by A. D. Koboah
Her soft brown eyes were steady and unrepentant as they looked into mine.
“You done?” she said casually. I held her gaze for a few seconds, my anger simmering away. “I’m sorry you’re pissed off, but you need to get over yourself. He made a mistake. A really big mistake, but you’ve got no right to keep his son away from him now he wants to make amends. No right at all, so call him and tell him where his son is.”
“You cheeky cow! I should fucking knock you out,” I hissed, getting myself into a sitting position. “You don’t know Mohamed and you don’t know what you’re talking about, so shut up. You don’t know what you’ve done. You’ve made everything ten times worse. You should’ve stayed out of it. I swear to God if you ever do anything like that again I’m gonna make you wish you’d never met me. Do you understand me, Eva?”
A volatile silence hung between us as I stared her down, hoping to scare away the determination I could see in her eyes.
“You’re right, I don’t know Mohamed and I don’t know what happened with you two because you won’t tell me.” There was a flicker of the continual hurt she felt about my refusal to talk to her about my son in her eyes. It was quickly replaced by steely determination. “But you need to put your bitterness aside and tell him where his son is, Peace.”
“I’ve already told you, it’s none of your business. Can’t you get that into your thick head? My son is none of your business!”
“And I don’t know how many times I have to tell you! He is my business because you’re my business.
“When my mum killed herself I’m sure she thought the same as you, that the secrets she kept from me were none of my business, and maybe she even thought that she was protecting me by keeping me in the dark. But whatever she was hiding was my business because I was the one who had to deal with the consequences when it eventually killed her. Can’t you understand that what you do, what you choose not to tell me affects me because I’m in your life? Can’t you understand that?”
Her eyes had taken on the haunting desperation I had seen come to the surface more and more often since Mohamed’s reappearance and this whole issue of Dante and my dogged determination not to talk about him to anybody. “You can cuss as much as you want but like I told you before, I’m not going to let you give up on yourself.”
She stood up and walked to the bedroom door. “You’re obviously in a shitty mood so I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She switched off the light, plunging me once again into darkness.
I listened to her retreating footsteps and then the sound of the front door close softly behind her when she left the flat.
I lay back down on the bed and stared angrily ahead of me for a few minutes. Then I sat up abruptly.
What if she never came back? Where would I be if she never came back?
I jumped out of bed and raced to the front door. The ice-cold concrete felt almost painful against my bare feet when I stepped out onto the balcony and I immediately hugged myself in a feeble attempt to ward off the bitter cold I had walked into. I looked over the balcony and was able to make out her tiny green-clad form disappear around the corner.
“Eva!” I called out in vain. “Eva!”
I stayed there hoping to see her reappear, but she didn’t and I didn’t know whether it was because she hadn’t heard me or if she had finally had enough.
Fearful and miserable, I turned my head up to the vast night sky, remembering when I had once in my naive arrogance dared to imagine that a mere man’s dark eyes could be compared to the awe inspiring beauty before me.
How did I manage to get everything so wrong?
Chapter 11
What am I going to do?
It was a question I couldn’t answer. It was a question that started off as a steady canter when my eyes opened that morning. It was now a furious gallop that kept getting faster as one hour turned into two, three and then four without my regular morning hit of heroin to get me through the day.
What am I going to do?
At first I was convinced I would be okay. My benefit payment was due the following morning and I told myself I could manage for one day without any brown.
But by the afternoon the flames licking at my intestines were already bordering on unbearable. And when beads of sweat began gathering on my forehead like a small army of soldiers, I was forced to acknowledge the fact that there was no way I could get through the rest of the afternoon, let alone the night, if I didn’t get myself some heroin.
So I asked myself again:
What am I going to do?
Not having a ready answer to that question had me in turmoil. I sat on the living room sofa with my foot tapping the floor impatiently as I tried, unsuccessfully I would imagine, to give Eva, who was lying on the rug in front of me with a book, the impression that all was well by keeping my gaze on the television screen. But I couldn’t even see or hear the television through the roar of those six words which bounded through my mind with excruciating force.
What am I going to do?
Without my usual fix to dull everything around me, it felt as if I was being forced to look straight up at the sun without anything to protect myself from the fearsome glare which was searing my eyes and burning right through to my brain.
I needed to close my eyes.
I was desperate to close my eyes but the only thing that would allow my eyelids to fall and form a protective shield against that golden ball of fire, was heroin. And without it I was defenceless, not only against the blinding sunlight, but against the mounting problems I could normally avoid looking at.
Of those problems, the one which assailed me the moment my eyelids flickered open was, of course, the problem of what I was going to do about Mohamed. A problem which set my stomach squirming and brought with it that terrifying sense of being in the path of a destructive juggernaut.
I hadn’t seen Mohamed since he gave me that money nearly three weeks ago, but his presence still managed to dominate my thoughts, especially since he had called me non-stop for the past two weeks ever since I failed to turn up at his house with Dante. I now had at least twenty missed calls from him, along with about a dozen voicemail messages, some of which I listened to, others I ignored. The messages were all the same anyway. He would start off shouting like a madman, telling me I was making him look like a fool and that he was going to call the police or call his lawyer if I didn’t tell him where his son was. They were all desperate threats born out of his helplessness. But the tone of the messages always changed towards the end. After he had released some of his pent-up anger and frustration, he would plead with me and tell me he needed me, he needed our son, and the misery I heard in his voice was hard to ignore, especially for the old me. I had no Dante to give to him. It didn’t matter how many times he called or how often he chose to come pounding on my front door whilst I hid in the bedroom with my hands over my ears, there was nothing I could do to change that fact.
Things couldn’t go on like this for much longer but I didn’t know how to sort out this awful mess without telling Mohamed the truth. And I couldn’t do that, especially since his five hundred pounds had long since been spent and there was no way for me to replace it.
Again I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t.
My source of income which came from the cloned credit cards had ended abruptly after a disagreement with the person who sold them to me. It had seemed at the time as if he was trying to rip me off. But thinking back to the situation, which was hazy in my mind, I had the distinct impression I had got things confused and made a mistake. I didn’t have any other income to rely on apart from my fortnightly benefit payment, which couldn’t pay for much of anything, let alone support my heroin use. So cutting off my only steady stream of income over a stupid argument was a mistake I would come to regret again and again.
Blowing my nose for the fourth time since sitting down, I let my head fall back against the sofa, giving up the pretence of watching television. I didn’t have many o
ptions where money was concerned. The only possibility, albeit a horrifying one that I tried not to let enter my mind, led me back to a memory I thought had been tucked safely away. It came back to haunt me now and I was swiftly taken to a shabby living room which smelt of stale cigarettes and dogs. I was sitting in a tatty beige sofa sneaking surreptitious glances at another girl to my right. She was a light-skinned girl a few years older than me who had a long brown weave and a mask of heavy make-up. She hadn’t even acknowledged me when I had been brought into the room but just sat staring out of the window, absentmindedly twisting a lock of hair round her finger, her hand coming down occasionally to tug at a short, white Lycra dress which refused to be pulled down any lower than her mid-thigh. I was dressed quite modestly, in comparison, in a fitted T-shirt and denim skirt which reached just above my knees. I had sat there wondering why Nigel had brought me to the flat and then left, leaving me to follow another woman in her early thirties. She had led me into this room, giving me no more than an enigmatic smile when I had looked hopefully at her for an answer to why I was there.
The doorbell had rung about fifteen minutes later and I had looked questioningly in the direction of the girl in the white Lycra dress. But she had steadfastly stared out of the window until the woman who let me in re-entered with a young white man in jeans, trainers and a hooded top. The answer to why Nigel had brought me to that flat had hit me even before the woman had politely asked her guest which one of us he would like.
I had tried to stay calm, but my eyes were already a lot wider than they normally were, my mouth had gone dry and my throat had squeezed itself shut as I watched him bring his finger up to waver uncertainly between the two of us like a pendulum. The relief that washed over me when that finger settled on the other girl was indescribable. It had also come with a surprising sense of humiliation at the rejection as she promptly stood up and followed them out of the room with a flick of her hair. But that hadn’t stopped me from bolting up out of my chair the moment I heard their footsteps begin to ascend an unseen staircase. I found my way out of that flat and toward the lifts. I didn’t even bother to wait for the lift when I got there but rushed past them to flee down about eight flights of stairs until I shot out of the block of flats into a thin drizzle of rain. I had hurried off that estate, eager to put as much space between myself and that grotty little flat and the filthy trade I’d had a brief glimpse of.
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon and most of the people I passed that day were parents with young children who were all suitably dressed for the weather. So I wasn’t surprised at the bemused glances I received from some of the people I swept past in my flimsy T-shirt, who obviously wondered why I was out without a coat or jacket.
I had walked around, looking for the main road in the cold, angry with that bastard Nigel and what he had tried to make me do. I didn’t even know where I was, I had no money to get myself home and no credit on my mobile phone so I couldn’t even call Nigel and tell him to come and get me. A film of sweat had already broken out on my forehead by then, along with a noticeable tremor in my hands. But when the pain began in my stomach, a pain I had never felt before at that stage of my love affair with heroin, I knew I had to do whatever I could to make it stop.
I had, by that time, walked for about fifteen minutes away from the flat but I turned back in that direction even though I was disoriented at that stage and unsure whether or not I would be able to find it.
I had to make that pain stop now. And what lay waiting for me at that flat seemed to be my only option. It wasn’t as if I would really be prostituting myself, I figured. I would only do it once, get myself enough money to make the pain stop and get myself home. Then I could cuss Nigel out and make sure he knew that something like that could, and never would, be an option for me.
Luckily for me, Daniel had pulled up beside me in his car as I walked jacketless in the rain, which was starting to get heavier. At that time he was merely an ugly old man I saw every once in a while who used to pester me for my number and promise me things if I would let him take me out somewhere. When he had pulled up beside me that day and offered me a lift, his presence had seemed like a godsend as it meant I could get out of the rain and back to the flat a lot quicker. So I had clambered into his car and as he pulled away from the kerb, I did my best to ignore the way his eyes took meaty bites out of my chest and bare legs and how sickening I found him.
“I need to go that way, Daniel,” I offered timidly with a nervous laugh when he steered the car in the opposite direction from the one my finger had pointed out to him.
“Yeah, I know. I jus’ need t’ get a coupla tings from da shop, den I’ll turn back up da road.”
I had stayed silent and was contemplating how to get myself out of his car when he opened the glove compartment and began casually searching through it with his free hand. Not seeming to find what he was looking for, he had closed it again, slowly, making sure I saw the two small bags of heroin that were tucked away in the back of the glove compartment. I doubted that letting me see it there was an accident, especially when he turned to me with a sickening smile.
“Where d’you say you wanted me t’ drop you off?”
I couldn’t answer him as I was still staring at the closed glove compartment, my body singing all the louder now I was in reaching distance of what it was calling for.
“I’ll tell you what. Lemme tek you to muh house an’ we can cotch dere for a while.”
I had nodded silently, my gaze still on the closed glove compartment.
“Yeah, I thought you might wanna do dat,” he had said with a laugh.
That bastard, I thought bitterly as I sat on my living room sofa, remembering how he had made me wait for my heavenly brown that day. He had toyed with me until I was so desperate that I would, and did, do anything he had asked of me.
But I hadn’t known then how much of me Daniel really wanted and how he would systematically do his best to break my mind over the next year and a half of my acquaintance with him. I also hadn’t known how hard it would be to get him to let go once he got a hold of me. But I did now, which was why I hadn’t called or seen Daniel since Mohamed gave me that money nearly three weeks ago.
But it didn’t stop Daniel from calling me. Unlike Mohamed, he didn’t leave behind any desperate voicemail messages even though his calls were a lot more frequent. Thankfully he didn’t know where I lived as I’d had the good sense not to tell him. But I knew he was just biding his time, his anger getting colder and harder with each unanswered phone call. And he no doubt expected to hear from me soon, when desperation finally led me back to his door. But that wasn’t going to happen. There was no way I would ever put myself at Daniel’s mercy ever again.
So...what am I going to do?
My mobile phone rang, making me jump. I glanced down at it and saw Daniel’s name flashing away on the screen like a warning sign. With a sneer, I turned off the ringer and placed the phone back down on the sofa.
Feeling Eva’s gaze on me, I looked up. But she deftly evaded my eyes and returned to the book she had open before her on the rug.
Eva. Something was definitely going on with Eva but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. All I knew for sure was that she had changed towards me and I wasn’t sure why. She had fallen uncharacteristically silent these days and was no longer asking me about Dante or Mohamed. I was also starting to notice the same closed look in her eyes I had seen in Nicola’s shortly after I had started seeing Mohamed. She didn’t say anything to me about the fact that my mobile phone rang constantly or about the fact that I ignored these calls. And she said even less about the increased traffic to my front door and the way in which I would cower as far away from the door as possible whenever it happened. All she did was stare at me silently with a knowing, all-seeing smile that told me everything and yet told me nothing at all. She was also secretive about some of her own phone calls and was even more guarded about what she did in the time we spent apart. S
he was keeping something from me. I was sure of it and that scared me because she was my only friend, the only normal thing in my world, the only thing I didn’t want to close my eyes against.
No longer wanting to think about whatever Eva was keeping from me, or the terrifying possibility that she would eventually disappear from my world as Nicola had done, I rose unsteadily from the sofa.
I couldn’t cope with the pain anymore. I picked up my phone and left the sitting room with a heavy feeling in my chest. I had to call Daniel before the pain in my stomach got worse.
I didn’t even notice Eva’s small black handbag in the corridor under the coat rack until I reached the toilet door. I glanced back at it with my hand hovering above the door handle and gazed thirstily at it. Then I walked back to the handbag and stood over it, those six words that had receded when I made the decision to call Daniel whispering earnestly in my ear, seeming to hypnotise me.
What am I going to do?
I stood there like that for a few seconds, which seemed like hours, listening to those words whispering in my head. Then I poked my head around the living room door.
Eva was still lying on her stomach with her legs stretched out behind her. I watched her lift up her head and release one of the hands clasped under her chin so that she could use a pencil to underline a section she had just read. Dropping the pencil, she yawned languidly, brought her hand back under her chin and lowered her head to the book once more. I doubted she had even noticed me leave the living room.
As if in a trance, which seemed to still every nerve in my body, I slowly scooped up the bag and walked to the bathroom. Once inside, I closed and locked the door behind me.
Suddenly out of my trance, I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my jumper, knelt down on the blue bathmat and emptied out the contents of the bag. I watched as a packet of pocket-sized tissues, a pen, some receipts, an Oyster travel card and finally a red purse, tumbled out of the bag and onto the bathmat. I reached for the purse and searched through it eagerly, finding nothing but a few coins. She didn’t even have a cash card with her.
