Well-Made Flesh

The King’s Cross streets are loaded, Thursday night miniskirts and Chelsea boots, pastel Hackett polo shirts and Stone Island wear, people coughing the odd virus or two in my direction. All sorts of rubbish clinging to the curb, crisp packets, bottles, tissue, and ting. But still, this is as dirty-clean as London streets at night can be, you get me? No roadman or beastman in sight and the boney hookers are yet to come out their nooks.

I hit the buzzer on the intercom and listen to whoever the drunk eediot is on the other end make a fool of himself before buzzing me in. I suppose man can afford to make a fool of himself in a building for rich kids—a Hall of Residence made especially for them, the kind of gates I didn’t even know existed until I met Kaisley; just fancy, plants as tall as I am and everything faux marble, everything sweet. Drop your gum in the lobby, pick it up again. No problem. No lergies, I’m telling you.

I call for the lift. The clock above the door says it’s closing in on midnight. Minutes away from tomorrow. Tomorrow is when we throw sulphuric acid at Michael, the Israeli boy. Simple tings, we’re gonna just buck up on him and chuck it in his face and have that face slip right off its skin. I’m just saying. Sounds sick any which way you slice it. But bread is bread is bread. Don’t be shooting the co-conspirator. I pushed and I pulled at this plan, even up until as late as yesterday evening, you get me? When I sat with Kaisley in the student bar and I listened to her tell me how you don’t need much time to think about things when you’re doing the right thing. And I said: That sounds about right, since it’s happening the day after tomorrow. But don’t you think it’s all come together pretty quickly though? Not at all like how you might normally plan the crime of the century? She said: That’s the universe telling us something. That it just might be the right thing to do in this very wrong world. That was that then. Man can’t argue with the universe. I agreed that I would come over to hers since she lived close to our uni, and we would just leave out from there in the morning and, well, once there we’d do the misdeed. It’s simple, yeah, but it’s the simplicity that’s got me all prang and ting.

The lift don’t seem like it’s coming so I go off in search of the stairs. But I bring myself right back when I remember she is top floor. It’s a madness. I’m a bag of nerves, meanwhile she’s throwing a party. She love a party, though. She’s always throwing them. Has a bit of a reputation for them now. All-night dramas. A fortnight ting. 50 Cent and Jay-Z and Nas chugging from the speakers, volume turned to the max, and people just smoking puff, and drinkin’, and smoking puff, and talking politics. Kaisley with her white-arse self, all hip-hopped out and everything. Bless her. It’s cute, as Americans like her would say.

The floor indicator says the lift is still on the eighth floor, for fuck’s sake. Screw dat. I ride the stairs instead, thinking about how I don’t really have no arms with Michael; but he did kind of take the piss in the end though, and there’s a way people will do that, will walk all over you and whatnot if you let them. So Kaisley’s right, it’s about standing up for sumthin in the end, innit? I know I’m tired of man taking the piss. Feels like man’s been walking all over me my whole life. It’s a madness, yeah, but I’m good for it. Not even much for me to do. Except to kick up a stink, and let her do her ting. Which is to take his face off. With the acid.

The door’s open when I get there, when I finally wobble up the stairs, the music and the talk and whatnot dribbling out into the hallway, and I wonder why the people on her floor never seem to mind, and then I clock that they’re probably in here with everyone else. Feels like every student from uni is here, every bloody yout’ from the Institute; like they’ve come from every part of the world. The school is mad international. Sometimes it feels like there’s more foreigners at the Institute than home students. You can just feel their foreignness. It smacks you in the bloody head at times. Take this brudda, for instance, hanging out behind the front door. Like he wants people to crush his face with it. Local man wouldn’t do such an eediot ting.

All sorts of eediot man here. Man dat think they’re better than you. I push past the people in the passageway to look for Kaisley in the kitchen. Some of my African bruddas are in there; bruddas from all parts of the continent, in their oxfords and their derbies, in trousers and repellent pullovers, talking free trade, market adjustment, and government credibility and, you know, listening to them, you wouldn’t think it was a party. And the music was bothering me before, but now I’m just happy that it’s drowning out half the things they’re saying. Like Africa is this huge big problem, and they are going to make all this money by fixing it with all this big talk at parties.

I check the living room. The bedroom. Juss more people, and the lingering smell of her incense, but no Kaisley. Man should know, I’m like VIP here. Man should know this. Part of Kaisley’s inner circle, a member of Friends of the East (FOTE), which is our student society, a performance-protest student society. It sounds like some hippie-type shit. But there are no hippies. Mostly grunge loyalists. Mostly girls. We are a group full of mostlys. Mostly white, and mostly Americans, mostly apologetic Americans, keen to tell you how they are just as pissed off as you are about US foreign policy, the illegal occupation of Iraq, the failure to recover weapons of mass destruction, and President Dubya, who don’t seem to know what he’s doing, but still managed to get himself elected again. They’re sorry, they’re sorry.

Come rain or cloudy-shine, we gather in the school’s basement, in one of the overlit classrooms, and push all the tables to the walls. We workshop stuff, do all these exercises, and rehearse all these acts that we are going to perform. Then we go out into the world (meaning, the campus) and not do any of what we talked about. Instead, we make a lot of it up as we go along. Really, I say “we,” but I only get to hand out leaflets for some reason, which is just taking the piss, if you ask me. The others, they bang their fists on the cafeteria tables, bounce themselves off of doors in the hallways, or lie on the floor in the common rooms—whatever they feel they have to do to get their point across. And I don’t always know what their point is, I’ll admit that. I read the leaflets, though. All this talk about whether or not lecturers and academic organisations should boycott universities in Israel. Or support the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel campaign. Sometimes the group uses props. There was that time when an academic came to give a talk, “Conflict Currency: Lockheed Martin, the SPADE Defense Index, and Privatised Reconstruction,” and FOTE members painted their hands red and held them up the entire time. I was feeling that one, I’ll have to admit. Dat one was sick. It’s not all performance, though. We got all sorts of campus cred for hanging the Guernica-inspired banner from the main stairwell; (Gaza-Guernica, Lee called it, and Kothai was mad about that, and told her that there was no room in history for equivalence, but it was big and was paid for already and Lee had done all that work, so we hung it anyway). And we were one of the student organisations that got behind the sit-in, protesting that the cleaners get a living wage. I stayed the entire four days through for that, despite the “missed” calls from my mum wondering where I was, and the threatening voicemails that I had to wince to listen to and delete. I was there, sitting alongside Kaisley when we cheered at the news that the school administration agreed to review the matter.

I mention all this because a lot of people in FOTE think I have no business being in the group at all and, if you ask me, I reckon they’ve got together and have been slagging me off and plotting against my being allowed to perform. Not entirely because of my being Black, I reckon, but more like I’m the wrong kind of Black. Not giving a fuck and whatnot. Not tryin’ desperately hard to be like ’em. But they leave me be because I’m in with Kaisley, who they let be the group treasurer, because her parents are stupid-rich and she does stupid-rich stuff like paying for all the shit they need out her own pocket—the flyers, the stickers, the fake blood, the paint, the region-two versions of the DVDs we screen, and pizza that’s brought along to the meetings. I should call them workshops, like they do, but most of the time all we do is sit around and talk.

There are plenty of FOTE members here, I recognise them, but a lot of others too; man dat live in the dormitory and man dat Kaisley must share her classes with, even though she don’t ever go to her classes. I listen to them exchange their gap-year and semester-abroad adventures. Big talk about spur-of-the-moment trips to some of the most remote places of Africa. And all matter-of-fact—like how I might chat about stumbling down the wrong aisle in a supermarket. Most times, I’m eavesing on these voyages of self-discovery. Clinging to everything I hear: the boy who chewed khat in a town outside of Mogadishu, another guy who can’t forget the girl he banged before boarding a bus to Casablanca. But tonight I’m over it. Because tomorrow we’re on it. And I just ain’t got time for anything else no more. So I try the one place I haven’t looked: the bathroom.

Kaisley’s sitting in the bathtub, like it’s a hammock, puffing on a spliff, her bunny slippers hanging over the edge. Khaled’s also in there, sitting on the toilet cover seat. Wes is leaning against the wall, like that’s what smug people do for a living, and Rose is here too. And because it’s the four of them, it’s like all the real man dem—FOTE’s finest—have just converged here to get away from it all.

“Yeah-yeah-yeah,” Khaled says, before I’ve even said anything. “Give us a minute,” he says. “We’ll be out there soon.”

But man don’t move.

First off, man don’t answer to him. Secondly, man don’t know me to talk to me like dat, you get me? So why am I moving? Khaled has had his dander up ever since the first day I met him. Thinks I’m moving in on Kaisley. I am. I think I am. But allow that bollocks. We could’ve been civil, you get me? Despite the competing interest, gentleman and all that. But he’s full on full of himself, on a lot of gas, always finding a way to weave into the convo that he’s on a study-abroad program, forever flapping his gums about being a Stanford man. It might be Halloween, and he wants to tell you how Halloween’s done at Stanford. We might ride the lift up the building, and he wants to tell you about the elevators at Stanford. Pussyhole, sometimes I just wanna tell him: Fuck off mate, I didn’t even know what Stanford was until I met you. Stink man. I wouldn’t mind steppin’ on him. But I look at Kaisley and she gives me this quick nod. And it’s the only reason why I leave them to it.

I met Kaisley a few months back now. Back in September, when I first started at the Institute. When I got there all the madness was yet to begin. The cleaners still had a job. Jyllands-Posten had only just printed their cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and the annual round of campus protests hadn’t resumed yet. For new arrivals like me, the university had the feel of a blank canvas. The Doric columns hadn’t yet been tagged with spray paint. The statue of the Writer—beneath the portico at the top of the steps, looking out onto the lawn—still stood erect. Old baldy, three feet tall plus plinth, rimmed glasses, a walrus moustache, a book, a pen. The inscription beneath him proclaiming, and what should they know of england who only england know?

I stepped all over those first few weeks of school; the unseasoned freshman, every part of me a mess, like I was trying to broadcast my complete lack of focus to everyone. I clattered into an exhibit stand during Freshers’ Week, knocked the whole shit down, and had a gang of students in tie-dye come at me. I would line up for hours, in the wrong lines, in the wrong places, trying to process a library card before I even had my student ID; trying to process fees in offices where they only process your assignments. Sometimes it was too much. I would go on walks and measure the passing of time in footsteps, stair climbs, and lift rides. My feet could carry me across campus, back and forth, sometimes for hours on end when I had these huge gaps between an early class and an evening one. The Institute of African and Asian Studies was a bit of a blur during those first weeks of the academic year—both a baptism and an awakening of sorts—and movement seemed to help tame the anxiety swimming in my blood.

There were all these mini discoveries on these walks. I found vending machines that actually worked, computer labs that no one cared to mention during orientation, prayer rooms in the basement, and the wing on the main building where they study law—an enclosed part of the school that is carpeted and better furnished. I ran into Kaisley during one of these walks. She was outside the main building, sitting on the capstone to a low wall that cordons off the bicycle rack. I sat on the capstone at the other end, having decided on a pit stop, just to get my bearings and whatnot. I wasn’t clockin’ her or anything, but I could see her. She’s got a lot of hair, fierce copper curls that hang from her brown beanie and fall to her shoulders, you get me? Her large brown eyes look glossed over, as if she’s in a permanent trance. Her nose is definitely Roman, and though she’s no showstopper she has this comic-book smile, symmetrical ivories, the best combination of lips and teeth that I have seen in a minute. She brushed a lock behind her ear and that’s when I first saw the pale-pink birthmark, roughly the size of a ten-pence coin, half an inch above her left eyebrow. She pulled a lighter and a spliff from her small, battered leather shoulder bag. Lit the thing like she didn’t care for a minute that we were in public. She caught me looking, then offered me a pull. I waved it away. Even from where I sat I could see it was badly rolled. It looked all rubbish and whatnot. No thanks. But then she just started talking. Telling me her name, telling me her whole life story, oversharing in the way that people who are not quite right in the head tend to do. And because of this, you done know my back and my antennas and everything shot up, like: What’s all this, then? And I was ready to leg it out of there. Yada yada yada: how she was born in Namibia but has no memory of it. Yada yada yada: how her parents are in Washington, DC, but she has lived in a number of places, because her father used to work in the Foreign Service. Mostly Africa. Yada yada yada: She spent four of the last five years at Brown University (don’t know it), and before that at National Cathedral School (don’t know it) and, before that, Dakar (know it). She is a postgrad, studying development, and when she told me this I nodded like I knew what studying development was. And she said: You don’t know what that means, do you? which was kind of funny. She did all the talking, chatted so much that it didn’t occur to me that the yat didn’t know my name until she asked for it. Chatted so much that I had to stop and think about who I was. Later, I did wonder why I sat there, listening to the white girl yamming her mout’. Why I didn’t tell her I had to go. And it was only when I thought about that, that I thought about my younger sister, Abiola, and how, for the first time in a long time, I hadn’t been thinking about her until I thought about not thinking about her. My whole attitude towards Kaisley changed after dat. Man was like: You know what? This redhead yat might be the distraction I need.

50 Cent vibes and dat, and Nas and Jay-Z and 2Pac and Biggie, and I’m thinking: It can’t hurt to shake up the playlist a little some, maybe some two-step, maybe some ragga.

I’m sitting on the sofa arm next to Lee when Kaisley and the others come out the bathroom. Kaisley walks around the room checking in with people, not paying much attention to me. I put it down to her playing host even though she looks nothing like the part, dressed down in a long pullover, black leggings and them bunny slippers. She is briefly at Kothai’s side, who I’m surprised to even see here after Kaisley’s recent calls for violent action in the FOTE meetings. Even from where I sit, ears swallowed by the music and the din from all the chatter, I can still see how they struggle to be nice to each other. And I can see the relief that washes over Kaisley when Kothai and her friend get up to leave.

I rise and fight my way to the kitchen. Man ain’t trying to look bait or desperate or nothing. There’s a ton of shit in the fridge, lots of green shit, a Red Bull and Qibla Cola, and beer, a ton of beer, but lots of Bacardi Breezers too, and I’m thinking: You people can do better than this. But then I spot a Heineken bottle among all the green, and swipe that. I pop the top on the edge of the kitchen counter and cause a little scratch but since no one saw me do it, it never happened. I head back to the living room. My plot’s been taken, so I just stand against the wall and sip my beer, looking like a sad case. But no one’s dancing. They never do at these parties, they just fight hard to talk over the music, and to get buzzed and drunk. I stand corrected. My man by the telly is trying to do something with his body; a white-boy sway and him singing along and everything. Now, I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger. But she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas. Words fail me really. Kaisley and Khaled are by the small bookshelf on the other side of the room, I can barely see them, but enough to clock the gesticulations between them. I can see she’s pissed off at him, and I’m good with that.

She heads over to where these two skets are chatting and taking up half of the sofa and tells them to get up. No joke. Kaisley’s a bit different, this is true, but I love her for it. Love like like, I mean. And then she gestures me over, when I didn’t even know she knew where I was in the room.

I do as asked, and take the roll-up from her. It’s a seriously ugly ting; I’m tempted to ask her for the Rizla, but I don’t have the heart to tell her this. I never have the heart to tell her much of anything to be honest. For example, I want to ask her why she thinks disfiguring this boy’s face with acid is such a good idea.

She kicks her slippers off. I wouldn’t have had her down as the type that painted her toenails, but there they are, bright red. Feels a little too conventional for her. So maybe that’s a Communist red, a Che Guevara red. I feel nervous this close to her. I feel my bum cheeks twitching. Real talk: I’m horny and I wouldn’t mind a bang, still, this is true, but it’s nuts also, because I don’t think she’s even that criss. I didn’t when I first met her and I don’t now, plus she’s crazy and none of this makes sense, so I put it down to my buzz. I take the lighter from her, take a few puffs, fight to get it burning and whatnot, and when it looks okay I hand it back to her. The drags scratch at my throat and I’m trying not to cough in front of her, so I’m a little teary. That’s also real talk.

When Khaled comes back over, he’s all bent out of shape, blabbering about how we can’t do this, and Kaisley hisses at him and tells him there’s no need to editorialize it. Kaisley grabs a coat and we all go out onto the balcony. Saadia follows us out. Outside of Kaisley, she’s the only one in the group who shows me any respect. Classy yat. Clothes are always det. Gucci. D&G. YSL. And I’m looking at her knowing her headscarf alone probably cost more than everything I’m wearing, my Air Max included. Rose and Wes are already out here. So it feels like everyone who is important in FOTE is here, except Kothai. Present company excluded. I ain’t dim. I don’t have blinders on. I know I’m not important to this group, and that I shouldn’t be out here. But by now I’ve been smoking a bit, so I don’t give a fuck and everything is hilarious and I am trying to stem this rising fit of giggles that’s kind of bubblin’ inside, because I can tell we’ve all come out here for some serious big man talk.

Khaled’s giving me dirty looks, like: What’s so funny? His hair falls over his face, and he’s got this chin—as weak as his character—with all this bumfluff that’s gathered on it. Proper unruly. Marga man too. He turns to Kaisley and pushes his arms back and forth into the air in front of her, stabbing his fingers at her as if he is rapping to camera. “I don’t know why I have to keep telling you this,” he says to Kaisley, sounding both like the world has gone to shit and like he is talking to a child. “You’ll be caught,” he says. “You’ll get into trouble. Deep fucking shit.”

She’s had this conversation with them before. They’ve been arguing about this all week long. They say they’re just entertaining her, that they don’t believe she’s really going to do it. Eediot man. I know she’s going to do it and they do too, else they wouldn’t keep bringing it up. Deep down we all think she’s a little loops, crazy enough to go beyond just talking about this shit. Kaisley brings up her summer again, the families she met in Ras al-Amud whose neighbourhood was invaded and occupied, taken over, their lives pretty much smothered. Michael, she says, has violated her right to speak up on their behalf.

“I can’t even believe we’re talking about this—again,” Khaled says.

“You know you will go to prison, eh?” Rose says. “That Kothai will tell the authorities, eh?” Authorities. Her South African accent gets me every time: one part English statesman, another part African statesman, you get me? The whole thing ends up sounding like this bad impression of an Australian accent. “You should not help her,” she says, turning to me. “She is not well.”

“I’m standing right here,” Kaisley says, and now I’m fighting to hold back my laughter. I’m proper wrestling with it.

“You can’t undo this,” Khaled says.

“I don’t intend to,” Kaisley replies.

“Then tell us why you would scar that guy for life, eh?” Rose says.

“You’d prefer I shoot him? Bomb the room to bits?”

“Why not just disrupt the event?” Wes asks. “Like a normal human being would.” Normal human being. I start giggling again and now they are all proper looking at me. “Disruption is for losers,” Kaisley says. “That’s what we’ve been doing for months now. Besides, they are going to have security there, already prepared to shut any kind of disruption down.”

“Why not just use paint or something?” Rose says.

Kaisley rolls her eyes. I can see them eyes, even though it’s dark. “Here we go,” she says. “Paint, paint paint. It’s always paint. So they can brush themselves off and get on with it?”

“Yeah, and not hold you for any serious crime at the same time.”

“I like how you’re all assuming I’ll be caught—”

“You will,” they say, almost in unison.

“But that’s why Richard here is gonna be the diversion,” she says. “He just has to be all angry for like five minutes,” she says, “like he’s really gonna get violent. They see a big Black man acting all crazy and security is gonna freak.”

Sometimes they look at me like Kaisley and I are one and the same, like I’m just as crazy as her. Rose, who is mixed race, is doing this right now, looking at me like: Are you really gonna sit and listen to her snatch that Black card from you? True, it is bang out of order. I’m not down with the phraseology, you get me? But the entire thing is a joke, while at the same time really not that funny. I know this. But I don’t know if I can keep these giggles down any longer. Big Black man? I’m like 5’9” and some change. Twelve stone on a good day, after I’ve had some of my mum’s eba. And now I can’t keep from laughing because I’m thinking about eba, of all things, which my sister hated but never said so because my girl didn’t want to get popped in the mouth. So I’m just out here bending over and creasing up and shit, clutching the balcony railings. And they’re all looking at me again like: What the fuck is wrong with him?

Kaisley shakes her head like she’s disgusted—at Khaled, I reckon, but maybe at me also, for cracking up. Then she steps back into the flat. The rest follow, but I could do with the air.

I’m lean maybe, I did down a couple of beers before that Heineken, before getting here, and I’m buzzing and London is supposed to be beautiful on a night like this, but it isn’t. It’s biting, bloody cold, and the view of just another block of flats in front of us is all rubbish. And I’m feeling myself, and I’m feeling myself feeling myself, you get me? My skin all tingling and shit. Almost painful, but not, and it gets me thinking about Michael and why we gots to acid up his face.

It started with the posters, innit? Dotted all around the uni building. against apartheid week: monday, 17th october—saturday, 22nd october, 2005. Kaisley read that and was proper pressed to get involved. Then she caught wind that the Palestinian Student Society was going to have this fake wall outside, office dividers that would be lined up and have all this information on them, as well as photos of the West Bank wall’s graffiti and art. It was over after that. Couldn’t nobody tell Kaisley nothing. She had this big idea that FOTE could act out some shit she saw in East Jerusalem; roll Kothai’s objections: “You have to be oppressed to participate in Theatre of the Oppressed”; roll Kaisley’s objection to her objection: She was, in the moment she joined a protest, “oppressed.” She was, she said as we sat in one of our meetings, practically one of the people of Ras al-Amud. Everyone who was there when she said that, me included, just kind of looked at her with our necks sideways; especially me, because I knew she spent that Jerusalem summer volunteering at the YMCA. Allow it, girl.

Kothai caved, Khaled and Kaisley went off for like a week, and I don’t know how they found them, but they recruited all of these Palestinian youts from some community group—except it wasn’t clear if any of these Palestinians were Palestinian, or if any of them, especially the cockney-sounding ones, had ever set foot in Palestine, and the whole thing felt a bit sketchy to me but who was I to say anything, I’m just the guy who gets to hand out leaflets, you get me?

That’s what I do that day. I hand out leaflets on the West Bank barriers. Meanwhile, the performance behind me took on a life of its own and just went on, all of them making shit up on the spot. And it wasn’t pretty. Wes and Rose in military wear from the Oxfam or something, harassing people and turning them away from the wall, telling the “Palestinians,” Kaisley among them, to go away, and some mock aggro every now and then. It was awful, and I’m sure the Palestinian Society, who never really liked FOTE in the first place, fucking hated it.

But then Michael showed up with a megaphone and started heckling the masses with it while Kaisley and them were trying to perform. Forget all the information on the West Bank wall that was plastered to dividers. Forget the performance. All the attention turned to him, students jeering and trying to shout their counter arguments, and then real aggro started to happen, pushing and shit. Security guards came out, shut down all outside events including the wall and the performance. And Kaisley’s been pissed ever since, like she’d been denied her moment.

But this isn’t even what brought out her ultraviolent tendencies, you get me? We all said “Merry Christmas” and “Have a happy New Year,” and went away for the break. We put 2005 behind us, and when we came together for the first FOTE meeting of the new year, as everyone was yabbering on about their Christmas adventures, Kothai asked the room if we all knew that the Institute had an Israeli Society.

Sometimes it was too much. I would go on walks and measure the passing of time in footsteps, stair climbs, and lift rides. The Institute of African and Asian Studies was a bit of a blur during those first weeks of the academic year—both a baptism and an awakening of sorts—and movement seemed to help tame the anxiety swimming in my blood.

I didn’t quite get what all the fuss was, while everyone else was like, What the fuck? I mean, I knew a little about the actual politics of it but, at the same time, I didn’t really clock why they were being stoosh about who should and shouldn’t have a student society at the Institute. Then they started discussing it, how there hasn’t been an Israeli Society at the Institute for years and whatnot. And during all this passionate yada yada, Kaisley was like, “Kothai, how you know all this?” And that’s when Kothai brought out the crumpled leaflet for the event.

Later, we find out that not only is Michael moderating the event, he’s the student president of the society. And it was over after that. Try talking Kaisley out of doing anything at that point. I mean, Kothai tried, but Kaisley’s been losing her head over it ever since.

I try to gather myself. The sliding door opens and closes, and Saadia sits beside me. “Tit for tat,” she says, more to herself than me, “seems so…basic for her.”

“Yeah,” I say, “like red nail paint.”

“What?”

“Nothing. But scarring the guy for life because he heckled your shit. That’s hardly tit for tat.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. She isn’t gonna do it.”

“She is.”

“I know girls like her. I grew up with them. In Dearborn. Trust me, she isn’t.”

“I know Kaisley. She’s unpredictable.”

“You also know you don’t have to go, right?”

Of course I know. But I can’t tell her I can’t tell Kaisley no. And I can’t tell Saadia how Kaisley makes shit interesting, and interesting is distraction, and distraction means I can breathe again. I can’t tell her this because a) that shit would sound like a line from a pop song, but mostly b) if I tell her all this, then really, it’s like an admission, you know? That like some part of me is dead. But there’s nothing else at uni outside of hanging with Kaisley, not all these foreigners or even all these new experiences, that makes me feel as if I can put one foot in front of the other without feeling like I might topple, you get me?

So instead I say, “I know.” I say, “I know, I know, I know.”

I’m on Kaisley’s settee when she wakes me the next morning. My face in a wet patch of drool. I feel something hard beneath me and pull a copy of No Logo from the crack between the cushions. I sit up, feeling a few Heinekens heavier, like I’ve got to take a piss. “It’s time to soon get going,” she says, except the way she says it, and the way she looks—not looking like she’s ready to disfigure a man for life, but not not looking like it either, you get me? There are a handful of people still in Kaisley’s flat. It takes her a minute, but she manages to eventually kick them out.

We sit at the small table in her kitchen. She sits in her chair sideways. Her tiptoes on the lino, and there are those red nails again. Every time I look at them they’re a surprise.

She drags a cigarette box across the table, takes one out, does this thing where she taps it against the box before lighting it with her cap lighter. When she isn’t smoking weed, she’s tugging on a cigarette, usually Marlboros, but sometimes Benson & Hedges, to which she says, “When in Rome.”

She makes me toast my own bread. She tears open a packet with a plastic knife-and-fork set. I’ve watched her do this many times in the cafeteria. She only ever uses plasticware. A new set with every meal.

“Rough night,” she says as I’m waiting on my slices. “How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

“What do you feel?”

“I don’t feel nothin’.”

“How can you feel nothing on a day like today?”

I shrug my shoulders. Truth be told, man ain’t felt anything for over a year.

The toaster springs.

I scrape the burnt crumbs from the corners of the toast into the sink before I cotch again.

“I think you’re lost,” she says.

“Whud you mean by that?”

“Well, for starters, you’re self-medicating.” She tells me I don’t seem present.

“I’m here, innit?”

“But are you, really?”

I think so.

“It occurred to me this morning,” she goes on, “that I don’t even know who you really are. You don’t talk about yourself very much.” Now I’m really screwing, because what the fuck is all this? Like is she purposely trying to set me on edge, to hype man up and ting? First off, I’ve known the girl, what, four? Five months? Secondly, I done told her my younger sister threw herself from the top of a twelve-floor building on our estate. I ain’t talked to anyone else about that outside of family and close friends from the area. At the Institute, she’s the only person who I really talk to, full stop. She knows how I hid in my bedroom for the better part of that year, and how I still see my sister at times, hanging out in rooms with me. How I can’t rid myself of her constant absence. It chases me. It’s like I’ve lost my footing and normally you fall, you just hit the pavement edge, the ground, the floor. Whatever. It’s over. It happens in seconds. The rush, the fright, the burst of anxiety. Over in seconds. Take your bruises. Get up again. But for me, it’s like take it back, rewind, and now pause it, you get me? Pause that moment between the trip and the impact. Stretch it over the eighteen months between my sister’s passing and now. It is that fright, constant and prolonged. I am forever bracing myself for some sort of impact that’s just not coming. I done told Kaisley all this. Now she’s sitting here talkin’ foolishness and wondering why my face is all screwboat, like she don’t know she’s taking the piss.

“I’m just making sure you’re ready for today,” she says. But the only thing that jumps are my eyebrows. She says I’m lost, again, and is still trying to be my counsellor. Says I’m angry all the time (I don’t think so), and then adds that maybe that’s a good thing this morning. She says it could be the drinking. She says: Did you know you’re an alcoholic? And I laugh like: pffff. Like: maybe by white-girl standards. I don’t say that, though, I just roll my eyes. To tell the truth, I’m a little annoyed at her; wondering if it all means I’ve told her too much.

She gets up and pulls a bottle from a plastic bag on the counter. Industrial drain cleaner. Bare sulphuric acid up in that ting. She fingers the bottle, a little too dramatically, if you ask me, before placing it on the desk. “Vitriolage,” she says. “Bengali women who had acid thrown in their faces by men who their family had rejected, or disagreements over dowries. Their flesh seared from the skin, women without lips, without eyelids, their faces severely disfigured, their lives in tatters.” She describes the violence, and cruelty, and says there needs to be more male victims, that the world will clamp down on it when it happens to more men. I believe her. The way she tells it, I think anyone would, man or not.

“Ready?” she says.

I reckon that I am.

We decide to take the bus down to Russell Square. We could walk, it’s an okay day for it. But there’s violence in our heads, and it’s seeping into our legs, and being that we’re a little giddy and all, seems best to get there as quick as possible.

Kaisley starts asking me all these questions once we’re on the bus, her Egyptian musk filling up the rear of the double-decker. She wants to know where I live and what’s my family like, and because she knows all about my younger sister, I tell her about my older sister, Modupe, and how I am the middle child, bookended by the two of them, each of us five years apart; an eerie symmetry that I would not put past my parents as being intentional. I tell her about how I live in Walworth, a southeast area of the city, not far from central London. The areas nearby—Peckham, Camberwell, and Kennington—have already begun to wear new faces, scowls reared from outdoor gyms, white mothers jogging with baby buggies, and Costa coffee shops opening on the high street. Kaisley starts going on about the evil of gentrification, like she’s been on the other side of it. I’m not feeling it. I am divorced from all the quivering community anxiety. Even now, with all the talk about how the local council plans to demolish the sprawling Aylesbury Estate that my family lives on to give way to luxury flats; a systematic rehousing—I don’t give a shit. The same estate put an end to my sister. If it takes urban planning to help rid me of the constant reminders, I am okay with it. Gentrification can’t come quick enough for me.

I don’t tell her all that, though. I just let her go on about us poor people. She doesn’t give me the space to respond, even if I wanted to. It’s like she’s taken my five minutes of talk and made twenty minutes of it, and pulling magic tricks like that makes me wonder if the five minutes were ever mine to begin with. And as she’s yabbering I’m thinking maybe Kaisley should know this basic information about me already, because it’s not lost on me that Kaisley’s asking me all these questions just now, when we’ve been hanging out together for about four months and some change. And all that time it’s been all about her, which is why she knows nothing about me except the death of my sister, like that’s all she needs to know, and it’s clear that she’s asking now with all the feeling—as if this is about to be our final time together and this part of it is really our final hurrah.

And if I was drunk before, or even hung-over, I’m fucking sober now.

Bloomsbury is one of the more manicured parts of London. The type of area that I wouldn’t really have had any good reason to be in, for any significant amount of time, if it wasn’t for uni.

The January weather is sleazy and there’s a stunted solemn air about the place, you get me? Summer memories still linger, because last summer around here was a madness; the university being just a stone throw away from where, last July, the No. 30 bus had been torn to shreds by one of those four suicide bombers. It’s like this part of the city is still in a state of recovery.

It’s a short distance from the bus stop to the Institute of African and Asian Studies. It’s north of the large park square. The building’s facade is nineteenth-century neo-classic; a pseudo-Greek-revival affair, white stone with the usual bells and whistles—an entablature with bas-relief depictions of Greek gods behaving badly on its frieze. Makes me think of my dad and all the Greek shit he forced on me before I was even ten.

Kaisley looks cuddle-ready, with rosy childish cheeks, wrapped up to fend off the wind: coat and scarf, knitted gloves, and the beanie she was wearing when we first met. I look like someone who slept in their garms, I’m sure. The cold bites the top of my ears, the nerves in my teeth send me these small shocks of pain whenever I open my mouth.

She pulls out this big summer hat from her bag, and a mask from the Scream movie, and says she’ll use the hat, but that she might use both. I tell her that the summer hat, even in the winter, is less conspicuous than the mask. “And we know what to do, right?” she says. She tells me that she’ll sit on the right side of the auditorium and I should sit anywhere to the left. She’ll wait on my cue, to create a stir, and while security descends on me, she’ll attack Michael and then leg it out the exit left of the stage. Our acts, completely isolated, a coincidence. Sorry, I’ll tell anyone who apprehends me, I swear down I don’t know the person who did that awful thing.

Alright, then. This is really happening. My convo with Saadia is replaying, though, and I ask Kaisley, “How about we get him on the hands?” She just looks at me with those never-present eyes, and then looks back at the school’s entrance.

She says to give it five minutes before I come in, and then she’s gone. I give it five minutes or so, just watching people trickle on into the school. One woman is giving me widow vibes, one student looks like they’ve grown up an orphan. Pure death energy in the air and ting.

The more I think about it, Michael hasn’t really done anything other than protest our protest. I could walk away. I could go the fuck home. But Kaisley would never speak to me again.

I skip up the steps and head on in through the revolving doors. There are the remains of something offensive on the wall. The new cleaners are having at it, and their cart, beside the turnstiles, is stacked with industrial chemicals, spray-nozzle bottles of all sizes that are spread like a scaled model of the Manhattan skyline. There is an assortment of labels. Skulls and bones. X’s. Warnings. Do not. Do not. Do not. And the cleaners—four of them, three women and a man, in their tabards and overalls—scrub at the spray paint as if their jobs depend on this. These cleaners are new, yeah, but shit, they already look just as tired as the ones the school had recently sacked; like-for-like replacements, just as eastern European as their predecessors, and just as low paid; they got them fat bags beneath their eyes, like they carry every setback in ’em.

I feel sick, like I’ve just swallowed my spit. Because I know how this is going to end. Because I know we’re really going to do this, and I know we’re going to get caught. And even if we don’t get caught today, someone—Khaled, Kothai, Wes—someone will grass on us. I done know.

The security guard by the turnstiles is clockin’ me—was clockin’ me even before my eyes fell on him. Manaman them looking at me like I might’ve done him something. There are a number of them in the lobby, in their blue blazers and stiff grey trousers, putting in extra hours since the school doubled the number of guards for the day. They’ve all got this new renewed vigilance about them. No, not renewed. It was never there before. This is new. This thing. This gaze.

This one clocking me, I’m gonna say he’s Nigerian. A lanky brudda. I’m gonna say he’s in his midforties. He’s still looking at me looking at the faded words on the wall. Looking at me like I’ve got two jaws. Maybe because I’ve stopped for too long, maybe because I haven’t shaken my head or lowered it in shame. I should wave him over. Over here. Yoo-hoo. Guilty as charged. Guilty in advance.

He turns away. Bredrin’s eyes darting everywhere, and I can’t be sure if his gaze lingers just a little while longer on the Arab students who pass by. I could just be making that up. Looking for stories where there aren’t any. I pass through the bloody turnstiles and head down the hallway. School always strikes me as a mash-up of the past and present. The building is clad with antiques, archaic radiators that choke and gurgle, industrial light fixtures that flicker so frequently they should carry epilepsy warnings. The walls are Victorian wood panels with portraits of white men in gilded frames; Sirs and Lords to some, men who must’ve have done something in the name of the British Empire or otherwise generously donated to the school. There are A4-sized posters taped to the walls between the oil paintings. They publicised upcoming lectures, things like “The Face of Islam After 7/7” and “The Hijack of the Palestinian Cause,” and old pointless posters, like the one still demanding the university’s cleaners receive a living wage, or the one that urges the school to loosen its restricted library hours.

The lecture theatre is in the basement at the end of the corridor; outside is a bust of its benefactor. Beside the door, in an A4-sized slip display, is the notice the israeli student society presents…. There’s a pocket of people with placards lined up outside the doors, chanting and stuff, handing out leaflets…that could be me on any other day. Even more security down here, just watching them. Good job Kaisley’s not trying to leave via this exit.

The room holds about two hundred and is three-quarters full—where did all these people come from? Seeing the crowd has me even more prang. There’s extra security inside too. And I’m looking at this security that’s been tripled and inside I’m shaking my head thinking: Nah, this ain’t the move. This is a madness. I’m looking to call it all off.

I spot Kaisley in the first row, or more like I spot the big summer hat. She must look so bait, so obvious, wearing that shit inside, in January. Michael is onstage, sitting with the four panellists, talking all that pre-talk good talk. Then he gets up and you can tell he is nervous as he begins to introduce the first speaker.

To tell the truth, I can’t hang on a single word this speaker, Benashel, is saying. I’m thinking about what distraction looks like. Do I stand up and say something offensive? No. Course not. Even I have my limits. But I’m here, and I shouldn’t be, and I am thinking about Michael, who may have a sister too, and how harm has its ripple effects, you get me? I’m thinking about someone at the hospital bedside him, his face all bandaged, his breath all shallow. I’m imagining Michael without a face. Skin melted. Lips seared shut. Imagining the chancellor’s office on the phone with public relations and administration. I’m imagining it already, the powers that be scrambling for the best image consultants that money can buy. It ain’t gonna help them. It’s all going to wind up in the press. They’re going to gather outside the university in significant numbers. Not local North London press, the Camden Times or whatever that shitty rag is called. Big time press. The Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Independent. They’re going to storm the castle. Not a thing will hold them back if Michael dies. What if he dies? Maybe it’s going to end with his death. The newspapers would kill for that, for a death. No pun intended. I’d be an accessory then. The beastmen—who, mind you, ain’t ever had a history of being partial to young Black men—will stick me in an interrogation room and be all, no-no-no, we know you know her, we’ve got the two of you on camera. Students can testify you were close…some say you were lovers. We’re gonna stick a few bruises on you until you tell the truth. And me on the other side of the table, trapped in a low and ugly light, full of embarrassment and fear, chuckling at that last part—the lovers part, that is.

Should call it off for real, but Kaisley though…she’s relying on me. Relying just as much on a flawed hypothesis too. She’s banking on the security guards to be in the right place and come after me. She is looking over her shoulder at me, looking at me like: What are you waiting for?

I think about what Kaisley said, about not really knowing who I am, and her not even knowing my name, my real Christian name, which isn’t even Richard. I was eleven years old when I buried my name. I’d spelt out the letters with the cuttings from old newspaper headlines and glued them to a sheet of paper. O-W-O-L-A-B-I. One who was born at a time of wealth. I’d never questioned it. I assumed my parents had been amusing themselves or, since they weren’t known for their humour, possibly being optimistic, improving the terms on their self-fulfilling prophecies. Whatever it was that they were thinking, I felt like the name was never mine, and so I took the paper, balled it up and buried it in a patch of grass behind our block of flats. It was a ceremonial gesture, a nudge towards who I thought I really was: Richard Aluko. And though my dad and I share this name, my mum never uses Richard for either of us. Dad is “Baba Owo”—father of Owo, her only son, and I am Owo.

Or at least I used to be. Fuck knows who I am now.

I try to think about anything else, which means I think about my sister. My family huddled in the living room the day after she took her life. My parents at other ends of the room, like boxers between rounds. Close friends of the family filling out the space between them, along with a handful of senior members from my mum’s church, the Celestial Church of Christ at Elephant & Castle, at least half the sisters in soutanas and matching white bonnets. The dim fog of light in the room, full of our disbelief and denial. My uncle David by my mum, who had just stopped crying for the first time in a long time and was silent, her chin on her chest, her plaits covering everything above the neck. Her eyes, when she looked up, I had never seen like that before—wide, wild, flushed red, and padded beneath with swollen skin. I remember the sound of primordial anguish. The women’s bodies as they joined in; sorrow in their shoulders, in their stomachs, in their hips, and in their feet. And many of their knees gave way as the room moved to collective prayer. One voice laid itself on top of another. I wasn’t feeling it, you get me? God and I were not on the best of terms. So I just had to duss, had to get out of there. Later, my mum threw quotes from the book of Job at me, “Therefore listen to me, you men of understanding: Far be it from God to do wickedness, And from the Almighty to commit iniquity.” Alright then, it was sorted, it wasn’t God’s fault. He said so himself.

I’m up, I’m on my feet without even realising, and it’s like I’m beside myself. I just start screaming, it’s all I can think to do to create a distraction, incoherent stuff. And the security guard in the left aisle must be on high alert, like their bosses must’ve stressed how they needed this shit to pass without incident, for their image and whatnot, because manaman comes rushing at me, like those ghosts in the Pac-Man game. I head to my right, knocking knees as I pass, people leaping up to let me pass and I just keep screaming out, looking off-key and shit, and everyone onstage has stopped because they don’t know what to do and they are just looking at me, and everyone in the audience too is looking at me like they don’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. And the security guard at the top of the steps is coming at me, and so is the one at the bottom by the stage, and the only way I can avoid them is to rush back into the seating.

And Kaisley’s taken the hat off and is looking at me like how everyone else is looking at me, like I’m skits, and I’m thinking: Am I skits? Did we not have a plan? Did we not talk about this? And of course we did.

So now I’m really looking at her and she’s not really looking at me as I push past people, knocking knees. I want to scream at her to do it, get it done, even though, really, I don’t want her doing shit. And I’m looking at her and she’s turned back around and is rocking in her chair as others have stood. But not much time to think about this, and I’m not quite sure what to do, and I am climbing over people into the next row to escape the security guards, and people are like oi, whatcha doing, but no one is trying to play hero and put their hands on me and maybe I am the Black man Kaisley thought I could be. More security guards are leaving their posts at the entrance and coming in, and people are getting up and making way and staring. Some of the outside protestors are starting to spill in, and are cheering like they know what it is all about.

I realise these security guards are up in age, some are overweight. They’re probably underpaid and not too keen on getting hurt for an insulting wage. I hustle around the seats dodging them and accidently hitting people and apologising and feeding off all the chanting. Kaisley isn’t even looking at all anymore. She’s pulled her knees up to her chest and is just rocking back and forth, back and forth, like she’s going to combust. And I stop running because in all the commotion Michael and the other guests are nowhere to be seen, but even if they were, I know now that she is not going to do it. That she was never going to do it, and that I couldn’t ask for anything better than this. Because nobody dies, nobody goes to the hospital, no one goes to jail. But I’ve got everything, I have her. She’ll come to me and we’ll come up with a story, we’ll explain how this day ended differently, and she’ll ask me what do you want? And I’ll say let’s not talk about it, but they’ll be no more sitting on the outside, no more handing out leaflets.

All the air leaves me. I can feel a shock of pain, my back against the back row of seats, bodies on top of me, lots of bodies, maybe not as old as I thought, but definitely overweight. I can feel the crush and the smell of musty wool. I see only the future: The handcuffs will chaff my wrist a little, yeah, but that’ll be okay. I might not know the person who my left arm is cuffed to, and I may forget the name of whoever is cuffed to my right, but I will be cuffed to someone who is cuffed to someone who is cuffed to Kaisley, and somewhere in that chain she’ll feel me. These same security guards will be standing over us, addressing us, English in a West African accent. Get up. What is all this? Get up or we’ll have you all arrested. Like my dad having a fit. We won’t move, not one of us. No one will have the key to the cuffs. More security guards. More threats to call the police. They’ll know better than to touch us. Sterner warnings from above. We will forcibly remove you. And they will. I won’t be the guy passing out leaflets when they do. That will be someone else—maybe Khaled! I’ll be one of them feeling the heave, the tug on the wrists as we’re pulled to our feet. I’ll open my eyes to see a crowd of onlookers. Our job will be done. “We do this for the oppressed!” someone will shout. But, to tell the truth, that will not be accurate. Man will know then, as I know now, that I won’t have anything more than an armchair concern for the oppressed dem. I will be doing it all for Kaisley, my big meaningful meaningless distraction.

“For fuck’s sake,” I manage to stammer from beneath the mountain of security guards on top of me. “You gonna let me breathe?”