Irenosen Okojie: Butterfly Fish

The bottle slipped, nicked my finger. My blood became a small red tide that ebbed down settling on the jagged rim in a circular, bloody kiss. I dropped the broken bottle inside the green plastic bag and shoved it in my wheelie bin. I locked the door, checked the post hatch. It was empty. The cut throbbed and the blood drop began to grow into a red bulb. I looked at my finger, noticed the tiny piece of green glass grinning inside the wound.

I had a meeting planned with my mother’s old friend and solicitor Mervyn for later in the day. Mervyn and his family collected strays. He was the centre, a warm, pulsing nucleus people surrounded. You never knew who you’d see at their house; maybe a Jamaican cabbie with gambling debts needing an unlikely haven to lie low, or broken prostitutes with heroin babies needing rescuing, or a friend whose hands were disappearing, who needed help before his whole body vanished, reduced to a heap of clothes on a side road.

I’d known him for as long as I could remember and it was hard to separate him from the things I associated with him. The smoothness of his bald head, like a crystal ball hiding the night, crumpled expensive suits, expressions of concern, large Cuban cigars dangling jauntily from the corner of his mouth. As a kid, I imagined he slept with one of those cigars firmly lodged between his lips, lit and burning with particles of the cases he’d taken home. I saw him tossing and turning without dropping that cigar, and winding curls of smoke twisting in the dark around him like flying white snakes.

I used to play hide and seek with his sons as a kid. I hid so well behind the line of cushions on the soft, plum sofa I slipped into a world beneath where coins and old conversations hummed their approval. Mervyn was a great dad. I watched the way he threw his sons in the air as if they were the only suns allowed to set and rise back up with each catch and fling. In Mervyn’s home, the warmth and love was inescapable. Whenever I saw this, the well inside me deepened, lengthened. Only there was no water at the bottom, just stones thrown swallowed by silence. All this made me like Mervyn, even love him a little. I pictured my mother and me arriving in his life as two stray winds creating small havocs for Mervyn and his boy’s but that story she’d never told me.

I caught the train from Elephant & Castle to Mervyn’s in Harlesden. In a fairly empty carriage, heads unconsciously bobbed to its rhythm. I coughed and the coloured train lines flattened. The train paused for breath frequently at main station stops, and at pits in-between, the ones left off the map. It squeaked and sputtered, its sounds creating a low, dark horizon on tracks were mice flew. It shuddered along.

At Harlesden, I moved with the throng of people spilling out of the station like a language. I spotted a young woman stealing a bouquet of blue azaleas from a flower stall right behind the owner’s back. Her arms were outstretched, mischievous grin in tow. Her body was arched and she was dressed in a yellowy brown African wrapper. Braided in multiple single plaits, her hair looked neat. She stood tall and the lines of her body seemed familiar. Then, she looked right at me, and as if it was a signal of sorts, turned to run. Instinctively I followed. I chased her and the distance between us shook like a rickety, wooden bridge. She flew, dipped, turned and twisted. Her movements were rugged musical notes. She had moonshine on her back. I removed my rucksack from my shoulder, rummaged for Marpessa, soon solid in my hands. I pressed the power switch, watched it light red. I snapped away. Marpessa’s lens whirred the way cameras did when they spoke. Above us, pigeons flying drew another skyline with their beaks. They cooed at each other, grey wings spreading.

I followed the young woman’s moving back. Follow, follow, follow, I muttered to myself, small beads of sweat springing up in my armpits like translucent crops. Marpessa’s frayed strap bit into my neck. The summer streets were fully occupied by clusters of people, their perspiration dripping along the pavements. I shoved Marpessa back into the rucksack. Ahead, my pied piper of sorts waited outside the inviting, yellow sign of Honey’s Caribbean takeaway.

She’d paused, as though giving me an opportunity to close the gap between us. She sat on the steps outside, hand on her jaw, flowers beside her, wrapper riding up smooth, brown legs. Something about her on that stairway made the hairs on my arms stand to attention. I spotted moss growing on the stairs, green dreams of concrete she’d somehow commanded. I fished Marpessa out once more, snapped away.

“Hey!” I said, “I’d like to photograph you some more.”

She sprang up, shoved Marpessa away, grabbed her flowers and took off again. Past the laundrette with washing machines mid- cycle, the funeral home set in large green grounds, past rows of quaint shops sporting colourful window displays that shared one neon heartbeat they rotated during breaks.

At the compact, red-stoned building on a raised kerb with a roof that looked like a low brow, she dropped her flowers and disappeared around the corner. Slanted, elegant typography on the window read Williams & Co. Solicitors. Near my feet something rustled. I stared. The azaleas she’d dropped were no longer flowers but crushed blue butterflies near death. Some had wings shorn, some were partially squashed. A few attempting to unstick themselves, fluttered pathetically. I tasted their desperation for one last broken flight.

Inside the building, the secretary Pauline sat behind a black-flecked grey desk that might have been made of marble and fog. She wore a crisp white blouse and a brown woollen skirt. Red-framed glasses finished the look.

“Well, well, well,” she said. “Wonders will never cease.” A finger and its long nail curled away from the keyboard. “You allergic to this area or something?” she asked. I always enjoyed her warm, Bajan accent, even when it was biting.

I dropped the rucksack and helped myself to a cup of water. “Nice to see you too. He in?”

“Yeah, he’s in,” she said leaning back into her chair.

The hallway curved snakelike and was flanked by rooms on either side; there were cracks of light underneath the doors that were closed. On the left, I passed a grey-haired man standing behind a desk piled high with files, talking insistently into a mobile phone. Spotting me he smiled distantly and shut the door firmly. To my right a slender black woman in a charcoal grey trouser suit paced back and forth. I caught the wink of a slim gold watch from her wrist. At the end of the hall stood Mervyn’s office. I knocked.

“Come in,” his voice boomed.

I could smell and feel his presence even before seeing him. Paco Rabanne aftershave mingled with Cuban cigars. He sat in the skylight window at an enormous sprawling oak desk that managed not to swallow the whole room. There was a chocolate leather chair at the back next to a compact library of Law and fishing books. On the walls were hung certificates, photos of him and his sons, his staff and a picture of him holding a kingfisher on a hook.

“The prodigal daughter returns,” he said enveloping me in a hug. He had a habit of doing that, drawing me into things whether I had a say in it or not. It felt good. At 6 feet 2 inches he towered above me, a black skinned man with broad facial features and a Jamaican lilt, like molasses melting in his voice. When he became angry the molasses turned molten.

“Sorry,” I said, dropping my rucksack at the foot of the chair opposite his desk. “I’ve been busy.”

“Yes but this meeting was for your benefit.” He walked back round, folded his considerable frame into the seat. At my mother’s funeral, he had cried for her. I’d never seen a grown man cry other than on TV. His body had trembled in grief while my own wails stayed caught in my throat. I held his cries gently, as if they were the delicate rims of fragile cups.