Closure (8 page)

“I don't think you really do love me, Lola.”

“I do, J, honest I do. I'd do anythin' for you.”

He stared into her eyes.

“Anything?”

“Yeah, J, anything.” She was resting her hand on her stomach. “Don't leave us, J. Please don't say you don't want me no more.”

“But you know that we've got a problem, don't you?”

“What problem, J, what you talkin' about?”

“The baby, Lola.”

“The baby?” she said, stepping backwards. “But how's that a problem? I'd be a good mum, J, I promise. I could go back to school after the baby's born. I can do this, J, I know I can. Other girls in my school have done it.”

“Don't be stupid, Lola, you are only fifteen for fuck's sake.”

“I'll be sixteen soon.”

The urge to slap her returned. He stepped forward and caught hold of her hands.

“What about me, Lola? What about us? Listen. You know I still want to be with you. Trust me, Lola. You do trust me, don't you?”

Lola nodded.

He pulled Lola towards him as he stepped backwards into the toilet. He stopped when he felt the toilet bowl touch the back of his legs.

“If you love me, Lola, you'll do what I ask.”

He started to close the door with his right hand and with his left hand he pushed Lola up against the door. Then he locked it.

“It's for the best; you know that, don't you?” He stroked back the curls that had fallen onto her face. “You have to do it Lola, so we can still be together.”

Lola opened her mouth to speak.

“Shush.” He rested a finger on her lips. “Who knows best?”

“You do,” she said, lowering her head.

“Will you do what I ask, Lola, will you?” His hand glided upwards along the inside of her thigh. “Do you love me enough to do it?”

“Yes, J,” she said, as the tears collected at the tips of her eyelashes. “Whatever you say, J, I'll do it.”

“Good girl,” he whispered.

Ten minutes later Jason pulled up his zip. He stared at Lola and grinned.

“Now fix yourself up and smile; don't start that pouting game with me.” He looked at his watch. “If we go to the apartment now, I could be back at home for eight.”

Jason opened the toilet door and walked to the sink where he washed his hands and face. He looked at himself in the mirror. His reflection winked back at him.

Ask Truman.
He ran his fingers through his silver highlights.
He's your man.

He left the bathroom with Lola trailing behind him. He pulled out his wallet and threw £20 on the table.

A nice tip for the false blonde
.

He walked slowly across the room, deliberately looking into the eyes of the people at the tables.

“Oh, thank you,” said a voice from behind him.

So she's found the tip
.

When Jason reached the door and turned, his eyes met the steady gaze of an older woman in an apron. Her face was serious, her lips taut. She had a heavy-handed dose of blusher on her cheeks. He was about to call out,
No problem
, but the woman cut him off before he could speak. The café had fallen silent and the other patrons had their eyes fixed on him. The woman's harsh tone bounced over their heads.

“Are you alright, love?” Then pointing at Truman she said, “Has your dad here been giving you a hard time?”

LYNNE E. BLACKWOOD
CLICKETY-CLICK

The carriage clock continues its muffled clickety-click as it has done for generations. It was The Mother's pride and joy. The carcass of the brass mechanism is an ugly towering beast of veined marble and gilt. It has sat on the mantelpiece for as long as Marge can remember. No one knows why it made that noise. It just did, even though carriage clocks were supposed to be silent. It murmured like the sick heart of a ghost – the brass balls turning in uneven rhythms to a silent sarabande.

“Balls…” Uttering the word sent The Mother into an indignant rage. “You are a dreadful, vulgar child. I forbid you to say that. Spheres, brass spheres, that's what they are.”

As a grown woman, she still confuses spheres with fears and cringes at the admonishing whiplash of The Mother's voice. “Discipline, discipline, that's what you need.”

Discipline was as regular as the clickety-click of the circling brass: the heavily-perfumed hand on a child's cheek filling the mouth with copper-tasting blood. Dusky bruises on the skin while the gleaming clock on the mantelpiece measured out The Mother's moods.

Marge turns in her seat to face the empty armchair opposite. No breath disturbs the air, no pulse of flaccid flesh, but she continues to feel The Mother's presence. The Mother is a shadow against the stained and faded chintz of the armchair. Marge sits further back into her seat, fingers twitching. The dense smell of rotting foliage rises with dancing blackflies from a neglected houseplant hidden somewhere in the darkened room.

“A penny for them, Marge,” Violet says.

Her aunt is perched on the sofa – a tiny bird unbalanced on a wire. A battered black hat sits askew on her head. Strands of spun gossamer escape the hat in misty wisps. The Mother's younger sister, the runt of the family, is always dishevelled, as if she's run out of time to dress. Small and – like herself – submissive towards The Mother, Marge has never called Violet “aunt”, because as a child she had sensed their shared suffering.

“You'd have to give me ten pounds for my thoughts, Violet,” Marge says.

Lightness, she thinks, we need lightness in this room.

“Oh, I can't afford that on my pension,” the aunt laughs nervously. “She is still here, isn't she?”

The quiet hangs between them, broken only by the clickety-click on the mantelpiece.

There is a tiny glint from where Violet sits, as she slides the silver spoon around the porcelain cup of tea. A faint whiff of camphor wafts from the shapeless black outfit on Violet's bony frame. A childhood memory returns to Marge: a decomposing blackbird with scattered feathers lying on the ground.

Violet always looked so frail, while The Mother's rolls of fat and goitred throat betrayed her eating excesses up to the moment of her death.

Marge stares again at the stained chintz armrest. She is uneasy. There, where The Mother's paralysed hand had lain, where sweaty palms had soaked the fabric over the days, months and years, is a semi-invisible imprint. She makes out what could be the blurred outline of fingers and again, pushes her body farther back into her seat.

Move away, escape, slip between furniture, hide in corners was the quickened sarabande she had danced from the time she was a child. No more hiding now.

The Mother had gone quickly, unexpectedly.

Old fears creep back and Marge's fingers grip the armrest. The touch of the fabric is reassuring and she gently scratches it with her nails, feeling the chintz's roughness against fingertips.

Clickety-click fills the darkened room.

The furniture will be thrown out, she thinks. She looks down at the carpet where, in front of the armchair, The Mother's slippered feet had lain. No stain, but the pile is worn.

“She certainly stamped her feet a lot, didn't she?” Violet's tiny voice drifts with the smell of tea and camphor across to Marge.

“Yes, she did, Violet. And the kicks, trying to trip us up all the time. Do you remember? A full tray or cup of hot tea and she'd do her best to make us fall. She couldn't get up, but knew how to swing those fat legs right up to the day she died.”

The two women fall quiet.

“She's still here, you know,” Violet whispers. “I can feel her.”

“Me too, Violet, but she can't harm us anymore,” Marge says, but doubts her words.

“She always was a wicked one. The way she treated you was terrible.” Violet shifts on her perch and attempts a smile with faded lips.

“Yes,” Marge says.

It is all she can say. The Mother's death has cleansed the hurt and ended the wait – the years of counting the hours and days till she could be free from her.

Marge now floats in a calm emptiness and welcomes the relief.

She looks intently at the clock. Clickety-click.

“Not long, now, Violet. It will soon be finished. Then we can go.” The brass spheres, dulled by dust and grime, continue their slow sarabande. “She will never be able to make you afraid again.”

“You won't leave me again, here with… her, Marge, will you?”

“I won't abandon you, I promise,” she says, sending Violet a reassuring smile. Violet's fear is palpable across the camphor and tea-scented air.

It is night behind the drawn drapes. A sliver of lamplight enters from the street. Clickety-click. There is a porcelain clink as another lump of sugar dissolves in the hot whirl of tea and milk.

“Do you think she remembers, like us?”

“I hope so, Violet.” Marge continues, gazing at the carriage clock.

“What she did to you was…”

“I know. Unspeakable. So let's not talk about it. It won't be long, now. Be patient, and remember what she did to you as well.”

Clickety-click.

The women wait, Marge held safely within the cushion feathers, fingers scratching the chintz fabric, Violet still teetering on the sofa's edge, picking at invisible threads sprouting from her black clothes.

Clickety, clickety. Then silence.

The spheres cease their slow sarabande. Marge smiles. The darkness has swallowed the faint shadow on the armchair.

“She's gone, Violet. We can leave.”

Violet's pale features light up. “Now?” The word tumbles out as she rises, holding out her hands to the younger woman.

“No goodbyes will be said, Violet. It is time to leave for better things.” Marge cocks her head and listens. “I can hear them coming. We should go now.”

The two women take a last glance at the front room. The sound of muffled voices coming from the hallway grows nearer. They lock hands, hover and listen.

“Blimey, James, find that bloody light switch, will you?”

“Alright, I've got it. Don't tell me you're afraid of the dark, Steve? A big man like you!”

“Not anywhere else, mate, but this house… people talk, you know. Things happened here. You're a young'un, you won't remember.”

“Bloody hell, look at all this! Couldn't the old biddy get a cleaner in from time to time, with all the money she had?”

“Mean witch, that's what she was. I lived down the road, you know. I knew the girl, the old witch's daughter and the aunt. They all lived here together. Then the girl died. An accident, they said. She fell over in the front room and hit her head on the fireplace. Pretty girl too, only thirty or so. Aunt died about fifteen years later and the old biddy lived alone after that. We all thought she killed them. My word – who's been – looks like somebody's been having a cuppa in here.”

A porcelain cup containing mouldy tea-dregs lies on the table beside an empty sugar bowl. Blackfly dance a slow sarabande above a stained chintz armchair. An odour of camphor lingers as the blood-red marble carriage clock on the mantelpiece ceases to tick. Clickety-click, click… click…

PETE KALU
GETTING HOME: A BLACK URBAN MYTH
(THE PROOFREADER'S SIGH)

Strange things happen after midnight. Three weeks ago, a Friday, I was coming back from London. Earlier trains had been cancelled and I was in this crowded last train. We were all crammed in, my mouth was dry as feathers, my stomach twisted with hunger. I got out at Manchester Piccadilly, uncreased myself, and headed to the city centre bus stop on Oldham Rd
¹
to get back to Oldham where I live.

OK, nobody rushes to get back to Oldham. There are no flowing cornfields, no marble terrazza
²
leading to sublime waterfalls in which bronze demigods frolic, no sumptuous hot sand beaches up which fishermen haul their boats, land and fry their catch to the praise songs of waiting villagers. Nevertheless, it is home; there is a lockable door there for me and, behind that, a decent mattress.

I must have dozed on the train like a horse
³
, sleeping on my feet. The train must have been further delayed en route because it was later than I'd thought – the battery on my phone had no-barred me somewhere between Stoke-on-Trent and Crewe
⁴
so I couldn't check the time.

Waves of cleaners were slipping in and out of office blocks. McDonalds
⁵
had placed a security guard on their door. I get knocked into “no offence like” by some burly bloke. A girl – a buttery mix of cigarette, alcohol and Chanel No. 5 – ran up and kissed me, no doubt for a dare and I didn't fight it. Someone was dry-heaving by the Spar All Night Kiosk.
⁶
It was that kind of late.

The air was some strange miasma
⁷
– a balmy cocktail of pepperoni pizza fumes and the convecting heat of a long, hot day was infusing the night with good vibes. Mancunians are not used to this – heat – and they're all a bit thrown. I drag my weary ass through it all, clutching my flight bag of poetry publisher's proofs. As I walk, I reel off a couple of Inshallaahs, God Willings
⁸
and pluck the entrails of a sacrificial chicken in my sleep-addled mind, before stepping up to the podium, face oiled, every one of my twisted dreads in immaculate place as I ask, please, no more applause, I am not worthy, my poems are not worthy…
⁹

It was only when I got to the bus stop I realised that the regular buses had stopped. I looked around. There were six of us at the bus stop, or spread about, waiting; only one of us, me, was sober. There is no greater hell than being the only sober person at a bus stop after Friday night's pub and club chuck-out time. Everyone's heaving or bawling or boasting. Nobody but you can read the bus timetable.

I could feel a long line of zeds waiting to rush my brain; I could feel my consciousness slipping off like petals from a fading flower; I could feel the God of Sleep arriving in her spray-gold Chariot.
¹⁰
A not unpleasant numbness was just beginning to settle over me when the bus shelter frame shook and the glass I was leaning on shuddered.

This tattooed knucklehead, at least forty, staggers up to me – big chops, red face, rubber legs. He has this wary, I'm-a-hard-man-just-finished-my-prison-sentence-for-gbh look. He sways past me and he's in front of the timetable board at the bus stop, squinting.

He turns to me. “When's the next bus?”

It's a bark, a command. Maybe he's ex-military, I muse; there were many around now – damaged in mind and body – after all the illegal British wars.

“According to the timetable it's at half past twelve – half past midnight,” I say, smiling at him.

“What time is it now?” he snaps back, swaying – which is a hard trick to pull off.

“Yeah, when's it comin?” someone else calls out.

I'm wearing jeans and a black jacket. I don't have a clip board or walkie-talkie or anything, but everyone seems to think I work for the bus company. Maybe it's my rahtid
¹¹
flight bag.
¹²
My mouth opens to tell them all to go fuck themselves, then closes again. I shrug off my zeds. The Windrushers
¹³
arrived in Britain and became bus conductors. Although my roots are African – not West Indian – this subtlety is for another time. I bow to my role. This is honouring our predecessors. We are born to conduct buses.

“It's half past,” I say, “bus should be along any minute.”

There's a row of three young women, not past twenty, on the doorway steps behind the bus stop. Standing by them are two lads
¹⁴
– the boyfriends I presume – both swaggering drunk, giving mouth
¹⁵
to whoever passes by. One of them, the slightly heavier one, has a long stick by his side, like a cue stick. A Pakistani-looking bloke my age, still in kitchen whites under his coat, comes along. He pauses at the stop, takes in the scene and, wisely perhaps, carries on walking. So I'm still the only sober guy here. And I'm the only one who's not white, not that anybody's mentioned this so far. I've been around the world; I can handle the situation.

The two boyfriends get a quarrel going with a couple of bouncers standing outside the King's Head just four doorways down. I thought bouncers were trained to be calm and negotiate a situation without violence. These must have been on holiday when they ran that course. The boyfriend with the cue stick that isn't a cue stick starts doing these Bruce Lee kung fu moves, goading the bouncers. His mate is bopping about like the old style boxers used to. The bouncers are huge. The two lads are puny. Do I intervene? Are you crazy? I decide I can do without the bus, it's only ten miles.
¹⁶

As I walk on there are various yelps, expletives, splintering and ejaculations coming from the vicinity of the nightclub doors. I'm about to turn round but… nah, still not worth it. If people's sense of fun extends to rushing at bouncers to get their heads busted, so be it.

I look down the road to Oldham. It's a vast, bleak, empty landscape, known locally as Miles Platting. And now rain.

I suppose in this situation, for some, a hotel becomes a viable option. In my eyes I am a promising young black poet with several publications under his belt, on the cusp of literary and financial greatness. In the mean eyes of the grasping telephone loan arrangers, I am no more than a 37-year-old Lancastrian with 15 years of sporadic missed payments who,
if I may speak off the record, sir, would be best advised to change career. The poetry obviously does not pay; after 15 years even you can do the maths on that one, with respect, sir
.

Yeah, right. Expensive loans but free careers advice.
¹⁷

So, I'm walking home out of the city centre along Oldham Rd. It's 2 a.m-ish, dark, light rain – par for the course for Manchester. The street is deserted. I walk on and on. The rain keeps it up. A white woman comes into view on the same side of the street.

The navigation of public space by a lone black male in the night is problematic with or without hoodies, with or without “stand-your-ground” laws, with or without a Neighbourhood Watch committee in place – or whether or not that space is “gated”, should we say? Likewise, the ability (as opposed to the right) of a lone woman to move unmolested through the night in whatever kit she's decided to don. I nudge my zeds
¹⁸
aside and try to process the information provided by my eyes. From this distance she could be a very light-skinned black woman, in which case she might give me a short nod of recognition as we glide past each other, our black solidarity thing boosted. She is in a party dress. (I would like to provide more information on the dress: e.g. an A-line bolero effect with diamante detail and a flounced flapper hemline, scrunched at the midriff, clutched at the waist, and single shoulder strap. But a man's got to know his limitations. It was a dress. A party dress.)
¹⁹

You can speculate why she is walking late at night:

a. A party just finished and no taxi money?

b. A lover's tiff?

c. She's her auntie's main carer and needs to get back to help her auntie dress in the morning?

d. Kids to get to school?

The gap between us is closing and I can see now she is alabaster white. Her body language – a stiffening of the back, a slight drop in the head, a faltering in her footwork – tells me we two are not about to duet to the soundtrack of
Fame.
Her increasing hesitation makes me decide that out of consideration for her, conscious of her vulnerability, and to make it easy for us both, I'll cross to the other side of the street. But she must have had the same idea. Just as I cross, she crosses too. She's convinced now I'm after her. We're on the same side of the street again and closing. She crosses the road again and starts walking back in the direction she has just come – slowly at first, then faster till she's running. Running away from me along the deserted London Rd.
²⁰
Ah well, I did my best.

It's 2 something a.m. The light rain has lightened into almost a mist.

Beauty is everywhere, even on the road to Oldham. I come across a scene that slides my eyebrows up my forehead and bunches my cheeks. Rabbits. Like a scene out of
Watership Down
, a hundred rabbits are bobbing up and down, nibbling grass on the wide roadside verge where the Italian Restaurant used to be before they flattened it for lack of custom. By day, this arterial road roars with lorries, commuters, bankers, fish vans, prison vans, car-parts couriers, mobile hairdressers. And lo, by night, there appear jug-eared, white, bob-tailed, jerky-up-and-down, fluffy, cuddly-toyable, cookable rabbits. I've stopped. They look at me. I look at them. They dart, then sit. Dart, then sit. Like my career, or Jockey Wilson
²¹
(Prince of the Flighted Arrow).

Misty rain is the long distance walker's dream. This is the mist rain of my high school's feeble showers, the mist rain of a dog's sneeze, the mist rain of a girlfriend's errant hair spray. It soothes the soul and coats my glasses so I have to keep taking them off and wiping them. It's while doing this that I turn the corner and there's a man, a white man, lying on the edge of the pavement. He's shouting, “Help me! Help me!”

He looks in a bad way. Maybe a car has swiped him. It's wet, late. I'm tired, but you can't walk by. Did not that great Roman thinker, Thucydides
²²
say it is the duty of every citizen to come to the aid of his brother? This is the very essence of our civilisation, the foundation stone of citizenship itself, without which the Barbarians will soon be clambering over our city walls, our temples to destroy, and we will all be hastened to hell in a handcart? Something like that.

He's seen me coming, and he's been trying, uselessly, to get up. All he needs is a helping hand. I shuffle my flight bag from one shoulder to the other, sweep my dreads off my face, bend down and offer my hand. He sees me close up and a mask of horror has installed itself on his face.

“Somebody else help me! Somebody else help me!” he shouts.

I pull back my hand and straighten up. Some civilisations deserve Barbarians inside their city walls.

This walking home business is not so simple, I decide. Maybe I should try hailing a cab. Three empty taxis have gone past in the last half hour of my walking, all of them heading back to the city centre. Surely they would want to make a little more money before calling it quits for the night? But I've got no cash. There's a Post Office close by with a cash machine in its wall. No one around. No one to panic. I put my card in the machine. A police car screams round the corner.

“Stay right there! Hands where I can see them!”

It's three something a.m., light rain, dark. I'm tired. “OK.”

I'm too wet to run anyway.

While they're questioning me – who I am, where I live – a car with no headlights comes screaming round the corner and smacks into a bus stop, concertinas it, then catapults into a lamp post that crashes into the road.
²³

“You going to see to that?” I ask the cops. “You could do me later?”

They hate advice.

“We're doing fine here,” they say. “Now, how long have you lived at this address and what is your mother's maiden name?”

They continue frisking me. There's blood oozing from the wrecked car, groans, but they display a complete insouciance to that. Once they've crawled all over me so they can recognise me in the dark by the shape of my frozen genitals, they let me go and proceed to the RTA23.

I turn to continue my transaction with the global capitalist system but my card has disappeared. Yeah. Still, the cops who frisked me found a tenner in my back pocket and handed it to me, though they kept my little bag of herbs.

I walk on, watching to hail a cab. For the same reason – known only to God – that buses do this – several come at once. The first has an “I Heart Pakistan” sticker. It flies right past me – en route to Lahore I suppose. The second cab's driven by a huge Rasta. He appears to be pulling over, then speeds up and off. “Heh, heh, heh!” Yes, Rasta, you can laugh. The third cab has this bald-headed, olive-skinned guy at the wheel. He veers towards me, only to speed through this mother of a puddle, drenching me. In the back of that third cab I distinctly see the woman who fled back on London Road and the guy who'd been knocked over. The woman is waving my plastic cash card at me. And the guy's waving my little bag of herbs
.
As I'm taking all this in, the late night bus, all its lights off, flies past me, empty.
²⁴

________________________________

1.
   Sic. Fact check: actually Oldham Street.

2.
   Sic. Cannot mean
terrazza
as in balcony. Probably means
passaggio
(walkway) though these are never marble.

3.
   Sic. Generally, horses are not found dozing on trains.