He pulled on his jacket, tugged his thin dreadlocks into a ponytail. Enough, he decided. He would go to Natasha, tell her in person. It was a fair journey from Brixton to Ladbroke Grove, but the thought of the cold air in his face and lungs was beguiling. His house felt oppressive. He had spent hours on the phone that morning, the same phrases again and again — Six floors straight down… The filth won’t let me talk to him and the walls had soaked up the news. They were saturated with the old man’s death. Fabian wanted space. He wanted to clean out his head.
He shoved a page of newspaper into his pocket. He could recite the relevant story by heart: News in brief. A man died in Willesden, North London, yesterday, after falling through a sixth-floor window. Police will not say if they are treating the death as suspicious. The man’s son is helping them with their enquiries. The screaming accusation of the last sentence stung him.
He left his room for the filthy hall of the shared house. Someone was shouting upstairs. The dirty, ill fitting carpets irritated him always; now they made him feel violent. As he struggled with his bike, he glanced at the unwashed walls, the broken banisters. The presence of the house weighed down on him. He burst out of the front door with a sigh of relief.
Fabian treated his bike carelessly, letting it fall when he dismounted, chucking it against walls. He was rough with it. He yanked himself onto it now with unthinking brutality, and swung out into the road.
The streets were full. It was a Saturday and people were thronging the streets, coming to and from Brixton market, determined on their outward journey and slow on the way back, laden down with cheap, colourful clothes and big fruit. Trains rumbled, competed with the sounds of Soca, Reggae, Rave, Rap, Jungle, House, and the shouting: all the cut-up market rhythm. Rudeboys in outlandish trousers clustered around corners and music shops, touched fists. Shaven-headed men in tight tops and AIDS ribbons made for Brockwell Park or The Brixtonian cafe. Food wrappers and lost television supplements tugged at ankles. The capricious traffic lights were a bad joke: pedestrians hovered like suicides at the edge of the pavement, launched themselves across at the slightest sign of a gap. The cars made angry noises and sped away, anxious to escape. Impassive, the people watched them pass by.
Fabian twisted his wheels through the bodies. The railway bridge passed above him; some way ahead the clocktower told him it was mid-morning. He rode and walked intermittently past the tube station, wheeled his bike across Brixton Road, and again over Acre Lane. There were no crowds here, and no Reggae. Acre Lane stretched out wide. The buildings that contained it were separate, sparse and low. The sky was always very big over Acre Lane.
Fabian jumped back onto his bike and took off up the slight incline towards Clapham. From there he would twist across into Clapham Manor Street, wind a little through backstreets to join Silverthorne Road, a steep sine-wave of minor industrial estates and peculiarly suburban houses tucked between Battersea and Clapham, a conduit feeding directly into Queenstown Road, across Chelsea Bridge.
For the first time that day Fabian felt his head clear.
Early that morning a suspicious policeman had answered Saul’s phone, had demanded Fabian’s name. Outraged, Fabian had hung up. He had rung up Willesden police station, again refusing to give his name, but demanding to know why policemen were answering his friend’s phone. Only when he acquiesced and told them who he was would they tell him that Saul’s father had died, and that Saul was with them — again that disingenuous phrase — helping with enquiries.
First he felt nothing but shock; then quickly a sense of a monstrous error.
And a great fear. Because Fabian understood immediately that it would be easy for them to believe that Saul had killed his father. And, as immediately, he knew without any equivocation or doubt that Saul had not. But he was terribly afraid, because only he knew that, because he knew Saul. And there was nothing he could tell others to help them understand.
He wanted to see Saul; he did not understand why the officer’s voice changed when he demanded this. He was told it would be some time before he could speak to Saul, Saul was deep in conversation, his attention wholly grabbed, and Fabian would just have to wait. There was something the man was not telling him, Fabian knew, and he was scared. He left his phone number, was reassured that he would be contacted as soon as Saul was free to speak.
Fabian sped along Acre Lane. On his left he passed an extraordinary white building, a mass of grubby turrets and shabby Art Deco windows. It looked long deserted. On the step sat two boys, dwarfed by jackets declaring allegiance to American Football teams neither had ever seen play. They were oblivious to the faded grandeur of their bench. One had his eyes closed, was leaning back against the door like Mexican cannon-fodder in a spaghetti Western. His friend spoke animatedly into his hand, his tiny mobile phone hidden within the voluminous folds of his sleeve, Fabian felt the thrill of materialist envy, but battened it down. This was one impulse he resisted.
Not me, he thought, as he always did. I’ll hold out a bit longer. I won’t be another black man with a mobile, another troublemaker with ‘Drug Dealer’ written on his forehead in script only the police can read.
He stood up out of his seat, kicked down and sped off towards Clapham.
Fabian knew Saul hated his father’s disappointment. Fabian knew Saul and his father could not speak together. Fabian had been the only one of Saul’s friends who had seen him turn that volume by Lenin over and over in his hands, open it and close it, read the inscription again and again. His father’s writing was tight and controlled, as if trying not to break the pen. Saul had put the book in Fabian’s lap, had waited while his friend read.
To Saul, This always made sense to me. Love from the Old Leftie.
Fabian remembered looking up into Saul’s face. His mouth was sealed, his eyes looked tired. He took the book off Fabian’s lap and closed it, stroked the cover, put it on his shelf. Fabian knew Saul had not killed his father.
He crossed Clapham High Street, a concourse of restaurants and charity shops, and slid into the back streets, wiggling through the parked cars to emerge on Silverthorne Road. He started down the long incline towards the river.
He knew that Natasha would be working. He knew he would turn into Bassett Road and hear the faint boom of Drum and Bass. She would be hunched over her keyboard, twiddling dials and pressing keys with the concentration of an alchemist, juggling long sequences of zeros and ones and transforming them into music. Listening and creating. That was what Natasha spent all her time doing. When she was not concentrating on source material behind the till of friends’ record shops, serving customers in an efficient autopilot mode, she was reconstituting it into the tracks she christened with spiky one-word titles: Arrival; Rebellion; Maelstrom.
Fabian believed it was Natasha’s concentration which made her so asexual to him. She was attractive in a fierce way, and was never short of offers, especially at clubs, especially when word got around that the music playing was hers; but Fabian had never known her seem very interested, even when she took someone home. He felt blasphemous even thinking of her in a sexual context. Fabian was alone in his opinion, he was assured by his friend Kay, a cheerful dope-raddled clown who drooled lasciviously after Natasha whenever he saw her. The music was the thing, Kay said, and the intensity was the thing, and the carelessness was the thing. Just like a nun, it was the promise of what was under the habit.