Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

‘Whose flat?’ I said foolishly.

‘I got to spell it out for you? Go on over there.’

‘Aw, hell.’ I shook my head. ‘We stayin with her ? No way, brother. No.’

But a hour later I was parking Ernst’s dusty Horch up on the curb and wrestling a big metal trunk out of the cab, banging it hard down into the street. When I glance on up, there she was, staring down at me through warped glass with dark eyes.

It was a shabby old apartment house. The street door was propped open with a cinderblock and I dragged that thick trunk through. Inside, a tile courtyard stood open to the sky and there was a checkered path leading across it to the stairwell. Stone lions crouched on the outer lintel posts. A fountain in the corner stood dry, its bowl stained by the pigeons. I dragged the trunk through the small foyer, set it down at the edge of the tile floor. The walls was yellow, chipped and peeling, and I leaned up against them as Delilah come out. She bent over the balustrade and called, ‘It’s up here. Second door on the left.’

I give her a grim look. It going be like that ? She ain’t even coming down ?

‘Where’s Hiero?’ she called.

Hell.

‘What?’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘I ain’t said nothin,’ I called up.

‘What? I can’t hear you. Come up.’

I blown out my cheeks, lifted that damn trunk up by the leather strap. I was determined not to ask her bout Berlin. Not to start nothing up with her. No damn way. When I come through, the apartment surprised me with its calm pale tones, the cream walls with their mouldings, the grey ceilings, and the long row of cold windows behind the furniture. Dragging in that trunk, I called out to her. But Delilah wasn’t in sight. Frowning, I gone back down and begun to wrestle our old instruments up the stairs. I set everything down on the gleaming oak floor of the living room.

Then, the glass doors of the dining room opened, and Delilah come in, holding them open with a hand on each door. She wore a blue dress that hugged her hips and a purple wrap on her head, and her skin looked soft, bruised, velvety in that pale light. A faint scent of sugared almonds, like she just been baking, reached my nose.

‘Hi, girl,’ I said, all at once shy.

‘Don’t mind me.’ She smiled, distracted. ‘I was just changing. You’ll all be alright out here? We can put one of you on the sofa, I think.’ She glanced round. ‘I sleep just through here.’ But she ain’t met my eyes as she said it.

I sat down, stood up. And then, hell, it ain’t mattered what I’d told myself.

‘Lilah,’ I said. ‘Listen.’

She cleared her throat, put one uneasy hand on her wrap. She ain’t come no closer. ‘I know it’s not much, but—’

‘It ain’t the flat,’ I said. ‘The flat’s fine.’

She give me a puzzled half-smile.

My head felt thick, strange. ‘Aw, Lilah. You goin tell me? Or I got to ask?’

‘Ask what?’

‘What you mean “what”.’

She clasped her hands before her thighs, stood there looking at me.

I swore. ‘If you was to tell me you Lilah’s twin sister, I’d believe it. If you was to say you just blinked you eyes in Berlin and was transported here on the back of a pigeon , I’d believe it. You ain’t real, girl. You ain’t. Not to me.’

At the mention of Berlin, her face darkened.

‘You get picked up by the Boots,’ I said, ‘and then you just disappear? End up back in Paris like it ain’t nothin? You know how that look?’ I turned, walked over to the window, walked back. ‘You ain’t got nothin to say to that?’

‘I had a ticket , Sid. I wasn’t arrested. Hiero didn’t tell you?’

‘Hiero?’

‘Hiero. Your friend . He didn’t tell you I was leaving?’

‘The kid known ?’

‘Of course he did. You think I’d just run off like that?’ She give me this sudden sad look. ‘Oh, Sid,’ she said, sort of quietly, like she only just starting to understand.

I shook my head. ‘The kid known you was goin?’

All a sudden I sat down hard in her wicker chair. Kid known my grief. He known it, he seen it, he lived it alongside me. And he ain’t done nothing to soften it.

I wasn’t sure if maybe something was wrong in all of it, if there been some mistake. But then I thought back to his shifty looks, his worried frowns, his sudden brotherly protection of me, and I thought, Hell, brother, he a cold old Kraut after all .

‘Sid?’ said Delilah. ‘What’re you thinking? Sidney?’

She was still standing there, looking at me. Something gone dark in me then. Something I ain’t able to explain. It wasn’t jealousy, it wasn’t betrayal. It wasn’t even a lack of trust, exactly. I don’t know. It was like I been sick from Lilah too long to just start back in.

I pushed back the chair, made to get up and go.

But Delilah come over to me, laid one cool long hand to my throat. I froze. The light seemed to slow right down. ‘Sid,’ she said, as if from a long way off. ‘Where’re you going now, hmm?’

And then she leaned in, real slow, and kissed me.

Hell.

It was then I started to hate his damn face again. The kid, I mean. Hiero. Little Judas.

I ain’t said nothing to Chip, I don’t know why. Maybe it just felt too delicious, knowing what the kid was really capable of. That night we rolled up in them blankets and lay ourselves out on Lilah’s living room floor. Everyone but the kid. For some damn reason he gotten the couch. But no sooner he fall asleep than Chip rose up and dragged Hiero off that sofa by one ankle. The kid hit the floor like a sack of vegetables. Yawning, Chip sprawled out there hisself.

Hiero call over at me. He was standing, clutching his blankets to his belly. ‘You goin let him do that, Sid?’ he complained. ‘It ain’t right. You goin let him just take the couch?’

‘Eat it up, kid,’ I said coldly. ‘Eat it up and try not to choke on it.’

Chip cackled to hisself. ‘You young yet, kid.’ You could almost hear him smiling in the darkness. ‘You can take the stiffness. I only got one bone can take that kind of stiffness.’

I rolled over onto my back, folded my hands under my neck.

‘Hey, Sid, where’s you sweetheart?’ said Chip. ‘ She got a sweet old bed.’

‘Shut up, Chip.’

‘Aw, she ain’t home yet,’ Hiero whispered, confidential like. ‘She out paintin the town, brother. Left our boy to his own devices .’

‘His five-fingered device, maybe.’

There was headlights cutting up through the window as a taxi pulled past, the cold beams sliding over the ceiling, down the far wall. Some jack was hollering in the street below. I listened for the scrape of Lilah’s key in the lock, feeling something real black rising in me.

‘Or after that sweet old kiss, maybe she got what she needed,’ said Chip, a smile in his voice.

‘Maybe she scared she goin get more of it,’ said Hiero with a squeal.

Chip was laughing so hard he like to wet hisself.

I sat up on one elbow, stared over at the kid’s dark form. ‘You say another word and I’ll shove that fuckin horn down you throat. You hear me? Kid?’

There was a thick silence.

‘You alright, buck?’ said Chip. ‘We just foolin with you.’

I scowled. ‘Don’t you start on nothin. I mean it.’

‘Hell. I ain’t startin. You like this girl, you got to give her space. You keep on her this quick, she goin to lose interest in you, like that.’ Chip snap his damn fingers.

But I was thinking of that soft cool kiss she give me. Of her fingers on my throat. I lay awake a long time, thinking of that. Then I was thinking of old Berlin, and Ernst, and Paul. The kid started snoring soft like.