What’s wrong?’ Amma asked.
‘You’ve really fucked the mood of this painting.’
‘How short-lived kindness and concern are with –’
‘Seriously. You’ve … like, infected it with some sort of weird Daria gloom and shit.’
‘What’s the one about a workman and his tools?’ Amma hopped up, lighter in the head, and walked over to Helena, muttering, ‘Workwoman. Her tools.’
Amma saw wildness on the canvas. Dragged, dripping bars of dirty brown and licks of red. Darker waves near the top. Scratched bits, etched with the pointed end of the brush perhaps. Mum would stand right up close to the thing and complain she couldn’t see what was supposed to be the fruit, what was supposed to be a leg, what was supposed to be an eye. To Amma, the swirl of wet colour in front of her, its indistinctness, the frightening sense that it might morph or become something more, was entirely familiar. She chuckled.
‘What’s funny?’
‘I was thinking to myself. Sorry. Nothing.’
‘Why don’t you think to me as well? It’s only right and proper.’
Helena’s eyebrows and forehead were working so much that the glittery bindi she had decided to wear slipped off. Amma picked it up, passed it over. She watched Helena press the dot back onto herself primly. Helena checked herself in one of the conservatory’s windows and Amma saw how pleased she seemed; how easily that pleasure arose.
‘When have you been most scared?’ Amma asked her.
‘Funny question.’
‘Try. Go on.’
‘What do you need to know for?’
‘Why so reluctant, ma chérie?’
Helena’s pinking eyes flashed. ‘When I thought I might drown. But you know about that. So you’re probably after something –’
‘Doesn’t matter. Keep going.’
‘So, OK, I was about eight or something. Mum was going out with that creepy cellist then.’
‘Eugh, yeah. With the teeth and the fingernails.’
‘The three of us were in Cornwall. He’d never been and Mum was, like, too happs about showing him everything and blah blah. Some afternoon we were on the beach and I swam in the sea. And I hadn’t swum out like crazily far or anything because I’m a good girl and know the rules –’
‘Indeed, indeed.’
‘And I, I had a cramp, like, winding round my leg, like squeezing it? I had no clue what was happening. Fucking terrible, man. Swallowing water. Yelling. It felt like I was doing that for hours, but that’s what happens in those, like, crisis moments, isn’t it? Time stretches? I bet it was probably only fifteen seconds or something before the cellist came and got me. So I suppose he was good for something.’ Helena laughed lightly, reached for a different brush.
Amma didn’t like what she was doing: forcing her friend to perform to prove a point to herself, a point she already understood and whose recognition would bring about no change. But the truth was unavoidable, as Amma watched the excitement with which Helena spoke as she recalled details. Fear was easy for Helena, maybe because it could be talked out, later. Amma could not breezily say what she wanted to; could not play it for laughs.
Amma coughed and shook her head when Helena offered the pipe. She returned to the raffia armchair and picked up the apple. ‘OK, let’s keep going then. Was it like this?’ Amma tried to replicate how her body had been. ‘Or this?’
‘What, now? We’re back on? I can’t keep up.’
‘More like this? H? More like this?’
Gravely, Helena cleaned her brush in murky water, sniffed and sighed, but Amma only half-heard, because she was looking at the apple’s buffed skin, wondering how Helena would react if she pressed in the three soft brown bruises on its surface: three tiny dips of disgusting tenderness.
Earlier that day, in Belinda’s new bedroom, Nana picked through Belinda’s belongings. Belinda looked on, tightly wrapping her fingers around her thumbs. Nana inspected each item, making disappointed noises in response to every T-shirt or pair of shorts. Nana started moaning about how she never got to have a girly, girly shopping time any more. Nana talked about Belinda exploring her new ends; she thought they should do it quickly, before the sticky weather broke. Nana promised they would have too much fun together.
So they headed out for Marks and Spencer. Belinda walked just behind Nana as they made their way along noisy Brixton High Road. Flat, late summer heat hung from Belinda’s shoulders. The sky was bored, the traffic was angry. Everything around them beeped or screamed. People on bikes turned around to swear at people in cars. Three striped white vans with swirling blue lights moaned. Buses bent round corners looking like sick caterpillars. Both Nana and Belinda were careful to avoid stubby black bins that choked on packets and bottles, and that made Nana hiss ‘Lambeth Council’ like those words were bad kenkey on her tongue. A tall man with wheels on his shoes sailed through it all peacefully. He overtook them until he became a thin, upright line between all the bodies in the distance. There was no space; the road was too full, the pavement too narrow to hold all the people pushing along it. Nana marched on, pointing forward with two certain fingers, swinging her yellow handbag with the little LVs on it. Belinda tried to match the pace but she kept nearly bumping into everyone because the surroundings pulled at her attention so much.
On her left, outside a huge shop – Iceland – a group of children played silver drums that were like the buckets she had used when fetching water from the stream when the village pump wasn’t working. The children’s music was a wobbling sound that shimmered on the air. Two women with flopping hats stopped to dance in front of the band, wiggling their bottoms and holding their breasts. Near an even bigger store – Morleys – muscled men wearing small vests had arranged themselves in a circle. They casually held big guns made from coloured plastic. A joke of an army. They pressed their pretend weapons into the ground as though steadying themselves. A larger circle of girls formed around the men. The girls picked at the small jewels growing out of their belly buttons, touched the drawings on their arms, talked to the little dogs at their heels that bit at nothing. Every few seconds one of the men pulled a trigger and water sprayed. The girls shouted like they were surprised, the dogs became furious and the men all shook hands. Nana muttered. Belinda wished she could make out the words but Nana seemed to be trying hard to speak very quietly.
Opposite Superdrug, Belinda tripped and landed on her knees. A girl in a red cap with a wad of leaflets in her hands helped Belinda back up. Through a giggle, the girl asked Belinda if she was OK. It took Belinda time to get to her feet and to understand what had been said because she was distracted by the picture on the leaflet: a black baby with squeezed eyes and tears moistening dusty cheeks. The girl asked Nana to do something about saving children for only £5 a month. Nana was not interested.
Belinda knew what crowds were like. She had battled through New Tafo. She had been in packs of brave pedestrians who ran across the crazy junction near Kwadwo Kannin Street. But it was different when so many of the rushing faces of the crowd were white.
Obviously she had seen oburoni before: Leonardo DiCaprio and Julia Roberts in the magazines Aunty left on the bathroom floor, the big men on the news, the silly young man in the zoo, the families at Heathrow. Belinda was familiar with the idea that their hair was weird, their voices weirder, like the sound ignored the mouth and came out through the nose. But here they were even stranger. They seemed so determined. Or focused. Yes, their pale stares were very focused on something important. And they themselves were important too, with their heads up and shoulders square and faces on the edge of anger. They were certainly too important to notice her. But if,