Mat Johnson - Drop

‘Oh, fucking hell!’

The first to reach her, I held Fionna’s back as she held her ankle. ‘Are you okay?’

‘No, it’s not okay, I’m hurt!’

‘Is it broken?’

‘No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ Inspired by the urgency of the moment, I moved around Fionna and gently took her leg into my lap, touched her ankle with my famished fingertips, bent the joint slowly in my hands up until ‘Ow!’ and slowly back down until ‘Oh!’ and left ‘Ew!’ and right ‘AY!’ until ‘No, it’s not broken’ but damn, isn’t it divine to hear you scream and imagine that the sound must be the same when pleasure motivates it?

After the food, after the drinks, after it was too late for a limping girl to ride all the way back to East London, I offered my place to her for the night. It was the perfect time to ask the question: I had finally reached that delicate plateau where I was drunk enough for bravery but not too smashed to pronounce the words. Fionna agreed that would be good, ‘Because I’m very tired.’ When I carried her from the cab into my apartment, the driver looked at me funny: even he knew she was too pretty for a wreck like me to be holding. I managed to get out my keys and open the door without dropping her or her overstuffed duffel bag that weighed nearly as much as she did. What’s in it?

‘Just some of my clothes. Lately I’ve been staying with girlfriends while I hunt for a new bedsit. This is your place?’ Fionna asked inside.

‘Yeah. This is me.’

‘You live alone then? No flatmates or anything? How much do you pay?’

‘I don’t know. David says he takes it out of my salary.’

‘I’ve been looking for a new flat for months, and I haven’t seen one this nice. Not one that didn’t cost a fortune.’ She made me feel unusually lucky.

I turned on every light in the house as I carried her upstairs to the living room, trying to destroy any shadow that might scare her. Trying also not to bang her bad ankle against a wall. The swelling had gone down in the hours since the sprain, assisted by a variety of towel-wrapped foodstuffs Margaret found for her, but it was still an ugly thing sitting above her foot.

‘Were you robbed recently?’ Fionna looked around like maybe she didn’t want me to put her down in this place.

‘No, is something wrong?’

‘You don’t have any furniture,’ she said, shocked, staring at my apartment with nothing more than its own dust and possibilities to fill it. ‘How long have you been living here?’

‘About nine months. I bought a kitchen table and some chairs.’ Actually, Margaret had made that donation from her basement, along with some dishes, flatware, and pots and pans after the time she came by the house to offer me leftover spaghetti and had to watch me sit on the floor eating it with my hands.

‘Do you like it here?’ Fionna’s was a new voice echoing around these walls.

‘I love it. I’m not going back to America.’

‘I meant the flat. There’s so much room, isn’t there? You should really get some more furniture, right? Some carpets and such. Make a home. It could be really nice, once you get the proper things together. Then you could let a room out or something. It’s too big for one person.’ Fionna took the seat on the futon I offered to her. I turned on my clock radio hoping for something romantic; it was pathetic, that tinny, cheap, monotone sound. I slapped it off again and tried to smile.

‘Have you thought of painting any of the rooms something besides white?’ Fionna asked.

‘I like the white walls, actually. It makes me feel kind of free, for some reason. No stimuli. It’s like the color of silence. It’s an old place: a bit more than a hundred years, I think. You should see what they used to paint the place. In some rooms, I’ve actually chipped at the paint a bit, with a knife, all the way down to the wood, to see all the layers the walls were covered in before. You know this room was actually pink once,’ I said, motioning around. ‘And light blue, too.’ What the hell was that? I was making things up and I still sounded like an idiot.

Fionna looked around. Her leg hung out of her dress; you could see the light cut a perfect line down whatever angle of it was closest to you. Her toes, poking out the front of her sandals, were long and beige on the bottom, as if she’d been walking through sweet pancake batter. On one toe was a golden ring, a strip of solid metal seizing a strip of delicate skin. If I took her foot in my hand and pulled that ring off slowly, she would be more naked than the mere lack of clothes could ever provide.

‘Do you like it?’ Fionna asked. ‘It’s very expensive. I got it in the town of my father. In Nigeria. I could probably sell it here for enough for a car, if I wanted one.’ Keep talking. As long as we’re talking I won’t try to kiss you, and then things won’t go wrong. There won’t be that moment when you say ‘Please, no,’ and then that awkward time after I apologize when we’re both sitting here, trying to act out the scene that mirrors this perfect time before anything stupid was done.

‘I’ve always wanted to go to Africa. I actually got David to put some of my money aside, a bit each check, into a savings account, and that’s the big thing I was planning. Fly down into Egypt, go into Côte d’Ivoire, then go by land the rest of the way into West Africa. Do you go back there a lot?’

‘Sometimes. I go at Christmas sometimes, to see them. Christmas, there’s parties, things to do. Our house, where I was born, is very big, very old. You would like it. It was the magistrate’s, when it was still a colony. Tall ceilings, and so much wood. My whole family lives there. Maybe you could visit. We could have a good time there. I want to go to America someday.’

‘No, you don’t.’

Fionna fell asleep on the futon, halfway through an Alec Guinness flick on BBC 2. Awake, I stared at her, petrified that if I fell asleep I would succumb to flatulence, or wake up with a viscous pool of my warm drool coating us both. So I just kept looking, scared she would wake up and catch me and then it would really be over. This wasn’t like with Alex; it could not be as simple as reaching out to another sibling of solitude. Fionna was of another caste, the one stories were told about and pictures were taken of, so far above my own I was surprised she found me visible. I kept looking at her closed lids as the balls swam joyously beneath them. My ear resting on the mattress edge, listening to her breath.

Saturday, a lack of blinds combined with an eastern exposure meant that, as usual, I woke up at dawn blinded and sweating. Scared that she would awake and then leave me, I got dressed and went down to the supermarket to get some food, cook a breakfast so big that she couldn’t move.

At Sainsbury’s I resisted the urge to stand gawking at the incomprehensibly large selection of baked beans and pork products by jogging through the aisles, grabbing at staples. Back at my front door, I became sure Fionna had already vanished, that inside was a goodbye note with a smiley face but no phone number, but upstairs she was still lying there, pulling on her top sheet with the blind gluttony of the sleeping. Back down in the kitchen, I cooked in careful silence: shoes off, movements slow and studied, I even turned down the heat on the potatoes when the grease started popping too loud. When I finished, I could hear her above me. A repetitive, scratching sound. Probably clawing her way out the living room window. But when I climbed the steps, the sound was coming from the bathroom. Fionna was in the tub. Crouched down on her knees, working on something. Her back to me, I saw her bare legs. The right ankle was so bloated it seemed to belong to another, much larger person.