Need (7 page)

“What you need is a haircut,” Miss Root told him then.

Along one wall there was a heavy velvet curtain, with a separate chamber on the other side. A salon, you might say, or simply a barbershop. Washbasin, mirror and old-fashioned barber’s chair were grouped beneath a ceiling fan, and on the wall opposite hung a rotating pole.

“I had a trim only Friday but,” John Joe said.

“Just a smidgen off the top,” said Miss Root. “A quick snip around the ears.”

What was her point? Timmy Mallory,
Tonsorial Artist
, had given him a short-back-and-sides in Glenties the morning of his mother’s funeral. Timmy called it his Alcatraz Special, guaranteed good for a calendar month. And meanwhile Juice Shovlin sat waiting, thirty-one floors above Park Avenue, in his good suit and clean white shirt and a powdered roll of flesh on his neck shiny pink as bubble gum where the collar squeezed too tight. There was no reason to stay here, no probable cause in creation. “A decent shave at least,” said Miss Root, and John Joe climbed into the barber’s chair, he bowed his head in submission.

The ceiling fan purred steadily, uselessly; no breath of air stirred below. Up close, Miss Root smelled of animal cages and sawdust, Camels, carbolic soap, and her fingers on John Joe’s face did not feel like any woman’s. Impersonal, brusque, they slapped lather on him like a plasterer spackling an outhouse wall. At each stroke, a fresh fall of cigarette ash scattered on his forehead, his eyelids. Then he heard a razor stropping, and a pillow that might be breasts softly cradled the back of his skull.

The shape of this room was a long narrow funnel like a shooting gallery, with a barred window at the far end instead of tin ducks floating past. The window faced onto a red-brick wall, and the windowsill was strewn with cups, used teabags, half a packet of highland shortbread. John Joe did his best to freeze this frame, not let it go. But there was no use. Under Miss Root’s hands he had no will, no self. Through the drifts of ash he felt his flesh turned and reshaped at whim. The straight-edged razor carved him a new set of cheekbones, a firmer chin and stronger jaw.

Behind the velvet curtain, some animal moaned in its sleep. “Would that be a monkey?” he asked.

“Not on your life. Filthy beasts,” said Miss Root, and slapped a steam-hot towel on him, blistering, blinding him. Then there was only the sound of her breathing in, breathing out, and the fitful creaking of her stays, a tugboat riding at anchor.

In this darkness John Joe felt the next thing to nothing. “Da had a monkey one time,” he said.

At Duchess Gardens, that was, when he was seven and they lived at the top of four flights of stairs above a padlocked green garden. There was one room in bright light, where his mother played the radio; another room, huddled and dark, was his own. A long thin corridor like a tunnel, like a rope dropped down a black well, led off someplace else. John Joe did not walk along it.

His mother’s name was Bernadette, she had blue-black hair and blue-black eyes. He could not picture how her face looked then, just the wild morning sprawl of her hair on the pillows when he crept in bed beside her, the sun and sleep warm in the crook of her neck, the Victor Sylvester quick-steps playing soft on the bedside table, and the pink cardigan she wore as a bedjacket, its shaggy wool matted with the sugared smells of the night before. Lager and lime, rose-water soap, Jasmine Blossom perfume—Da despised these smells; he said they made a woman cheap. But Da, on these slow mornings, was not around.

Where was he? Doing road-work, driving his taxi, swilling tea in Tiny Doyle’s. He was a prizefighter, a warrior, a man with thick purpled lips and a splayed nose, scars on both cheekbones, scars above and around both eyes. When he fought, his name was announced as Kid Ojeah, but Bernadette called him Moses.

Inside the house he hardly spoke and, when he did, he spoke funny. He used to rise before daybreak, put on his clothes in the dark. When the front door creaked open, there was a moment’s silence. Da would start to whistle, trilling light and fluttery like a nightbird.
Stop! In the Name of Love
, he whistled, and danced down the stairs to the street.

One time, though, he had come inside John Joe’s room, and carried him off in his boxing robe, red satin embossed with gold lettering, saying:
KID OJEAH, THE LAGOS LAMBASTER
.

It was a raw morning near Christmas, the green garden was black, and a black taxi stood parked at the corner. John Joe sat by himself in the back seat, the satin robe felt slimy-cold, his bare feet dangled in air. Whistling and laughing, Da drove them through empty streets beneath high lamps. Fog turned the light sulphurous, the streets seemed full of holes. “I want my bed,” said John Joe.

“You can’t have it,” said Da.

Across the pavement was a plate-glass window bright with Christmas decorations; behind it was Tiny Doyle’s. Wreathed in steam, white men and black men in bomber jackets sat eating egg, sausage and chips, drinking mugs of sweet tea. When they saw Kid Ojeah in the doorway, they shouted out his name like praise.

A life-size Santa Claus drove his sleigh and reindeer across one wall. Fairy lights and iridescent balls, strings of tinsel and paper chains made rainbows through the room.

“Who’s this?” one man cried, pointing out John Joe.

“This is the Champ,” said Da.

Paraded on his father’s shoulders, he was spun round the room on high. The black men and white men shouted words he did not know, and a woman frying bacon grabbed at his thigh, made kissing sounds through bright orange lips. “Big head, big balls,” the woman said. Then they were through the
back door, alone in a walled yard. A brindled mongrel bitch lay sleeping in dirty straw. When they passed by she opened one eye.

Across the yard another door led inside a chapel. The door was heavy oak, the chapel high-ceilinged and bitter cold. A boxing ring was set up beneath a stained-glass window that showed St. George slaying the Dragon. One man skipped rope, another shadow-boxed. The morning light on the stained glass turned St. George’s sword to flaming gold.

Taking John Joe by the hand, Da led him on bare feet across the chapel floor. Beside a row of metal lockers a sofa sagged against one wall, its guts spilling down through the springs. Sprawled on the sofa was a fat man in a slouch hat and army greatcoat, eating peanuts. “This man here, Tiny Doyle, he is your best uncle, sit on him,” said Da, placing John Joe with care on the fat man’s chest. The man did not speak or stir, just spat shells. “My own son needs must see me fight,” said Da, and walked through a ragged curtain into a locker room.

The man who re-emerged two minutes later wore high white boots with tassels, white trunks inscribed KO. When he struck a fighter’s stance, fists clenched, one of his front teeth flashed gold. “Look upon this man,” he said. “Is he not great?” With his weight resting on the ball of his right foot, he flexed and posed, swivelling slowly through a half-circle, his back a drawn bow, his calf and thigh muscles ropes, his biceps bulging like twin mouths stuffed full of gobstoppers. “What man born of woman could beat this man?” he cried. “What creature of God’s creation?”

“Jimmy Partridge,” said Tiny Doyle. “Knocked you kicking inside three rounds.”

“I was sick that night. Indispose.”

“Arthur Crufts. Big Boy Williams. Lester Digges.”

“Sick, I tell you.”

“Tony Majors. Stoker Watts.”

“Sick,” said Da. “Sick, sick.”

Across the chapel the skipping rope snapped and whirred, feet scuffled on canvas, the two men training snorted and gasped. “Wrap me,” said Da, reaching out his hands for bandaging. “Make me strong.”

“Fucking Ada,” said Tiny Doyle.

What came next? A black stranger leaping and whirling across the chapel floor, spinning through bars of shadow and strips of light, the tassels dancing on his boots, his arms pistoning in crimson gloves, a leather helmet like a cage, silver spray flying backwards, a gold sword on fire.

By the time they reached home John Joe was burning hot, ice cold. His mother at the top of the steep stairs stood waiting with her hair undone, her nails not painted.

“We took a ride,” said Da. “Two men, two men.”

“In his bare feet,” said Bernadette.

“He had my robe. He knew no cold,” Kid Ojeah said, a laughing man. But his wife, with her long nails unsheathed, raked her hand across his cheek, made him bleed.

“You stupid damn gorilla. You ignorant ape,” she said, and threw John Joe in the bath.

The water was so hot, the shock made him cry. Submerged all at once, he struggled and thrashed to rise up but his mother held him pinned, refused to let him surface. Only when he submitted did she leave him go free. Her hands in lazy circles soaped his chest. “Shut your eyes,” she said, and he shut his eyes. “You’re safe,” his mother said, and he flooded the bath with piss.

Da was gone when he got out.

All that was left was the flat and his mother’s room, her radio playing, her warm morning bed. There was something wrong with his chest, something weak that made him struggle
for breath. His mother blamed Tiny Doyle, and kept John Joe home from school. In a tight square of brightness by her window she read him stories, taught him words by rote. “Amber. Amble. Ambulance,” she said. Together they danced foxtrots and slow waltzes, they danced Irish jigs. On the wall by his mother’s bed, next to the crucifix, were coloured pictures of cocker spaniels and toy poodles, red setters, terriers. “Ambush. Amen,” she said. At her dressing table she brushed out her blue-black hair, a hundred strokes with the left hand, a hundred strokes with the right. She drank vodka and orange, she chewed peppermints; she sprayed her flesh with Almond Temptation Plus.
Secret Unguents of the Orient
, the plastic bottle read. Tame dogs on leashes walked in the green gardens below. “I want one,” said John Joe.

“Amends.”

“A brindle bitch.”

“Amity. Amour,” his mother said. “Amuck.”

On his birthday, instead of a dog, his presents were a picture book called
Saints: Adventures in Courage
, a snowglobe showing Calvary, and a pair of rabbit slippers. After dark he lay in his mother’s bed and watched her dress up.

She clothed herself for a ballroom: peachblossom-pink silk drawers with matching uplift bra, starched white petticoats, a backless gown of alice blue. When she twirled on stiletto heels, the petticoat and gown flared out in a fan, displaying her legs to the hip. “Not so bad for an old maid,” she said. Bending low across the unmade bed, she kissed John Joe’s eyes and throat and hair. Her bare shoulder against his cheek felt sleepy warm like fur. “Dance with me,” she said.

“I will not,” said Da.

He stood in the doorway, black on black, with a ringtailed monkey perched on his shoulder. It wore a red velvet jacket trimmed in gold, it shivered with cold, its face was grey and
wizened like an old man’s. “I fought in Leamington Spa, eight rounds with Houston McBee,” said Kid Ojeah. “I was invincible.”

“Out of my house,” said Bernadette.

“Still they rob me blind, the referee is a highwayman, I haul back in my dressing room for quittance. But Tiny Doyle, ace manager, will trade no money to me. Not a shilling, not a pence, not one tin farthing for hire. All he harvest me is this worthless monkey. For honour, he claim. For shame, say I.”

“I’ll call the police.”

“You will not.”

When Da came close, his face was whittled and slashed like razor-stropped leather, his swollen eyes were red crescent moons. “You’re drunk,” said Bernadette.

“I am,” said Da. “Drunk as a pale horse, drunk as a drunk cock. Drunk as any father may be.”

Outside in the street where rain slanted against the high lamps, he covered them, all three, with a black rain-slicker, a night watchman’s cape. The monkey, shut up in darkness, began to whimper and riot. It stank of rot and urine, some stale sickness; it nipped at John Joe with sharp teeth. “Free we be,” said Da, removing the cape, and then they were inside a clothing store, a basement lit orange and blue, where a man in a skullcap sat reading
True Detective
, The picture on the cover showed a half-naked blonde in terror, a hand with a blood-dripping knife. “My own son requires apparel,” said Da. “Same size like myself will suffice.”

The song he whistled next was
Walk on By
. The melody line spun and flickered, the monkey’s teeth chattered, John Joe walked sloshing through puddles in shoes seven sizes too large. Heavy wedges of newspaper bound his feet, and all his clothes were held up by safety pins, yet he was shaped like a scaled-down man; a warrior.

They walked by side streets and mews through Notting Hill, behind Paddington. At a pub called Bonaparte’s Retreat, where John Joe ate crisps, Da drank bitter. “King Napoleon died in Elba, Kid Ojeah deceased in Leamington Spa,” he said. “No more punching bag for peanuts. No more ape monkeys for honour. No more.”

Down in the depths of the watchman’s cape was a whisky flask, which he suckled and passed to John Joe, but John Joe would not drink. Then his father was enraged. “You take for your sick mother. You don’t glean one true thing,” he said. “How you make me waste for shame.”

Later they came into a neighbourhood of railway sidings, looming sheds, idled carriages and freight cars. Halfway across a bridge, high above the Paddington tracks, Da stopped short and scooped John Joe in his arms, bear-hugged him close and fierce.

“You don’t take my drink, take my monkey,” he said.

“It smells.”

“All things smell. That is the game.”

Down below, invisible for the wet, goods trains shunted, coupled, broke apart. Drawing the monkey from its shelter, Da placed it on the bridge’s iron parapet. Its fur was drenched, its velvet jacket ripped and fouled. Its old man’s grey face peered up questioning, then a sudden squall made it scream. Scrabbling for purchase, it went skittering across the slick iron, teetered on the brink. “Honour,” said Da, and gave it a push.

But that had been another land. Here in New York, in this new world, hot pincers pulled hairs out of John Joe’s nostrils, a lemon-scented spray splashed his cheeks. Barnabas, the monkey was called. “Dirty-minded perverts,” said Miss Root. “All they’re good for is jerking off.”