God, I actually want to stay. To carry on. This kind of pleasure is explosive, it is addictive. ‘I have to go home. Got work in the morning.’
‘I’ll drive you,’ he says evenly, and, moving off me, begins to dress.
The way he switches off immediately makes me feel insecure. I quickly pick up the robe on the floor and wrap it around myself. ‘I’ll just go change in the other room.’
‘OK. Meet me in the living room.’
I look at myself in the mirror and think of Jack and feel guilty. While I was in Vann’s bed I had never spared a single thought for him. I dress quickly. When I get back to the living room Vann is already waiting for me.
In the lift I sneak a look at him and find him leaning against the chrome railing watching me. He raises his eyebrows. I think of his thumb jammed like a plug inside me and flush. Quickly I avert my eyes to the lighted numbers. I hate lifts. The doors open and I dash out.
‘This way,’ he says outside and points to a brand new Jaguar CX Four-by-Four. He opens my door and waits courteously as I climb in.
‘Blake’s?’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s nice. He’s really good to his friends, isn’t he?’
‘Blake doesn’t do friends. There is no one he can trust.’
‘But he trusts you.’
‘Only because we grew up together. Are you hungry?’
I’m starving. ‘Nope.’
‘Then I hope you won’t mind if I drop by and get a takeaway Chicken Shwarma.’
‘Not at all.’
Except for giving him my address, we don’t speak much until we get to Beauchamp Place. He parks and turns towards me. ‘You sure you don’t want anything?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘OK, won’t be a minute.’
I watch him cross the road, his stride long and prowling, and go into a restaurant called Maroush. In less than five minutes he is making his way back to me, two cylindrical white packages in his hand. He gets into the car and opens one package. Is he planning to eat it here in the car, in front of me?
He is. He untwists the top of white greaseproof paper and, tearing it off, reveals the pitta bread filled and rolled with chicken kebab inside. The smell. Oh sweet Jesus. The smell of garlic sauce when you have missed dinner and had a bucket load of sex. He waves it in front of my nose. I know if I ignore the hunger pangs they will go away in a while, but not with the scent of food so close by.
‘Just taste it.’
I look at him with an unfriendly expression.
‘Go on… It’s the best in London,’ he cajoles.
One taste. I swallow my saliva, take the package from him and take a small bite. Goodness, gracious me. It is so good I have to stop my eyes from rolling to the back of my head. I try to hand the food back and find him waving it away, and opening the other instead.
‘I got you one just in case you changed your mind.’
No further invites are necessary. I bite into the kebab, chew and swallow. And carry on doing so until there is nothing but soggy paper. I gaze at it almost with surprise.
‘You were hungry, weren’t you?’
Oh shit. I’ve just eaten a whole kebab at one o’clock in the morning. It’s going to become pure fat in my body.
He starts up the engine. There is no traffic on the roads and soon we are outside my block of flats.
‘I’ll walk you to your door.’
‘There’s no need. See that door there?’ I say, pointing to my door on the third floor. ‘That’s my home.’
We exchange numbers.
‘Wednesday at seven. Don’t eat before you come over and bring some clothes and the stuff you need in the morning. Plenty of empty cupboards for you to choose from.’
‘OK,’ I say and jump out of the car.
He waits until I have run up three flights of stairs. I wave before I enter my home and close the door. Everybody is asleep. I go into the kitchen and fill a glass with water. I salt the water. I drink three glasses. Then I run up to the bathroom and make myself sick. There, all that horrible fatty meat is gone from my body. Tears are streaming down my cheeks, but I feel light and good again.
I flush the toilet, clean my teeth, spray some air freshener and go to bed.
Nineteen
It is 9.10 when I leave home for work. On the way I see two men putting up a billboard poster with a pair of eyes looking out of punched out gray wallpaper and the caption, ‘We’re closing in on undeclared income’. The poster is from Her Majesty’s Revenue Collection Department. It is designed to put the fear of God into people who are evading or planning to evade tax.
People like me. Who pretend to work sixteen hours a week, but in actuality work many more. Fuck them, I think. They honestly make me so mad. It’s bullshit that taxes are used to raise revenue. Imagine putting up a poster like that in such a poor and depressed area, and there are all these giant multinational corporations getting away scot-free with not paying billions in taxes.
As far as I am concerned they are just bullies to come after little people like me. It is not the likes of me that are killing the economy, but them. Think about it. If I revealed the exact number of hours I work, they would tax not only me, but also the small business I work for. My employer would then no longer be able to afford my services and run aground. Besides, they don’t need my little contribution at all. They proved that when they suddenly and magically found billions to bail out the big banks with. Income tax is a tax to work. And I’m not fool enough to pay tax to work.
I unlock the door of Sasha’s Flowers and disarm the alarm. I switch on the lights and the computer and check if any orders have come in during the night. There are none. I put on my apron, sweep and mop the place. As I am changing the water in the pails of flowers Zipporah comes in.
She stops in the doorway, narrows her eyes. ‘What have you done to yourself?’ she demands.
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re glowing.’
I flush hard.
‘You had sex last night, didn’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Yes, you surely did. Look at you, you’re as red as a Walker’s crisp packet.’
‘All right, I did. But I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘So it’s not the boy, then?’
Ziporrah is the only one who kind of knows about the crush I have on Jack.
‘No,’ I mutter.
‘Hon, if a man can make you look this good, you should kick that boy to the curb, and get with the man.’
Let me tell you about Ziporrah. She has all her hair in tiny cornrow braids and the type of hourglass figure you would see in a rap music video, the butt so high and rounded you could eat dinner on top of it. Her mother named her after the wife of Moses. Yeah, I didn’t know either, but apparently she was black! On a plaque hanging on the wall in the shop Ziporrah has part of a verse from the Song of Solomon 1:5: “I am black and beautiful.”
The thing about Ziporrah is that she is unashamedly black. She doesn’t try to straighten her hair, color it, or do anything to ‘whiten herself’. She always tells it like it is. In fact, nothing infuriates her more than white people who think they are doing her a favor by using ‘the n word’ instead of nigger in her presence.
‘Cause that just means you have to say the word in your head for them. Black people have a chip the size of Africa on their shoulder because their blood remembers the time they were sold like oxen. But underneath their skin, they’re just like you, girl. Only less fucked up.’
I choose the flowers I want to use in my flower arrangement and lay them down on the wooden table in the back room of the shop. I start my arrangement with a pink rose stalk (desire) and follow that with an oleander (caution).