Irenosen Okojie - Butterfly Fish

At exactly 2.15pm, Queenie’s right shoe caught in a groove on the road. She went flying, grazing her elbow. The contents of her handbag spilled. Had the dog’s head from the costume stall not landed at the feet of one of the flock of orange-robed monks ahead, had her lipstick not rolled to the feet of that same monk, had the man on the motorbike not appeared from nowhere, revving his engine and rudely cutting across the monks, causing their cluster to fracture and that particular monk to accidentally crack her lipstick beneath his sole, Queenie would never have stood abruptly and awkwardly to try to save it. She would never have knocked into the stall selling maps and atlases. She would never have noticed the heavy black boots under the stall with bits of cement and paint on them.

He sat before a building site. Construction workers trailed in and out. Sawdust and white residue covered their winter skin. Her heart began to race and her mouth ran dry. Thoughts sped up and jumbled in her head. All these years later and she’d never forgotten his face. It was him, she was sure of it. He was older of course; his handsome features more lived in, weathered. Tight curls beneath his yellow hard hat were greying at the temples. She rubbed her leg. A tingling sensation made her arms tremble. How ordinary he seemed! Smoke from the hissing wok at the next stall shrouded him, as if he would change guise by the time it curled away. How plain he looked holding a steaming cup of coffee. How ironic to find him loitering behind maps and atlases, the sly curls of smoke ready to make him disappear into an atlas. Blue plastic sheeting covering the stall flapped in his face. As though part of it would morph into a carrier pigeon reporting to the wandering God blowing silences into the city.

“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice still heavily accented.

He set the mug of hot black liquid down on the pavement.

Queenie nodded, watching the slow look of horror on his face, a flicker of recognition as his dark brown eyes darted sideways quickly. She knew she was moving forward but couldn’t feel her legs. “Papa that is you? Peter? Peter Lowon? It’s me, Queenie.” She grabbed his arm despite herself. Thoughts in her head were bent arrows flying into other openings. Their angles of flight had caught him off guard. His left hand shook in her grasp, some small creature made of nerves and instinct. He snatched it away. “Nnno, that cannot be. I’m sorry, I don’t have a daughter.” He shook his head, turning away, unable to meet her gaze.

“It’s me, Felicia’s daughter! Your daughter, you remember. I know you remember! All these years and not one word. You remember Felicia, your wife?”

He stopped in his tracks. That look of horror appeared again. Queenie was the spitting image of her mother. “Where have you been?” she asked, her voice cracking and rising simultaneously, as if it didn’t know whether to do one or the other. She halved into two, overwhelmed, she didn’t feel the Singer sewing needle sinking into her tongue, stitching a blueprint of invisible threads. His shoulders stiffened. The wind puffed his orange jacket. His expression of shame contorted. Men on the site behind them leaned in and out of impossible angles, Lego people in the dangerous house. The hot liquid he set down had spilled, leaving a small trail of coffee for the motorcycle man to rev his engine through. The sounds of hammers and drills rang from the site.

Queenie looked up at the rusted bars of scaffolding she was suddenly balancing on with a drill going into her head, the churnings of her organs catching bits of air from holes in her body. Instruments of rubble winged their way into the vast, grey sky. The wandering God began to try the hard hats of men who’d disintegrated into sawdust, knocking his head repeatedly against the window. Her weatherman faced her. His body shook. And just above the din he muttered, “Forgive me.”

He’d scribbled an address down for her near Liverpool Street he’d said, the road right after the petrol station that had the man without legs in the sign grinning maniacally, the faulty pump and the car wash at the back.

“Please excuse my living circumstances. I never wanted you to find me this way,” he’d said.

It was strange hearing the formality in his voice before the setting of a building site. Her father, the great Peter Lowon she’d built up in her mind for years was an ordinary man after all, who seemed vulnerable and ashamed ready to collapse under the weight of it all, bits of him lost in the very rubble he’d created with his own hands.

“How have you been?” He asked, such a simple question. Standing there amongst the swirling human traffic, fingers numbing from the cold, Queenie wanted to tell him her answer was a rumbling earthquake, moss over her insides. At the back of her mind, she knew she needed to gather the contents of her bag from whatever corners they’d landed. She was shocked, angry and sad. The crumpled paper he’d handed her turned between them like a bolt. She looked at the neat, slanted handwriting for some inkling of how he’d been and who he’d become. Her mouth opened to speak but all at once the paper was burning another entry into her. And all at once, its contents of ink bomb and blood wrestled to call her body home.

The house he lived in was a shared address. When he answered the door that evening she couldn’t hear a thing from the other occupants. There was only the light from a kitchen down the hallway beckoning and inside the sound of the fridge groaning. He wore a stained white vest and rocked unsteadily in the doorway, reeking of alcohol. His eyes were bloodshot. “Come up,” he slurred. He saluted comically, stepped aside to let her in. Queenie brought a blast of cold air in, rubbing her hands uncertainly. “I can come back,” she said, slowly becoming aware of a tension she couldn’t yet identify.

“No, no, no. Not this time Felicia,” he said, already stepping on the bare staircase to lead the way. A single black and white poster of Laurel and Hardy hung on the wall, curling up at the edge. It was only after passing those same heavy, black work boots caked in cement at the foot of the stairs, it dawned on her he’d called her by her mother’s name. In the bedroom, the walls were unpainted, clothes were piled on a single rickety chair and the cheap looking double bed was unmade. An empty bottle of gin rolled into a corner. A dilapidated wardrobe sat miserably in the far left end.

It smelled of sweat and decay. He shut the door behind them. Queenie sat on the bed; her eyes darted around the room. He sat beside her and grabbed her arms as if the moment he had been waiting for had finally arrived. “I need to tell you something. I need you to listen to me Felicia. I killed a man, years ago in the army. I helped kill an innocent man. You don’t know the things I’ve seen… done.”

Queenie stood, unclenching her fist. “What? I don’t want to hear this! I’m not Felicia. Tell me why you abandoned me all these years. Why can’t you give me an answer?”

“Why can’t you comfort me?” he roared. “You’re my wife. Why couldn’t you ever comfort me?”

Queenie never saw that first blow coming. It knocked her clean off her feet. Fist connected with bone resulting in a crunching sound. Blood spurted from her nose. Her head rang as she landed on the bed. She was vaguely aware of falling into the red mist of his eyes. Years later, she would block these details out; the feeling of being above herself watching the whole scene unfold as though it were someone else, one hand squeezing her throat, pinning her down, the other moving roughly between her legs. Rapid words like bullets. “You’re my wife, shut up. Shut up.” The bed creaked in a heart-crushing rhythm; hot breath marked her skin, his other face floated in the mirror and then, ultimately, the terrible weight of him, body twitching, emptying into her own.