by Paul Mendez
Jay-Z namechecked the Fugees. I need another album by Lauryn Hill, Jesse thought. I need her voice in my life. He thought of her performing “Killing Me Softly” with the Fugees on Top of the Pops. No one in that crowd, surely, had ever heard a voice like hers, much less live. That song embarrassed him, when he first heard it coming out of the speakers one morning. It sounded like a gospel song; what was it doing on Radio 1? He thought the idiots at school would take the piss out of him, knowing he was a Christian. But then it went straight to the top of the charts and sold over a million copies, and everyone loved it. It became his sacred song, and the Fugees came back to give an even better performance of it for the Top of the Pops Christmas special. This is such a romantic song, he thought, of the slow-jam now playing. There’d been bedroom rap songs, but never, to his mind, had a six-foot-four black rapper sounded so tender about another man. It was like Jay-Z was speaking to Jesse. It was like Jehovah was speaking to him. That plaintive nigga? at the end, where his voice cracked? This is a love song, Jesse thought, and was almost embarrassed; a song about love between brothers. He glanced at Fraser, who didn’t look back, but smiled slightly, and nodded. He let his knee touch Jesse’s. Jesse’s instinct was to move his own, to make himself smaller and allow the white boy his space, but he kept his knee where it was. An electric pulse ran through his whole body. Another slow soul song. Was this the most emotion any serious rapper had ever shown on record? Smiling, Fraser lit up, dragged deep and puffed out a strong, sweet-smelling cloud. Weed? The boys at McDonald’s smoked it but Jesse had never known a Witness to. Fraser took another toke and the smoke rolled sexily up from his bottom lip, up his nostrils before disappearing with an intake of breath. His eyes locked on Jesse’s as he passed it to him. Jesse put the spliff to his lips; it was already moist. He put his lips to the thing a man had put his lips to, and sucked. He felt the difference immediately from the cigarette, that he would cough and choke if he wasn’t gentle. He opened his throat to it. Breathed it right down. He let the smoke come back out through his nostrils—two white jets like plane trails against a blue sky. The air felt less cold, stiller. His eyelids dropped down by a millimetre. He felt a degree or two warmer. An inch or two closer to Fraser. The volumes and balances of the music evened out. He could see the music. This is so much better than that Dr. Dre album everyone loves, he thought. What rappers usually peddle is the idea that black men lack emotion.
Fraser held out his left hand, his fingers splayed to accept the spliff. “Puff-puff-pass, puff-puff-pass,” he said.
Jesse passed it to him, giving him a kiss with his eyes. “There’s something I don’t like about this beat,” he said. “It’s too ’arsh for Jay-Z’s voice. Them drums are too tinny. Er, Eminem? I’m so bored of him.”
“Why, because he’s white?”
You hit the nail on the head, nigga, Jesse thought, startling himself. “Are you trying to say I’m racist?” he said.
“He’s got the best flow on the whole album,” said Fraser. “Black men invented rap but you have to say the best rapper’s white.”
Like Jesse, Jay-Z wasn’t raised by a black man. Jay-Z’s mother wasn’t at home, sitting on the sofa all day in her nightie watching TV, like Jesse’s mother was. She was out there at work, making money to raise her family. Jay-Z didn’t have a useless white adoptive father who kept himself to himself and didn’t care. If he had a computer, Jesse thought, and wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, he would write a book about his childhood. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t write books. It’s not about them, as individuals, but about Jehovah’s salvation only. His only vocation would be to promote and uphold Jehovah’s Will.
The best song came on last, a remix of “Girls, Girls, Girls,” with a cheeky soul sample and Motown-style beat underpinned with bouncy hip-hop drums.
“There’s nothing better than just smoking a spliff and listening to a good album,” said Fraser, when it was finished but still echoing around in Jesse’s head. Fraser took back Jesse’s earbud, wound the cord around his Discman and put it back in his pocket. “Well, apart from sex maybe.”
“I wunt know,” Jesse said, sadly. It was the subject he most, and least, wanted to talk about with Fraser.
Fraser passed him the spliff. “Are you still a virgin?”
“Of course I am. I’m a baptised Brother. I can’t,” said Jesse, trying not to sound judgemental.
Fraser sucked his teeth, or at least attempted to. “You need to get into that pussy, bredrin, literally. Anyway, I’m not baptised, so I can do whatever I want, and there’s nothing they can tell me.”
“Who ya seein’? Someone in the truth?”
“The truth. Isn’t it funny that they call it the truth!” He laughed. Jesse found him beautiful, and even more so when he laughed. Fraser leaned back, with his legs wide open. “No, she’s not in the truth. She works across the road from me. We go round her house, in her car, round the back of my work, all the time.”
“I suppose, if you need to and your conscience is okay with it,” said Jesse, mesmerised, his dick as hard as a hammer, but trying to sound like an upbuilding Brother.
“Not with the state of the women in the truth, with their long skirts and blank smiles. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were absolute beasts once you broke them open. The truth though, Jess. The fucking truth. Bullshit.”
He finished his second can, and chucked it the way of the first. Dry from the spliff, Jesse impressed himself with how easily he was able to copy Fraser. His heart was thumping; he’d never heard a Witness swear before.
“You know what?” Fraser said, taking another can out of the blue plastic bag and opening it with a spritz of foam that he caught quickly in his mouth. “That Brother Woodall, he’s an alright guy, I like him, but he asked me to go out with him on the ministry, so I asked him about the dinosaurs. I said, if God created the Heavens and the Earth, how long ago what was it they say?”
“Six thousand years ago?”
“Exactly. What about the dinosaurs? Sixty-five-plus-million-year-old fossils I can go to the Natural History Museum in London and touch with my own hands? How do they explain those?”
“What did he say?” asked Jesse. He’d never thought about it before, even when Jurassic Park was out. It was just another, though very good, monster film.
“He said dinosaur fossils are fabrications by world governments to discredit Jehovah as Creator, bredrin,” Fraser said, looking at Jesse and gesturing with a pointed finger. “That’s why I won’t get baptised. I don’t believe it. I go to the meetings because of my mum, but I don’t believe a single fucking word that comes out of their mouths. And they think I shouldn’t fuck that girl who works across the road from me? Whose fucking business is that, but mine?” He got up to pee.
“I suppose they can’t expect us to stay virgins until we’re married, in today’s world,” Jesse said, surprised at where his mouth was going but unable to do anything to stop it. He was almost drooling, and shocked by Fraser’s new candour. The dinosaur thing was real, but he couldn’t comprehend six thousand years, never mind sixty-five million. He listened to Fraser pissing loudly. So many times he’d stood at a urinal in a public toilet, facing straight in front, bringing himself on a headache looking too far in the corner of his eye for the source of that jet washing the ceramic and making such a noise, afraid to turn his head even a degree for fear of having his forehead cracked up against the tiles. Maybe, still, he could be tempted; then usually, someone else came down the stairs—a child, a cleaner, an unattractive or otherwise sexually uninteresting human—so he’d shake the last of the pee from his dick, put himself away, zip up, wash his hands in predictably ice-cold water and leave dripping because the hand-dryer was out of order.
Cars glided past on the wet road. It started to rain again but the weed had made Jesse feel warm and calm. Fraser turned round from peeing high up the back wall, still putting himself a
way, looking like he was deep in thought. Jesse took another toke on the spliff. Fraser stood in front of him, blocking out the light, taking the spliff from him and putting it straight to his lips. White smoke danced there then rushed down his throat, the ends of his gelled hair backlit by the streetlamp. He wasn’t baptised, but Jesse was. There was temptation, and then there was need. Fraser took another drag of the spliff, and looked past Jesse at the dark empty rooms. Jesse realised why they were in the derelict flats; Fraser must’ve been scoping out locations. He thought of how deliberate it felt, when Fraser lingered a hand on his arse at the meeting. He’d been planning this. They were alone. Nobody was going to come to disturb them. They couldn’t do this at his house, not with his parents and brothers there. This area was normally so noisy with the workings of the ironfounders across the road and trucks coming up and down with scaffolding poles on their beds; now it was noisy with the sound of his heart thumping and the rain falling. He looked at Fraser’s crotch in his jeans and thought, even in the darkness, he could make out the contours of a hard-on. Jesse allowed himself some time looking at it, rolling it around the mouth of his inner life. Abdul and Carl were nodding at him, encouraging him into their world. The muscles in his left arm were ready to contract, lifting his hand.
He couldn’t believe what was happening; he couldn’t believe what was no longer happening as Fraser sat down next to him and gave him back the spliff.
“Another beer?” he said.
“Yes, please,” Jesse said, taking the last can from him, pulling off the plastic ring and throwing it behind him. He felt out of breath. There would always be next time. He didn’t usually litter but reasoned the whole place was trash. What they said, and did, would be crushed to dust and wiped away forever.
The smoke filled his head and thickened in his sinuses, narrowing his eyes, distorting his vision, slurring and drying his mouth. Jesse took another, deeper drag, puffed out and burst out laughing.
“Nice, isn’t it,” said Fraser.
“Where d’ya gerrit from?”
“A mate from work.”
“You’re bad, man.”
“You probably don’t know this,” Fraser said, “but I had a sister, who died. It would have been her birthday yesterday.”
This came out of nowhere. Jesse was almost overcome with sympathy and love for Fraser, and did well not to choke.
“I’m so sorry. When? How?”
“Leukaemia. The only way she would’ve survived was if she’d have been given a blood transfusion, but my parents couldn’t because of their beliefs, and she died.”
“That’s horrible, but it’s God’s Will,” Jesse said after a pause, tapping and rubbing Fraser’s back, unable to stop the inadequacy coming out of his mouth.
“It’s fucking bullshit,” said Fraser, sharply, leaning away from Jesse’s rubbing hand. “It killed my mum.”
“Sorry,” Jesse said.
“After my sister died Mum stopped coming to the meetings. She hardly ever left the house. She couldn’t understand which God would want her daughter to die. Which God would make a rule that said her daughter couldn’t have the one thing that would keep her alive.”
“I doe know if it’s that simple.”
“ ’Course it fucking is.”
Jesse held out the spliff for Fraser to take, and he did.
“I dint know that your family had to go through that. I’m sorry. How old were ya?”
“It happened before I was born,” he said. “She was a year younger than Duncan. I never knew her at all, just had to live with the grief, but when I got older and found out it explained everything. Mum agreed to start coming back to the meetings if we moved somewhere else, she didn’t care where. So when the job came up in Dudley my dad took it. We could’ve moved anywhere in the country, but we’re here at random.”
“Well, if you ever need someone to talk to, just like this,” Jesse said, “you know where I am.”
“Cheers, Jess.”
The whole time they had been talking, Fraser was looking out into the street and Jesse wished he would look at him. He did now, almost making him jump. They clinked cans and Fraser passed back the spliff. Jesse took in the fact that they were sitting in the living room of a flat.
“Why do you stay at home?” Jesse said, as he felt the spliff take him into a perfect world.
“Huh?”
“Why doe ya move out and gerra flat a your own?”
“No, I can’t do that yet,” Fraser laughed, leaning his elbows on his open thighs.
“Why not?”
“It’s just a thing. In my family you don’t leave your mum’s house until you’re married.”
“Int that the way wi’ Witnesses in general? Are all your dad’s brothers Witnesses?”
“Most of them. A couple of them have fallen away over the years.”
“Do you ever think about leaving?”
“Sometimes. Not sure where I’d go, though. You?”
“Never. I look at the world out there, all the wars, all the stupidity. The organisation int perfect, but it’s better than out there, and I can stay in it wi’ people like you in it.”
Fraser laughed through his nose. “I don’t know why you’d say that. I’m just a bum.”
Jesse looked at Fraser.
“Why dunt we gerra flat together?”
“What?”
“We’m best friends, we enjoy each other’s company. We can keep each other on the straight and narra.”
“I don’t know about that,” Fraser said, as he pressed a button on his Casio G-Shock watch.
“I’d be like your girlfriend, or summat. I’d look after ya.” Fraser’s brow tightened. He looked Jesse up and down and Jesse started laughing, idiotically. “You know wharra mean.”
“Suppose I’d better head home,” said Fraser, standing up and taking a great gulp from his can. “Working tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said. It had only just occurred to him how cold and damp his arse felt. “Ministry.”
They drained and chucked their cans. A mild sense of panic came over Jesse, as his brain lolled around drunkenly in his head, that if the police saw him he’d be arrested, taken to a police station and thrown in prison when they found out he’d had a spliff. Why else would he be hanging out in a derelict block of flats, if not for criminality and drugs? News would get out and the whole congregation would know. It might even get in the local papers. Young, baptised Brother caught trespassing and smoking weed. He followed Fraser down the stairs, the sorts of stairs he’d been up and down for years, ringing doorbells and tapping letterboxes, trying to find people in to preach to, posting copies of the Watchtower and Awake! He’d worked that actual block before, many times. It all felt a world away as they stumbled through the site yard back to the fence.
“You alright, mate?”
“Yeh, just a bit…”
“Stoned?”
“If that’s what you call it.”
“Mate, that was a weak one. I only had a tiny bit of weed left.”
“I suppose I just int used to it.”
They hugged in that way drunk boys who don’t understand their love hug, in that slap-each-other’s-backs-really-hard-and-suddenly-doubt-ourselves kind of way. But in that short moment Jesse could smell the damp of Fraser’s waxed Barbour and feel the slip of its fabric against his cheek. He could feel Fraser’s heart beating, quickly, against his chest. Fraser stood away from him, but for a full second their mouths hung close, breathing hot boozy steam into each other’s. It was the most beautiful second of Jesse’s life. Strumming my pain…Fraser took a step back, smiled, said good night, tapped Jesse on the arm and walked away as Jesse hung back to pee. He closed his eyes and his mind spun around like he was in a fairground; his solar plexus glowed.
When he’d finished peeing, he stag
gered back out onto Great Bridge. A car approached him, pipping its horn and pulling over, its passenger winding the window down.
“It is him! Brother McCarthy! Jess?” she said, smiling. “Alright, am ya? What yer up to? Do you wanna lift somewhere?”
It was Sister Tammy Winstanley, an athletic black woman from the neighbouring congregation, who worked as a bricklayer. “Oh, alright, Tam?” He didn’t want to see or speak to anyone. He could feel his speech slurring and he didn’t want to come down from the glorious place he’d been in. “I’m alright, just walkin’ ’ome.”
“Jump in! Me and Ness’ll tek ya!” She leapt out and pulled her seat forward.
Sister Vanessa Marriott, a plain, short white woman, waved to him from behind her wheel. It was only a seven-minute walk home at most but it was cold and drizzly.
“Alright,” he said, and contorted himself into the back of Vanessa’s green Metro, shifting over behind the driver’s seat because of Tammy’s long legs.
“Wharrave you been up to tonight, then?” Tammy asked, looking over her shoulder sceptically at him as Vanessa pulled away and over the not-so-great Great Bridge. He realised they must be able to smell the weed, beer and cigarettes on him.
“Oh, nothing,” Jesse said. “Just hung out with a mate for a beer.”
“Am they in the truth?” asked Vanessa, questioning him in her interior mirror as they bore right where the road forks at the Limerick pub. He was careful not to draw attention to Fraser bearing left, towards Horseley Heath, on foot.
