Stand up in the presence of a lady,' Uncle Paul barked at his son, stepping abruptly into the room. It wasn't hard to see where Zed got his looks from. Paul – a childhood friend of my aunt's – was a very symmetrical man, upright and handsome. He had an old-school nobility about him, none of his son's wily twinkle. The boy popped right out of his seat, and me almost out of my skin. I wiped my hands on my shorts, struggling to regain my composure.

‘Eden, this is my son Aaron. Aaron, this is Aunt Katherine's niece, Eden. You guys are a similar age, so I thought it would be a good idea for you to meet each other.' He gave his boy a hard look. ‘It would be nice for Aaron to make some
new
friends. He can show you around New York the way I used to do for your auntie. Be useful for a change.'

Aaron said, ‘Nice to meet you,' and pulled his oversized jeans up, something that would turn out to be an endearing little tic of his. Uncle Paul looked at his son like he needed either a hard slap or Jesus Christ and he wasn't sure which one. Maybe both.

When Paul left again, Aaron said that he went by the name Zed these days.

‘Zed.' I tested it. What a weird nickname. ‘Aunt K kept talking like . . . talking like you were,' I stuttered, ‘gonna be a little boy.'

The not-so-small boy grinned. ‘No, not little,' he said. He already had an air of worldliness about him, of cheerful, wolfish corruption. He sat down, spreading his legs as wide as they could go. ‘I'm sixteen. Why you still standing in the door? You scared of me or what?'

‘'Course I'm not scared,' I said, sitting next to him, sweating, inspired, inexplicably different. I was thinking that he probably only messed with teen princesses; mini-women with tight clothes and inked-in lips. I decided not to get my hopes up. Just looking at him, my hair felt more messed up, my kicks felt more beat down, my chest felt less breast-y.

I asked him what it was like to be a teenager in New York, and was it true there were shootings every day and that everyone was in gangs. He said yeah, there are shootings, and yeah, there are gangs. But there were other things too and that it wasn't like the movies. ‘Does everyone,' he asked, ‘in England drink tea with their little finger poked out?'

‘No.'

‘Exactly. What's it like living in London?'

‘I dunno,' I said. ‘It's weird. English people hate young people and then some of us have the nerve to be black too.' He laughed, surprised. Disappointment had made me precociously cynical. It's ironic really, because these days I think that disappointment is what's keeping me teenaged.

He turned slightly in his seat to pound fists with me and it made our knees touch. I missed the first time and almost punched him in the neck. I went hollow. It was the beginning of the lesson I was going to learn about all the ways your body can betray you when you're in love.

I told him I was going to the bathroom and fled upstairs to my room, trying to work out what had just happened to me, shaken at my sudden and violent bout of emotional indigestion. The rap star sag of his jeans. The nonchalance of his posture.

I threw myself across the bed and thought of him, this boy as sudden as a knife-cut to your fingers whilst peeling fruit. The pain. The instant red. He made me want to know what my mother knew, do things I didn't know anything about (yet).

MY FIST ON
Zed's bedroom door is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
Tap, tap, tap.

‘Zed?' I say, then a bit louder, ‘Zed? Hey. Are you awake?'

Tap, tap, tap.
He's taken the room that used to be my grandmother's: the small, box-shaped one next to the kitchen.

I push the door ajar and he's passed out horizontally across the disordered mattress, light slanting across his face from the hall behind me. There are pages of his heavy, angular handwriting scattered over the bed and the floor. I stand in the purgatory of the open doorway feeling like an intruder. Which I suppose I am.

‘Zed?' I say again, so quietly that he probably wouldn't be able to hear me even if he was up. Instead of leaving, like I should, I sit gingerly on his bed and examine the planes of his face. Sweat is shining on his neck and gathering in tiny beads on his forehead. The heat is almost unbearable. I'm close enough to feel it radiate from his skin but there might as well be light years between my body and his. The space is infinite. Every time I look at him, I stand teetering on the edge of the chasm where my obsession ends and his indifference begins, stretching away and away and away. His face is relentlessly peaceful.

‘Could you turn the light off?' he says suddenly, eyes closed, and I think I just had a stroke.

‘Shit! You're awake?'

‘Yeah. I'd prefer to be called Zed, though.'

‘Ha. Ha.'

‘Go on.'

‘What?'

‘The light,' he says. ‘I'm getting a headache.'

When I return, he's turned over onto his back and moved closer to the wall. I try not to stare at his chest.

‘So what's up? Are you here to put a pillow over my head? Finish the job?'

‘Come on! No, Zed.' I pause. ‘Look, I want to pay for the window.'

‘I already did.'

‘Then what can I do?'

‘Nothing, Eden. Just let it go.'

‘But I want to make things better,' I tell him, ‘I wasn't . . . myself. I didn't mean to do it. There was just so much going on in my head . . .'

‘Look, you're creeping me out standing there. Sit down or go away.'

For a moment, we listen to what sounds like a drunken fight somewhere outside. Then I slowly begin to collect his writing into a pile so there's room for me to sit, but he grabs it from me and jams it haphazard on the bedside table. I take a seat.

‘Listen,' he says eventually. Faint light from the window colouring his face blue. ‘If you think that we're gonna somehow be instantly cool after what you did, that's not gonna happen.'

‘Fair enough.'

‘I'm just being straight with you.'

‘That's it for us, isn't it? You don't even want to be friends anymore.'

‘What did you really expect? Did you think I was gonna buy you a thank-you card?'

‘I can understand that,' I say, exhausted. ‘I can understand that. It's just a shame after everything we've been through,
after all of this time.' He scratches the top of his head, adjusts his position. ‘So,' I say with masochistic abandon, desperate to numb myself. ‘So. What about Max? What happened with her?'

Shrug. ‘Well, I guess we're still kind of seeing each other.'

‘Wow. Didn't know it was serious like that. So you guys are long-distance now?'