Rainbow Milk

by Paul Mendez

  His recovery took two years, during which time UCL, standing by their man despite the drink-drug-drive scandal, kept his post open, filling it, at great expense, with guest lecturers and term-on-term temps. He’d wanted to get in touch, even if he didn’t know what quite to say, but didn’t have Jesse’s number, and Anya had changed his so that the likes of Jesse couldn’t contact him. Owen dated other men, warily, but never regained his previous self-confidence, even after fully recovering from his injuries. For years, he lived with his wife—who came to terms with his truth—in a sexless marriage, and helped raise their daughters.

  Jesse left Bruce Grove within weeks of the accident, and moved to Kent to live with the dunderheaded son of a retired Tory councillor he met months before on Gaydar, whose front door got smashed in one morning by police carrying out a dawn raid. They arrested the man on suspicion of soliciting a minor (not Jesse) though they were very interested to know who Jesse was—as he appeared young—and demanded to see some identification; perhaps they suspected the man of harbouring a refugee minor for his sexual satisfaction. Jesse showed them his provisional driver’s licence and overheard them phoning its details down the radio: Non-white male…He wasn’t under suspicion for anything but was still made to feel guilty. They took the man away in cuffs and searched the property, unearthing a large stash of something quickly smuggled out for evidence under puckered lips. Jesse packed his bags and took the first train back to London with £100 out of the man’s wallet, all the while panicking that he would be caught and arrested for theft.

  After a night in a hostel he found an elderly man on Gaydar called Derrick who was looking for a young man to move in with him rent-free in exchange for occasional sexual favours, so long as he could tolerate living with Derrick’s mother, aged ninety-three and suffering from dementia. Enduring Derrick’s exhausting attempts at conversation, the odd shit smear on the bathroom wall and awkward interactions with the mother, who called Jesse Daddy and constantly tried to force herself into his room, he otherwise spent a restorative two years seeing just one client a week, reading Proust and, as a result, writing self-indulgent-every-thought-in-my-head-matters-and-has-to-be-explored-to-its-furthest-conclusion tripe.

  He still didn’t know how to live, what to make of the world, who he was, what he was supposed to do, what to think, how to think, but he was grateful for that moment of pause, with a double mattress and two pillows, even if the house hadn’t been decorated since the sixties. After the mother was moved to a home, and Jesse made it clear he no longer wanted to have sex with him (however good his blowjobs were), Derrick introduced a small rent, which he then increased every three months, till eventually Jesse found himself a job in a restaurant. As he got older, worked more and saw clients less, he realised Derrick had rescued him by patiently giving him the space to feel like a normal human being.

  The Oscar buzz descended on 12 Years a Slave, and Gini started to receive scripts featuring Lupita Nyong’o–type characters, as casting agents miraculously began to see the appeal in her dark-skinned, natural-haired, white-toothed appearance. By then, though, she had already started writing her own scripts and was directing pieces written by other black women, such as Winsome Pinnock, debbie tucker green and Joan Anim-Addo, which beat attending endless castings, either for a performer of unspecified race and gender, or for jobs where she’d see the same half-dozen black women forced to compete against each other.

  Her first success as a director, at the short-lived Foundlings Theatre pop-up on Old Street (now luxury flats), was a three-act play she’d written the first draft of when she was seventeen called Cowfoot, following a West Indian family in London over three generations. Other producers turned it down, saying it was too niche because it was written in full patois. She ended up producing it herself while nursing her mother through chemotherapy. She knew the right people and got them on board. Cowfoot sold out every night of its run, hit five-star reviews across the board and turned a profit. Good writing, good directing, good design, good sound and good acting apparently greatly appealed to black people, to diverse local Silicon Roundabout techies and their art-PR girlfriends, and furthermore, to white middle-class demographic theatregoers. Since then, she has had Soon Come produced at the Royal Court, Keys to the Shop at the Arcola and Backside! at the Liverpool Everyman. Cowfoot is being revived at the National next year. She still acts, but has concentrated on directing since he last saw her playing Emilia in an Othello at the Foundlings.

  Jesse was one of the bridesmates at her wedding to Julius Akinfenwa, also an actor, a dashing prince currently playing the title role in Biyi Bandele’s Oroonoko at Stratford. They went through absolutely everything in preparation except for the electric slide, so when the DJ played Cameo’s “Candy”—one of Jesse’s favourite songs and music videos of all time—at the reception and every black person in the whole place from behatted great-grandmother to popsocked pagebwai got up to perform the apparently famous line-dance routine (not featured in the video), Jesse was the only person not to know what he was doing, and found himself drowning in a vortex of moving blackness, persistently facing the wrong direction and grazing the heels of the poor already-suffering stiletto-wearer in front. Julius pointedly shares the video every anniversary on Facebook.

  * * *

  —

  Such a beautiful day. He comes up out of the Tube at Brixton. Pret A Manger have recently opened here—a key stage in an area’s journey to gentrification—approximate midpoint between no-go and Waitrose. He’s been in there and seen a homeless man wearing his jeans belted under his arse walk right in, dragging the glow back into the end of his foraged rollie, to help himself to a prosciutto baguette and a can of sparkling apple juice, and didn’t see so much as an eyelash move in protest.

  A thin, tacky layer of historic spilt milkshake keeps Jesse’s Lemaire sandals on the ground a millisecond longer than is reasonable. He almost decides to walk to Brockwell to avoid the sweaty bus, and imagines a path in avoidance of the yellows of Amnesty International charity fundraisers—he’s already a direct-debit supporter—but finds himself locked behind an elderly woman with a pull-along trolley, then a younger woman with three kids and a buggy; the 35 bus stops to let twenty people off and thirty on, giving him more time to appreciate the smells of the flowers on the truck in front of the station, raw meat from the butcher’s on Electric Avenue, southern-fried chicken from KFC and beef patties from the Refill Eaterie on Brighton Terrace. The number 3 is due in one minute. The oft-sighted local woman in a mauve wife-beater, denim miniskirt and slime-green DMs—who looks like a little boy who’s had all his teeth knocked out and decided to live the rest of his life as a girl, with Raggy Dolls make-up and a bow tied around her head—is staggering down the opposite pavement in a zigzag, muttering to herself, looking for fag-butts. A boy with a durag on doesn’t look at him or address him but he knows that what comes out of his mouth—battiman—is directed towards him; then he wonders whether he might not just be a stoned French flâneur in black Nike huaraches and grey sweatpants dreamily declaiming bâtiments. Every Aaliyah-waisted fourteen-year-old girl with long straight hair, a Primark quilted purse, contoured make-up and pristine Vans, he hopes is really listening to Jill Scott and Erykah Badu, and that Bernardine Evaristo and Roxane Gay get to her before the mandem do. Every mother he sees at a bus stop, with her children, he looks her right in the face and hopes she makes them know they’re loved. Every man he sees walking down the street with his shirt open, drinking a can out of a paper bag and chatting nonsense, he sympathises with, because he knows that could be him one day.

  * * *

  —

  He sees them from a distance, and as he calmly approaches their little spot, even if he can only spend an hour in their company before he has to go back to work, he wonders what people did before they could drop their location pin on WhatsApp. They are gathered under the low-hanging branches of a poplar, its gold and green leaves gl
ittering on the breeze like tinsel. An older-looking man with short dreads, and a young-looking white couple are present. They’re playing Mary J. Blige’s “Be Happy,” the perfect summer park song, through a bassy little Bose pepper-pot speaker.

  “I was listening to Mary just this morning!”

  “Haaaaaaay!” Gini calls out, wearing big bug-eye shades and a blue-and-white maternity dress with her corn rows tied at the ends in a scarf. She looks like a little Jamaican girl in the sixties waiting to have her photo taken professionally, trying on props.

  “Don’t get up. Oh my God look how big you are already!”

  “It’s because she’s so tiny,” says Surenna, from under her enormous centre-parted Afro. Surenna’s a Guildhall-trained composer who creates post-industrial soundscapes incorporating dub, synth, experimental and gospel sounds. She’s capable of writing magnificent original pop songs but refuses to sell out like that. Jesse stoops down to kiss her.

  “I like your Sade T-shirt,” he tells her.

  “Thanks. You’re looking good. Melanin’s popping.”

  “Me? I feel like shit, I’ve been working.”

  She rolls her eyes. “You look bangin’.”

  Jesse recognises the handsome older man with the grey goatee, but can’t remember his name. “Hello,” he ventures, holding out his hand, and they shake in the arm-wrestling way.

  “You remember Conroy from the wedding, don’t you?” says Gini, who prides herself on knowing, and knowing the schedules of, every “cool” black person in London. Jesse raises his sunglasses.

  “Yes, of course! How are you, sir?”

  “You remember Jesse, Conroy?”

  “Yes I do, but you had a beard, didn’t you, at the wedding?”

  “Yeah, I went through that phase.”

  “You look better without it. Good to see you, young man.”

  “Thank you,” says Jesse, as their smiles linger a second. Good black daddies are so rare, and in Jesse’s experience, so worth it.

  “And this is my erstwhile intern Mahalia and her boyfriend Ronny,” Gini says of the two young white people sitting together, smiling awkwardly and waiting to be introduced.

  “Mahalia?”

  Jesse hopes he doesn’t sound too incredulous. Mahalia. The blackest of black gospel soul singers. Taught Aretha Franklin everything she knew. Now a posh blonde girl with eyes like saucers who looks like she hasn’t had a wash yet today, with a ridiculously big and handsome tanned guy next to her falling out of his shorts. Jesse immediately imagines how warm he would feel, spooning. He can’t conceive that Gini invited them, so perhaps they were walking through the park on their way home from last night’s party and spotted her and Surenna sitting under their tree.

  “Nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you, Ronny.”

  “Is Owen coming?” says Gini.

  “I haven’t even told him I’m here,” he says, sitting down on the orange kente blanket. “My phone was in my locker so I got your message at the end of the shift and came straight here. I didn’t think it’d be worth dragging him from his desk when I’ve only got an hour max.”

  “But he only lives up there!” she says, pointing in the wrong direction, then correcting herself. “Surely he’ll want to come down and eat some of this beautiful nice organic Jamaican food me spen’ nuff time fe cook.”

  Gini takes after her mother, being a wizard in the kitchen. There are Tupperware boxes of various sizes everywhere, containing prettily presented homemade confections.

  “What have you got?”

  “Do you want me to make you a plate?”

  “Yes, please. Is that okra? No okra, thanks.”

  Gini bores her eyes into him.

  “Okay, I’ll try a little bit of the okra.”

  “Good! You look like you want feed,” says Surenna. “A maga y’a maga so. Me shunny able fe see your sum’n deh nuh yuh trowsiz!”

  “Thank you! Let’s try to maintain the original meaning of the word maga by using it as often as possible,” says Jesse. “But stop looking at my willy.”

  “What does maga mean?” asks Mahalia.

  “Skinny. Like Jesse, the thinnest person I’ve ever seen who says he works in a restaurant,” Surenna laughs, slapping her thigh.

  Gini knows as well as Jesse does that working in a restaurant is a quick route to an eating disorder. Waiters in restaurants such as the Light Café and Sebastian’s are too busy—too busy trying to be as thin and beautiful as some of the customers there less to be fed than to be seen—to eat, and when they do get time, cigarettes, alcohol and cocaine suppress the appetite.

  Jesse looks upon Gini with love while she serves him her food. She’s been like a sister to him, and in some ways, a mother, especially during those times when methedrone, as well as cocaine, was eating through him—giving him tough love, making him see how pathetic he looked, giving him another option that was just as attractive but less reckless; she and Owen combined to make Jesse a morning person. A person who ran around Brockwell Park or Clapham Common; who had vegan smoothies for breakfast; wrote a thousand words before work, nothing special, just who he was, today, and how he was feeling. She and Owen are the only people in his life who have ever met anyone in his family, when his sister Esther found him on Facebook and came down to London for the day. She was shocked at his appearance, that he still looked so boyish, her big brother, six years older than her, but she was impressed with his friends, with the people who had taken him into their hearts. Ruth was still a Witness, and had married. Esther had left the organisation and was living happily with her long-term partner Sean and their two small children Leo and Riley. They found a bond as adults they never quite had as children because their mother kept them so separate. He cried to see how well she was doing, how beautiful she had grown up to be, and they’ve kept in touch since on a WhatsApp group.

  Surenna turns up Kelis’s “Young, Fresh N’ New,” with its fairground-like synth effect, clicks her fingers and shrugs her shoulders.

  “This still sounds so sick,” says Gini. “No one ever plays this one.”

  “Right? Normally when someone bothers to play Kelis it’s ‘Milkshake,’ ‘Bossy’ or ‘Trick Me,’ ” says Surenna.

  “This is a tune, but ‘Good Stuff’ ’s the one,” says Jesse.

  “I’m there,” nods Surenna, and they high-five. “Neptunes for life.”

  “You should look out for a new artist from Brixton called JaJa Kisses,” says Conroy. “My daughter knows her. Really good, sort of understated soul singer in the Sade/Aaliyah way. Watch her blow up, if not this year then next.”

  “Yeah, I love her,” says Surenna. “I wanna work with her. I love how shy she is.”

  “How are all your projects going, Surenna?” Jesse asks. Her last gig, at the ICA, was one of the best things he had ever seen, a brilliant projection show, and industrial R&B from another planet. She is also one of the best vocalists he has heard. He cannot believe she doesn’t just sign a massive record deal and become the next Missy Elliott.

  “Fine. I’m busy,” she says, ever vague-sounding whilst being known to be almost frighteningly productive and driven.

  “How’s the writing going?” Jesse perseveres. Surenna also happens to be researching a biography of the African-American classical composer Florence Beatrice Price, who was the first black woman to have a symphony performed by a mainstream orchestra. Gini told Jesse a bidding war is brewing among publishers, with Faber in the lead.

  “It’s going,” Surenna nods, aware of how infuriating she is being.

  “How is Owen?” Gini says, as if to keep it between them, then says to the blanket, “Owen’s a poet.”

  “What’s his surname?” asks Ronny, as if he knows what he wants the answer to be.

  “Gunning.”

  “What, you’re Owen Gunning’s partne
r?” says Ronny.

  “Yes,” says Jesse, surprised such a deliberately obscure poet as Owen has been taken in by a horny twenty-year-old with a Cockney accent.

  “No way, I love his work! And he lives in Brixton?”

  “I don’t know him,” says Mahalia, as if she knows lots of other poets.

  “I should think Brixton would be the perfect place for a poet to live,” says Conroy. “All the sounds, the rhythms, the clashes of language and race. Gentrification and halfway houses. I think I’ve heard of your partner’s work, though it’s not really my speciality.”

  “What is your speciality?” asks Jesse.

  “Dr. Conroy Adam. Lead Curator of Caribbean Diasporic and Black British Collections at the British Library,” says Gini, as she spoons some extra okra onto Jesse’s pumpkin and callaloo patty, spinach, fry dumplin and plantain. “Did I get that right?”

  “Precisely,” says Conroy with a shy smile, keeping his eyes to Jesse’s with a slightly confused look.

  “So mainstream poetry might not be your thing but when it comes to black British…”

  “Will he get your book in his hands soon?” Gini says.

  “You’re writing a book?” Conroy asks.

  “I wouldn’t call it a book,” says Jesse.

  Gini shapes as if to serve him a backhand across the face.

  “Well, I’m writing, but I’ve no real thoughts as to form or anything, yet. I’m just collecting material.”

  “He’s a really good writer,” she tells Conroy, handing Jesse his plate. “You want some coconut punch?”