Queenie Read online

  Queenie

  Let me know if you need me to bring anything home

  I sat in the corridor staring at my phone’s smashed screen, waiting for Tom to reply. A few minutes passed, and eventually, no reply later, I walked back toward the waiting room. I could hear Maggie talking as I made my way toward her.

  “One day, years ago now, my ex-husband told me he was popping out for petrol, and do you know what? He was gone fifteen hours! When he got back, I said, ‘Terrence, where did you get the petrol, Scotland?’ ” She paused for effect. “I told him to get out after that. I had a baby to look after, I had my bills to pay, I couldn’t deal with any man’s nonsense.” Maggie paused to adjust her bosom. “The day after he left I went to the doctor and I said, ‘Listen, tie my tubes in a knot, I’m not having any more!’ I’m telling you. The one I’ve got is fifteen now, all she gives me is trouble. It’s all about makeup and boys and fake eyelashes and making videos for YouTube. This isn’t what my mum came over from Jamaica for, for her granddaughter to be throwing away her education.” Maggie folded and unfolded her arms. “I go to church, and I pray, I pray for myself, I pray for my daughter, for my niece. I just have to hope He’s listening, Marina.”

  How were my aunt and this stranger already on first-name terms? I hadn’t been gone that long. I threw myself down next to my aunt. Marina, sitting opposite, was nodding vigorously although Maggie had finished speaking.

  “What did they say?” Maggie asked, pulling out the hand gel again.

  “Nothing really! Just women’s problems, you know.” I swerved the question.

  “What women’s problems?” Maggie is a first-generation Jamaican and therefore a woman entitled to information about others.

  “Just women’s problems!” I said, forcing what I hoped was a convincing smile.

  * * *

  Maggie and I stood at the bus stop outside the hospital. She spoke about something I couldn’t quite pay attention to as I looked up at the three gigantic tower blocks looming opposite, so high up that dark clouds almost hid their tops. I kept my head tilted back, hoping that if I did it long enough the tears that were brimming in my eyes wouldn’t fall out.

  “Queenie, what did the doctor say?” My aunt narrowed her eyes at me. “I don’t buy this ‘women’s problems’ rubbish. Do I have to pry it out of you?” Why did I think I’d got her off the topic earlier?

  “She wanted to look at my cervix, Maggie,” I said, hoping that would get her off my case. “Something about it being narrow?”

  She looked at me, annoyance and then shock contorting her face. “Pardon? Must you embarrass me?” she said through gritted teeth, looking around. “We do not talk about our vees in public.”

  “But I didn’t say vagina, I said cervix,” I replied. Her lips tightened. “Anyway, the bus is here!”

  The 136 crawled down Lewisham High Street, Maggie speaking a hundred words for each yard we moved.

  “You know, back in the day, when Mum came over, they used to put implants and IUDs in black women without us knowing to stop us getting pregnant.” She cocked her head. “To stop us procreating. That is true, you know!” She raised her eyebrows. “Mum’s friend Glynda, the one who eats Mum out of house and home when she visits? Well, she couldn’t get pregnant for years and she had no idea why. So you shouldn’t even have had that thing put in in the first place, politically as well as physically. You don’t know what it’s doing to you.”

  She was talking so frantically and moving so drastically to support her chat that her gigantic plastic earrings were providing a soundtrack to her words.

  “Black women’s bodies don’t work well with this sort of thing. Have you read up on it? Chemical imbalances, the absorption to our melanin—that affects the pineal and pituitary glands. Swelling also.”

  Maggie stopped talking to call Diana, so I tried to call Tom. The first three times it had rung out, but now it was going to voice mail. It was past six, he’d be out of work by now.

  “Is he still not answering?” Maggie asked.

  “Huh?” I looked out the window. “Who, Tom? Yeah, he sent me a text to say that he’d see me at home.” She knew I was lying, but my stop was coming up so she couldn’t interrogate me about it.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come to church with me on Sunday? All are welcome. Even you, with that IUD.” She looked at me out of the side of her eyes. “God will save even the most wanton. . . .”

  I rolled my eyes and stood up. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said before I pinballed my way down the bus, careful not to touch anything or anyone with my hands, and stepped off.

  I stood waving at my aunt as the doors closed and the bus pulled away. It’s a family thing. It is an annoying and time-wasting thing.

  * * *

  When I got home, the flat was cold. I ran a bath and wriggled out of my clothes. I crinkled my nose at the goo from the ultrasound that had stuck itself to the gusset of my knickers and chucked them into the wash basket. I doubled over and sat on the edge of the bath. The bleeding had stopped, but the cramps hadn’t.

  I wrapped my hair in my headscarf and stepped into the bath. I sat in the water and prodded at my stomach, wincing as I hit tender spots. Why had this happened? I was twenty-five; I wasn’t going to have a baby. Obviously. But it would have been nice to have the choice. Having a contraceptive placed in my body wholly suggested that I was not wanting to have a baby; so, yes, my choice would be to not actually carry a child to term and then raise it—but that wasn’t the point. “Would I have been ready?” I asked myself aloud, stroking my stomach tenderly. My mum was twenty-five when she got pregnant with me. I guess that says everything about how unprepared I’d be. I lay back, numbness cloaking my body as the hot water swathed my cold skin.

  * * *

  Midnight, and Tom still wasn’t home. I couldn’t sleep because my womb felt like it was trying to make its way out of my body, so I assembled some boxes and started to wrap up and pack my half of our separated belongings in the living room so it at least looked like I was going somewhere soon. A snow globe from Paris, mine and Tom’s first holiday together; a comically ugly porcelain donkey from Spain, our second holiday together; and a Turkish eye ornament from our third. I wrapped all of these memories of our relationship with care, swaddling them in layers of newspaper and sealing them with tape. I moved on to the plates, then the mugs, before I stopped to get the donkey back out of the box. I unwrapped it and put it back on the mantelpiece. If I was going to leave a reminder of our relationship, it was going to be the thing I didn’t want in my new place. I carried on wrapping until I got into a frenzy of paper and tape, only pausing when I got to two mugs on the drying rack. One embossed with a T, the other with a Q.

  • • •

  “Why have you got so much stuff?” Tom asked, leaning on a cardboard box marked MISCELLANEOUS 7 and wiping sweat from his forehead. “I’ve only got a few hoodies and two pairs of socks.”

  “I don’t know, maybe I’ve become a hoarder without noticing?” I said, cupping his face in my hands. “But you wanted to live with me, so you’re going to have to live with it all.”

  “Fine, I regret nothing,” Tom said, kissing me on the forehead. “Queenie, you have a very dry forehead for someone who is meant to be lifting boxes.”

  “Yes, maybe so, but I am organizing, as opposed to lifting,” I told him. “And making sure that the boxes marked KITCHEN are in the kitchen.”

  “Well, if you’re going to be in the kitchen, could you at least make some tea?”

  “Yes, now that you mention it, your clever girlfriend has just found the box with the kettle and bought milk and tea bags on the way here,” I said. “But I don’t know where the mugs are.”

  “Look in my rucksack, my mum bought us mugs. Moving-in present, she said.”

  I found Tom’s rucksack in the hallway and, when I opened it, found two gift boxes containing a white mug each. I washed them out and made us tea, plucking the hot tea bags out wit
h my fingers in the absence of a spoon. “How do your fingers not burn?” Tom asked, walking into the kitchen, a box under his arm.

  “They do, I just don’t talk about it,” I said, handing him a hot mug. “These are fancy, where did she get these from?”

  “No idea,” Tom said, taking a sip.

  “Oh, hold on, you’ve got the Q mug.” I reached out for it.

  “This one’s going to be mine.” He lifted it out of my reach. “Like you’re mine,” Tom said, putting an arm around me.

  “Do you know,” I said, “whatever tone you’d said that in, it would have sounded creepy and possessive.”

  “Creepy and possessive.” Tom took a sip of tea. “Were they the qualities that initially drew you to me?” He laughed.

  • • •

  I packed until I was exhausted, falling asleep on the sofa boxed in by years of accumulatively unimportant stuff that I probably didn’t need to continue carting through life. When I woke up the next morning, my alarm chirping obnoxiously from the bedroom, Tom still wasn’t back. I sat on the Tube to work, doubling over when pain ripped through my stomach. A woman handed me a plastic bag, saying, “If you’re going to be sick, can you at least do it in here? Nobody wants to see a splattering so early in the morning.” I snuck in late, turned my computer on, and fake-smiled my way through the morning. The television listings got confused with the club listings, and I asked Leigh to fix it before our boss, Gina, noticed. One day he’s going to tell me to do my work myself, but as long as I listen to him talking about his own work and his boyfriend Don’s faltering DJ career in great detail, he lets me get away with a lot.

  At midday, I walked over to Darcy’s desk, a gray metallic dock in the quiet corner of the office that she shared with Silent Jean, the world’s oldest and the Daily Read’s longest-employed subeditor. She was a ghostly pale waif of a woman who didn’t fit with the aesthetic of a flashy news institution, one who seemed to hate me without having ever spoken to me. Or to anyone, actually.

  “Good afternoon, Jean,” I said, bowing. She tutted, nodding swiftly before putting her surprisingly snazzy earphones in. I placed both hands on Darcy’s head and began to plait her thick, heavy brown hair, an activity that, thankfully, she found as satisfying as I did, so no HR summons for me.

  “Please keep doing that. It is literally the most soothing thing,” she said. I looked at her screen and began to read the e-mail she was composing aloud:

  Simon, you just can’t expect me to reconfigure my wants and my needs to suit you. Knowing that I’m at a different point of my life to you, instead of understanding it you almost use it as a weapon—

  Silent Jean looked at us and sighed surprisingly loudly for someone who rarely exercised her vocal cords. “Queenie! Privacy, please!” Darcy snapped, turning to look at me. Her bright blue eyes looked through my dark brown ones.

  “Uh-oh. What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Lots,” I groaned, banging my head down on her partition so loudly that Silent Jean jumped in her seat.

  “Right, let’s go, come on!” she chirped, looking apologetically at Jean and sweeping me up and away. She’s the most intuitive of my best friends, though Darcy has known me the shortest amount of time; that we’ve worked together and spent every weekday talking to each other for the last three and a bit years has meant that we know each other better than we know ourselves.

  She’s very beautiful, with a complexion as rosy as her outlook, and looks like one of those wartime girls whose pictures their army husbands would kiss at night. You might think that that aesthetic doesn’t really have a place in the present day, but she makes it work.

  Darcy bundled me into the lift, forcing me to step on the foot of a man I hadn’t seen before—he was dressed in a tweed jacket with glasses too big for a face that I would have thought was handsome if my entire brain weren’t concentrated on heartbreak. He looked at me and opened his mouth to complain, but instead stared until he looked down at his phone. “It’ll be all right, Queenie,” Darcy whispered, putting her arm around my shoulders.

  “You don’t even know what’s wrong,” I whispered back at her. “So you can’t say that.” The lift zoomed to the ground floor and we bundled out, words of sadness and betrayal and abandonment firing out of my mouth at a hundred miles per hour.

  “I just don’t know what to do! Things have been so bad for such a long time, Darcy. It’s relentless,” I told her, my pace quickening the more irritated I got with my stupid situation. “We argue every single day, about absolutely everything, so much that he’s started going back home to stay with his parents at the weekends, and when it’s really bad, he stays there in the week and commutes! From Peterborough! Then this weekend, when we really got into it, he told me that he needed a break, and that he thought I should move out.”

  “Yeesh.” Darcy winced. “Did he mean it? Or was he just angry?”

  “Darcy, I have no fucking idea. We stayed up all night talking and bickering about it, and I agreed to move out for three months, after which point we could revisit things.”

  “Why are you the one moving out when he can go and stay with his parents? It’s not like you have that option.” Darcy linked her arm through mine.

  “He said he can afford to stay on in the flat because my entry-level wage is nothing in comparison to his big-boy fucking Web developer salary.”

  “Is that a direct quote?” Darcy asked, horrified.

  “He’s always been like that about money, so I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s using it against me.” Darcy squeezed my arm tighter to her. “I just don’t understand why he isn’t better at understanding that he needs to lean into all of my stuff. He knows I love him,” I huffed. “Why doesn’t he fucking see that?”

  My expletives weren’t suitable for a public dining space, so Darcy herded me away from the cafeteria and toward the tiny park near our office. I guess it can be called a park even though it’s really only patches of damp earth and bare branches surrounding what is mainly concrete, but it’s nice to have something resembling greenery in central London. We warded off the sharp October air by huddling together on a wooden bench that wobbled dangerously, especially when my gesticulating really tested it.

  “He knows that I have stuff, he’s always known about my stuff, so why can’t he be understanding?” I looked at Darcy for a response but carried on talking before she could say anything. “It could all be fine. We have a break, I move out for a bit, sort my head out; then in a few months, all fine, I move back in and we’re happy forever,” I assured myself.

  “Like an interracial Ross and Rachel?” Darcy offered.

  “Friends is the only reference you could think of?” I asked her. “There weren’t really even any black people in Friends.”

  “I think you just need to give him a bit of time, and a bit of space. Once you get out of there, he’ll realize how hard it is not having you around,” Darcy said. She is very solutions-driven, a welcome counter to my impulsiveness and inability to think things through. “Have you been sleeping together?”

  “No, not that I haven’t been trying.” I sighed. “He thinks it’s a bad idea. It’s been a month since we had sex.” Darcy winced again.

  “It’s killing me.” I threw my hands to the sky in mock exasperation. “I just wish it could all be fine,” I said, resting my head on Darcy’s shoulder. “What if this is the end?”

  “It’s not the end!” Darcy assured me. “Tom loves you, he’s just hurting. You’re both in pain, don’t forget that. His pride will be in pieces because of this whole break thing. Men don’t like to admit that they’ve failed at anything, let alone relationships. I once suggested a break to Simon, and in response, he booked a triple session with his therapist and then got his eyebrow pierced. Things will get better.” Darcy rested her head on mine. “Oh! What did they say at the hospital yesterday, by the way? You know, the scan thing?”

  “Oh, all fine.” There was no point in telling her. “It’s just stres
s or something.”

  “Tom went with you, though, right?”

  “No, he went back to Peterborough on Sunday evening. Haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

  “Are you kidding?” Darcy squawked. “Do you need to come and stay with me and Simon for a couple of nights? Are you still having those stomach pains? We can look after you.”

  “No, I’m all right,” I said. I wasn’t hurting anymore, but in place of the pain was something else, something sitting heavy that I couldn’t quite identify.

  * * *

  Wanting to kill some time before I got home to reminders of my disintegrating relationship, I went to Brixton for some Jamaican bun, hoping that I could kick-start my appetite with my favorite comfort food. I climbed the steps out of the Underground and stood catching my breath at the top.

  I inhaled a little too hard, and the smell of incense from the street sellers made me sneeze as I turned into the market. I hopped over a puddle that looked as suspicious as it smelled sour and carried on weaving through what always felt like thousands of people. I made it into Brixton Village and followed a route to the Caribbean bakery that was etched in my memories of Saturday shopping trips with my grandmother. I turned a corner and went to walk straight into the bakery, but was instead faced with a trendy burger bar full of young couples. The men were all wearing colorful oversize shirts, and their female companions were all wearing colorful overpriced coats.

  I frowned and retraced my steps, turning various corners in my search and convincing myself that I’d dreamt the bakery’s existence before going back to the burger shop. I stood for a minute, trying to recall some sort of memory of going there.

  • • •

  “Hullo, hullo, how you keeping, Susie?” My grandmother smiled at the plump Jamaican woman behind the counter. The whole bakery smelled so sweet. And not sickly sweet: it smelled sugary, and warm, and familiar. I stood on tiptoe and looked over, seeing how her pristine white apron strained over her soft, round stomach.