After Nothing Read online

  Kane’s comforter was blue, and it was clean. So were his sheets. His room smelt good, and it was warm and light because the afternoon sun was falling into it through the rectangle of the glass sliding door. He had tattoos, and his body was hard. I wasn’t expecting that: the weight of him against me, and how my body had to give, to mold around his.

  When he said he’d get a condom, I stopped him getting up and told him I was on the pill.

  Him being in me, it felt like nothing and something at the same time. Physically, it was something – but in terms of this being the whole vine-covered idea, I couldn’t feel any fear or excitement.

  It hurt. To be honest, when he stripped off his jeans I wondered how he was even going to fit in me. I just left that up to him though, and it was soon clear that he knew exactly what he was doing. He even said how good I felt as he was pushing himself inside me.

  The edge of his jaw was pressed against the side of my face and his breath was warm on my neck. Even though he was hurting me it wasn’t like I was fighting the urge to push him off me. There was something about his body pressed to mine; something about the warmth of his bare skin against mine, and being close to that much strength.

  And then there was the kiss afterward when he’d stopped moving but was still inside me. I hadn’t wanted to kiss him before we’d had sex. I’d actually never kissed any guy before, and I thought maybe he might pick up on that. Anyway, leading up to actually doing it, he got the message pretty quickly that I didn’t want him to kiss my mouth. But somehow I misplaced that thought afterward. I can’t explain how the kiss was, and I obviously can’t tell you what it looked like. I guess it just felt like me. I could accept it, and respond to it because I knew it or something. I guess that’s it. I knew Kane’s kiss the first time he properly kissed me.

  ‘You’re weird, girl.’

  We were still lying in bed. I was looking up at the white-panelled ceiling, and turned to face him. He was looking directly at me.

  ‘Are you normal?’

  ‘Compared to you? Yeah.’

  I think I was going to say something sarcastic back. I never got there though; only got as far as saying his name.

  ‘Kane –’

  He frowned, and I stopped short and was silent.

  ‘I never told you my name,’ he said.

  ‘I heard someone call you that last year.’

  ‘Last year? What are you playing at?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Everyone knows who you are. I told you, I just wanted to have sex with you. But I only want to do it now. That’s what this is, nothing else.’

  Kane was looking doubtful – even more so when I added, ‘I want to do it again.’

  I lay, looking at him, and his eyes stared into mine before traveling to my bare breasts.

  He pulled away the sheet covering us both and then moved on top of me.

  I told him ‘harder,’ and he responded. Then I said it again and he stopped moving.

  ‘’What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘You can’t. Nothing hurts me.’

  I left his place and went to a drugstore in his neighborhood. I swallowed the emergency contraceptive pill right outside on the sidewalk. It took me two buses to get home.

  Lisa’s hair didn’t all fall out. It just thinned out to the point where you could count the individual black strands. Her entire ball-shaped skull was visible. She didn’t care what she looked like by then, but I still had to look at her. Every day for a year I had to see how the whites of her eyes became a more and more sickly yellow. Her skin also took on a yellow tinge. Worse, toward the very end of her life her skin became mottled with grey. My sister’s skin had been light in color and even toned, but at the end it was this repulsive ugliness, which clung to her skeletal frame. She reminded me of a dead, bald baby bird I once saw in the gutter down the road from church. The flesh had wasted away, but the skin was whole and contoured around the delicate bones. That was my sister. A near bald baby bird, who fell from the nest and wasted into death.

  I walked past Kane for two days without looking at him. On the third day he stepped out of his group of friends and into my path. I tried to walk around him but he put his arm out, and for a moment his hand was on my waist.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

  ‘What do I want?’

  I looked at him and said nothing.

  ‘So that’s how it is?’ said Kane.

  ‘How what is?’

  ‘A’ight. If that’s how you want to be, I ain’t got no problem.'

  He stepped away from me and went back to his group of friends. Walking away I glanced behind me, but he wasn’t looking.

  The next morning he headed me off before I even reached the front steps of the main school building. He was direct.

  ‘You and me are gonna talk,’ he said, and he took my hand, holding it firmly as he guided me away from the main building and toward the sports grounds.

  I went with him. To be honest, I wanted to know what he was going to say, or do.

  He bypassed the track, where a dozen student athletes were doing sprints. I thought he was going to duck under the stands, but he walked around them and then around the side of the old two-court gymnasium, which was seventy years old, as opposed to the new gymnasium, which was three times the size and brand new.

  The ground there was littered with empty potato chip packets and soda cans. The grass became damp dirt by the wall, and that was where we stood. He let go of my hand.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, what’s going on with us?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You just wanted to lose it?’

  ‘Lose what?’

  ‘Jesus. Your goddamn virginity, that’s what.’

  ‘I wasn’t a virgin.’

  ‘Yeah, Natalie, you were. I ain’t stupid, you know. You barely moved. And other girls don’t feel like that. Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘You didn’t say anything.’

  ‘I’m saying it now. What the fuck was that?’

  I didn’t answer, just stared at him. Kane responded by moving closer.

  ‘You ever kissed a guy before me?’

  My face filled with heat. It was a strange feeling. Foreign.

  ‘Why do you even want to talk about it?’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lying.’

  ‘You asked, I’m telling you.’

  ‘Are you on the pill?’ Kane punctuated every word.

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked at me hard.

  ‘Fine, I hadn’t done it before. And I wanted to. I started taking the pill two months ago.’

  ‘You got it on you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your pill packet.’

  ‘No, it’s at home. I take it in the morning. I’m not stupid either you know.’

  ‘You already lied to me.’

  ‘I hate kids,’ I told him, although I didn’t actually know any, and didn’t feel anything about them other than knowing I wasn’t going to have any. ‘There’s no way,’ I added for good measure.

  He seemed to relax a little.

  What happened next came from Kane, not me.

  He took my hand again and walked further along the old gymnasium wall to a door set flat into the side of the building. I probably could have walked passed it ten times and never seen it, but Kane knew exactly where it was. He pulled something out of his pocket that flashed silver in his hand. The door was open in a matter of seconds, and he waited for me to walk inside.

  The only light came from the dust- and dirt-covered skylights overhead. Everything was dim to the point where I couldn’t see the whole of things, just parts of them.

  It was dusty. I sneezed three times in a row. Here and there bits of broken or retired gym equipment were visible. Chairs and
desks could be made out, and a large roll of old carpet leaned against the far wall.

  Kane moved me back toward an old wooden teacher’s desk. When the back of my legs bumped into it his hands went to my hips, and he lifted me onto it. I moved further back, thinking he’d come lie on top of me, but his hands went to my thighs and he pulled me back to the edge of the desk, causing my skirt to ride up. Kane studied my thighs a moment and then pulled me closer still.

  I tried to pull away from his kiss again, but Kane wasn’t having it.

  ‘That ain’t how this is gonna go.’

  ‘I don’t want us to kiss.’

  ‘Girl, you want to do this or not?’

  I wanted to.

  It wasn’t like last time when he kissed me and it was so familiar and right. This was kind of scary and overwhelming, and practical. Like me learning how to kiss him back.

  ‘You okay?’ he said at one point.

  I was breathing hard. Rather than speak, I nodded.

  We didn’t get fully undressed. Kane touched me for a long time between my legs. In the end though he figured out that I wasn’t particularly into him rubbing me and putting a finger in me, so he stopped and undid his belt and then his jeans.

  It still didn’t feel good. And he went way slower entering me. It didn’t help: if anything it dragged out how uncomfortable the whole thing was.

  Except Kane’s hands and mouth countered that feeling a little.

  His hold on me was firm and kind of reassuring, and just like the last time, it was clear he knew what he was doing. He supported my weight every time he shifted us, his hands going from my waist to my thighs, and then to my butt. And the kissing was really good – not just on my mouth but also on my jaw and my neck and even behind my ear.

  When his teeth pulled on my ear lobe a combination of need and electricity traveled straight down through my body to the very core of me. Without quite realizing, I grabbed at his shoulders. Till then I’d kept both my hands pressed to the wood of the desk, but that one action of mine had Kane pull me hard against him. For a moment I wasn’t even touching the desk; I was clinging to him, my legs and arms tight around him. His mouth crushed against mine, and I felt the tremor that ran through him.

  He said my name. Not my whole name. He said ‘Nat.’ Then he said ‘Fuck.’ Then he pressed his mouth to mine again.

  Even now I can distinctly remember the moment when I said, ‘I’m going to class.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kane didn’t move. He wasn’t in me, but he was still standing between my legs, which meant I couldn’t get down off the desk.

  His looked at me a long time.

  ‘Are you going to move?’ I asked.

  ‘Why’d you choose me?’

  ‘I don’t know. You chose me too.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘You didn’t have to follow me.’

  ‘You for real?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Girl, I don’t know a guy alive who would turn down the invitation you gave me.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘You really want to go to class?’ asked Kane.

  I looked up at the dirty skylights, then around at the collection of discarded forgotten things surrounding us.

  ‘I don’t actually care,’ I said.

  Kane seemed to study my face. Then he shifted his gaze to the right side of my neck. He kissed it gently. After not very long I thought maybe we were going to have sex again. The sensation of his mouth on that part of my body was definitely making me up for it. But then he stopped kissing me, although I could still feel his breath on my neck, and the firmness of his hand on my hairline, and the pressure of his thumb against my jaw.

  Suddenly he put his teeth in my skin, and sucked on my neck. I flinched. My hand went up to his, and he responded by sucking harder.

  When he was done he kissed where he’d marked me, his mouth gentle once more.

  ‘Feel that? Girl who feels nothing?’ he said in my ear.

  Lisa’s room was untouched – or maybe I mean ‘unchanged’. My mom was a robot when she went in there to clean. Anything that she moved to dust around or under was put back in its exact place. Not a single thing had left that room since Lisa had died, except for the clothes she was buried in.

  The stupid thing was, it wasn’t just Lisa’s things from around when she died, but a lifetime of her possessions: clothes and ornaments, shoes, schoolwork, photos and books. There was a plaster Minnie Mouse figurine that she had painted as a child still sitting on her dresser. There were clothes and shoes in her wardrobe that were too small for her before she even got sick. There was even a box of toys in her wardrobe: a naked newborn doll, a faded box filled with paper dolls, a pile of My Little Ponies, a bunch of white Polly Pocket dolls, a child-size music keyboard and a broken Barbie microphone.

  I just felt that the least Lisa could have done was throw out a whole heap of junk before she died. I don’t mean that unfairly. I didn’t want her to have a spring clean on her deathbed. But there must have been a moment, or several moments, when she thought ‘I could make this just a bit easier on everyone else.’ All those years dying, and she didn’t let go of any of the stuff that she couldn’t take with her.

  ‘You’re fucked up,’ said Kane to me.

  We were down in his basement room, both getting dressed. Me, into what I’d worn to school. Him, into sweatpants, a tank and a hooded sweatshirt.

  I asked him if it mattered.

  ‘Depends what level you on. My mom was fucked up and she OD-ed. You that fucked up?’

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. Instead, I asked about his dad.

  ‘Never had one.’

  ‘What about your uncle? Where is he?’

  ‘He inside. Be out soon though.’

  ‘He’s in jail?’

  ‘Yeah, what I said.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He didn’t do nothing.’

  ‘Must have done something.’

  ‘He blocked a cop from hitting him, and the motherfuckers did him for assault.'

  ‘Did your uncle tell you that?’

  Kane looked at me coldly.

  ‘I was there when it happened.’

  3

  My dad was not the brainless fool my mom said he was. It was just that by the end of it all, he was a defeated man. Every day must have been a battle for him. He was the only source of income in our family, and I have no doubt that as wives go, my mom was an unsupportive bitch. Then there was the strain of Lisa’s slow crawl toward death.

  That was what he was up against. My mom’s hatred, and my sister’s virus, and my sister’s cancer, and my sister’s death. And he managed over a hundred people at work, dealing with all their grievances and tragedies and lies about why they weren’t at work last Friday. Somewhere in all of that were the ingredients that made up the first stroke. And that first stroke paved the way for the second. And that was that. Life defeated him. But that didn’t mean he was a brainless fool. He knew plenty. Even though he was partly paralyzed and couldn’t move or speak that well, he could still think. And he could still feel all the emotions he’d had access to before he became unwell. Like his strokes dealt him some terrible blows, but I think his heart was more intact than Mom’s or mine.

  He had these habits. Mom barely went near him, so she never interfered with them, and I just figured he’d earned the right to do what he wanted, so I just let him be.

  He had two bathrobes that he wore in rotation. They couldn’t go in the wash at the same time or he wouldn’t get out of bed. At least one of them had to be there. If both were there he would always choose his blue and black check bathrobe over his red and black check one. He could bath himself, and he did this every morning after breakfast. He could shave himself – just not very well. He always missed patches, and sometimes cut himself, but he wouldn’t let me do it, and tutted when I suggested he grow a bear
d. He was great at making that tutting sound. Sometimes he wouldn’t be doing anything in his room but sitting in his chair and tutting. He could make that sound for hours and not stop until you distracted him.

  Dad could get himself breakfast. Granola and milk every day. He always had to drink his tea out of the same stained cup. It had love hearts of different shades of pink all over it.

  He didn’t eat lunch. Mom always put his dinner on the table in the early evening, but she never went into his room to tell him it was ready. If I wasn’t home he ate most of his dinners cold. In winter he had to have dinner extra early because for some reason, known only to him, he wouldn’t eat after it got dark. Those early winter dinners were the only allowance Mom ever made for him.

  I’d often stand outside the door of his room before I went to bed. Sometimes I’d hear him tutting, sometimes snoring. Sometimes I could hear the soft hum of voices on the radio through the closed door.

  ‘Why’d you say “rubbish” earlier?’ asked Kane one day when we were lying in his bed.

  ‘Rubbish?’

  ‘Yeah. You said how there was “rubbish” all over the street.’

  ‘I meant trash.’

  ‘I know what you meant. Why’d you call it rubbish?’

  ‘My dad’s English. Sometimes I accidently call things what he called them.’

  ‘That’s why you sometimes speak different.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah, sometimes.’

  I didn’t reply. Kane moved over on top of me.

  ‘My dad’s Black,’ I said.

  He nodded, staring down at me.

  ‘You got gold in your eyes.’

  ‘Just a lighter brown near the center,’ I replied.

  ‘Looks like gold to me.’

  I traced a finger over the black letters inked on the forearm he was resting his weight on.

  ‘What does this mean?’

  ‘One of my boys.’

  ‘Shys,’ I murmured. ‘He died?’