“What?”
“Why you asking me. Why don’t she ask me?”
“Your man’s got his feet on her seat, blud.”
“But is it your business, though? Why you tryna make it your business? Who you callin’ blud? I ain’t your blud.”
“I didn’t say it was my—”
“Is it your business, though? You got a seat — you fucking get up.” Felix tried to defend himself; the kid waved a hand in his face. “Shut up — fool.”
The other guy opened one eye and laughed quietly. Felix stood up.
“Take mine — I’m getting off.”
“Thank you.” Felix saw how badly she was shaking, and that her eyes were watery. He angled himself out of her way, and felt the moist skin of her arms against his own. She sat down. She looked directly at the two men. Her voice was wobbly: “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she said.
They were pulling into Kilburn Station. The carriage was silent. No one looked — or they looked so quickly their glances were undetectable. Felix felt a great wave of approval, smothering and unwanted, directed toward him, and just as surely, contempt and disgust enveloping the two men and separating them, from Felix, from the rest of the carriage, from humanity. They seemed to feel it: abruptly they both stood and hustled toward the door, where Felix already stood waiting. He could hear the inevitable thrum of cusses, directed at him. The doors blessedly opened; Felix found himself shoulder-charged; he stumbled onto the platform like a clown. Laughter, close, then vanishing. He looked up to see the soles of their trainers as they took the stairs two at a time, jumped the barrier and disappeared.
• • •
Trees shaggy overhead. Hedges wild over fences. Every crack in the pavement, every tree root. The way the sun hits the top deck of the 98. The walls have grown taller outside the Jewish school, and outside the Muslim one. The Kilburn Tavern has been repainted, shiny black with gold lettering. If he hurries he may even get home before her. Lie down in that clean room, that good place. Pull her into his body. Start all over again, fresh.
Outside the Tavern, Felix spotted Hifan and Kelly eating a tray of chips at a picnic table, both of them from his year at school — he bald, she still looking fine. To get a laugh Felix high-fived Hifan, kissed Kelly on her cheek, stole a chip, and walked on, like it was all one movement, a form of dance. “What you so happy about?” Kelly called after him, and Felix shouted, “Love, shorty, L.O.V.E. LOVE!” without turning round, and did his pimp-roll walk, and enjoyed the laughter as he disappeared smoothly round the corner. Nobody to see him collide with the gray bins out the back. He steadied himself with a hand to the Tavern’s back door: fancy colored glass now and a new brass doorknob. Wood floors where carpets used to be, real food instead of crisps and scratchings. About six quid for a glass of wine! Jackie wouldn’t recognize it. Maybe by now she’d be one of those exiles on the steps of the betting shop, clutching a can of Special Brew, driven from the pubs by the refits. Maybe she was never that bad. It was impossible to know, with Lloyd, how much was true, how much pure venom. Felix glanced through the window to the interior: no more velvety corner booth. Where he had sat with his sisters, six little feet not even touching the ground, earnestly listening to Jackie give her leaving speech. Some new man she’d met who made her feel free. Lived in Southampton, some white guy. At seven you don’t know. He didn’t know that freedom was something you could feel. He thought it was something you simply were. He didn’t know where Southampton was. He loved his own father and did not want to go and live with a strange white man. Only when the conversation was almost over did it occur to Felix that she wasn’t asking him to come to Southampton. Two years later, she turned up in London with a light brown baby boy. Left Devon with Lloyd and went — wherever. Wherever she went.
• • •
On Albert Road Felix fell in step behind a tall girl in tight red jeans and black spaghetti-strapped vest. She had broad shoulders and a square trunk. She had more muscles than Felix, and as she walked her muscles moved together, fluid and complicated: the way the arms attached to the back and to the backside and to the hips. Not like Grace at all, who was shorter and curvier and softer. This woman could pick Felix up and run with him all the way home, put him down on his doorstep like a baby. She wore a lot of cheap silver rings, green round their bands, and running down one forearm a tattoo of a flower with a long, winding stem. Her heels were dry and cracked. The label on her top was showing. Should he tuck it in? A trickle of sweat ran from her ear, along her neck and down her back, straight down that muscled division — strongly defined — between her left side and her right. Her phone rang. She answered it and called somebody “Baby.” She turned right. Another life. Felix felt someone push two fingers hard into his back.
“Money. Phone. Now.”
They were either side of him. Hoods up but perfectly visible. Same two from the train. Not much taller than he was. Not much wider, either. It had just turned six o’clock.
“NOW.”
He felt himself being jostled, manhandled. He looked up at their faces. The talkative one, the one doing all the cussing, was truly a kid; the other, the silent one, was closer to Felix’s own age, and too old for such foolishness. He had ashy hands, like Felix’s own, and the same dull sheen to his face. Along his cheek a scar ran. He was local somehow, familiar. Felix tried turning away but they swung him back round. He swore at them at length, creatively, and looked to his right: four houses down the tall girl put a key to a lock and went inside.
“Listen, I ain’t giving you nothing. Nothing!”
He found himself on the pavement. As he got back up on his knees he heard one of them say, “Big man on the train. Ain’t the big man now.” And instead of fear, a feeling of pity came over him; he remembered when being the big man was all that mattered. He reached into his pockets. They could have his phone. They could have the lone twenty in his pocket if it came to that. He’d been mugged many times and knew the drill. When he was younger they might have wounded his ego; now the old fury and humiliation were gone — they could have it all. Everything he cared about was elsewhere. He tried to laugh at them as he handed over his meager valuables: “Should have caught me two hours ago, blud. Two hours ago I was loaded.” The kid gave him a dead-eyed look, face set in a violent pout. It was a necessary mask, without which he could not do what he was doing. “And the stones,” said the kid. Felix touched his ears. Treasured zirconias, a present from Grace.
“You’re dreamin’,” he said.
He turned once more toward the street. A breeze passed over the three of them, filling their hoods and sending a cloud of sycamore leaves spinning to the pavement. A firm punch came to his side. Punch? The pain sliced to the left, deep and down. Warm liquid reversed up his throat. Over his lips. Yet it couldn’t be oblivion as long as he could name it, and with this in mind he said aloud what had been done to him, what was being done to him, he tried to say it, he said nothing. Grace! Down Willesden Lane a bus came rumbling; at the same moment in which Felix glimpsed the handle and the blade he saw the 98 reopen its doors to accept the last soul in sight — a young girl in a yellow summer dress. She ran with her ticket held high above her head like the proof of something, got there just in time, cried out “Thank you!” and let the doors fold neatly behind her.
HOST
1. These red pigtails
There had been an event. To speak of it required the pluperfect. Keisha Blake and Leah Hanwell, the protagonists in this event, were four-year-old children. The outdoor pool — really a shallow trough in the park, one foot at its deepest end — had been full of kids, “splashing all ways, causing madness.” There was no lifeguard at the time of the event, and parents were left to keep an eye as best they could. “They had a guard up the hill, in Hampstead, for them. Nothing for us.” This was an interesting detail. Keisha — now ten years old and curious about the tensions between grown people — tried to get at its meaning. “Stop gazing. Lift your foot,” said her mother. They sat on a bench in a shoe shop on the Kilburn High Road getting measured for a pair of dull brown shoes with a t-strap that did not express any of the joy that must surely exist in the world, despite everything. “I’ve got Cheryl acting wild in one corner, I got Jayden in my arms bawling, and I’m trying to see where you are, trying to keep it all together…” It was in this ellipsis that the event had occurred: a child nearly drowned. Yet the significance of the event lay elsewhere. “You rose up with these red pigtails in your hand. You dragged her up. You were the only one saw she was in trouble.” After the event, the mother of the child, an Irish woman, thanked Marcia Blake many times, and this in itself was a kind of event. “I knew Pauline to look at but not to speak to. She was a bit snooty with me back then.” Keisha could neither contradict nor verify this account — she had no memory of it. However, the foreshadowing could be considered suspicious. Her own celebrated will and foresight so firmly established, and Cheryl already wild and unreliable. Also, Jayden could not have been born at the time of the event, being five years younger than Keisha. “Keep still now,” murmured Marcia, pushing the steel bar down to meet her daughter’s toes.