Page 40 of Exquisite Things

Nothing could prepare me for the feeling of emerging out of the Brixton Tube station with Bram by my side. We’re greeted by

bikes for rent, a bus advertising The Phantom of the Opera , Sainsbury’s, old red telephone boxes that no one uses anymore. Street vendors selling souvenirs. And of course, CCTV cameras.

I can feel them spying on me. Almost a million cameras in this one city alone. Watching me. Watching Bram. Keeping digital

eyes on these crowds of busy people rushing to their destinations. One camera for every ten people in London, apparently.

Every Londoner is captured seventy times a day. I anxiously try to do the math in my head. If I only stay in London for a

few hours, that’s still at least a dozen opportunities for me to be caught.

“Bram. I’m scared. Someone who has access to all this CCTV footage must be friends with—”

“Wow!” Bram says, pointing to the striking mural of Brixton boy David Bowie. “Let’s read the messages.”

I take in a deep, calming breath as Bram and I take in all the messages written from those Bowie moved through sound and vision.

I miss you, David.

Thank you, Bowie.

Shine bright, Starman.

We walk to Railton Road. I don’t know which punches me in the gut harder, the things that have changed or the things that

haven’t. There’s a gated community where a school used to be. The squats aren’t squats anymore. They’re refurbished homes.

They probably go for a million pounds. Gentrification is everywhere. To Let and For Sale signs pepper the buildings. Everything has its price. Thatcher’s legacy.

The record shops are all gone, lost to new technology, rising rents, and the grim reality that this isn’t the community it

once was. Reggaeheads used to hang out outside the record shops, gathering materials for their sound systems, shebeens, and

blues dances. There are no rebel dykes anywhere. No women’s centers. No Race Today Collective. No anarchist news service.

The energy of the place is more comfort than anarchy. There are odes to the past everywhere. The Black Cultural Archives.

A poster of Olive Morris outside the Brixton Advice Centre. Olive, a once vibrant activist who changed the world, is now a

memory. An image in a window. What once was present is now archival.

“The best of our life is ancient history,” I say.

“The best part of everyone’s lives turns into ancient history,” Bram counters. “That’s not unique to us.”

“I suppose.” I look around. There’s graffiti everywhere. Also advertisements. The words of the ads say things like Fire Broadband Is Here and Hot Coffee . The words of the street art declare Free Sudan and Black Power . The contrast is stark.

“Come on,” Bram says. “Let’s get to Chaucer.”

“Doesn’t it make you sad?” I ask. “Why are there bougie coffee shops and Pilates studios where there used to be shebeens, Brixton Faeries, and Rebel Dykes?”

“Maybe because people want them?” Bram looks around. “Everything changes.”

“Except us,” I say, my voice sad and ominous. I can’t shake off my fear. “Bram, is this a good idea? What if we’re caught?”

Bram closes his eyes. “If we let them keep us away from Lily’s send-off, then they’ve won. We have to be here.” He opens his

eyes again. They look uncertain as he says, “Besides, maybe they’re not looking for us anymore.”

He doesn’t convince me, but I let him lead the way. Even after all this time, it feels good when he guides me into the unknown.

I notice that time is everywhere. It’s on the post office box with its collection times. It’s on the Ethiopian and Jamaican

and Greek restaurants with their opening and closing times. It’s on the parking signs. Time haunts me. The way it lurches

forward.

And yet, remnants haunt the neighborhood like ghosts. It’s the smells that hit me hardest. The familiar scent of jerk chicken

being cooked, fish being fried, turmeric and curry powder. Food, I suddenly think, is our most direct link to the past. Everything

else changes. Sounds and sights evolve quickly. But not food. Sure, some trendy chef might deconstruct classic dishes with

molecular flair, but it will never stick. As long as there are humans, I bet there will still be dumplings and rum cake. I

think of Mother’s recipes. Her meat loaf and green beans. What I would give to taste them again. To be transported back to

her love.

We stop just shy of what was once our house. Bram lowers his veil. I put on a large pair of sunglasses. A floppy hat that falls over my face.

Maud speaks to the group. Her voice is deeper than it used to be. Her hair, once a short Afro, is now in beautiful braids.

She holds a woman’s hand. They both wear wedding rings. “Miraculously, the Brixton Housing Co-op still exists,” she says.

“One of the few survivors from our time. So much is gone.”

“But we’re still here,” Azalea calls out.

“That’s right.” Maud nods. “The first time I came to the house, I was a lost person. I called the helpline first. A lot of

you know the story by now. I spoke to Bram before I met Lily.”

There’s a hush when Bram’s name is spoken aloud. People whisper to each other.

“I’m sure wherever he is, Bram is thinking of Lily. Oliver too.” Maud pulls her wife closer. The supportive look on her wife’s

face fills me with agony. Maud did it. She found love that lasts. A true partner. Happiness, I hope.

“We shouldn’t be here,” I say to Bram. “If they see us—”

“They would be thrilled to see us,” he says. “Didn’t you see Maud’s face when she spoke of us? She doesn’t hold a grudge.”

“If they see us, Lily’s memorial will become all about us. The ageless wonders. We can’t do that to her. Today is about her,

remember?”

“Right.” He takes my hand, just as Maud took her wife’s hand. I know comparison is the enemy of peace. Lily said that once.

Still, I can’t accept how much easier their touch felt. Maud and her wife touch each other in a way that feels natural, automatic.

Ours is forced.

“Lily left the home after Bram and Oliver left. Too many ghosts, she said. Lily didn’t like living among ghosts.

You know how she was. Always changing. Curious.

Maybe those boys did the right thing, she told me.

Children are meant to fly away. She told me to fly away and I did.

But never too far. She walked me down the aisle, didn’t she?

” Maud kisses her wife’s cheek. “She didn’t move far, of course.

Found a house just a few roads down. Kept taking in children.

Kept telling them to fly away when they were ready.

And eventually, she took in her last child.

Her own Uncle Alton. That man spent four decades in prison for a bogus charge before he was finally exonerated. All those years Lily missed with him.”

“And we’re still dealing with racist cops,” Azalea calls out, bringing back the energy of the old uprisings.

Poppy chimes in. “They’re exonerating the old cases but arresting new boys. It’s youth they want to take from us. They’ll

let us be free when we’re too old and tired to take what’s ours.”

Now Archie steps forward. “Look at Turing’s Law. Passed only eight years ago. Not until 2017 did our government think to overturn

the convictions of gay men arrested for doing nothing but being brave.”

“We’re still fighting the same fights,” Maud says. “Black Lives Matter. Police brutality.”

“Anti-trans bullshit,” a young Black boy calls out as he scratches his beard.

“Who’s that?” I ask Bram.

“His name’s Tobi. I’ve never met him. Probably one of Lily’s last children.”

“He’s so young. He looks like he’s our age.” Bram shoots me a curious look. “You know what I mean,” I say.

Tobi keeps going. “The prime minister wants to remove legal protections for trans people in the Equality Act. Families are leaving the country because their children are being bullied. She-who-must-not-be-named has devoted her magical powers to attacking us. Hate crimes against us are at a record high.” Tobi’s voice thumps with righteous rage.

The fury of youth. “I’m just so filled with.

.. with...” I think he’s going to say anger, rage, frustration, but what he says is, “Hopelessness. Lily’s gone and hope is too.

” Tobi buries his head in his hands and breaks down crying.

Maud rushes to Tobi’s side and puts an arm around him. “Hey, it’s an emotional day. Let it out.”

Tobi cries on Maud’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know this is meant to be a celebration of life.”

“In all its beauty and brutality,” Maud says. “Celebrating life means acknowledging all of it. Not just the pretty parts.”

“I know Lily didn’t want no boo-hoo backstories,” Tobi blubbers.

Maud lifts Tobi’s chin up. “Hey, this isn’t a boo-hoo backstory. This is grief. For the mother we lost and for the joy they

want to take from us. This is your story. Your time. You’re how old now?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen.” Maud exhales the word luxuriously, elongating the last syllable. “Your life is ahead of you.”

Tobi wipes the tears off his face. His jaw hardens into defiance again. “She gave everything she could to this country and

look at it now. Moving backward instead of forward. I’m scared of what’s ahead.”

“I know you are. I am too. But the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.”

“Too slowly,” Tobi says.

Archie awkwardly inserts himself into the moment. “It’s true there are challenges still. But these times are the best we’ve

ever had. Poverty is in free fall. More humans have access to food and education and clean water than ever. Children used

to die of scarlet fever. Our community used to die of AIDS.”

“Still do, last I checked,” Tobi says.

“Because of ignorance and greed,” Archie replies.

Tobi grunts in frustration. “But ignorance and greed are the problem. Don’t matter how many lifesaving medicines we discover.

How much water we clean. Is it too much to ask for a world without ignorance and greed?”

Archie puts his thin arm around Tobi’s powerful young shoulders. “Tobi, what you’re asking for is a world without humans.”

Tobi laughs at that. Looks at the others sheepishly. “Sorry, friends. We should keep moving.”

“Forward we go,” Maud says with a wink to Tobi. She leads them to 103 Railton Road, where Pearl’s shebeen once welcomed us.

Pearl’s is where Maud truly found herself. Only in community can we find ourselves and that was hers. It’s gone now. Just

one more nondescript forgotten building. The trash bin outside has the numbers 103 written on it in white. If only the tourists

and teenagers walking by knew the magic this place once held. But then, each generation makes their own magic, in their own

ways.

Tobi turns toward us. Bram quickly pulls me behind a truck. “We should go,” he says. “We know where they’ll end up. We can

see Lily off there.”

“Then what?” I ask.

“Then I don’t know,” he says. He pulls me down Shakespeare Road. Takes his veil off. I put my sunglasses in my pocket. Throw my hat in my bag.

Poets Corner, they call it. Of course, it’s where we made a home. In a neighborhood where the streets are named after Chaucer,

Shakespeare, and Milton, but where the people were Black and brown and queer and defiant. There’s a poem on Shakespeare Road

commemorating the Brixton Uprising.

“You always know, though,” I say. “You always have a plan.”

He leads me into Brockwell Park. Green everywhere. A glorious spring. Seasons, like us, never get old. They arrive every three

months fresh and new.

“I don’t have a plan anymore. I want to be with you. I know that. But I’m done chasing you. Done trying to convince you that

we’re enough.”

“But we’re not enough. We would have been enough if only we could age. I could have loved you until the day I died.”

“I would have died first,” he says. “I would have made sure of it. I could never handle seeing you pass.”

I shake my head. He’s ever the morbid romantic. “This way is doomed though. Never aging. We’d get bored with each other because

we’d never change.”

“I was never bored of you. Not in Boston. Not in Brixton.”

I lean against an ancient oak tree. Gaze out at a large open meadow. Families play together. Parents coo over their babies.

A very young mother sings Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games” to her newborn like a lullaby. Perfect pitch. F sharp minor. Adagio.

It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you. She turns a song about romantic love into one about parental love. I feel every ounce of her love for her child. It’s Mother’s love, which Lily taught me how to feel in a new way. It’s Lily’s love. It’s every parent’s love.

Grandparents walk their grandkids. Couples hold hands. The cycle of life is everywhere, like the seasons. Change. It’s essential

to happiness.

“I didn’t last two years in Brixton,” I say. “You didn’t have me long enough to get sick of me. Maybe if you hadn’t been so

stupid. If only you had left well enough—”

A heavy hand on my shoulder.

My heart sinks.

I was about to blame Bram for what happened to us that last night in London, but I don’t need to.

Because we’ve been found.

Whatever freedom we thought we had ends here.

But when I turn around, it’s not some goon I see. It’s Tobi. His eyes are misty and confused as he asks, “It’s you two, innit?”

“Sorry?” Bram asks.

I clutch Bram’s hand tight, afraid of being found out. In the calmest voice I can muster, I say, “We should get going. We

have an appointment, remember?”

We try to walk away but Tobi follows us. “It’s you. I know it’s you. I’ve heard all about you. Look at your eyes. You look

just like how Lily described. Except... you should be ancient by now. It makes no sense. You defy the laws of time.”

I look at Bram. We could run away from London like we did decades ago. But then, it’s not our family we were running from,

and Tobi is family. I feel Lily’s presence around me. I close my eyes and feel her like she taught me to feel Mother. Lily

tells me to let Tobi in. When I open my eyes, I say to Bram, “We’re brothers, aren’t we?”

Tobi takes his knitted scarf off and ties it around his waist. “That’s what Lily told me. That you were my oldest brothers.”

I smile. Of course Lily said that. Of course she considered us her children long after we deserted her. “Walk with us,” I

say to Tobi. “It’s a long story.”