The Liminal People (6 page)

The picture's irrelevant. It's the caption “The Bridgecombe family takes a well-deserved stroll around their new neighborhood in Kennington.” She lives in Kennington now. Shouldn't be too hard to find her.

Two hours before the sun comes up the next morning, a hotel staff member's ulcer pain wakes me up. She knocks on my door. The ache on her ankles tells me she's been on her feet more than twelve hours. I don't open the door. I know she'll be back. Probably Nigerian, maybe from a poorer Kenyan family. Back when I was living here, the posh hotels only had white help. But more than ever London's an international city now, full of ethnic underclasses from every landmass in the world. So many of the poor and unwashed need jobs that even the Charos Grand Hotel, with its excellent view of the most gaudy tourist attraction on the planet, the London Eye, hires them. Creature comforts and the rest be damned, I chose the hotel for its centrality and its order-in-anything service. The concierge looked cross-eyed at me when I paid a week in advance with cash, but the extra tip got me the type of suite I wanted: on the least populated floor and far away from that damn Ferris wheel. The suite is impressive; Suleiman and his family could all fit in here comfortably. A bedroom, a main chamber, a kitchenette of sorts, and a full-sized bathtub. Plus there's a glass wall facing the office building across the street. Early morning light bounces off of those windows and reflects into my eyes if I don't close the blinds. Other than that the room is perfect. Too perfect for a black guy who pays in cash, I remind myself.

The boss got me to figure out how to change the way I look. How to change my bone structure, my body fat, my fingerprints, even my teeth. It was one of few times I saw joy in his dehydrated face. “Now you are truly useful,” he told me.

I make myself two shades lighter and force my hair to grow about five inches longer. I compact my vertebrae and shrink my thigh and arm bones so that I am effectively about three inches shorter. I smooth out the forehead and cheek wrinkles that desert and beach living have graced me with. In the mirror I smile at my lie. I look like I'm twenty-one again.

I meet London early morning after a big breakfast of ham, steak, egg and cheese, biscuits, potatoes, toast, coffee, and tea. I'm not hungry. It's all ammunition. I don't know what this day will bring, but if it's lots of metabolic changes in me or lots of healing for someone else, I'll need energy. I'm in the neighborhood of the fish'n'chips boy before the first commuters wake. I'm wearing a black and red Adidas running suit I picked up yesterday, across the street from the internet café. As I walk I'm stretching my legs like I'm about to go for a major run. Like I need to. My hood is down. I want everyone watching Yasmine to be watching me, seeing this face. I give them five minutes of the bullshit stretches people who run all the time have to do. Normal people. I'm feeling for Yasmine. Her biorhythms are so familiar to me, even now it's painful. I don't mean to wake her up, but I flutter her. Then I take off.

The phone book listed five gyms in the general area of their flat. One is way too grimy to be of use to Yasmine. My run reveals another as being too popular. Who goes to the gym at six in the morning? I narrow it down to three, and pick the one easiest to get to. I throw my senses wide for the woman I love while I ask for a day pass, and as I sit through a pushy offer to join the gym, I luck out. She's here. There's a pud in front of me I wouldn't waste time to smack, babbling away as though he and I were the best of friends while the woman I
should
be spending the rest of my life with is walking right by me. And she doesn't even recognize me.

The years have been more than kind to her. Even the last time I saw her, through the window of our old place, in that black silk dress that looked too good for me to put my hands on, even then she didn't look as good as she does now. It was like her beauty was waiting until her body grew to an appropriate age to fully manifest. She doesn't wear a lick of makeup, not even some base-color lipstick. She's got hips, and enough of a rounded ass to not be confused with a flat-butted Brit chick. Her hair, short-cropped and showing the first signs of gray, is pulled back in a tight bun resting just above the base of her neck. By the time she exits the changing room and climbs on the elliptical machine, she's sporting a dark green top that holds her small breasts close, and black tights that hold that beautiful ass even closer. I'm visibly distracted. The idiot ranter is finally giving up the ghost and giving me a trial day pass as an endurance prize for putting up with his bullshit. Despite temptation, I do a once-around the gym, targeting anyone that came in after her. Each one could be MI5.

After a sip of water I'm giving the sixty-five-year-old with carpal tunnel trying to jazzercise his way backward from his next heart attack a dopamine rush he hasn't felt since he lost his virginity, sometime around when the first
Dr. Who
came on. He's stunned—any more of his runner's high will leave him with stains on his pants. I slide next to Yasmine, who notices nothing with her headphones on.

I want to apologize for all the things I've thought. I want to get down on my knees and beg her to forget about Fish'n'Chips and her missing kid. I want to sell her identity to Nordeen, so she'll be in the same ambiguous bind as I am. I want her on top of me screaming in my ear to not stop. I want her to never know how to write the word “freak.” My pulse is a speed-metal techno beat. My heart thinks my chest cavity is just a mirage. I've forgotten how to swallow. I've forgotten which glands will give me saliva. I'm about to speak when she looks at me. We both stop the elliptical machines. There was a better way to do this, other than looking like my twenty-one-year-old self again. But I don't know how.

“I'm sorry.” Her voice is the same cayenne-flavored honey. Randomly accented thanks to parents who couldn't figure out what continent to settle on. “You look like someone I used to know.”

“It's me,” is all I can get out.

“Taggert?”

“You called. I came.” There's no lie in it.

“I'll wait outside.”

I don't smoke. I drink, because most people I'm around do and it puts them at ease. It takes more effort for me to feel the effects of alcohol than it's worth, but I put up with it. Point is, I've got no vices. They're important. They give you something to do other than stand around and look nervous while the only woman you've ever loved changes into her street clothes inside a gym.

It's full morning now. Respectable morning. Seven-thirty in the morning. The streets are bustling. I grab two coffees from a Turkish street vendor. Yasmine exits the gym looking like the most efficient heartbreaker on the planet. Where semi-skintight gear used to hug her, she's sporting a button-up white silk blouse with blue stripes, and a pumpkin-colored skirt that lies to your eyes when they ask where the cloth ends and the ass begins. Still no makeup. Still no bullshit. As I hand her the coffee, she's got her professional voice on.

“I need to know why you're here.” Dry as a Bedouin's tongue.

“You called. I came.” The repetition of my answer startles her.

“This . . . this isn't about you and me?”

“This is about your daughter.”

“For me.” She nods, searching my face for comprehension. “But what is this for you?”

“This is me coming because you asked. You want me gone, say go. I'll leave knowing my word is still good. But it sounds like you need some help. You want it, I'm here. You don't . . .”

“Tamara didn't run away.”

“Speak on it.” I follow her lead on the mad dash through crowds that seem to part the way for the both of us. Four inches shorter than I am now and she still makes way through the crowd like a linebacker.

“It's more convenient for everyone to think that she's just some brat who wanted more attention and decided taking off for a few weeks was the perfect way to get it. She wouldn't do that. I know her.” This is all she'll say until we reach a café by the Thames. I sit down silent, like a good dog, and wait. The waiter gives us menus, but she doesn't even bother with the pretense of opening hers before ordering pastries and coffee for the both of us.

“I never lied to Tamara. Never gave her any reason to lie to me. She was a typical teenager, yes. She smoked hash about every other weekend. I wasn't proud of it, but I didn't malign her because of it. She had a boyfriend last year, but he broke up with her because she wouldn't shag him. That wasn't my direction but her own. You understand, Tag? She has her own principles. . . .”

“Did you tell her about me?” She's about to answer when the bloody waiter comes back. She takes spins around the coffee rim with her spoon, then answers in a deliberate voice that lets me know I've crossed the line.

“I told her that I was in love with someone else once. Before her father. But that our lifestyles didn't coincide.”

“Makes me sound like a dope fiend.”

“Better a dope fiend than a—”

“Don't say freak!” I'm too loud. It's a novice mistake of mine, to shape my vocal cords temporarily for greater volume. Maybe the cooks in the back didn't hear, but everyone else does. I shake my head slowly, preparing to apologize.

“I . . . I wasn't going to use that word,” she says.

“Stay away from euphemisms as well, if you don't mind.”

“I . . . can't apologize for that, Tag. I was younger then, harsher. I didn't mean to . . .” She's expecting me to stop her. I don't even try. “Was it a mistake to call you?”

“Depends on why you did in the first place.”

“My daughter didn't run away. Someone chased her away, or she's staying away for a reason. No one else will find her. They think its part of a political ploy ever since Darren took a stand against the sympathy vote in Parliament.”

“Darren.” I didn't realize I'd said it until it came out of my mouth.

“Hey!” She barks at me like I'd just trashed the man's name. “He is my husband. He is Tamara's father. And he's a good man.”

“If he's such a good man, then why isn't he trying to find his daughter right now instead of making speeches to this permanent undersecretary and that budget director? And what the fuck is a permanent undersecretary anyway? And since when did you find politicians so goddamn sexy?” She's so smart it's scary. She just sits back and waits until I condense it all down to one question. “Did you cheat on me with him?”

“By the time I left for Liberia, it was done, Taggert. I was done. You had . . .” She's calling the waiter over for more coffee. She hasn't even taken a bite out of her pastry. I check the activity of the acid in her stomach and find its hasn't broken down anything in over thirty hours. But it's getting more agitated with every passing second. My fault.

“Tell me what you know about Tamara disappearing.”

“No,” she says softly. “This could all be a mistake, Taggert. I was . . . I am desperate. I'm grasping at straws. You're a straw. That's it. I'd be a total liar if I said I didn't think about you all these years. But that was my adolescence. I look back on it fondly, but I don't miss it. I don't miss you. I miss . . .” I feel her tear ducts giving before she does. I'm telling myself it's sympathy pains that cause mine to go when hers do. “I miss my baby. I miss my little girl. I want my little girl. I'll do whatever I have to do to find her. No one else cares, Tag. Everybody thinks she ran away, but she wouldn't do that to me. Do you see what I'm saying? She just wouldn't do that to me.”

She wipes her face with her sleeve, takes a small napkin and blows her nose briefly but fiercely. The red puffiness about her eyes and cheeks won't go away for another couple of minutes, but her voice returns to its solid calm in a matter of seconds.

“I called you because I think you can help find my daughter. I didn't call you because I love you or I miss you or I need you or anything like that. If that's your hope, and I contributed to that in any way, then I'm sorry . . . and let's say good-bye now. I love my family. I love my daughter and I love my husband.” I'm taking the blows like a champ even though each one feels like a wooden stake through my vampiric heart. I feel like an ass for wanting her, pining away for over a decade. I'm feeling like even more of an ass for wanting to run away from the situation. “Prove that you were right.” The thing that lives inside me whispers every time I attempt to leave. It's the only thing keeping me stuck to my seat.