So What if a Flower Never Blooms? 

I even forgot to slip on my mother’s wedding ring. And instead of a 70s band, I was listening to my gym playlist: I wanted Fatboy Slim to get me to the office quicker. Where did I work? I was the Social Media Assistant for a South African charity, SAFrica-One. I used to be late for everything.  

Jodie had imagined her death differently. She knew it be caused by a road accident but she thought the event would at least behold some kind of morbid romance. She had pictured herself listening to the Smiths on her BeAtLick headphones, wearing her stewed-plum corduroy skirt. She saw it raining heavily and her freshly-dyed hair waving like mangled seaweed across the pavement and into the lurking waters that gurgled at the roadside drain. But she laid disfigured, bleeding, on the outer edges of the Super-Cycle highway on Commercial Street. The bike wheel was bent halfway over her thigh and she faintly heard Lola’s Theme, playing through her still-connected headphones which the illuminous pink wires of spiderwebbed across her twisted neck. Her work phone buzzed in the left pocket of her coat. Where are you Jodie, the meetings about to start? I heard Roshan’s voice, the overly ambitious squawking of the proud woman behind the ‘savoir-white-sweet-chariot-ee’. That’s what Lucia called it.  Jodie’s light dimmed beside clattering of London’s morning rush-hour traffic. Extinguished at age twenty-four.  

‘Fuck’s sake.’ It was one of those sudden city downpours that managed to depopulate even the most miserable of streets. Leon stamped upon the stump of his roach and pulled up the collars of his hoodless jacket. He made a run for it, towards the sheltered back entrance of University College Hospital. It was beyond late now, even for Jodes, he thought. He pressed her name once more. Hi this is Jodie, I’m busy right now, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. ‘Bitch.’ He pocketed his phone and body stiff, headed towards the underground. It was Friday evening; the baby-pink line would take him directly to Ladbrook Grove, his usual dealing spot.

 

 

I

Every ceramic vertebra was hunched. Jodie sat on the edge of the mould-bordered bathtub running her cold fingers through her scalp. She stared at the two lines.

‘The East London Termination Clinic, how can I help?’

The colour of the lines began to change, like a sick chameleon, from warning-red to magenta purple: a shade so fatal it returned every memory of her childhood bedroom. The hanging portrait of Piglet, Titch the Octopus that fell victim to her solitary trails of snogging, a dinosaur encyclopaedia, her Mum’s broken hair straighteners…

‘I need an abortion.’

The clinicians voice was hoarse; a secret NHS smoker, Jodie guessed. ‘And you’re certain about this decision, no one is influencing you?’

There was a complete mania to it. An uncomfortable God-like game of Bullshit in which I held two cards: an Ace; become a mother and a Queen; continue life as it stood. And did anyone influence my choice in which to play? Indirectly, yes. There was my Grandmother whose last words were ‘whatever you do, don’t get marry too young’. And then there was the entire SLWs (Secular Liberal Women’s society) who I’d seen marching, holding placards which, upon fragments and fragments of cardboard, retold the story that for over twenty thousand years, there had been some women who had took up the laborious task of painting over every Neanderthalic cave drawing of men. They were doing it so they could instead inscribe the ancient tale of how motherhood, although a beautiful process, was entirely overrated and in fact a ‘natural con’. SLWs shouted Bullshit the loudest. Like how the most beautiful faces in my university seminars spoke so confidently. Why wouldn’t I listen to them?  

After further questions about abuse, medication history and allergies, the clinician hung up. Jodie wrapped the pissy-plastic wand in four sheets of toilet paper and used the decorative piece of driftwood that her flatmate had brought back from a hiking trip in Wales to prod it deep into the tiny metallic bin. It was a metallic bin which, like all metallic bins, had a foot peddle that had been broken since the first week they’d brought it. What a waste.

 

 

II

Was it worthwhile? I often hear that question up here but I stopped asking it after I realised that the only thing that mattered was that it was all so real. I remember once leaning my head outside of the unwound window of a taxi. I was drunk and alone and it was 3.40am. I had work early the next morning but I didn’t care a wink. It was the night of Lucia’s twenty-third and I felt so alive. The skimpily-dressed flesh of my thighs were connected to every inch of that leather taxi seat and at the same time, I was expanding, stretching out into the infinities of the ghost-silent night. I was there, in every place I saw passing, and I sensed, for that fraction of a solitary moment, the starry-eyed bond between every living thing.

‘Leon…’ Leon sat up from the bed and slipped on his boxers. It was almost 4pm and he’d promised a friend he would pick up some speakers from a guy in Peckham.

‘What’s up?’

*

They’d met on a park bench in Gordon square seven months before. A fat squirrel that was nosing through the bin beside them was their cupid. ‘Nice day ain’t it?’ Jodie looked to him and yanked out the plastic film of her finished tuna-mayo baguette that, out of lunch-break boredom, she had wedged into the wooden slats of the bench. Naively, she thought it was the only thing that separated them. ‘So nice, and it looks like that squirrel agrees.’ The squirrel, in its spoilt urban delight, had jumped up onto the bench and was helicoptering the bush of its tail. Their laughs submerged into the murmurs of another Springtime in Bloomsbury.  

*

Jodie laid on the bed, twisting her hair and staring at the ceiling. ‘What do you think about the ANC?’

‘Woman!’ Leon jumped onto Jodie’s body that whilst Leon was dressing, had remained naked under his bedsheets. ‘You’re always thinking about work.’ She felt the weight of him sink into her chest as he kissed her forehead three times. Jodie stared unresponsively, preoccupied with her question, awaiting his answer.

‘I don’t know Jodes. I mean, my Dad liked them back in the day but I reckon they’re the same as any other rich business man pretending to be the black man’s hero. I mean, you know better than me that a tonne of people suffered under Zuma.’

‘Yeah,’ Jodie tutted. ‘But representation is important, right? Like Lucia was telling me that since Obama, there’s been a twenty-percent rise in black Americans taking politics at high school!’

Leon pushed himself off of Jodie and stood up. He kicked their clothes that had been carelessly flung away in their doped moment of sensuality. ‘Jodes, just ‘cos a black man’s in power, it don’t mean we people are represented. Sometimes they cause more shit that the white man.’

‘But like, in Britain, there hasn’t been…’

‘Jodes, look, I gotta’ go. Are you staying or what?’

Jodie sat upright against his bedroom wall. Her hair fractured the glowing winter of her skin. I was so young. I hadn’t realised that love had never asked for self-denial. She pulled the bedsheets over her breasts that fell outwardly like sleeping limbs. She reached for her phone and scrolled through the day’s unread emails.

Leon adjusted his cap in the mirror and noticed Jodie grinning at her phone in the reflection. He assumed it was a meme he would never understand or a piss-take news article from one of the many ‘propagandic feeds’ she trusted.

 ‘So you’re staying?’ He threw on his jacket.  

Jodie looked to him and her lips and cheeks widened. Blessed be the love that transcended our differing beliefs.

‘I’ll leave soon.’

Leon winked his goodbye and kissed his teeth.

 

 

III

When Jodie’s mother called, Lucia was sitting cross-legged on her bed, applying for a secondary school teaching job in Bedfordshire. Writing cover letters, she had come to realise, was the first processual step to alienation. When Lucia wasn’t working lates at the Rocksteady, on Sunday she would sometimes read her old sociology essays from college. The last one she had read compared two Neo-Marxist theories on the rise of zero-hour contract jobs: full marks.

Lucia never admitted it to her boyfriend, who criticised all sides of political ideology, that she saw no separation between her beliefs and her identity. To anyone else, including her possible employers (she added it to the ‘skills’ section of her CV), the fact was clear: ‘I am a Marxist feminist.’ Really though, all of Lucia’s political talk was only another one of her attempts to cover up her anxieties that had grown since her mother had died. And Jodie realised that early on.  One night, whilst smoking a joint together on the roof of Dumpton Park station, Lucia told Jodie the real reason why she had skipped their Health and Social exam: ‘I just couldn’t sleep. I mean, I was reading Audrey Lorde.’ She blushed after she said it and wrapped her Mum’s handknitted scarf around her mouth. I knew she was still feeling lost.

Lucia sent the job application, closed her laptop and flip-flopped into the kitchen of her grotty shared apartment. She flicked on the kettle, said hey to her flatmate, rolled a cig, and played the Brink Style Dub version of Typical Girls in memory of Jodes. ‘What’s this?’ Her flatmate asked, picking up a box of Moringa tea from the side counter. ‘Ah, some herbal shit I got for free on an app.’ Of course a few tears fell later onto her pillow, in the silences of the night, but nothing at that very moment: no tissue nor remorse. All that was needed was a hard suck on DRUM tobacco and repetitive head nods to the Slits. (Typical girls get upset too quickly; typical girls don’t rebel.) Death, as Lucia understood, albeit by surprise, was a natural and social phenomenon. Besides, by then it had been over ten years, since the suicide of her mother, since Lucia had decided that life, whatever it was, was utterly riddled with suffering.

 

 

IV

As a child, I was more fascinated by worms than white dresses. Barbies were creepy and I vividly remember beating the moving eyeballs out of my baby Annabel. (I smashed her plastic head against the brick wall in the side alley). Real Babies though, that was a different story. I wanted to be a mother and when I was seventeen I drew a small image of myself, with a biro pen, sitting cross-legged on grass, around the age of thirty-five. I had a bobbed haircut that matched my fully rounded belly. I would be a great Mum; I knew it even then. And the year after, when I moved away from home and tried Acid for the first time (it was on New Year’s Eve after I’d already drunk a bottle of champagne and taken Mushrooms), that was exactly the thing I tripped on. I was sitting alone on my friend’s bed, feeling the walls move, nestled in the pillowed corner of her small-time creative warehouse unit in North London. I held my hands upon my womb and started to cry. I looked down to see myself melting away whilst giving birth to two-hundred small apes. I was the mother of an entire hairy species, a being that could create another. I was crying because it was a real-life trip.

It was Sunday afternoon, late-May. The air was stagnant in Tower Hamlets cemetery and every concrete stone awaited the purging sting of acid rain. How do you dispose of a bloody sack of frozen life? The clinician told her to send it away like shit – ‘you won’t recognise it, flush it down the loo’. But Jodie felt bog-water was disrespectful: her faeces never had a heartbeat.

Two lovers passed with their skipping posse of a dog and two children following behind them. Jodie crouched beside a tree and dared to look at them for too long, afraid to fall out from her homemade universe. She dug a small hole into the soil, using a tablespoon that she had brought from her dirty washing-up bowl. Leon was unnecessarily on the lookout. What was he scared of? The foetus flopped in and it was a strange grief, yellow and renewing. They prayed and touched their hands upon the earth, though neither of them religious. ‘Forgive us,’ Leon whispered. Though Jodie knew that there was no reason for her to ask; she never chose to be the voice of a fertile land.

They lit an incense stick, Jasmine scented, which Jodie had brought a packet of earlier that week. She had brought it from the overpriced cornershop on Lucifer Street. It was owned by a Turkish man who served every customer without looking. He was forever standing up on his counter podium and with the upmost intent, watched the local news on the TV screen above. His customers in the meantime, standing beneath, would hand over their money, bag up their items, say farewell and move on.

It was a wonderful feeling being pregnant: big breasts and a satisfaction inside that made pizza, alcohol and chocolate seem like petty anti-depressants. Looking back now, I wonder – so what? – so what if a flower blooms too soon?

 

 

V

Lucia’s gym shorts pinched her thighs. She squatted to the beat of the malicious pop-song. Sunlight leaked through the window, illuminating desperate flashes of black and neon-yellow sport bodies.

‘Two more rounds girls and we’ll be fit for summer!’

She smiled at the thought of it; meeting up with old friends, sipping tins of fruit cider, the smell of a drying swimming costume! Could she resist the pain? It would be different without Jodie. Movement helped to overcome the numbness, glinted a life where Lucia spoke every one of her words from the knotted ball of love in her stomach. She added extra weights to the crossbar, envisioning it as a necessary crucifix upon her shoulders. Yes, she could. She was a soldier in training, a part of the communal femme-force that manifested at this local Leasuire centre every Wednesday evening. Another squat, this time raising the crucifix high above her head.

 

 

 

VI

The black hearse hovered steady: the determination of a fly upon a sweet drink. Leon left the ceremony a few minutes early to be alone, to finish off his smoke in the arched porch of the southern-most entrance. The oak tree sighed whilst the church loomed beside in gothic majesty: a great Aunt standing, without consent, in the foreground of his portrait.  

Jodie’s family trickled out in twos and threes under umbrellaed tents. Leon recalled the songs they had selected and realised they were nothing that he would have chosen. He wondered if he had ever even known her; whether those nine months were a freak-storm season, a midsummer gale, that despite his earthy weight, had knocked him onto an uneven curb of discarded chewing-gum.

Was it ok to get stupidly drunk at a wake? Leon knocked back the last of his rum and coke. He guessed not but also noticed that half of the guests were swaying young boys who had merely reached their twenties – how did Jodie know so many? Leon looked over to them, envying the tight skin on their forearms and their freshly pierced tattoos. He caught eyes with one, a shorter boy who was an obvious ring-leader.  He noticed his jittering pupils; how they so obviously gave away his irresistible urge to slurp down the pressures of living a meaningful life. ‘Go on then mate, I’ll have another,’ Leon overheard him say to his friend who was jesting an empty pint glass, ‘might as well.’  

In lonely solidarity, Leon’s stomach coiled and soured. He ordered himself another double and in the few seconds of waiting for his change, thought, yeah kid, you might as well until time hits you in the fucking ribs. Until you accidently conceive a child, until your mother commits suicide. (Lucia was standing outside the window, smoking with Jodie’s uncle). Until you get runover because you were late for some shitty work meeting - He ached for her. Yeah, you might as well.

The call was raucous, shouted by a footballer swathed in black lace.

‘Cheers, to Jodie!’

Even Lucia by then wobbled on noddled legs. How was she going to break up with her boyfriend and move to Bedfordshire without dummy-comforting daily voice notes from Jodie? Leon removed the lemon from his drink and was handed his change.

 ‘To Jodes.’

 

 

VII

The epitome of a what-can-I-do-to-help moment. The most awkward city-goers passed by whilst a delivery driver and a suit wearer untangled the pink wires from around her neck. The Bangladeshi man who had made the hit stood next to his red Honda, helplessly holding Jodie’s rucksack beside the passenger door. A woman wearing a hijab and carrying a bag of sweets thought to offer up her water bottle and a construction worker, the first to think to call an ambulance, repeatedly tried to lean the bent frame of Jodie’s bicycle against the street bin.

The sirens screamed and pigeons flew overhead caring as much for their next crumb as for the commotion. The chaos of the event flattened across the surface of the street and after a few farewells, the randomly coordinated group of Londoners dispersed back into the dream of their weekday routines. No one, not even the Bangladeshi man, really had anything to say. City life, despite the sudden cradling of death, continued, unshaken by a woman who was a good friend, in love and until that moment, always running late.