Chabella sits by me and insists I rise. That’s exactly how she says it: ‘Rise.’ Her hands caress my face; her voice is thinner than tracing paper.
‘Tomás told me that you’ve lost your collar,’ I tell her finally, because it is either that or cry. I remember how heavy she told me the collar was, and how in my hand it weighs hardly anything.
At the running track, Mami sits between Papi and me and links our arms through hers. No one else’s parents have come. The swing seats behind us are aswarm with kids in PE kits, some of them splashing water over their faces and gurgling loud encouragement to their friends in other events. The long-jump competition, at the far right of the track, is made mysterious by its distance — a boy with impossibly long legs wades the air and lands with a stiff snap. When Tomás’s race starts, we lean forward as one, peering into the dense pack of boys sprinting two hundred metres. Chabella and Papi can’t pick out Tomás until I tell them that he’s the one with the white zigzag masking half of his face. Tomás’s head is lowered; he is ready to ram the whole world. He hurtles straight through the centre of the boys keeping pace with each other, his feet blur as he peels back space with his legs. Tomás is the most beautiful black boy there, the most beautiful boy there. Chabella and I scream for him, Papi stamps his feet, but we are lost beneath the school crowd who are chanting with one fast-fermenting voice for someone called Joseph. Tomás, two other boys at his heels, lifts his head to look at the stands. He over-steps, kicks out too far, swerves and folds onto his knees. The other boys buffet him as they swarm past, and he is on his feet in an instant, but an instant too late, and he is fifth to the finish line.
The crowd says, ‘Joseph, Joseph,’ but when Tomás shouts out, they hear him. Two girls behind me loudly agree that Tomás is a sore loser.
It’s as if Tomás comes home separately from us; his body sits next to me on the tube, but when I try to hug him, he is like a mannequin, his half-face cool and incurious.
At home, I knock on his door.
‘Ask him if he wants dinner,’ Chabella hisses from below.
‘Tomás? Do you want dinner?’ He doesn’t answer.
I sit down outside his door and tap, low, to let him know where I’m sitting. A long second, and then he taps back, just a little higher.
He tries to talk to me but his voice won’t let him. The school was screaming, ‘Joseph,’ and after all he is not Joseph. If they were quiet, or if they had just made wordless noise, Tomás could have soared through on his own call.
Disappearing: Tomás is the kind of boy who can do it if enough people tell him to. I don’t know why Chabella and Papi keep calling him the London baby. If you put a name to this boy he’ll die. Chabella and Papi mustn’t do it any more — it bothers him, it’s different from calling him el enano and they know it.
Tomás is crying now, and he doesn’t care if I hear it.
* * *
The house is silent in the early afternoon. I look at Bisabuela Carmen in her place at the centre of the family altar, behind flickering candles — I lose myself in looking at her. She appears to be watching the Holy Child of Atocha very suspiciously from the corner of her eye. How blood works, the things that pass across. I’m not sure what there is of Carmen in me, and I worry about what she, a babalawo who could read messages in blood and salt, might tell me if I really opened my heart to her and asked. She might fill me. Candle flame heats my fingertips as I run my fingers along the rows of faces.
Mami has been cooking the way she does when she is nervous. She has made an enormous batch of chicken ajiaco, more than Tomás and Papi and I could ever want to eat — this is a catering-sized pot. It sits, squat and morose, still bubbling on the back hob, covered only slightly so it can cool. I feel as if we are beginning here again, and if I step out through the back door and into the garden I will find my brother, four years old, bundled up in scarves, kicking up leaves and happily colouring in bear shapes.
Upstairs, Papi and Chabella are asleep. Papi’s breathing barely disturbs his chest; Mami sleeps with a glow on her. I am smoke, the sign of her fire. She doesn’t know that she’s alight.
I am staying overnight for Tomás, as if I’m back to watching him for cot death.
His door stays closed — he doesn’t come out for dinner; he doesn’t come out for the pasteles that Chabella has made especially for him. Papi said that we must call him once, then leave him be. The boy is not a drama queen — if he’s hungry, he will eat.
I watch late-night television, listening out for the stairs to creak, nodding sleep away until my chin dips in and out of my glass of lemonade. On-screen, two hamsters begin to chase each other around a maze. Tomás looms behind me in a mushroom cloud of blankets and touches my elbow. I don’t jump. Ever since I left those two sleep-girls behind me in Hamburg, I keep thinking that they will come back. Ever since Hamburg I have been ready.
I take my blanket and wind it around me. Tomás and I pad through the kitchen, a tight squeeze through the doors because we are holding hands and mashing into each other. Tomás fetches Mami’s black lanterns from the shed, and even though the cold night knifes us, we fall into the garden deckchairs. We wrap our legs in our duvets; we tuck our hands inside our dressing gowns. The wind knocks my hair lopsided.
We watch the lanterns scattered around us, the tea-tinted wax inside them holding up their flames against all-comers. The wind comes, some rain comes, two murders for our light. But the flames stay so we can see each other’s faces. I smile because Tomás is smiling. He looks exhausted, cosy, as if he has come in from some long journey and collapsed in front of a fireplace, but the candle flame isn’t enough to warm us. What warms us is the way the light stays and stays, dances limbo, touches the bottom of the glass then shimmies up again.
Mami’s collar is in my pocket, working itself loose from old string and old care.
Tomás says something. His voice is hoarse and I don’t catch his words. I ask him, too loudly, what he said. He puts a finger to his lips and we quieten, in case we disturb them, our guardians and guides, our Orishas in the house, the ones upstairs asleep.
Acknowledgements
E.D.
Thank you Bente Lodgaard for That Chat In Oslo.
Yay (and much love to) Ali Smith.
Yay (and much love to) Sarah Wood.
Yay (and much love to) Loa/Lorna Owen.
Boogie/J/Jason Tsang, best friend to be had anywhere in the world, and father of TOH at T Street. Boogie. . I don’t know what to tell you, man. Thank you.
Anita Sethi, thank you for the support and the ultra-late-night chit chat.
Ptah Hotep, thank you for the transatlantic cheerleading, best of Ps.
Thank you Robin Wade for keeping everything together.
Thank you Juliet Lapidos for your attentive reading, especially re Aaron.
Thank you Alexandra Pringle, you are the king, the king.
Beatrice Monti della Corte Rezzori, thank you. .
Thank you for feedback and general jest, Antosca.
Pam Hirsh and Lorraine Gelsthorpe; it probably wasn’t apparent on my face at our supervisions, but I think you’re both awesome and idiosyncratic teachers. You helped me to finally find value and interest in SPS. I’ll remember that. Thank you.