The Score

by HJ Golakai

  “Proooobaaably not.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Joshua massaged his eyelids and the muscles of his face, groaning. At the second chime of the doorbell, he considered lifting the throw cushions off the couch and burying himself under the entire lot. Or under the couch itself. Could he fit?

  The chiming stopped. Silence reigned once more throughout the apartment. He released a breath and unpaused the college basketball quarterfinals on the Sony BRAVIA forty-inch.

  Vee flounced in, hips a-sway like a vixen on a mission. Her knee-length orange African print dress clung to her legs. Joshua sat up. His internal beast, prepped to battle through muscle-melting fatigue so he could cheer his team on to the championships, retreated; another stirred, in his chest and lower down, with a different brand of interest. He took quick study of her face. Eyebrows knitted, mouth clenched, chin on her heart-shaped face stabbing the air. He released another slow breath, closed his eyes, fumbled blindly along the couch till his fingers found a cushion and placed it over his face.

  “Was that door open?” he said, loud as he could from behind it.

  “Yes. Closed but not latched.”

  “Wow. I should tighten up security around here.” He peeped over the top.

  “I glad you tink bein’ careless with your life dah sumtin funny.” He had to strain his ears through her speed and cadence. From the way her irises spat flares like the surface of a tempestuous dark-brown planet, how her tongue sliced into the consonants of ‘careless’, ‘funny’, ‘glad’, ‘your life’, all of it for that matter … She was coasting on a livid high, guns cocked to blast in his face. Ahead was no easy conversation.

  “You went to work today? You’hn lookin’ like it. Wha’happin, you sick?” Concern softened her for a breath of a second, then her lashes fluttered as she made an immediate mental recalibration. She re-clenched her jaw.

  Yup. Time to get torn a new one, he thought. “Yeah, I did.”

  She scanned his jeans and T-shirt.

  “I assure you I did attempt to make a living today. As you well know, as an associate I sometimes have less hectic days, therefore I can leave early. This was one of them. Correction, it was nuts but I still managed to wrap it up by four, take my bike out for an hour and get home to watch the game. Haven’t had any missed calls,” he grabbed his Samsung Galaxy smartphone, held the screen up to her, “correction, six missed calls, but none of ’em from my boss so these other jokers can piss off till tomorrow.”

  Her lips pulled and mashed into a fuss-pout; she cut her eyes up and down the length of him to her satisfaction before blipping a shoulder in a ‘fine, whatever’ shrug. Black women, Joshua anguished. If my mama wasn’t black, I doubt I’d be inclined to put up with any of this.

  Waves of lactic acid cranked through his system, souring the pain in his muscles to an ache. “V.J., let’s not do this. I’m so exhausted.” He ran an agitated hand over his head. “She’s gone. I promised I wouldn’t let her stay here anymore, and she’s gone.”

  “Who say dah wha’ dis about?”

  “Then what?” He popped up a finger. “But before you launch, can you please promise not to let this deteriorate into a ghetto argument, ending with you breaking up all my stuff and possibly burning the place down?”

  “You boy, don’t mess wi’ me right nah.”

  The force of her fury finally registered. Her hands were fists, her entire upper body so rigid it seemed she was stomping down on a geyser of rage, preventing it from consuming them both. He involuntarily reached out for her, caught himself in time. She cut him off before he’d even opened his mouth properly.

  “How you know Lovett Massaquoi?”

  “Huh? Lovett? Lovett the lawyer? The guy with the rights advocacy set-up for foreigners in Joburg? Of course I know him. You know I know him.” He shrugged. “Haven’t seen him in a while, though.”

  “I’hn say if you know him, I say how.”

  Self-preservation sounded a clarion of alarm bells, blasting through his composure. Shit. I know him through you, his brain formed the cool reply, ever the saviour. You worked that first gig with him, told me all about it. You introduced us. Remember, that Liberian doctor you both knew threw a party, we all went, you, me and Titus? What was it, four years ago? Not that long. How could you forget? Girl, you trippin’.

  “Voinjama,” he said instead.

  She crumbled like all her stuffing had leaked out of her. She shook her head at the floor for what felt like an eternity. “I was almost hoping you would lie to me. I wanted you to lie,” she jerked open her handbag, wrenched out a handful of papers and shoved them into his chest, “so I could see the look on your lying face.”

  “Vee … look. What could …” He scanned the printed pages, first quickly, in pure puzzlement, then more thoroughly, his vision clearing, sharpening, with every line. How … what … was she serious? “Where’d you get this? Are you crazy? You hacked into my email and printed my correspondence?”

  A tiny, bittersweet smirk quirked her lips, but did nothing to dampen the hurt in her eyes. “Don’t call me crazy,” she whispered.

  A wrecking ball smashed his composure. “Do you know who I work for? How much it values absolute confidentiality? Do you realise the gravity,” he shook the fistful of papers, “of hacking the files of a JPMorgan Chase employee?!”

  “I don’t give a shit! You could be a goddamn secret agent for all I know or care! I wouldn’t be surprised. And that’s from your private email account, so calm down. It doesn’t jeopardise your precious job.”

  “It violates my privacy!”

  “Your privacy?!” She reeled, glaring around the apartment in disbelief, as if in search of anyone else present who would second her outrage, confirm she had every right to it. “Don’t dare spit that American bullshit in my ear. Violates your privacy, your human rights. What about my right to privacy? You thought about that?”

  He screwed the print-out into a ball with one hand, flung it. “It’s that, whatshisname, that Richie dickhead, your hacker buddy, he helped you do this. I told you to shut it down, Vee. This shit is illegal, it can be dangerous, it doesn’t go unnoticed. That guy can lead you into really messed up stuff if you’re not careful. You don’t know who he’s mixed up with, who he pisses off to get the kind of information he feeds you.”

  “Leave Richie out of this. He’s harmless. He feeds me what I ask him to feed me. The truth, when I ask him, every time I ask him. I can say the same about you?”

  “The truth?” Joshua scraped his hands through his hair and down the back of his neck, threw them to the skies. “I hate to sound like the biggest cliché alive, but I don’t think you can handle the truth. Not always.”

  “Try me, mister liar.”

  “Stop it.” He wrapped both hands around her neck, gently but firmly turning her to face him, holding firm despite her squirming. “You cut it out right now. You know damn well I wouldn’t hide anything from you without a good reason.”

  She twisted her head out of his grasp. “I can’t trust nothing you ever say to me.”

  He dropped his arms. She stepped away, nostrils quivering as her breath thundered in and out. Under all of it he saw her relief, though she hid it well. His rare flashes scared her. The rise and fall of her breasts, the warmth of her breath against his face, the sensual notes of a light fragrance wrapped in the deeper headiness of her own smell, and soon the rise of the other kind stirred again. He longed to pick her up, kicking and screaming no doubt, unwrap her on his bed, kiss and bite every part of her till her fight weakened and turned on her, part her thighs and drive into her until they both shattered.

  “Don’t mess with me, Vee. You tell me where and when and how you got this.”

  “You tell me why and for how long you’ve known Lovett! Why you have all these emails y’all been exchanging about me since God knows when, especially since I got no idea y’all were even on speaking terms! Let’s start there!”

  He snatched the ball of pa
per off the floor, read through the first page again before tossing it onto the coffee table. “Sit down,” he said softly, sitting down himself. She stayed put. He grabbed her wrist and hauled her towards him. She tottered on wedge heels and slumped onto the couch. Her mutinous glare threatened to laser holes through his cranium. This is serious, he threatened off a smile.

  He clasped his hands over his knees and looked sideways at her, waiting. She shifted in her seat, smoothed her dress and stretched her long neck. “Chlöe.”

  “Chlöe?” he scoffed.

  “Yes. Well, Chlöe and Richie. She told Richie to …” Vee exhaled lengthily. “Chlöe saw me with Lovett at The Grotto, heard us talking about something that wasn’t any of her damn business and decided to make it her damn business. In true Chlöe style she went rooting around in my private life –”

  “And mine.”

  She flicked a sneer with her eyes only she could make. “Hmmph. Well, I nah deal with her already.” She reprised the look of hurt and anger; it conveyed that she expected far better of him. “Half the time she’hn got no common sense in her head. But you …”

  “Are you going to hear me out?”

  She crossed her arms.

  Joshua exhaled and rubbed his eyes some more. They ground like a handful of sand had been thrown into his face. “Alright. Guess the beginning’s the best place to start. It’s not as insidious as you think. Not anymore anyway.” He popped a one-shoulder shrug. “I truly didn’t know Lovett from a jar of jam until four years ago, I swear to that. He contacted me out of the blue. Introduced himself, said the Liberian community here was small, he knew Titus a little, you guys had just moved down here from the States. Titus worked at Deloitte in Joburg a lot back then so they had a common circle. Therefore he, Lovett, knew you … and by extension, me.”

  Joshua reclined in the couch, casually, for better vantage. The trick to reading Vee’s expressions lay in her profile. She gave good mask full-face, but her flashes and tics were laughably open plan in side-view.

  “He only knew of you, but his interest had been piqued beyond that. A, um, let’s call them a group of interested parties, had approached him about your father.”

  “My father?! What –” Her clever layers of hair whipped over her face, giving him the benefit of only one eye cocked to full incredulity. She straightened up, smoothed and tucked her hair down, worked her shoulders as if sucking a torrent back in.

  “Yes, your father. Concerning the war, the Charles Taylor regime, his security company …” he noted a quiver of undistilled rage skittering through her cheek muscle, “the allegations of … shall we call them goods, that people like him ran back and forth across the border during that period. They –”

  “That –” She ground her teeth. “Finish.”

  “They claimed they were a private forensic investigation NGO. Got most of their business from human rights groups and civil action firms, sometimes even the big guns like legal teams working with The Hague. They’d been contracted to look into,” he rubbed the back of his neck, delicacy failing him, “small-time criminals, warmongers, even civilians who’d been implicated in various forms of violent unrest in different countries. Basically they helped hook the small fry and twisted their arms until they snitched on the big fish. They wanted to know about your dad … if he’d … and how, when, under whose directive. And they figured they’d get info about him from, well, you for instance.” Joshua blew a breath. “Lovett never went into details with me on what their information-extraction plan consisted of; he didn’t know an awful lot himself. We imagined they wouldn’t dare drag you in, throw you in a dungeon and shine a searchlight in your face. You have an American green card. It was more undercover, gentle probing. They approached Lovett’s firm, I assume under the guise that as a fellow human and civil rights advocate he’d sympathise and comply. I’m sure they also thought he was a dumb, small-time African who’d be both super impressed and too scared to question much.”

  “They really didn’t do their research, then,” Vee muttered.

  “Clearly not. He smelled a rat. He dug, and found their company was a pure front. He never got conclusive proof, but he got enough to know they actually supported war criminals. They were like a stealth organisation that worked with defence teams or something, ferreting out damaging evidence before it surfaced against their clients.”

  She scooted about on her bum to face him, profile now lost to scrutiny, eyes enlarged to huge globes. “You keep saying ‘they’ – didn’t they have a name? And what was their plan of action, after they found out who had damning evidence? What … they would ‘deal with it’? Take care of it?”

  “It doesn’t matter now; you won’t find anything under the name they approached us with. It was likely a shadow company put together for the purpose of information-gathering, because we sure as hell can’t find anything substantial to link them to. As to what their endgame was, I don’t know, we don’t know, we still don’t. We speculated a lot, part of what the emailing was about, though we were careful what we wrote.” He caressed her arm. “Once we started probing too deeply and asking too many follow-up questions they backed off; they knew we didn’t trust them and they wouldn’t get anything out of us. We’d reached a dead end, so we let it go. We didn’t forget about it, but we let it lie. It felt like the smartest thing to do, the only thing really. It’s been, what, two and a half years since then. They never contacted either of us again.”

  “Why did Lovett bring you into it? He asked you to … what?”

  Joshua couldn’t suppress his chuckle. “He didn’t ask me to waterboard you.” He read another flicker of her lashes and flinched internally. “He didn’t ask me to spy into your life either, and even if he had, come on. He simply,” he spread his hands, searching for the right words, “wanted to know if there was anything to it. Have a close friend ask you, very delicately, if there was any chance there was a smidgeon of truth behind their so-called investigation. In order to be the first to step in to protect you, on the off-chance there was. He’s a really good lawyer, and not as cold and mercenary an ass as you think he is.”

  “I don’t think Lovett is cold or mercenary. I just think he’s an ass.” She studied her knees. “I don’t ever remember you prying about my Pa, no more than usual.”

  “I couldn’t do it. You’ve told me about your life and family, your own way, own time. It’s not my story to retell. And I’m sure as hell not gonna let some shadowy group of fuckmongers twist your arm about it, or twist it through a second or third party.”

  “But you know my father wasn’t involved in any sick nonsense like that. He ran an honest security company, even during war-time, that’s why –”

  “I know what you tell me, Vee. And you know what you’ve pieced together. Fathers, parents, aren’t obligated to tell their kids the worst of who they are. Much as you adore your dad, you’re not naive.”

  “Hehn?! So, what … then,” she blustered, head shaking, “you think …”

  “I know none of it will ever change anything between us.”

  Elbows on knees, she buried her face in her hands. He watched her shoulders move in time with her breathing. When her head rose, she looked destroyed. “Everything’s so –” now was her turn to throw her hands up in wordless frustration – “it’s you, it’s Chlöe … Lovett, Richie … What …? Uurrrrggh. Why nobody can talk to me? Why all this soap opera behind my back?”

  “You don’t know why?” His look was loaded. “Chlöe actually cares about you a lot, worships you in fact, misguided motives aside. Richie is your employee. You pay him to swoop in with all the right information, make your articles all crisp and edgy. Me, I’m just the guy who …” he shrugged. Which guy was he? Even he didn’t know. “I look out for you. You don’t need me to, you hate it when I hover. But I want to. I’m supposed to. Titus does, always has, but he couldn’t, not on this one. He’s got too much to lose.”

  “What Ti got to lose?”

  “Which goes t
o show you don’t know as much about everybody as you think you want to, Vee. We all keep things from you to protect you, and ironically you go around doing the same thing for us. It’s nuts.”

  “I know. You’hn think I know that?”

  “I don’t – shit. I know information is a two-way street. I lied about Mozambique, that Titus was out there trying to be a hero when you were here falling apart. We hashed it out, you said you forgave me.”

  “I did.”

  “Did you?”

  Her face crumbled. “I’ve never lied about my feelings. You’re the one person who knows more about me than anyone else, Joshua Allen. Anyone. Even Ti.”

  “I want …” He squeezed the pads of his thumbs into his temples, hard. “I can’t believe the bitchass thing I’m about to say, but I want all of you. Trust me with that. So we can –”

  “Don’t say ‘be together’. Don’t turn this around.” Hand over her face, her shoulders shook, pain clogging her voice. “Please don’t turn this around.”

  “Cricket … I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” It was becoming his mantra, he thought dejectedly. He might as well get it printed on a T-shirt.

  “I can’t …” She jerked to her feet, furiously wiping her face. Her eyes glittered when she turned around. Joshua’s heart whimpered. “Why? Why this shit between us can’t stop? When everything clicks, when it makes sense why I love you so much, one more thing got to pop up to press chakla.” She snatched up her handbag. “We can’t trust the space we making together. So where it going?”

  “Cricket …”

  She wriggled out of his grasp, uttering a strangled sob that was the worst variety of ‘no’ he’d ever heard. The front door slammed.

  He slumped onto the couch. Still on mute, the basketball game had ended. Rich kids hugged it out on the court, casting hopeful eyes up the bleachers at the scouts who may have seen their athletic genius. He stared at his bare feet a long time. Eventually he cast his eyes to the ceiling, but past it, far higher, to where an omniscient God was meant to be, one he sometimes believed in, most often when she was around.