• • •
From the doorway, Felix watched Lloyd settle into the old gray velour couch with his book, arrange a little pile of Hobnobs on the glass side table, the tea next to it, carefully balancing the joint at a genteel angle so the table was saved while the ash crumbled to the carpet. He considered asking his father when he’d last spoken to Devon, but chose, instead, the path of self-preservation. “Lloyd, I’m gonna chip.” “You just got here!” “I know — but I gotta chip. Got shit to do.” Felix slapped the doorframe in what he hoped was a cheery, conclusive way. “For who?” said Lloyd coolly, without looking up, “For you or she?” It was that particular tone, inquiring and high — and suddenly Jamaican — coiling up to Felix like a snake rising from its basket. He tried to laugh it off—“Come on now, don’t start that, man”—but Lloyd knew to place his poison with precision: “I’m trying to train you up, right? It’s not that you don’t hear me, Felix, it’s that you don’t want to hear me. You’re the big man these days. But let me arks you some ting: why you still chasing after the females like they can save your life? Seriously. Why? Look at Jasmine. You nah learn. The man cyan’t satisfy the woman, right? Don’t matter how much he gives. The woman is a black hole. I’ve gone deep into the literature, Felix. Biological, social, historical, every kind of oracle. The woman is a black hole. Your mudder was a black hole. Jasmine was a black hole. This one you got now is the same, and she’s nice looking, too, so she’s gonna suck you in all the way before you realize she’s sucked you dry. The finer they are, the worse it is.” Lloyd took a large, satisfying slurp from his tea. “You give me jokes,” said Felix, weakly, and just about managed to make it out of the room.
In the hall, forcing his feet back into his Nikes, Felix heard Lloyd’s hand come down hard upon a page. “Felix: come!” He returned to find his father bending the spine of the book back, pressing at the crease between two pages until it was flat. “Right there at the edge: with the flowery dress — I remember the flowers, they was purple. Hundred and twenty percent. Serious! Why you always doubting me? That’s Jackie. Listen, when she was big with the girls she wore flat shoes, right? Always. Never wore flats unless she had to, right? Too vain.” Lloyd reached out for his smoke, content with this logic. Felix sat on the arm of the sofa and looked down at the alleged elbow and left foot of his mother. Some hopeful muscle in him tried to flex, but it was weak from past misuse. He leaned against the wall. Lloyd moved to bring the book closer to Felix’s face. It was a greenhouse in this place, it was unbearable. The walls were sweating! Lloyd slapped the page again. “That. Is. Jackie. Hundred and twenty percent.” “I’ve got to chip,” said Felix, kissed Lloyd briefly on his cheek, and fled.
• • •
The air outside was cool by comparison; he wiped his face and concentrated on breathing like a normal person. As he pulled the door to, the next flat along did the same. Phil Barnes. Sixty, now? He was trying to lift the heavy flower pot that sat outside his front door. He peered over at Felix, who smiled and pushed his cap back off his face.
“All right, Felix!”
“All right, Mr. Barnes.”
“Held him on my knee. Now he calls me Mr. Barnes.”
“All right, Barnesy.”
“More like it. Christ, this is heavy. Don’t just stand there looking like a ‘youth,’ Felix. Like a ne’er-do-well YOUTH. Give us a hand with this, will you?” Felix held the pot up. “That’s the ticket.”
Felix watched as Phil Barnes looked up and down the walkway like a secret agent, dropped a key on the floor and kicked it underneath.
“Terrible isn’t it? Me, worried about my property like an old lady. Like a PLUTOCRAT. Before you know it I’ll be saying things like ‘You can never be too careful!’ Just kill me when I get to that point, all right, Felix? Just put a bullet between my eyes.” He laughed and took off his little round Lennon glasses to clean them with his t-shirt. He looked searchingly at Felix, suddenly mole-like and vulnerable. “You off to carnival, Felix?”
“Yeah. Probably. Tomorrow. Saturday today, though, innit.”
“Course it is, course it is. My brain’s failing me. How’s your dad? Not seen him out and about much, recently.”
“Lloyd’s all right. Lloyd’s Lloyd.”
It touched Felix that Phil Barnes was kind enough to pretend, to Felix, that he, Barnes, and his neighbor of thirty years were on speaking terms. “That’s eloquence, Felix! ‘A word can paint a thousand pictures!’ Well it can, can’t it? Though thinking about it, isn’t it the other way round, come to think of it: a picture can paint a thousand words?”
Felix shrugged pleasantly.
“Ignore me, Felix! I’ve become one of the doddering old. Must bore you to tears listening to the likes of me. I remember when I was young, I couldn’t be having it, old people complaining, going on. Let the young get on with it! Have a bit faith in them! Let them do their own thing! I’m a bit anti-establishment, you know, but then I was a Mod, wasn’t I. Still am, in my own way. But these days,” said Phil, and put a hand on the balcony rail, “well, they just feel no hope, the young people, Felix, no hope, we’ve used all their resources, haven’t we, used them up, well, we have! And now I’m giving you another lecture, aren’t I? Run away! Run away! I’m like the ‘Silver Tsunami!’ You read that? It was in The Guardian the other week. ‘Silver Tsunami.’ That’s me, apparently. Born between 1949 and 19 something else. Selfish baby-boomer. We’ve taken all the resources, you see. I said that to Amy and she said, ‘Well, what have we got to bloody show for it?!’ That made me laugh. She’s not very politically minded, Amy, you see, but she means well. She does mean well,” said Phil, and looked troubled, for he had strayed too far from small talk right to the center of things — it happened more and more these days — and now must try to return to the things that didn’t matter. “How old are you now, Felix?”
Felix punched a fist into his other waiting palm. “Thirty-two. I’m getting old. Ain’t even funny no more.”
“Well, it never is, is it? That’s why they complain all the time, the old. I’m beginning to have some sympathy with them, I can tell you — aches and pains. Press that button now, will you? Broken? Ah well, let’s take the stairs — better for you. Those lifts are really a disgrace.” Felix pushed the fire door wide and held it open for Barnesy. “On the other hand they’ve got nothing else to do, have they, these kids? That’s what gets me. That’s what someone should say.”
Together they made their way down the narrow breeze-block stairwell, Barnesy in front, Felix behind. From the back it was a sort of time travel to look at him, no fatter or thinner, no change in the clothes, no sign of the twenty-year distance between then and now. His fine, fair hair was turning white in a subtle silvery way, so it seemed to be simply getting blonder, and it still fell, in a young man’s style, just to his shoulders, which were rounded and bear-like and soft as they always had been. He still wore a black waistcoat, undone, with a CND badge on the lapel, over an enormous white t-shirt, and elasticated jeans in a light blue wash. In his back pockets he kept a pair of soft slippers, for putting on the moment his rounds were finished. You’d see him in Rose’s café on the high road, slippers on, eating his lunch. Felix had thought this an eccentric touch until he, too, delivered the post, for five months only, at the turn of the century, and found it to be the most exhausting work he’d ever done.