by Paul Mendez
It’s not, Jesse is certain, an issue of recognition. He would only have to look at Lord Groombridge a certain way for his rectum to open involuntarily. Fuck me with that big black dick. If the world was like that he would excuse them both from the table to another room the other side of the house, pull his sheepish little pants down and give him a good old thrashing for his impudence. He used to love being spanked. They’ve both changed in the ten years or so since, but their skins are still stretched over the same skulls, Lord Groombridge’s a little more loosely, it has to be said. Jesse looks more like a man now, and so certain men, who once valued his boyishness, will now automatically have turned their backs.
“Mike” used to request Jesse to turn up at his door wearing a tracksuit and a cap; he affected a terrible South London accent over the phone right from the beginning so as to speak to Jesse on a level. He required Jesse to wear his sweatpants down low, showing his arse in his boxers, because he liked his boys saggin’. Jesse would make his way to “Mike” ’s Marylebone pied-à-terre and pull his sweatpants down just as he was about to ring the doorbell. “Mike” would answer the door wearing his own, and a T-shirt or vest. He wasn’t bad-looking at all—he still isn’t, really—and Jesse might’ve fancied him a bit more if he’d just been himself. He used to fuck him in front of his giant Georgian gilt-framed mirror on his drawing-room carpet, smoking the weed Jesse brought and sniffing poppers, and he’d say, Yeah, you love fucking that big white daddy arse, don’t ya, boss. He saw Jesse practically weekly for a while, then he suddenly vanished after that last time, the best time. There’d been days when Jesse was struggling and texted “Mike” to remind him he was still around, because he was fond of him, really, and he was generous, but he never replied; Jesse assumed it was because he’d suddenly felt ashamed. He still remembers the smell of him, of his particular cologne that he’s never discovered the name of, mixed with poppers; the sense of his body relaxing out in front of him, turning himself into a heavy mound of soft flesh; the slapping sound of their connection, the ripple of fat up his back, the sight of his eyes closed and his mouth squashed open on the towel.
So distanced is he—sitting opposite him and talking to Nick about the inherited Constable he’s just had reframed above his drawing-room fireplace—from any notion of that life, that he questions himself: is it really him, or am I just projecting my filthy, immoral past onto an innocent man? His voice is the same, though he’s ditched the approximate South London accent for present company. He had no idea that he was married to a woman, and assumed he was gay. Even then, because he was so clearly neither poor nor unattractive, he wouldn’t have found it difficult to get a boyfriend, so why did he have to hire an escort? It is him. The accent may have changed, but the voice is the same, the mannerisms. The hair’s the same, the eyes and the jaw; the smile, the pheromones. Jesse is not going to gaslight himself.
“So, young man, what brings you to Suffolk?” asks Lady Pamela, and Jesse hopes she didn’t clock him staring at her husband.
“I’m Owen’s boyfriend. He and Nick went to university together.”
“What, Owen went to Cambridge?”
With a little hunk of bread in between her nails she scoops up beautifully dressed little mouthfuls of the salad onto her fork.
“They read English together.”
“How fascinating. And you, do you go to Cambridge?”
“No,” Jesse said, as if he should be embarrassed to have not gone to Cambridge, fearing her next question will be, So what are you doing here, then?
“Which university do you go to?” She is now assuming he is in his early twenties.
“I haven’t been to university.”
“Whyever not? It’s so easy these days!”
“I just never found myself in the right life situation. But I may still in future.”
“So what do you do with yourself, then? Are you into sport?”
Owen catches his eye, whilst talking to Father Alex, and winks.
“Not really. I write, a bit.”
She almost chokes.
“Really? And what sort of writing do you do?”
“Non-fiction, I guess.”
“How charming,” she says, flatly. “Have you had anything published?”
Her rings clink as she takes up her goblet, which already has big red lipstick marks on it.
“Not yet,” he says, pathetically.
“Oh well, I suppose there can only be one genius in the family, hahaha, yes please, darling!” she says, as Jean-Alain hovers the red over her shoulder, winks and pops a kiss in the air at Jesse as he tops up his white. Father Alex cuts in to ask Lady Pamela how her banker sons are getting on in their new houses in “Hackney, is it?”
As the wine gets louder in Jesse, he is ready to butt back in to tell her that he quite cleverly fucked two grand out of her bottom bitch husband, actually, but as if to forestall him:
“Please join me in raising a toast to my beautiful, wonderful husband, Jean-Alain. My love, I don’t know where I’d be without you.”
If Jesse’s been wondering whether Jean-Alain is happy being such a formidable man playing dogsbody to his lordly husband, the brimming look of love across the table quells any doubt. All raise their goblets.
“To Jean-Alain.”
Chapter 5
NOVEMBER 30, 2016
The Black Country. Wull-VRAMpton. He has played Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Solange’s A Seat at the Table three times on a loop, preparing himself for how, later today, he will turn up unannounced at his parents’ front door. To reprogramme his memories. “Home” sounds like a Knowles-sister album now. Of his engagement, his friendships, his work-in-progress, his holidays. Not the way it sounded before, of engines burning, of diesel fumes, of the landfill site, of the derelict gas works, of the rickety rackety 644 West Bromwich–Great Bridge shuttle bus. Of Oi, Jovo! Of uPVC windows shutting. Of Not today, thank you, or even of people not coming to their door because they know the Witnesses are working their street. Of rubbish cluttering up the drains, of supermarket trolleys blocking the canal lock, of the belt coming down across his arse across his back across his thighs, or porn strewn through the stinging nettles along the overgrown old rail line. Of the sound of his parents’ front door slamming. Of his mother, holding a sharp knife, saying, I wish I could just put this in you.
He has come armed with the truth. I break chains all by myself; won’t let my freedom rot in hell, Beyoncé sings as he rings the doorbell.
Conroy put him in touch with Glorie. A neatly trimmed front garden. Hanging baskets either side of the front door. Creeping wisteria that will look gorgeous in spring but for now, it’s raining. She recognises him straight away. She gives him a strong hug, a loving, motherly hug. He’s ever so posh, she says to her daughter. There is a true family resemblance. The shape of the eyes. Their eyebrows, thick and shrewd, naturally arched, no need to pluck or shape. He has them, Aunty Glorie has them, her daughter Mareka has them, her grandson Rashan has them. Robert had them. Owen, in a different way, has them.
His father, Robert Alonso. Aunty Glorie Williams, his cousin Mareka Williams, and—he supposes—his second cousin, Rashan Powell. His future husband, Owen Gunning. A whole new family.
Now he has three nephews, a niece, and a godson, Bilal. Gini said there could be no other choice than Jesse as godfather, even though he’s no longer a Christian.
He tells Aunty Glorie and his cousin Mareka everything. Stays for three hours. They drink lots of tea, eat red snapper and hard-dough bread, and too much bun and cheese. Certain ornaments all Jamaican people of a certain generation have in their house, like that wooden block shaped like the island with a red, black and yellow ackee berry painted on it.
She shows him lots of pictures she has scanned, on an iPad. His father was such a handsome man. There he is playing football, aged fourteen. There he is, smoki
ng a cigarette with a foot up flat against a wall. There he is, at Christmas. He fixates on all the pictures of the family, adds her on Facebook, gives her his email address so she can share them with him on Dropbox.
“Like father, like son, isn’t he!” his Aunty Glorie says.
“Mum, you’ll embarrass him,” laughs his beautiful cousin Mareka. He just wishes she wouldn’t straighten her hair.
Glorie’s mother was a lovely-looking woman called Claudette, who served as a nurse. She is dead now. Cancer. Her father she never knew. His name was Norman. He had the eyes, too. He died even younger, of a massive stroke caused by a brain aneurysm. On a summer’s day, when he was just thirty-one, he went into the kitchen and dropped like he’d been shot in the head. Robert wasn’t even three at the time. Glorie herself was not yet a year old. They both screamed and screamed, climbing on their father’s body until the neighbour came round. Luckily, everyone left their doors open, then.
“I don’t think Mum ever recovered from that,” Glorie says. “She tried her best to raise the two of us by herself but it was hard for any black woman in those days. She sold the house and moved here, where it was cheaper.”
“It’s hard now,” says Mareka.
“But the racism in those days.”
“Nothing’s changed in that respect,” says Mareka.
“It was extra hard for your grandmother, in the late fifties, with two children to raise, a dead husband to bury, two jobs just to pay the rent, the shame—being from Jamaica where everyone works hard and if you don’t work hard you stay on the street—of having to claim benefits if she didn’t work those two jobs. And your grandfather was such a good man. She had men at the door asking for her hand in marriage but None a them fit to lace yuh Daddy shoe, she used to say. She carried on, carried on, carried on, worked herself into the ground, almost literally. But she came back, and became a matron. And she was able to make this house a home, which you’re not getting if that’s what you’ve come for, son-of-Robert.”
She scares him for a second, pointing her green-nailed finger, but she knows that’s not at all why he’s there, and they all laugh. “Haha, me a joke. Seriously, the house is nothing special, but it came at a price because she couldn’t always keep us together. Robert found life difficult sometimes, and for a while he went into foster care. He lived with one white family for a couple of years and they nearly adopted him. But he came back, and became a painter. All us idiots were telling him to get a real job, and now look at us, talking about his work! What do you know about it?”
“Only what Conroy’s managed to find out from the archives. Some of his paintings he sold and are untraceable. But there may—must—be someone somewhere who owns or knows where his studio was and where he kept his canvases, his drawings. I just hope it hasn’t been destroyed, because it’s good, and maybe, one day, if we do find more of it, we might be able to exhibit it and raise awareness of his existence, as a black artist, as an artist who lived with AIDS, because he’s potentially important to both those narratives.” His aunt and cousin watch him so intently, Jesse has the thought they might not be listening to what he’s saying, so impressed do they seem by his presence, his existence, his maturity. They giggle like teenage girls at times. “As it happens, I met someone when I first moved to London, someone from Wolverhampton—of all places—who owned a painting called Nude with Othello. I went to visit him to look at it again. I was extremely lucky, because he’s retired now, his partner’s passed away and he’s about to sell his house and retire to the south of France, because of Brexit. It was definitely a self-portrait by Robert. He bought it at a group show in Brixton in 1991, though unfortunately he doesn’t remember meeting him. Othello was the name of the rose in his hand, bred right here in Wolverhampton by David Austin.”
“Never!” says Aunty Glorie.
“I’ve got a picture of it. Do you want to see it?”
“Do I want to see it?” she says, pulling her head back and looking at him through her side-eye.
“It is a bit rude.”
“Then I’ll take your word for it, thanks,” she laughs, then drops it quickly from her face. “I did see him once, before he died. I went down to London and visited him in the hospital. I couldn’t stay long; I couldn’t bear to see him like that, and I had Mareka with me.”
“I don’t remember that,” says Mareka.
“You were three, or summat. You shouldn’t have been there, really, but I took you just to have an excuse not to stay if I got too upset. I left you in the creche. There was no way in a million years I’d ever have taken you onto an AIDS ward.”
“I do have one memory of him,” says Jesse. “I was at this horrible dinner party, during the summer, in the countryside, the day after I spoke to Conroy. Ugh, it was horrible, this dusty old Brexiteer and his disgusting bejewelled Louboutin-wearing wife who ground her bottom up against me when ‘Jenny from the Block’ came on because I was the only black person there.” They both grimace and laugh as if they know exactly the sort of person Jesse is talking about, though they could never have met someone like Lady Pamela. “It was vile, and I couldn’t help it, I got drunk and shouted my mouth off about the arrogance and ignorance of people who put their own needs before those of the greater number, trust me, I was provoked. But then, do you remember Wham!?”
Aunty Glorie glares at him as if in wonder at the strange turns his thoughts take. “Of course!”
“Well, their song ‘Freedom’ came on—doo…doo…doo! Doo…doo…doooo!—and I had the instant—they call it involuntary memory—recall of being, I must have only been two or three years old, just like he was when he last saw his dad…” His voice breaks.
“Oh, darling, it’s alright,” Glorie says, and squeezes his forearm tight. “You got any tissue, Marie?” She shuffles around in her bag and plucks out a pack of Paloma.
“…And I was in a kitchen, with a tall black man in his pyjamas, and he was making me Weetabix for breakfast, and that song came on the radio, the horns, so distinctive, and I just knew straight away that it was him, and it was all I had of him, so my mother must’ve known about him, and he must’ve known about me, and she let him see me. But then she told me he was dead, and he was lost to me, until now.”
“I’m so sorry, Jesse,” says Aunty Glorie. “But your mom’ll have that on her conscience until she is dead.”
“I’m trying not to blame her for everything. The eighties were a different time, especially when it came to sex being so mixed up with death, and Section 28 coming in and all that. All our favourite pop stars and Hollywood actors dropping like flies. I never for a million years thought my dad would be part of that world, but I’m proud of him. He’s like a king, to me.”
“Oh, Jesse. And I’m sure he’d be proud of you.”
“I wish he could come to my wedding,” he says.
“You’re getting married!” says Mareka, clapping her son’s hands together.
He shows her his phone screensaver.
“Owen,” he says.
“Ooh, he’s handsome,” Glorie says, without missing a beat. “Good for you. I mean what I say when I say Robert would be proud of you, you know, Jesse. You’re smart, a good person, I only just met you but I can tell. You didn’t deserve to grow up with pain, and look at the person you’ve still grown up to be anyway. With what’s going on in the world, it’s best to be with someone who makes you feel loved. Nuh waste your time with people who don’t.”
He hopes his Aunty Glorie, cousin Mareka and second cousin Rashan will attend. Rashan can play with Bilal. Mareka will meet Jesse’s sister Esther, almost her cousin, and their children can play together. Ruth and Hannah, as Witnesses, won’t let themselves be there. Of course, their parents are out of the question. They belong to the past. This isn’t the past. This is now, and the future.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Sharmaine
Lovegrove, Dominic Wakeford, Millie Seaward, Thalia Proctor, Emily Moran, Alan Hollinghurst, Emma Paterson, Monica MacSwan, Margo Shickmanter, Emily Mahon, Rita Madrigal, Lorraine Hyland, Cassandra Pappas, Jillian Briglia, Daniela Ayuso…and all my friends and family.
I have made reference to The Passages of Joy by Thom Gunn (Faber and Faber, 1982) and the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures by the Watchtower, Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania and the International Bible Students Association.
Playlist
1“Depression” by Bedasse and Chin’s Calypso Sextet
2“Gimme the Loot” by the Notorious B.I.G.
3“Takeover” by Jay Z
4“Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees
5“Freak Like Me (We Don’t Give a Damn Mix)” by Sugababes
6“Love Will Set You Free” by Starchaser
7“Unfinished Sympathy” by Massive Attack
8“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by Nina Simone
9“Disorder” by Joy Division
10“Candidate” by Joy Division
11“Albatross” by Public Image Limited
12“I’m Goin’ Down” by Mary J. Blige
13“Insecticide” by Fad Gadget
14“Freedom” by Beyoncé
15“Freedom” by Wham!
In memory of Isoline Vassell—my grandmother—
and Alejandro Mendez (no relation)
A Note About the Author
Paul Mendez was born and raised in the Black Country and is a novelist, essayist and screenwriter. He now lives in London and is studying for an MA in Black British Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been a performing member of two theatre companies and worked as a voice actor, appearing on audiobooks by Andrea Levy, Paul Theroux and Ben Okri. As a writer, he has contributed to Esquire, The Face, Vogue, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and Brixton Review of Books. Rainbow Milk is his debut novel.
