Speak Gigantular Page 11

  Each time someone asks, “Why all these questions? Shouldn’t you be leaving this to the police?”

  I don’t bother telling them Nadine is my friend. Instead, I say I’m a trainee journalist with CNN and it’s my first investigative piece.

  “You mean I could make the news?” That stops the fuckers asking questions. I picked up this trick from my sister. She tells elaborate lies and never feels bad, as she believes that lying often is the humane thing to do. Sixty percent of the time human beings interact they’re lying to each other. It’s a coping mechanism.

  I talk to Sammy at Shoe World who gives me good deals through his staff discount. There’s a beautiful sheen to his dark, Ghanaian skin and I can still hear the tiny hint of a lisp when he talks. This makes me like him even more.

  “Sure I saw her,” he says. “It’s hard not to notice them. They’re always together. I remember her ribbon.”

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “She was retying it. It must be a lot of pressure looking after a kid like that.”

  After three hours talking to locals in and around the centre, I leave, wondering if the inanimate objects saw more. Maybe the red post box opposite the music store had a blueprint of every scene etched on its pile of envelopes. And the fat blue change machine could cough out silver trails of her movements.

  I talk to Elora and she trembles, sitting back in the large, wine-coloured sofa that dominates her living room. She is thinner. If I touched her with one finger, her legs would probably buckle. She left Nadine in the yoghurt aisle briefly, asked her to get her favourite brand while she grabbed some vegetables. That was the last time she saw her.

  At home I study my yellow post-it note board of evidence. Every sighting leads to a dead end. I move things around to think fluidly. Nadine in the newspaper picture frame stands up and looks right at me. My head is full of cotton wool, stopping thoughts from connecting. My skin is static, my hands jerk involuntarily, and my body follows. I know a seizure is coming, running erratically towards the heart of me.

  When I come round, my sister’s holding my hand. She’s changed one grimy alpaca T-shirt for another of Grace Jones.

  My brother cracks a relieved smile. “We’ve run out of apples,” he simply says.

  Wherever she is, Nadine’s voice has planted itself in my eardrums. I keep going over evidence, thin accounts that are different textures of clothing; Nadine retying the ribbon in her hair, waving at Brenda on till thirteen, weighing melons in the fruit and vegetable aisle, flying through the exit. One tiny thread could mean something; I just need to know what it is.

  Wednesday arrives grey and groggy as if on flu medication. By evening, everybody else in my house has gone out. I fall asleep early and dream of Nadine and I dropping down a tunnel like coins flicked in. Eyesight is a neon glow and things hurtle down; the BMX bike I had at age nine, the globe in my room, Nadine’s Lauryn Hill T-shirt, her ribbon, the yellow post-it notes with my handwriting scrawled across them. It all becomes ink tears on square paper suns. When we land, Nadine leads me to my green sea, to the water’s edge where reflections of others are back to back. Her voice erodes the lines of their bodies.

  I wake up to a panic attack; call an ambulance! In the van their gazes switch on small light bulbs under my skin. At the hospital waiting room, I’m not the only one having a panic attack; all the elements of my dream are too. We take up an entire front row.

  My sister picks me up. At home she tucks me into bed. When her back is turned, I fish out the tape recorder containing interviews and my observations on Nadine’s case and press play.

  At 8.30am my phone rings. My tongue feels like it’s done five rounds with Ali. The white display screen shows Number Unknown.

  “Hello, Cree?” a male voice with an Asian accent asks when I decide to accept the call.

  “Who’s this?” I reply, ready to pretend it’s the wrong number in case it’s a sales call. The voice breaks slightly—my room has shitty reception. “Sorry, who?”

  “Hamil from the Internet café! Listen, I remembered something about Nadine. I think it’s important…” His voice trails off.

  “Stay there, I’m coming right now.”

  “Do you think you could come around 2pm?”

  “Hamil, Rome was probably built before 2pm. Don’t go anywhere.”

  I grab my trainers. Every word I’m saying tastes foul. Sweet sleep can leave dead gifts on your tongue. Hamil is still yakking away. I think of Nadine’s screams being parachutes in the sky. Static from the phone threatens to suck me in. I face Nadine’s picture in the frame. She’s alert, leaning forward; a flame licks at each heel. She’s ready to fling herself into the whites of my eyes.

  At 9.00am the Internet café, a long narrow room with dull decor, contains six people. It’s amazing how many monitors these café owners fit into small spaces. The café has stout, black chairs you can swivel in, maybe into another place or outcome. Monitors flicker and I see hands pressed against the screen from the inside, but this could be a trick of light.

  Hamil has the smallest head I’ve seen on a man and a faint moustache that changed its mind about its own density halfway through growing. His movements are that of a park squirrel on acid. Blink and he’s at the opposite end of the room fiddling with a loose wire, convincingly slipping an international calling card into your clutches or pressing his hand against the buzz on the right side of my brain to stop the bee inside from wailing.

  We sit in the tiny kitchen at the back with the door shut. An old monitor is on the table. Hamil knows my face. When the Internet was down at our house for a month, I practically lived in his café.

  “Hamil, do you like Egg McMuffin?” I lay my tape recorder on the counter; switch it on and split one Egg McMuffin.

  He crumples his face. “Half an Egg McMuffin?”

  “I never share Egg McMuffins, you are an important man. So you remember something?”

  He takes my offering, chews a chunk. “Yeah, the thing is, you see someone many times, one sighting blends into another.”

  “What are you saying? Help me out, it’s early.”

  He demolishes another mouthful in true park squirrel speed. “I see her and the grandmother all the time. They shop like everyone else. But she knows him; I’ve seen her talking to him a few times.”

  “Who?”

  “That kid Ryan and his buddies. I think they go to the same school. You know him?”

  I shake my head. He chucks the McDonald’s packaging in the bin. “Mixed race kid, good-looking, wears a maroon Umbro jacket. They both attend St Michael’s.”

  “How do you know this?” I ask.

  “I run an Internet café. It’s amazing the bits of conversation you catch, the things I know about the locals; websites they frequent, if they use online banking and with which bank, when their last job was from printing CVs. Anyway, this Ryan kid and his mates come in here sometimes.”

  I lean further back into the counter. “What’s he like?”

  “He’s a regular teenager, confident and popular. The girls like him, except…” He pauses for a few seconds. “…he’s a different person when you catch him alone.”

  “In what sense?” I ask, realising a shared Egg McMuffin isn’t enough for breakfast.

  “Thoughtful, sensitive even but hides it. So he and his friends are talking to her and I don’t think anything of it because I’ve seen them chat before. Then, some woman calls me over about a virus and she’s out of my head. I just assume she went back into Asda.”

  My fingers reach for the recorder. “Ok, that’s good, thanks.”

  “Oh, one more thing, these kids were bored. The food fair was on and not really their bag. They were hanging out, drinking Budweiser and Guinness. I found this,” he said, clicking into a shared folder on the screen.

  “What is it?” I ask, zipping my bomber jacket up.

  He drags a file from the folder into the centre of the screen, clicks on it. “I only stumbled on this bec
ause I was clearing files out this morning. It’s a Skype video of Nadine on her last visit here. Somehow it was accidentally recorded.”

  Nadine’s face fills the screen. She’s laughing with that innocent, blank eyed stare and I want to cry. I feel myself welling up. The voices of several boys behind her fill a void. Their faces float into the screen; they look young but have hardened gleams in their eyes. These boys could be my little brothers, I think. A sick feeling grows in the pit of my stomach.

  “Come on, Nadine, come for a walk. We want to show you something.”

  “Don’t you want to be like the other girls at school?”

  “Beer in the cake,” Nadine says.

  “Yeah we’ll give you beer, you stupid cunt.” They snigger, the screen flickers, they all become grey. Nadine gets out of her chair. The screen flickers again, shrinking the boys’ faces in what feels like a second.

  “You think you’d recognise these boys?” I shove the recorder into my pocket, from the slightly open door I can see more customers have appeared at the counter, waiting for Hamil.

  “Yeah,” he replies. “I’d know those little bastards.”

  I launch myself at Hamil, planting a kiss on his cheek. “Next time you’re getting the full English, the works.”

  He flushes, delighted, but moans, “You owe me five quid.”

  “Put it on my credit!” I yell, breezing through the door.

  “I don’t do credit! Not even for a beautiful black girl who knows how to use her wiles!”

  All I could think about were Nadine’s last words to me—“Beer in the cake”—and the boys’ faces closing in on hers on the screen.

  I find Ryan at his mother’s, hitting a punching bag in the garage. There are weights on the floor, dumbbells, a weighing machine, an area for chin ups, sealed boxes around the edges. I feel as though I’ve entered a makeshift ring, both of us orbiting towards a scene where the other is floored. He is melancholic, serious, polite. He offers me a glass of water. I decline, despite knowing I will need water during the break, against the ropes. He meets my gaze slowly. There is both relief and fear on his face. “I wondered when somebody would come.” The punching bag dangles between us.

  Once upon a time, the wolf inside a boy fell in love with a girl’s expression; fell in love with its innocence. The boy held it between his teeth when the wolf sat on its haunches. The girl’s name was Nadine, the boy’s Ryan.

  Ryan’s unwitting seduction began under the umbrella of rusty school gates and the grey wheezing of winter. Ryan started to notice things, such as the girl’s ripening body and the effect her pure smile had. He saw beauty when superficiality told him he shouldn’t. Beauty drew itself into the placid lines of her face. This is wrong, he thought, she’s not normal, people will talk! They’ll laugh. Nadine wasn’t like other girls. He wrestled with the wolf.

  He walked her to school a few times, talked about the silent things he’d never had the courage to share. He watched them fall on her face as she listened attentively. People sniggered at her holding his blazer in the hallways, during breaks. “Look at that spastic,” his friends mocked him. “How’s your disabled girlfriend? Do her yet? You freak.” And the wolf laughed, Hahaha, should have given her to me.

  Ryan looked at other pretty girls but he found most boring. They talked about silly things. He waited for them to say things of consequence but it never came. Yet he could be himself with a girl whose limitations were inescapable. There was something darkly wondrous about Nadine, about all the things she couldn’t say or express that intrigued him. He wondered what those things were. He started to resent Nadine for his attraction to her. The wolf ruptured something in his blood.

  On the day of the international food fair, he and the boys were at the shopping centre, all six of them drinking and getting high. They spotted Nadine wandering on her own. Ryan waved her over. She babbled about beer and baking a cake. They hung around in the internet café for a few minutes since Mark needed to Skype some French girl he’d been chatting to. When they left the café, Ryan gave her some Guinness. The boys offered her more beer, a little weed. They chuckled when she sputtered.

  Their smiles became one white trap. They passed an invisible note between them but nobody knew whose handwriting it was. Ryan threw his arm around her reassuringly. They took her to the Alps spot with its hidden enclaves and view over the area. She was yanked deep within it. The unnamed flower inside her nursed a fist growing through blood. The boys held her down, undid their trousers and ripped the red ribbon from her hair to wrap around her fate. Two doves died in her eyes as they put a bag over her head. They took turns stealing her virginity. Their hands splayed, covering sprigs of grass that sprang up as witnesses. The wolf won and the boys howled at her face, the bagged afternoon moon.

  Thanks to Ryan’s confession, the police are able to find Nadine where they left her, naked and circling her footsteps. Traumatised, unable to speak.

  According to the judicial system, the boys aren’t adults, so nobody knows what sort of sentence they’ll get. CNN does a feature; they call me an intrepid sleuth. They offer me an actual investigative journalism internship.

  Nadine’s picture stops moving in the frame. I keep it in an old tuck box. I visit her a few times and just talk, even though she never responds, except to squeeze my hand. I tell Elora that the old Nadine is still in there somewhere. I know what it’s like to have a terrible thing happen to you and hold you by the throat.

  September arrives. The air is crisper; leaves bend to the will of the wind. People’s walks change. I haven’t had a seizure for over a month, which feels great. I’m still sad about Nadine, mourning who she used to be. I’m sad that we never see monsters changing their disguises. Sad that teenage conformity can be a knife to the skin and that unspoken things can take the shapes of wolves and men interchangeably.

  It’s that time of year again and the local businesswomen of Sure Start Network are having their annual event. It’s a good gig for me: I chat, take pictures, get paid. My camera is safely packed in my bag and I zip through the front door.

  I pass Elora’s house on my way, look up to my brother’s bedroom window. His head bobs slowly, appreciatively to music. I hear the sound of my cold green apple making its way to his grip. Nadine’s face swims in the glass. Tears run down her cheeks. She silently begs me not to forget her. I hear her.

  I nudge the squeaking gate open and slip a card into the post slot for Elora and Nadine. Light falling on the pavement makes me contemplate possibilities. I think of standing beside Nadine on dark slip roads connecting the incidents of that summer, of the boys’ tongues leaving their mouths to become small, thirsty creatures in the distance. I imagine waiting patiently until Nadine starts to speak again.

  My head feels funny, murky; the wind is cold against my face. My right arms jerks. Something’s running towards the centre of me, digging its heels in. The world outside opens and I fall into it.

  Poko, Poko

  Sun-soaked yawns hover in Sal Island, Cape Verde. Desert land, miles and miles of barren spots unfurl in a series of lithe morning stretches. Our hotel Porto du Vento in Santa Maria, where my sister and I are staying, is rustic and warm. I like that we’re the only guests, and that the white woman who runs it writes but can never decide which language to write in because she speaks two—Portuguese and Spanish. I like that she eats with her staff and that they never have most of what’s on the menu. The special is the same every night: rice with chicken and potatoes. Her huge, black dog drools while we eat and her adorable mother hovers in the background of our live pictures. Her curly silver hair bounces and she wears neat, flowery shirts. She offers us cake or biscuits after breakfast and fills the iron with water to wipe frowns from my clothes. She is so cute and quaint, my sister and I pretend she’s a mafia don hiding out in Cape Verde. She has the look of a woman who would surprise you with tales of her life.

  There are building works outside the hotel and surprisingly, this doesn’t annoy
me. I enjoy being in the centre of things, among real life, real people, circling the hem of developments just through our daily walks. This is Africa and it’s hot, but not unbearably so. The dogs and cats here are lean. They catch sunrays on rooftops and take shade under cars. The guardians of the streets, they bark and meow across to each other at night.

  Cape Verdeans are ridiculously good-looking people, effortlessly so. It’s a wonder they don’t start the day gazing at their reflections for long periods of time. The cab drivers are all young and attractive, as well as the shop workers, the bar staff, the fishermen. Even the local beggars are blessed with nice looks. The people amble across roads in slow, even strides saying, “No stress, no stress”, the motto on the island.

  The streets in Santa Maria are all connected and dotted with brightly coloured houses. At times I see silver scarves trembling but they are freshly caught fish winking at me from wheelbarrows. The children playing are drops of blood on hot tarmac, bleeding into one another.

  Charming Senegalese shop owners wielding Colgate smiles accost us mid-stride. They show us pictures of their newborn babies and talk of family back home. I can’t help it, I find myself reaching into my wallet to buy turtles carved from wood and jewellery.

  Boys on the cusp of manhood carry surf and skim boards under their arms. The taxi drivers in light blue cars with yellow stripes shout at us, “Espargos, Espargos!” We shake our heads, slightly embarrassed to be among black people and still be easily identifiable as tourists.

  My sister and I are crossing a wide, thirsty patch of ground two minutes from our hotel. The gates are cactuses the length of my legs. Aluminium drink tabs are its scattered teeth. We spot a silver van with the company name in Portuguese followed by tours in sweating black typography. Forty-five minutes earlier, I’d booked a tour of Sal with a man who came down especially to the hotel. The driver honks the horn. He’s looking right at us.