Brother Read online

  “You’re going to do this,” Francis said, his hand on Jelly’s neck.

  —

  Her father was working late shifts that August, and so, for the first time, Aisha invited me to her home. Even though the sun had set, their unit was still hot, with only one source of light from the stove risked. So much in their home reminded me of mine. The neatness, the patterned chesterfield, the glass bowl of lentils set out in the kitchen to soak for the next day’s meal, the used tea bag kept on a square of foil for a second use. There were photos of Aisha receiving one award or the other. There was a shelf of books, and also a record player with albums.

  “Look,” she said, sitting with me on the chesterfield. “We’ve really got to talk about your hair. What are you doing exactly? No, what are you trying to do?”

  “It’s, you know, a hi-top fade.”

  “You look like Gumby. A flop-head Gumby.”

  “Francis used to pull it off.”

  “Well you’re not Francis, now, are you?”

  She went on laughing for a bit. She told me that when she used to sit in her enrichment classes, the girls would spend a third of their time on the composition and calculus, and two-thirds of their time talking about Francis. “The stuff that came out of their mouths,” she said. “I’m talking predatory, Michael. I don’t care what reputation for toughness your brother has, he wouldn’t stand a chance with those girls. They’d eat him alive. They’d kill, even now, for an introduction.”

  “Would you like an introduction too?” I asked quietly.

  She stopped laughing, and her smile seemed to change.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well?” she answered.

  She took me to her bedroom, which was also neat, which also contained books, and she shut the door behind us. Without warning, she lifted off my shirt and then did the same with her own. She pushed down her shorts and did the same to me, and we stood there for a moment. She was beautiful, but when she came closer I flinched. She drew my hand towards her body, and I found the scar near the bottom her stomach that might have been an appendix operation, the first part of her I touched.

  Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I understood that I was supposed to be good at this, was supposed to know, instinctively, what to do. But I didn’t. We lay together on the bed for a long time, learning how to touch and kiss each other. She gently pushed my head lower down her body, and afterwards she found protection, which I fumblingly put on inside out. She nodded at me and kept her eyes open when I entered her, and she turned her face away, and when she turned back her eyes were closed and her mouth reached up for mine.

  Later, she guided my hand to where it needed to be, and in the end helped herself, and afterwards we lay on the bed without speaking. It was not her first time, and when I kissed her fingers gently, over and over again, she had her own smell upon them.

  IT IS NOW TWO HOURS AFTER the last of the partygoers left, and while Mother sleeps in her room I’ve been cleaning the kitchen and living room. I’ve opened the windows to let the smoke out, put furniture back where it belongs. It’s all still a mess. Crumbs scattered all about, but I’ll wait until morning to vacuum. Bottles of wine and beer have been abandoned, and I’ve helped myself to them. Mother’s suitcase is still yawning open on the coffee table, and only now, with drink in me, do I permit myself a look.

  Old things. Things to remember, and maybe, just as much, things to forget. Postcards and concert tickets. Mementoes and relics. A small maroon box filled with glass jewellery, pretty but worthless. There are many photographs, of course, some loose and some bound together with paper clips and elastics, pictures of Mother and me and Francis, but I try to ignore them. I instead take out the school notebook that Mother has for some reason saved from her childhood. It has the meaningless title of Standard A on the cover, and inside are words written so beautifully and carefully, as if, for the girl who wrote them, absolutely everything were at stake.

  Daffodil.

  Rochester.

  Empire.

  Preposterous.

  Beside each word is a quick check mark, and then a brief note at the end of the page. “Very good,” it says.

  I’m still sitting on the couch when Aisha returns alone around one, using her own key. I signal that Mother is sleeping in her room, and she comes in slowly. I ask her where Jelly is, and she says he’s getting something for the carpet stain. He’ll be back in a moment, just to pick up his stuff if he has to go. I don’t respond. I’m not going to be moved right now by pity. She joins me on the far end of the couch, but she reaches closer for the photographs I’ve laid out, relatives from the village where her own father was born. She finds a picture of Mother as a teenager in a dress maybe blue or green, her eyes looking strangely into the distance, her thin arm held up against the power of the sun.

  “She was beautiful, Michael,” she says. “She still is. Do you know about the white building in the background? Did you go when you visited? It’s the church of the Spiritual Baptists. Shouter Baptists, they used to be called. I learned about them when I was there. For a long time, their services were outlawed in Trinidad. They couldn’t worship the way they chose to. They couldn’t praise and weep loudly.”

  Her brow is furrowed and she’s making a sound in her throat like difficult swallowing. She’s crying, I know, but when I touch her shoulder she shakes her head angrily. She clears her throat and swallows. When she speaks again, her voice is hoarse.

  “My father lived only a short walk away from that church, but he told me nothing about it. He told me so little about his past. He didn’t mention how his parents couldn’t always feed their children. He never mentioned his dead brother and dead sister, both taken in childhood, or that his aunt had “entertained” American soldiers to survive. He never explained why he worked his whole life here as a security guard. Even his cancer was something I had to learn, too late, from a nurse.”

  I can see him now. It was the winter before that last summer, and I was returning home when I saw Francis standing with Samuel on the sidewalk near the Waldorf. When I got near, my brother gave me a tight nod, but Samuel smiled, took off his hat, and smoothed his sparse and greying hair. “Good evening,” he said. And then, incredibly, he started to sing. He sang, badly and in a lowered voice, and it was a song in French, I could remember that much, but I couldn’t name it, and anyway my attention was all on Francis. It’d been a difficult week, and my brother had been quarrelling with Mother again. He could be set off, I knew, by anything offered from an adult, anything perceived as educated posturing or veiled mockery. But as Samuel sang, all my brother did was stare out at the street, awkward, even a bit shy. The singing lasted only for a few seconds. It was an in-joke of sorts, I assumed, but Samuel seemed to recognize that Francis wasn’t enjoying the experience. He glanced at me, and with a quick nod, politely took his leave.

  I want to tell Aisha about this moment. I want the sort of conversation I’ve hoped to have with her since she’s come back. But now I hear footsteps on the porch and see the front door opening. It’s Jelly. He’s carrying a spray bottle of stain remover. He closes the door behind him but remains standing on the doormat, as if unwilling to step in farther. Aisha smiles, beckons him in, and he removes his shoes, goes to the kitchen to wet a cloth and then over to the stain to gingerly test for dampness. He reads the instructions on the spray bottle, squinting at the fine print.

  Aisha huffs a laugh through her nose. She gets up from the couch and goes into my bedroom. Jelly has begun spraying and scrubbing at the stain when she returns with a light green flyer. It features the image of a microphone set up on a stage. And over this is a list of performers. Jah-Righteous, Sister Sojourner, Dutty Bookman. Second from the bottom: DJ Djeli.

  “Djeli,” Aisha says. “As in a griot. A storyteller with memory. A few days after my father’s death, I was downtown, just walking, mourning, pretty out of it still. I heard someone call from behind me, ‘Yo, sister,’ and when I turned, a boy nervousl
y offered this flyer. He apologized for shouting out. He suggested that I help spread the word, ‘You know, like, maybe if you have a son or daughter or something.’ Blind little fuck.”

  “It was Scott,” says Jelly. “Such a good kid. He meant no offence.”

  “Well, I guess I wasn’t looking my best,” says Aisha. “Anyway, I took the flyer, but wondered why I did. And why the next night I showed up at that tiny basement club in the city. There were maybe three dozen of the expected sorts, students, artists, activists, nobodies. There was music, some good, some not so very good. There was poetry, some good, some not so good. But I enjoyed myself. I felt connected somehow.”

  I look at the name once more. Djeli. Did the boys at Desirea’s always mean it this way? Did they know? I look at Jelly, still scrubbing, seemingly only spreading the purple wider on the carpet. He sighs.

  “I don’t have to stay,” he says.

  “Look,” I say. “I’m sorry I got angry. I get what you were all trying to do. You both can stay another night if you need, okay? I’m just trying to warn you that we have to go slow with Mother. It’s not easy for her. She’s broken. Really broken.”

  Aisha nods. She shuffles through the photographs still in her hand and finds one of Francis from the late ’70s. It shows my brother in an Afro and a wide-collared shirt, grass green and orange. She shows the picture to Jelly. The look I caught earlier in the night returns. A sadness implicating.

  THE NIGHT AFTER AISHA AND I first touched, the boys at Desirea’s decided Jelly needed a dress rehearsal, a practice throw-down, with a real audience. Aisha and I walked together through the trashed-up glare of the avenue, the night heat raw upon our skins. As soon as we reached the back of the strip mall, we could see and hear it, light and music radiating through the overlapping flyers and leaflets posted all over the windows. I pulled open the door to find a press of people inside. Dru let Aisha in, but then put out his arm to block me.

  “ID, please,” he said.

  “Screw off,” I said.

  “You watch your fucking language, young man.”

  Desirea’s had transformed, amazingly, into something like a club, with borrowed speakers and amplifiers and mikes. Thin cloths were draped over lamps, creating coloured shadows over everything. Jelly was doing his thing with mixers and turntables on a makeshift raised stage, and the crowd was rocking bold and free and close to one another. Some boy I didn’t recognize was saying something into a jacked-in mike, and a big girl, hair done up Golden Beauty, snatched the mike away. “Give it here,” the boy said, but she ignored him, and other girls cheered. Golden Beauty spoke into Jelly’s ear, and he nodded and found her a break beat. You could see her lips moving for a while as she rehearsed a few lines in her head, and then she started rhyming in a sharp, high voice, hands carving out words in the air.

  “Youth of Eglinton,

  “Youth of Kingston,

  “Youth of Compton,

  “Youth of Brooklyn,

  “Youth of Scarborough…”

  I saw Francis next to Jelly as his man switched up the music, knitting together two completely different tracks, old and new, Caribbean and American and now African soul, and then a cheer rising from the crowd. Francis calling out “Volume!” and others joining the call. And now Aisha too, sweeping her hair from her face, and saying, “Volume!” Every voice in the place together.

  Volume!

  FIVE

  Around six o’clock in the morning, just as that party at Desirea’s was winding down, the cops showed up. Visits to Desirea’s had happened before, according to the boys. And there was at least a routine to these intrusions. But this time, in the wake of the shootings and resulting crackdown, the cops were cold-eyed with purpose. They appeared in force at the front door, six of them at once in bulky vests, and when they asked to be let in we understood that it wasn’t really a request. They entered our space and the shop suddenly became small, the air changed. The music was cut, the faces of the crowd once glowing now expressionless.

  “What’s this about?” asked Dru.

  “A neighbour smelled pot,” explained a cop. “We’re searching for drugs.”

  “Might I suggest an office on Bay Street?”

  “Stand by the wall, funnyman. Empty your pockets. The rest of you too.”

  Everyone started moving slowly to the wall, but one cop didn’t like the way Jelly was dawdling at his turntable, taking two of his precious records off the turntables and putting them into their sleeves. The cop moved over to him, tapped him hard. “Hey, genius,” he said.

  Francis jerked around. “Don’t touch him!” he shouted.

  A dangerous moment of quiet in Desirea’s. Everyone, even the police, silent and staring. I felt a single cold itch of sweat creep down the back of my shirt. The cop who had touched Jelly looked younger than the rest.

  “Excuse me?” he asked, a smile on his face.

  Francis didn’t answer, and his stare grew hard and unblinking, moisture rimming his eyes. I stared helplessly at the hand of the younger cop and its distance to the holstered gun on his belt. An impossibly long period of time until the cop asked again, “Excuse me?” and then an older cop said something to him under his breath.

  “Okay, Francis,” the younger cop returned. “You and your friend move over there to the wall. Empty your pockets like the rest.”

  My brother and Jelly obeyed. And the search proceeded quickly. There was little to find. A roach clip was discovered in the Professa’s pocket, which Dru quickly explained was, in fact, a hair clip, and proceeded to demonstrate this on a boy with dreads, who promptly slapped it out of his hands and gave him a look. The older cop rolled his eyes but didn’t call anyone out. When the search was finished, he thanked us for allowing his crew to enter.

  “Oh no,” Dru said. “Thank you, good officers.”

  For a few seconds after the cops left, no one in the shop moved or spoke. I stared at Francis, still wet-eyed and shaking, with fear or anger or both. And only when Jelly approached him and touched his arm did he swallow thickly and nod.

  —

  Francis could be pushed. Everyone knew it. It was a sense you had, growing up in the Park, a sense famously confirmed one evening when Francis was sixteen. It was the week before Christmas, and Mother had just come home from work. She had put on lipstick and the pleated skirt she sometimes wore on “occasions.” She was humming a bit of parang, the Spanish-sounding music we knew was played at this time of year in Trinidad, and she seemed happy, or at least determined to be. She quickly reheated and served what remained of yesterday’s lentil stew, and when Francis said, “You’re hardly leaving any for yourself,” she claimed she wasn’t hungry. She then warned us it was probably going to be a quiet Christmas this year, one with a nice meal but perhaps no gifts. It was just “the economy,” she explained. She would find new work and hopefully get overtime hours after the holidays.

  Sitting at the table, Francis got quiet, and that was all, just quietness.

  Mother at first just continued humming. Then she put down her fork, shut her eyes in anger. “Grow up,” she whispered. “Be a man.”

  Francis stayed quiet for a bit longer, and then he rose and began putting on his coat. I rushed to put on my own jacket and followed him out the door.

  A sleety rain was blowing hard against our faces, the sky the bitter colour of road salt. Francis and I walked twenty minutes to the nearest 7-Eleven, but after we bought a hot dog each and ate them inside, the security guard said we’d have to go or else he’d call the cops. We ended up walking to a bus shelter a block away, and we sat shivering inside on the bench without saying anything. We stared at the dripping doorway, our hands in our pockets, our necks and cheeks hunched into our coats, our hands pulled into our sleeves for warmth. My shoes were soaked, and I kept curling and uncurling my toes to keep them from freezing.

  A woman stepped into the shelter. She was nicely dressed, despite the weather, and she was carrying shopping bags that had colour
ed ropes for handles. She obviously hadn’t seen Francis and me through the grime-streaked glass of the shelter, and now that she found herself in close quarters with us, she looked a bit uncomfortable. Francis was taking up two spaces on the bench, and he moved so she could sit, but she looked deliberately away. He tried to catch her eye, and even at one point gestured to the available seat, but this only seemed to scare her more. She left, walking down the street, maybe to the next shelter, her heels clicking on the sidewalk.

  “It’s not Mother’s fault,” I said. “She’s doing her best.”

  “I know it’s not her fault, shithead! What kind of guy do you think I am?”

  A group of youths approached the shelter. They were hard to recognize at first, but they were bigger than us. They were dressed in heavy oversized shirts and loose jeans that hung out from the bottoms of their unbuttoned coats. One stood up on the pedals of a bike that was way too short for him, the handlebars done up with ragged black tape. They were lit hard from behind by the caged security light on the back of an apartment building so that as they approached they seemed to have no faces, just darkness outlined by glare.

  “We should go,” I said to Francis.

  “Nobody owns a bus shelter,” said Francis.

  It wasn’t the right time to fight over the question, but I stayed, hoping that the group would just pass us by. Instead they crowded at the doorway, blocking us from leaving. Up close, they weren’t so menacing. They were people we knew, neighbourhood boys who had learned to carry themselves tough. One of them flicked a lighter, and a huge orange flame lit the other smiling faces while the shadows danced and quivered on the glass of the shelter. The smallest, a youth who called himself Scatter, wore shades that gave him reflective bug eyes. A wicked smile when he saw me.

  “What’s up, bitch?” he said.

  There was laughter then. Mean and throaty laughter. One kid showed a big white wad of gum in his mouth. Another one was missing a bunch of his front teeth, though he must have been fourteen at least. Then the laughter faded and there was an awkward pause when I guess I was supposed to answer.