Love Me (16 page)

‘Well, I like her a lot. Plus seeing how her career is going, she'll prob'ly get work over here at some point.'

‘Right. Well. That's nice. That's nice.' Picture a broken elevator speeding down the shaft, crashing at the bottom. That's my belly. After several moments I ask him, dying: ‘Do you ever think, like, what's the point of all this?'

‘Of what?'

‘Everything. I mean, sometimes I just don't understand any of it.'

‘Here we go.'

‘I just think that dissatisfaction is the one constant in the human condition. It makes practically everything you do meaningless.'

‘You know what I think?'

‘What?'

‘I think you should go to sleep.'

‘Good idea,' I say. ‘Zed . . . do you hate me?'

‘Hate is a strong word.'

‘I've been having nightmares about my mother and then it all just keeps leaking into my awake time. You know, the mood, and the colours. They stain me all day. Does that ever happen to you? Do your dreams leak?'

‘They used to. I don't dream anymore.'

‘Everybody dreams.'

‘Not me,' he says. ‘I just . . . Look, I'm tired. Let's talk tomorrow or something. Close the door on your way out.'

‘What were you gonna say?'

‘Good night.'

I get up and go two steps toward the door before he stops me.

‘Eden,' he says softly, with that particular inflection of his that makes me a brand-new thing. ‘Why did you do it?'

‘What?' I ask, knowing.

‘The brick.'

It seems to me that my answer could change everything, past as well as present as well as future. I'm swallowed by fear. ‘I don't know.'

He lies back down. ‘Good night,' he says, colder this time.

I HAVE THESE
dreams lately where I'm on a staircase grabbing handfuls of my mother's gypsy skirt and the staircase ends in darkness and I can't even see the landing and I can't even see the steps all I can see is my mother's skirt and she won't slow down no matter how hard I pull and her feet are bare hitting my tiny face and shoulders and my little fists are straining trying to stop her walking up the steps and no matter how hard I shout we are both enveloped in silence not even her steps are audible and then the delicate fabric keeps tearing off in my fists and I leap and grab hold again and she's almost at the top and the fabric keeps tearing and I can't hold on and it's like she doesn't even know I'm there and she won't turn around she just keeps kicking me with every step and the fabric tears and I fall down the steps all the way to the bottom head over foot over head over foot and it hurts and I cry silently and scream at my mother but there is no sound and she's already completely disappeared into the thick darkness at the top of the steps—

AROUND EIGHT IN
the morning I give up on oblivion and stand in the shower for a while. The temperature is lukewarm. Trying to sleep with Zed in the house is a trial. I'm spent. Every time I start to drift off, I remember he's here and my mind is like a drop of water in hot oil. Carefully I shave my legs and armpits. When I'm clean, I put on a really nice lotion I stole from the Body Shop on a day I felt particularly invincible, file my feet smooth, paint my toenails orange. Peasant dress. Waist belt. Flip-flops. I painstakingly shape my brows the way Brandy taught me to and tug my hair into French braids with a handful of shine gel, praying no one lights a match within ten yards of my flammable head.

But when I get upstairs, Zed's room is empty.

The bed is made with barely a wrinkle. All his poetry is gone. No shoes beside the bed. No bags. It's only nine thirty. He didn't even say goodbye.

I sit on his bed for a moment to collect myself. It still smells like him in here. I feel ridiculous and bereft. I'm all dressed up with no one to show.

‘Hey,' he says, appearing in the doorway.

I jump to my feet.

A white T-shirt is stark against his skin; a duffel bag hangs off one shoulder.

He says: ‘What are you doing in here?'

‘Zed!' I tug at my clothes, tell him I thought he left.

‘No,' he says, ‘not yet. I was out on the front steps wakin' and bakin'.'

‘Oh.'

‘I thought it was good manners to knock first.'

‘I did knock.'

‘Did I answer?' He raises an eyebrow. I laugh, defeated, face gone sunset.

‘Where you off to so early?'

‘I've got a session.'

‘Right,' I say, trying not to sound distraught. ‘Like, in the studio?'

‘Yep.'

‘Cool.'

He hesitates. ‘You?'

‘I. Uh. I don't know, really. I was just gonna drift around a little bit. See the sights or something.'

‘Alright.' He gives my little makeover a subtle exploration with his eyes. I tingle.

‘Well, see ya,' he says, heading for the front door. ‘I'm out.'

‘Zed . . . wait,' I say to his back. ‘You going to the subway?'

He turns around, flickers momentarily. ‘Yeah,' he says and I try not to look desperate. ‘Yeah,' he repeats. ‘Come on.'

‘OMEGA!' A GRIZZLY
bear of a man dressed head-to-toe in oversized, heavily branded clothing pulls the door open. He grins, one gold tooth catching the light. ‘What's good, alphabet geek?'

‘Everything! You know I'm a contented son of a bitch,' says Zed. The bear laughs high-pitched like a girl or a velvet-wearing pimp. ‘Hey, Bleak, this is Eden. She'll just be here loitering 'cause her time is obviously pretty cheap right now.'

‘What's good, ma?'

‘Not much.'

The bear laughs again. He and Zed smack palms and we're ushered into a low-lit, messy apartment with black leather sofas and black heroes framed on the walls, from Mohammed Ali to a big-haired Angela Davis. It smells like years of daily marijuana abuse and the musky odour of people sleeping in their street clothes. A widescreen TV displays mute booty-shaking.

‘Omega?' I enquire.

‘I go by many names, precious,' Zed replies and his manner is slippery. I wonder what I've gotten myself into. We didn't talk much on the way here, too close for small talk and too guarded for anything else. On the subway, he gave me directions for some good art galleries in Manhattan and Harlem, and for the Statue of Liberty in case I was feeling mainstream. After he'd finished his tour guide impression, I asked him where the studio was.

‘Queens,' he said.

‘I've never,' I struggled, ‘I've never been to Queens.' Zed smiled and shook his head almost imperceptibly. I was like a gambler hoping that eventually my luck would change if I just stayed in the game. I should have fought myself harder, but maybe I'd managed to convince myself, as we took our silent trip under New York, that if we didn't speak, he wouldn't notice that we'd failed to part ways.

And now, apparently, my ‘time is cheap'. I don't know if that's a bad reflection on him or on me.

Bleak offers me some Koolaid. I decide that drinking anything unsealed in this apartment is probably a bad idea.

‘No thanks.'

‘Suit yourself,' he grins knowingly. ‘Well, come on through and listen to some of these beats.'

He leads us into an even dimmer room, which likely housed a bed in a former life but now is rigged up with a computer, mixing desk, and countless other unknown gadgets. Zed takes a seat in the leather swivel chair furthest from the computer. Bleak lets me sit in the one directly in front of it.

‘Just for a hot minute though, ma. Only the captain gets to sit at the helm, you feel me?'

Bleak flicks a switch and the apartment is flooded with repetitive, beat-heavy music, dark and discordant. Zed magicks a spliff out into the open and lights it, head nodding in time.

‘You feelin' that, son?'

‘It's marvellous.'

‘You got something for it?'

‘Any second now.'

‘Alright, I'm gonna let you hear some of the other shit I've been working on.' Bleak looks at me. ‘So now you gonna have to scoot over onto the amateur's chair, baby
girl!' he says, pointing one giant finger at a worn little two-seater sofa in the corner of the room. I go over there and perch like a canary. ‘Perfect.'

‘What time is Nami coming through?' Zed asks, mid-toke.

‘You know how she's always late, man! It was supposed to be an hour ago, but who knows?'

They smoke so hard that after forty minutes or so I'm starting to lose any little cognitive ability I had to begin with. They don't speak to me. Bleak plays some different beats and Zed scribbles intensely in a tiny notebook, mumbling. He carries himself differently here and it's like he's a stranger.

‘London girl! What you doing?'

I lower the clicker. ‘I was, um, just taking a couple of pictures. Is that OK?'

‘You a narc?'

‘No.'

‘CIA? FBI? SWV?'

I laugh. ‘No!'

‘Then you good, ma. You cool. You got skills?'

‘I suppose.'

‘Well, let me see them photos when you done. We need some shit for the site.'

In five minutes I've captured it all. The heat and the smoke wring every ounce of will out of my body and I lay my head on the arm of the sofa, giving in to the inevitable. I wake up when a door slams and there's suddenly a very loud woman's voice in the room.

‘Zed! Damn you are one good-looking motherfucker! Make me scared to look in a mirror.' They both laugh. I open my eyes and the girl's bum is at eye-level in jeans so tight that the little flesh she has spills over the top. I try to press back into the wall, terrified that any moment she'll sit on my head. ‘Shit, Bleak, what you lookin' at? You know
your ass
always
has been and
always
will be ugly. Can't have everything, huh, playa?'

‘Shut your pie-hole, fish face.'

I figure the only way to avoid being crushed by denim-butt is to stand. She jumps and turns, gives me a brazen look head-to-toe.

‘Hey! Didn't see you back there!' she says and she's pretty enough. A Demerara brown girl with big sleepy eyelids, a long fake ponytail and equally fake nails.

‘Yeah. Nice to meet you.'

‘Nami.'

‘Eden.'

‘What kinda accent you . . .?'

‘I'm from London.'

‘London, England?' She flicks her ponytail.

‘Yep.'

‘Oh snap!' she says, laughing. ‘They got sisters over there now?'

‘A few.'

‘OK. Welcome to Queens then, Ms Black Princess Dian-a.'

‘She's dead.'

Nami smiles and winks at me, turns back to her banter with the guys. I sit back down. Bleak plays her the first beat he put on when I came in.

‘We think you should put one of your dirty hooks on this one, fish face.'

She nods her head, begins humming a melody. Bleak gets her a stool to sit on from another room. I guess he was serious about my chair being for outsiders only.

Nine p.m. and I've been here all day long sitting in this funky chair falling in and out of consciousness. Zed and the crew have recorded three tracks or so and lit up
constantly. I'm higher than a plane mid-Atlantic and queasy from a couple of slices of sweaty-looking pizza I had hours ago. And still hungry. Not a good combination. I wish I could leave myself here and go.

‘Hey, princess!' says Bleak, snapping his fingers in front of my face. ‘Princess?' he turns to Zed. ‘Dude! This chick has gone into a trance.'

‘What?' I say.

‘You wanna do a little skit for the album?' he says. ‘That accent of yours is delightful.'

‘You mean like, be on Zed's album?'

‘No,' says Zed, ‘I don't do gimmicks.'

‘It would be for a side project me and Nami are doing,' says Bleak.

‘Oh.'

‘Don't keel over from excitement or anything,' the bear laughs.

‘What would I have to do?'

‘Pretend like you're a stern schoolteacher.'

‘Are you serious?'

‘I'm gonna be your naughty student,' he swigs his massive bottle of beer, ‘and you gotta tell me to behave otherwise I get a spanking.'

I look at Zed.

‘I can't do that!'

‘You just gotta pretend, ma. I ain't really gonna make you punish me with a ruler.'

Nami almost falls over. ‘Bleak, you are a hot mess.'

‘Unless you
want
to . . .' the bear continues, twirling his untwirlable moustache. ‘Do you?'

‘Fuck off!'

‘Oooh! Cool it, Princess. I was just kidding. Seriously, you gonna help us out with this thing?'

I look at Zed but he's talking to Nami, laughing at us.
One of her slim, heavily ringed hands is on his arm.

‘Yeah. Alright,' I say. ‘I'll do it.'

Bleak sets me up in a box room next door that's been soundproofed and converted into a booth. I've been here all day so I might as well make it count for something. I put the headphones on and Bleak tells me what to say.

‘Just start with that little script I gave you, then go with it. Do what you wanna do! I'll be talking back to you through the cans; that'll help keep it natural, know what I'm sayin'?'

When he's gone I switch the light off.

‘I'm just gonna set some levels. Say something to me, ma.'

‘One, two. One, two,' I say into the mic. Cough. My voice is so loud. The silence around it is velvet. ‘One, two.'

‘OK, just freestyle it. Have fun. I'm gonna put in my parts later . . . You ready?'

‘Um. Yeah.'

Couple of beats go by in the dark. ‘When you're ready,' he says.

‘Cease your insolence, boy!' I say, imagining Zed in school uniform. ‘If you speak one more time while I'm speaking, you are going to be a very, very sorry young man! Very sorry. I've had enough of your back chat!' I pretend that I'm powerful and sexy. Rocking a skin-tight pencil skirt and wire-rimmed spectacles. I fear no man. ‘I run this classroom, not you, you snivelling little worm!' I imagine having a whip in my drawer. I don't follow boys around begging for scraps of attention. They sweat when they see me and put apples on my desk. ‘Say it! I'm pathetic and stupid and I deserve a spanking.'