John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

She nodded slowly. “Risked yourself to do it. I know that. But you’re one of them. They don’t just hire people. What I heard, everybody’s got to believe. ” She was staring at him, seeing him differently now. She asked him bluntly: “Do you believe in that crap? Their racist shit?”

He reached for the belief, for his pride, his conviction.

Then he saw the pink squirming things. The subhumans. The things in tank forty-one. And conviction was a wet bar of soap.

“I don’t know. It’s—getting harder to believe in.” It was the best he could manage.

She looked out the window. “Why Picadilly?”

“No reason. Just wanted to get to another part of town. Got a better idea? My house or yours is right out.”

“I ought to ditch you,” she said, not looking at him. “But I guess… I guess I don’t want to.”

But she continued to look out the window. He wanted to take her hand, put an arm around her, but a certain compression of her legs together, a warning in the set of her shoulders, kept him back.

After a long moment, she added, “I got an idea where we could go.”

“Some friends to hide with?”

“Yeah. Somebody, anyway, I know through a friend. Only met him once. But I think he’d help. I heard he was in town, over at Dahlia’s. A guy named Smoke.”

Barrabas had a sense of unreality when he saw Jerome-X and his enormous black Negress sitting on the sofa at Dahlia’s.

No: Jerome wasn’t on the sofa, exactly. Jerome was sitting in her lap.

Miscegeny, Barrabas thought. Expecting to feel the nausea of revulsion. All he felt, though, was a dull disorientation.

Jerome was wearing a black leather jacket, open to show a few hairs on his skinny, shirtless chest. Antique jeans, rather silly red plastic boots with bright yellow baby doll’s arms on them in place of Mercury’s wings. The black woman wore a big shapeless red house dress with electric-blue carnations strobing on it. No shoes. Barrabas was worried the couch would break under the bloody great bulk of her.

“Hi,” Jerome said. “What’s happenin’?”

Barrabas decided it was a rhetorical question used as a greeting, and only shrugged.

Jo Ann said, “We’re looking for Dahlia.”

“Right here.” She appeared at the door to the dining room—a tall, gracefully long-necked black woman in an African robe batiked in red clay, copper, and silver; she wore silver contact lenses, white-blue lipstick, earrings that were dangly gold replicas of ancient tribal fetishes; cornrowed hair, each row glazed a different metallic color: copper, silver, gold, platinum, bronze, stainless steel…

“’Ello, love,” she said, crossing to Jo Ann. Her anklets clinking; her bare feet slapping on the polished hardwood floor. She hugged Jo Ann, slowly and deeply. A little embarrassed, Barrabas looked around.

They were in a high-ceilinged sitting room, in the old Edwardian terrace house, beside a dusty marble fireplace. The room was busy with the sheer excess of its decor. The mantel was crowded with a collection of jade figurines. The late-nineteenth-century plaster moldings near the ceiling were ornate. On the walls, between the cheerfully painted woodwork, covering most of the faded, intricately patterned wallpaper, was a crowd of artwork; aboriginal art, with its assertive angularity, was mixed indiscriminately with the evocative blur of Impressionist paintings and the restless collaging of video paintings. African and Australian nature gods scowling out from between Seurat and Thaddeus Wong.

My God, where has she brought me to ? Barrabas thought.

Dahlia came out of the giggling clinch and snaked out a long arm to Barrabas.

In a rather rummy voice, Barrabas thought, Jo Ann said: “Oh, Dahlia, this is Patrick Barrabas.”

“’Lo.” He took her hand. It was warm and moist.

“I guess you’ve already met Jerome and Bettina.”

“Sort of,” he said. “And we saw them perform the other night.” Dutifully, he added, “Exxy show.”

Jerome grinned. “Thanks.”

Dahlia led Jo Ann to the Louis XIV sofa. Barrabas sat across from them in an antique chair of cracked brown leather. He tried not to stare at Jerome and Bettina.

Bloke looked like a bloody ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on the great puddle of the black woman’s lap, Barrabas thought.

Dahlia reached languidly to a remote on a mahogany end table. “Let’s have some music,” she said. Her accent was middle-class London, Barrabas thought, for all her African affectation. A wealthy family, like as not, judging from the expensive jumble of the furnishings. From a family of black immigrants, he told himself, come over a generation ago, taking opportunities that should have gone to white British natives.

Barrabas tried to work up some inner spark of outrage about it. But the flint found nothing to strike on.

The music swelled to thud and skirl on the high ceiling; Barrabas had expected recordings of “authentic aboriginal” music, or some such, but instead the music was an amalgamation of house music and dance electronica. Perhaps it was the contemporary equivalent of aboriginal music.

“I was hoping Smoke was still here,” Jo Ann was saying. “I need to talk to him, if you think it’d be okay. I’ve got a problem. Some people—”

“Might be better to tell as few people as possible,” Barrabas broke in. Smiling apologetically. “To protect them as well.”

Jo Ann hesitated. “I guess so. To protect them.”

“Oh, I do love the dramatic sound of all this,” Dahlia said, yawning. “Not going to tell even poor Dahlia?”

“Um—eventually,” Jo Ann said.

“They don’t know if they can trust us,” Jerome remarked, whispering it sotto voce to Bettina.

“Hell, I don’ know if dey can either,” Bettina said. “I don’ know who dey are. I don’ care about dis shit neither. Dying for some motherfucking dinner.”

Jerome started to get up. “I’ll get Smoke, maybe we can all cruise for something.”

Bettina grabbed him, held him back. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Did I say you get up?” Looking at Jerome with narrowed eyes.

Not serious, Barrabas realized. Some kind of game.

“ Fuck you,” Jerome said, trying not to laugh, wriggling free of her. “I go where I please, bitch.”

“Who you calling bitch—? Come here, I beat yo’ skinny pink ass!”

But he was gone, laughing at her as he went through the door.

“Little white punk!” she called after him. “I make you sorry!” But shaking with silent laughter, big belly and the obese undersides of her arms quivering.

Weird, Barrabas thought.

“If you want Smoke’s help,” Dahlia said, thoughtfully clicking her long, gold-painted nails against the carved wood of the armrest, “then it’s maybe some… political problem?”

“Yeah,” Jo Ann said.

“You need Smoke’s people too?”

“Yeah.”

“Right, no reason not to talk in front of Jerome and Bettina. It’ll come out, I reckon—they’re part of it.”

“Uh—” Jo Ann looking at Barrabas. Thinking, he supposed, of warning Dahlia not to say too much in front of him. She wasn’t sure of his loyalty.

And he wasn’t sure himself. But he said. “It’s okay, Jo Ann. I’m committed.”

She pursed her lips—but shrugged resignedly.

Barrabas noticed Bettina watching them; following the implicit message as well as the explicit one, in the exchange between Jo Ann and Barrabas.

He had an uncomfortable feeling Bettina knew exactly what was going on. Looking at her, just a quick glance into Bettina’s eyes, he glimpsed the analytical whir of her mind; was shaken up by the hard glitter of intelligence he saw there.