Dead to Her(8)

Weren’t they?





6.

Keisha couldn’t get back to sleep. She wished she could turn off the air-conditioning and feel the night heat, which might help soothe away the ants in her brain that were keeping her awake. The worries. The sense of isolation. The anxiety and dark muddled thinking that had plagued her since she was a child and now were threatening to return.

Her eyes kept glancing to the corner of the room where the shadows stretched longest. When she’d woken she’d been sure she’d seen him there. A ghostly boy emerging from the gloom, as if he’d followed her from her childhood and her dreams to this place so far away from home. She’d shivered, repeating the words that had been her mantra all her life—there was no boy, there was no ghost—until her breathing evened out. Still though, she felt panicky, lying so still and awake in the night. Billy wouldn’t sleep with a night-light on. He’d laughed at her when she’d asked him. He laughed at her a lot. Or shouted.

Don’t fuck this up, she told herself. Fuck. Billy didn’t like it when she swore and she’d tried hard not to speak like she had at home, where cursing was part of the vernacular. Despite the Egyptian cotton sheets, soft against her naked skin, she was consumed with a longing for home. The traffic noise, the dirt, the tiny flat on the tenth floor of a building where the lift mostly didn’t work. Where the stairwells stank of piss and the corridors were filled with broken old people trying to hold on to their dignity in a changed, uncaring world, while teenagers tried to sell you crack.

Everything was different here, and not just the way of life and the quiet, still nights. In London, her family and all the other girls at the club had laughed at Billy’s pathetic romantic overtures until they realized what he was worth and then it didn’t matter that he was old and fat. Then they’d all made sure his pursuit of Keisha was serious. The dollar signs were lit up bright in everyone she knew.

Think of the money, her uncle Yahuba had said, eyes flashing sharp with endless greed. Dolly had said the same, teeth gritting with envy and all the other women nodding along. They were hard girls at the club, no goodness in them, grifters, graspers, making hundreds of pounds by night and none of them with the sense to save a penny. Smile, dance, and take the money. Drink your way through it. More fool the men.

But Keisha, Keisha with her odd moods and erratic behavior, had not been like that. The dancing she could do, the feeling of being lost in music under a spotlight, real life forgotten, but not the men, and so she’d become a drinks waitress, her tight clothing staying on, no hands allowed to paw at her. She certainly didn’t do afters, even knowing she could have made so much more, enough to break free of her uncle’s control perhaps, to pay her family back what they said she owed them for raising her, and then maybe enough to run somewhere even her awful dreams couldn’t find her.

The air-conditioning clicked and started to hum again, the sound enough to keep her awake without the addition of Billy’s sleeping pig grunts and snuffles beside her.

Her sleeping prince, her hero, she had hit the jackpot with him. Her. Everyone had seen. A rich lonely American widower. She’d have been stupid not to grab at it, and once her uncle and auntie had seen the gifts he’d bought her she’d had no choice. Back then, at the beginning, she hadn’t even minded. Billy was kind. He was fragile almost. He was saving her and maybe she could help with his fear of being old. Dying. Rotting away like his first wife. He was a man who had been forced to look in the mirror and realize that time was no longer on his side.

Auntie Ayo had told him there would be no lingering cancer for him, after the long and awkward wedding celebration where Keisha had been forced to take him to Peckham and watch her relatives circling like sharks. They’d both drunk too much to get through it; Auntie Ayo said he wouldn’t die in his own shit. People believed her, said she had a gift, a knowing—it shone through—and Billy was no exception, although Keisha could see that Auntie Ayo slightly scared him too.

He’d fallen for Keisha harder after that, seeing himself as her knight in shining armor saving her from her wicked relatives. He’d said she was his lucky charm. She made him feel young, as if there was clean new breath in his lungs, and she’d thought a life with Billy, even with everyone else clamoring for her to clean him out, could be good. An escape.

Her past wouldn’t haunt her. Perhaps no more dreams of the boy who was never there, the ghost boy who cursed her. She couldn’t wait to get here. But now she was living it, and everything was different.

He’d changed too, now that they were in this hot alien place that was his comfort zone. He was shedding his lonely-widower skin.

“Don’t ever embarrass me like that again,” he’d said on the way back from the boat this afternoon, his warm smile dissolving as soon as they’d gotten in the car, his whole demeanor suddenly colder than any chill the AC could put out. “This isn’t some trashy part of London, and my friends aren’t your revolting family. You can’t talk like that here.” She was so stunned at the sudden shift in his mood—only seconds earlier he’d been holding her hand as they said their farewells—that it took her a moment to realize he’d meant her comment about the coconut water.

“Everyone laughed,” she’d answered softly. “It was just a joke.”

“You sounded like a whore.” His words were bile, raw acid hitting her.