Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Author:Caleb Azumah Nelson [Nelson, Caleb Azumah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241989470
Google: XSPkDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B088NRG888
Publisher: Penguin Books Limited
Published: 2021-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

15

‘Why did you ask me to hang out today?’

‘That’s a strange question to ask your friend,’ you reply.

Golden hour swarms your senses. Colour tears through the sky in haphazard strokes. Your hand is bleeding and you’re sucking the spillage from your thumb; you tried to open a bottle of cider with a key and the jagged edge sliced shallow through your skin. You’ve both been touched by the heat and the alcohol, but it makes this meeting no less honest.

‘Usually, we just, you know, bump into each other or link up on the day. This felt kinda … formal?’

You shrug. ‘I just wanted to carve out some time for you.’

‘I appreciate that.’ She takes a sip of her drink and comes up empty. ‘Shall we get moving?’

When the day started, she was angry at you, and you didn’t know why. You had an inkling and pushed apologies towards her in the way one would do when diffusing a bomb in the movies: one eye closed, snip at the wire and hope for the best.

She asked you to take her portrait. You placed her against the brickwork fencing her balcony and waited for both of you to relax. Your hands shook as she handed you her vulnerability, and you struggled to focus the lens on her features. When the contact sheet returns, the grid of pictures resembles a tussle; two people wrestling with how they feel about one another. The face does not lie. How the eyes widen, the skin around the mouth tightening, or, your favourite from the set, the last shot on the roll of film, where you trained the lens in her direction in a moment where her eyes were on you, not the lens, but you, and all guises slipped away with the ease of a gossamer sheet in the wind.

And as the sun set, you whispered secrets and intimacies into the solitude of the now empty sky. She asked you who you were –

‘What a question,’ you said.

‘It’s not that I don’t know you, there are just bits and pieces that need filling in.’

You wonder what it means to know someone, and whether it’s possible to do so wholly. You don’t think so. But perhaps in the not knowing comes the knowing, born of an instinctive trust that you both struggle to elucidate or rationalize. It just is.

From south to north, mainline, Underground, emerging only to submerge. You enter a pub, and they direct you down the stairs, towards a bunker-like basement.

‘What are you drinking?’ you say.

‘We are drinking … rum and Coke?’

‘Single or double,’ the woman behind the bar asks.

‘Double,’ she says.

The barwoman gazes at us, two giggly fools at ease, and takes comfort in our joy. The measures she pours are healthy, spilling over the limit, and she gives us a nod, a smile, a small acknowledgement. You look around the basement and remember that being seen is no small joy.

‘I’m gonna go to the toilet before they start,’ she says, heading round a corner.

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