Genie and Paul

by Natasha Soobramanien

  Sol had told Genie he would see her here after his meeting, and, when she felt someone kiss the top of her head and looked up, it was him.

  I still can’t believe I found you, Genie said.

  Were you looking for me?

  Well, not quite.

  Then you didn’t find me. You just bumped into me. Nothing unusual about that.

  I guess not, said Genie.

  They talked about how they’d been. Genie asked about the meetings. He looked better for going, she said. Though she thought he looked as delicate as he always had. Pale and thin. Dark and unshaven. A smudged charcoal sketch of a man.

  Two years this month, he said. I had to give all of that up. And how is Paul?

  That’s why I wanted to meet, Genie said. She told him about the night she’d last seen her brother. Their night out in the club. How she’d ended up in hospital. When Sol pressed for details Genie told him how she’d taken a pill for the first time. How she had nearly drowned from the inside: water intoxication, the hospital had said.

  And Paul had been with her that night?

  Yes, said Genie, but she’d lost him. They’d heard nothing of him since. He’d run off somewhere.

  Sol put his head in his hands. Don’t tell me he gave you the pill.

  Of course he did. That’s why I’m worried about him. It’s been three weeks now. I want him to know I’m OK. That I don’t blame him.

  And then Genie surprised herself by telling Sol something she hadn’t even realised she’d been thinking: that maybe Paul’s disappearance had been inevitable; maybe it was something he’d been mulling over for a while. Maybe what happened that night had just pushed him over the edge.

  That’s possible, Sol admitted. I haven’t seen him since our big fight. I thought he was running out of options then but, from what I heard from Eloise, things got worse for him. I sometimes think he might have had a different life if he’d never met me.

  You can’t take the blame. You did meet him at a rave.

  No, I didn’t. He’d never been to one until he met me. He never told you the real story of how we met, did he? He was too ashamed.

  Tell me, said Genie.

  (x) Sol’s Story

  We met in hospital. It was 1990. We were participants on a medical trial. Don’t judge him till you hear what he wanted the money for. Six weeks, we spent, sleeping next to each other. He’d told your mum he was off in France grape-picking or something. I remember the time I first noticed him. We’d only just started the trial. It was in the early hours of the morning. I couldn’t sleep. I opened my eyes to find the bloke in the next bed looking at me. His eyes were open, staring straight into mine, shining like an animal’s in the dark. Then they shut again. Weird. Don’t know if he’d even been properly awake. The next day neither of us acknowledged the other. It went on like that for a while. Time’s like chewing gum when there’s nothing much to do except be experimented on. There was the pool table, but that got taken over by the ex-cons and the nutters. The ones who signed up for the danger money trials. Tests where they stopped your heart or flooded your lungs or burnt K-holes into your brain. We kept well clear. We just read or watched TV. Me and Paul were of a kind. We knew it ourselves. But neither of us really knew where to start. Then one day, one of the nurses brings Paul in a backgammon set. He asks if I want a game. I didn’t know how to play. So he taught me. Not just the rules but the strategies as well. He wanted me to give him a good game. So we start playing. And, when we started playing, we didn’t stop. We played first thing. We played while we ate. We played when the doctors were doing their rounds. We played late at night, using wads of bog roll to muffle the sound of the dice. When people asked if we weren’t bored of playing, we let the clatter of dice speak for us. We played one long game. We agreed that backgammon beat chess hands down for the great swathe of chance that cut across the game play. We liked the speed and the sudden turns of fortune. But, eventually, just playing wasn’t enough. Winning wasn’t enough. Fear of losing wasn’t enough. We began to play for dares. Progressively daring dares. Who would have to give the winner their biscuits at teatime. Who would have to alert the nurse to imaginary side-effects (hallucinations, glow-in-the-dark spunk). Who would have to ask Spider in the end bed if he ever regretted getting that tattoo done. And so we sat there day after day, moving our wooden men across those 2-D spikes, moving them all home. So imagine how we feel one morning when Paul reaches for the set and it’s gone. Spider comes up. Asks us if we’ve lost something. We know it’s him but he won’t admit it. Then the nurse has a go about us causing trouble. So we give it up. And that’s when we started talking. I mean really talking. About ourselves. Why we were in there. Paul wanted the money to go back to Mauritius. He’d gone over two years before, he said. But he’d come running back to London when his brother got killed. Jean-Marie, I remember his name. But there was nothing for him here. He missed the place. Not just Mauritius, I’ve realised since. I think it was also his brother he was missing – not his brother at all, I know now, but your half-brother. He sounded pretty cool, that guy. Paul told me a lot about him, about the island, about all the things he did over there. But most of all he talked about Jean-Marie. I remember one story about him. Nothing much happened but it made me see him how Paul might have done. Him and all his crew, the ones Paul hung out with, they used to go to this same spot by the river to fish and smoke weed. You couldn’t see them from the road. I remember how Paul described it. The foliage dense and full of litter. They’d sit around, looking out to the processing plants and factories by the docks of Port Louis, and Jean-Marie would say shit like, Call that a capital city? Or, How many Port Louis could you fit into London? I think that’s what Paul dug about him. He was bittersweet. Too big for the island. They’d sit passing beers and joints around while they set up the rod over the water, which was smooth with oil. Paul said the first time they took him there, Jean-Marie pointed to this rainbow patch on the water and told him the fish they caught came in its own oil. No need to stick any in the pan when they fried it. And that was what they’d do when they caught the fish – fry it up with garlic and chilli and salt and eat it, hot and fresh, with their hands. So this was how they sometimes spent their Saturdays. But one afternoon, this copper comes along with a sidekick. He’s new to the force. He must have seen them on the road and followed them down there. He picks Jean-Marie out as a face and says he wants to search him. None of them can believe this. They’re six against two, hidden from the road. And these facts appear to dawn on the man only after he’s issued the order, though now he has no choice but to see it through. And he’s pretty shitty about it. Probably to mask his fear. Jean-Marie stands up, brushes himself down and raises his arms. Search me if you like, he shrugs. But show me your hands first. Think you’re smart, don’t you? the cop says, but he still does as Jean-Marie asks. He was probably more relieved than disappointed not to find anything on him. He cut his losses and wisely decided against searching the rest of them. Which was lucky, because Maja was the one who, well, you know – he was holding their ganja. Apparently Maja used to like telling Paul, whenever they were smoking, how you could be stuck in prison for possession of just one joint. But this is the bit I love about the story. As the cop turns to leave, Jean-Marie calls out to him in an almost friendly way, I’m going to get you, you know. I don’t know when, but I will… I don’t know that he ever did.

  We got our backgammon set back in the end. Spider was in for eye medicine. Something went wrong. Some kind of discharge. He ended up with his eyes bandaged over. No more pool games for Spider. In the end it was a simple thing for Paul to creep up to his bedside locker and nick back our stolen board. Spider heard him. Sat up in bed, bellowing, waving his arms around like a mummy. Fucking hilarious. We sat by his bed and played our first game in ages, rattling the dice really loudly. This time, when we played, it was different. This time we talked while we played. We talked about music and films. Cricket and football. And girls. And he told me about you
. Me, I told him about Berlin – helping to pull down that wall. I told him about squatting. Raving. All the parties I’d been to. The drugs I’d taken. I offered to take him on a night out after the trial was over. To say goodbye, I said. Before you go back to Mauritius. But of course he never went. I think that’s where he’s gone now, Genie.

  (xi) 1991

  In the eleven months that Paul and Eloise had been squatting together, they had moved three times. Now they were living in an old Victorian terraced house at the Shoreditch end of Kingsland Road with Sol, among others, and on the night of her fifteenth birthday Genie came to stay with them. They were taking her to a club. Genie assumed it would be a club in the West End; there was nothing round where they lived. She hated the area, how it was always windy on Old Street, as if the air itself was in no hurry to linger, with nothing around but locksmiths, glaziers, sad little sandwich bars, tatty little offices and pubs with boarded-up windows boasting live exotic dancers (as opposed to dead ones, Eloise would sneer). Eloise’s name for the area was ‘Poland’. But the club was in Shoreditch Town Hall. And it wasn’t really like a club at all, Paul explained, as they left the house, since it was one where you could take kids.

  As they entered the main room Genie felt as if she’d walked into a hippie’s wedding reception. There were kids and parents and people of all ages in between or older, those being the biggest kids: running about in what looked like clown trousers, batting balloons to and fro and sucking on lollies, drinking from bottles of pop. Genie had hoped to get drunk on Southern Comfort and lemonade but no alcohol was served here. Paul and Eloise didn’t seem to care, though. Genie watched them rubbing up against each other like cats. Eventually, after noting how Eloise had lost her spikiness and Paul was not his usual wired self – both of them becoming something almost molten and fused – Genie guessed they’d taken Ecstasy. She knew they did this regularly but she had never been with them when they had. She felt uncomfortable around these strangers and drifted away.

  At the end of the night they came to find her outside in the corridor and brought her back into the hall. Everyone was sitting on the floor. Some kind of weird space-age music was playing. Paul and Eloise found a spot near Sol and pulled her down beside them, just as a huge canopy drifted gently down from the ceiling, trapping everyone together in a benevolent bubble of silk. It was a bit of an obligation, Genie thought, as if you were expected to feel something, but she acted as though she thought it was all magical, the way Paul and Eloise were wanting her to. But Sol gave her a sneaky dig in the ribs and smiled apologetically, even though he too was on a pill.

  Afterwards they walked back to the squat. It felt like all the other squats Paul had lived in and decamped from over the past year, the rooms damp and chilly, filled with broken bits of bikes and all kinds of rubbish, lit with hundreds of candles, the windows covered in sheets, the walls in torn patches of old people’s wallpaper – large cabbage roses or trellis patterns. It felt at once like home, in that it felt like all the other places they had lived in, but then again not, because they lived in a way that indicated they knew they would have to leave at short notice, like refugees.

  Paul and Eloise disappeared while Genie sat in the living room, yawning on the bald velour sofa, the diseased heart of the house transplanted to each place they moved to. She was waiting for them to bring out blankets. She preferred not to enter any room where they were alone, even after knocking. Remembering the time she’d walked in on them could still make her angry for reasons she couldn’t fathom. She was jealous, of course, but of what or whom, she couldn’t tell. She lay on the sofa and closed her eyes.

  Sol, on his way back from the kitchen with a glass of water, asked where she was sleeping. She patted the sofa. There were a few rooms free, he said. The others had gone to some Spiral Tribe thing. She declined. She didn’t want to sleep in their beds. They were too relaxed about their personal hygiene. Sol offered her his room. He would take the sofa. If he got her some blankets, she said, she would be fine down here. Suit yourself, he said. Though you could always bunk up with me. Might be comfier. But before she could reply he had gone upstairs. He returned shortly afterwards with a duvet.

  Genie woke in the night after a series of dreams filled with flowers. In the first, she had wandered into the school’s hockey field at night to find it filled with overgrown delphiniums. They swayed over her. She began to dance with one of the deliphiniums, under a sky whose stars mirrored the many flowers around her. She was naked. In another dream, the large tree outside the school chapel was filled with blossom, and from one of its branches hung a swing on which she sat and rocked. She awoke to hear music coming from the room above. Sol was still awake. She threw aside the duvet and went upstairs.

  He lay reading by candlelight, smoking a joint.

  Can I stay here? I think I heard a mouse…

  Course.

  The opportunity to share a bed with Sol thrilled and frightened her. The bed – a mattress on the floor – looked too intimate when Sol flung back a corner of the covers, exposing the sheets. She was embarrassed to look at it. She focused on a pair of shoes instead – proper men’s shoes – quite unlike the old school trainers Sol always wore.

  Have you got a job interview?

  He laughed. His mum had bought them for him. For a wedding. And then she asked if he could put them away because shoes with no feet in them looked spooky to her, like empty eye-sockets. He looked amused and said, Of course, and climbed out of bed. He put the shoes behind a box of records.

  Here, he said, passing her a folded T-shirt from a pile. A nightie for you.

  The room was dark when she came back from the bathroom. She could smell the affronted smell of a candle that had been snuffed out. She was grateful he couldn’t see her, suddenly feeling shy. She made her way round the edge of the room, carrying her pile of clothes, aware of every step. When she slid in next to Sol, she could smell him on the sheets. It was disturbing. She lay awake for a long while, rigid on her side of the bed, anxious not to touch him accidentally, aware that he was not yet asleep either, and that, like her, he was struggling to control his breathing.

  Around dawn Genie woke with a lurch: someone had come into the room. The sky outside was light and she could see Paul creeping over to Sol’s jeans, cast aside on the floor at the end of the bed. He rifled through the pockets and pulled out a packet of Rizlas. As he turned to leave he noticed Genie. He looked furious.

  What the fuck are you doing here?

  You didn’t leave me any blankets.

  Go and sleep in Tom or Anke’s room.

  No. They smell.

  Well, let me get you some blankets, then.

  Nah. I’m comfy here. What do you think he’s going to do? Rape me?

  He looked as though he was about to say something. But then he changed his mind and left the room. The noise had disturbed Sol, who shifted and grunted a little in his sleep. Genie leaned close and whispered, Shhh. On a whim, she kissed him lightly on the lips. She did it again, and, without knowing she was going to, slipped her tongue in his mouth. His tongue seemed to melt on hers. He opened his eyes and pulled away sharply.

  Woah. Genie…

  But she kissed him again. This time, he kissed her in return. She slid her hand under the covers, over his naked chest. Her fingers felt strangely numb – numb in the sense that they were feeling too much – as though their fuses had blown – like that instant of confusion before you worked out if something you were touching was very hot, or very cold. And she discovered what he felt like, which was tense and knotty… smooth and firm and sparsely haired there, and here, feeling him through the thin soft material of his shorts, amorphous, tightening into veins and ridges. She heard the hardening of his breath as she slipped a hand inside his shorts and gripped his cock. His eyes, already closed, closed tighter. And then he was touching her. The more she learnt, she thought, the more she realised how ignorant she was. And when it got too much to look at him she tried to hide herself
in his body, burying her face in his armpit, the hollow inside the thin bulge of bicep a rockpool in which she found seaweed hairs and the smell of garden fences warmed in the sun.

  He was still asleep but his eyes were not fully shut. She could see a tiny crescent of white beneath the lids, barred by lashes spiked with eye-dew. His eyelashes were long and ragged, like torn netting. She unclasped his arm and got out of bed. Downstairs she made herself a cup of tea and sat watching cartoons, her knees pulled up to her chest under Sol’s T-shirt, an intense and unfamiliar ache around her inner thighs.

  Paul came in and told her to get dressed.

  I’m buying you breakfast. Just you and me.

  Goody, yawned Genie. I’m staaaaaaaaarving.

  Paul looked horrified. How come you’re so hungry?

  Genie reminded him that no one else had wanted to eat the night before. I had enough trouble getting a kebab out of you.

  In the café, Genie slid her tinned tomato onto Paul’s plate.

  They make me eat them at school. Every time I look at them I think of the Sacred Heart.

  Paul prodded the tragic, pulpy thing with his fork and watched it bleeding weakly.

  I never gave you your birthday present.

  I thought I had it last night. My night out.

  Yes, said Paul, but I’ve been thinking. There’s something else I want to give you. He leaned forward and brought his hands to the back of his neck, unfastening the chain which hung there.

  I can’t take that.

  You can and you will.

  He got up from his chair and walked behind her. She felt him brush aside her hair, felt his hands on the nape of her neck as he fastened the chain. It was still warm from his skin.