I Am Joy

She is drunk, he isn’t. Her weight on his arm is what causes him to stumble every few steps, to walk lopsided, like his broken wing is dragging in the dust. Her heels clatter on the asphalt: clak-a-clak-a-clak. When he stumbles she teeters, her hands fly out and claw his arm, his shoulder, his neck. Her mouth jerks open, ejects noises that turn to laughter. His anger has become a raw taste in the back of his throat—each time her fingers rake his skin, each time her beer-breath washes over his face, he feels the sourness eat deeper into his oesophageal lining. He endures. With each wave of anger he overcomes he feels himself become a stronger man, a better person.

Drunk or not, he will fuck her this morning.

She halts. He has moved two steps ahead before he misses her presence. He whirls around.

‘What is it?’

She is standing stiff and straight, staring at her feet. She is clad in a red tank top and white bum shorts. A white handbag dangles from her left shoulder. He admires the braless boldness of her breasts; his gaze sweeps over her bare arms and legs. Her shoes are red patent leather, the heel a contoured block of wood.

When she drops to her haunches he starts forward, but draws up when she begins to undo the straps of her shoes. The movement of her fingers is slow, languorous. She rises to step out of the shoes, then bends to scoop them up. She rises again, unclasps her handbag and drops the shoes inside.

‘My feet are paining me,’ she says, and strides toward him, barefooted.

The sky is tinged with the watercolours of dawn but the moon is still a big fat pearl in the roof of the world. The air is heavy with dew and the scent of wet grass.  The nightclub is far behind them; the bass of its music speakers thump the air. She has taken his arm, their progress is faster, the road stretches before them, it is deserted—then it is not. She says ‘Ah, there,’ and pulls him after her, towards the shapes lurking in an arboreal cluster of shadows. Everything happens in a blur; it is too sudden, too soon; he has no time to resist this force that sweeps him towards a disaster he did not foresee. When they are close enough to inhale the burnt-weed smell of the two men, she releases him.

She moves forward, alone. Her gait is disjointed—from the waist up she cringes, but her feet are dancing.

The men know what she wants. ‘How much?’ one of them asks, and when she whispers a reply his hands reach down and make zipping noises. ‘Your friend wants anything?’ he says as he extends a balled fist.
Her arm darts forward, her fingers cupped. She turns her head to look at him. She drops her fist. He can see the outline of her face, the rigour of her features, but not her expression.
He nods.

‘Bring two hundred,’ she says. She turns to the dealer. ‘Bring another one.’

#

The neighbourhood cocks are crowing at the sun when they arrive at her house. There is a half-naked old woman perched on a stool in the corridor and for a moment he thinks that this is her grandmother. But she unlocks the first door in the house without glancing in the woman’s direction, without greeting her, and when she enters the room he dashes in after her.

The room is cool as a tomb. Cigarette butts, bottle corks, dirty clothes, litter the floor. The cobwebs that hang in the corners of the ceiling are sagging with dust. A mattress dominates one side of the room. On the floor beside the wall socket sits a TV, a CD player, an electric cooker, a table fan. CD plates lay scattered about, like spilled coins.

There is no chair in the room so he sits on the bed. She drops to the floor beside the CD player and draws in her legs. She leans forward and riffles through the CD plates, squinting at the names printed on them. She hums as she finds one that she likes. She turns on the player and inserts the plate. She has unwrapped one of the brown parcels, has shredded the leaves and removed the seeds, is folding the crumbled fibre in cigarette paper, when the music starts.

‘I am not a prostitute,’ she says. Her gaze is fixed on her fingers, which are pinching and twisting, tapping and stroking.

He waits for her to make her point. She has nothing to add, so he says, ‘I know.’

‘Listen to this song,’ she says, and dips her head to tear the cigarette paper with her teeth.

He listens: he is sure: he has never heard it before. He wonders how to tell her. He is ready to pay her, despite her denial. He is sure she is—he met her at the club less than two hours ago and here he is, lying on her bed, watching her roll a joint—a prostitute. He will wait, the time is not right. After she has had her smoke.

He is distracted by the spark of the lighter. She has lit a mosquito coil.

‘Mosquitoes?’ he asks.

She jabs the joint between her lips and rasps the lighter—one time, two times, a few more times. When it catches, she throws him a glance over the flame. ‘The smell—I have neighbours.’

From the way her lips pucker when she sucks on the joint he can tell she is not smoking for pleasure. She turns her head toward the ceiling and exhales—he feels a prickling of respect settle on him like a cloud of flies. A haze that is the colour of old aquarium water swirls about the room. Through it, her eyes gleam like beacons.

She leans back until her elbows rest on the floor. She stretches her legs, crosses her ankles, and twiddles her toes. The undersides of her feet have a carapace of dead skin.

‘Do you like the music?’ she asks, and raises her foot, the right one, to point at him. Her toenails are gnarled and broken. Her tone, unlike the language of her body, is composed.

He nods.

‘Have you heard it before?’

He shakes his head.

‘What do you mean—do you listen to radio at all? They play it all the time!’

The irritation in her voice startles him. He hastens to reassure her:

‘I don’t listen to radio that much. Who is he?’

‘Skinny C. He is the brother, the younger brother, of the owner of the club, you know, where we met.’

‘Oh,’ he says.

‘He is my boyfriend,’ she says.

A single second, big as a thundercloud, floats by. She blows smoke at him and wags her tongue, so he says, ‘Ok.’ She is crazy, this girl, he has begun to suspect.

‘Take,’ she says. She pushes herself up with her elbows and leans forward with the joint outstretched. ‘I want to go and piss.’ As his hand reaches for the joint, as his fingers brush hers, he feels a stirring in his groin.

The song is on repeat. He holds the joint over the edge of the bed and taps it to dislodge the ash. He listens to the song lyrics; he catches a few words through the kitchen-clatter beat. No talent, no voice, he thinks, and feels an urge to laugh, but the joint is burning out, so he takes a puff, to rekindle it.

#

It is the sixth or seventh time he has stoked the joint. He is blowing smoke rings and watching them disintegrate in the air, when he hears a sound outside the door. He looks up and sees a face peeking at him through the gap between door and jamb. Her grandmother—I knew it, he thinks. He leaps up and flings the joint to the ground and stamps it out. He controls the urge to bolt: he knows they will be expecting that. It was planned, it is a trap. They have done this before, grandmother and child.

When she enters he is bobbing and weaving, flailing his arms, jerking his head, to the music. She stops in the doorway and stares. She says, ‘Great song, enh?’ She looks at his hands, at his face, at his hands again. ‘Where is my dope?’ she asks. Her eyes drop to the floor. She stiffens. ‘But why?’ she snaps at him.

He makes an effort to bring the movement of his limbs to a stop. He is wet with sweat: he can feel it streaming into the crevices of his being. He is short of breath, and panting, as he barks at her: ‘Where is your grandmother?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t even lie…I saw her just now peeping at me through the door!’

Her eyes are like moonstones. She stares at him, her gaze mesmeric.

‘My grandmother…both my grandmothers…are dead.’

Her words have shattered his conviction and scattered the fragments. He grasps at the explanations that dangle before him like ropes, but his mind is a heavy object, it weighs him down. He gapes at her, transfixed. She drops to the bed and digs into her pocket, then brings out the parcel and unwraps it, her fingers working deftly. She glances up. Her face relaxes and laughter gurgles in her throat. ‘You’re high,’ she says, patting the bed, ‘come and lie down.’

The mattress sags as he settles in. His knee brushes her thigh. ‘Careful!’ she hisses, and presses her hands against her belly, to keep them steady.

She lights up and sucks down. When she exhales it sounds as if her soul is leaking from her orifices. Her eyes are like polished pebbles, bright and round.

‘Where is your boyfriend now?’ he asks.

‘Who?’

‘Skinny C.’

‘Who told you he’s my boyfriend?’

‘You.’

‘I did not.’

‘You did.’

‘When?’

‘Just now, not long ago, before you went to piss.’

She takes a drag: her cheeks deflate and the spliff crackles. ‘Ok,’ she says, ‘if you say so.’ The frown she turns on him is connected by nerve strings to some rancid spot in her memory.

‘What did he do?’ he asks.

‘That one? What has he not done? He’s fucked my friends…he’s stolen my money. But the one that pained me most was this last time he went back to Yankee—’

‘He’s based in the US?

‘I didn’t tell you that before?’

‘No.’

‘He lives there—in Illinois. Mattoon.’

She says the name of the town with a boast in her voice. She repeats it, ‘Mattoon’—a smile brushes her lips. She is lying on her back, and he on his side. He has been waiting for the right moment, for the chink in her armour. This is it, he thinks, and places his hand on her knee. She doesn’t react, so he begins to stroke her leg, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, his fingers inching higher, heading north.

She is telling him about her boyfriend. He comprehends her monologue in snatches: he promised to take me…he lied…he broke my heart. He is not interested. His thoughts are focused elsewhere.

‘What are you doing?’

His left hand is fondling her breast and the right is stroking between her thighs. ‘Nothing,’ he says, and continues doing nothing.

‘Stop it.’ She takes a drag from the joint and quenches it by pinching the tip. She places the stub under the pillow. When he looks up from licking the rim of her navel, she exhales in his face.

‘I like your t-shirt,’ she says.

He winks his thank you, and lowers his head, again.

‘Stop,’ she says, and places a hand on the back of his neck, ‘I told you—I am not a prostitute.’

‘Then what are you?’

‘Enh?’

He is not listening. He is far-gone on his journey. From where he lies the road ahead is smooth as skin, and every bend, every diversion, leads only in one direction.

He repeats it. ‘What are you?’

For a split second, before she gives him the shove that tumbles him off the bed, he believes he has brought her to a climax. From the floor, he watches as she sits up, arranges her top, and zips up her shorts. When his discombobulated gaze latches unto her face, his stomach jumps into his chest, flops about a few times, and then begins to sink a long distance, turning over and over.

‘Get out,’ she says.

‘Please…I’m sorry.’

‘Why are you sorry?’

He senses a ruse, a leading fist, but he is desperate, so he says:

‘I’m sorry about what I said. I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘Wrong answer,’ she says. ‘Get out.’

He can feel his craving turning to anger. He rises to his feet and glares down at her. She holds his gaze.

He bats his eyelids to keep back the tears of rage.

‘What did I do?’ he asks.

‘If you don’t know, you will never know.’

He is tired of this game. She is a prostitute, after all.

‘I want to fuck you,’ he says. ‘How much do you want?’

Annoyance flashes across her face like lightning across the night sky. When she speaks, her voice is invested with a grandeur he cannot understand.

‘You’re a fool,’ she says, ‘I can hear everything that that you’re thinking, you just make it worse by saying it. But don’t worry, you will get what you want, one day you will fuck me. Just not today.’

‘Then when?’ he asks.

‘Get out now, before I get angry,’ she says.

‘Not before you tell me when.’

On the CD player, Skinny C starts up again, stuck on repeat. He will say the same words, express the same emotions, make the same mistakes in pitch and grammar, as long as she wants.

‘You will fuck me on a Saturday, at night, at your place. Around 10 o’clock on the 6th of March. You will come two times, the second time without a condom. In the morning you will give me five thousand naira plus this t-shirt you’re wearing.’

He laughs. ‘Are you serious? Three weeks from now?’

Her silence is a stone wall: his words splat against it. He presses, he cajoles, he pleads, and then he falls silent, too. He shambles to the door, halts in the doorway and turns around. He says, ‘One last thing…can I have your number?’

She is plumping up the pillows.

‘What about your name?’

She is smoothing down the sheets.

 ‘At least tell me your name, please?’

The bed is now ready, so she lies down on her belly, turns her face to the wall, tucks her hands between her knees and crosses her ankles, and—as he stands there, stuck in the goo of frustration—she announces, in a voice ravaged by sleep, ‘I am Joy.’

A. Igoni Barrett is the author of From Caves of Rotten Teeth. His work has appeared in Agni, Guernica and New Madrid. He lives in Nigeria.