Butterfly Fish (5 page)

Will

The cat's meow drew me outside. I recognised the neighbourhood rambler, black with a split white stripe down its back. It stood on a half smashed green bottle, back arched, body poised. Its amber gaze bore into mine and momentarily it looked like an artist's sculpture:
Cat on a Green Bottle
.

“Hey boy,” I cooed gently, tightening my dressing gown. “Get off that.” I bent down to shoo it off amazed it had at all managed to balance on the bottle. Smoke filled its eyes as it leapt off in a nifty trick. The bottle rolled towards my feet, and its jagged base stared down my fluffy slippers in an unequal stand off. The cat circled, tail upright like an antenna drawing an invisible line in the air before approaching the bottle again. It leaned low, stretched its neck, shot its tongue out and licked, deftly avoiding shards.

I slapped my hands together. “Stop that! You're a bad boy.” I ran indoors, grabbed the plastic bag that was a green tongue poking out of the kitchen drawer. By the time I re-emerged, the troublemaker had disappeared into the shrubbery separating my house from the neighbour's. The sky was shedding one darkening blue to reveal another. I scooped up the bottle by its neck, sniffed. It smelled like palm wine. Fermented wine was a sharp scent that lingered; I wondered if the smell would remain in my nostrils throughout the rest of the day.

The bottle slipped, nicked my finger. My blood became a small red tide that ebbed down settling on the jagged rim in a circular, bloody kiss. I dropped the broken bottle inside the green plastic bag and shoved it in my wheelie bin. I locked the door, checked the post hatch. It was empty. The cut throbbed and the blood drop began to grow into a red bulb. I looked at my finger, noticed the tiny piece of green glass grinning inside the wound.

I had a meeting planned with my mother's old friend and solicitor Mervyn for later in the day. Mervyn and his family collected strays. He was the centre, a warm, pulsing nucleus people surrounded. You never knew who you'd see at their house; maybe a Jamaican cabbie with gambling debts needing an unlikely haven to lie low, or broken prostitutes with heroin babies needing rescuing, or a friend whose hands were disappearing, who needed help before his whole body vanished, reduced to a heap of clothes on a side road.

I'd known him for as long as I could remember and it was hard to separate him from the things I associated with him. The smoothness of his bald head, like a crystal ball hiding the night, crumpled expensive suits, expressions of concern, large Cuban cigars dangling jauntily from the corner of his mouth. As a kid, I imagined he slept with one of those cigars firmly lodged between his lips, lit and burning with particles of the cases he'd taken home. I saw him tossing and turning without dropping that cigar, and winding curls of smoke twisting in the dark around him like flying white snakes.

I used to play hide and seek with his sons as a kid. I hid so well behind the line of cushions on the soft, plum sofa I slipped into a world beneath where coins and old conversations hummed their approval. Mervyn was a great dad. I watched the way he threw his sons in the air as if they were the only suns allowed to set and rise back up with each catch and fling. In Mervyn's home, the warmth and love was inescapable. Whenever I saw this, the well inside me deepened, lengthened. Only there was no water at the bottom, just stones thrown swallowed by silence. All this made me like Mervyn, even love him a little. I pictured my mother and me arriving in his
life as two stray winds creating small havocs for Mervyn and his boy's but that story she'd never told me.

I caught the train from Elephant & Castle to Mervyn's in Harlesden. In a fairly empty carriage, heads unconsciously bobbed to its rhythm. I coughed and the coloured train lines flattened. The train paused for breath frequently at main station stops, and at pits in-between, the ones left off the map. It squeaked and sputtered, its sounds creating a low, dark horizon on tracks were mice flew. It shuddered along.

At Harlesden, I moved with the throng of people spilling out of the station like a language. I spotted a young woman stealing a bouquet of blue azaleas from a flower stall right behind the owner's back. Her arms were outstretched, mischievous grin in tow. Her body was arched and she was dressed in a yellowy brown African wrapper. Braided in multiple single plaits, her hair looked neat. She stood tall and the lines of her body seemed familiar. Then, she looked right at me, and as if it was a signal of sorts, turned to run. Instinctively I followed. I chased her and the distance between us shook like a rickety, wooden bridge. She flew, dipped, turned and twisted. Her movements were rugged musical notes. She had moonshine on her back. I removed my rucksack from my shoulder, rummaged for Marpessa, soon solid in my hands. I pressed the power switch, watched it light red. I snapped away. Marpessa's lens whirred the way cameras did when they spoke. Above us, pigeons flying drew another skyline with their beaks. They cooed at each other, grey wings spreading.

I followed the young woman's moving back.
Follow, follow, follow,
I muttered to myself, small beads of sweat springing up in my armpits like translucent crops. Marpessa's frayed strap bit into my neck. The summer streets were fully occupied by clusters of people, their perspiration dripping along the pavements. I shoved Marpessa back into the rucksack. Ahead, my pied piper of sorts waited outside the inviting, yellow sign of Honey's Caribbean takeaway.

She'd paused, as though giving me an opportunity to close the gap between us. She sat on the steps outside, hand on her jaw, flowers
beside her, wrapper riding up smooth, brown legs. Something about her on that stairway made the hairs on my arms stand to attention. I spotted moss growing on the stairs, green dreams of concrete she'd somehow commanded. I fished Marpessa out once more, snapped away.

“Hey!” I said, “I'd like to photograph you some more.”

She sprang up, shoved Marpessa away, grabbed her flowers and took off again. Past the laundrette with washing machines mid- cycle, the funeral home set in large green grounds, past rows of quaint shops sporting colourful window displays that shared one neon heartbeat they rotated during breaks.

At the compact, red-stoned building on a raised kerb with a roof that looked like a low brow, she dropped her flowers and disappeared around the corner. Slanted, elegant typography on the window read Williams & Co. Solicitors. Near my feet something rustled. I stared. The azaleas she'd dropped were no longer flowers but crushed blue butterflies near death. Some had wings shorn, some were partially squashed. A few attempting to unstick themselves, fluttered pathetically. I tasted their desperation for one last broken flight.

Inside the building, the secretary Pauline sat behind a black-flecked grey desk that might have been made of marble and fog. She wore a crisp white blouse and a brown woollen skirt. Red-framed glasses finished the look.

“Well, well, well,” she said. “Wonders will never cease.” A finger and its long nail curled away from the keyboard. “You allergic to this area or something?” she asked. I always enjoyed her warm, Bajan accent, even when it was biting.

I dropped the rucksack and helped myself to a cup of water. “Nice to see you too. He in?”

“Yeah, he's in,” she said leaning back into her chair.

The hallway curved snakelike and was flanked by rooms on either side; there were cracks of light underneath the doors that were closed. On the left, I passed a grey-haired man standing behind a desk piled high with files, talking insistently into a mobile phone. Spotting me
he smiled distantly and shut the door firmly. To my right a slender black woman in a charcoal grey trouser suit paced back and forth. I caught the wink of a slim gold watch from her wrist. At the end of the hall stood Mervyn's office. I knocked.

“Come in,” his voice boomed.

I could smell and feel his presence even before seeing him. Paco Rabanne aftershave mingled with Cuban cigars. He sat in the skylight window at an enormous sprawling oak desk that managed not to swallow the whole room. There was a chocolate leather chair at the back next to a compact library of Law and fishing books. On the walls were hung certificates, photos of him and his sons, his staff and a picture of him holding a kingfisher on a hook.

“The prodigal daughter returns,” he said enveloping me in a hug. He had a habit of doing that, drawing me into things whether I had a say in it or not. It felt good. At 6 feet 2 inches he towered above me, a black skinned man with broad facial features and a Jamaican lilt, like molasses melting in his voice. When he became angry the molasses turned molten.

“Sorry,” I said, dropping my rucksack at the foot of the chair opposite his desk. “I've been busy.”

“Yes but this meeting was for your benefit.” He walked back round, folded his considerable frame into the seat. At my mother's funeral, he had cried for her. I'd never seen a grown man cry other than on TV. His body had trembled in grief while my own wails stayed caught in my throat. I held his cries gently, as if they were the delicate rims of fragile cups.

He nudged the open file on his desk towards me before reclining back into his seat.

“This is it?” I asked studying it as though it was in a foreign language.

“Yes, your mother's will.”

I pulled the file closer, felt a fresh film of tears I blinked away.

I shook my head. “I can't believe she was organised enough to arrange a will, she never said a word.”

I could feel Mervyn's gaze on me, I snuck a look and the corners of his mouth were drawn making me wish I had a father to hold my hand. To tell me how to navigate emotional landmines that unexpectedly went off and rendered you crawling legless because the lines of someone's mouth triggered your memories.

“Well, she was your mother and maybe she didn't want to worry you,” Mervyn said, yanking me out of my reverie. I felt a twinge of jealousy that he'd known this secret.

“She managed to tell you though.” I didn't quite keep the resentment from my voice.

“I was her lawyer and friend, of course she told me. Your mother could be very secretive, in fact annoyingly so at times. This she was absolutely clear on.”

A fat tear ran down my cheek.

Mervyn brought out a worn piece of paper from the file. I bent my head, drank the words in:

I, Queenie Lowon leave the sum of £80,000 to my only child Joy Omoregbe Lowon. As well as my house at 89 Windamere Avenue and all the contents within it, I bequeath a brass head artefact and her grandfather Peter Lowon's diary to her. She'll figure out what to do with them. I leave her everything I have. I ask my lawyer Mervyn Williams to advise her should it be necessary.

Below it was the date and my mother's signature which looked hurried and leaned to the right, slightly squiggly, as if it would morph into a mosquito and fly off the page, fat with her blood.

I leave her everything I have…

It was there in black and white, the proof my mother wouldn't suddenly re-appear and declare this a joke. The offending document was becoming a white room with words dripping black ink on the walls.

Mervyn loosened his tie and motioned at the wide, square windows behind him. “You mind if I open them, bit stuffy in here.”

I shrugged, barely looking at him. “It's your office.”

I glanced to my left and Mervyn's picture with the fish on his
hook had changed. The fish's mouth had become a woman's jaw straining against the hook, threatening to leap out through the glass.

I was holding my breath and didn't even know it. Mervyn fished out from the bottom drawer of his desk a white plastic bag bulky with the shapes inside it. From the bag he pulled out a brown leather diary and the brass head. He laid them on his desk. “These are yours.”

All the sketches of myself I'd drawn in my head with a finger dipped in saliva seemed to show up. Better versions of myself in a suit facing Piccadilly Circus tube, waiting to pick up another version of myself from a curved, red carriage. Another dumping an attempted suicide version in a grey bin bag, me walking a black tightrope in the sky, naked. In this life, my mother would never see those versions of me but maybe all they needed was her gaze from the next life, to stop them jumping into the orange sea at the horizon.

I picked up the brass head, weighed it. I ran a finger over the high, proud forehead, its broad nose, wondering how many lives it had seen with its defiant expression. I placed it back on the table.

I murmured, “I've never seen this.”

Mervyn leaned forward, smiled reassuringly. “It's just an art piece, she probably kept it among her personal things.”

A tiny drop of sweat ran down my back. “If you had something like this, you'd display it though wouldn't you?”

“Not necessarily, I have lots of things I've collected I haven't displayed.”

“Hmmm, it's just odd I've never seen it. And £80,000? Where did she get that kind of money?” I felt flat, dispossessed, thinking of all the ways I'd wanted to get money and nice things, but never like this. Never without her here to help me squander some of my new found glory.

“She used to own a flat in Brixton, sold it a while back now.”

“Oh my God! Something else I didn't know about. Was this woman even my mother?” My hands became wet cloths I wrung.

“I'm sure she had her reasons.”

“Yup, and she's taken them to the grave. I have no idea what to do with her money.”

“You know that youth project in that abandoned building I volunteer for? Why don't we run something there together?”

I shrugged, slightly surprised at the ease and speed with which he found something for me to do with the money. He continued, “There's lots of space and you could incorporate photography into it. Think about it,” he advised.

I stood abruptly, slid the diary back over. “Will you hold onto that? Just for a little while,” I instructed.