Mat Johnson - Drop

‘I see Saul gave you some work’ were the first words she said to me, but when her voice cracked on the last syllable, I knew that I had her. I knew, that at some time in the future, I would tease her about the tears she was currently dropping and that she would punch my arm or roll her eyes in denial that this had ever happened.

‘I got it. The job I’m supposed to have,’ I said, stepping closer. Alex had no shoes on and her toes wiggled ‘hi’ to me through the holes in her socks. ‘I want you to do it, too. It should last a few weeks, be a lot of work. It’ll be great.’ Alex nodded, looked back from the billboard to me again.

‘And when it’s over, what happens? What happens after you’re done that?’

Chris Jones, stunningly prepared on this day, was so eager to give her the answer to the question that he nearly ripped her tickets while yanking them out of his pocket and slapping them into her hand. Alex knew what they were as soon as she saw the cardboard holder, but she opened and read them anyway.

‘Roundtrip,’ she said, nodding, inspecting them.

‘That’s right, lady. All there and paid for. Right there! You got to come with me.’

‘What about yours?’ she asked, motioning with her head to my still thick pocket.

‘What about it?’

‘You got roundtrip too?’ Alex asked me. I looked back at her relaxed, hands at my sides, smiling lightly into her eyes. It was clear to both of us that I didn’t. Alex sighed, but it was a sound neither of exasperation or exhaustion. I was her friend. I was who I was.

‘That doesn’t mean I won’t be buying a ticket back again.’ We both hung there for a moment, not saying anything, just knowing that.

When I pulled out the cash, everybody was happy. Nobody doesn’t like getting paid, but for these folks it was something special. Despite the shoving, I still made sure to pay Natalie first, and by the time I had counted out her $200 the rest were in a perfect line behind her. Clive offered weak protests when Cindy demanded I give her guardianship of his money, so I ignored him and obeyed her. The only other words muttered were divisions of twenty as they re-counted their booty.

Behind us, a gust of a passing SEPTA bus sent the billboard flapping in large bass-filled waves that made us all prepare to be crushed. Reggie ran to the other side of the street. ‘Yo Chris,’ he yelled, ‘what you want now?’

‘I don’t know. Take it down, maybe,’ I offered, looking back to Alex to see if she still needed to see it some more. Alex was hugging herself, talking to Natalie in a way that said that they already knew each other from some other, distant context. Such a small town.

In moments, what was a dream became a ball of paper the size of a snowman’s ass. Next to it sat bundles of barely used timbers with nails sticking out their ends. One vision discarded. Maybe the trashmen would take it when they came by. Maybe they wouldn’t. The future was a hard thing to know. I walked back to Alex as soon as Natalie, with smiles and waves goodbye, walked away from her.

‘Do you really like it?’ I asked Alex when Clive, the last of the group to leave, had finally gotten his cigarette lit and turned the corner and it was just us standing there.

‘I do,’ Alex told me. Behind her door I could see the news on her television. It would be dinnertime soon, and I would cook something for us. If she let me, I would.

‘What do you like about it?’ I prodded. Let me know this. Let this be a hard thing I could hold on to in nights to come.

Alex looked down, turned around slowly and started walking back, stopping at her entrance. When she leaned on her door, the hinges in the back creaked and snapped loudly, but that didn’t interrupt her concentration. It seemed more than a minute, her staring towards the ground, searching for what it was and the proper way to name it, before Alex finally raised her head again.

‘I like that you did it’ is what she told me.

Knock-knocking on a tube through darkness, holding on so I don’t fall, mainlining back into this land down the blue vein of the Victoria Line. Too fast. This train should slow, this trip should be given weight, its wheels aching as it pulled further against the improbability of my return. If my hands were big enough, I would reach out and capture every moment of rock and roar as we sped forward, every half-note of hollow echo, every lean of the car back or forth, just take the lot of it, squeeze it hard and give it form so I could cut it as thin as deli ham. Wrap a slice of that shit around every moment past this one. Wake up and with first bite know that each day could be this good. Chris Jones coming back to London, standing as tall as the curved tube ceiling would allow him.

Alex could bitch all she wanted, but I never said we’d be flying over together. She could wait the week I needed to feel my arrival, reacquaint myself with every inch I’d been barred from, do a posh crawl down Neale Street to find the packaging that would best present the product that I would be selling in my interviews in the days to come. I’d let the flat in Clapham for a month, enough time to enact my rituals and still offer Alex a few weeks for touristy persuals. I wasn‘t getting stuck in a queue for Parliament as the real city called.

Past one more ‘ Mind the gap ’ and Stockwell was behind us. Soon we were slowing down again and this time would be the last stop. Immediately I seized my position in front of the doors, my nose perfectly aligned with the crack so that when they slid open, I stepped forth to Lambeth ground.

Escalator rise, rising. Me at the bottom, queuing to climb, looking on. It was worth telling Margaret I would meet her in Brixton, at the brasserie, as opposed to the sterility of Heathrow. This is how it was supposed to be. From the back of the tile valley, I watched as before me my heralds crowded in twos and glided upwards. I stepped onwards to moving stairs, not sure if it was elation or mechanics that raised me. Exits passed, I had two feet in this town once more.

Brixton! I flung out my arms, quickly poking the old guy on my right in his temple and having my left arm and suitcase swatted down by several passersby. Finding a safe place away from the traffic, hugging the urine-stained wall by the 7-Eleven, I looked up at that sky once more, my infinite duvet, as it drizzled back down on me. So polite it’s misting; I didn’t even have to squint my eyes as I kept walking on.

In the Iceland, tired people grabbed for one more frozen thing to go thunk at the bottom of their carts. Staring at pictures of airbrushed gourmet interpretations of the cardboard’s contents, they imagined the meal soon to come, as well as the one that would always be sitting on ice, waiting to exist for them. They knew that the real version would be much duller in color, muted in curves, and be served on less attractive chinaware, but as they stood in long lines it was those pictures they looked down on. They were thankful they could afford such overpriced illusions. Outside the market’s sliding doors, I walked slowly at irregular angles through the crowd of workers waiting to take buses further south than the tube line. They were so damn beautiful, so damn tired, necks elongated and to the side to see if the next red blur coming their way had their number in its eye. So damn fine because you knew the reason they were rushing home was that there was love somewhere waiting for them. Maybe love was just a bed or a dog or a list of responsibilities they would need decades of separation to romanticize, but they were still hustling towards it without question. Across the street, on the corner down from the bagel shop, were Brixton boys, stationary and proud of this. Leaning against the jaywalk fence with bomber jackets they had no business wearing in summer heat, sporting baseball hats touting professional teams for games for which they didn‘t even know the rules. Too cool to acknowledge the water falling down on them. It wasn‘t lost on me any more, the sense of familiarity, that of all the worlds within this city, I‘d chosen the one that mirrored the place I’d been running from.