Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

‘Go on, kid,’ said Chip. ‘Go find youself a pew. We like to be a while.’

I ain’t known how long we stood above that street. I watched a dark cat mince across the cobblestones. Someone dumped a bucket of wash water out a window. Then a lone figure come around the corner, start making its way up the road, its legs and arms looking grey and thin in the watery daylight, its head all bloated with a wrap. And, like that, I felt my heart suck itself down into this real deep hole in my chest. She stopped at the foot of the steps, folded her arms. She looked leaner, more worn and threadbare, but, hell. It was her .

It was Delilah.

I started shaking. Like that, I just started trembling real light and fast, like a bird’s heart in you fist.

Chip come up beside me. ‘Told you this was goin be a wild day,’ he murmured. ‘You just goin stand there? Or you goin down give her some sugar?’

I ain’t understood. I give him a helpless, frightened look, feeling the cold air coming in at my collar. Delilah was glancing across at a café, that huge blue wrap on her head like something from a far-off land. She was a mirage, I swear it. Suddenly this huge wave of meanness start pushing against me from the inside.

Hold on, Sid , I thought. You don’t know nothing yet. Just hold on .

But Chip was already slipping past, starting down them steps. ‘Well, look who risen from the dead,’ he called with a smile. ‘Lilah, girl, you forget what we look like, you got to look so hard?’

She turned, and I seen her face clear. Was like my blood just stop. I couldn’t move. I stood above her at that railing and I couldn’t move a inch.

‘Charles,’ she cried with a sharp squealing laugh. ‘Charlie Jones!’

‘It’s Chip, sister. You know it.’ But he was smiling too.

She just lift up her skirts and run on up the steps, her long heels like gunshots on the cracked stones. She catch him in this savage hug before he even a half dozen steps down. I bet Chip ain’t been held like that even by his own mama. Then, over his shoulder, she lift up her eyes, and seen me.

Hell. I ain’t said nothing. I didn’t think I be able to say nothing.

She let Chip go and stood there breathing hard.

‘Delilah girl?’ I could feel myself gripping that cold railing.

She looked at me shyly. ‘Hi, Sid.’

Neither of us stirred, made any move to come closer. And then, hell, there was a high whooping cry, and a cloud of pigeons exploded behind me. I jumped a little. Sweet Lilah lifted her beautiful face away from mine, following the line of birds, and catching sight of the kid some steps up, she start to running. She held him to her chest in this ferocious damn embrace like she ain’t never held nothing she loved before.

We ain’t lingered long. Delilah led us into that old church, along the wood pews, out some back door into a small, grassed courtyard. Wasn’t no one around. A spiked iron fence behind a hedge, a wood bench under a apple tree, a table with three rickety cane chairs. She led us to a gate in the far corner, unlatched it. It opened onto a steep alley incut with stone steps going down.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s not far.’

‘We goin to see Louis?’ said Hiero in German.

I was too distracted to answer. I felt slack, strange, not quite in my own skin. It wasn’t nerves I was suffering now. Every time I sneak a look on over at her, hell. De lilah . It ain’t seemed possible. Watching her start down those steps, with her bird’s bones, with that oaky smell of outdoors on her like she just been walking the countryside, like it any damn day and not miraculous at all — everything rose up in me. I caught a glimpse of her scrawny ankles under them skirts, then they was gone.

It ain’t been but a week and a half, but she seemed a complete stranger. The stress of these last days, the grief — twenty years might have passed.

‘Tell me everything,’ she said. ‘I want to know everything.’ She put her slim hand to the back of her neck, like to check that her wrap was on just so.

Chip was running his fingers over the iron railing. ‘You supposed to be dead, girl. How come you ain’t dead?’

She smiled. ‘Careful, Charlie. You’re going to rumple your suit.’

‘Don’t start with that Charlie business. I mean it.’

Hiero trailed behind us, about as far from Delilah as that gate could get. She turn around, give him a wink.

‘I think he’s afraid of me again,’ she laughed.

‘You a ghost,’ said Chip. ‘We all afraid of you.’

‘So where’s Louis?’ I said, irritable.

Delilah, she ain’t hardly lift up her eyes at me at all. We come to the gate at the bottom and she lifted the latch, held it open for us. When she answer me, her voice gone different. ‘He’s just down here a way. He still isn’t well.’

Chip swore. ‘He sick? Louis been sick?’

‘You know that,’ she said.

I turned as we went, said to Hiero in German, ‘Lilah says Louis been sick.’

‘We still goin see him?’

‘Kid wants to know if he well enough for visiting,’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said simply.

She led us down a narrow street, past patisseries steaming with blond bread, past hidden bistros and fish stands stinking of guts and coquilles Saint Jacques.

‘You boys look awfully tired,’ she said.

‘Not too tired to scratch the old skins,’ said Chip.

‘You’re ready to play again?’ she smiled. ‘Already? You all are?’

‘Except Hiero lost his damn horn.’

She give me a look. ‘Is that the truth?’

I shrugged.

Armstrong was staying in a small hotel, top of Rue Lepic. We push on through the big glass doors. The lobby like to blind us, it so damn brassy and gilt with mirrors and white tile. Hell. Smoked-over glass on the inner windows, a shining brass elevator standing along the far wall. The doorman nodded to Lilah as we gone on past, lifting up his cap with one white glove.

As we come through I took her arm. I surprise myself, how hard I held it.

‘Sid,’ she said. ‘Not here.’

But I ain’t hardly heard her. ‘I thought you was dead,’ I murmured. ‘Lilah? Girl, we thought we lost you.’

But Hiero was already pushing through the glass door, staring nervously around at all that damn opulence. She pulled away.

Chip stood near the elevator, turning his hat uneasily in his hands as we approached.

‘I didn’t want to ask.’ Lilah swallowed hard and looked at him. ‘Where are they? Where’s Ernst and Fritz?’

‘Ain’t you forgettin someone?’ I said.

She give me a hurt look. ‘I know about Paul,’ she said quiet-like. ‘I was there.’

Hiero watched us, nervous.

‘Ernst still in Hamburg,’ said Chip. ‘He with his family. He goin be alright, his pa awful damn powerful. Ain’t got him no visa to get out, though. I reckon the old bastard got us visas just to clear us out of his boy’s life.’

‘He could’ve just had us pinched,’ I said. ‘He ain’t done that.’

Chip shrugged. ‘If you seen Ernst’s face,’ he said to Delilah, ‘if you just seen Ernst’s face. It like to have broke you cold Canadian heart, girl. You seen everything he wanted just gone, just scraped out of him. You know, he love old Louis. And he give that up when he say goodbye to us.’

‘You wasn’t even there, Chip. What you know about how he looked?’

‘You told me bout it. Hell. I just sayin what you said, Sid.’

I shook my head.

‘And Fritzie?’ she said.

Chip’s face closed over. ‘That damn Judas gone over to the Golden Seven. He ain’t one of us no more.’

Delilah look real sad.

‘If it up to me I’d scrape his damn name off every record we ever cut. Erase his fat sound off it like he ain’t never been born.’