A. Barrett - Blackass

‘Don’t go, not yet,’ Furo said. He didn’t want to be left alone. ‘Are you in a hurry?’

‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘But I can wait a few minutes.’ She sat at the bed’s edge, tossed her keys to the floor, and placed a gentle hand on Furo’s chest. ‘Eat.’

He ate quickly. The last mouthful gone, he rose from the bed and walked to the fridge, took out a bottle of water, and stared out the window as he drank. He had overslept: his muscles felt waterlogged and the ache in his neck was more insistent than usual. He’d intended on washing his clothes today, but now he felt too lazy. Glancing down at his boxer shorts, he tugged at the waistband and checked it for grime. When Syreeta said, ‘You’ve been wearing those for days,’ he released the waistband with a snap, and raising his hand to rub his neck, he said to her: ‘It’s the only pair I have.’ He started towards the bed. ‘I need to get some new clothes.’ He sat beside her, then lifted her hand from her thigh, turned up her palm and covered it with his. His fingers were longer, blunter, fish-belly pale. A muscle flexed in her wrist.

‘Milk and chocolate,’ Syreeta said. Her eyes rose to his face. ‘Is something wrong?’

Letting go of her hand, Furo bent forwards and clasped his temples in his palms. ‘I miss my mother,’ he said.

‘Oh!’ Syreeta exclaimed softly, and reaching out with both arms, she drew his head against her bosom. Her heart raced beneath his cheek. ‘How did she die?’

Furo raised his head and stared aghast at her.

‘Your mother — what happened?’

He had forgotten. His mother was dead, his father had abandoned him, and his sister was someone he had never met. He lived with a woman who fed and fucked him. He was white.

‘Cancer,’ he said. He pulled away from Syreeta, flopped back on the bed, and the jolt of the mattress reminded him of his neck. ‘Can you give me a massage?’

‘I really should get going.’

‘Then go.’

He felt the force of her stare before she stood up from the bed. He heard the clink of a bottle on the vanity table, and then her footsteps returning. When she said, ‘Turn on your belly,’ he opened his eyes to see her unscrewing the bottle cap, the fragrance of eucalyptus oil escaping as she lifted it off. He adjusted himself on the bed and arranged a pillow under his head. As she bent forwards with the bottle poised, he asked, ‘Won’t you remove your clothes?’

‘Fuck it, Furo! I have to go out.’ Her voice had lost its patience.

He threw her a wide-eyed look from an awkward angle. ‘But that’s why you shouldn’t get oil on your clothes,’ he said with innocence. And then he grinned.

Syreeta gave a grudging laugh and glanced over her shoulder at the wall clock. ‘OK,’ she said as she unhooked her dress. ‘But I’m out of here in ten minutes.’

‘If you say so,’ Furo said, his voice muffled by the pillow.

Sometime during the night, Furo felt Syreeta stir beside him and then stand up to switch off her singing phone. When she slipped back into bed, he rolled closer and spooned her, nestled his face in her fragrant braids, and then drifted off in the sudden quiet.

Wednesday morning. Furo was curled on the settee watching Mr Bean on TV when a loud rapping on the front door killed his chuckles. Syreeta was in the kitchen peeling plantains for breakfast, and as Furo looked in her direction at the second round of knocking, he saw her peering through the window netting. Then she leapt back and whirled around and ran on tiptoe out of the kitchen with the knife grasped in her fist. Furo was on his feet by the time she reached the settee. He started to speak but she raised the knife to her lips and, grabbing his arm, she pulled him into the guest room. ‘Please stay here, lock the door,’ she begged in a whisper, her fingers digging into his forearm. Furo nodded in assent, after which she loosened her grip and began absent-mindedly stroking his reddened skin with a nervous look on her face. The knocking had grown louder, the in-between pauses shorter. Syreeta’s eyes refocused on Furo’s face as she said to him, ‘Don’t come out until I tell you,’ and striding out of the guest-room door, she eased it closed behind her. Furo reached the door in a bound. He turned the key and removed it from the lock, but still he felt exposed, so he rushed to the windows and drew the curtains, then returned to the door and dropped to a squat beside it. Still the pounding sounded; the blows were furious. But they stopped when a door slammed in the house, Syreeta’s bedroom door, and she called out, ‘I’m coming, don’t break my door!’ The sounds of the front door opening, Syreeta’s cry of surprise, and then a deep male voice, which followed Syreeta’s into the parlour. The settee huffed as the man, still talking, sank into it. Furo could hear him clearly through the thin wall that concealed their nearness. His voice was a rich baritone, brandy- and tobacco-roughened, and it seemed to emerge from a thick body. His words, as he asked Syreeta if she was punishing him, were accented with the mellifluous timbre of Yoruba.

‘I’m telling you, Bola, I’m not angry any more,’ Syreeta responded, to which the man fired back in tones of annoyance: ‘So why didn’t you show up yesterday? And why are you not picking up your phone? I was calling all night!’

‘I went to bed early. I wasn’t feeling well,’ Syreeta said. Furo had never heard her so submissive. From the man’s tone when he spoke again, he wasn’t surprised by this side of her. ‘Riri, Riri, Riri,’ he repeated with rising reproach. ‘How many times did I call you, you this troublesome pikin? You couldn’t even call back? I waited at our place for over an hour!’

‘I’m sorry.’ After a pause she added: ‘But now you know how it feels.’

‘Shut up there,’ Bola said lightly. ‘How is your body?’

‘I’m feeling better.’

‘That’s good. So you’re strong enough to give me some sugar? You know I’ve missed you. I had to cancel an important meeting today. Just so I could see your face.’

Syreeta’s voice now came from a different place, somewhere further away, nearer the bathroom. ‘Give me a moment to get ready. Are we going to Oriental?’

‘I’m here already,’ Bola said. She made no reply, and he continued, ‘We haven’t spent time in this flat since you moved in. I don’t even know what your bedroom looks like.’ Furo barely had time to interpret the creaking sounds from the settee when, as Syreeta called out with urgency, ‘No Bola, that’s the guest room!’ the door handle turned. Furo stared at the door with evangelical awe, the sweat dripping from his face like the last grains of sand in a fatal hourglass. ‘Is it locked?’ Bola asked, rattling the handle, each swing tugging the string that was snagged in Furo’s guts. And then, ‘Why is it locked?’ His voice, to Furo’s ears, was sibilant with suspicion.

‘No reason,’ Syreeta said. ‘I hardly ever use the guest room and so I locked it. I misplaced the key somewhere. I’ve been meaning to get a carpenter, but I keep forgetting.’

Again the handle turned under Furo’s terrified gaze. ‘Do you want me to force it open?’

‘Hell no, you’ll spoil the door! Leave it alone. I’ll take care of it later.’ Her words were followed by rapid footfalls, and after her door opened, she said, ‘This is my bedroom. Come and sit here and wait for me, I’m going to bathe. I’ll finish now-now.’

While he listened to Bola’s voice rising and falling in telephone conversation, Furo began to recover from his overdose of adrenaline. His outpaced heartbeats still left him short of breath, and his skin was cold with sweat, the wetness squelching in his armpits and between his thighs, yet he was calm enough to steer his thoughts to the trough of common sense. This much was clear: Bola was Syreeta’s sugar daddy, her lover and benefactor, her man. Furo had always suspected how Syreeta afforded her lifestyle, but now he knew it was to Bola as much as her that he owed his gratitude for the comfort he was provided. The roof over his head, the bed he slept in, the twenty thousand for his passport, the food he ate and the fruit juices he drank, he knew from whose pocket everything came. If Syreeta was the breast at which he sucked for favour, then Bola, though unknowing, was the father figure. As this notion flashed through his head — that he was fucking the woman of the man who sheltered him, a man whose voice this moment was bubbling from behind the wall that shielded his cuckolder — Furo felt a twinge of remorse. He shrugged it away. Going by what he’d gathered, the man was himself an adulterer. Syreeta was free, unmarried, her own woman; and from the sound of things, probably half Bola’s age. If anyone deserved pity, it wasn’t Bola.