Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

‘Aw, you boys will have to excuse me,’ said Armstrong. ‘Let me introduce you. Chip, this Jacques Painlevé, the trombonist. Bertie here goin tickle the keys for us. Herve be damn hot on the licorice stick. I reckon you know Jean. He goin crack the bass for you in the back line.’

Son of a bitch . I felt my face flush. I look down at my hands. My fingernails was cutting into the flesh of my palm.

Chip ain’t even seem to notice. He was messing with the trombonist’s gin and the other gates leaned in, laughing. It was then that Armstrong turn to me, put a big hand on my shoulder.

‘Sid,’ he said quiet-like. ‘You goin sit this one out, if that okay. It ain’t but the first one. We got other discs to press. Jean just got the fingers I want on this one.’

I give a funny little shrug, like it ain’t no trouble.

‘Aw, it alright Louis,’ I said. ‘It alright. Sure. It alright.’

It wasn’t alright.

When I wandered back into the flat, everything felt strange, a shadow of itself, like I was seeing it all for the first time. All that dust, the shabby, dented end tables, the creaking floorboards. I trudged past chairs sheeted like corpses, past grimy windowsills. Delilah’s bathroom door stood open. I watched her lean over the basin, wet her thin fingers under its stream, reach up under her gold scarf to scratch her head. She heard my breathing and turned, alarmed.

‘Oh, Sidney Kidney, it’s you,’ she said.

‘What you doin here?’ I said. ‘Ain’t you got some place to be?’

She smiled, shrugged. ‘It gets awful hot sometimes, this helmet. Even in winter. I’m like a draft horse, I just need to be wetted down sometimes.’

‘I’m sorry you uncomfortable.’ My voice, it was hard and awkward, a right plank of wood.

She stood there staring at me, water dripping from her fingers. ‘You sound angry.’

‘Well.’

‘A well is nothing but a hole filled with water. What is it?’

But my voice, when I finally spoke, wasn’t steady. ‘I ain’t on it. Chip and the kid are on it, but I ain’t. Louis got some other gate supportin Chip.’

She froze, her hands half-lifted to her head, her face turned toward me. ‘Oh, Sidney. Oh, I’m so sorry. I am.’

I said nothing.

‘What’re you going to do?’ she said quietly.

I shrugged. ‘There ain’t nothin else. This was it. This was my shot at doin somethin real. There ain’t nothin else.’

‘Oh, Sid.’

‘Don’t look at me like that. I mean it.’

‘Sid, I’m sorry. I’m sure it isn’t you, I’m sure there’s some other reason Louis skipped over you.’

I give a sharp laugh. ‘It don’t matter. Kid’s on it, ain’t that all that matters?’

‘No, Sid, it isn’t. Though I’m glad for him.’

‘Of course you glad for him.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You need me to say it? You wink and tease and flirt with the kid like you got designs or somethin.’ I ain’t looked at her, glancing instead at the sink’s rusted gullet, the clean water thrumming against it. I ain’t believed a word of what I was saying. But I ain’t cared. Felt like everything being torn from me.

I said, ‘You keep on like this, kid goin to get ideas. Like you mean it or somethin.’

Silence, filled with the drumming of water on steel. She turned off the tap.

‘Like I mean what or something?’

I felt a twinge then, like I should just shut my damn mouth. But seeing her stubborn face, its righteous frown, hell, the heat just rose up in me.

‘Way you carryin on, girl, it ain’t right. It ain’t goddamned right. I know you just teasin, I know you wouldn’t never do nothin. But other folks, what they goin think? And Hiero hisself — you can see he half in love with you. It cruel, makin him think you love him back.’

Slowly, Delilah wrapped her fingers round the back of a wrought-iron chair. Her face darkening. She drawn back the chair and sat.

I stood there staring, the skin hot all along my hairline. I watched her watching her hands. What a face she got, smooth as the surface of milk.

‘Delilah?’ I finally said.

She raised her hand like to say stop. Let it fall in her lap. After a minute, she look up at me, her green eyes filled with some strange subterranean feeling.

‘If I have made him think I love him,’ she begun, then broke off. ‘I hope to god I have. I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything I could think of. Someone has to. Have you even seen that kid out there, Sid? Have you taken one goddamn look? He’s a sunk little boy. Lost as a stray cat. You’re always so worried about you, so damn worried about yourself. He’s just a child . And he’s got no one.’

She was staring at me from a cold, unnerving distance. The light in her eyes gone out. ‘You have some very sick ideas in that head of yours.’ She paused, raised her face. ‘Hiero’s like a little brother to me.’

I known that. Course I known that. I done said the words myself to Chip months and months ago. I felt a heaviness in my gut made me want to curl up and clutch my ribs. Man, the shame . My jaw started twitching as I stared down into her face, its utter emptiness. And I seen clearly and sharply just how much she did not love me.

‘Lilah,’ I said.

‘Close the door on your way out.’

I watched her face. Nothing, no water on her eyes — nothing.

I turned to go. Even as I shut the door with a click, I was listening for her voice, thinking she might call me back.

She ain’t.

Did that scrawny Kraut bastard mean to take everything from me — the band, Armstrong, the recording, even Delilah? Ain’t he like to leave me no scraps? Is that what genius does — entitles a gate to claim whatever pieces of others’ lives he want?

Cause I admit it. He got genius, he got genius in spades. Cut him in half, he still worth three of me. It ain’t fair. It ain’t fair that I struggle and struggle to sound just second-rate, and the damn kid just wake up, spit through his horn, and it sing like nightingales. It ain’t fair . Gifts is divided so damn unevenly. Like God just left his damn sack of talents in a ditch somewhere and said, Go help youselves, ladies and gents. Them’s that get there first can help themselves to the biggest ones. In every other walk of life, a jack can work to get what he want. But ain’t no amount of toil going get you a lick more talent than you born with. Geniuses ain’t made, brother, they just is . And I just was not .

I was drinking alone at one of the red tables in the tobacconist’s down near the flat when Hiero ankled in. The tobacconist leaned out over the counter, her shirtsleeves turned up, one scrawny arm propped under either cheek. We called her the Bug cause of her thin, masticating face, her bulging eyeballs.

She come over here from Switzerland after the first war. ‘What’ll it be, Hiero?’ she called out in that cracked German the Swiss talk.

I looked up at that.

The kid seem confused a second, like he a actor done wander onstage at the wrong cue. He stood staring at her, then shrugged. Turning his face, he seen me in the corner.

‘Aw, I ain’t so thirsty,’ he mumbled to her.

‘On the house,’ she said. ‘Whenever you’re ready for it.’

Hell. Why everyone got to be so damn nice to him all the time?

Hiero seen the graveness of my face, and stopped where he stood. I was thinking bout Delilah’s words. Thinking, you can be damn young and not be a kid. You can stop being a kid at any age, it ain’t got nothing to do with years. And Hiero, hell.

‘You a fraud,’ I said, sort of soft-like. ‘You a damn fraud. You hear me?’