Blue Bad Love

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-913090-38-8
Verlag: Jacaranda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Reihe: Twenty in 2020

A young woman living in London, Ekuah loves deeply and loves hard, yet with each romantic encounter she is left feeling increasingly unmoored and adrift. She struggles in her love for Dee Emeka, a gifted musician, who is both passionate and distant in the way he loves her back. Confirming her worst fears about the unstable foundation of their relationship, he suddenly disappears from her life. Heartbroken, she is left to pick up the pieces, while searching for new validations and preoccupations from others. But when, against a backdrop of enigmatic, poetic, nights in London, Venice, Accra and Paris, she finds an unexpected new love in the form of Jay Stanley, Ekuah re-focuses on her journey to meaningful love. She is determined to feel deeply again, but can she handle the vulnerability and forgiveness that comes with falling in love?

Maame Blue is a Ghanaian Londoner, writer. As well as co-hosting Headscarves and Carry-ons-a podcast about black girls living abroad-she regularly runs social media campaigns for www.bmeprpros.co.uk and blogs at www.maamebluewrites.com. In 2018 she won the Africa Writes x AFREADA flash fiction competition for her story Black Sky. She has since been published in AFREADA, Afribuku, and Memoir Magazine; with stories forthcoming in Storm Cellar Quarterly and Litro Magazine. She is also the winner of the 2021 Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blue, Maame

Leseproben

3.

I was a bag of nervous energy waiting for Dee’s call. I sat uncomfortably in the idea that he might never materialise again, that I had imagined the thing between us that lasted mere seconds, the thing I couldn’t get out of my head. A whole month passed before I heard from him again. I played it cool and pretended not to remember who he was when he called. He saw right through it of course, and so we began.

Our phone calls set the scene for my falling for him, his voice an ethereal thing that I could mix in with whatever my imagined idea of him was that day. We talked about our friends, our degrees, and briefly, our previous romantic entanglements. I was a novice by most of my peer’s standards, dating two boys in secondary school to very little consequence. Dee on the other hand had already slept with four girls, and I pushed down the fear this elicited in me. When it came to love, I imagined that we were equal novices, though he never confirmed this out loud. I felt we were two sides of the same coin; he didn’t know how to be alone just as I didn’t know how to be with someone. And for all the telephone conversations that we had over many weeks, it wasn’t until we saw each other again for the second time that the pieces of him began to come together for me.

It was January, just after the Christmas break. I returned to my halls a few days before lectures were due to begin—partly to get a head start on some reading, partly to get away from the frosty atmosphere between my parents. Dee called me that night as I was warming some tomato soup, saying he was on his way to a local gig and could he crash at mine afterwards, so that he didn’t have to do a late-night journey home? He asked it so casually I immediately enquired what time and wondered out loud if he wanted to order some food, as if it were something we had already agreed upon. It had not been, of course, and in fact up until that point we had barely discussed the two of us as any kind of subject, let alone the notion of sleepovers.

Instead I had been fantasising about him: what he was doing on the day to day, what song he heard when he thought of me, whether he told his friends about “the girl from Lewisham”—a moniker he had given me during one phone call that I clung to far too desperately. I noted with vague interest how he had grown larger in my mind during those telephone-wired weeks, with university and friends quickly becoming secondary story arcs that only had half of my attention.

That evening he appeared in front of my building. I watched him park his beat-up Peugeot from the window, butterflies present and accounted for in my gut. I was full of the kind of anxiety that was eventually only reserved for him. It felt like a warning that something dangerous but exciting was about to happen, and nothing was going to stop me from letting it. A kind of gentle madness.

I waited for him to ring the bell, buzzed him up, and then walked to the end of the hallway to let him onto our floor of self-contained bedrooms. We exchanged a brief hello as if we were colleagues not friends, before he followed me to my room. He looked different, unshaven and dishevelled, without that forced air of self-assurance that he had possessed the first time we met. He appeared uneasy as he surveyed my room, removing his coat and running his hand over his whole head before smiling at me weakly. He apologised for the lateness and how tired he was, and I told him I had ordered pizza—having poured my soup away as soon as our phone call had ended.

The pizza arrived twenty minutes later, and we sat on my bed eating it, watching Tom Hanks play a giant piano on my tiny television. We finished eating halfway through the film and although it remained on, there was a silent tension between us that quickly became unbearable. I stood up and picked up the empty pizza box, placing it beside my waste paper basket, afraid of what would happen if I didn’t keep my hands busy. He shifted on the bed and then launched into a detailed account of the band that had followed his set that night. They were doing Prince covers and he couldn’t decide if he liked them or not. I asked a few questions, trying to remain interested and keeping an eye on the time. Eventually we got onto the subject of his parents and what they thought of his musical aspirations.

“They’re musicians, aren’t they?”

I tried to recall something from our phone conversations about them, but his response was a frown in my general direction.

“Nah. My mum’s in the church choir, that’s about it. My dad used to play the piano, or organ or something… I don’t know.”

“Do you see him much?”

“Not really. He calls my sis sometimes, tells her he wants us to visit him in Lagos. Every few months he’ll remember that we exist.”

“Oh.”

“He’s not exactly dad of the year.”

“Do you... miss him?”

He hesitated, looking at me, wondering whether I could be trusted with his reply. We hadn’t really talked about parents before, nothing beyond me relaying my vague annoyance with my own during that first return home at the Christmas break, my irritation amplified since living away for three months. He said very little about his mum, only that he missed her cooking. I tried to coax more out of him over the phone, but he was monosyllabic. Yet now, sat on the edge of my bed in the middle of the night, he seemed ready to divulge, in his way.

“Not anymore.”

“Would you meet up with him, if he came back to visit?”

He looked at me incredulously, like I had uttered something offensive.

“Of course. He’s still my dad. He’s been crappy but—yeah, he’s my dad.”

“Okay.”

Sitting beside each other, I was acutely aware of how our thighs were pressed lightly together. He looked down at his hands and spoke again, this time in a low voice.

“When I was about 10, he came back to London for a few months, took me and my sis to Maccy D’s, we were ecstatic. Then we went to his mate’s house, he had all these instruments and my dad was picking up each one and playing them—guitar, piano, did a minute on the drums, bass, it was wild. I genuinely thought he was a superstar. Even made up in my head that that’s why he didn’t live with us, because he was busy making music. Dumb kids’ stuff innit.”

“It’s not dumb it’s—”

“Naively optimistic?”

He raised his eyebrow at me, literally snatching the words from my mouth and causing me to laugh out loud.

“It’s not wrong though, is it?”

“Depends on how you look at it.”

He pulled a face afterwards, as if he didn’t like what was fluttering through his mind but couldn’t quite shake it. He rubbed the flat of his palm against his nose suddenly, and then asked quietly if it was alright if he went to sleep as he was knackered. I nodded a little too enthusiastically, switched the TV off and headed into the bathroom to change. When I came out, he was wearing just his boxer shorts and socks. He looked down at the bed and asked me what side I preferred to sleep on. I couldn’t tear my eyes away, taking in the whole of him before mumbling something about wanting to be closer to the wall, and then crawling into the bed as if to demonstrate. I felt him slip in after me, our thighs pressing together again before he readjusted his position. There was zero wiggle room in my single bed. I faced the wall and tried to think of anything else but him lying next to me, breathing softly, possibly already asleep. It was a useless effort on my part of course; his toned torso, a maze of muscle and strength, the dark blue boxers with the bulge that was hard to ignore, they mixed with my thoughts and I gave into my urge to leave the bed and run back into the bathroom.

Alone in front of the mirror, I splashed water on my face and took deep breaths, trying to slow my thumping heart, cool down my rapidly heating skin. A storm was brewing inside of me. If I could just touch him, I would be happy. I didn’t want anything else but some indication that he felt the same way as I did. I had, thus far, been floating in a stream of uncertainty. He remained that mysterious boy whose text messages I sometimes dissected with girlfriends. He had a sophisticated arrogance that meant other boys my age often paled in comparison. Now he was in my bed and I couldn’t deal with it. I would have to kick him out, tell him that he couldn’t stay, that it was too much too soon, even though I knew that it wasn’t nearly enough.

Eventually I left the bathroom again, and as I climbed back into the bed I felt his hand on my back, guiding me on to the mattress. I resumed my position facing the wall and froze. His hand remained. I closed my eyes and let myself become immersed in darkness for a few moments, and then I turned to face him. We stared at each other in the moonlit room, faces inches apart, until I felt him tug me at the waist and pull me into him, our pelvises colliding awkwardly. I gasped and then heard a small chuckle come from his direction. Instinctively I dropped my head in embarrassment, but felt the warm touch of his lips on mine as if from nowhere, our connection suddenly a real, physical one.

I floated through the motions with a sickly-sweet feeling, painfully aware that I had never done before what I suspected we were about to do. Yet the fact felt unimportant; it was merely something to note, a thing that...