Yeah, she was. Anika sighed, going to redo her school tie in the hallway mirror as she realised she’d miss out on her stalking that morning. The particular way her classmates seemed to tie theirs here still eluded her. Anyway, what did her mum want her to do – run giddily down the road and magically befriend Kwame and Zaya? Anika basically went straight into her exams at a new school, all while still processing moving from Streatham to East Sussex and now back again. Well, near enough. After five years away from London, this new place in Thornton Heath was far enough from their old flat that Anika didn’t know anyone local. She was deep in the cut of starting from scratch.
At school she might as well have been invisible, until she opened her mouth in class and heard herself through everyone else’s ears after so long away, now half sounding like Princess Di was her aunty.Hah.Her mother wished. Sometimes Anika wished she could have some kind of outlet to control the way people saw her – an invented persona, like a musician or an actor. But no. She was an observer and probably always would be. Shewatchedand then turned inwards. To the outside world she probably seemed passive and contained, but inside she felt like dry kindling ready to ignite.
When Anika and Zaya were paired up in Biology, it was hardly Edward and Bella dissecting a frog (there were rumours about Zaya, but Anika didn’t swing that way) but it forced them to interact more. Kwame’s sister obviously had no idea it would be Anika’s birthday the same day as the party, but it was better than spending her seventeenth watching Saturday night TV with her mum.
Was this situation right now much better, though? Hiding in a… what would you call this? A utility room? Who evenhadone of those? But then Anika hadn’t expected any houses in this area to have a conservatory either, even one as shabby as the one this utility room was built into the corner of. Nella was burning through her divorce money from Clive by renting their new place a short walk away from there, but in Anika’s opinion they’d have been better off back in Streatham in the pokey two-bed they’d been in before.
Even though the party was ten minutes from their house, her mother had instructed her not to walk home after it had finished. Anika pulled out her Nokia and stared at the time on the little screen. Nine-thirty? Had she really been in this room for nearly twenty minutes? Anika flipped the phone open, considering whether she should just ring Uncle Ernest in his taxi now. He could come get her when he was done with his next drop-off and then she’d get home at an hour that meant her mum would assume she’d been out making ‘friends-for-life’ …
Before she could scroll down past the three other phone numbers she had stored to get to her uncle’s, Anika heard a load of shouting coming from the party, even over the pounding of UK Funky, with ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ blending clumsily into Donae’o’s ‘Party Hard’. The music didn’t stop, but the shouts became punctuated by shrill feminine shrieks. The voices got louder, as if they were spilling into the solid glassy echo of the conservatory, which had previously been filled with couples slow-dancing to fast songs, grinding against the prefab walls. Anika reached a hand out like a reflex to flip off the light in the room. She pressed her ear to the door, but all she could make out against the pulse of the music was a jumble of voices escalating from tense joviality into a fever pitch of out-and-out fighting. One voice sounded familiar from class. And, of course, from watching and re-watching the short clip on Kwame’s Facebook of him jokingly freestyling. He patted out a beat on aTupperware box produced from his schoolbag, while Zaya spat a complex rhyme pattern, her cadence precise, her pitch low, joking in her rap about how often she was mistaken for a boy. The video had been shot outside the corner shop where Anika always volunteered to run errands in the hope she’d see him hanging around outside.
Kwame’s deep voice on the other side of the door was now repeating, ‘Allow it, man,’ with his usual mischievous ring of humour, but that was pressed out of the phrase as the fight continued. ‘Zay, ’llow it.’
Then suddenly another girl shouted, ‘Feds! Feds are out there. Oi, you lot …’ The melee got more frantic.
‘Out the back, bruv!’ Anika heard Zaya call, then the reply.
‘Nah, man, there’s one parked out there, too.’ Kwame again. Anika’s breathing started to grow shallow. How was she going to get out of there?Shit.Why hadn’t she just left before?
‘Fuck it, I’m jumping that fence. Don’t be a pussy! Come, man!’ she heard Zaya reply. There were more shouts and sounds of scrabbling, a long pause. Then …
Boom, boom, boom!
Anika sucked in a high-pitched gasp as someone pounded open-palm against the door she was still leaning against. She bolted away from it and spun around, staring at the shuddering wood.
Boom, boom, boom!
‘Who the fuck is in there, man? Let me in.Shit.Let me in, yeah?’
It was him. It was Kwame.
Chapter Four
Monday 2nd July
Anika’s eyelids fling open as she hears someone enter the room. It’s the nurse from earlier, holding a bag. Glancing at the clock on the wall, Anika realises she must have only been asleep for twenty minutes or so.
‘I think this is from your friend,’ the nurse says with a smile, holding up a Louis Vuitton leather duffle that could only have belonged to Shamz.
‘Yeah.’ Anika croaks out the word, sagging with relief. ‘Thank you.’
The nurse hands it to her before checking on the IV drips hanging next to the bed. Anika rummages in the bag Shamz has sent and sees pyjamas, a wash kit, several packets of the fruit Mentos that Shameeka knows are Anika’s favourite, a square Alexander McQueen skull-print silk scarf and a phone charger, alongside a scrawled note from Shameeka written on King’s College headed paper.
Babes, my freedom is being curtailed, they won’t let me up. Be there 1st thing tomorrow tho. Sorry about the scarf, was all I could find – Mai seems to have hidden her bonnets. Smh.
Love you. You’re gonna be fine xx
Anika smiles, then holds still for the nurse to take her temperature and check her blood pressure. After the nurse leaves, Anika contorts to reach the socket at the side of the bed toplug in the phone charger and then taps out a message of thanks to Shameeka, and asks if she could fill Tina in.
Although she’d initially been Shamz’s close friend, Tina has become one of Anika’s best mates too. Sweet, funny and loyal, not to mention five feet and ten inches of stunning St Lucian beauty, she was one of the few people where it seemed believable that shechoseto be single and play the field. Anika feels bad for not getting in touch with T directly, and even more guilty at not yet calling her mum, but she still feels too weak to make any more revelations tonight.
A couple of hours later the sky outside the small window has deepened with the night’s darkness, but Anika’s fitful slumber is interrupted by the nurses checking her vitals. Much as Anika is grateful to have the room to herself, as she lies awake she finds the quiet that has descended around her increasingly troubling. Locating her headphones, she connects them to her phone, nestling the buds into her ears. The shows on the radio-player app remain available for thirty days and she’s been re-listening to one recent episode ofCam Asiedu in the Morningin particular over and over again. Shuffling into the stiff cotton sheets of the mechanical bed, she turns her head so that the earbud is pressed in between the pillow and her ear. Forwarding to the part that she’s been listening to repeatedly, she concentrates as the final strains and piano notes of a beautifully meandering song by Sampha fades out. There’s a beat before Cam’s voice comes in again, low and rich as usual, but with the threat of a break in it. He speaks into silence rather than over the rumble of hip-hop beats he normally uses between the songs.
‘That one … that one hits me differently, I’m not gonna lie,’ he says slowly. ‘I dunno, man. Sometimes it’s just out of nowhere, you know? Tell you what, it’s important to remember that this can all just “poof”.’ She imagines him miming something disappearing, then exhales shakily. Anika keeps listening. ‘Iheard that song for the first time seven years ago …’ He sighs hard, regret sinking into the microphone as he does. ‘On a really significant day. We sometimes just assume we’re going to be here for ever, man, and that everyone around us will be, too. Just … Like I was saying earlier, the film has a lot of deeper meaning for me.’ He laughs incredulously. ‘Still sounds mad talking about this, you know. Like, it’s very mad that I’ve written a whole movie! But shout to everyone who worked on the soundtrack and to Sampha for letting us adapt this beautiful song over the credits, man. It’s been a long road, but it’s kind of perfect that we’ll be hitting screens end of next month.’ Cam pauses and then sucks in a long, trembling breath, his next words bathed in forced levity. ‘Oh, man. So. Thanks a lot to everyone who’s been reaching out, who’s been hitting me up to let me know you’re planning to go and seeEnd of the Day. My bredrin Maxwell Lumumba has directed the hell out of it, trust. The next few weeks we’ll have lots coming up on it, so keep an eye out. Uh, thanks to my producer, Shan, for allowing me for a second here, I know that was mad sentimental, far as our usual radio fare goes …’
He laughs more heartily and the J Dilla instrumental kicks in as the bed of music resumes under his voice. The show recovers some of its usual morning pep, but the moment still hits Anika with a wave of emotion. Cam’s vulnerability draws her to him, but also triggers in Anika the question of her own mortality.We sometimes assume we’re going to be here for ever.But what if this, now, in this hospital, is going to be the full stop to her life? Would she be happy with it, her relationships? She thinks about her friends. Her mother. Her father … Her half-brother, Kwesi, who she could have tried so much harder with. If things ended now, would she be happy with what she’s achieved?
Whathasshe achieved?
