“No, and they don’t need to,” Cassandra said viciously enough to make me pull back. “Guy’s said that we can start having a good life together, and I believe him.”
“Cassandra, let me get this straight.” I was trying to make sense of the nonsensical. “You hear me talk about some boy for months. Like, the duration of the time you’ve been with him. You aren’t sleeping with him; then you come to my house and watch him walk out of my bedroom with your own two eyes, and your next step is to cut me out and leave London with him? I came here because I thought you were going to apologize, but instead you’re telling me that you’re making a choice, and you’ve chosen him? You don’t even know him!” I pleaded with her.
I crossed the room and placed a hand on hers to stop her from packing her life away.
“Don’t.” She yanked her hand away as if mine were made of fire. “This isn’t a choice between you and him, don’t be so self-centered,” she said. “It’s about me. I’ve found someone that I want to be with. He gives me stability. I can’t carry on with the only consistent thing in my life being your problems.” She let those words hang in the air. “I’ve met someone that I love, he loves me, and we’re starting a life together.”
“But he was cheating on you, the whole time,” I said. “This wasn’t a drunken kiss in a club! Don’t you think you deserve better than that?” Cassandra picked up a roll of brown tape and turned it around in her hands, looking closely at it for the edge.
“Do you know the thing about you, Queenie?” She found the edge and picked at it. “You’re damaged goods,” she said. Her words hit me as if Apollo Creed had punched me in the chest. I sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re damaged goods, so you self-destruct,” Cassandra repeated calmly. A good thing she repeated it, too, because I couldn’t believe what I’d heard the first time. “No wonder Tom escaped when he did. He was too good for you.” As her words continued to strike me, I could feel my heart fragment a little bit more.
“You’re so closed off that actual love is out of your reach, so you settle for sex. With anyone who’ll fuck you. Your self-esteem is a joke.” She placed the edge of the tape on the cardboard and extended it, sealing the box. “With a mum like yours, it’s no surprise.” She smoothed the tape down on the box. “So. Take care.” She lifted the box and put it atop a pile of others.
“Cassandra, we’ve been friends for, what, almost a decade?” I said, my voice breaking. “Why are you saying this? How can you say this?”
“It’s all true, isn’t it?” She shrugged. “You’re always saying I psychoanalyze you too much. Think of it as my final diagnosis. You can let yourself out.”
I stood up. What was the point in trying to change her mind?
“Good luck with everything, Queenie,” Cassandra said as I walked out of her room. “Oh, and you have my bank account details. I’ll send you your tab.”
chapter
TWENTY-ONE
“SHE’S A BITCH for that, don’t you dare listen to her. She’s more of a prick than that Welsh ting, and he’s a major dickhead.” Kyazike and I stood on her balcony smoking. She had one eye gazing out on a sparse and wintry London, the other looking through the window at the living room door in case her mum came home and caught us.
“Why don’t you save yourself this drama, fam? Why don’t you just date black guys?” Kyazike asked.
“Why do you think?” I asked, shutting her down.
“Sorry, no, I know. I should have thought before I said,” she said, flustered.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap,” I apologized, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Remember the first family party you took me to?”
“The one where my cousin Elias tried to move to you?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “And I was so stressed by it that I started crying?”
“Yeah, and we had to pretend it was because you had period pains,” Kyazike recalled.
“I just can’t do it, Kyazike. I’m scared of black guys. I’ll always, always think they hate me.”
“I get you, I get that,” she said reassuringly. “But that’s pure nonsense, my strong, beautiful black queen,” she added in a thick Ugandan accent, the one she borrowed from her mum when she wanted to hammer a point home.
“Maybe Cassandra is right. Maybe I am damaged goods, that’s why all of that stuff with Tom, and Ted, and all the others,” I said, ignoring her compliment. “And the king of it all, Roy. He made sure that any self-esteem I had was crushed into nothing.”
“Nah, I’m not having that!” Kyazike shouted so loudly that her voice echoed around the buildings. “These men, they ain’t worth all this. And Cassandra?” Kyazike kissed her teeth. “She’s just vex because her man found good sex somewhere else. She’s taking it out on you, fam. All of that psychology nonsense she chats, and she can’t even do it on herself. You think that relationship is gonna last?” She kissed her teeth again. “She’s lucky I don’t spin her jaw, how can she talk about your mum like that? The stuff with you and your mu—”
“Kyazike, don’t,” I warned her, then screamed and ducked as a pigeon that had nested on the balcony flew over my head.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “Anyway, I give it two months, she’ll be belling your phone telling you how she needs help moving home and how she’s sorry she didn’t listen and takes back everything she said. So don’t think about it for now. Put it out your head, fam. Come, we go inside, it’s a blitz.”
We went back inside and rubbed our hands together. It was a cold February afternoon, and the air held a harsh chill.
I threw myself down on the sofa, yelping as my skin touched the cold leather. Kyazike handed me the razor blade and lowered herself to the floor. “Beg you hand me that blanket?” she said, holding her hand out.
“Can we at least turn that fan heater on?” I begged. “My fingers are shaking so much that I might scalp you.”
“Are you going to pay the electric bill?” Kyazike asked, turning to look at me.
“It’s your head, Kyazike,” I warned her. She crawled across the room and turned the heater on. We both sighed with relief as the hot blast of air hit us.
“Are you going to get rid of that pigeon nest? It can’t be hygienic to have them living there like that.” I gestured to another bird as it landed on her balcony.
“I’ve tried to poke it with the broom, but it’s stuck firm. Those pigeons are crafty, they’ve built it on a corner we can’t reach. But I’m going to get closer. I just need a white suit.”
“What? Like a white trouser suit?” I asked.
“Nah, not my Sunday best, Queenie, one of those CSI suits they wear when there’s been a murder. Trust me, I will have those pigeons up.”
“Sorry, yeah,” I said, my head all muddled. “CSI suit.”
I took a deep breath. “Kyazike. What do you think about counseling?”
“The pigeons aren’t stressing me that much, fam.” She laughed.
“No, I mean, like, when people are having a bad time. Do you know anyone who has ever been?”
“Queenie. I’m Ugandan. You think anyone in my family is allowed to say they need help? You bury that shit and you move on. If I told my mum I need counseling, she’d ship me over to Kampala in a cargo barrel.”
“I’m thinking about getting it,” I said. “I don’t know. I feel, like, awful, all the time. It’s not shifting. This frosty woman at the clinic wants to sign me up because she thought I was going mad. Well, first she thought I was being pimped out, but then she realized that I was just having sex for fun,” I rambled. “But that I probably wasn’t having that much fun.”
“Well, do it if you need to, innit. I don’t think I’m the best person to talk about all this feelings therapy fluff with.”
I carried on with Kyazike’s hair while she told me about a guy who kept taking her on dates and then promising her shoes or similar. I couldn’t keep track of what she was saying because I kept getting snatches of panic that would rise and fall in my chest and had to concentrate on quelling them while trying to pick up keywords from the story.
“Are you listening?”