Speak Gigantular Page 10

  She cried on the way back home, watching car headlights fall on carcasses telling bedtime stories to dirty bonnets. At the flat, Loneliness was perched on the couch, mouth open and blinking at the television screen. She held the semen-speckled handkerchief of ZACHARY LIKES TO DANCE up. Loneliness ambled over, swallowed the small, white material whole, tail wagging. She sat on the couch, carrying the creature on her lap. She recounted the day’s encounter out loud to it, stroking it, remembering her fingers on ZACHARY’s bald patch, his keen mouth on her feet sucking greedily, and then asking, “Please can I come on them? Please can I have your panties?”

  Instead she’d seen his handkerchief tumbling in the void inside her, along with other items that had landed silently. She’d shoved one stocking in his mouth before he buried his nostrils in both feet, inhaling deeply, hands grabbing, asking to be suffocated by them repeatedly.

  Loneliness, somewhat sated, fell asleep.

  SABIEN X was an art tutor. Brown-haired and golden-eyed, he possessed an inquisitive, long face and aquiline features. He talked with a lisp, as though a small, slight silhouette passed a limb through his teeth with each word uttered.

  In his roomy studio, the large canvasses leaning against white walls were their audience. There were two windows, one overlooking the street and the other above a pathway leading to the garden of headless stone gods, whose heads sank in the green pond. The smell of paint and dampness hung in the studio air. She caught smudged purples, pinks and reds on a handful of paintbrushes in the sink. Coloured fingerprints on a half-empty jar of water on the table edged into a hand.

  “Recently,” he said, “I have begun collecting stuffed animals.”

  Awkward introductions wrapped up, she placed her bare foot on a stacked wooden shelf, beneath the gaze of an owl and the spine of a thick book on the lost architecture of ancient Rome. He crawled towards her wearing just a black scarf, hypnotised by her feet as if a murky horizon unfolded from them. He placed her foot on his chest. She felt his heart beating against the sole. He closed his eyes, held her foot still, finding a rhythm. She ran through the canvasses, borrowing their painted skin.

  He told her, “Lately, I’ve developed a taste for eating uncooked food. The other day, I ate half a packet of sausages raw. I don’t know where this has come from or why I’m telling you.” She nodded because she understood the arrival of things you couldn’t explain. His uncertainty blurred the lines of his body. At home, Loneliness left holes in the black scarf, SABIEN’s gift to her.

  The third guy, RAY, a country boy from Devon with sleepy brown eyes and broad, reliable shoulders, was a farmer at heart. Still adjusting to being in the city, he felt out of step with London, with its pace. RAY had first discovered his sexual pull towards women’s feet aged twelve when in the summer the blue Volkswagen Beetle of a group of young nuns driving past broke down near the farm. While his father was taking a look at the car, the nuns had slipped their sandals off. Something about them being covered up except for the exposed skin of their ankles as they danced in the field, their pretty bare feet in the dirt, had caused a twinge in his groin. RAY had stared at them standing by the tractor in wonder, in discovery. He had masturbated that night. He had fallen asleep thinking of the nuns in the tracks on the field, light pooling at their heels, their arched feet eluding him in the dirt and him trying to catch them all at once with his mouth, tongue, hands.

  After a year in London, RAY had begun to grow things on pillows as if they were soil. Sometimes, his lovers would wake to find offerings by their heads: a weightless ball of pomegranate seeds, a blue turnip, a stalk of asparagus.

  They would laugh uncomfortably. “Why have you left a vegetable on the pillow? What an odd thing to do!” One day, a lover had risen to discover a fragment of a future he’d grown overnight, a sleep-lined model family made from cabbages. She had fled, leaving the cabbage family to wilt on the maroon bed sheet.

  At his ramshackle attic space, RAY cried against her feet. Embarrassed, he confessed it was the first time in a while and that something about them made him feel both desire and vulnerability. He ran ice cubes along the dips and curves. Her collages were stuck between the wooden beams in the ceiling, talking to her in a muffled language. She groaned back at them, pointing her toes from the ice strokes. Words in rigid blocks of ice travelled along her soles: She gathers, she draws night siblings, breaks skin, hollow instruments to mould with one breath. Then ice and words became a small, cold river. Four words melted last: She gathers, she draws.

  In a rhinestone-studded belly, she caught maps of places yet to exist. Her pen leaked. RAY grew a potato the shape of her foot. Afterwards, he sucked on the corner beneath her fifth toe, where the skin was tougher. An ache migrated when she came. Her tiny silhouette broke into a memory in his iris.

  At home, Loneliness growled in greeting when she collapsed on the sofa. It flicked the television channels. Later, it chased her potato foot through a gauzy revolving door.

  In April, her mother Merlene arrived to stay for a week. Merlene had a stout frame, perfect cinnamon-coloured skin and a soft voice with a hint of an Antiguan accent. Typically, she appeared unannounced, wielding a small black suitcase. At the front door, she looked up from heavy-lidded golden eyes, busied her fluttering hands smoothing down a floral, pleated skirt. “So this is where you been hiding, girl.”

  “You should have called first,” she answered, conscious of still being dressed in her pajamas. “I’d have cooked something.” She drew Merlene inside, closing the door and leaving the short chain to rattle in protest against the wooden doorway. Her mother’s scent of rose clogged her nostrils.

  Merlene studied the flat with critical eyes; the stencils of shadows on orange hallway walls, some stilettos with broken heels strewn over the floor, a cramped kitchen housing a rusty Indesit washing machine, the recently wiped sink. She ran her fingers along the dust on the TV set. Merlene ignored the feelings of guilt and disappointment coursing through her veins. She knew things about her daughter that Grace would be surprised by. She had the eye. That was why she’d come.

  She spotted Loneliness licking itself in a corner. “That dog needs a bath, Grace,” she commented.

  “It’s not a dog!” Grace shrieked, feeling tension creeping into her neck.

  Merlene shrugged her black woollen coat off. “Good, I was about to say it’s the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen.”

  Loneliness growled.

  Later, Merlene unveiled her favourite memory: teaching Grace to ride a yellow bike aged eight. It was tucked into her suitcase, folded carefully between clothes. Together, they watched eight-year-old Grace ride through the rooms, laughing on her bike. When her eight-year-old self ran out of breath, tired from riding for hours to keep the smile on Merlene’s face, Grace tried to slip one leg of a broken shoe onto her foot, but of course it didn’t fit.

  Two days into her stay, Merlene and Grace continued circling each other.

  “You need a different job,” Merlene said. “I don’t know why you call that… creature Loneliness or why you insist on drawing bad things to yourself.”

  “It’s just a name!” Grace spat.

  “It’s not healthy for you to be cooped up working indoors, not interacting with people.”

  “I have friends I see.”

  “I know you don’t, you’ve always been awkward,” Merlene retorted, mouth a grim line.

  “I’m not awkward.”

  “You used to be a lovely girl.”

  The words echoed in Grace’s head, prompting a memory to resurface. Her sixteenth birthday, a gathering of excitable girls playing games, hands tied behind their backs eating cake from the table. They had played spin the bottle and truth or dare laced with gulps of rum. Icing had crumbled on dresses. And of course Merlene had appeared, walking on crumbs of cake barefoot. Crying after the party had finished, “You’re not my little girl anymore, Grace.” It had been said with a hint of malice. She had realised then that Merlene had never wanted her to
grow up.

  All week she tried to entertain her mother. They took in a play at The National Theatre about a homeless man who believed he was God. They cooked together, argued over what to watch on TV. At one point, Loneliness escaped with the batteries from the remote. Merlene wrestled them from its mouth. Grace couldn’t see any foot worshippers during this period. She couldn’t gather. She knew Merlene would smell it on her. Each night, she watched Merlene perform her ritual of rubbing rosewater into her perfect, smooth feet, then carefully wrapping bandages around them. Each time Grace’s resentment grew. But she didn’t ask. They never discussed it.

  At the end of the week, she accompanied Merlene to Waterloo Station. They embraced, surrounded by a backdrop of swirling commuters. She almost asked then, but Merlene shut her down, as if she knew. “I nearly died giving birth to you, girl.” The gleam in her eye hardened before she disappeared down the platform, gliding along on those bandaged feet. Grace found the nearest toilet, collapsing on the seat in tears.

  Spring arrived and Grace woke one morning to sunlight streaming through her window. A cool breeze caressed two shadows in her gold curtains. They yawned, stretching tongues made from a woollen coat sleeve. She felt an ache in her leg. She peeled back the duvet to discover her right foot had grown three times its size seemingly overnight. She squealed in horror. Not only had it tripled in girth but it had lost its beauty. Gone was the appealing arch, kissable dip. Now it was deformed, twisting slightly to the left. There was no way she could gather with this affliction.

  Over the following weeks her foot continued to grow, until it became like a giant’s foot attached to her shapely, well-proportioned leg. It showed no signs of stopping, looking larger in doorways as the days passed. She felt ugly and freakish. She stopped going out and checking messages for her ad. Loneliness escaped as she threw the bins out one day. She was no longer nimble enough to catch it. Her foot had to be dragged around. Her collages abandoned her to become background images in the lives of others. When she cleaned her room, she found a bottle of rosewater in the bottom drawer. It wasn’t until the cap was twisted off that she tasted tears on her tongue.

  One evening, she flicked the TV channels to BBC News. A sharply-dressed male broadcaster in his fifties announced the police were investigating a series of sexually motivated disappearances they believed were connected.

  When the men’s faces flashed on screen, she felt a tingle of recognition. She remembered their hungry mouths on her soles, licking, sucking, mapping, absorbing the undetectable poison from her feet, her inheritance.

  In her mind’s eye, she saw Loneliness growing on the escalator at London Bridge again. Fat with all the evidence she’d fed it, strumming the old shape of her beautiful, lost foot like an instrument.

  Disconnected, Grace mourned her old feet, mourned the feeling of being worshipped. She thought of those men, recalling each one. And she remembered standing barefoot on the tips of silences winging their way over to the bodies.

  Nadine

  I make electricity with my brain, enough electricity to power laptops and start kettles boiling.

  A mouse had eaten the sympathetic expressions of the doctor who diagnosed me when I was fourteen. He told me I was epileptic and had “grand mal seizures”. I didn’t know what was so grand about them. I just felt like I made a show of myself. Slipstreams showed me eyes rolling in my head, spittle dribbling down my chin and uncontrollable jerking. I used to pretend spirits borrowed my head to see things. After they finished, I’d wake up.

  Now at twenty-six, I get auras before a seizure. It’s like intermittently having fucking déja vu. On a bad day I’ll do anything to avoid my aura: shove it in an old, tattered bag, dump it in empty cereal boxes or my DVD player so it can run. On a good day, I’ll embrace it like a favourite jumper; try to take sly pictures of it with my Nikon camera.

  Coming out of a seizure is terrifying. I know I’ve visited the green sea where those who regularly die temporarily go. It has a floating white bed sheet of charts, tracking all the comings and goings. But what do I do in that sea for the two, sometimes three minutes—the average length of my seizures? I can never remember. My body always feels heavy, as if I’ve been carrying a washing machine spinning possible cures for epilepsy, sinking down into the sea, kicking fervently to save the cures. I always cry after my seizures, green sea water trickling down my cheeks. The faces of my family hover above me, etched with concern. I grab at them as if they’re lifelines floating out of my reach.

  Except for a couple of interlinking roads breaking them up like referees, all the houses on my street are attached. The English are too efficient with space, to the point where, just to get some freedom, your home may one day end up on a football field, in the park opposite the swings or on the cold shoulder of a motorway.

  When I hop out through the front door that early afternoon, the sky is swirling moody hues of grey. Tracey Chapman’s crooning in my earphones about a fast car and the Nikon camera on my neck is ready to snap all the injuries of the coming week. My fat, auburn twists bob up and down.

  A couple of steps down, I spot Elora, one of our neighbours, with her fifteen-year-old granddaughter Nadine. Elora is a stout woman and her short hair neatly packed into a small bun is shot with grey. She still has her Jamaican accent. She is the kind of woman whose shoulder you grab on to steady yourself. Nadine has Down’s syndrome. She has that slightly vacant look people with Down’s syndrome carry, but when she hugs you, she means it. I jog up to catch them.

  “Carpe diem,” I say.

  “Cree!” Nadine’s laugh is soft and warm. She flings her arms around me. Between the dormant static in my brain and the squeeze of her fingers, we’re Einstein’s secret equation.

  I thread my arm through hers. “You guys checking out the international food fair at the store car park today?”

  Nadine is wearing a Lauryn Hill t-shirt, blue jeans and white Nike classics. Her hair is separated into pigtails and tied with a red ribbon. Elora picks up the pace. “Yes, we’re making Guinness punch cake. You OK, darling?”

  “All good. Guinness cake sounds intriguing,” I reply.

  Nadine says, “Beer in the cake!”

  I steady my bag. “Beer in the cake should be our new mantra, Nadine. Save me a slice, alright? Nice outfit. Oh! Stop one second.” I aim my camera, snap Nadine and her red ribbon. I run ahead scattering kisses behind, yelling, “Keep some Guinness cake for me. Beer in the cake!”

  I photograph the things I see. Body parts of a rabbit reassembling on the eastbound platform at Mile End station; the man pulled aside by security at HMV Oxford Circus as a naked redhead crawls out of his rucksack; the guy whose right hand is a gun and has to take the bullets out at night so he doesn’t shoot himself; the sky at night. I look for God’s face in those images. He is the Big Foot of the skies.

  When I arrive home that evening, a police car is parked opposite Elora’s house. Some neighbours are out chatting. Elora emerges, trailed by two uniformed officers. She looks grainy, as if she’s been sitting in a TV screen. She is frantic: Nadine has disappeared.

  My sister Dakore is a wisp of a woman who sleeps with books on her bed. She pads about the house in old T-shirts. An unapologetic slob, my mother refers to her side of the room as “the hovel”. When I’m bouncing around early in the mornings, she cracks a sleep-lined eye open, muttering a variant of “Jesus fucking Christ! You’re like a wind-up toy that doesn’t run out of batteries!” Then she pounces, smothering me in kisses.

  My younger brother Scoli is a genius. He studied animation at Ravensbourne College and draws funny little characters. Tall and handsome, he has vampiresque molars he inherited from our mother and a scar on his left hand. When he’s having intense periods of creativity, he listens to Joana Newsom on loop, her haunting voice lingering in our hallways, the musical equivalent of a Grimm’s fairy tale.

  I’ve been having panic attacks since a terrible thing happened to me two summers ago. When the panic hits,
I make my way to Scoli’s room. He opens the windows, sits with me taking deep breaths. Sometimes he fetches me a cold apple to bite on. Afterwards, I hear the apple in the corners of the house, damp from the green sea, bruised from the thing I cannot breathe through.

  Three days pass. I wake up with Nadine’s laugh in my chest. She still hasn’t been found. There’s no media coverage because they don’t care about missing black girls. The only exception is our local paper, The Recorder, which has used the picture I took in their article. I know Nadine’s alive. Each day, I look at my picture of her. Each time her expression changes, from lost to forlorn to angry. She’s sitting in the corner of the frame, her back turned and the red ribbon on the floor. Her legs are dangling off the edge as if any day now, she’ll fall out of her own picture.

  I leave the house armed with copies of her photo, my camera and a voice recorder I bought on sale at Argos. On my way to the small shopping complex in Beckton, I think of Nadine and how sweetly she trusts. Her collective handshakes have been driving cars at night. They are driving not to places or cities, but to the next promise, the next time someone gives their word.

  The small complex where our local Asda stands is stunted. Maybe the original idea was for something bigger but the budget fell through. We have Asda, Hamil’s Internet café, a post office/shop, the music store, a chemist/opticians and Shoe World. Everywhere you look there’s unfulfilled potential carrying the residue of lead from sketched lines. I talk to staff at each store but there are no real leads. I put pictures of Nadine up on their walls.