Love Me (33 page)

I reach out and touch her hand.

‘There's no way you could have known what Dominic was going to do. No way . . .'

She nods, wiping her face. ‘Yep, but I acted out of bitterness. Never let a force so negative take over your life.'

‘It's hard not to be bitter about Marie,' I say.

‘Your mother did the things she did because she was in love with life. And she never stopped loving you, Cherry Pepper.'

At that moment Max wakes up.

‘Bloody hell,' she says. ‘That was some fucked-up dream.'

LIGHT-FOOTED I
am, walking toward Brooklyn Avenue. Blue skies are uninterrupted block after block, ‘The Boys of Summer' on my MP3 player. And ‘I Can't Stay Away From You'. And ‘Wuthering Heights'. If I weren't walking, I would dance. I would throw my body around the way I did when I was small, with no fear of table edges or walls or teetering ornaments. The way I did with her. I arrive outside the double gates of Holy Cross cemetery and stare at the sign. She was laid to rest here, in the foreign soil of her favourite city. I haven't been here since the first time. A few people wander in quietly, alone or in groups but I don't steal any pictures. Instead I switch off my music and dig for my earliest memory; Ridley market on a Saturday morning, all those years and moments and miles away, emerging now as a jewel in my eye. The smell of her. The green and blue print on her long gypsy dress. Her red-painted nails. The sky seemed so far away, and only slightly closer was her face up there, curls loose and shiny about her cheeks. Smiling at me.

A young autumn breeze sings amongst the maples and the air is fresh with the scent of cut grass and flowers. Tombstones stretch away and away, glittering in that early-morning sun. I make it to my mother's name almost without searching:
Veronica Marie Boccelli
. Run my hand over the cool stone. Aunt K reminded me that she is not this grave; she is not the dust and the bones. She stands over me in the mirror smoothing out my wrinkles. She picks lint out
of my hair. She blows a breeze across my forehead on hot nights; she keeps watch over my dreams. She's still my mother.

The grass is soft on my knees as I sink down to the earth. The sun is kind to my skin.

‘Hi Mum,' I say, and smile. I haven't said those words in so long they fall out of my mouth with an awkward, baby-like joy, and never before with such conviction that she can hear me. Not even when she was alive. She would love this dress I have on. She would love the shade of red on my lips.

In my knapsack are scores of prints that I lay out, a tapestry on the grass. I talk her through all my enthusiasms and madnesses, I tell her all about Old Chanders and Dad and how they're coming over to New York to celebrate their engagement. I tell her about Juliet and The Woman Who Got Away. I tell her all my fears, dreams and lovers. My tears are absolutely painless.

‘I wanted to show you these. I'm a photographer, Mum! An arty chick just like you,' I tell her, feeling somehow like she's seen it all already. She lurks somewhere in my clicker's heart, racing for experience and new colours even beyond her passing. She's that part of me.

A long shadow falls over the grass.

‘Aunt K said she thought you'd be here.'

Look round and there he is, twinkling like a silver coin in amongst the coppers. ‘Zed!' Sporting a blue-black eye and a red T-shirt, hair growing in thick on his face and scalp. My Aaron. My Zulu, Zoo, Zee, Zed. ‘Where have you been?'

‘I didn't want to interrupt,' he says, hiking up his sagging jeans, putting his hands in his pockets. ‘I'm sorry. I just wanted—' Pause. ‘I just wanted to see you.'

‘It's OK,' I say lightly, breathless like I always am when
I see him, but without the fear. Flying instead of falling. ‘Where have you been?'

‘I took Max to Manhattan, some friends she's got in Soho,' he says and laughs. ‘She's got a message for you. She said –' he puts on her rough cockney voice and mimes tossing long, blonde hair – ‘Tell that miserable cow she can have you! I don't know why she didn't just bloody tell me she fancied you in the first place! It's not like I didn't guess! I only wanted you for summer, anyway. I am
way
too pretty for you! And she knows I really only like boys from Shoreditch!'

I shake my head and laugh, and it doesn't feel bad at all to laugh here, by my mother's grave. That curtain between life and death is, after all, just a curtain. She's laughing too.

‘And I called Spanish,' he says, looking down. ‘He didn't answer any of my calls but not long ago he sent me a text message. Said he's gonna go look for his father. Aunt K said he'll be alright. She said everything had to happen just like this. For all of us.'

I nod. ‘She knows all, she sees all, huh?'

‘Indeed she does,' he says, hanging back still, waiting for an invitation. Silently I give him my open palm. He doesn't move. ‘Come on,' I tell him. And after a few moments he does. Our hands are dark brown and light brown, each more vivid for being intertwined. ‘I know why you threw that brick,' he says.

‘Why?'

‘Because I'm an asshole.'

I laugh. ‘Yeah. And because I was lonely and tired and spiteful. And because I'd rather you hated me than just didn't care. I wanted you to feel something.'

He closes his eyes. ‘You gonna come with me to see
my
father,' he says so quiet and thick I barely hear him, ‘sometime?'

‘Whatever you ask, you already got it.'

He snakes his arms around me and his hug is the realest thing I've ever felt, snapping me right up against the moment. ‘I get all twisted up wondering how things would have been if my dad was alive, and your mom,' he says, voice muffled by my hair. ‘What would have happened with us if they'd gotten serious. We couldn't have been together. It seems wrong to . . .' he drags the words from down deep, ‘to benefit from their death in any way at all.'

‘You heard Aunt K. This could only be how it is, Zed. Maybe we're living their dream.'

He squeezes me and pulls back slightly so he can look at me, letting the possibility sink in. ‘Maybe,' he says, and then reaches over and fingers all my prints. ‘I love these.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Where's your camera?'

I take it out of my bag and hand it to him. The clicker gleams silently and is just a piece of technology today. It's asleep. He stretches out his long, dark arm and takes a picture of us.

‘Put that with the rest,' he says.

Isaiah! Everything for you, little one. Stephanie Cabot (and everyone else at The Gernert Company) thanks for your guidance and support from the end of my teens up to the present! Rebecca ‘Midwife of the Soul' Carter, you have taught me so much! Poppy (+1) Hampson, Claire Morrison, Lisa Gooding and everyone else at Chatto, thanks for your patience and enthusiasm. The Arts Council, and more specifically Charles Beckett, thanks for giving me a real start on this thing. My wonderful family: Mum, Dad and ‘Graunty'; my three departed grandparents and Papa, who remains; my gorgeous brothers, Marlon, Jermaine and Malcolm, and their own families (I love you Tia!); and the rest of my massive tribe (including super-fly Emma Robinson), thanks for your abiding love and fanatical cheerleading! Mary Valmont, Leon and Valerie, thanks for giving me shelter and wisdom in Brooklyn. Friends, muses, mentors and confidantes – Clara Mintah, Kelly Foster, Rich Blk, Ms Mimi Fresh and Nayak, Priscilla Joseph (Lucian girls RULE), shortMAN, Caroline Morgan and the little ones, John A., Karee and Kemi, Bris Carclay, McGavin James, Matthew ‘Face' Lawrence and lovely Mumma Sandra – thanks for your hospitality and kindness. Simone Stewart and Ms Loseca Austral, Street Journo (thanks for reading!), Courttia Newland, Kim Trusty, The Bard, Diran Adebayo, Karen McCarthy, Patrick Neate, Eric Jerome Dickey, Ty, Cody ChestnuTT, Soweto Kinch, Kn0wn, One Taste et al, Paul Stiell, the entire contingent of London artistes, writers and thinkers, expecially the Free-Write Wednesday crew, Uprock and Amplified, thanks for giving me somewhere to go dance, and all the other wonderful people who have offered advice, a meal, a joke, or a willing ear during this lengthy process, you like, totally rock dudes. You know what? Just everyone, yeah? All 6 billion and change. Especially you, who's reading this right now. And Michael Bhim, my dear, you are just in time. (Oops! Is that a cliché? Ha ha!)

Peas,

Gem xo

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Epub ISBN: 9781407021201

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Published by Chatto & Windus 2009

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Copyright © Gemma Weekes 2009

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First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

Chatto & Windus

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