What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (phonics story books txt) 📕

come home to help shoulder his father’s boorishness. This time it was Kwesi he was avoiding. He knew that Kwesi would be looking to tell him that he had punked out. Fine, he would cope with that later. God, he thought to himself, he was tired of people wanting things from him. He was tired of hiding out against it all.

“Cool, cool,” Carla said, throwing him twenty dollars, “but don’t make a mess, eh, please, please.” She and Tuyen had to take their chances when he got too creative.

“I know you people don’t eat unless I’m here, you know! You two are just lazy, man. Look at this,” he said, holding up a loaf of stale bread from Carla’s kitchen. “How old is that?”

“Tuyen will help.” Carla laughed.

“Hell, no, I won’t. I have work to do.”

Carla took the wheels of her bicycle down from the wall. “Figure it out.” She hooked them onto the frame in the hallway, gathered her knapsack, and clanked down the stairs. “Later, people.”

Upstairs Oku looked out the window to watch her go before asking Tuyen.

“Why you figure she doesn’t like your pictures?”

“Issues, man, issues. I don’t think it’s personal. I don’t take it personal or anything.”

“Yeah, but why do you think?”

“I don’t know.” Tuyen didn’t want to venture. She didn’t talk about her own things, and she didn’t want this intimacy with Oku.

“Secret, eh?” He wanted to know what Tuyen knew, but he didn’t want to appear overly curious. He looked at her over his slightly raised arm, but she was noncommittal. “Come go to Kensington with me then.” When she hesitated, not wanting to keep on with the same conversation, he gave her a look of truce and became his joking self again. “Hey, you wanna eat? I can’t carry all the bags, can I?”

“Not to mention you don’t want to meet Jackie and Reiner.”

It almost slipped out of him, but he kept his silence. He didn’t want to tell Tuyen about making love to Jackie. He wanted to hold all they’d done in the time it happened. The minute he said anything about it, he knew it would disappear. So he allowed himself a joking boast.

“Girl, I’ve got that under control. I’m scoping it out. Don’t you worry. When I come on that it will be like a motherfucker.” Even this felt ugly to him, like an intrusion or a betrayal, so he said no more.

“All right, big Daddy Mac. Hang on a sec, wait here, I’ll get my stuff.”

“Sure, sure, I’m right behind you.”

“No, no, wait, I’ll …”

“Whoa! What the fuck is that?”

Tuyen’s door had been closed, and as she opened it, Oku had a glimpse of a line of photographs of the same face strung across the room.

“Don’t look! It’s not ready yet.” Tuyen’s voice was slightly panicked. “Hang on, I’ll get my bag, okay?” She closed the door behind her. After a few moments of rummaging around inside, she came out again.

“Hey, no sweat,” Oku said. “I know the creative thing, you know.”

“Yeah,” Tuyen offered, and nothing else.

As they opened the door to the alley, they saw Kumaran waiting for them.

“Hey, man, lend me that music you were playing. What was it again?”

“Ornette Coleman, ‘The Jungle Is a Skyscraper,’ man.”

“Fantastic. Sweet.”

“Give it to you when I get back. I want it back though, okay?”

“No doubt, man, but come on, man, just get it for me, huh?”

“Okay. All right.” Oku ran up the stairs and was back in the alley in a minute.

“Don’t forget, man, I need it back, like today.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Kumaran’s happiness followed them down the alley.

The streetcar was squealing by. The profiles of its passengers struck Tuyen as another idea for her installation. Then she remembered the face in her studio and quickly shoved those thoughts aside.

NINETEEN

JAMAL WAS ON THE PHONE. He’d been languishing now for two months at Mimico. There were cracks in his voice where his bravado was leaking out. Carla had gone to his hearing in the courthouse on Jarvis Street. He sat with an uninterested slouch in the Plexiglas prisoner’s box. The hearing was routine—a postponement until his lawyer could appear, then another postponement until the police discovery. The Crown imposed bail conditions Carla couldn’t possibly meet on her own.

“When you coming to see me?” he said over the phone.

“I can come on Saturday. I got to pull some long shifts.”

“Oh …”

“What’s up, Jamal? You okay?”

“Nothin.’ Nothin,’ same old, same old.” He giggled a bit.

“Did Nadine come to see you yet?” She had expected Nadine to pick up a bit of the slack.

“Yeah, she came, but she didn’t have no ID so they didn’t let her in.”

“Oh, shame.”

“It’s nothing. She left me some money. Didn’t want to see her anyway.”

“Oh, don’t say that …” Carla stopped herself. She was not going to fall into that trap with Jamal any more. “You holding it together, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Look, Carla, ah, anyway, you know, you could get me out?”

“Jamal, I don’t have the money, you know that, right?”

“Yeah, yeah …”

“This time it’s big. They want big money and …”

“Okay, okay, no biggy, eh? Just come and see me, okay?” He sounded plaintive. Carla felt an opening in her chest.

“You know I will. You know I will. No doubt. Right?”

“Okay. See ya.” He hung up, trying to sound light.

Carla had been trying to come up with the stomach to go talk to her father. Nadine had been unable to get him to bail Jamal out of Mimico—there was clearly no respect left there, no leverage. Apart from that, the month had passed with a kind of calm. Ironically, she didn’t have to worry about Jamal. When he was out on the street, she lived with constant anxiety about the next phone call, the next trouble. Now she at least knew where he was.

But on the phone he had sounded jittery and lonely. He had taken himself so far away from her, she could not even be sure of her readings of him. Was it nostalgia on her part to read his