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  In the morning, she woke to find Hilly standing over her, breathing heavily. She turned a photograph of Odun in her hands as though it were a weapon, then held it up to the light, scanning it searchingly, as if she’d left some belongings there.

  Saturday rolled in. Grace told herself she wasn’t going to go on the date set by the stranger. A lie she said out loud so her own words could hold her accountable. But she knew she was deceiving herself when she wore her lucky multi-coloured polka dot shirt teamed with ripped blue jeans and black ballet style flats. Hilly walked in on her checking her outfit in the mirror, eyed her suspiciously.

  “Who’s the guy?” she asked, grabbing a black cat suit she’d loaned Grace some weeks back, then handing Grace a deep raspberry hued lipstick from the dresser. “Here. Use this one. It’s vampy.”

  “Just a friend,” Grace said offhandedly.

  “Some friend. You’re wearing your favourite shirt. Odun would approve. He always liked your style. He loves you more you know. He thinks you’re stronger,” Hilly replied, tucking a stray braid back from Grace’s forehead almost tenderly.

  Grace caught the Central and Victoria lines, avoided eye contact with people in carriages and emerged from the station with a sigh of trepidation. She loved The Ritzy’s organic feel and the screenings written on blackboards.

  In the screening room there were only a handful of people. She sat right at the back to observe everybody else and keep watch on the entrance discreetly. A velvet red seat swallowed her bottom. This is dangerous, she thought. I feel alive. She adjusted her buttocks, some popcorn spilled, leaving a trail of small white clouds on her thighs. Soon, she was swept up in adverts; a silly mobile ad with a man running around a beach desperately trying to get a signal and a trailer for a terrible-looking medieval movie.

  She felt his presence before seeing him. Her neck was warm, something danced on her skin. He stood to her left, light from the outlines on the screen played over his frame, as though he had somehow emerged from that same screen while the adverts were rolling, while she’d momentarily looked away. His movements were languid, confident. Dressed in worn black jeans, a retro yellow Bruce Lee T-shirt and a pair of battered green converses, he looked casual and relaxed. He sat next to her. Wearing a sheepish expression, he stirred his cookies and cream flavoured Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

  She recognised him. He was the cute Asian guy who’d been coming to the café for roughly a month. He had an American accent she couldn’t quite place, loved bagels and seemed to mull over problems that needed unpicking while he ate. There was a tiny, endearing gap between his two front teeth. Deceptively sleepy, slightly slanted eyes with long lashes crinkled at the corners as he smiled warmly. His hair was cropped close. From his darker skin tone she guessed he was maybe Filipino, Malaysian or Cambodian. He leaned over. “You must be a little crazy,” he whispered. “Coming out to meet a stranger. My kind of woman. I’m Michael.” He brushed a kiss the weight of a butterfly on her cheek.

  “You smell nice,” he added. “What is that?”

  She choked back a laugh. “I’m Grace, but you already know that. You mean I don’t smell like omelets and sausages for a change?”

  “I have to admit, you wear the scent of omelets and sausages very well and you look good doing so.”

  They both laughed.

  Grace slid some popcorn into her mouth. “You can share this with me,” she offered, setting it back between her thighs.

  Michael took off his jacket; a mobile phone went off. “Oh I’m counting on it, between getting our tickets and buying this shit, I’m actually broke. It’s outrageous the charges for confectionary in cinemas. Don’t worry; I can still buy you drinks.”

  She chuckled, leaning forward in her seat, holding his unwavering gaze with a probing one of her own. “Your poetry is odd,” she said finally.

  “You came,” he answered, unable to stop a small grin, his opening of skin for her to sink her fingers into. He stretched his long legs, sank further back into the seat and wolfed down a couple more spoonfuls of ice cream.

  “Are you familiar with Kurosawa?” he asked.

  “I only saw one film of his,” she answered honestly. “I saw Seven Samurai late at night on Film Four.”

  “The first time I saw you, you were serving this table of asshole City-types breakfast. They were rude. You seemed like you were ready to kick someone’s ass. And I thought, there’s a woman who looks like she has some spirit, some adventure in her,” he said before turning back to the screen.

  Afterwards, they sat in the bar area talking and listening to isolated sounds; glasses clinking, rims crawling off the short bar, a few orders trapped between the till opening and closing, drunken silhouettes scraping back against the shadows. She sipped glasses of Tia Maria, vodka and orange. He drank Jack Daniels mixed with coke, a brand of German beer she couldn’t pronounce properly. Her body became sweaty, a result of her nerves and excitement. She found herself struggling to grapple with her feelings. He watched her through eyes that seemed to have tricks up their lids.

  “What do you do?” she asked.

  “I travel, write among other things. You like literature?”

  “Yeah. James Baldwin, Dosteovsky, Zora Neale Hurston. Why the note? Why not ask me out in person?”

  “Too easy. I wanted to intrigue you, plus the probability you might not show prolonged the anxiety. A man should wrestle with some anxiety if he likes a woman, don’t you think?” he replied.

  “You’re a peculiar egg.”

  Michael kissed her, sucked her tongue. The kiss became heady. He tasted of alcoholic possibilities; of things in the dark she’d drawn with her fingers that needed faces and permission to quench their thirsts. Her fingers sunk further into his opening of skin.

  “Say you’ll see me again,” he begged.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to know the strange things about you.”

  Three weeks passed. On the evening Grace received the phone call from the hospital, she was standing by the dresser in her room. After she hung up, the phone fell from her hand. She needed to find Hilly. The pain in her head was so strong, as though someone had plunged a hot poker in there, tracing half signs in her brain she wouldn’t be able to interpret till later, flashing in a darkness that was spreading. She tried to grab the signs but they remained illusive, flickering then thinning. She though her head would explode.

  She opened the packet of Codydramol on the dresser, swallowed two before collapsing on the bed. The ceiling spun. Tears ran down her cheeks as she reached for the photograph on the chest of drawers beside the bed, the one Hilly had been fascinated with for weeks. In it was a young Odun, handsome and smiling at the camera in his long black leather jacket, an afro comb tucked into his hair. He seemed to be launching himself at the lens in a way that said, “World I’m coming, get ready for me.” Just behind him on the steps of a house was the figure of a woman in a yellow dress, pregnant and looking at Odun with such an expression of love, it was almost palpable. She recognised those steps. A feeling of sickness rose through her throat. Pearl had lived in that house too, the home they grew up in. Odun had gotten rid of every scrap of evidence, every sign of her but somehow this photograph had resurfaced and who knew how long Hilly had been carrying it around. The resemblance between the girls and their mother was so uncanny; it could have been either Grace or Hilly in the picture, taking turns to sit in the yellow dress to watch Odun transforming into the man he’d become.

  Grace closed her eyes. She could hear the sound of the fridge groaning. She saw herself and Hilly running towards Odun, crossing the white line of the park, only this time Pearl was beside them, arms outstretched, feet covered in white paint, tongue floating in the dark cavern of her mouth. She was running too, pregnant with the blueprints of things that would happen, her stomach extending towards that line, her hands waving frantically. Grace climbed off the bed, ran into the bathroom retching in the toilet. Afterwards, she stumbled towards
the front door, clutching her stomach, reaching for the handle. She walked into the night almost blindly, calling Hilly’s name to the luminous signs from her head that had made their way into street corners.

  “You look a little different tonight,” Michael commented. “This updo suits you, you have an elegant neck.”

  Hilly smiled, noticing the few paintings of kimonoed women on the walls, the birdcage in the corner by the bar, the dark décor. She liked his choice of a moody, atmospheric discreet Dim Sum restaurant that served unusual cocktails with exotic ingredients. After reading their text message exchanges on her sister’s phone, it had been a simple decision to come. Why should Grace have all the fun? It was easy enough to pretend to be Grace, she’d done it on and off secretly for years. She ordered spicy duck, he ordered some seaweed dumplings. She wondered if Grace had fucked him yet.

  Later, they threaded their way through less busier streets. A puffy-eyed, bald-headed man attempted to sell them drugs opposite Brixton station. The air felt charged between them. They meandered over to the new water garden. An oasis of green, dotted with bright rings of flowers, ponds and small seating areas. It was empty, flanked by a few trees. He held her hand and they wandered in, towards a broad trunked Sycamore tree. Hilly didn’t notice the tears running down the face of the female statue sitting cross-legged in a pond. Instead, her focus was on the oval shaped, large silver capsule beyond that area, burrowed in the grass with a bubbled glass window and dimmed yellow light emanating from it.

  “It’s that memory capsule that’s been spotted around the city,” she explained. “I think it’s some sort of movable art installation. People write their favourite memories of London on cards or scraps of paper and slip it in.”

  “Come on,” he said, tugging her forward. “Let’s have an adventure.”

  He opened the capsule door easily and they entered. She barely spotted the white screen and gearstick when the lights went off. She could feel the scraps of paper beneath her feet.

  All evening something had been gnawing at her, a terrible feeling of dread that had been growing which she’d ignored but couldn’t any longer. The pain in her chest was searing. She couldn’t breathe. Odun had died. She knew it; she felt that last breath leave him.

  Michael wouldn’t let her off. Instead he said, “I forgot to tell you: I’m not from anywhere you’d know.”

  He loomed towards her, his mouth widened, twisting and silver in the dark till she thought it would swallow her. The engine came on. The capsule hovered above the ground.

  Oh God, Hilly thought. She felt something prick her skin. She counted to ten, her limbs slackened, she couldn’t feel her body anymore. She tried to stop the panic rising. Grace would come because she owed her. Odun wasn’t coming. He’d kicked the bucket. Goddamn him.

  She fell to the floor crying on the city’s memories, turning her head to the light in the window, desperately trying to stretch her hand out to trace the shape of a whistle rising through the bubbled glass.

  Walk With Sleep

  The bomb shelters resembled museums waiting for the flurry of movement. At each one—Camden Town, Belsize Park, Goodge Street, Chancery Lane, Stockwell, Clapham North—there was no exit for underground jumpers.

  Brick ventilation shafts on the roofs of tunnels waited for them. At Clapham South, shelter doors whispered. The big lift was still in use. Haji and October rode it several times, watching expectantly as the door creaked open. They slid down the spiral staircase that burrowed into the tunnel. At the bottom, the walls bore directions for a canteen, shelter and medical areas. The empty control room was dusty with bits of wood in corners. They stroked the old board missing its emergency alarms. The bunks rolled out one after another, empty of bodies. It was like a forgotten town, ready for them to invent their own subterranean language. October discovered a broken safe storing abandoned government files, filled with documents on World War II. She pored over them. They wandered the rooms, running their hands over items.

  Haji told her about his constant battle to feel at home in his own body while he’d been alive. He had never been diagnosed, never sought the advice of medical professionals but he’d always known something wasn’t quite right. The random attacks of disconnection he experienced made him feel awkward around people. At social gatherings he found himself holding his breath, watching and waiting for the body parts he couldn’t feel to appear at the opposite end of the room, his leg parting through the crowd towards him to claim ownership, his arm bruised from all the times it had attempted to lift Nuri off the ground after it was too late. Once at a gallery launch, he’d been so panicked that he had spilled his glass of white wine on the pristine white tablecloth, leaving a baffled group of people to rush into the toilet. There, he had felt his face in the mirror frantically, convinced it was made up from the parts of others. Haji had curled into a ball on the cubicle floor, wanting to flush his head down the toilet.

  Sitting up on an empty bunk listening to him, October began to whimper softly.

  “You’ve been here a long time haven’t you? Years,” she said, wiping her tears, trying to steady her rising shoulders and the panic in her voice.

  He nodded gravely. “It’s a funny place this world, there’s no artifice. Somehow, I feel more of a sense of myself here without all the noise.”

  “But don’t you feel lonely?” October asked, searching his face.

  He laughed, running a finger over the space on his shirt a button had come off. “I felt lonelier out there, surrounded by all those people chasing ideas of happiness that weren’t even theirs.” The silence that followed felt thick, melancholic.

  October was grateful Betty had dozed off. “I remembered something earlier,” she said, stumbling over her words a little. “When I bought Betty, the lady at the shop who served me said, ‘I still do that sometimes.’ What do you think she meant?”

  Haji did not answer but smiled patiently instead, watching her hands morph into small traps.

  Before

  On the morning of her audition October counted thirty women in the cold, narrow audition hallway, imagining wax figures of everybody melting on a conveyor belt that stopped each time a figure flattened. She sat wringing her hands nervously, every now and again looking at the white audition room door at the far end of the hallway. It swung open each time an actress walked out, creaking loudly in satisfaction. At the opposite end, the water machine chugged, dampening the sounds of heels clicking in the various rooms. Large headshots of famous, successful actors and actresses lined the walls. October watched each one take a bite from the same never-ending piece of cake before passing it on. Sated, the actors’ bodies then leaned forward, threatening to leave their frames to wander the long hallway mockingly.

  She’d gone to twenty-five different auditions in the last month and hadn’t gotten one central role; only features as an extra in Eastenders, Holby City and Coronation Street. She was planning to try her luck with theatre instead to see how that panned out. She’d visited The Tricycle Theatre a few times, starring at their posters, drinking at the bar and waiting for the actors to emerge from their heady nights of performance.

  She took a deep breath and the conveyor belt now surrounded her, the wax figures had disappeared but the actresses in various states of undress held items October recognised; a pair of torn period-stained tights, a pale parasite that had begun to grow tiny legs on her bedroom window sill at nights, her mother’s gold ring she’d had to sell to help pay rent months back. She blinked the image away and the women were all back in their seats again, restless, adjusting their costumes, checking their reflections for silences in small make-up mirrors.

  She took another deep breath, aware of every leg uncrossing, every panicked whisper, every body leaning towards an invisible, darkening line. She ran her lines over in her head to keep her calm.

  When the heavyset woman with a severe bun and a clipboard called her name, October stood up steadily, sensing the eyes of the other actresses on her but no
t the faintest of smirks on some of their faces.

  The audition room was a plain, underwhelming experience; white walls, a wooden floor, an open skylight. The producer and director of the drama—both men—and a surly-looking, chestnut haired, grey-eyed woman sat behind a table. They got brief pleasantries out of the way before indicating she should start.

  October gave her interpretation of the scene she’d been sent; a pirate battling on the seas, his tormented love, a reckoning on an unnamed Caribbean island. Her audition lasted ten minutes. She searched their faces expectantly after her last line. They thanked her for coming, smiling politely, their expressions unreadable. Then the director stood and ushered her to one side. His lanky frame momentarily blocked her view of the others.

  “You were very good,” he offered flatly. “Erm… This is awkward. The part wasn’t written for a black woman.”

  October pulled her arm back, the small embers of anger flickering. “It didn’t say so in the casting call. I don’t understand, some of it is set on a Caribbean island. Why couldn’t I play a pirate’s wife? You’re the director. Doesn’t your decision stand?” Her voice rose then. Behind the table, the producer and the woman, shifting awkwardly, looked everywhere but at her.

  “I’m sorry, my hands are tied. I’m only telling you because I feel it’s cruel not to. You really are very good and very attractive. Good luck,” he said, face flushed, already turning his back.

  She passed through Deptford market feeling angry and frustrated. From the Sense charity shop doorway, she spotted a Betty Boop T-shirt on a rack. It was the last one of the lot, rumpled a little from all the hands that had decided to pass on it. Stepping into the shop, she felt herself already reaching for it and the bitter wind whipping her items from the audition conveyor belt all around her.