The silence on the street forty eight hours later was wrong from the moment I became aware of it. An alien presence of hush and unease seeped in from the morning into my ears and my mind and stirred me from my fretful sleep. Grudgingly, I was awake. I got up too quickly and experienced the usual dry-mouthed, banging headache of a hang over as little bursts of light popped up all over my eyes.
House party. I sat up as hot leather from the couch peeled off my bare arms. The bodies of sleeping and passed out people were strewn across the den floor of Edgar Fountain’s minuscule apartment. I always hated being the first one to wake up. The view from the morning after was downright bleak. Everybody’s face’s were pale, their clothes were half on- half off, thrown off in a haste to find ecstasy, tear tracks down the cheeks of people who’d gotten drunk to loose their problems but found them all in an instant, the harsh breathing, the blotchy, sweaty limbs. Stubble. Tell tale signs of people who should get a fucking life and stop pretending to have things to celebrate.
My girlfriend Sara was amongst them. I saw her, slumped at the fireplace, fast asleep and as bitchily beautiful as ever. I sat there, looking over at her while I re-buttoned my shirt and fished around the mess of the floor for my sneakers. My hand sank into a pile of vomit, my vomit, as I found out when I tasted the bitter remains of it on the roof of my mouth. . I tried, and failed, to work out why exactly I felt like throwing myself off a building into a street of terrifically fast traffic. That was until I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I cried out.
‘Shush! You’ll wake them up! It’s only me, Che-what the hell’s the matter with you?’
‘I know now why it’s all quiet,’ I said, more bile rising in my throat ‘it’s….the funeral, today.’
‘Today?’ shrugged Edgar dismissively, ‘I wouldn’t know. God, I don’t mean to be funny or anything, but you’ve never stank so much in your entire life. The smell of sweat coming off you could floor an army.’
‘Didn’t you wonder,’ said a crisp, yet even voice from the door of the kitchen ‘why they’re all still unconscious?’
Edgar laughed a little whilst I squinted over and saw the dark, thin figure of Nick Follow smiling back at me. He was staring at me with the same concern in his eyes as there always was when I was around.
‘You have looked better, Che. Coffee? I could cook you some breakfast.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ I said.
‘That’s what girls say,’ said Edgar, jumping over the side of the couch and landing beside me with easy grace. He was thinner and smaller than me about a mile, but it still unnerved me when he got so close. I always had the uneasy sense that he knew exactly what I was thinking in my head, and what I felt. I started shivering like a madman, just then. It wasn’t a good sensation, let me tell you.
‘Good party,’ said Edgar, stretching his arms out and looking over them all like a king to his empire.
‘Yeah,’ I said, dragging a hand down my face and taking away about an inch of grime ‘yeah…was….when did all these people get here?’
‘We invited them,’ said Edgar ‘Don’t you remember?’
Nick cleared his throat warningly from the kitchen, but Edgar ignored him
Don’t you remember the other night, all the stuff that went down? You’re our hero, Che. That’s the truth. Nothing’s ever gonna be the same on this street again.’
My insides were black. Black and nothing else. I bent over and with difficultly, managed to tie my sneakers. I spotted my jacket over at the other side of the room and ventured over to get it. My head was weak like water and I must have stepped on about a million limp fingers and toes getting it. I felt Edgar’s eyes follow me in every movement that I made.
Edgar Fountain was a year older than me, but I towered over him like a castle. That didn’t stop him from scaring the shit out of me. He was cunning and intelligent, ruthless and irresistible, and they said he was one of my closest friends. I couldn’t by any stretch call him a friend though.
I always felt strange in his company. It wasn‘t like he was some big meat head guy though. He just had this pale face with big sharp eyes and light feather like hair, and he had this habit of darting his eyes all over your face when you said anything, searching, like he was waiting for you to tell him something you both knew you could never be capable of thinking up. Like he wanted more off you than you could give.
But the truth was, I needed him. I was lucky to have him.
He was the most influential nineteen year old in all of the Light District. Men twice his age respected and revered him. Mysterious and un-confirmed stories of his teenage years still hung around him like a cloud of bemusing smoke. He allowed it all to conspire up against him, stoked the fire of his own wicked reputation. That was Edgar.
‘I’m going home,’ I said.
He opened his mouth in response, but just then the door from one of the bedrooms banged open with an almighty bash, and the huge body of Brad Kane squeezed itself into the already packed den of people. Brad grunted at me and walked on, bound no doubt for the kitchen, but halted, rather stupidly when Edgar said
‘Che says he’s leaving.’
‘Leaving?’
All three of them were looking at me now. Edgar, eyes glistening and mouth curved, Nick with only concern etched across his tired face, and Brad, completely blank faced, but with his only satellites of human emotion activated- his two thick hands balled up into fists.
It was rather ridiculous how long Edgar let the silence ensue. I knew rightly that they’d react this way if I wanted to go. After all, we’d all been in on the events of the past two days, we knew the score. The truth would out. And they knew and I knew, I wasn’t to be trusted at all. But what could they do, hold me captive?
‘Well, we’re hardly going to hold him captive, are we boys?’ tittered Edgar eventually, and he got to his feet and Nick and Brad’s bodies visibly relaxed. I went to the door, saying
‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours. My head’s a wreck. I need….shower, food, my own bed for a while. You understand.’
‘Of course we do,’ said Nick quickly ‘….understand.’
‘Wait,’ said Brad, putting out a hand to stop me from opening the door ‘you forgot to do something.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘To kiss your girlfriend goodbye,’ he said, a queer smile of sarcasm spreading across his baby fat cheeks.
Edgar laughed in surprise.
‘Don’t worry, Braddie. I’ll see to that.’
And he went and without a second’s hesitation, swooped down and administered a long, resuscitating kiss to Sarah. I’d be lying if I said I was shocked. He did stuff like that all the time, but all the same, it was humiliating. I wrenched the door open and left before she stirred enough to open her eyes and see it wasn’t me standing over at her. I’d almost gotten to the first flight of steps when I heard footsteps pounding up behind me
‘Wait!’
‘What is it now, Ed?’ I could feel my voice breaking ‘forgot to kiss me goodbye, too?’
He laughed
‘That’s good, Fitzgerald. You’re getting there,’ he lent nonchalantly against the stairwell railings and slipped a hand into his pant’s pocket. A flash of white. He pressed the little bag of powder into my hand and smiled a sinful smile.
‘Who’s this for?’
‘You, stupid.’
‘What for?’
He sighed as if vexed with me beyond words.
‘Can’t a guy give his friend a little token of his love, every now and then?’
‘There’s a hundred dollars worth, here.’
But I put it in my jacket pocket and said nothing more about it. When Edgar gave you a present, you accepted it. I felt his eyes linger on my shaking fingers for more than a moment.
‘You know we all love you very much, Che.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you know it’s us forever, right- the four….musketeers, isn’t it? Fucking, blood brothers.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re upset,’ he said. I saw what was coming before he did it. So I ducked before he could put a hand up to touch my face. A flicker of alarm crossed through his eyes.
‘I….’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. My head was heavy so I lowered it to the floor ‘he was in my grade at school….my Mom….we, she knew him well. It’s just, strange.’
‘Of course,’ he was saying bracingly ‘of course it’s weird. No, I understand. We all do. We just want to know that you’re okay. That’s why, we know you’ll be back in a couple of hours to see us. Either that, or we’ll have to go and check up on you personally, and we wouldn’t want to have to do that. But we will, if it comes to it. We need you here- Spence Haut will be back soon, with more shipments-’
‘I get it, Ed- just let me go home and sleep. I’ll be back.’
I turned and fled down the stairs as fast as my feet could carry me. I felt like if I didn’t get out of Edgar’s seedy apartment building, I’d die of lung failure of something from breathing in so hard. I crashed through the fire exit and fell face first into a pile of overturned trash cans, empty cardboard boxes and food containers. It felt like my whole insides were exploding, exploding into tears and yells and shouts and threats to people I’d forgotten who I was going to kill. I got up, dusted down my clothes- which were soaked with dirty water and that stinking kind of trash juice. It was all over my hands, so I rubbed them on my jeans and broke into a run through the back alleys of Talent Avenue until I got to Globe Street.
The funeral cars were dragging a huge crowd of blackened mourners behind them at a glacial speed. I tried not to look at their faces, afraid I’d catch a glimpse of a member of his family, practically my family, and the questions and the disapproval of my not being there to follow my friends last walk through the street to his final sleeping place. Maybe they’d understand. But I doubted it. People always tried to take on a new lease of human empathy when grief suddenly hits a place. I couldn’t see how they’d take kindly to me sulking the alleyways dressed as a tramp while they tried to make his last moments beautiful. So I walked behind all the cars on the street and tried to look straight ahead, as if my feigned indifference might make me somehow invisible. I could hear crying. I didn’t think of that.
Of course there would be crying. And drawn curtains and stopped clocks, and a bed that hadn’t been slept in, and a teenage boy’s clothes gathering dust, becoming fragile artefacts to time, patiently waiting for the day when it was polite to be handed into the Salvation Army. There’d be one of those awkward luncheons, with clinking china and the smell of lilies lingering over the dainty little sandwhiches, maybe his Mom would run out of the room and they’d all stand there like idiots, wondering what to do. Someone would say the wrong thing. His Dad Bob would get drunk as a sailor. I foresaw all these things as the procession marched away in the opposite direction of me and I walked up my garden path. I’d never been so happy to be surrounded by home.
But I’d only gotten to our fridge when out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone standing in the hallway. For a wild second, I thought it might have been a ghost, but it was too small and feminine for the ghost I was imagining, and a second later Mom’s voice filled the house
‘Che come here, we need to talk.’
Her tone was deadly. It struck bells of fear ringing throughout my every orifice. Grunting and opening the fridge, I called back
‘Later, I need to eat.’
‘Come here now, Che.’
I picked up the milk carton and slammed the fridge shut. I knew what was coming next. How could I have been so stupid? Hide it in your room, Che. That’s what they’d said. No one would ever go looking for such a thing in his best and oldest friend’s house. They didn’t bank on good old Esther, with her white bony fingers and her razor sharp mind.
‘What?’
She simply set her beady little eyes on me like I was something that should have been thrown away long ago. I caught a glance of her, she looked bad. Still in shock, I supposed.
‘Don’t you dare give me what? you little piece of….this, Che! This!’
‘That isn’t mine,’ I said, when she’d practically shoved the gun in my face ‘what would I need one of those for?’
I took a swig of milk, but gagged, and ended up spitting it out all over the show. Mom didn’t appear to notice, even though I’m pretty sure I’d covered her in salvia and milk.
‘What,’ she said, ‘indeed.’
‘Ah, Mom,- you can’t mean….are you serious? What the hell’s the matter with you? Luck? Christ, you really have lost it. It’s Edgar’s, I said that. It hasn’t even been used, if you checked.’
She stood there, clucking her tongue and blinking at me.
‘You’re filthy,’ she said ‘I haven’t seen you in a day. What have you been doing, Che? You’re friend’s not even cold in the ground and you stink of alcohol and god know’s what else. You know what? I don’t believe you.’
‘You can’t be serious, Esther. I’m your son!’
‘I beginning to hope that’s not true,’ she said to the wall, she sounded disgusted. I wiped my shaking hand on my dirty cheek and tried to think of something to say. But it was futile. My whole brain was going berserk with flashes of coffins and hand cuffs and electric chairs that fried you like an egg.
‘You have no proof,’ I said, I couldn’t believe I was saying it to my own Mother ‘besides, I have no agenda. Why would I kill my best friend?’
‘You haven’t been treating him like your bestest buddy of late, Che. Don’t think I don’t know these things, I wasn’t born yesterday.’
‘Huh,’ I said ‘it’s not like you look it.’
‘You think this is funny? You- big, proud Che. Hard man. Tough guy. With his fast car and his rings and his sneakers, and his dope and his crack, with half the kids in the neighbourhood afraid they’re going to get a beating from him, while Luke Disney is Dead! In a hole in the ground? You THINK that me finding this under your bed is just going to disappear?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with Luck’s….Okay? I’m asking you to stop being so rash about the whole thing, why don’t you stop for a moment and think about how I’m feeling?’
‘So selfish,’ she shook her head ‘I know all about you Che.’
‘Maybe,’ I said ‘But you got no idea what it’s like to be me. Day in, day out.’
I seemed to have struck gold. She put a hand up to the peeling wallpaper and steadied herself against the bathroom door. She sighed
‘You’re right, maybe I don’t. But I’ve got to try and start somewhere, don’t I? I can’t stand by and watch you kill yourself anymore. You go out every night and every day and I don’t know who you’re with half the time, and maybe you are a man, but maybe you’re not. Eighteen is a strange age, Che. It doesn’t magically mean you’re any more important in the world. You’re this small, to everyone. I’ve gotta do right by you, for once. That’s why I’m gonna hand you into the police.’
‘Whoa,’ I said ‘wait there just a second. You can’t seriously think….I’ll allow that you happen, do you?’
‘It’s that- the station, you and me….or you start showing me you’re not failing at everything in your life.’
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean? You’re crazy- have you taken your pills today?’
I was trying to get back into my bedroom but she kept getting in the way. Finally I went to turn around and ran in when she tried to follow me in the other direction. The door wouldn’t close behind me. She’d jarred her foot between it and the wall.
‘Did you hear what I said? I mean it, Che.’
‘Yeah, alright, I got that bit. I’ll…show you when I get time. Right now, I’m gonna go to sleep. I have a pounding headache.’
‘I’m not finished, Che,’ she disappeared for a moment into her bedroom opposite mine, and I was halfway to closing my door when she came back and jarred herself so that it wouldn’t close, holding a bunch of papers. She was shaking like a leaf, I was so confused for a moment as to why she was so nervous until I saw my passport amongst my personal details.
‘What the hell? What have you got that out for?’
‘You’ve heard about the trip, you know the one I’ve been planning for months,’ she said, eyebrows raised manically ‘remember?’
‘Yeah…’
‘Well, there’s an extra place going. Someone dropped out, last minute.’
There was a long, long silence. The type of one you in which you listen hard for the sound of a lion waking up.
‘You mean to tell me,’ I said very slowly, ‘that you want me to go with you?’
She nodded.
‘You’re out of your fucking mind,’ I said, laughing like a mad man ‘seriously Esther, you’ve finally lost it.’
‘I’m out of my mind, am I?’ she said ‘well maybe its having you that’s driven me crazy, Che! Did you think about that? How many Mothers round here put up with a crack head of a son still living in their house without a job? And with a gun under his bed?’
I didn’t have an answer. It did look pretty bad, I’ll admit.
‘Besides, it looks like you have no choice-’
‘I do have a choice,’ I said, trying to push her aside ‘I can tell you to get the fuck out of the way before I…’
‘Oh no you don’t!’ she yelled, and she grabbed me by the collar and yanked me back, slamming me against the wall ‘you’re going, Che- and that’s it. We leave tomorrow. I’m not going to stand back and watch you continue to kill yourself. You’re not going to end up like your Father!’
I hit her like I would hit a guy outside a bar, with my palm spread open, intent on breaking her nose. But she managed to turn her face in time for me to catch the side of her cheek. She was so shocked that she half smiled at me, and we both stood there, gazing in horror, like someone had just played a very cruel joke on us.
I’d never hit my Mother before.
She backed away from me, her arms held out, bent down and scraped up my papers as a solitary tear rolled down her burning face.
I stared at the closed door for a while before I started going crazy. I kicked the wall until there was a hole in it, I tore the curtains from my window, ripped up books and broke photo frames and threw aftershaves and empty beer bottles. I stood bitterly in front of the mirror, panting licking my lips. Take a look at yourself, Che Fitzgerald, I said over and over under my breath, smiling maliciously at the eighteen year old kid in my reflection. I didn’t look anything like my mother, well she’d been born to two white English parents in Strawberry Hill. I was half Puerto Rican, medium to pale skin black hair and very nearly black eyes. It was true when I’d said she didn’t have any idea what it was like to be me. I had red lips and long eyelashes. I looked kind of evil. But then again, maybe I was.
I smashed the mirror into about a million pieces, shards of glass flying everywhere. They were in my hair, on my skin, on my jersey, glistening as I held my throbbing hand up to the light. There was a deep cut running the length of my knuckles. I could even see the white of a bone under a big shard of glass. Dark red blood was pouring out everywhere, so I turned and pulled my blanket off my messy bed and wound it around my clenched fist until only a faint circle of red seeped through. The carpet was covered in tiny specks of black rain.
The pain finally set in like a butcher’s knife and my head started going around so I collapsed dizzily on my mattress as my stomach turned over. I tried to focus on a white pool of light on the ceiling, but it kept slipping out of focus. Then I heard someone crying. I don’t remember much after that.
