Honey(47)

She takes her time changing into denim shorts and a jumper. She collects her belongings, humming as she goes—that 50 Cent tune was catchy. She is careful to wipe down the surfaces and, re-counting the cash, she takes one and a half thousand to cover her Soho House membership, an extra two hundred as a tip, and throws the remaining money on the bed.

She uncuffs one hand and leaves the key on the bedside table. She lifts and drops the hand a few times.

“You’ve just got to live, laugh, and love, eh, Henry?” It makes her laugh.

Walking over to the window, she breathes in the street and looks back on him. In the duller light he appears porcelain-like—bloated—a chunk of moon. There’s something intoxicating to the air after death.

She closes the window and—before leaving—slips a peach-stemmed dahlia from its vase.

“For Venus.”





.

The thing with being a young Black girl is, the world isn’t made for you. There was no foundation for you in Boots. You, the textbooks say, didn’t accomplish anything until Rosa Parks sat on a bus. You’re rude or you’re a fetish or you’re too much. Can you be quieter, please. Can you be smaller, please.

But the thing about the world not being made for you is, you see it for what it is: how the pieces of power slot together. You start to ask—why?

Why? And you peel back the histories. You learn that the textbooks don’t speak to truth; that f-r-e-e-d-o-m is a word you gave the world.

Are we really to believe the slavers got a conscience and liberated the slaves?

No. Because you did that.

But power wants people to forget the part you played—the wars of spirit you started—and you understand. That’s the game. So you learn to play the game. To soften your voice and wear your hair “neater.” You tell the boys, yes I like it when you touch me like that. You tell the officer, no sir, I was just walking home. Make them think you’re one of them. Make them think you’re not onto them.

But r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n isn’t a word of the French, or the Americans. It’s Caribbean. It’s cashew apple sweet on the tongue of Cécile Fatiman. You know this. Malcolm X taught you things. Sojourner Truth taught you things.

Ain’t I a woman? You ask yourself over and over. Because “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone; these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again.”

The only difference is, Yrsa’s not interested in right side up or wrong side down. She’s—

well—it’s hard to say quite what she’s interested in. Call it redemption

call it rage

call it sport





to [email protected]

[email protected]

Mon, 30 May, 00:12 (today)

i know what you’ve done





VI


It was high. The aftershocks of elation. Nothing touched her for days. Drenched light. First you watch, counting the hours, the afternoons and evenings, but no one comes for you. So you stop counting and start remembering, his eyes, the still air, the crackle of the body. It doesn’t make the news, only his fiancée’s talking about it. Bank cards, faces, drugs, nothing can be sourced. But then again, no one’s looking. And she’s fresh open and whole, for days, and days, and then it’s— the “i” in the email that distresses her most, the deliberate overriding of autocorrect. No full stop. An untraceable IP. Comic Sans. It’s clearly pathological. She hasn’t left her room. Between marking exam essays and not sleeping she’s been going over and over the details. All movements, cameras, mistakes. Going over and over. She needs sweetness.

Stepping out of the sweet shop and onto King’s Parade, Yrsa leans against its window, dipping into her paper bag of licorice allsorts. People pass by her, and back by her. Tourists with their cameras, students with their end-of-year delight—an older couple talking about where to have lunch. Anyone could have seen her. Richardson, it was broad daylight. Hugh, all those college rooms. She takes a piece of black-and-yellow licorice.

Although, there’s no saying this is about, you know, the dead bodies. It’s not like she’s always been a saint. She once gave someone chlamydia even though she suspected she had it. Plus, it could just be departmental drama. She’s basically used up Oliver’s box of organic Rooibos.

The day is white with cloud and she takes a blue sweet. But if it is, you know, about the bodies, then—what with it being from someone who knows her name, someone who knows her occupation—it would be a massive. fucking. problem.

He was showing me this diagram he’d made of the fall. Eliot, of course, she’s been thinking a lot about Eliot. And then there’s @therealman, her and him were in touching distance the night of Mack. But then what’s with the email? Why not go straight to the police, or the internet? Is she about to be blackmailed? She’s only got ?496 in her Monzo.

The licorice is making her feel sick but she keeps going. Another orange one, a blue one. The overripe taste of aniseed. She wants to feel full of something, her period’s late.

Ida, noticing Yrsa hasn’t been leaving her room much, insisted this morning that she come and meet them later at the pub. She agreed as she knows she needs to act more normal than she is. On finishing the last allsort she starts walking, watching the eyes of people as she goes.