People Person, page 15
“Okay, relax,” Prynce said, making his way back inside the house. “Empowerment,” he muttered to himself as he slunk back through the kitchen. He still didn’t believe what Dimple was saying. And he still didn’t believe in star signs either.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TWO FEAR-FILLED AND UNEASY days had passed since Kyron’s message. Every time Dimple tried to call him, it went to voice mail, and when she’d messaged him none of her texts had gone through. He hadn’t posted anything since his return. Not even any links to his shit music that nobody ever listened to. As Dimple got ready for Prynce’s birthday party, she tried to call Lizzie to see if she wanted to head there together. When Lizzie sent her to voice mail after two rings, Dimple ignored the all-too-familiar feeling of rejection that nestled in her chest.
“Who was that?”
Lizzie watched her girlfriend Patrice’s soft curves jiggle as she reached into the high kitchen cupboard for a sachet of Lemsip.
“Lizzie?” Patrice ran a manicured hand across her shaved head as she waited for the kettle to boil. “On the phone. Who was that?”
“Nobody.” Lizzie shrugged, turning her phone over. “Probably a cold caller.”
“Mmm.” Patrice tore open the sachet and poured its contents into a mug on the kitchen counter.
“You sure you don’t want to come?” Lizzie asked. “Though you probably shouldn’t. You don’t look too good.”
“What, so you’re ashamed of me?” Patrice laughed, her usually infectious chuckle turning into a coughing fit.
“Maybe I should stay home with you,” Lizzie said, concerned.
“No, I’m fine! It’s just a cold. I sound—and obviously look—worse than I feel. You should go and spend time with your siblings.”
“Half-siblings.”
“You’re still on that?” Patrice shook her head as she poured boiling water onto the yellow medical powder in the mug.
“You should wait till the water cools down,” Lizzie said.
“Oh my God, don’t change the subject,” Patrice scoffed as she turned to look at Lizzie. “I think it’s nice that you’re connected to them! When we have babies they’ll need aunties and uncles to babysit. If you think I’m staying at home 24/7 you’ve got me wrong.”
“Our babies aren’t going anywhere near those people,” Lizzie said quickly. “No way.”
Patrice shot Lizzie a disappointed look.
“What’s your problem with them?”
“Where do I start?” Lizzie folded her arms and leaned on the kitchen counter. “Nikisha is a know-it-all.”
“That must be hereditary, then.” Patrice smiled, reaching into the cupboard for a jar of honey.
“Prynce doesn’t take anything seriously. It’s like being back at school and having to sit next to the class clown,” Lizzie carried on, ignoring Patrice’s comment. “And Danny is a bit stupid.”
“You know, just because he’s not a medical student, or a creative, or working in finance, doesn’t mean he’s stupid,” Patrice said. “You’re sounding kinda judgmental.”
“No, no.” Lizzie shook her head. “Okay, maybe he’s not stupid. As in, he’s smart, but I don’t know how much common sense he has. Like his common sense has been replaced by blind optimism. If that makes sense.”
“And what about Dimple? Surely you get on with her? You’re the same age.”
“She’s the worst one,” Lizzie said. “Always got a problem, always feeling sorry for herself, always the victim. You can’t have a conversation with her without her bursting into tears.”
Patrice stared at Lizzie for a while.
“What?” Lizzie asked.
“This isn’t you,” Patrice said. “This definitely isn’t the Lizzie I fell for.”
“Well, the Lizzie you fell for was technically an only child and didn’t have to deal with a bunch of people she doesn’t have anything in common with.”
“And the Lizzie I fell for was a lot nicer than this,” Patrice said, shuffling past Lizzie. “This energy of yours? I don’t like it. I’m gonna take this Lemonsip to bed. I’ll see you later. Have fun.”
“It’s called Lemsip,” Lizzie said, correcting her.
“Bye!” Patrice slammed the bedroom door behind her.
* * *
“Happy birthday, Prynce!” Danny shouted very loudly as he, Dimple, and Lizzie entered the house. They’d arrived at Prynce’s mum’s doorstep at the same time, and Dimple was elated not to be walking in by herself.
“Do you know what an inside voice is?” Lizzie asked Danny.
Danny ignored this. He’d always had this special skill of managing to block out vibe killers.
Prynce looked up from pouring a second bottle of rum into a punch bowl on the rickety table and smiled at his half-siblings.
“You made it!” He walked over and pulled them into something resembling a group hug.
“Obviously!” Danny said. “I’m not missing my little brother’s birthday!”
“You did miss the previous twenty-four of them,” Lizzie reminded him, handing Prynce a bag containing a perfectly wrapped gift.
Dimple took the room in while they waited for the other guests to arrive. Prynce and his mum, Bernice, who was currently out of the house, as always, lived in a five-story house on the edge of Battersea, the rent for which was heavily subsidized. It hadn’t been taken the best care of, and every corner that Dimple had seen was filled with clutter. Papers, dozens of tins of food, arbitrary pieces of Robert Dyas equipment that had been bought and never used: All had been pushed into every spare inch of the room to make space for more… things.
“Is it your mum who’s the hoarder or is it you?” Dimple asked her half brother.
“Go up and look at my room,” he told her. “Top floor, straight ahead.”
Dimple, curious as she was to learn as much as she could about her brother, turned on her heel and moved towards the stairs.
“You coming?” she asked Lizzie and Danny.
Danny was already walking toward the food on the table, but Lizzie was up for exploring.
“Might as well.” She shrugged. “After you.”
They walked up the four flights of stairs, slightly out of breath when they got to the top.
“We’re getting old,” Dimple huffed. “When I turned twenty-five I could have done this, like, five times over.”
“You sure?” Lizzie asked her.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Dimple conceded her lack of fitness as she opened the door to the most immaculate room she’d ever seen.
“Oh. Okay then,” Lizzie said, walking across the thick gray rug and sitting on a bed that looked like it had been made by someone who’d spent a stint working in hotel cleaning. The sheets were tucked so tight she almost bounced up off them.
“How are you doing, though?” she asked Dimple. “Everything been okay? You heard from Kyron again?”
Dimple walked around the room to get a better sense of who Prynce was, and also to be nosy. She stroked the books on his shelf. Lots of philosophy, lots of nonfiction. Nothing that looked very fun to her, nothing that she wanted to borrow. Not that she was into books at all.
“No. I’ve been trying, but… it is what it is. Anyway. How are you?” When Dimple wasn’t ready to talk about the several emotions she was feeling at any given time she deflected the question back onto who asked it.
“If I told you how I was, you wouldn’t understand,” Lizzie said.
“Well.” Dimple blinked at her half sister. In this moment she felt strong enough to engage in an emotional standoff with a Leo. “You never know. I might understand more than you think.”
“Okay.” Lizzie took a deep breath. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but my life was fine until you all came shouting and crying and arguing into it.”
“How can I not take that the wrong way?” Dimple asked, rejection hitting her like a punch to the chest.
“You see, look at your face!” Lizzie rolled her eyes. “I knew you’d make this about you.”
“Okay, well, sorry, I guess?” Dimple crossed her arms. “Please continue.”
“I don’t think that’s unreasonable to say, Dimple,” Lizzie scoffed. “Before you lot, I didn’t feel like I was going to vomit every time I heard a siren. I was doing well in my exams. Now I can’t concentrate for more than a minute without imagining what prison is going to be like. Plus, I’m pretty sure my girlfriend thinks I’m cheating on her because I keep disappearing on her! She hasn’t let me touch her ever since I got home that morning because I can’t say anything to convince her that I wasn’t at some girl’s house until five in the morning.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her a friend had an emergency.”
“So you haven’t told her about us?” Dimple asked.
“I have, but not properly,” Lizzie said. “I need to figure it out for myself first.”
“You mean you need to figure us out for yourself first?” Dimple said, trying to clarify. “I don’t think it’s that hard.”
“To you, maybe.” Lizzie shrugged. “But I think you needed us more than we needed you.”
“What?” Dimple felt like she was about to cry. She should have known she wasn’t strong enough to engage in an emotional standoff with a Leo. “Because of the Kyron stuff?”
“Not just that.” Lizzie shook her head. “I don’t mean to be rude, but… your life outside of all of this… well, it wasn’t real, was it?”
“Shall we go downstairs now?” Dimple asked, smiling to hide the sting of Lizzie’s assessment.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Lizzie said, standing.
Dimple and Lizzie trudged down the stairs and faced a sea of people, including Nikisha, who had just burst into the house.
“Hello, little sisters.” Nikisha smiled, hugging them when they met at the bottom of the steps. “Welcome to my childhood home.”
“Was it this messy when you lived here?” Lizzie asked.
“Yep. Which is why I got the fuck out when I was sixteen. Prynce won’t ever leave, though. He’s managed to make the top floor his sanctuary. Nobody is allowed in there. That’s how he survives the hoarding.”
“We were just up there!” Dimple told her.
“Well, he must really trust you.” Nikisha grinned, then looked around at Prynce’s friends who were filling the hallway in an annoying way. “Do you lot want to move through to the kitchen?” she asked a group of boys who were looking at Dimple and Lizzie nervously. They hadn’t conquered older girls yet.
“We’re thirty. Not your age-mates,” Lizzie told them as they shuffled off, dragging their box-fresh sneakers across the floor.
“Is my mum here?” Nikisha asked Dimple and Lizzie.
“Not that we’ve seen,” Dimple said.
“She’s not here, then,” Nikisha said. “You would have heard her before you saw her. Even from upstairs. Anyway. Let’s go eat!”
It had been a long time since Dimple had been around twenty-five-year-olds. She stared at them with caution. What did they like to do? What sort of things did they think about? Were they vastly different from her? Did they share any of the same interests? She almost wanted to interview a group of them to have these questions answered. She thought about the person she was at twenty-five. She didn’t have a handle on her emotions now, but at least at thirty she knew why she was doing, thinking, and feeling the things she was.
Five years ago, she was sort of just existing recklessly. She could see that in Prynce, but only a bit. He already seemed a lot wiser than she’d been back then, or even was now. She caught a glimpse of him laughing with one of his friends and smiled. She didn’t remember laughing much when she was twenty-five. It was all intense heartache and trying to figure out who she was. That was when the obsession with being an influencer had begun. That was when she’d decided that projecting an image of herself to “the world” would protect her from how harsh the world was.
Her chain of thought was broken when she locked eyes with Danny, who was talking to one of Prynce’s female friends and looking panicked.
“You okay?” she mouthed at him.
He kept widening his eyes, which Dimple didn’t understand until she saw that he clearly needed saving from the conversation.
Dimple walked over to him and said she needed his help with something, excusing both of them from his conversation and pulling him into the hallway.
“Thank you so much.” Danny exhaled. “She came over and asked me if I was Prynce’s big brother, I said yeah, and all I did was ask her how she knew him, Dimp. That’s all I said. And guess what she said to me? She told me that she didn’t know him as much as she wanted to get to know me!”
Dimple laughed at her half brother’s shock.
“She’s no older than Prynce, Dimp!” Danny folded his arms to protect himself. “I’m so much older than her!”
“Relax, relax.” Dimple laughed again. “I’ll protect you from her if she propositions you again.”
“I didn’t like that at all.”
“Danny, haven’t you got a child? With a woman? How can you be so stressed about talking to another one?”
“Yeah, but that woman is also thirty-three,” Danny said. “I don’t know where these young ones have got all this vim from!”
Dimple carried on laughing at Danny, but stopped when she heard a familiar but not-so-familiar voice at the front door.
“How is everybody?” Cyril Pennington asked everybody and nobody in particular as he came through the door, standing still so everybody at the party could observe his presence, even though nobody did.
Dimple hadn’t expected him to look so old. The last time she saw him, he looked closer to the pictures of him she’d found in an old photo album under her mum’s bed. He was still handsome, but now, he was smaller. He smiled, still flashing that gold tooth that replaced his front one, but his skin was sallower round the cheeks, and there were now lines around his eyes that deepened when he smiled. His dark skin didn’t shine like it had that last day she’d seen him. Instead, it was dull, lacking the richness she’d been so envious of when she’d been younger.
Cyril moved his way through the young bodies that filled the hallway, smiling at the girls and holding a fist out to the boys. All largely ignored him, but he carried on smiling, his delusional optimism making him forget that he didn’t have the charm he used to.
Why didn’t he ever come to her birthdays? Dimple wondered. Was it that her mum had never invited him? Even so, he could have tried to come round. It didn’t seem fair that he was here. Maybe he just liked Prynce and Nikisha more. Maybe he liked their mum more than he liked Janet. But if that was the case, why should she have been the one to suffer?
Cyril’s smile dropped when he saw Dimple and Danny standing in front of him, and he very nearly frowned when Lizzie walked out of the kitchen and joined them, handing them each a can of Ting.
Lizzie turned to look at what her half-siblings were staring at, and saw Cyril standing there, looking even smaller than he had when he’d first walked in.
They all watched him decide whether he’d turn and run out of the door or face them all. He decided on the latter.
“Well,” he said, walking over to them. “I didn’t expect to see you three here.”
He went to hug Lizzie, who pressed a hand against his chest and said a firm no.
He went to hug Dimple, who hugged him back because, in that moment, she felt sorry for him.
He went to shake Danny’s hand, who reciprocated awkwardly because he didn’t dislike his dad, he just didn’t know him.
“You’re all so big,” Cyril remarked. “And look how gorgeous you are, Dimple. Shocking vibes! You must have children by now, surely—some man mussa breed you by this point? Wow. And who knew I could have produced such a serious weapon? But I know you didn’t get it from me, that your mother’s Indian genes coming through. How is Janet?”
“Yeah,” Dimple said, reeling from the million terrible things her dad had said. “She’s good, you know.”
“Are you going to ask about my mum, Cyril?” Lizzie asked him.
“Well, I can tell Kemi raised you to be as serious as she is. And you’ve got her forehead.” Cyril laughed. “And how is big Danny boy? Solid! Built like a tank.”
“I’m good.” Danny shrugged.
“You know, I heard about you in the prison,” Cyril said.
“I did write to you,” Danny told his dad. “And I sent you a visiting order.”
“And I did mean to come, I really did,” Cyril said, lying. “But you know things are busy, and I lost the paper you sent, and then when I went to write you back, things just took me over. But I was sending good vibes, son. I know you didn’t mean to do what you did.” Cyril looked past his children and into the kitchen. “Now, that rum punch is calling me. Check you lot in a little while. You’re not going anywhere?” he asked, not waiting around for the answer.
“Did either of you expect that to be as disappointing as it was?” Lizzie asked Dimple, who didn’t quite have the words, and Danny, who just looked sad.
They turned to watch Cyril walk through the kitchen and immediately over to the punch bowl. He picked up a plastic cup from the upturned stack next to the bowl, dipped it in, downed the contents, then dipped it in again as Prynce walked over to him.
“My bwoy!” Cyril exclaimed, pouring more drink in his cup and throwing his arms around Prynce, who embraced his dad back. “Happy birthday to you!”
Prynce stepped back, placed his hands together, and bowed a thank-you.
“Twenty-three today!” Cyril shouted. “Wow.”
“Twenty-five.” Nikisha corrected him as she walked in from the garden carrying a couple of plastic chairs. “Hi, Dad. Little help?”
Cyril took one of the chairs from her and put it down right next to him.
“Anyway, I’m just passing,” he said as he eyed a young Black girl with shoulder-length braids walking past him. He nodded in approval as she placed a hand on Prynce’s shoulder and squeezed it.
