“Yeah, fair point.” He laughed nervously. “Do you live round here?”
“No. But I like the common,” I told him. “I grew up not far from here.”
“Oh, cool. Were you born here?” Why was he asking so many questions? Was he an immigration officer?
“. . . in the UK? Yes. I know that I’m black, but I wasn’t born in ‘nebulous Africa.’?”
He laughed. “You’re a funny one, aren’t you?”
“Funny weird or funny ha-ha?”
“Both,” he said. “Not that being funny weird is a bad thing.”
“No, I know. I think it’s my personal brand.” I smiled at the ground, fiddling with the corner of my book. He was the first man I’d met who seemed not to want to immediately push any weirdness out of me.
“I like your hair. It’s really long,” Tom said. I wasn’t used to being approached by men who wanted to say nice things to me. It was very weird and unfamiliar. But it was nice.
“Thanks. I bought it myself.” I flicked it over my shoulder and it whipped him in the face accidentally. He ducked and laughed again. He had a nice laugh, I noticed. There was nothing about it that made me think he was laughing at me.
“Do you live around here?” I asked, panicking a bit as I felt myself soften.
“No, I work just over there.” He pointed into the distance. “I’m a Web developer. Started a few months ago, but I’ve been working on this killer project for days,” he said, lying back on the grass. “I’ve had too much coffee and my eyes were going a bit funny. My colleague told me to get some fresh air.”
“Web development, huh? Fancy,” I said, impressed. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, go for it.”
“Is that your job because you see the world in code, like in The Matrix?” I asked sincerely.
“Ha, good question.” He laughed his nice laugh again. “No. Almost. I guess I like it because it’s very logical. I like logic, I like rules.”
“Oh God, I don’t.”
“Ah, a rule breaker.” He raised his eyebrows. Like his laugh, they were nice too. “So, what do you do, Queenie?”
“Nothing, yet,” I told him.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I’m going to change the world,” I said. “The world of reporting, anyway. I graduated last year and have been doing absolutely nothing with my degree ever since. I had an interview this morning at a newspaper, though. The Daily Read. Can you believe that they interview people for an internship? All I’ll be getting is lunch money and they asked me to give five examples of culture websites and what makes them so successful. I had to do a PowerPoint and everything.” I was talking so much.
“Ah, welcome to the world of free labor,” he said, standing up and taking his phone out of his pocket. “Shit, I need to get back. They’ve found some sort of bug.”
His leaving unexpectedly took me by surprise. “Bye, then,” I said defensively.
“Can I, er, have your number?” Tom asked, his voice breaking slightly. “It’d be nice to talk to you again.”
“That’s very forward of you.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Like I said, I’m very logical. No point talking to a pretty girl if you aren’t going to ask for her number.”
“Who, me?” I looked around.
“I’ll text you,” he said, handing the phone to me. I put my number in. “Hope you get the internship! They’d be mad not to hire you.” I watched him walk away, bouncing lightly with each step he took.
? ? ?
“Anyway, that’s basically how we met,” I said, taking a deep breath after giving them a potted version of mine and Tom’s meet-cute.
“We’ll let you know tomorrow,” they said in unison.
On the way back to the flat I’d bought a twenty-pack of cigarettes, then sat on the doorstep and smoked half of them before stepping back through the front door. The next day, Lizzie and Sarah had rejected me. They thought they “were going to go in a different, older direction.”
chapter
THREE
I STARED IN the mirror after getting ready for the party, trying to summon the courage just to leave the house. My new housemates weren’t in, so it wasn’t as though I could flake and use getting to know them as an excuse. I was wearing a tight black dress, the first thing I could find at the top of the pile of unpacked clothes. I turned sideways in the mirror and looked at my stomach. The bloating and cramps were gone, finally. Without thinking, I took a deep breath and pushed it out to replicate a pregnant belly. I rubbed my stomach slowly. “What are you doing?” I asked myself, angry with the reflection I’d seen. I slammed out of my bedroom and out of the house.
* * *
When I arrived at the party, I was greeted by Fran and James at the brushed-glass door of the luxury apartment, who genuinely and unironically refer to themselves as “couple goals.” “Queenie! You look amazing! Love your hair! It looks great, what have you done to it?” Fran cooed as James clung onto her, his arms around her waist. Had they both walked to the door like that? Surely it wasn’t comfortable for either of them.
“Nothing, it’s the same as normal!” I fake-smiled.
“Well, it looks great,” James echoed his girlfriend.
“No Tom with you?” Fran asked, looking behind me.
“No. We, er—” I felt my throat tighten. “Can we not talk about it?” I asked, handing them a bottle of wine.
After Fran and James untangled themselves from each other, one whipped my coat off and the other (hopefully unintentionally) ushered me into a corner next to Sam, the only other black person here. He looked like my mum’s old partner, Roy. Stocky, short, dark-skinned, and with a bald head that I think he shaves so closely with a razor so as not to let any Afro hair come through, Sam goes by Sambo. He turned to look at me, and the resemblance to Roy made my stomach lurch. I nodded a hurried hello, and he looked back at me blankly, as always.
When I once told him that if he wanted to stop people from calling him Sambo, I’d back him up, and followed that by asking if he’d seen the film Get Out, he firmly told me that the nickname was “ironic.” He’d gone to boarding school with James and was adopted by white parents, which I think you can tell quite quickly by the way he publicly ridicules anything resembling black culture and carries his mute blond girlfriend around like she’s some sort of symbolic rite of whiteness.
He’s been introduced to me many times, and pretends not to know me every time. It’s tedious. I always want to take him by the shoulders and shout: “Sam, we’re the only two black people at these functions, just say hello, you don’t need to be dismissive of me because your black family rejected you!” But it’s best to keep a low profile when you always feel like you could be kicked out at any minute if someone starts feeling a little “uncomfortable” in your presence.
I made my way to the bar that James has told me many times he installed in his not-quite-a-bachelor pad the second he moved in. He’s told me about the bar almost as much as he’s told me about the roof terrace, even though my deliberately lackluster response to these fixtures surely didn’t do anything to justify their cost. When I got there, I found Darcy, who was pouring herself a glass of white wine. “You made it!” she said, getting a glass down from the shelf for me. “Want one?”
I nodded quickly, taking her glass and downing the contents. “Ah, I see. Yesterday was moving day,” she said. I nodded again. “Okay, well, let’s have a drink to your break, shall we?”
“I’m not toasting to heartbreak!” I sighed.
“No, we aren’t toasting to heartbreak,” Darcy told me, filling her glass and then mine, “we’re toasting to the fact that you’re both having a little time-out, after which your relationship will be better than before.”
“Okay. I’ll cheers to that.” I clinked my glass to hers and downed my drink again.