Queenie

by Candice Carty-Williams

  “Well, you know, that’s the cost of living in London, lovely girl,” the estate agent lied.

  “My name is Queenie,” I reminded him. “The cost of living in London? There’s not even a washing machine.”

  “Launderette is close, no problem. You put it all in a bag, carry it down the road, five pounds easy.”

  “There’s no actual oven.”

  “There’s room for a microwave, yes? And look, a hotplate.” He opened one of three cupboards to show me a two-ring plug-in hotplate that looked back at me as though it knew it would never be enough.

  “But it’s one room! The kitchen is the bedroom! I could cook my Bolognese from my bed!” I said to the estate agent.

  He told me that everything in the flat was state-of-the-art, new, and refurbished, and that even though I wouldn’t have access to the garden, I had a garden view. When I looked out the window at the patch of grass and four concrete slabs below and asked where the rest of it was, he tried to distract me by showing me the bathroom. He opened a door in the corner of the room and beckoned that I go inside. I left the lure of the garden view and went in, ducking through the low doorframe as I felt for the lightbulb cord.

  “Oh, the light is here.” He crossed the room and stood by three switches next to the front door. “These two control the main room”—he flicked each switch up and down, bright spotlights beaming white, artificial light down onto the kitchen surface and then the middle of the room—“and this one is for the bathroom”— he flicked the final switch down and the light went on above my head.

  “Why is there no window in the bathroom?” I asked, turning around once to scan the room, my bag hitting every area in there: the shower, the bathroom cabinet, the sink.

  “No window, but extractor fan . . .” He opened the small cupboard underneath the light switches and pressed a button. A whirring began above my head. “You see? The bathroom, everything new. Power shower, newly fitted toilet, sink.” The estate agent slid past me, his face too close to mine, and lifted a handle to turn the sink tap on. Nothing came out. He pushed it down again. “It will all be working once you move in.” He smiled.

  “I don’t think it’s for me, but thank you for taking the time to show me,” I said, making my way two steps toward the front door.

  “Don’t go so soon,” the estate agent said, stepping close to me. “There is a way that it could be a bit cheaper.”

  I stepped back.

  “You know, I do you a favor, you do me a favor?” He placed a hand on my shoulder, the moisture on his hand making it stick to my cotton sweater as he moved it down to my chest.

  I stepped farther back, falling into the kitchen counter. “What’s wrong? You don’t want us to help each other out?” He smirked as I reached for the handle and backed out of the front door. “My people, we like your people. We’re all outsiders. First Brexit, then Blaxit.” He chuckled.

  Disgust and anger had propelled me out of the flat, and to another viewing at a tiny cottage in Mitcham that smelled of lavender. When I arrived, I wasn’t shown around, but was instead sat on a sofa and interviewed by two women who introduced themselves as Lizzie and Sarah without differentiating which was which. They were in their late thirties, possibly a couple, and visibly realized that they should have specified a higher age bracket when advertising the room as I walked in the door with my hair falling out of its bun, my coat hanging off my shoulders, and my open rucksack spilling various sanitary products onto their beautiful wooden floor.

  “Are you clean?” was the first question one of them asked. “It’s very important that you’re clean.”

  “Do you make a lot of noise?” the other asked. “Sarah and I don’t like a lot of sounds.”

  “Do you have a lot of guests?” the one who I’d now deduced was Lizzie checked. “We don’t like visitors.”

  “Do you cook a lot?” Sarah asked me. “We don’t like a lot of . . . fragrant foods. The smell hangs in the fabrics.”

  “Do you keep yourself to yourself?” Lizzie folded her arms. “Sarah and I very much keep ourselves to ourselves.”

  “Do you shave?” Sarah asked. “It’s just that we have a very delicate drainage system that can’t really cope with thick hairs.” That question felt pretty personal.

  “I just need a room because me and my boyfriend are on a break, and I’m sorry to be dramatic, but if I have to look at another house I’ll honestly kill myself!” I exploded, and they both jumped in their seats.

  “Oh no, sorry to hear that,” Lizzie said quietly.

  “How did you . . . meet?” Sarah asked out of politeness, desperate to move the conversation away from me potentially living with them.

  • • •

  “I’ve read that.”

  “Huh?” I looked up at the stranger who had sat right next to me on Clapham Common despite the unlimited grass that surrounded us. I was trying out this whole “being outside in the summer” thing that people seemed to like so much, and it was mainly fine apart from the insects. I should have known that someone would come along and spoil it.

  “The Lost World.” With one hand, the stranger shielded his eyes from the sun, and pointed at my book with the other. Even though they were partly hidden, I could see how green they were. “I like it, as far as sequels go. Didn’t like the film, though,” he said.

  “It’s one of my favorite films,” I said, lifting my sunglasses and letting them rest in my hair.

  “Ha, sorry. I’m Tom,” the boy said, holding out his hand to shake.

  “I don’t like touching strangers. Don’t take it personally, though. I don’t really like touching anyone.” I put my book down on the grass. “I’m Queenie.”

  “Is that a nickname? Or your actual name?”

  “Yes. Is Tom yours?” I smiled at him.

  “Yeah, fair point.” He laughed nervously. “Do you live round here?”

  “No. But I like the common,” I told him. “I grew up not far from here.”

  “Oh, cool. Were you born here?” Why was he asking so many questions? Was he an immigration officer?

  “. . . in the UK? Yes. I know that I’m black, but I wasn’t born in ‘nebulous Africa.’ ”

  He laughed. “You’re a funny one, aren’t you?”

  “Funny weird or funny ha-ha?”

  “Both,” he said. “Not that being funny weird is a bad thing.”

  “No, I know. I think it’s my personal brand.” I smiled at the ground, fiddling with the corner of my book. He was the first man I’d met who seemed not to want to immediately push any weirdness out of me.

  “I like your hair. It’s really long,” Tom said. I wasn’t used to being approached by men who wanted to say nice things to me. It was very weird and unfamiliar. But it was nice.

  “Thanks. I bought it myself.” I flicked it over my shoulder and it whipped him in the face accidentally. He ducked and laughed again. He had a nice laugh, I noticed. There was nothing about it that made me think he was laughing at me.

  “Do you live around here?” I asked, panicking a bit as I felt myself soften.

  “No, I work just over there.” He pointed into the distance. “I’m a Web developer. Started a few months ago, but I’ve been working on this killer project for days,” he said, lying back on the grass. “I’ve had too much coffee and my eyes were going a bit funny. My colleague told me to get some fresh air.”

  “Web development, huh? Fancy,” I said, impressed. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure, go for it.”

  “Is that your job because you see the world in code, like in The Matrix?” I asked sincerely.

  “Ha, good question.” He laughed his nice laugh again. “No. Almost. I guess I like it because it’s very logical. I like logic, I like rules.”

  “Oh God, I don’t.”

  “Ah, a rule breaker.” He raised his eyebrows. Like his laugh, they were nice too. “So, what do you do, Queenie?”

  “Nothing, yet,” I told him.

/>   “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I’m going to change the world,” I said. “The world of reporting, anyway. I graduated last year and have been doing absolutely nothing with my degree ever since. I had an interview this morning at a newspaper, though. The Daily Read. Can you believe that they interview people for an internship? All I’ll be getting is lunch money and they asked me to give five examples of culture websites and what makes them so successful. I had to do a PowerPoint and everything.” I was talking so much.

  “Ah, welcome to the world of free labor,” he said, standing up and taking his phone out of his pocket. “Shit, I need to get back. They’ve found some sort of bug.”

  His leaving unexpectedly took me by surprise. “Bye, then,” I said defensively.

  “Can I, er, have your number?” Tom asked, his voice breaking slightly. “It’d be nice to talk to you again.”

  “That’s very forward of you.” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Like I said, I’m very logical. No point talking to a pretty girl if you aren’t going to ask for her number.”

  “Who, me?” I looked around.

  “I’ll text you,” he said, handing the phone to me. I put my number in. “Hope you get the internship! They’d be mad not to hire you.” I watched him walk away, bouncing lightly with each step he took.

  • • •

  “Anyway, that’s basically how we met,” I said, taking a deep breath after giving them a potted version of mine and Tom’s meet-cute.

  “We’ll let you know tomorrow,” they said in unison.

  On the way back to the flat I’d bought a twenty-pack of cigarettes, then sat on the doorstep and smoked half of them before stepping back through the front door. The next day, Lizzie and Sarah had rejected me. They thought they “were going to go in a different, older direction.”

  chapter

  THREE

  I STARED IN the mirror after getting ready for the party, trying to summon the courage just to leave the house. My new housemates weren’t in, so it wasn’t as though I could flake and use getting to know them as an excuse. I was wearing a tight black dress, the first thing I could find at the top of the pile of unpacked clothes. I turned sideways in the mirror and looked at my stomach. The bloating and cramps were gone, finally. Without thinking, I took a deep breath and pushed it out to replicate a pregnant belly. I rubbed my stomach slowly. “What are you doing?” I asked myself, angry with the reflection I’d seen. I slammed out of my bedroom and out of the house.

  * * *

  When I arrived at the party, I was greeted by Fran and James at the brushed-glass door of the luxury apartment, who genuinely and unironically refer to themselves as “couple goals.” “Queenie! You look amazing! Love your hair! It looks great, what have you done to it?” Fran cooed as James clung onto her, his arms around her waist. Had they both walked to the door like that? Surely it wasn’t comfortable for either of them.

  “Nothing, it’s the same as normal!” I fake-smiled.

  “Well, it looks great,” James echoed his girlfriend.

  “No Tom with you?” Fran asked, looking behind me.

  “No. We, er—” I felt my throat tighten. “Can we not talk about it?” I asked, handing them a bottle of wine.

  After Fran and James untangled themselves from each other, one whipped my coat off and the other (hopefully unintentionally) ushered me into a corner next to Sam, the only other black person here. He looked like my mum’s old partner, Roy. Stocky, short, dark-skinned, and with a bald head that I think he shaves so closely with a razor so as not to let any Afro hair come through, Sam goes by Sambo. He turned to look at me, and the resemblance to Roy made my stomach lurch. I nodded a hurried hello, and he looked back at me blankly, as always.

  When I once told him that if he wanted to stop people from calling him Sambo, I’d back him up, and followed that by asking if he’d seen the film Get Out, he firmly told me that the nickname was “ironic.” He’d gone to boarding school with James and was adopted by white parents, which I think you can tell quite quickly by the way he publicly ridicules anything resembling black culture and carries his mute blond girlfriend around like she’s some sort of symbolic rite of whiteness.

  He’s been introduced to me many times, and pretends not to know me every time. It’s tedious. I always want to take him by the shoulders and shout: “Sam, we’re the only two black people at these functions, just say hello, you don’t need to be dismissive of me because your black family rejected you!” But it’s best to keep a low profile when you always feel like you could be kicked out at any minute if someone starts feeling a little “uncomfortable” in your presence.

  I made my way to the bar that James has told me many times he installed in his not-quite-a-bachelor pad the second he moved in. He’s told me about the bar almost as much as he’s told me about the roof terrace, even though my deliberately lackluster response to these fixtures surely didn’t do anything to justify their cost. When I got there, I found Darcy, who was pouring herself a glass of white wine. “You made it!” she said, getting a glass down from the shelf for me. “Want one?”

  I nodded quickly, taking her glass and downing the contents. “Ah, I see. Yesterday was moving day,” she said. I nodded again. “Okay, well, let’s have a drink to your break, shall we?”

  “I’m not toasting to heartbreak!” I sighed.

  “No, we aren’t toasting to heartbreak,” Darcy told me, filling her glass and then mine, “we’re toasting to the fact that you’re both having a little time-out, after which your relationship will be better than before.”

  “Okay. I’ll cheers to that.” I clinked my glass to hers and downed my drink again.

  “Besides, Tom wasn’t great at parties anyway!” Darcy reminded me. “He’d always just pull you into a corner and talk to you about his job. You’ll have more fun without him here.”

  “But at least I had an ally,” I whispered as she pulled me across the room. “Plus, he always made me feel safe from him.” We walked past Sambo, who looked at me with disdain. I shivered the way that I used to when Roy looked at me that way.

  There was more alcohol than I’d ever seen at this party, and while making sure that I was drowning any sorrow that I might currently or ever have had, Darcy and Fran, once Darcy had filled her in on the break, thought it would be fun to rally some of their school friends around me in order to create the best OkCupid profile a team of six could construct now that I was temporarily without a partner.

  “I don’t want to do this,” I said as Fran took my phone from me.

  “But it’ll be fun!” she said. I was too tipsy to protest. “Okay, so, I think that you should accentuate your features, hon? Like your voluptuous figure?” Fran pushed me against a white wall. “And maybe, like, pout your lips? God, babe, you’re so lucky your lips are just like that.” She stared at my mouth in wonder.

  I stood against the wall and folded my arms awkwardly. “I’m not really good at the pouty stuff,” I said. “How about I just smile?”

  “Okay, well, why don’t you just give, like, a sass face?” another girl suggested.

  “Mmm, I don’t think so. I reckon I’ll just look pissed off, and guys don’t seem to go for that angry black girl thing.”

  The girls carried on pulling me this way and that, when a boy who’d been pointed out to me earlier as James’s only single colleague, came over and told me that it wasn’t necessary. He introduced himself as Rich and handed me a glass of something that, after drinking it in three hungry gulps, I deduced was a lot of spirit and a little bit of mixer.

  Quite a bold thing to say, and he was tall, which made me feel petite, I thought woozily. Something that doesn’t happen very often, given that I am the average height for a woman in the United Kingdom but, unlike all of my friends, a size fourteen.

  “Why isn’t it necessary?” I asked, looking up and blinking about a million times in an attempt to be doe-eyed, because I’d read that boys like that sort of
thing in a teen-girl magazine when I was about fifteen.

  “Why do you need to go on a dating app when I’m here?” he said, smiling. “Do you like playing games? I don’t.” I took a swig of wine that finished me off. I was drunker than I’d ever been.

  “Sorry, what did you say?” I asked him, my eyes blurring.

  • • •

  “What did you say?” I asked Tom’s uncle, trying very hard to register what had just come out of his mouth. I could feel my face getting hot.

  “You’re not going to take that seriously, are you?” Stephen barked his reply. “Come on, don’t be so politically correct, you silly girl.” He twirled the Clue cards around in his hand before smacking them down on the table. “We’re having fun!”

  I looked at Tom, who avoided my gaze and looked at his brother awkwardly. “Tom?” I asked him sharply. “Don’t look at Adam, look at me!”

  “Queenie, leave it,” Tom finally said quietly.

  “Leave it?” I asked, looking around the room, waiting for anyone to defend me. “Did you hear what your uncle just said?”

  “He was joking, Queenie, don’t get worked up!” Adam scoffed. “And the character is actually black, so—”

  “Am I in some alternative universe?” I asked, standing up. “Your uncle just said, ‘Was it the nigger in the pantry?’ and you’ve got nothing to say?” I pleaded with Tom. “I’ll go, if you’re going to pretend I’m not here.”

  I charged out of the living room and fell straight into Viv, who was leaving the kitchen with her birthday cake, a beautifully decorated thing that she’d explained to me earlier that day had been made by her ninety-five-year-old great-aunt “despite the unyielding arthritis.” We both watched it slip out of her hands and land on the floor at our feet with a loud splat, the iced “60” still intact.