Gardner Dozois - The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 18

She got up behind that mic and smiled apologetically. Then she began to sing, and I wondered how I had never thought her unnoticeable. It was a slow, quiet song. I couldn’t understand the language. I didn’t need to, her voice said it all: loss and hurt and lost love. Bass and rhythm felt out the depth and damage in every syllable. She was five foot nothing and looked like she would break in half if you blew on her, but her voice had a stone edge that said, I’ve been where I’m singing about. Time stopped, she held a note then gently let it go. I-Nation was silent for a moment. Then it exploded. The girl bobbed shyly and went down through the cheering and whistling. Two minutes later she was back at work, clearing glasses. I could not take my eyes off her. You can fall in love in five minutes. It’s not hard at all.

When she came to take my glass, all I could say was, “that was…great.”

“Thank you.”

And that was it. How I met Ten, said three shit words to her, and fell in love.

I never could pronounce her name. On the afternoons when the bar was quiet and we talked over my table she would shake her head at my mangling the vowel sounds.

“Eh-yo.”

“Ay-oh?”

The soft spikes of hair would shake again. Then, she never could pronounce my name either. Shan, she would say.

“No, Shawn.”

“Shone…”

So I called her Ten, which for me meant Il Primo, Top of the Heap, King of the Hill, A-Number-One.

And she called me Shone. Like the sun. One afternoon when she was off shift, I asked Boss Wynton what kind of name Tendeleo was.

“I mean, I know it’s African, I can tell by the accent, but it’s a big continent.”

“It is that. She not told you?”

“Not yet.”

“She will when she’s ready. And Mr. Accountant, you fucking respect her.”

Two weeks later she came to my table and laid a series of forms before me like tarot cards. They were Social Security applications, Income Support, Housing Benefit.

“They say you’re good with numbers.”

“This isn’t really my thing, but I’ll take a look.” I flipped through the forms. “You’re working too many hours…they’re trying to cut your benefits. It’s the classic welfare trap. It doesn’t pay you to work.”

“I need to work,” Ten said.

Last in line was a Home Office Asylum Seeker’s form. She watched me pick it up and open it. She must have seen my eyes widen.

“Gichichi, in Kenya.”

“Yes.”

I read more.

“God. You got out of Nairobi.”

“I got out of Nairobi, yes.”

I hesitated before asking, “Was it bad?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was very bad.”

“I?” I said.

“What?”

“You said ‘I.’ I was very bad.”

“I meant it, it was very bad.”

The silence could have been uncomfortable, fatal even. The thing I had wanted to say for weeks rushed into the vacuum.

“Can I take you somewhere? Now? Today? When you finish? Would you like to eat?”

“I’d like that very much,” she said.

Wynton sent her off early. I took her to a great restaurant in Chinatown where the waiters ask you before you go in how much you’d like to spend.

“I don’t know what this is,” she said as the first of the courses arrived.

“Eat it. You’ll like it.”

She toyed with her wontons and chopsticks.

“Is something wrong with it?”

“I will tell you about Nairobi now,” she said. The food was expensive and lavish and exquisitely presented and we hardly touched it. Course after course went back to the kitchen barely picked over as Ten told me the story of her life, the church in Gichichi, the camps in Nairobi, the career as a posse girl, and of the Chaga that destroyed her family, her career, her hopes, her home, and almost her life. I had seen the coming of the Chaga on the television. Like most people, I had tuned it down to background muzak in my life; oh, wow, there’s an alien life-form taking over the southern hemisphere. Well, it’s bad for the safari holidays and carnival in Rio is fucked and you won’t be getting the Brazilians in the next World Cup, but the Cooperage account’s due next week and we’re pitching for the Maine Road job and interest rates have gone up again. Aliens schmaliens. Another humanitarian crisis. I had followed the fall of Nairobi, the first of the really big cities to go, trying to make myself believe that this was not Hollywood, this was not Bruce Willis versus the CGI. This was twelve million people being swallowed by the dark. Unlike most of my friends and work mates. I had felt something move painfully inside me when I saw the walls of the Chaga close on the towers of downtown Nairobi. It was like a kick in my heart. For a moment I had gone behind the pictures that are all we are allowed to know of our world, to the true lives. And now the dark had spat one of these true lives up onto the streets of Manchester. We were on the last candle at the last table by the time Ten got around to telling me how she had been dumped out with the other Kenyans at Charles de Gaulle and shuffled for months through EU refugee quotas until she arrived, jet-lagged, culture-shocked and poor as shit, in the gray and damp of an English summer.

Afterward, I was quiet for some time. Nothing I could have said was adequate to what I had heard. Then I said, “would you like to come home with me for a drink, or a coffee, or something?”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was husky from much talking, and low, and unbearably attractive. “I would, very much.”

I left the staff a big tip for above-and-beyondness.

Ten loved my house. The space astonished her. I left her curled up on my sofa savoring the space as I went to open wine.

“This is nice,” she said. “Warm. Big. Nice. Yours.”

“Yes,” I said and leaned forward and kissed her. Then, before I could think about what I had done, I took her arm and kissed the round red blemish of her chip. Ten slept with me that night, but we did not make love. She lay, curled and chaste, in the hollow of my belly until morning. She cried out in her sleep often. Her skin smelled of Africa.

The bastards cut her housing benefit. Ten was distraught. Home was everything to her. Her life had been one long search for a place of her own; safe, secure, stable.

“You have two options,” I said. “One, give up working here.”

“Never,” she said. “I work. I like to work.” I saw Wynton smile, polishing the glasses behind the bar.

“Option two, then.”

“What’s that?”

“Move in with me.”

It took her a week to decide. I understood her hesitation. It was a place, safe, secure, stable, but not her own. On the Saturday I got a phone call from her. Could I help her move? I went around to her flat in Salford. The rooms were tatty and cold, the furniture charity-shop fare, and the decor ugly. The place stank of dope. The television blared, unwatched; three different boomboxes competed with each other.

While Ten fetched her stuff, her flatmates stared at me as if I were something come out of the Chaga. She had two bags-one of clothes, one of music and books. They went in the back of the car and she came home with me.

Life with Ten. She put her books on a shelf and her clothes in a drawer. She improvised harmonies to my music. She would light candles on any excuse. She spent hours in the bathroom and used toilet paper by the roll. She was meticulously tidy. She took great care of her little money. She would not borrow from me. She kept working at I-Nation, she sang every Friday. She still killed me every time she got up on that stage.

She said little, but it told. She was dark and intensely beautiful to me. She didn’t smile much. When she did it was a knife through the heart of me. It was a sharp joy. Sex was a sharpness of a different kind-it always seemed difficult for her. She didn’t lose herself in sex. I think she took a great pleasure from it, but it was controlled…it was owned, it was hers. She never let herself make any sound. She was a little afraid of the animal inside. She seemed much older than she was; on the times we went dancing, that same energy that lit her up in singing and sex burned out of her. It was then that she surprised me by being a bright, energetic, sociable eighteen-year-old. She loved me. I loved her so hard it felt like sickness. I would watch her unaware I was doing it…watch the way she moved her hands when she talked on the phone, how she curled her legs under her when she watched television, how she brushed her teeth in the morning. I would wake up in the night just to watch her sleep. I would check she was still breathing. I dreaded something insane, something out of nowhere, taking her away.