Candy

  “I meant the underground trains,” I lied. “The tubes were held up.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. There was some kind of problem at King’s Cross—”

  “You should have called me.”

  “Yeah, I know—”

  “I’ve been trying to ring you. I couldn’t get through to your cell—”

  “I forgot to charge it. Sorry.”

  He gave me one of his serious looks—a kind of long-faced doctory stare—then nodded his head, seemingly satisfied, and started to fasten his coat. “Did you get to Dr. Hemmings on time?”

  “I was a bit late,” I said. “He didn’t mind…”

  Dad nodded, moving closer. “How did it go? What did he say about the ganglion? Did he remove it?”

  I held out my arm and showed Dad my lumpless wrist. No scars, no stitches, just a small red needle mark.

  Dad said, “He aspirated it?”

  “Yeah…sucked it all out with a big fat needle.”

  Dad took my wrist and examined it closely, probing gently with his large delicate hands. “Hmm…” he said. “It looks fine. Did it hurt?”

  “Not really—he gave me a cortisone shot.”

  “Good.” He carefully ran his finger over my wrist. “Nice and clean. He’s done a good job.” Still holding my hand, he looked at me. “You really should have rung me, Joe. I was starting to get worried. If you’re going to be late—”

  “Yeah, sorry—”

  “That’s what your cell phone’s for—”

  “Yeah, I know, Dad…I just didn’t realize what time it was.” I took my hand away and started to take off my jacket. “Are you going out now?” I asked him, changing the subject.

  “Just for a while,” he said, looking at his watch.

  “Are you seeing Mum again?”

  He nodded, fussing awkwardly with his tie.

  I hung my jacket on the coatrack.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “She’s fine…” He smiled tightly and reached for the door handle. “Look, I’d better get going. Gina’s upstairs with Mike. If you want anything to eat, there’s some cold chicken in the fridge…and make sure you have some salad with it.” He opened the door and pulled up his collar. “And don’t stay up too late—you’ve got school tomorrow.”

  “OK.”

  He nodded again, hesitated for a moment, then went out and shut the door.

  I’ll tell you what’s weird. When your mum and dad get divorced and your mum moves out, leaving you and your sister with your dad, and your mum never comes to visit you, and then a year later your mum and dad start seeing each other again, going out with each other again, falling in love with each other again, and she still never comes to visit you…That’s weird.

  After Dad left, I went upstairs to my bedroom and lay down on the floor. I like lying down on the floor. It’s a good place to be. You can close your eyes and feel the movements of the house rippling through your spine. You can listen to the sound of your heart, the sound of your blood, the sound of the machine beneath your skin. You can open your eyes and stare at the ceiling, imagining it’s your very own sky. Or you can just lie there, perfectly still, doing absolutely nothing.

  I tried them all that night, but none of them seemed to help. The sound of my heart was too unnerving, and the only movements I could feel were those of Gina and Mike from the room above mine.

  Gina’s my sister and Mike’s her boyfriend.

  They’d probably heard me come in, so they weren’t actually doing anything, if you know what I mean. From what I could hear, they were just sitting around, talking quietly, occasionally moving about, tapping their feet to the low-volume groove of their favorite R & B.

  God, I hate R & B. That awful wailing, those miserable wobbly voices—it really gets on my nerves. When she was younger, Gina used to listen to R & B all the time, really loud, night and day. It used to drive me mad.

  How can you listen to that?

  I like it.

  But it’s so depressing…

  It doesn’t bother me so much anymore. I still don’t like it and I still have a moan now and then, but I’ve given up trying to change Gina’s mind. She likes R & B, it makes her happy, and that’s all there is to it.

  Anyway, I lay there for a while, trying to ignore the muffled music, trying to lose myself in the patterns of my painted sky, but it wasn’t any good. I couldn’t relax.

  I got up and turned on the TV, setting the volume just loud enough to drown out the music, then I fetched my guitar from the corner of the room and started to pick out some chords. As far as I was aware, I wasn’t playing anything in particular, I was just strumming…just seeing what happened…mindlessly repeating the same magical chords—G to C, G to C—over and over again…nice and slow, deep and heavy, open and raw, letting the harmonies find themselves.

  After a while, the essence of a song began to appear. Sweet and haunting, a melody steeped in sadness…

  I didn’t mean it to be sad. But that’s how I felt. And that’s what music is all about—sounding how you feel.

  I know it sounds kind of pathetic—sitting there feeling sorry for myself, playing the brokenhearted blues as if I’d just lost the love of my life when, in fact, all I’d lost was my dignity—but, like I said before, being pathetic’s not the worst thing in the world, is it?

  One of the best things about music is the way it takes away time. You can sit around for hours, making up songs, playing little tunes, fiddling around with different chords and different variations, and the time just seems to evaporate. It’s really weird sometimes. You can pick up your guitar at ten o’clock in the morning, start playing…and the next thing you know it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. And you haven’t moved. You haven’t eaten. You haven’t even been to the lavatory. It’s almost as if you’ve been drugged and when you finally come to your senses, you can’t remember what you’ve been doing.

  But it feels OK.

  And that’s how it was that night.

  Lost in time, lost in the music, lost in another world, I gradually became aware of a voice. It was faint at first, drifting around on the edge of my consciousness, and I couldn’t make out what it was saying. As it got closer, though, the voice became clearer: “Joe,” it was saying. “Hey…Joe?” I thought perhaps it was my imagination, but then I heard it again, more clearly this time, and I slowly realized that I was still in my room, still sitting on the bed, still playing the guitar, and the voice was Gina’s.

  “Joe?” she said again. “Are you all right?”

  I stopped playing and looked up to see her standing in the doorway with an amused look on her face.

  “Who’s Candy?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Candy…you were singing about someone called Candy.”

  For a brief moment I didn’t know what she was talking about, but then my fingers brushed the guitar strings, bringing out the chord I was still holding down, and the melody came back to me. The melody, the tune, the words I’d been singing…

  “How long have you been listening?” I asked Gina, slightly embarrassed.

  “Not long.” She smiled. “I knocked on your door, but you didn’t answer. I was just checking you were all right, that’s all.” She came into the room and went over to the window. “It sounded really nice,” she said. “The song you were playing…did you make it up?”

  “I was just messing around,” I said, fixing the plectrum in the strings and putting the guitar down. “What’s the time?”

  “Half past twelve—something like that.” She turned from the window and went back over to the doorway. “I was just making some tea before Mike goes. Did you want a cup?”

  “Is Dad back yet?”

  She shook her head. “He’s getting later all the time. He didn’t get home until nearly three the other night.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “We’ll have to ground him if he keeps this up.”

  I looked at he
r, recognizing the sadness behind her smile. She didn’t really get on with Mum that well and although she’d never said anything about it, I knew she didn’t like the idea of Mum and Dad getting back together again. I wasn’t too keen on it myself, to be honest, although it didn’t bother me as much as it bothered Gina.

  “Do you want some tea, then?” she said.

  I nodded.

  She smiled again. “Mike’s in the kitchen. Why don’t you come down and tell us all about Candy?”

  “There’s nothing to tell. It’s just a song…”

  “Yeah?”

  I blushed, thinking of Candy—her presence, her body, her face, her voice, her being…

  “Come on, Joe,” Gina said. “I’m your sister—you can tell me. We tell each other everything.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Well, we ought to.” She grinned.

  “You don’t tell me anything.”

  “I do.”

  “Like what? When was the last time you told me anything?”

  “Just now.”

  “When?”

  “I just told you I was making some tea, didn’t I? What more do you want?”

  I gave her a look, then got up and went over to the window to close the curtains.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what—you come down and tell us about Candy, and we’ll tell you something about us. Something that no one else knows. How about that?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know anything about you.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “It’s probably pretty boring—”

  “You reckon?”

  I looked at her. She was nearly twenty-one now, but she still didn’t look any older than me—in fact, she was often mistaken for my younger sister. She had that wide-eyed freshness of a little girl, all clear blue eyes and golden hair and spotlessly smooth skin. It was enough to make you sick sometimes. That night, though, as she stood there smiling at me, dressed in a simple white T-shirt and jeans, there was no mistaking what she was: a beautiful young woman who meant everything to me.

  “Go on, then,” I told her. “You get the tea on and I’ll be down in a minute.”

  Gina met Mike a couple of years ago when she was visiting the local hospital as part of her nursing course. Mike was working as a porter back then, and I think they just bumped into each other in the corridor or something. A quick hello, a friendly chat, and that was that. They’ve been inseparable ever since. Gina’s mad about him. She thinks he’s the best thing that ever happened to her, and I think she’s probably right. He’s kind, funny, serious, smart—protective but not possessive, friendly but not patronizing, cool without trying—in fact, come to think of it, he’s almost too good to be true. But he is true. Which makes it all the more baffling why Dad doesn’t like him.

  “It’s because he’s black,” Gina said once. “Dad doesn’t like me seeing a black guy.”

  “Dad’s not like that,” I said. “He might be a bit old-fashioned, a bit stuck in his ways, but he’s not like that.”

  “No?”

  “Of course he’s not—”

  “Well, why else wouldn’t he like Mike?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because he’s a hospital porter—”

  “What’s wrong with that? There’s nothing wrong with being a porter, for God’s sake.”

  “I know. I’m not saying there is, but you know what Dad’s like—”

  “Yeah, he’s a snob. He thinks that just because Mike has an unskilled job, he’s not respectable enough for me. God, he’s so narrow-minded. I mean, did you see the look on his face the other day when I told him about Mike being a DJ? He couldn’t have looked sicker if I’d told him my boyfriend was a murderer.”

  Mike used to spend all his spare time DJing in clubs around Essex and London. It meant a lot of late nights in a lot of strange places with a lot of weird people, but he really liked doing it—which was why he didn’t mind being a porter. Being a porter was his job, but being a DJ was what he did. Dad, of course, couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t understand how anyone could just have a job instead of a career, how anyone could just want to do something because they really liked doing it.

  It was beyond him.

  Anyway, about six months ago Mike packed in the porter’s job and opened up his own little business in Romford, selling and hiring out DJ equipment—desks, mixers, sound systems, that kind of thing. At first he kept on DJing as well, but after a while he began to realize that he liked the business side almost as much as the DJing itself—and it was less tiring, too. And more lucrative. So now he’s pretty much retired as a DJ and he’s doing really well with the business—making a name for himself and piles of money—but it doesn’t make any difference to Dad. He still can’t stand him. Which, to put it mildly, makes things a little bit awkward now and then.

  So when I went down to the kitchen that night, and Gina told me that Mike had asked her to marry him, I didn’t know what to say. I was pleased for them, of course, and it was really nice to see the excitement in their faces, but I couldn’t help wondering what Dad was going to say.

  “Have you told him yet?” I asked Gina.

  She shook her head. “Mike only asked me tonight—look…” She waggled her finger at me, showing off a small silver ring.

  “Very nice,” I said, looking at Mike. “Did you get it in a cereal packet?”

  “I’ll have you know that’s a top-quality platinum ring,” Mike said.

  “Who told you that?”

  “The guy who was selling them in the pub—top-quality, he said, forty-eight-carat platinum, very high-class.”

  “High-class goods for a high-class guy.”

  “That’s right.”

  He grinned across the table at Gina, making her smile like an idiot, and I found myself looking at him, wondering why I wasn’t scared of him in the same way I’d been scared of Iggy. It was an uncomfortable comparison to make, and it made me feel really stupid, because I knew I was only making the comparison because they were both big and black, and that didn’t make any sense at all. I wasn’t scared of Iggy because he was big and black; I was scared of Iggy because he was scary. Because he was Iggy. Black had nothing to do with it.

  “What’s up?” Mike asked me.

  “Uh?”

  “You’re looking at me like I’ve got two heads or something.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was miles away.”

  “Thinking about Candy?” asked Gina.

  “No—”

  “Who’s this Candy?” asked Mike, leaning his arms on the table, looking interested.

  “No one—” I started to say.

  “Come on, Joe,” Gina interrupted. “We made a deal. I told you our secret, now it’s your turn.”

  “Yeah,” echoed Mike, “come on, Joe—give it up, dish the dirt, spill the beans, ‘fess up—”

  “I thought you were going home?” I said to him.

  “There’s no rush.” He smiled.

  I didn’t want to tell them about Candy. I was afraid of making a fool of myself. But I didn’t want to keep it inside me, either. I wanted to let it out, to give it some air, to see how it sounded outside my head…at least some of it, anyway.

  And I had made a deal, after all.

  So I drank some tea, settled back in the chair, and told them what had happened. I didn’t tell them everything, of course. I didn’t tell them about the touch of her fingertips or the intoxicating scent of her skin, and I certainly didn’t tell them about the light in the darkness or the crying voice or the stuff I could feel deep down inside me…whatever it was.

  Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have told them about that.

  But I told them everything else.

  When I’d finished, no one said anything for a while. Gina just sat there, looking at me with a slightly dazed expression on her face, while Mike kept his head down and stared thoughtfully at the table. I drained the cold tea from my cup and glanced aroun
d the kitchen. White walls, stone floor, pots on the wall—everything was shrouded in the worldless silence of the early morning.

  “Well…” said Gina, clearing her throat.

  I looked at her, suddenly feeling anxious, wondering what she thought of me. Did she think I was dumb? Naïve? Idiotic? Was she embarrassed by my stupidity? Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything after all, I thought. Maybe I should have kept it all to myself.

  Gina ran her fingers through her hair, glanced at Mike, then looked back at me again, smiling awkwardly.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said. “You must have been…”

  “What?” I said nervously. “I must have been what?”

  “I don’t know…scared, confused…I mean, if that had been me—”

  “You wouldn’t have been so stupid.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. God, Joe—it wasn’t your fault. How were you supposed to know?”

  I shrugged.

  Gina leaned toward me. “She didn’t ask you for anything, did she?”

  “What do you mean? Ask me for what?”

  “Money.”

  “No…she just started talking to me.”

  “Well, then…”

  “What?”

  “You weren’t to know what she was, were you? It’s not like she had a tattoo on her head saying, I’m a prostitute…”

  I grinned.

  Gina grinned back. “She didn’t, did she?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  Gina relaxed. She reached out and squeezed my hand, then glanced across the table. “What do you think, Mike?”

  Mike raised his head and looked at me. “Are you all right now?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  He nodded. “Did you get his name, this black guy?”

  “Iggy. She called him Iggy.”

  “Iggy?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mike shook his head. “It’s probably just a street-name. He could be anyone. There’re guys like that all over the place—small-time pimps and dealers who run a couple of girls from a flat somewhere…King’s Cross used to be full of them. The whole area was cleaned up a couple of years ago, but there’s still a lot going on down there.” He looked at me. “How old was this girl?”

  “I don’t know…seventeen, maybe eighteen. Something like that. It was hard to tell, the way she was dressed and everything…she could have been younger, I suppose.”