by Maggie Gee
They took my job. They took my future.
‘Fuck you, fuck you,’ he said under his breath, then louder, angrier, ‘Fuck you all!’, aiming a sudden kick at a tree, kicking the tree and hurting his foot.
When he looked up again, the man wasn’t there, and then he was there, but at a different angle, walking away from Dirk, past the playground, and then Dirk was sure that he wasn’t white. Fuck you, fuck you. His heart began to beat. He stopped behind a tree and watched for a moment.
Dirk saw that the man was looking at him. He had stopped as well, and was looking at Dirk. It was too far away to see his expression. In the bright sun, his face looked blank and curiously pale, but he wasn’t white, he couldn’t be white, he was certainly a nigger or else a Paki. Dirk stared at him and saw Dinesh Patel, he saw his tormentor, he burned, he swelled, he shook with excitement, trembled with anger.
Fuck you, fuck you. I’ll fuck you for this.
He followed the man between the trees. He kept on staring;
Dirk stared back. Dirk saw he was making for the toilets.
I’ll kill him, he thought. He was almost calm. I’ll use my knife. My bayonet. Dad’s knife, yes. The thing he gave me. The thing I took, because I’m his son. I’ll stick it in him. Into the heart. I’ll get rid of them all. I’ll clean the Park. I’ll show them they can’t come barging in here, taking over everything, going where they feel like. Looking at me as if I was dirt –
Yet he still hadn’t got a good view of his face.
Stopping and starting, they walked into the shade of the deeper cover around the toilets.
Then the man disappeared into the dark of the doorway. A pitch-black slit. You could see nothing inside. There was a smell of urine, strong, choking. The usual notice about Police Surveillance propped across the same smashed pane of glass. The place his dad could never sort out. The place Dad said was a disgrace, an eyesore –
Dirk stopped for a second. He caressed the knife. He had carried it since he was eighteen years old. It was part of his father’s army kit. He had borrowed it – stolen it. Five years ago. There had been a row when Dad found it was missing. Dirk didn’t give in. He had lied in Dad’s face. And Dad lost his rag and got him by the throat and shook him till he could hardly stand, ‘I’ll get the truth out of you, you little bastard –’ ‘I never saw it. Mum must have had it – She probably chucked it in the bin.’ And Dad’s face fell, and he let him go.
He ran his finger over the blade.
Then pressed until the pain kissed him.
His heart was fast, thumping, tightening, jumping in his chest like a living thing.
The nigger had gone into the place Dirk hated.
Time to be brave. Time to be a man.
One hand on his jacket, Dirk followed him in, into the sharp foul stink of the dark.
Dirk could hear him somewhere, but he was blind. He stood there, choking, peering round him, terrified of what was to happen. What had to happen. Pumping, pumping. The dreadful pumping of his heart.
But something soft brushed against his shoulder and he leapt round, swearing, knife in hand, and saw him clearly; he was black, pitch-black, African black, as black as the toilets, and his face had a horrible soft sort of look, like he was a girl, like he was in love, and fucking hell, he was touching his cock, I don’t believe it, his great black cock –
And Dirk felt a terrible excitement, something he wanted, something he needed, and ‘Fuck you, fuck you,’ he panted, he moaned, and he felt his cock swell inside his trousers, and he slipped the knife gently out of his jacket and hit the bastard in the middle of his chest, the blade sliding in surprisingly easily, sticking it, jerking it, forcing it in, holding it there, screaming with panic, ‘Fuck you, fuck you,’ for the body was too heavy, too big for him, he would bring Dirk down, and Dirk only let go when the blood pumped out, drenching, spurting, so much, so hot, was he human, then, must they both fucking drown –?
The man slid down the wall. He looked at Dirk. His mouth was half-open. His eyes were very white. He reached out a hand. The palm was pale.
Sobbing, vomiting, Dirk turned and ran.
It was nine forty-five on Sunday morning.
THE CHURCH
43 • Shirley and Elroy
The two bodies lay there together.
It was nine forty-five when Shirley woke up. For a little while she lay almost still, side by side with Elroy, staring up at the ceiling, then moved very slightly to feel his warmth, stretching luxuriously, silently. One of his arms was on top of the blanket; she slid hers against it. Smooth warm skin. White on black. But she didn’t want to wake him. She got up quietly, pulled on a wrap.
The events of the day before were dream-like. She needed time on her own to think.
They were going to St John’s at eleven o’clock. That meant leaving around ten thirty. Plenty of time. Shirley felt happy. She wandered downstairs and poured herself some milk, a large beaker, and sat down to drink it. She could see herself in a mirror on the wall. Pink and cream. Flushed with contentment. Her pupils very large and black.
She wriggled in her chair. Two in one night.
She hadn’t heard Elroy come downstairs, barefoot, so she jumped slightly as he touched her shoulder, caressed her neck and the base of her skull underneath the curls which he liked so much.
‘Hi Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Hi Curly-head.’ Because of his one white grandmother, her curls weren’t such a lot looser than his, but he liked their blondness against her pale skin.
She felt caught out with her secret thoughts. ‘Elroy, love. I was going to bring you coffee –’
‘And I was going to bring you breakfast in bed.’
‘You’ve never brought me breakfast in bed!’
‘Well a lot of things round here never happen before.’
A few more than you know about, she thought, but she kissed him lovingly, enjoyed his soft lips.
And in the middle of the kiss, as their mouths opened, as she felt the damp heat, she suddenly remembered her father was dying.
A stone. A cold stone. A heavy little stone.
‘Sit on my lap,’ he said to her, and she got up, docile, and the pain melted, at least for the moment, she sat on his lap, lowered her head and kissed his chest, naked under his open robe, firm and black and beautiful. ‘You made me come,’ she whispered. ‘I loved the way you made me come.’
‘Can’t say I didn’t try before,’ he said, but he was smiling, blowing in her hair, nibbling a curl between his teeth. ‘Time for another go this morning? Maybe not – we have to get to church –’
‘There’s plenty of time,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’m going back upstairs. I’ll be waiting for you. And all I need is a cup of tea.’
‘Shirley, love. I been thinking. The Temple give me a hard time about marrying, and you give me a hard time by not agreeing. But you know, I don’t feel sinful with you. Because our souls join. Our souls join already. It says in the Bible, “My soul hunger for you; my body long for you.”
She smiled at him. ‘Too much Bible, Elroy.’
Sometimes she felt he kept the Bible for her, because they’d met in church, on her first visit to the Temple, and perhaps he thought she was better than she was … Idealized her. Which was nice, but tiring.
Certainly he thought she was better than she was, Shirley reflected, thinking of last night. And she almost ran upstairs to the bedroom, springing like a girl from step to step, feeling the joy of her breasts pulling, their weight bouncing slightly as she moved.
Perhaps it’s because I nearly died …
Maybe I’ve become a different person.
She’d thought that nothing would ever change. Especially the family. The White family. Dad was so proud of their name: the Whites. It was the Whites this, and the Whites that – ‘The Whites don’t have debts … The Whites never beg … The Whites don’t lie … The Whites have their pride … The White family sticks together …’ (But we didn’t, did we? I lost my daughter.)
/> And later Dad was always pushing me away because he couldn’t stand Kojo or Elroy. That force of hatred like a wall. You could never break it down, you could never climb over –
Then suddenly Dad is at death’s door and all the family are back together and Darren comes flying in from New York and Thomas Lovell appears from nowhere –
And here I lie, a scarlet woman, with sperm from two different men inside me.
But the stone came back, falling through her body. Hardest to bear was simple pity. Dad looked so small, so weak, so – human. Would they let her mother be with him, in the hospital? Or – would he come home? Her heart began to hammer. Would she have to help Mum look after him?
I ought, she thought. He looked after us. He came home every night. He paid the bills … He did his duty, by his lights.
Rubbish, she told herself, don’t be so soft. Look at the harm that man has done. Mum is his slave, but I don’t have to be. Look at his sons. What good are they?
She remembered Darren at Kojo’s funeral. He’d had a few drinks and talked too much. ‘Isn’t it frightful, I have no black friends. I wish I had. You’re very lucky.’
But most white people had no black friends.
Elroy, Elroy. Why can’t Dad see? He should be glad his daughter’s got a man like Elroy. Doesn’t smoke, hardly drinks, has a job, is faithful – Shirley thought he was faithful. Though sometimes there were things – a telephone number with a female name written beside it in his jacket pocket. A woman who rang, then rang off, suddenly. Certain jokes his two sisters made, though Shirley suspected them of wanting to hurt her. A passing look of concern in her direction from Winston when Elroy disappeared with a friend.
But Elroy was so serious about the Temple. Wasn’t he? He couldn’t be leading a double life, could he?
Was each of them idealizing the other? It had to be harder to know a person when it wasn’t easy to know their family.
Hard to know Elroy’s friends, as well. She felt they saw her as Elroy’s white woman. They were nice to her, but there was some kind of distance that was only partly bridged by her sex.
But she did know Elroy was a caring man. His job was caring for other people. Patient Care Officers fixed things for patients that they were too ill to do themselves. He put up with their tantrums and complaints. How many men could do that job? She made jokes about it. ‘Patient Care … that’s what you give me, patient care.’ And he did; he was almost too nice to her. Kojo was different, very confident, a joker. She and Kojo talked all the time. Whereas Elroy was often strong and silent.
It comes from how Elroy was at home. He had to look after his mother and sisters and little brother when his father vanished. He’s had to be the responsible one. Only twenty-nine, but seems older than his years –
Lovely Elroy. He’s still my toy-boy. I love the smell of him, the feel of him – I’ve always liked the maleness of men. Talking to my women friends I sometimes wonder – They talk about men as if they hate them, their breath, their wind, their penises. But hating people gives them no choice – what can they do, except be hateful?
Waiting for Elroy. Wet for him. Wanting him as I never have. Touching myself and thinking of Thomas, touching myself and thinking of Elroy …
He brought up the tray, but seeing her lying there, he put it down, came over and kissed her.
‘Is this the land of milk and honey? What you doing to me, girl, you look so sexy –’
‘I feel so sexy. Ooh, and you’re hard.’
She had lain like that on purpose to arouse him, posed so the duvet pushed up her breasts, and she pulled him down, she held him fast, she held his warm springy head in her hands, she burrowed down and sucked his dark penis, enjoying its blackness against her pale fingers, she kissed and licked it till it bucked in her hand like a living thing, like a force of life, she weighed his heavy balls in her fingers, she told him she loved him, she worshipped him, and as she pulled him inside her she was almost coming, already coming from deep deep inside, and his slow firm thrusting made her come up, up, coming to him, coming to meet him, coming like honey from a dense dark comb, coming gold and white and wet and moaning as doves come thrumming from their warm dark dove-cote, trembling, flurrying, flying into sunlight.
And then the two bodies lay together, slowly breathing in the warmth of the morning. The brown and the cream, the black and the rose, each curl of dark hair, each shining iris, each curve of the lid, each moving eyelash, intertwined in their living beauty.
They arrived at St John’s at the last moment, took their hymn sheets from the matron on the door who recognized them and smiled automatically, a sweet smile but tired and thin. Very few black people used this church. Kojo had liked it partly because, as he said, it was so much quieter than black churches; ‘I’ve had too much of the shouting and jerking.’ They had attended quite regularly over the years, and lots of people knew Kojo by name, though she realized how imperfect the friendships were when so many of them greeted Elroy as Kojo. He put his arm lightly around her shoulders, accidentally winning a radiant smile from a middle-aged woman with a large red face and a knotted rope of long grey hair who sat on the end of the pew they chose.
Walking up the aisle, she had felt without pleasure heads turning, as they did everywhere except the poorer parts of London where mixed relationships were common, the parts of London where black people lived. In Hillesden, so many of the families were mixed. But in other places, people still noticed. One of the cruder responses had been yelled at them from a passing car only last week: ‘Oi darling, why do you like doing it with black men?’ There were three young white men straining at the windows, crewcut, thickset, leering and making disgusting gestures. Just too late, she thought of a response. ‘Because black men aren’t mannerless yobs,’ she said. Whereas here in St John’s – where all was acceptance, where communion was taken for ‘Our brothers and sisters in Islam and in the Jewish faith’, where the vicar always asked at the end of the service if there were any newcomers or foreign visitors, so all the congregation could applaud them – people were more likely to romanticize them.
On some occasions the glances were from women, envying her both men for their good looks. She knew that women who had never had a black man believed they might be better, sexier. As did white men. And it made them afraid.
Fear and envy of the black penis. That was at the bottom of it all. (Indeed Kojo joked that all white men were gay, they didn’t really envy it, they wanted it.)
Maybe in heaven there would be no colour –
But on earth, since Kojo, love had been black. She was drawn to Elroy because of Kojo, although she always had to deny that to him, for he didn’t want to be in Kojo’s shadow, Kojo who was older, cleverer, richer – She reached out gently, touched Elroy’s arm, and mouthed ‘I love you. I do, you know,’ and he whispered back, ‘Skeen, it’s blatant’ which made her laugh aloud into a sudden silence, for the procession was just coming in.
The priest and his retinue of deacons and cantors and other Latin names she could never remember, but some of them women, long-haired white women, floated down the aisle in a cloud of white surplices.
Then the priest asked everyone to greet their neighbours, and a wave of shaking hands, of embraces, kisses, of smiles and touches and chatter and laughter swept through the church like a flock of bright birds, light-feathered birds sweeping in from the south, and everyone was lifted, they hovered in the light, everyone was part of the flock, flying, and it only died down reluctantly, slowly, when the priest raised his hands and called them to prayer, as if they didn’t want to cease and be still, to sink back into their single wooden spaces, as if once people moved, once they moved together, the tide of good feeling would rise to the rafters and float the great church straight down Piccadilly and over Charing Cross to the golden Thames, as if the life in people was unstoppable –
But no: they were middle-class, they were docile. Shirley and Elroy settled down with the rest.
The hymns be
gan. They were always long, and the choir were the only people who knew them, their thin clear voices sprinting ahead with the congregation trailing after. The tunes were modern, to be honest rather tuneless, and each hymn seemed to have at least a dozen verses. The church felt cold; she moved closer to Elroy. She was wishing they had gone to Elroy’s church, somewhere where they could move and dance … But St John’s had its points, she reminded herself.
It tried hard to be democratic; so everyone did something, one a prayer, one a reading. Though it did make the service a little long. The Order of Service was a printed sheet, and the questions and responses went dutifully on. Liturgy, thought Shirley, this is liturgy. The word was unpromising, like something legal, and yet the repetitions were comforting … She knew it wasn’t right to sit and criticize.
I suppose this was written to hold us all together. Which is why we come here; to be together. We could pray, after all, on our own at home. But heaven could never be lots of separate houses.
Shirley had always liked the priest. The Reverend Stewart had a sense of humour. He was passionate and honest, he was big and handsome with thick silver hair, and Kojo had liked him. He was kind to her when Kojo died.
Today, though, her mind wandered during the sermon. He was talking about the City of God. She was stroking Elroy’s hand, tracing the veins, the tree of blood underneath the skin.
Suddenly she felt from the tension in Elroy that he was listening in a different way. The Reverend Stewart was leaning forward, raising his voice, thundering: ‘… recent bloody acts … disgraceful blot upon our city … These poor young people, pointlessly murdered … White and black is just a matter of skin … Remember the speech that Shakespeare gave to Shylock, the Jew, addressing Christians. “If you prick me, do I not bleed?”’
Shirley grimaced at Elroy, helpless. There had been a lot of killings in the last six months. The guilt she felt was always wretched and total: My people are killing your people.
Now she longed for this church service to be over, so the two of them could leave with their arms around each other, so she could be close to him, show him she cared.
