Good For Nothing, page 11
PC Phillips seemed pleased about this. ‘I’ll give you sixty seconds, OK? Then you come back and get rid of those crisp packets.’
I took a shaky breath. I nodded. It seemed like the right thing to do. And I watched her walk back to where PC Chris stood waiting, his arms crossed over his chest, while PC Phillips’ lips mouthed a countdown.
‘Thirty seconds!’ she yelled, her thumbs-up all faint in the distance, her eyes fixed on mine.
There was an ache in my skull. My brain rattled around. I ignored it. The wet slosh echoed as I walked back to where Kemi and Amir were jabbing at the grass and depositing the rubbish into their bin bags. The wet slosh, slosh, slosh.
The tasks for volunteering changed as the weeks went by. We went from having wrinkled fingers from washing bus shelters and pasting Barker Summer Festival posters on walls in the middle of the town, to developing calloused hands from litter-picking in the park, to getting paper cuts from doing admin work in the police building, to having tired feet from delivering leaflets for the police themselves.
We were expected to put in our very best effort all of the time.
Despite the stale heat, the sweat gathering in a sickly strand at the nape of my neck.
We were expected to learn from the graffiti stains on our skin at the very beginning of this ordeal and never do anything as troublesome, as disrespectful, ever again.
Well, that’s what the state of my hands and feet said to me. I don’t know what the message was to Kemi, who always laughed when someone did something stupid at school. I don’t know if the soap, the glue, the litter, the paper, the leaflets shone very brightly for Amir, who already knew the vivid language of school detention by heart. Was fluent in it.
I’m not really sure what tasks the kids from north Friesly were given to do after Fowley Park was divided into sections for our litter-picking, either. I think I should have paid more attention when PC Chris was talking to us about it, our bright volunteering bibs all collected in his hands, our litter-pickers lined up by all the bin bags we’d filled that morning.
Honestly, all I could focus on was how there were so many bags that had my name stuck to their sides. All these double-knotted black ones, lumpy with soggy cardboard and empty drinks cartons, with my name written in permanent ink on their little sticky tabs. In a very familiar style of handwriting. But I couldn’t place where I’d seen it before.
‘Huh?’ I said, when PC Chris congratulated me on my speedy work.
He and PC Phillips exchanged a smiling glance. ‘See? We knew you had it in you. You’ve really put your fellow volunteers to shame, Eman. Well done!’
Then PC Chris excused us and said we’d be starting our organization of the reprographics room in the police building tomorrow, and to get there really bright and really early so that we’d have plenty of time to organize the files and folders that needed it. He looked especially at Amir when he said this. But I don’t know if Amir had been late to volunteering yet.
I remember Kemi patted my arm before she zipped up her windbreaker. ‘See you tomorrow, Speedy.’
‘But I didn’t –’
I frowned at the black bin bags. I counted them all. I had two more than Kemi and Amir did.
‘I didn’t pick all of that up …’
‘Yeah?’ Amir shrugged his backpack on. He fussed with an inside-out strap. ‘Who d’you think did then?’
The handwriting on the tab really did look familiar. Sharp and spiky.
‘I … Hmm … Well …’
Kemi laughed. She beamed with all her teeth as she waved goodbye. I glanced between her retreating shadow, and Amir in front of me, and the heap of black bin bags. Frowned down at them, my shoulders heaving with the force of a contemplative sigh.
Amir’s smile showed a really sharp incisor. Like a vampire’s tooth. ‘You’re funny, you,’ he said.
Then he walked across the grass to where his bike was locked up against a grocery shop’s railing. I didn’t expect him to look back at me, but he did. Twice.
And I tried to imagine Nani was still here, not stuck in a state of deep unconsciousness, lost to a terrible fall, an accident-induced coma. I tried to imagine her face, seeing Amir’s thick eyebrows, and the razor slit in his right one, and how he looked golden in the afternoon sunlight, wrestling his bike free, and standing beside its glow, smiling at me. Twice.
‘Mashallah!’ my memory of her whispered to me, her phantom limbs nudging my side. ‘Smile back at him, won’t you, Eman? You know your grandfather smiled at me like this every time he was in front of me, walking in the alley back from school, just us two.’
I turned around quickly. I remembered Farida aunty. The seriousness of her one eyebrow, which moved vividly as she spoke about Zayd Ali. A drug dealer. Amir’s brother. A thug. Then I walked home along the back streets, past green wheelie bins and bricks used for cricket stumps. My heart skipped like stones on water. Warmth rushed to my cheeks.
‘Stop it,’ I told myself. ‘Just stop.’
A pile of Tupperware boxes greeted me at our front door. A Jenga-pile of Farida aunty’s sabzi and daal, Balqis aunty’s pakorey and lamb biryani.
I made the roti to go with everything myself. It was drier than Nani would’ve liked it to have been. But no one clicked their tongue against their teeth and dragged up their walking stick and had me make the atta, roll out the dough, heat up the tava again. The realization made me cry all over again. Tears that sizzled dry on the hot metal.
I turned up at the police station to tidy up the stacks and stacks of recyclable paper in the reprographics room with everyone else only slightly late. I guess because I felt tired. Like a Tuesday morning, which sometimes feels like a Monday morning but worse.
‘Eman!’ Kemi hissed, then patted the space next to hers.
Somewhere in the past, I watched Noor and her friends laugh together at our lunch table. The pull of girls’ arms when they’re together, a wall that feels impenetrable. My own arms, on the outside of that lunch table, so limp. Scooping up pasta. Watching Ball repeats. One pair of arms can’t be a wall at all.
Kemi hooked her elbow round mine. ‘Don’t worry,’ she hissed. ‘You didn’t miss anything important.’
I looked at the criss-cross of our arms.
Then, after hours of PC Chris speaking at us, we were called to lunch. And out by the oak trees dropping leaves on our shoulders, the dappled sunlight stencilling temporary tattoos on our skin, Amir stretched his arms up and out and reached one of them all the way around the back of me. My stomach lifted like bubbles in fizz. They spread everywhere. Like in the tenth level of Ball, when it starts getting hard, when you have to start putting the work in. That game felt so far away from me now.
‘Sit up, Amir,’ PC Chris said sharply, his voice echoing over the wooden table. ‘I’m explaining something important, and you’re acting like you’re at a bloody picnic.’
Kemi glanced at me, her teeth biting at her bottom lip. She pulled her feet back from where she’d been resting them out all relaxed in front of her. But PC Chris didn’t say anything to her about that.
He started explaining which files went into recycling, and which ones into spare paper, and which ones into the shredder. Then the freckles on his nose danced. He wrinkled his entire face in disgust.
‘For God’s sake, we’ve given you notebooks to write in.’ PC Chris took the pen that Amir was using to write on his palm and threw it in the bin. ‘You don’t need to do that.’
My hand was smudged with the notes I’d written on it, too. I clawed at the ink with the tips of my fingers, hating the reedy thinness of PC Chris’s words. Cold as violence. They cut extra hard. But PC Chris didn’t say anything to me about my hands.
And when we stood up to head back to the police station, shaking off the pins and needles in our feet, it was Amir that PC Chris yelled at for forgetting to put the wrappings of his panini in the bin, even though we’d all experienced the same drowsy after-lunch feeling that made us all forget these things. If I’m remembering correctly, it was usually Amir who remembered to swipe up his mess and who made a big show of tossing it into the bin in the first place. I don’t know if PC Chris saw that though. I don’t know if he ever did.
‘Maybe he’s having a bad day,’ Kemi said, when the three of us were on the carpeted floor of the reprographics room, organizing the hard-copy equivalent of Friesly Metropolitan Police’s spam email inbox into piles to recycle, reuse or shred.
The window was cracked open a little. No breeze outside. No clouds in the sky.
Amir didn’t move from where he was lying horizontally, a piece of printer paper shielding a heavy burst of sunlight from spreading its warmth on to his face.
‘Or maybe he just has it in for me.’
Kemi kicked the sole of his shoe. ‘At least look like you’re helping us out. Me and Eman have shredded loads of these already. Innit, Eman? She’s got bare paper cuts already!’
I looked down at the plasters Kemi had helped me place around my fingers. And then at the sharp tongue of the shredder, waiting for the paper pile we’d been instructed to move.
‘Yeah,’ I said slowly, flexing my finger joints.
Amir groaned before he stood up. He walked over to me while fussing with the Nishaan delivery cap on his head. ‘Alright, Eman. Why don’t you go and help Kemi with the paperwork and I’ll deal with the moving and shredding?’
He smelled like mint shower gel. Is that what all drug-dealer family members smelled like? A whole garden of the plant Nani used to stew and add to the kava that cooled my headaches? Fresh like pavement rain? Amir leaned down to hear me answer. I forgot I was supposed to talk.
‘OK,’ I said suddenly.
Amir laughed his vampire laugh. He leaned around me to turn the shredder on, and I saw that the eyes that always looked so angry, that always got caught in the shade of his delivery cap, were light brown.
Like tree bark. A place to rest your palm on, call your sanctuary, during games.
Kemi beamed at me again.
‘What?’ I said, sitting cross-legged next to her beside the big window, the traffic jam on Long Road harmonizing with the sound of the shredder.
‘Nothing,’ she hummed, as I began to leaf through the pile of recycling. But she still kept looking at me. She poked the part of my cheek between my jaw and my teeth. Smiled until I did too.
‘What’s his problem anyway?’ Amir yelled, throwing his arms around all irritated. ‘This PC Dickhead, what’s-his-name, Chris guy?’
He fed the waste into the razor tongue with reckless abandon, even with a little bit of joy for how it came out on the other side, spaghetti thin and white as ice. ‘Just because his trim’s dead. What does that have to do with me?’
‘Go on then.’ Kemi neatened the corners of her waste pile with her hands. ‘Give him your barber’s number if you’re bad.’
Amir snorted. ‘My barber’s my uncle’s best mate. Uncle Feroze.’
I could hear the smile pulling at Kemi’s lips. ‘Go on then. Give him your uncle Feroze’s number if you’re bad.’
The two of them burst out laughing at the idea of PC Chris ringing up for a regular Friesly boy haircut. Short back and sides. A touch-up. One blade on the top and another under. Even a fade at Clean Cutz, or 360 waves, or locs. He’d wear all of that with none of that strange sweet magic, that trick with no name which made some Friesly boys – with their awkward intentional limps, their joggers and too-big hoodies, their cheeky loudmouth grins – so beloved to us that knew them.
Kemi and Amir looked at me, inviting me into their joy. Was this it? A wall of arms?
‘Yeah,’ I said, desperate to hold them up with me. ‘Imagine him. Imagine … PC Chris … with a good haircut!’
There were more bubbles inside of me. Fizz and fizz and fizz, as Kemi and Amir and I fell over laughing. But they grew smaller when PC Chris appeared in the doorway of the reprographics room, grim-faced, his car keys dancing around the top of one finger while his free arm carried a heavy box of leaflets.
‘What’s so funny?’ he said, in the wake of our silence. ‘Go on. I like a laugh. Tell us a joke.’
None of us did.
An old woman walks into a wild field of green echoing with crows.
Or is it a young lady?
A young lady walks into a field of green echoing with crows.
CHAPTER 9
Kemi
The flat was heavy with chatter and rose-scented perfume. Large bottles of red wine, reflecting shards of pink all over our living room. Like stained glass. A church for St Valentine’s or something. But Aunty Sunbo and Aunty Ifeoma’s cackling was less respectful than any behaviour at a regular church service.
‘Kemi,’ Mum said, her hands quick to steady mine at the door. ‘Go wash up.’
The jerk of her head backwards – to the full sofa, the sounds of bodies in the kitchen – emphasizing the importance of guests. Of good manners to greet guests. Good manners to greet guests well – no sweat on your upper lip, no smell of too-full recycling bins. Whether Emmanuel was still busy leading the rest of the flock at the Jacob Pentecostal Church or not.
I looked past Mum’s small body to the copy-and-pasted reflections of her family who showed their gaps in their teeth when they laughed, who stopped Ada from perusing the folded-over corners of their Bibles to congratulate her on her success.
‘OK,’ I said.
Even though a part of me wanted to warn Ada about the flute of wine in her hand, and a part of me wanted to get washed down the shower drain and fall asleep somewhere, and a part of me wanted to help Mum clean the reddish spill growing bigger on the glass table.
I even hesitated, watching the tired sway of her hips, the hand on her back which signified pain in her joints again.
‘Kemi,’ Mum hissed, jerking her head backwards again. There wasn’t any fire in her eyes. Nothing that made her seem like anything but a woman ageing under the duties of her culture. I went to the hallway anyway.
‘Remember what you used to call her when she got like this?’ I said to Dad’s smiling face.
Hurricane, the man in the wedding portrait laughed, catching his wife around the waist, desperate to taste even one of the many puff-puffs cooling on the counter, the delicacies of a primary school party I’d pleaded and begged for. She’d smacked him away of course. A wry smile at the corners of her lips. ‘They’re for Kemi’s class. For children. You are not a child, are you?’ Maybe it was a good thing Dad wasn’t. Those puff-puffs were deep-fried and wrapped in foil and didn’t place any position on primary school palates more accustomed to samosas and pakoras, fairy cakes and iced gems. Jasmin had already eaten enough fried stuff, apparently. Michael was the pickiest eater in the world. So the Tupperware container holding the fried dough bites had been only slightly less full on the bus ride back from school – and what was missing was only because of a kid called Hassan Jalani’s endless appetite, and my own sad snacking. I remember Ada shaking her head at the sight. ‘You shouldn’t have forced Mum to make so many.’ How I’d pursed my bottom lip, stared out of the bus window, knowing she was right. I’d let the wind-whipped trees see me cry and no one else. I’d gasped a little at first, too. Feeling the shake of the Tupperware container in my hands, the lid being unsettled and my dad’s factory hands taking puff-puff after puff-puff. He’d handed them out to me and to him. Then he’d winked at me: ‘We’ll tell your mother everyone loved them.’ I’d taken a bite, smiling, watching him point to me and then to him: ‘Everyone. We’re everyone.’
‘Now, Jesus died for us all because we are sinners.’ Aunty Sunbo was a little unsteady on her feet, the glass of wine sloshing in her grip, the other hand hooked casually around Ada’s shoulders. ‘A God-fearing woman like me, I know what my sins are. But you, my girl. Smart, tall, beautiful. What are yours?’
I watched my sister search all the faces that worked at the flower shop for my mum, her eyes hunting past the laughter in the living room, Aunty Ifeoma bragging about her eldest niece to everyone sat beside her, Aunty Sunbo pressing Ada for a response.
‘Well,’ she said eventually, when the tired flutter of Mum’s eyelashes, and the way she shrugged into resting on the sofa, suggested any response was a good one, ‘I can’t always do more than one thing at a time.’
Aunty Sunbo walked and talked under a hazy grape-scented cloud. ‘Busyness is not a deadly sin, Ada.’
‘Oh.’ Ada’s voice got all soft. ‘Isn’t it?’
A series of stumbling and slurring: ‘No, preoccupation with the good keeps you from distraction with the bad! It is a blessing from the Lord!’
There were chants in agreement, a cacophony of voices asking about what Ada had to eat at uni down south, the cost of a taxi over there, her gown size. And then, what it was all for, her job in the future, a career so that she could cement her place elsewhere, so that she could always live right with the good and not wrong with the bad.
‘Somewhere else?’ I asked Mum, wiping the table beside me. ‘Is that what they mean by her living right? Somewhere that’s good enough for her? Not here?’
‘I don’t know, Kemi.’
There was no hurricane beside me. There was only a breeze struggling with a rag and a spray bottle.
I sighed. ‘Give us that, Mum.’
The breeze relented so easily. Like it had never been different. Like there had never been a strength inside it at all.
Nathan, Precious and Aron jumped a mile from where the kitchen counter stood tall with various bottles of juice. Some a darker shade of dandelion yellow, others brown as soil and just as rich. The cans of fizz at their lips clearly heavy with mixing.
I laughed despite myself. ‘I’m not even gonna ask.’
But they laughed, too. Told me stories of Uncle Jafari’s influence, Aron and Precious’s boredom, and how Nathan could never – no matter how hard he tried – hold his liquor right.
