What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

thin. And so they both fell on Oku, hugging him, when they got to the top of the stairs.

“If I was straight, I would marry you,” Tuyen said.

“You’re a dream, Oku.” Carla hadn’t eaten since the day before. The smell from his cooking made her notice how desperately hungry she was.

“Oh, you don’t want to marry me too? Still noncommittal?” Oku teased her.

“Closest you’ve come.” She moved to the sink compulsively. “You’re a great cook, but you use every pot, pan, dish, and spoon in sight. Everything’s dirty.”

“Oh, Carla, leave that. Let’s eat first.”

“We need dishes to eat on, Tuyen. Girl!”

They were sitting now on the floor in Carla’s apartment, savouring the meal Oku had cooked. He had no culinary antipathy registered in childhood discomfort. He loved his mother’s cooking, he loved his father’s cooking. He learned to cook lovingly what Carla had rejected from her stepmother. The graffiti crew from across the alley was there too, scattered around the floor: Kumaran, Keeran, Abel, and Jericho. They had smelled the cooking across the way and asked Oku if they could come over. He bargained with them for rice and cardamom and cloves and chilies, and now there was a curried chicken dish with the odour of cardamom, cilantro, and burnt cumin. Then there was rice, saffron-coloured, with peas and raisins. Oku hadn’t learned to cook rice this way from his mother but from the graffiti crew—well, not the whole crew, but Kumaran, whose parents were from Tamil Nadu. He had also crushed a papaya and tossed it into a vanilla ice cream for dessert, and he had brought from home one of his father’s precious eighty-eight-proof bottles of Wray and Nephew rum. He had taken his mother’s training and augmented it along the way with all the training of all the mothers of the friends he had. His father would probably not approve, preferring the monoculture of Jamaican food, but Oku’s tastes had expanded from this base to a repertoire that was vast and cosmopolitan. On their lucky days Tuyen and Carla would come home to fried snapper in a mole sauce or cassava frittes with burgers, or chicken’s feet soup. Odd that the same foods they were averse to in their childhoods they now revered in Oku’s hands.

Today he was really hoping that Jackie would return as they had loosely agreed, for Carla’s sake. But so far she hadn’t shown up. He wanted to make some type of amends for that ineffectual, rude remark he had made to her on the corner. He wasn’t sure really what her response had been, but he’d taken it as dismissal; in his long unrequited approach to Jackie he had always been able to balance himself between meaning and not meaning. He was waiting for her to take him seriously, but when she didn’t he prided himself on being able to laugh it off as she seemed to do also. He had watched carefully over her different relationships with men, knowing that if he was snide enough about them, they would disappear. He thought that it was his doing—their disappearances. The German boyfriend, however, was proving difficult, and he was getting slightly panicked.

“Jackie said she was coming, right?”

“Oh, and here we were thinking this was all for us, Carla.”

“Oh, come on, of course it was. I’m just asking. So she should be coming, right?”

“She’ll show up, I guess. You know she’s got the store now.”

“Ab und Zu! What the fuck is that anyway?”

“Here and now, honey. Or is it now and then, Tuyen?”

“Now and then, I think. They’re doing well, Jackie says. Reiner’s living at the back of the store to save money. And the band is practising in the basement.”

“Practising? Bunch of fucking Nazis imitating that Guns N’ Roses shit!” Oku was beside himself. “Can’t she see?”

“Chill out, man.” Kumaran laughed, trying to laugh Oku out of it.

Oku turned to him, slightly embarrassed. He’d forgotten the graffiti crew in the room. “Yeah, what you guys do lately?”

“The subway, end of the line at Sheppard. You can see the pig there when the train slows.” Kumaran licked his fingers. “And see that bank at the corner of Dundas and Spadina? Right at the top? We did that.”

“You guys are nuts, man. How’d you get up there?”

“We hold each other by the legs.”

“Out of your mind, man, y’all are out, frigging crazy!”

“It’s art, man. You should come with us one night. Tuyen does.”

“Now you got to be out of your mind. I’m staying on the ground. On the ground, man. None of that high-wire shit for me.”

The crew laughed, getting up as if by signal. Kumaran’s graffiti crew prided itself on fluency, stealth, and agility. They had made themselves shadowy and present in the city, as in the room. If anyone had looked into the apartment, they would have seen Tuyen, Oku, and Carla right away, and only after searching for something sensed but not seen would they have grasped the leaning, slouching, posed outlines of Kumaran, Keeran, Abel, and Jericho. They were critical presences, unnoticed until they felt like being noticed. They saw their work—writing tags and signatures—as painting radical images against the dying poetics of the anglicized city. The graffiti crew had filled in the details of the city’s outlines. You could see them at night, very late, when the streets seemed wet with darkness, agile and elegant in their movements. The spiritual presences of Tuyen, Oku, and Carla’s generation. Their legs straddling walls and bridge girders and subway caverns, spray-painting their emblems of duality, their dangerous dreams.

“Check you guys later,” one of them said.

Tuyen jumped up, following them to the door, promising to go out with them again soon.

Oku turned to Carla, “So, Yardie, what’s the dillio on Jamal?”

“You got ten thousand dollars or a house I can borrow?” She heard a betraying resentment in her voice. “No, I’m serious—that’s what I need to get him out.”

“Why do you have to do it? Why can’t your father?”

“Pleeease. He washed his hands