Queenie

by Candice Carty-Williams

  “Why are you so annoyed? I’ve only come up to say hello,” I said, heat flooding my face the way it did when he said something to catch me off guard. At least I was used to it by now. The machinations of a secret office relationship had been tiresome and confusing. So many people that shouldn’t see, so many hands that shouldn’t touch, secret kisses in the lifts, so many coded conversations.

  “Yes, but people will talk. Don’t be so stupid,” Ted said. He wouldn’t look at me.

  “No, they won’t, Ted!” I said, my voice catching in my throat. “We work together. You weren’t saying this at the Christmas party when you couldn’t let go of me. Or whenever you’ve shown up at my desk.”

  He didn’t reply. I felt like an idiot. “Ted, what’s going on? Have I done something wrong?”

  “No,” he snapped. “But, look, I’ve got lots of family stuff going on, so I can’t really do this. We’ll chat another time, yeah?” He still wouldn’t look at me.

  “It’s fine, we don’t have to chat,” I hit back. “I only wanted to say that I spoke to my boyfriend and we’re going to get back together,” I lied. Ted wasn’t going to make me look like a fool. My stomach tightened as I watched him drop the collected pieces of china into the trash bin and walk to the door.

  “That’s good for you,” he said, leaving the kitchen.

  THE CORGIS

  Queenie

  I know that I always say I feel bad, but I feel SO bad

  Kyazike

  What’s happened now?

  Queenie

  I just went to see Tweed Glasses to figure out why he was airing me, I thought he was off sick or something, but he was standing in the kitchen, fine as anything, and told me he had family stuff and that he’d chat to me “another time”!

  Queenie

  He wouldn’t even look me in the EYE

  Darcy

  What does airing mean?

  Kyazike

  Like blanking. If you give someone air, you give them nothing. Does that make sense?

  Cassandra

  Well, yeah? What did you think would happen? You gave him what he wanted.

  Kyazike

  @Darcy, you should go on a site called Urban Dictionary if you need to know what certain terms mean

  Darcy

  Thanks, @Kyazike

  Queenie

  Please can someone take this seriously

  Kyazike

  Queenie, we all told you about work romance. Not worth it. Take the L and go

  Darcy

  Okay, so, I’ve just looked that up: “Take the L: Stands for ‘Take the loss.’ Frequently used to describe flunking a test, being dumped, being stood up, being beaten up or robbed, or losing one’s money in the stock market, gambling, or through exploitative business schemes”

  Kyazike

  There you go

  Queenie

  GUYS

  * * *

  I left the office, my two new friends, shame and rejection, binding together before swelling in my stomach, filling my torso. I got the bus to Brixton and sat with my head against the window before I heard the internal voice of my grandmother asking how many dirty heads had been there before mine.

  I got off the bus outside KFC and went to cross the road, but stopped when I saw a familiar face sitting in all-too-familiar black BMW at the traffic lights right next to me.

  “Hello, you,” I said to Adi, leaning on the rim of the open window, not caring if he found me attractive or not but still hoping that I didn’t look completely shit.

  Adi looked up at me. “Fuck,” he said, terror flashing across his face. He faced forward and went to drive away, but a steady stream of people walked in front of the car. He looked at me and mouthed something that I didn’t quite catch.

  “Huh?” I asked, leaning down closer to him.

  He mouthed again, and I moved even closer. “What?” I asked again.

  “Say nothing,” I thought he said, before—

  “AH!” I heard a woman shriek. “This must be her, huh?”

  I followed the sound of the voice and saw a tiny Pakistani woman jump out of the passenger side. Her hair was as huge as her head and her makeup was impeccable. Her thick, sharp eyebrows framed her doll-like features.

  “This must be the big girl, yeah?” screamed the woman who I made an educated guess was Adi’s wife.

  She walked around the front of the car and over to me. I looked at Adi for help. “This must be the big kala bitch whose big size fourteen knickers were in your glove box, yeah?” she shouted, grabbing a handful of my twists and yanking them. “I knew it! I’ve seen you when you think I’m not there, throwing stones up at her window, chatting all nice things to her thinking nobody was watching, yeah?”

  I grabbed my hair back from her and rubbed my sore scalp, looking around to see if any of my twists had been pulled out.

  “Leave it, baby,” Adi said, jumping out of the car. Drivers honked angrily behind him.

  “You think I’m dumb, Adi?” his wife shouted, her voice shrill. “I’ve seen you talking to her like you’re brown South London Romeo and Juliet, and you go out late one night and then I find those big XL panties in your car? Thought I didn’t see them, didn’t you?” she screamed. “And you’re telling me it’s not her? And now she’s coming over to your car? In front of my face? Are you both crazy?” She swiped at me, and I ducked out of her reach. I guess karma was here for me; I could hardly fight back.

  “I told you I don’t know where the knickers came from, baby, it must be because my friend, he borrowed my car, innit, he’s the one who messes around,” Adi pleaded. “Him and his missus, they had a beef, and he must have checked some girl, baby.” I would have laughed at his terrible lies if I hadn’t almost lost a section of my scalp.

  “Which friend?” Adi’s wife asked, her nostrils flaring. I watched, panic keeping me rooted to the spot, as more cars lined up behind, beeping furiously. “If these fat girls are what you like, then be my guest.” She snorted in my direction. “You got me going to the gym every day, and this big bloated kala bitch is what you want?”

  I reached down to my soft stomach defensively.

  “Get back in the car, baby, come on, let’s go home. I don’t know her, I swear! You think I would choose her over you?” Adi said, grabbing his wife’s hands. “Look at her!”

  I watched as they got back in the car and sped off, Adi skidding away so fast that he left tire marks on the road. I looked around, expecting that everyone watching films in the Ritzy opposite would have come out to watch the drama, but instead, people were getting on with their commutes.

  Rejection was fine, rejection was a huge part of life—but twice in one day I’d been completely dropped by two men who had really put the hours in to make sure they got to fuck me. When I got on the bus, I googled kala with unsteady fingers.

  Meaning black in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan. Refers to any black masculine object.

  Bit harsh.

  chapter

  SIXTEEN

  JANUARY HAD HIT me hard. I was trying to write stronger pitches for Gina, but every time I tried my head would start buzzing. Work was made worse by Leigh moving to our rival newspaper to work on their fashion magazine. I just wanted my old life back. I wanted my boyfriend, and I wanted to not be fucking up at work, I wanted to feel good about myself. I was so far from that, so far from being who I was, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from self-destructing. Tom still didn’t want to talk to me despite his promising New Year’s text, and my social life was a myth; and on the days I was too tired to drag myself out of bed, I’d end up browsing Tumblr page after Tumblr page, reading piece after piece on police brutality. I was reading an article on protests in St. Paul, Minnesota, that had followed the shooting of a black man named Philando Castile, when my phone rang. I answered it, anger pulsing in my chest.

  “Kyazike, are they going to kill us all?” I asked angrily. “For doing nothing. Nothing at all. For just being. For being bl
ack in the wrong place, at the wrong time? I hate it,” I said breathlessly. “It’s unfair, it hurts my heart. Who will police the police?” I was getting hot and stressed. “I can’t understand it, and it makes me scared and confused, and it makes me feel like we don’t belong, like we have to prove our worth just to be allowed to exist.”

  “Relax, fam,” Kyazike said. “That’s why I’m calling. I’m getting ready. Black Lives Matter march. In Brixton, Windrush Square. I’ll meet you outside the Ritzy at two.”

  “Kyazike, you know I don’t like marches,” I reminded her. “I’m frightened of people, lots of people. I know that lots of people aren’t going to do me any harm, but I feel like I can’t escape from them. It’s too overwhelming. Carnival I can’t do, big shopping centers I can’t do, Oxford Street at any time of day I can’t do. That’s why I can never go with you there,” I explained to her.

  “Queenie.”

  “You’re right. This is bigger than me,” I said.

  “See you there.”

  * * *

  I tried to meet Kyazike outside the Ritzy and failed, mainly because she is a mover and a shaker and won’t stay in one place. We finally fell into each other on the literal opposite side of where we were meant to meet. We didn’t have any placards or signs, but that was okay because Kyazike has the loudest voice I’ve ever heard. We started off in the square, Kyazike shouting “Black Lives Matter” on repeat while I surveyed who was around us, mouthing it, not confident enough to join in. I didn’t like making myself the center of attention. Roy had seen to that.

  Kyazike was forced into silence when the organizer stood on a podium. She was a tall, lean black woman with dreadlocks weaved in with scarves that ran down her back and over her shoulders. When she lifted her hand, the crowd hushed. She waited for a time, lifted a megaphone to her mouth, and spoke. “The system is against us,” she said, her voice strong but close to breaking. “You cannot, you must not, brutalize the black body, but that is what we are seeing. It is all we are seeing. That is the message given. And it is traumatizing. Our people continue to suffer. The trauma is too heavy for us to bear.” The crowd shouted in agreement. “Black Lives Matter does not diminish any lives other than ours. That’s not what it’s about. What we’re saying right now is that we are the ones who are suffering.” She lowered the megaphone and stood looking across the crowd. Pain was etched across her face, and all too visible in the way she held herself.

  She handed the megaphone to a woman next to her and stepped down from the podium. The second woman climbed up and spoke: “Do you know what they want? They want us to riot, they want us to cause havoc, mayhem, they want us to burn ourselves to the ground. But you know what I say? It’s not a riot, it’s an uprising. And we will continue with our uprising until we get the justice we deserve.” After her, one by one, protestors stood up on a small stage to speak into a megaphone. We all watched, being hit by bullets of sorrow and anger as family members and friends of black men and women who had been killed unlawfully stood up on that podium one by one and recounted not just how those who had been lost had died, but how they were kind, they were loved, they had children, they were children.

  Then, we marched. We all walked, in droves, toward the Brixton police station, the atmosphere electric, the crowd not angry, not aggressive, but charged. Charged and wanting answers, wanting to be heard.

  Cars going in the opposite direction stopped and started as protestors weaved their way around them. The drivers beeped, raised fists out of rolled-down windows.

  “HANDS UP,” Kyazike shouted through a megaphone. Where had she got that from?

  “DON’T SHOOT,” the crowd replied.

  “HANDS UP,” she repeated, the crowd ahead shouting: “DON’T SHOOT.”

  Eventually we stopped outside the police station, and again we listened. This time to tales of injustice, to acts the police wouldn’t explain, couldn’t justify. More people joined, spilling into the streets and stopping traffic. Police escorts walked out of the station and stood around us. Fear unsettled my stomach.

  We walked away from the station, marching free-flow through Brixton, the crowd chanting, “NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!” We passed the back of the market. Instead of the fruit and vegetable stalls I’d been dragged to on a Saturday morning by my grandmother and thought I’d still recognize, more white kids spilled out holding colorful cans of beer.

  The shops where she’d buy Jamaican bun and bright orange cheese for our Sunday afternoon treat, the fabric stalls where she’d choose cloth for curtains, the pound shops where I was allowed to buy one thing and one thing only—these had all gone, making room for trendy new vegan bars and independent boutiques selling shockingly priced men’s fashion. When had this happened? When had the space that I had known like the back of my hand, the only area I’d ever been to that I felt like I could be myself in, the place where so many people looked like me, talked like my family—when had it gone?

  Brixton. When had she been stripped of her identity? Why hadn’t I properly noticed?

  “NO JUSTICE!” I shouted, a new brand of anger flooding my system. “NO PEACE!”

  “Do you want the megaphone?” Kyazike asked.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, raising my right fist above my head.

  We marched, and we chanted, settling finally in Windrush Square. A place named after the Windrush, a ship and a voyage where it had all begun for some of our ancestors. We sat on the ground in the streets, all being lifted out of our exhaustion when a new chant, this time a statement of truth rather than an objection to chaos, began, and echoed into the night.

  “WE ARE ENOUGH.”

  “WE ARE ENOUGH.”

  “WE ARE ENOUGH.”

  * * *

  “Why do you keep walking past my office, Queenie? You’re putting me on edge. Come in, or go and do some work,” Gina said. Was today one of her good or bad days? I wondered.

  “Sorry, it’s just that I wanted to ask you something.” I stepped into her office tentatively.

  “You’re not getting a raise, not until you give me what I asked for,” she said, not looking away from her screen.

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just—” I sat in the chair opposite her. “Well, you know I used to send you all of those pitches? It’s just that—well, two more black men were shot in America this week by police. And I know that it’s not here, though it does happen here, but—I was wondering if I could write something about it? It’s just that nobody is really reporting it. . . . It doesn’t have to be for the print edition, but maybe the blog, or—”

  “The thing is, Queenie”—Gina closed her laptop—“I know what you’re saying, and I understand that it’s awful. So awful. And if I could let you all write about every terrible thing that happened, I would, but I’m beholden to the powers that be.”

  “But surely the ‘powers that be’ can see that this is something that needs to be out there?”

  “I just think that these matters are a little too, how should I put it? Radical for the Daily Read. I appreciate your being so proactive about writing, though. How about we get some of that passion into a pitch for the magazine that’s a bit more . . . palatable?” Gina opened her laptop and carried on typing.

  “Well, I was thinking I could pitch something about how it would be great to see all the liberal white women who were tweeting fervently from the women’s march at a Black Lives Matter march?” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Gina asked me.

  “Well, all of these white women in the office seem to bleat about going to the women’s march, but I was at a Black Lives Matter march yesterday and I didn’t see anyone I recognized.”

  “Bit of a combative attitude, don’t you think?” Gina asked, frowning. “Rework what you’re saying, and come along to the pitch meeting at four.”

  * * *

  “. . . so I just think that we could use that argument to shine more of a light on Black Lives Matter, and if we do this in the context of the w
omen’s march, we make it more ‘palatable’ for our readers,” I said to the room, hoping that I’d managed to deliver my pitch and mask the fear in my voice with what I hoped was conviction.

  “All that Black Lives Matter nonsense,” scoffed an older man I recognized from the review supplement. “All lives matter.”

  “What?” I asked, blinking. I took a secret deep breath.

  “What about the lives of Latinos, of Asians, the lives of—I’m white, does my life not matter?” he continued.

  “I’m not . . . suggesting that the lives of other ethnic groups do not matter,” I explained, gobsmacked that I had to explain. “I don’t think that any part of Black Lives Matter even hints that other lives are disposable?”

  “Well, when you put the lives of some and not all on a pedestal, what else are you doing?”

  “It’s not putting black lives on a pedestal, I don’t even know what that means,” I said, my heart beating fast. “It’s saying that black lives, at this point, and historically, do not, and have not mattered, and that they should!” I looked first at Gina, then around the room to see if anyone was going to back me up. Instead, I was met with what I’d been trying to pretend hadn’t always been a room full of white not-quite-liberals whose opinions, like their money, had been inherited.

  * * *

  I left the meeting defeated, and feeling a lot more alone than I had when I’d walked in. “WE ARE ENOUGH,” I tried to remind myself as I walked back to my desk.

  chapter

  SEVENTEEN

  AT THE SEXUAL health clinic, I filled the form in as usual, did a scan of the waiting room to check that nobody I knew was there as usual, went to sit in the corner by the window as usual. After an hour I was called in by a black girl who looked about five years younger than me and I answered the usual questions. This was not the activity in my life that I thought I would become most familiar with.