Love Me (13 page)

‘A microwave and a canvas and I'd probably never have to leave this room.'

‘You don't,' she says. ‘You're safe. You're safe with Umi.'

When Brandy leaves, a panic starts in my chest, the full weight of the house pushing down on me. I sink down on the bed and find a note there. Purple handwriting on rough, cream paper.

Cherry Pepper,

Breathe. You are exactly where you need to be.

I hope you enjoy the basement. I thought of you while I
decorated it, knowing you'd return to us, so make yourself at home. Brandy's in the ground-floor front bedroom, the one that used to be the dining room. Violet and her baby live on the second floor. Baba lives up there sometimes too, in the front, second-floor bedroom. You go to him if you have any practical problems, if anything breaks or fails or has to get fixed. If he's around, you can ask him for a ride if you need to get somewhere.

For now, you'll find me at the top of the house but don't worry too much if I'm not around. My people are your people. Go to them if you need them.

Take time, niece. I'm glad you're here.

Aunt K.

I WAKE UP
to light streaming down through the ‘refractive tube'. And for a bright, clear second, I have no clue where I am, or when, or even who. The gelatinous heat settles into all my creases, eager to welcome a new victim. I'm a pile of sweaty limbs and a mouth of carpet, heavy as a bucket of water from toenail to split end. I can't believe I made it.

Last night, Violet cooked catfish and fried chicken, rice and greens and banoffee pie for dessert. I got the impression that it was a cherished event to have Aunt K and her niece at the table. She flitted and fussed, smiling her sweet, dimpled smile. I ate every scrap I was given and kept my trap shut. Let others talk. The timbre of Violet's rich voice – even speaking – slumped me in my chair, interweaving as it did with Aunt K's alto and the bass of Baba's untraceable accent. Soon there were no words, only a running harmony of tones and the dark behind my eyelids.

My aunt led me, half-blind with fatigue, down to my bed. She tucked me in like a child, saying she'd be busy today but that Brandy would happily reacquaint me with the city.

Sure enough, this morning there's a note slipped under the door. Brandy tells me in her round, curly handwriting about the muffins on the counter, waffles in the freezer and syrup in the cupboard for breakfast. She had to run out for a beauty appointment but will be back real soon for our ‘diva excursion'.
Get fly!
she writes.
Later! Brandy xoxo.

Get
fly
? I ball up the note and fire it into the nearby
waste basket. Sigh. I stare back at my jet-lagged self from the mirror pasted to the wall. I've come all this way but still, here I am. Just the same as always. I don't think I even know how to be
fly
(pretty, tarted, groomed, slick, exclusive). I feel distinctly un-airborne. Ankle-weighted, in fact.

After an exasperated shower, I dress in my neatest shorts and T-shirt and fight my hair into a ponytail, but by the time I've done that, I'm practically drenched all over again. Feels like I've done a day's worth of manual labour.

‘Brandy?'

No sign yet. It's quiet as I climb the stairs up to the kitchen, a silence flavoured by the merest suggestion of a children's television programme wafting down from Violet's floor. A paper bag full of muffins sits on the counter just as Brandy said. The sweet, fresh-baked smell of them is so
America
, a scent that jolts me back to the first time here. I remember the sweetness of being fifteen, even angry as I was then, the sweetness of absolutes and brand-new places. I will never be back there again, at the beginning of that summer. I avert my gaze from the window and its view out into the back yard. I don't have to look out there to know it's crowded with ghosts.

I go out and sit on the sun-blasted front steps to wait for Brandy with my muffin, a book, and my camera. The odd car goes by, light sparking against the metal, music blaring from the speakers. Some kids across the road are embroiled in a raucous tiff.
Click, click, click
goes my clicker. A girl poised inelegantly between childhood and adolescence stands with arms akimbo, hundreds of little braids in her hair, yelling at a boy with a potbelly and cornrows. A shorter girl in pigtails looks on gleefully.
Your mama! – Don't you talk about my mama! – Why? – Whatchoo gonna do about it? – Oooh! Are you gonna let her
talk
to you like that?
Are
you?!

A guy comes out of the house next door to the kids and
walks up toward Flatbush Avenue. Not as flash or as tall, but he reminds me of Zed – the New York swagger of him. It makes my heart do the fandango. I remember Zed as a teenager, us walking up this same street, sitting on these steps. Makes me miss him so hard it's an anguish of the bones, blood, muscle – but that's nothing new. I've always missed him, even when we're together, because no amount of belly butterflies or sleepless nights can help a person reach past the limits of the skin, or the boundaries of their mind. No matter how much we wish we could know a loved one's thoughts, we're deaf to them; and no matter how much we love somebody we can't stay with them. If life fails to steal them from us, then death will do it.

What a blind headfuck of a thing it all is.

‘It looks,' says Brandy, suddenly in front of me, resplendent in a white summer dress, ‘like you got a lot going on inside that brain of yours, girl! Don't hurt yourself!'

‘Nothing useful,' I tell her.

‘Well, you need to wipe that sour look off your face and smile, honey dip! It's a beautiful summer day in Brooklyn!' She sweeps her arm out like a model on one of those American game shows.
Look at what you've won!!!
‘The question is, what do you wanna do with it?'

I shrug. ‘I don't know,' I tell her. ‘I'm all yours.'

We walk to Prospect Park station and buy Metrocards from the machines, go through big metal turnstiles, down the steps to the platform. The subway is moody like I remember it, the light a dim yellow, the air blistering hot. A few moments later we get on a cold train full of slightly weird characters you'd be afraid to make eye contact with. Brandy and I ride in near silence, jolting quietly through the underworld. I stare at all the boys staring at her and try not to laugh. She is quaintly oblivious.

We emerge above ground at Atlantic Avenue to electric blue skies and sidewalks thick with noise and people.

‘Do you mind if we stop here for a second? I just need to get a couple of things, and then we can go up to Manhattan, do the tourist thing?'

We cross over the street to the mall, push through the double doors into the welcome air-conditioning. All the families are out shopping. Children are yelled at and cuddled, teenagers skulk about looking embarrassed or full of themselves depending on who they're with. The women look mostly harassed, the men unperturbed.

We hang around examining the stalls and going from store to store, Brandy yacking about bargains and body types. I finger stretchy T-shirts and rhinestone-studded jeans and tiny, bright dresses. No wonder Zed thinks I'm a slob. New York girls don't waste a single curve on excess fabric. Or even New York boys dressed as girls.

‘I bet London shopping is ten times better, right?'

‘I dunno . . . Kind of, maybe.'

‘More individual?'

‘Yeah, I suppose. But a lot of us are “individual” in exactly the same way though, ya gets? Hand built by robots.'

‘Funny!' she laughs.

‘But, as you can see,' I say, gesturing at my outfit, ‘what I know about fashion could fit inside the average pimple.'

‘Nah,' says Brandy with a rapid, surreptitious glance, ‘you alright, girl. Nothing wrong with you.'

She goes off to the till point to pay for some dangly earrings and two tank tops. I catch her up at the door.

‘Are you serious? There's nothing wrong with me?' I look from her blinding white dress to the ragged thoughtlessness of my outfit and back again. ‘You don't have to be nice just because I'm a foreigner, you know. I'm a mess!'

‘Damn,' she laughs. ‘Why I always gotta end up somebody's fashion guru?'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘It's OK, it's OK. With talent comes responsibility, right?' she says, waving her dainty hand in dismissal. ‘You're not a mess, Eden. People always start talking like that when their mind has changed but their fashion hasn't. What's your problem with how you look? It's not working for you anymore?'

‘I just . . .' I say helplessly, dangling like a hooked fish. ‘I don't know.'

She smiles. ‘Probably all you gotta do is take that look of yours and throw some glitter on it, you know what I'm saying? Your aunt is always complaining that women these days don't know their power.' She taps one long pink nail thoughtfully against her lips. ‘Come on, let's go. I'm gonna take you to my favourite store. Maybe we should be tourists some other time.'

We go back out into the faint-worthy, horizon-distorting heat.

‘I don't feel like I've got any at all,' I say eventually.

‘Any what?'

‘Power.'

Brandy sighs and shakes her head. The smell of melted cheese floats out of a pizza place. A group of teenaged boys walk toward us, broad as cowboys, talking animatedly about basketball.

‘Everybody's got
absolute
power over themselves, girl,' she says. ‘The question is, what do you do with it? You decide what to wear and how to walk and whether or not you accessorise. You do all of that with, like, a goal in mind, either consciously or subconsciously.'

‘Really, though?'

‘Yep.'

We walk along for a while, her wearing a look of schooled nonchalance on her face and me fighting myself. But eventually I have to ask the obvious. ‘Well, what do my clothes say about me, then?'

Brandy stops right in the middle of the street and flips her hair out of her eyes, gives me the head-to-toe. Like every one of her gestures, it's an event in and of itself. ‘Turn around,' she commands, ignoring the hard stares people throw her way. I do as requested and she shakes her head. ‘You got issues, honey,' she says and starts walking again.

I roll my eyes. ‘Oh, well, thanks for that! What are you? Psychic?'

‘Just kidding,' she laughs. ‘Are you ready for the real?'

I nod.

‘Well, from what I can see,' she glances at me, ‘you're working an arty, creative look. But it has an edge on it, like you're trying to keep people at a distance, you know what I'm saying? Not bring them in. The shapes aren't that flattering. You play your body down rather than play it up. Your posture is
horrible
, like you're afraid that if you took it up a notch and were sexy and feminine, that you actually wouldn't be able to compete with other women.'

‘Damn. OK.'

‘But,' she says with a narrow-eyed smile, ‘at the same time, I look at your wrinkled, frayed clothes and it's like you
want
somebody to see all the cracks and take care of you. Give you a hug and a glass of milk.'

We stop outside a shop with a naked mannequin in the window. She doesn't ask me if she hit a chord. She has complete confidence.

‘Anyway, you have to see this place. It's the best thrift store in Brooklyn and you were born for vintage.'

‘I don't even like milk,' I tell her, but she just smiles and
waves me through the doors. The bell tinkles and immediately there's a camp roar from the back of the shop.

‘MS GORGEOUS!!!'

‘JAY!'

A rustle of hangers and a small, pretty man dressed in a slim black shirt, black drainpipes and a white belt darts out from behind the till and air kisses her with gusto.

‘How you doing? You look
ridiculous
fine, girl!'

‘You too. Working that little Emo look you got going on! You met somebody new, huh?'

‘Girl! You like the psychic network in a Wonderbra! Holla!'

They dissolve into giggles. ‘So,' Jay says eventually, giving me my second head-to-toe of the day. This one less forgiving. ‘Who's your friend?'

‘This is Umi's niece over from London. Eden, Jay, Jay, Eden.'

‘You're kidding! Oh my God . . . wow! That woman is true royalty. How you doing?' he says, throwing his hand out.

‘Hey,' I say and shake it.

‘How you like New York?' he says to me, leaning against the cash register. I marvel at his voice and manner; he's like a teenaged black girl trapped in a twenty-something white man's body.

‘Cool so far,' I say. ‘Well, bloody hot. But cool.'

He laughs. ‘How long are you here for?'

‘I dunno . . . Three months at least.'

‘Wow, that's a long trip.'

I shrug and nod.

Brandy sighs. ‘Yada yada yada. Enough small talk, pretty boy! What you got to show me?'

‘Weell . . .' Jay smiles. ‘It's a very good day in thrift store land! Come on through. I just got these in today . . .' They walk off between the aisles. ‘That dress is
hot
, by the way! You tryin' to hurt people's feelings out here or what?'

The store is brightly lit and orderly, not like I expected at all. It doesn't smell of mothballs or the elderly. There's so much stuff I'm momentarily paralysed.

‘Hey, Eden!'

‘Yeah?'

‘What you doing over there, girl?'

‘Nothing.'

‘That's the problem! Go look at some threads! That's what we here for.'

It seems like just seconds later that Brandy is squealing at me from the back of the store. ‘Come see my outfit!'

I follow the squeal and she's stood in front of an antique standing mirror, smoothing a sixties mini-dress down over her narrow hips.