After Nothing Read online

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Got shot.’

  I looked up into the deep brown of Kane’s gaze.

  ‘You miss him?’

  ‘Yeah I miss him.’

  I went to the doctor’s. I couldn’t keep eating the emergency contraceptive. It made me feel sick half the time, and was doing really strange things to my cycle. At one stage I thought I might have been pregnant. The doctor said the pill would take seven days before I could count on it working. Kane and I were meeting up every day by then, and he wasn’t too happy when I started putting him off, so I ended up telling him why. No one had ever looked at me the way he did. Like I was responsible for the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

  ‘It’s fine, Kane. I’ve been taking the morning-after pill.’

  ‘Bitch, you said you were on the pill.’

  ‘What does it matter? I didn’t get pregnant.’

  He clenched his fists, and then actually backed away from me. I watched him take each step, and then I watched him walk away.

  I didn’t see him for a week.

  It was weird not knowing if he was in my life or not. I couldn’t really feel it, because that was how I still was, and it didn’t seem real. There were some things though that had a coldness to them. Walking past his locker and him not being there. Waiting on the front steps in the morning, and the afternoon, and not seeing him among the mass of students pouring through the school doors. Lunchtimes sitting alone at a crowded table in the cafeteria instead of meeting him by the hidden door of the old gym.

  On the Friday of that week, school broke up for the summer. I got up early the next day. There was a tattooist in the city that didn’t care how old you were. Everyone at school knew about her, knew you just had to forge a signature on the consent form and she’d ink you outside normal hours.

  That morning there was no one but her and me in the tattoo studio. I picked the lettering I wanted. She pulled on gloves.

  She wasn’t big on talking. She was big on piercings. She must have had twenty in her face alone. There were eight through the white freckled skin on her shoulder. I counted them a few times while she did my tattoo.

  The needle stung and burned at the same time. For what I was wanting though, it didn’t hurt nearly enough.

  I went over to Kane’s, but he wasn’t home. The basement was locked but the key was where he hid it. I didn’t go in. Just sat on the cold concrete in the shadow of the house and watched the sunlight tiptoe across wet grass toward me. After an hour he appeared, dressed in sweatpants, a tank and running shoes. The top half of him was drenched in sweat. He was breathing hard, and his hands went to his hips as he leaned forward to catch his breath.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You haven’t been at school,’ I said, standing up.

  ‘My uncle’s out. I needed to get my fitness sorted.’

  I didn’t get it, so I didn’t say anything. Kane pulled his sweat-soaked tank off and threw it toward the shut sliding door of his room.

  Down the side of his torso, marring a sketch-like tattoo inked into his skin, were three large dark bruises. I asked him how he got them.

  ‘How you think?’ said Kane, frowning at me.

  ‘Your uncle did that?’

  ‘Yeah. Nothing to what I did to him though.’

  ‘You beat him up?’

  ‘What?’ I must have been looking at him just as blankly as he was looking at me, because then he said, ‘You know I’m a fighter, right? K-1?’

  ‘What’s K-1?’

  ‘This is bullshit,’ said Kane. ‘You don’t know that? Why do you think I couldn’t ever hang late with you?’

  ‘I thought you had other things you had to do.’

  ‘Yeah, like training. Like spending my fucking life at the gym.’

  ‘That’s not all you do,’ I said quietly.

  ‘So now you know my business?’

  ‘I’m not questioning you about it. You can do what you want.’

  ‘Yeah, well I want the rent paid so I’ve got somewhere to live. That way you can come over all the time till you get knocked up.’

  ‘I told you, I’m not pregnant, and I don’t want to get pregnant.’

  ‘Bitch, you said you were on the pill. You looked me in the eye and you said it.’

  I answered that by saying, ‘I am on it now. I can show it to you. I’ll take it in front of you if that’s what you want.’

  Kane shook his head, muttered, ‘I don’t get you,’ and turned away.

  He walked partway down the slope and stood looking down at the oversized concrete drains. I could see the outline of every single muscle in his back and arms, and when he turned back toward me the lines of the tightly packed muscles of his chest and abdomen stood out in relief.

  I knew his body was hard; I was touching it all the time. But it’s not like I’d ever been with anyone else, so how would I know the difference between a normal lean and muscular body, like the guy who sat next to me in English class, and a fighter’s body? It wasn’t like he’d told me he was a fighter. When I thought about it, though, maybe there had been some clues. Next to a whole lot of weights in the corner of his room was a box with a heap of padded gear in it, and once when we’d come back to his place there’d been some long, elastic blue bandages lying on his bed. Also upstairs, where I only ever went to use the bathroom, there was a line of boxing gloves hanging from nails in the living room. I guess I could’ve asked Kane about all of that. I could have actually asked him more about himself. But getting to know him wasn’t exactly why I was with him.

  Kane came back toward me, and the sweat on his skin must have glistened in the light or something, because for some reason I looked at his chest. It was like my stomach changed places with my heart and then they swapped back again, and all of a sudden I felt nervous.

  ‘I got a tattoo,’ I blurted at him.

  ‘Yeah? What of?’

  ‘My sister’s name.’

  Kane’s expression softened, and I lifted the hem of the skirt I was wearing, revealing the bandage high on my inner thigh.

  ‘That’s where you got your sister’s name tattooed?’

  ‘Yes. She died.’

  ‘I know that, Nat,’ said Kane, still staring in the vicinity of my thigh.

  ‘You know?’

  Kane lifted his gaze to mine.

  ‘When we hooked up I asked round ’bout you. She had cancer, right?'

  I nodded.

  ‘That sucks.’

  ‘They think she got it because she was HIV-positive.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She had HIV,’ I said.

  His eyes narrowed.

  ‘Who gave her that?’

  ‘Just some guy. She met him at my dad’s work picnic. They only went on one date.’

  Kane was so quick. I couldn’t believe how quick he was at making the connection. But he did. He’d already been trying to figure me out, and he’d always been that close to having my number. Now he really did have it.

  ‘Are you fucking kidding me, Natalie?’ he said, exploding. ‘That’s what you wanted? Fuck you harder? Always fuck you harder. You thought that I could fucking infect you or some fucked-up shit?’

  ‘I just thought –’ I stopped short.

  ‘What? You thought what?’

  ‘You’ve been with lots of girls. I mean, I know you wouldn’t do it on purpose.’

  ‘You think I’ve got HIV?’

  ‘No,’ I said in a voice so small it didn’t even sound like me.

  ‘You ever been straight with me?’

  ‘It’s not like I’ve got tested or anything.’

  ‘Jesus, Natalie.’

  He was backing away from me again. I followed him; grabbed his arm in a bid to stop him moving any further from me.

  ‘Bitch, you need to leave.’

  To this day I wish I’d never said what I said next.

  ‘Can you hit me?’

  �
�What?’

  ‘Hit me.’

  ‘No,’ said Kane, pulling his arm free from my hold.

  ‘Please, Kane. I need it,’ I said, trying once more to be close to him.

  He wouldn’t let me. He held me away from him, my desperation no match for his strength.

  ‘Please, Kane.’

  ‘You fucked-up bitch. I’m done here.’

  He left. He left his own house to get away from me.

  I started crying on the bus. Tears blurred my vision as I looked upward and tried to blink them away. They fell. My throat tightened; my hands shook. I made it home before the pain rendered me helpless on my bedroom floor.

  I thought my world was dark. A place where Lisa and Dad and Mom and me were all compartmentalized into our rooms, walled in by each other’s death and sickness and just plain given-up-on-life meanness. It wasn’t the truth. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t sick. My body was well.

  ‘I’m done here,’ is what he’d said to me. And then he’d left.

  It was my sixteenth birthday. No one else spoke to me all day.

  4

  My summer holidays were always long, but this one was definitely the longest. Every day I went over to Kane’s and sat on the concrete outside his room. It was always locked and he was never there. A couple of times I cried. Once I cried uncontrollably for what felt like hours. By the end my head was pounding, and on the bus home people kept giving me strange looks, so I knew my eyes must have been all red and crazy swollen.

  I bought my first cell phone. I was so angry at myself for not taking one of Kane’s when he’d tried to give it to me. Worse was the fact I’d never gotten his number. When he’d offered to write it down for me I’d asked him why I’d need it. He’d gone all silent, but then made me give him my home line. He’d never called me though. Not before the summer break and not now.

  Silence was the abnormal normal in my house. The phone rarely rang, and if it did it was usually someone conducting a survey or trying to sell something.

  I can list the sounds of that summer. Doors and cupboards quietly opening and closing. One of the toilets flushing. Taps running. The hum of Dad’s radio. The neighbors’ cars coming and going on either side of us. The turning over of Mom’s car engine and her acceleration down the driveway.

  The sound of absolute quiet.

  Slurred words from Dad.

  My own voice.

  My mother’s voice, intermittent and mean.

  What comes back to me most of all is the sound of the television; almost continuous in the background in the years that followed Lisa’s death.

  My mom spent most days watching TV. She didn’t work. She’d been an at-home mom, then she’d been Lisa’s nurse, and then when Dad had his stroke the insurance payout was enough to clear the mortgage on the house, and I guess we were living off whatever was left over. None of us lived expensive lives. My bus fares were my only constant expense, and I paid for them out of the same allowance I’d had automatically paid into my bank account since before Dad’s first stroke. Whatever else I spent came out of a dwindling amount of money my English grandmother had left me when she died.

  The TV was an oversized flat-screen, too big for our living room, which Dad had got on sale. While Lisa was dying I had watched way more TV than any kid should: cartoons, sitcoms, movies, music videos, more cartoons. After Lisa died Mom must have clicked on to the same idea: she seemed to take up permanent residence in front of the television. She watched the morning shows with lots of cheesy interviews and infomercials in the morning, then the cooking shows around midday. In the afternoon there were soaps and talk shows, and at night she watched the news, followed by programs in which houses were renovated and redecorated or antiques were valued by an American talking with a fake English accent.

  You might have thought she would have sometimes mentioned a story she’d seen on the news to me. Or that the cooking shows might have inspired her to create something other than the same meals we had week in and week out. Maybe even that the renovation and interior design shows might have induced her to make some changes in the house. But that didn’t happen.

  Everything stayed how it had been when Lisa died, except that the carpet at the top of the stairs got a little more worn, and a bit more paint chipped off around the handle of the cupboard where the glasses were kept.

  And we changed. I grew taller. My hair was longer. I developed breasts, and I didn’t talk as much. Dad became stooped and grey. The paralysis had him favor his right side, and gone from his face were the constant stream of expressions that used to announce his thoughts before he spoke them.

  Mom’s face seemed the same as always, but liver spots appeared on the backs of her hands, and the knuckles of her fingers widened and twisted a little. She still wore her short hair in the same style, but now she dyed it with black supermarket dye to hide the grey. I always knew when she’d done it, because the color would cling to the skin around her hairline for days afterward. Sometimes the grey would start coming through again before that dye had worn off from her skin.

  After Kane disappeared from my life I felt more and more claustrophobic in that house. One night, unable to sleep, I crept quietly into Lisa’s bedroom. I knelt down by her bedside table, opened the top drawer and noiselessly removed her Discman. It was purple. Seeing it again after all these years sent a memory swarming toward me. Wanting it. Wanting it to be mine, and being told by Dad I was too young to have one.

  The batteries were dead, so I went downstairs in the dark and took the ones out of the television remote control. The same Alicia Keys CD Lisa had last listened to was still in the Discman; I lay in my bed and played it from start to end. Some of the words I knew, and I whispered them into the night.

  I fell asleep with Lisa’s earphones on and my left hand pressed between my thighs, my palm covering her tattooed name.

  An abrupt voice startled me. I looked up and then stood up.

  ‘He ain’t here,’ said the heavily muscled, heavily tattooed man. ‘And he ain’t gonna be here anytime soon. Got it?’

  ‘Are you Wayne? Kane’s uncle?’

  I got a cold stare in return.

  ‘I’m Natalie. I’m just wondering where Kane is. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘He’ll be coming back then?’

  ‘He lives here don’t he? But that ain’t an invitation for people to come here. Kane knows it.’

  I could feel the heat rising from my chest, up my neck, to my face, the blood burning in my cheeks. I apologized, which seemed a pretty stupid thing to do; apologizing for Kane bringing me to his own place. But Wayne just looked that angry about it all. I hadn’t really thought too much about Wayne, but if I had I don’t think I would have pictured him so young, or so intimidating.

  My apology didn’t exactly work wonders. If anything, it made Wayne look a whole lot more hostile.

  ‘Could I have Kane’s phone number?’ I asked.

  Wayne raised an eyebrow.

  ‘If he ain’t given you his number there’s a reason for that. Get out of here, and stop coming back.’

  5

  I changed my posture when I went into the city library; straightened my shoulders and added a subtle sway to my walk.

  I knew I looked the most feminine I’d ever looked. I was dressed in everything Lisa. A pair of Mary Jane flats, a blue skirt with pleats and a yellow buttoned-up cardigan. There was even a yellow headband in my hair – hair that I’d spent an hour straightening using Lisa’s hair straighteners.

  I went to the classics shelves in the literature section, because that was Lisa’s thing. I took Frankenstein off the shelf, only to remember Lisa’s tastes and swap it for Little Women.

  I was concentrating on sitting as straight as I could at one of the graffitied plastic library tables when a chair was pulled out beside me. Turning, I came face to face with a girl. A girl I knew; had in fact known a long time.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

&n
bsp; Melissa Patterson. We’d been at the same kindergarten, the same elementary school, and now the same high school. She was outspoken and popular, and considered rich – for our school at least. Her mom was editor of the city newspaper, and her dad was a journalist on a news program that aired once a week. I didn’t watch it. Melissa was also fiercely intelligent. Of all the classes we’d shared over the years, she’d always been at the top.

  ‘Hello Melissa,’ I said, because that’s what Lisa would have done. Greeted someone, even if she didn’t want to speak to them.

  ‘Where has “Natural Natalie” gone? I nearly didn’t recognize you with your hair straightened.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Are those heart earrings? And what are you doing in the library?’ She looked at the cover of the book I was holding. ‘Little Women? Really? You won’t even read books for English class.’

  I forced a smile. ‘I’m trying new things.’

  ‘Yes, like talking and smiling,’ replied Melissa. ‘Actually I don’t think we’ve talked since Taya Thompson’s birthday party. You remember that?’

  ‘You pushed me over during musical chairs.’

  ‘That is how the game is played,’ said Melissa.

  ‘You won by cheating.’

  ‘Yes, but I won.’

  A smile lit up her eyes. She was attractive in her own way. Her makeup was always immaculately done, and she always dressed in the latest style. But her face was a little too full and long to be considered pretty.

  ‘I wanted that Princess Jasmine doll, Natalie,’ continued Melissa. ‘But, if I’d known you were going to hold a grudge for so long I would have … no, actually I wouldn’t have. I really wanted that doll.’

  ‘It wasn’t the doll. You made our whole class think I wasn’t Black.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘We were doing family trees in Miss Shelby’s class – ’

  ‘I remember,’ interrupted Melissa. ‘What I said was that your dad was English. It was Jordeisha who said that meant you weren’t Black.’ Melissa frowned. ‘And told everyone else in the class. I put it right. I told everyone your Dad was Black. I spent months lecturing people about it.’