Page 1

Chapter 1

Of Love & Lobster Linguini

They say there are certain dramatic life-changing (or -ending) occurrences that a person can recognise are about to happen immediately before they happen. I don’t know if ‘they’ are a nebulous counsel of sages through the ages, psychologists or a Nigerian matriarch who swears she had a dream, but I am inclined to believe it. We are spiritual, instinctual beings– primal– and we can feel and sense and guess at an altering of a destiny in the moments before it unfurls. A car crash, for instance. A flick of the wrist, vision askew, your heart jumps into your mouth before your brain can recognise what is happening. There’s a split second before the fear sets in, and it feels worse than fear itself: the anticipation, the cold tang of pre-catastrophe on the tongue, the heady notes of dread tickling the back of your throat that make you want to hurl or laugh or scream or dream of anything,anything, but this happening.

Like the moment your heart breaks.

You feel it in the space between you and the person holding your hope in their hand, in the softness or firmness of their voice, in how their words land within you, like pinpricks, like a firebomb. Your palms begin to sting, your breath shortens, your heart thrashes like a war drum. The screech of wheels on tarmac, the overflow of emotion, regret in a gaze before they let that hope crumble in their fist as they say, ‘I can’t do this any more,’ the airless silence before a catastrophic fall.

This is precisely how I feel– like a car crash is about to happen, like I am about to plummet into an abyss, like all my bones are about to break, like my heart is seized– in the moments just before my sweet, flawless-credit-score boyfriend proposes to me.

Or at least I think he’s about to propose to me. All evidence seems to point to the fact that the man I like enough to allow to wake me at 6 a.m. and hike whilst on holiday is about to ask me to marry him.

It’s date night. A term I’ve always vaguely hated because it has connotations with a couple you went to high school with that refer to each other as ‘the boy’ and ‘wifey’ on Instagram. For me ‘date night’ conjures an idea of romance constrained to shisha spots with flowery wall decals and neon light fixtures that say ‘Good vibes’ in cursive and looking through a 1:1 digital dimension with eyes made sparkly with the eagerness to be #couplegoals and skin radiant with the plumping properties of Facetune.

‘Date night’ hints at a bleakness, a mundanity, a compartmentalisation of a fun that’s supposed to be infused into a couple’s connection– or maybe I’m just bitter because we need it now, the romance-by-calendar-invite, because we’ve both been busy recently, me with trying (maybe failing) to not descend into a quarter-life crisis and him with a new system integration of a new app with a new South Korean remote development team, something I don’t actually understand beyond the fact that he is up late speaking about tech in what he says is English, but actually might as well be Korean to me (a person whose Korean is limited to phrases vaguely recognised from K-dramas). So, with my boyfriend on a rare night off from speaking about robots in Korean and me having finished the last leg ofThe Heartbeat: Find Your Rhythmlive tour, we find ourselves here, ondate night, sat at his white candelit Japandi dining table. He holds my hand, looks at me with bespectacled eyes that are honey brown and sweet and soft enough to have been the place in which I rebuilt my hope in love, and says, ‘Kiki. . . this is going well, right?’

My girl Shanti is a beauty editor and make-up artist which means I’m a beneficiary of her many freebies (she dishes them out to our friendship group in rotation, like Baddie Claus). It also means I have an abundance of cosmetics to put to use even on indoor date nights, one of which is a lip oil unfortunately named D Sucker Pucker. The brand didn’t last very long, something about a sexism suit, but it really does provide maximum hydration of the lips, which is extremely helpful to me right now because my mouth is bone dry.

I encourage my glossed lips to form what I pray is a smile as a rapper demurs something from the speaker about wanting to meet the love of his life, but the problem is he has too much love to just have one wife. My boyfriend seems to lack a sense ofmoodwhen it comes to music; he is a man that had a Future song playing in the background the first time I went back to his, after all. His reasoning was that it was a ‘good song’, and whilst he was technically right, and him being technically right was part of my attraction to him– straightforward, simplicity, no mess, no fuss– hearing‘I want no relations/I just want your facial’just as you are about to have sex for the first time with a guy you enjoy enough to have your entire bottom-half attacked by hot wax for is just a little distracting. Or maybe apt? Maybe it was just funny and the fact that he had fuckboi rap and not my preference (slow R&B and neo soul) is not proof of our inherent incompatibility. Besides, Tchaikovsky and Chopin are also on his sex playlist; he has a range of taste.

Bakari works with facts and metabolises them into feelings, rather than extracting fact from feeling, and therefore he is focused on the objective quality of music production, technique, skill, level of bitrate– rather than how it all alchemises with your heart, softens you, strengthens you, reinforces your mood, stimulates your mood. He believes it’s the quality that really determines the suitability of a song. This is truly a well-produced song, and is in the top ten right now. That equates to the ‘best’ for him. It follows, then, that this manlovesme. Simple maths.

He’s looking so intently at me and the affection in his gaze pushes so deep into my chest that I feel like it makes a dent in a heart that’s whirring, that’s turning in on itself, trying to make sense of the fact that despite the fact that I love him, I’m sure I do, I feel like I’m going to throw up the lobster linguini that he so thoughtfully cooked for dinner.

He made the pasta from scratch, utilising his skills from the cookery class I booked for his birthday after we binged a poetic HBO dramedy about an angsty chef and his ragtag but dedicated employees-who-are-more-like-family. He became obsessed with the ‘precision of the kitchen’, the exacting mathematics and science of stirring and slicing and adding things together to get a perfect result, whilst I stayed triggered by seeing a stressed-out perfectionist trying to maintain the legacy of a failing family restaurant. So close to the bone it brushed ligament, being the eldest daughter of two soon-to-be-retired restaurant owners. The gifted class doubled as a tongue-in-cheek partial apology after a misguided decision to playfully say ‘Yes, Chef’ in bed once. (He came just as I burst out laughing. I said it as a joke and he heard it as a response to a very specific kink he had recently developed. It was all an unfortunate misunderstanding.)

The pasta’s a little chewy, but he’s done pretty well, and I don’t think the queasiness I’m feeling is from salmonella, but rather from the fact thathe’s not supposed to ask me this tonight.Maybe not ever. I never pictured it. I’m not ready.Weare not ready. I think my throat might be closing up. I make some attempt to clear it.

‘You OK, babe?’ His naturally gorgeous bushy brows crease with concern.

I nod, and swirl my hand in the general vicinity of my neck, indicating that something is stuck there, like food and not the words ‘this is way too soon, and I’m not entirely sure I trust you to pick out a ring on your own since the last piece of jewellery you got me was a heart-shaped pendant’. I don’t like heart-shaped jewellery.

Despite the fact that I’m wearing a slinky black slip dress, and it is February, and Bakari keeps his newly built sleek bachelor-pad flat at an even 20.5 degrees, my skin is beginning to prickle with a heat that could be used to soften the slightly chewy pasta. Is it possible to develop an allergy to shellfish at twenty-eight? Is it possible to develop an allergy to shellfish twenty-four hours after you shovelled M&S prawn cocktail mix into your mouth with half a bagel for dinner whilst trying not to spiral about your career? The bagel wasn’t even halved in the way you’d expect it to be–it was ferally torn vertically across the hole.

I was incredibly stressed.

I still am.

I flick a longing look at my phone, face down on the table because I wanted to focus on my date on this Date Night. I kind of want to google the possible biological phenomenon of my sudden possible allergic reaction and/or discover if I am a freak of nature, but I figure it would be rude to do so given the whole ‘possibly about to be proposed to’ of it all. I also want to phone Aminah to have a safe space to freak out about this and ask if she knew. In another universe, my boyfriend asking me to marry him without the blessing of my best friend would have been unthinkable, but the apocalypse happened in that universe, mountains keeled over, candyfloss clouds started to rain acid, honeyed oceans churned into lava and suns sank into the skin of the sky. So now I know that sometimes the unthinkable happens despite your inability to think it, and therefore in this universe it is perfectly plausible that my boyfriend is asking me to marry him without Aminah’s blessing of ‘sure, but I swear if you hurt her I will invoke a Yoruba curse that will bind you in a torture of your own making’. Besides, Aminah didn’t release any hints during yesterday’s Tuesday Night Tea Time, although she did finally admit that she’d started what was supposed to be ourInsecurerewatch without me, and we spent a lot of time working through that betrayal. That might have posed a distraction.

I gulp the pinot noir that I know he’s been saving for a special occasion, because when I reached to open it three weeks ago after a stressful conversation with my agent he said, ‘Oh, Keeks, I got gifted this after my last app launched. . .I’m saving it for a special occasion.’ Even though he always gets gifted alcohol whenever one of his apps launches. He then kissed my forehead and my nose and confirmed why I was with him by whispering softly, ‘How about I open this bottle of rum my mum brought me back from Jamaica?’ before giving me a shoulder massage and letting me watchTrysts in the Tropicswithout his usual commentary about how shallow and inane it is, which, actually, was what I really needed.

‘Yeah,’ I now respond to his question, ‘I think this is good.’ And then, as a reassurance for both of us, I add, ‘This is great, babe.’ And it doesn’t feel like a lie. It has been eighteen months of mutual cushy affection, and the second I saw him–or maybe the second second I saw him– at a party at which I was feeling an increasing amount of chaos within myself, I felt an immediate stabilising calm and stillness.

I was at a media networking event that was dressed up as an afterparty to an unknown beforeparty, talking to a street photographer dressed up as a medieval French street urchin, who was talking to me about how ‘purpose defining’ he finds it to capture Black skin on camera, and regaling me about his last trip to Senegal. I had slipped straight past offended and right into aloofly fascinated. I smiled as I flicked my gaze up from the picture on his phone of unsmiling, beautiful women in front of wares of fresh produce who’d had their working day interrupted by someone who definitely didn’t pay them for their time.

Sipping my champagne, I nodded in time to a B track of a 1997 soul artist who only had one album before disappearing from the scene. I loved the song, and I anchored myself to it because it helped neutralise the surrealness of being here, at a private member’s club, decorated in a baroque style of red and gold and velvet and old. When looking for the bathroom, on the wall of a narrow carpeted corridor that seemed to lead to nightmares, I encountered an Italian Renaissance painting that depicted a gorgeous pastoral feast table, with roasted ham and pheasant and fruits and cakes and a little Black boy chained under the table. I was beginning to feel a little like Jordan Peele had directed this evening. It was my first capital E Event after my little podcast had been picked up by SoundSugar, the premium streaming service that had sunk a terrifying amount of money into me and what had been a post-break-up project.

Some people take up pottery, others write Grammy Award-winning albums and I landed somewhere at the lower end of the middle, deciding to talk about love and music and its intersection of strangers who apparently found a home in the safe space I’d carved for myself in my post-apocalyptic heartbreak universe.

I found I enjoyed the company. Otis and Stevie and Luther. Mariah and Babyface. Jill Scott, Bilal, D’Angelo and Lauryn. Beyoncé and Summer and Sza and Jhene and then newer R&B and soul artists, independently signed, on Soundcloud. They were scoured from small live-music nights in bars with sticky floors, strong drinks and audiences Black enough to screw up their faces when a note reached the heavens or a bass chord hit that spot deep in the belly.

It made me feel alive.

Artists started reaching out, enjoying my analysis of songs into which they’d poured their hearts, appreciating the recognition of their soul, how their art linked to heartbreak, relationships, situationships, love that felt too heavy to hold. I started getting requests to host interviews and conversations with them, and I suddenly became a space where new artists came to cement their place on the scene, on timelines, in ears, and then Aminah, with her beautiful magic branding wizard brain suggested I include video to foster ‘warmth and connection, because, not gonna lie, people are gonna go even crazier when they realise that that sexy voice is coming from a sexy face’. Biased as she was, we did see an increase in listenership with the added video.

People started writing in, seeking romantic advice for me to discuss with them, or just to share a thought, or just to feel less alone, and then I found I had an Audience and then I found myself with an Agent and then I found myself in rooms with Creatives with whom I was supposed to find kinship, even when they told me they fetishised Black people and called it art.