by Paul Mendez
It was Owen’s wife. Anya. Must be. She said nothing, just stared down at the floor with her shoulders up near her ears. He knew she had seen him, when coming into the house, as if she expected to, but then she didn’t look at him again. He thought he would not speak until she did, because it was too extraordinary that she was there, with Owen’s keys. Owen’s not here, he would say. I thought he might be with you. He sat down on the stairs and gathered the skirts of his dressing-gown between his knees, convinced, now, that something bad had happened.
He didn’t want to ask her anything stupid, but the tension made him want to scratch himself all over, or laugh, scream, or slap her. Was Owen dead? Why? Why had God taken Owen? He wondered whether Owen’s daughters were outside in a car, screaming for their father. He didn’t know what had happened, and for some reason, he couldn’t ask; it was already his fault; he had known Owen for three months and been in love with him for a day, but this woman, this frigid stranger, had been married to him since the week before Princess Diana died.
He could see she was crying again, silently. He got up and slowly crept down the stairs, and holding the collar of his dressing-gown tight—careful not to touch her because she looked like the sort of person who might lash out—he encouraged her to follow him and sit down at the kitchen table. He asked her if she had come alone or if her children were in a car, and if she needed him to call anyone. He poured her a glass of filtered water from the fridge. She said nothing. Her face was red and as she wiped her eyes, more tears came. Then she spoke, quickly, sweetly, sometimes slurring as she chased and grabbed her tears like children running too close to the road.
“He’s crashed his car straight through a shop window. I’ve no idea where he was going but he was somewhere in South London and they think he fell asleep at the wheel!”
Jesse covered his mouth, as if he was going to be sick, at this unbelievable news. “Is he dead?” he whispered.
“Why did you let him leave the house and get in his car?” she said, staring right at him, and he straight away blamed himself. “He must’ve been out of his mind!”
She got up and fled the kitchen, and her boots sounded hard on the floor as she stomped upstairs. The veins had stood out on her neck as she spoke to him. She had the look of someone who boxed. He heard her check one room, before deciding the second was Owen’s. She would have identified it by the clothes over the back of his desk chair. She’d have recognised all the vintage posters, the row upon row of books, the turntable and loose vinyl LPs scattered around, and next to his bed, the school portrait of their smiling daughters.
Jesse flicked on the kettle. They had wanted to have sex, both of them did, but Jesse was sure he was sick, and the last thing he sought was to harm Owen. He couldn’t remember going to sleep, and must have passed out, so Owen must’ve found someone online, or something, and was driving to them. In Jesse’s mind, he’d smashed into a bollard, catapulted through the windscreen—the broken glass at the end of Unknown Pleasures. If Jesse hadn’t been sick, Owen would not have had to leave the house. They’d be in bed together now, spooning, unbothered by what time or day it was.
Anya was silent upstairs. Tears fell as he made her the cup of tea that he would have drunk to make himself feel better, with semi-skimmed milk and one sugar. He took it up to Owen’s room and knocked on the door. She didn’t respond so he invited himself in. She was sitting on the end of the bed, staring at the fireplace, folding down a piece of paper into eighths, sixteenths. Perhaps that was why she had come, to get rid of any evidence. He would do so in the living room, when she was gone. Why had Owen gone out? He came to stand near enough to her, and held out the tea for her to take. She ignored it.
“Is he dead?” he repeated, though he wasn’t sure how ready he was for an answer. He expected Owen to be dead, though it needn’t hurt him too much, because they hadn’t known each other for long and everything else was gone as well. He took a deep breath and calmed himself.
“Didn’t you have a home to go to?” she said.
“My parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
She blinked a nominal apology, and put the paper in her pocket.
“Is he dead?” he asked, more firmly this time.
“No,” she said. She’d stopped crying, and didn’t look quite so angry any more.
“Is he going to be okay?” he said.
“He had to be air-lifted to hospital. A miracle that that could even be done on Boxing Day,” she said, perhaps mimicking the tired surgeon who told her this.
“He’s the best person I’ve ever met,” Jesse said, now able to release his tears.
She laughed at him. Owen was the perfect man: intelligent, handsome, strong, masculine, gentle, a listener. She knew all that. She knew the power Owen had to make someone fall in love with him. His grey eyes and long lashes. His charm. His poetry and eloquence; his way of thinking out loud in long, passionately argued paragraphs.
She stood up—making Jesse, expecting a slap, spill the tea he was still holding—and walked round him to the bedroom door. Anya spoke to the dark landing, not to him.
“I’m moving him out of here, and I’ll take care of him at home when he leaves hospital. You are not to contact him.” Perhaps now she stopped blaming him, now that she had reinforced the status quo, because she turned round and addressed him more sympathetically. Her face was dry and some of the redness had gone. “I am his wife and he needs me. I don’t want to offend you, but this is a marriage, and only I can fix him. Nothing else matters.”
He waited until he heard the front door close, and a car drive away. He went downstairs and retrieved the few lines’ worth of coke left in the wrap. After a long time sitting, staring, thinking of, and doing absolutely nothing, he went back upstairs, put on Unknown Pleasures, got under Owen’s duvet, pulling it right up to his neck, and stared at the books on their shelves, remembering the one Owen had mentioned, while they were doing coke.
You’ve lost your centre of gravity, he’d said; the memory of his words sounding bright and clear as if delivered through a microphone from the platform at the Kingdom Hall. He imagined Owen with his hair combed back with a centre parting, wearing a suit and a floral tie like the cover of Power, Corruption & Lies. Jesse cried alone, until he slept.
* * *
—
A week later, a van came by and workmen packed Owen’s things unmethodically into boxes and took them away. In the new year, Jesse settled for a job stacking shelves at the local Safeway supermarket. Bryan came back from Canada and avoided him, convinced Owen’s accident was his fault. Jesse tried, a few weeks later when he got his HIV test result back as negative, to call Owen, finding his extension number on the university’s website, but they were not allowed to give out his mobile, and he considered sending an email, but knew he wouldn’t get it for a long time, if at all. He called around the hospitals, to be told they were only allowed to give out information to the next-of-kin. The old dining room was converted on-schedule to a new bedroom with its own patio door and private terrace. Another man moved into Owen’s room and painted his mauve walls off-white.
BRIXTON
Chapter 1
AUGUST 12, 2016
The Velux windows are open to birdsong and the west-facing early light, cloudless and mercifully cool. It is a one-bedroom flat in Brixton, with the bed in the old attic of the converted Victorian house. Two nudes, a Keith Vaughan line drawing and an Ajamu print, hang just above their heads. Downstairs, two scuffed mahogany writing desks face one another surrounded by books, and across the room, matching second-hand sofas oppose each other across an original working fireplace. In summer, it is so hot, even with the windows open, that there is nothing for it but to sacrifice themselves to the weather’s intentions and wallow in each other’s sweat. The leather straps of the bedframe have slackened and cup them together in the middle of the mattress. The arm that is crumpled be
neath Jesse has gone to sleep, and the other is around Owen’s stomach, their hands held tight. Jesse’s dick thickens against the small of Owen’s back, on the now-faint, pink scar from the surgeries on his spine.
He frees the arm beneath him and twists onto his front, and as the feeling trickles back, finds his phone under his pillow. When the alarm hasn’t gone off, it means he’s slept through it, forgotten to activate it, or left it on silent. He congratulates himself with a smile when he discovers he has woken naturally minutes before eight. He’s working a double with Georgia and Melania, so twelve and a half hours with two people who despise each other just because they both once went for the same man. Melania won, and she’s just lost their baby, so Jesse hopes Georgia, for all their sakes, can finally let it go and sympathise. The two women share the same skin tone and curly brown hair; both are naturally pretty, though one is half-Venezuelan-half-Welsh (nickname: VW) and the other fully Sardinian, so they hate being compared to one another when they could not be more different. The general manager’s main job, really, is to write a rota that gives both of them an adequate number of shifts without them ever overlapping, which isn’t always possible, especially in the summertime when there are so many absences.
It crosses Jesse’s mind, as it does most mornings, to call in sick, but he knows he cannot. Melania’s been off work for a week. Everyone else seems to be on holiday. He checks his Guardian app; nothing major, only the Republican presidential candidate joking-not-joking about Barack Obama founding ISIS. He’d switched off notifications the morning after the EU referendum, so as not to be confronted with shocking news before he was prepared for it. That day he called in sick, for the first time in five years. No way was he going to pop corks for braggarts and bigots celebrating the victorious Leave campaign, when its prevailing image was of a river of sun-baked beggars in torn clothes coursing in to overwhelm sloping Albion. If you do not want to see our England turn into this, Vote Leave. He often wondered about the number of people, potential customers of his, who would have been involved in it before it went to print, and he hadn’t so much as touched a copy of the Evening Standard since it ran the campaign full-page in the days before the referendum.
That night, after sprinting out during the break to vote Remain with Owen, he worked a close shift, drank till three in the morning, went home, smoked a really strong spliff and dreamed that he’d worked nine shifts in a row with a cold, then on his first morning off gone for a long lunch at a bistro off Clapham Common with a friend and shared three carafes of Malbec to drown down the gritty oysters and smelly, suspiciously pink chitterling sausage with chips and béarnaise sauce he randomly chose to order. It was a grisly, oddly pungent mess, almost as if he’d slit open a cow’s stomach, ripped out its intestine and noshed it off screaming right there in the field. He couldn’t send it back, because then he’d look like the black person who didn’t know what chitterling sausage was—chitlins, nigger? You ain’t eat chitlins?
He went to work, in his dream, and worked more hours with the cold. Gruelling shift. Celebrities. A customer, a customer, a customer and a customer, not to mention a customer and a customer, who, having used his newspaper to campaign for Leave from the very start, asked him for some white bread without even looking at the basket. Jesse collapsed right in the middle of the restaurant floor, by the till. They sent him in a white van to an abattoir to be cleaned out like a suckling pig. Every hair on his body was torched and scraped off leaving his eyes looking a little awake. He still had a mouthful of teeth and his tongue was intact. Delivered back to the kitchen with his entire skin surface oiled up, his abdomen was stuffed with bread, onions and sage. They chopped his legs off at the knee and braised them in chicken stock and white wine, garlic and whole shallots. Four hours in the oven was all his slender body needed. A customer waited in the middle of the feasting table, his cutlery stood on ends in his fists, Fernet-Branca having prepared him, the start of a bottle of 2011 Côte Rotie in his wine glass. A customer arrived, followed by a customer, a customer and a customer, not to mention a customer and his customer husband, whom Jesse was never able to look in the eye while alive. His mother, her bleach-job in need of a retouch, carved him wearing a red-wine-stained apron, starting with his head, which sat on a plate in front of the host while everyone took selfies; each meaty haunch, cut from the waist through the natural line into his groin, enough to feed ten with side bowls of stuffing, potatoes and greens, his kidneys a lucky find. Then the abdomen; she plucked out his ribs and separated chunks of steaming flesh with her tongs—he’s a tough one, int he? Maybe he wunt in the oven long enough—he was close to burnt but it had been hard to judge with his skin, which crisped up nicely. His heart, trimmed, turned up as a Monday lunch special, grilled with a balsamic glaze and served with green beans and a pickled walnut dressing; his testes, another starter, were poached in milk and deep-fried. His liver came as a main, devilled and pan-roasted in butter with a sherry vinegar deglaze. Delicious, said some customer dining alone, having licked his plate clean and drained his glass of 2011 Cahors dry. I’m not that hungry, explained a customer, having pushed his plate to the side after a mouthful or two. Can we order six financiers, asked a customer, midway through the liver.
He hasn’t smoked weed since.
His side of the bed is against the wall, so he has to climb out, but can’t do so without disturbing Owen, who squints his eyes twice like a child. Wakefulness rushes to him in a moment as he turns and sits up, his dick hard and flat against his little paunch.
“Morning, love.”
Jesse comes back to him. They kiss. Still a little boozy even though they brushed their teeth before bed.
“Mmm. Morning.”
“Sleep well?” Jesse asks, twisting his shoulder in its socket to get at a back-itch with his thumbnail.
“Not really,” Owen says, rubbing his temples in between fingers and thumb. “Too drunk.”
“Me too,” Jesse says, though he doesn’t feel as if he has a headache. He’s just a little bit hot and furry-tongued. He climbs over Owen to grab the pint glass on the bedside table, swishes the warm water in his mouth, and swallows. He moves down the bed, and Owen lies still and runs his fingers through Jesse’s hair, over his ears and down to his shoulders, massaging, flexing his body until his knob slips back over Jesse’s soft palate.
* * *
—
Last night they attended a prize-giving ceremony for the year’s best novel about contemporary British life; Owen had been one of the judges. The only two black men in the room were Jesse and one of the five shortlisted authors, the Somali-British novelist Liban Warsame. Liban looked sexy in a cream fitted suit tight to his crotch, the patterned shirt beneath open to his hairless solar plexus; Jesse wore a pale blue convertible-collar shirt and dark blue trousers that stood off his body in the heat. He and Liban wear their hair somewhat alike, shaven at the sides and with an inch or two of growth on top, but that is where the resemblance ends. They are as ethnically dissimilar as Georgia and Melania. Liban is dark-skinned, with a smiley disposition, high cheekbones and a crispy little chin beard. He is five years older than Jesse, taller and broader. None of this stopped a successful crime author in a floaty maxi dress approaching Jesse, as soon as the applause had died down from the winner’s speech, to wish him congratulations.
“Congratulations for what?” Jesse asked her, in all curiosity.
Then she looked at him properly and blushed.
“Oops, sorry! Drunk!”
The winner, for a modern-day comedy of manners set in the Cotswolds, narrated by a biracial married mother of two, is the model-like, pale-skinned, fine-featured daughter of a retired Etonian Oxford don and his Ethiopian-American second (now-ex) wife. As she posed for the cameras in front of a board monoprinted with the logos of the prize and corporate sponsors, everyone drank champagne and fanned themselves over her green eyes and golden curls.
Still,
there were some interesting people there, not least Liban, a former refugee whose novel—about a Somalian family in South London affected by the eldest son’s insinuation into a gang and death by stab wounds, driven out of the home by community taboos surrounding his mother’s mental illness—had been preferred by Owen, who had been frustrated that the other four judges could not, or would not, see that Liban’s novel, even down to its linguistic authenticity, most deserved the greater recognition that the prize would’ve brought. Jesse saw that they gave the prize to a woman of most faint, pastel-like colour, a nearly white woman from Notting Hill whose story the majority of the judges, being overwhelmingly white, upper-middle-class and highly educated, could use to ask themselves those difficult questions about race without confronting spilled black blood.
* * *
—
He hears the train doors beep and slide shut as he steps off the escalator, so crosses to the empty train waiting at the opposite platform, taking his usual seat against the wall behind the unoccupied one of the two driver’s cabins. A heavy, tired-looking black woman jogs on just before the door closes, sits down at the first seat, rests her wrapped head against the Plexiglas panel and closes her eyes, clutching her handbag tight to her stomach. He cringes at himself for assuming she’s just finished her early-hours cleaning job. He wonders, indeed, what she is closing her eyes from, what she’s been allowed to see by people who do not think of her as having an opinion.
