After Nothing (8 page)

Kane quit fighting.

Wayne wouldn’t believe him. Kane didn’t tell him straightaway. He went and saw Danesh in hospital first. A whole lot of Danesh’s crew were at the hospital. Some of them Kane knew – he had dealt them car parts, even organized a few vehicle deliveries. None of them gave Kane a hard time. Just nodded at him, even shook his hand.

It had been a week since the fight. A week since Danesh had had surgery for the bleed on his brain.

Kane never told me what he and Danesh talked about. But later that afternoon back at his place, while we were sitting on the edge of his bed, and I was trying to think how I could make him feel better, he told me what some of Danesh’s friends had told him.

‘Doctors say he got brain damage. I mean, he don’t look how you think someone who is brain damaged would look, but he can’t remember things from like two days ago, and he got tired real quick.’

‘He probably just needs longer to heal.’

‘Natalie, he’s brain damaged. I did that to him. I fucked his life.’

‘You did not. If he’s talking and walking and not paralyzed then he’ll be okay. It was a fight. It could have happened to you. It’s how it is, Kane. He chose to fight.’

‘And I fucking chose to kick him in the head. He was probably gonna go down anyway. Why’d I do that?’

‘Because that’s how you win fights.’

‘Makes me a fucking animal.’

‘Kane, he’ll be okay.’

Kane shook his head, then buried his face in his hands. I put my arms around him, and pressed a kiss to his shoulder.

‘It’ll be okay,’ I whispered.

‘I fucking hate all this shit,’ replied Kane.

That night Wayne went at him about not doing any training that week. Kane was still pretty emotional from seeing Danesh, and Wayne could tell. Rather than give him some space though, Wayne started saying things like, he had to let it go, and he’d be stronger in his next fight because of it.

It was then Kane told him he was giving it up. Wayne lost it. Told him not to say that, to even think that. Kane stuck to it though, saying again that he was through.

Wayne called him so many names. Swore at him; said that he hadn’t got Kane that far to have Kane get weak just when they were at the start of his fighting career.

‘You ain’t backing out,’ yelled Wayne at him. ‘You fucking listen to me. This is it. No more working, and you don’t need no more school. We doing it. You train full-time from now on.’

‘It ain’t gonna happen, Wayne.’

‘This ain’t a discussion.’

‘Wayne, Danesh is brain damaged.’

‘Yeah, that’s how strong you are. You got this, Kane. Ain’t no one gonna stand up to you. The guys at the gym, everyone who sees you, they all say it. Every fucking day I see it too. You a fighter, and now everybody gonna know.’

‘I’m done.’

Wayne grabbed Kane by his sweatshirt and yelled right in his face, ‘You ain’t done. You ain’t ever done.’

‘It ain’t up to you.’

Something in Kane’s voice must have thrown Wayne, because he was silent a moment. Then he said, ‘You think you’re done? You know what being done is? Nigga, you got no idea. You don’t fight, you got nothing. You just a bitch. Get your sorry ass out my house. You don’t live here no more.’

Wayne released his hold on him, pushing Kane back against the wall with a hard shove. Kane said nothing, did nothing. Seemed like all of a sudden he couldn’t even meet Wayne’s eye.

I was furious, shaking with anger, as it registered that Wayne was kicking Kane out. And maybe Kane didn’t have anything more to say, but I sure did.

I didn’t get very far. Barely opened my mouth before Wayne yelled at Kane over the top of me.

‘Take this crazy bitch and go. This ain’t your place. Men live here. You a man? You ain’t no fucking man.’

‘You can’t take Kane’s home from him.’ I said.

Wayne didn’t answer me, but continued to yell at Kane. ‘Move your bitch before I kill her. What you waiting for? You done? Fuck you, motherfucker, we’re done.’

Kane raised his gaze and looked at his uncle for a long time. Wayne didn’t say anything; just looked like he’d never hated anyone more than he hated Kane.

‘Nat, let’s go,’ said Kane in a quiet voice.

He took my hand, but I resisted following him.

‘Thought you were his uncle,’ I said to Wayne. ‘Supposed to be more like his dad – but you won’t be that, will you? Supposed to be looking after him all this time. Only a baby, and you had him fighting. You don’t decide who he is. Kane decides who he is.’

‘Nat, come on,’ said Kane, pulling me away. He opened the front door and didn’t look back. Wayne slammed the door behind us.

Kane said he’d rough it for the night, but there was no way I was letting him.

He wasn’t in much of a way to argue, but he really didn’t want to come back to mine. It was only when I said that I was staying out with him if he didn’t that he gave in.

Mom said he couldn’t stay. Luckily Kane had insisted on waiting outside while I asked, and didn’t hear her.

‘He doesn’t have anywhere else to stay tonight,’ I said. ‘You can’t make him sleep on the street. Can’t he just sleep on the couch?’

‘No.’

It was a stupid suggestion. Mom was sitting on the couch watching television, and probably would be for hours yet.

‘Fine, I’ll sleep in Lisa’s room and he can have mine.’

‘No.’

Just that one word again.

‘Now, I’m not asking,’ I snapped. ‘Kane and I are both sleeping in my room tonight.’

Mom turned back to the television. She picked up the remote and unmuted the volume.

‘We’re sleeping in my room then,’ I added with more uncertainty.

She changed the channel.

Kane didn’t sleep well, so neither did I. When my alarm clock said 4:54 am, I whispered into his back, ‘Tomorrow night, we’ll get a hotel room.’

He turned over toward me.

‘We can’t, Nat.’

‘Yes we can.’

‘I don’t have the coin.’

‘What about all the work you’ve been doing? And the money you were making off your fights?’

‘I gave it to Wayne.’

‘What?’

‘His woman’s in trouble. Got to the stage her kids were getting threatened. Wayne paid her debt, got the kids some clothes, made sure they’re eating decent and everything.’

‘What’s that got to do with you? Kane, you go to him, and you tell him, he needs to pay you back.’

‘It’ll be alright. I just gotta get some work behind me.’

‘He takes your money, and then he kicks you out?’

‘I would have kicked me out too if I were him. Fighting’s his life. He’s put everything into me. He ain’t being unfair.’

‘He’s trying to force you to change your mind.’

‘Yeah but he can’t. Fuck. I can’t face it. Every time I think about it. What I done to Danesh.’

Kane’s voice broke on the words, and he turned away from me. I wrapped an arm around his waist, and hugged his back.

‘I’ve got some money, Kane. Enough to pay for a hotel for a few nights.’

‘And then what?’

‘We could sleep in the storage room in the old gym.’

‘Can’t do that.’

‘Why not? No one would know. There’re showers in the gym and everything.’

‘Nat, they alarm the school. And there’s security that comes by and does patrols at night.’

‘How come you know that?’

‘Just do.’

‘Bet you could get around it.’

‘I don’t want to fucking live at school.’

‘Okay. I’ll talk to Mom. You can live here.’

‘No, I can’t do that.’

‘Then what?’

‘I got some places I can stay.’

‘With who?’

‘People you don’t know.’

‘You didn’t mention staying with them last night.’

‘Last night I didn’t want them to see me.’

I thought of how upset he’d been – how upset he was still sounding.

‘Will you be able to make things up with Wayne?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘He looked like he wanted to beat you up.’

Kane half laughed, but his voice was bitter. ‘Yeah, but he couldn’t fucking take me anymore. I’d probably put him in hospital with Danesh.’

‘He’d deserve it,’ I replied.

Kane left soon after. I went downstairs with him and watched him walk off into the darkness of the early winter’s morning. Dad didn’t even know he’d been there, and Mom didn’t say anything.

As I was about to leave for school, though, she said to me, ‘You’ve been wearing my daughter’s clothes.’

‘I’m not wearing her –’

‘You’ve worn her clothes,’ said Mom, cutting me off.

I paused, realizing she was right.

‘I did wear her clothes for a short while,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m not anymore.’

‘If you do it again I’ll kill you.’

It was the second time in twelve hours someone had threatened to kill me. Wayne’s threat, I knew, had been empty. Mom’s I wasn’t so certain about.

I looked into her eyes, and they were black.

‘You’ve got the devil inside you, Momma.’

She slapped me. First there was the sound, so close to my eardrum that all I could hear for a moment was a loud ringing. Then came a thousand pinpricks in the side of my face, followed by a searing heat that seemed to set my skin alight. The force of the blow caused tears to well in my eyes, and I was totally unprepared for the second slap. The third slap woke me up enough that I shied away from the fourth.

‘I ain’t your momma,’ she screamed, advancing to hit me again.

‘You crazy bitch,’ I screamed back. And then I ran.

I came home that evening. There wasn’t any choice – I had nowhere else to go. And there was Dad. He needed me.

Mom and I didn’t speak. Not even our functional language. For weeks on end after that there was just silence.

Kane picked up some extra work, which meant that he skipped some days of school and we couldn’t spend so many afternoons together. He refused to tell me what the extra work was, so I knew it wasn’t good. But it was kind of a relief not to spend so many afternoons together, especially because we didn’t have anywhere we could be alone together. We obviously couldn’t go back to his place anymore, and he said I wasn’t welcome where he was staying – which I knew meant he didn’t want me to see where he was staying, or meet the people he was staying with.

Most afternoons that we were together we’d spend at the library, where Kane did schoolwork and I halfheartedly tried to. Most times I just ended up sitting there bored and waiting for him to finish. If it wasn’t too cold, which it almost always was, we’d sit in the park. Lastly, we’d go to McDonald’s, which we both hated, but at least it was warm. Neither of us ate the food and we both hated the smell and we were always seeing people from school, which I didn’t mind so much but Kane did. We were both desperate for Kane to get his own place, but he needed some real money to do that.

That’s where the extra work came in. It was frustrating not knowing what he was doing. But no matter how hard I tried to get him to tell me what he’d been up to or what he had coming up, he kept silent about it.

During that time, if Kane was at school, we always spent our lunch breaks in the storage room of the old gym. It was the only place we had now that was ours. We always had sex first off. Then we’d lie on one of the frayed gym mats and just be together without any other people around. That hour was the best part of my day. I got to lie with my head on his shoulder, and feel the warmth of his hand resting on my stomach. I got to hear his voice, low and kind of hypnotizing. Sometimes I’d fall asleep for a short while – and it was always such a good sleep, deep and reassuring.

The only thing that disturbed the absolute peace was the sound of a basketball pounding up and down on the old court on the other side of the wall; shoes squeaking and voices calling out to one another. But even that was familiar, and made me feel, even if only for a short while, that Kane and I had snuck away from the world to a place where no one else could touch us.

One day, we were running late for afternoon class. Kane had decided, just before the first bell went marking the end of lunch, that he wanted to have sex again. We were doing it in a hurry, and I knew he was close to finishing but I decided I’d ask him anyway.

‘Kane, with this extra work, there’s no chance you can get shot, right?’

‘What?’

‘Could you get shot?’

‘Shut up.’

‘Answer me.’

‘No. Just shut up for like, ten seconds.’

He started thrusting harder. I responded by stiffening my body.

‘Answer the question.’

Kane groaned into my neck, but he stopped moving. ‘You fucking bitch.’

‘Kane.’

‘You are.’

‘Fine, hurry up and then we’ll talk.’

He couldn’t hurry up after that, so then I ended up having to wait what felt like forever. He was annoyed because, having missed so much school lately, he hated missing classes if he could help it. Still, I refused to give up, even though he was scowling at me as he did up his jeans.

‘So, are you going to answer my question?’ I asked, straightening my black sweater.

Kane pulled his jacket on, but said nothing.

‘So you could get shot?’

‘I ain’t gonna get shot, Nat.’

‘Are you dealing drugs?’

Kane looked seriously pissed.

‘No, I ain’t fucking dealing drugs.’

‘Good, because I don’t want you to. Ever.’

‘Girl, this ain’t a discussion you and me are having.’

‘It’s my business too.’

‘No, it ain’t. It’s mine. Just me.’

‘Why won’t you tell me?’

‘You don’t need to know.’

‘You can’t be working this much on your own. I know you’d never join a gang.’

‘Nat,’ said Kane sharply. ‘Drop it, or I ain’t fucking kidding. I’ve got enough shit to deal with. I ain’t taking any of yours on.’

A prickly feeling suddenly covered my skin.

‘Kane, who have you been working with?’

He actually growled at me. Like, in the back of his throat.

‘Fucking drop it, Natalie. I mean it. You ain’t invited in on everything.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means, I’m taking care of me, and that ain’t nothing to do with you.’

He left, but when I walked outside a minute later, he was waiting for me. He took my hand and we walked in silence back to the main school building. He kissed me in the empty hall outside my computer science class. I threw my arms around him, and kissed him as forcefully as I could until he started laughing.

‘I love you,’ I told him.

‘You better,’ he grumbled. ‘All the fucking effort I put into you.’

‘Say you love me too.’

‘You know it.’

I thought about what he wasn’t telling me the entire class. I was so distracted that when I went to put the old battered pink laptop that I’d had since I was twelve back in my bag it slid from my hand and hit the floor. The case cracked. I powered it up and all I got was a grey screen.

Everyone had left the class by then except for the teacher. He looked over my shoulder and said, ‘That doesn’t look good. Tell me, Natalie, that you’ve been saving your work onto the server.’

I shook my head, and slammed the screen down.

I threw it in the trash can on my way out of the room. Dad, and Mom by default, had given me that laptop for my twelfth birthday, just before Lisa died.

When I got home, Dad was making himself a cup of tea. I made myself a coffee beside him. You couldn’t make Dad a cup of tea. He wouldn’t drink it. He’d eat the food Mom or I made for him, and he’d drink from a glass of water that I’d put down beside him, but when it came to his cup of tea he had to make it himself.

I followed him back into his room and what was left of his life: a single bed, two low chairs, his desk and an ugly laminate coffee table, where his ancient radio and trailing headphones sat.

His desk was bare. Before he had his strokes, his desk had always had precise sections of paperwork on it. Unpaid bills in the top left corner; paid bills in the top right. Directly in front of his chair a large white notepad with his laptop on it. The laptop went back to the company when he could no longer work, and soon after that Dad had ripped all the pages of the notepad apart.

The telephone used to be there too. I had taken it away when he started dialling random numbers and then became distressed when people he didn’t know answered.

Dad awkwardly lowered himself into one of his chairs, managing to spill only a few drops of tea onto his robe, before placing his cup on the coffee table. As he reached forward I noticed that his pajama sleeve was fraying.

‘I’ll get you some new pajamas tomorrow, Dad.’

He reached for his headphones and put them on. I sat down in the chair opposite and watched him.

His head nodded to whatever he was listening to.

I missed him. He was right there beside me and I missed my dad so bad. I’d done so much recently that he never would have allowed me to do. I touched where the tattoo of Kane’s name was on the back of my neck.

I knew Dad would have hated it.

‘You’d be so angry with me, Dad,’ I said in a quiet voice. ‘This is my second tattoo. I remember how much you hated them on anyone. Kane’s got heaps of tattoos. But I still think you’d like him. You’ve met him. But you won’t remember. I know you’d be angry at me for sleeping with him. Mom doesn’t care, but you would have been furious. I know for sure that you’d be angry at me for failing school. I’m failing really badly. I’m just so sick of having to sit in a classroom. I feel like screaming when a teacher goes on and on about stuff I just don’t care about. I’m sorry Dad, because I know how important education was to you – but if Kane weren’t there I probably wouldn’t go to school anymore.’

Dad didn’t answer, of course.

‘Dad?’

No reply.

‘Mom hit me.’

That’s what I’d really wanted to tell him all along. Because I really wanted him to storm out of the room. I wanted to hear him say my mother’s name in anger. I wanted to hear raised voices.

I wanted him to hit her so badly, to pay her back for everything she’d done to us. But Dad would never have done that. Never.

The following day, when I went into his room, it stunk of urine. He’d peed on one of the curtains and it had all run down and soaked into the carpet.

I sponge cleaned the carpet with carpet cleaner and disinfectant. I moved one of his chairs to the window and stood on it so I could unhook the curtain. Then I hand washed the whole curtain so it wouldn’t get a water stain. It was too wet to dry it outside so I put it in the clothes dryer, then I hung it back up. It had shrunk in the dryer, and now hung two inches above the carpet.

The next day he peed on the curtain again, and it all ran down and soaked into the carpet, again. And I cleaned it all up, again.

This time though, I also brought my bedside table downstairs and put it in the corner where he was peeing. That stopped that from happening again, but there were other changes going on with Dad.

The same week that he peed on his curtains, I picked up one of his headphones to check what radio station he was listening to. It wasn’t tuned to a station, but was on static. I checked the next day; same thing. That night I checked while he was actually listening. Again, static. I asked him if I could tape the dial so it was fixed to his favorite radio station.

He tutted in response, so I taped it.

The way he communicated was changing. He no longer said, ‘Good,’ when you asked him how he was. Instead he’d reply with something that made no sense, like, ‘I know it. I know it,’ or there would be no response at all. Or he tutted, for a really long time.

One day he got upset in the kitchen because he couldn’t find the drawer with the teaspoons in it. He didn’t just cry – he made this howling, sobbing noise. Mom left me to deal with it. She went out to do her grocery shopping, even though I knew she hadn’t planned to. I tried to comfort Dad by giving him hugs and teaspoons. When that didn’t work, I made him pumpkin soup from a packet, and he quietened right down. It occurred to me then that Dad hadn’t spoken my name for months. After he went to bed I put teaspoons in every kitchen drawer.