Page 28 of The Square

“Yeah, well, you ain’t from Kensington, are you now?”

“It may not be where I’m from, babe. But it’s where I’m at. And I got there by learning to do for myself. Not because I was fucking born into it with a silver bleeding spoon in my mouth. So maybe you’d rather save the ‘crazy Alec doesn’t care about anything’ routine for someone who doesn’t know all your bullshit quite so well.”

I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know why she’s pushing my buttons. I don’t know why I’m still standing here, letting her. I should be gone. Off finding Christine and tending to her. Making up for… everything. And Danny. Fok, man. I miss Danny. It’s moments like this, when I find myself alone with a woman, that I miss Danny the most.

I have all the fokken money a person could want. All the power in the goddamn universe, man, and yet here I find myself. Feeling completely untethered and adrift about what to do next. So I ask a modified version of a previously asked question. “What is it that you want from me?”

She steps back. Away. And sits on the puffy, Roman arm. “Why don’t you ask what you actually want to know?”

“I thought I was.”

“What you actually want to know is… do I expect anything from you? Money. Time. Attention. For you to be a bloody father to this kid.”

“Yeah, all right. So. Do you?” She cocks her head to the left and then the right. Says nothing. “Because I can’t,” I say.

“I know.”

“Do you?” I ask. She nods. “Do you know why?” She nods again. “Tell me.”

“Alec—”

“Fokken tell me!”

She draws in a long breath, tilts her head back, closes her eyes. She relaxes her neck and shoulders again, lowers her head, opens her eyes to look at me, and says, “Because… I don’t fit.”

“Fit? Fok does that mean? Don’t fit?”

“Into the geometry of your life, my sweet.”

She stands and rounds the sofa to sit on it properly. She tosses aside a throw pillow and plops down onto the plush cushions of the settee. I wince as she does it. It’s goddamn insane, man, but now that I know she’s carrying a baby, everything she does physically causes me to feel a pang of anxiety. Because little babies growing inside their mother’s tummies are fragile things. I don’t know that I ever considered it much. Before. I’ve never been much of one to think about when life begins or what’s right and what’s wrong or any of that kak.

To my mind, we’re all just a bunch of cells and blood vessels and bones and that. In that regard, I don’t think anyone is anymore special that anyone else or that anyone has a right to life or a right to death any more than anyone else. We all begin and we all end. That’s the only thing that’s certain. How long one cheats the inevitability of their end is what makes someone who they are. Or, at least, that’s how I see it.

Probably why it shocked me so, back when my mother and father were killed. My father always struck me as the type of oke who would live forever.

But my point is, I ain’t precious about life. I haven’t taken as many lives as some, but I’ve taken enough to have become inured to the idea that it matters all that much. But this… this is a baby inside a person I’ve also been inside of and that baby is partially mine. And that… that is a different matter altogether.

“What do you mean ‘the geometry of my life?’ Fok are you talking about, man?”

She doesn’t look at me. She just stares ahead at the giant tapestry hanging on the wall in front of her. As if she’s studying it. It’s a battle of some kind. Some long-dead British king leading troops to their slaughter, it looks like. Has always seemed to me that the English are strangely keen to document battles they have lost.

“That piece on your back…”

“What piece?”

“The tattoo.”

“What about it?”

“It only has three sides.”

“Yeah. It’s a fokken triangle. That’s what a fokken triangle is.”

She turns her head to me. “But that’s not all it is. It’s you. It’s Danny. It’s Christine. There’s no room for anyone else. That’s what I mean, my dear.”

I stare at her. My chest heaves. I feel hot suddenly. “So what are you saying? You want me to add a fokken line to it? Change the dimensions somehow?”

“No,” she says, slowly, as if she’s debating it with herself but still stands by the answer. “No… that’s not what I’m saying at all. Honestly, I don’t think I’d actually like it much if I was drawn into your pattern. Fuckin’ hell, mate, I know my brothers would lose their blinking Chinese blinds.” She means ‘minds.’ And although the natural dialect that slips out is authentic, the Cockney rhyming slang is just as much affected as the posh, Queen’s English that she uses the rest of the time.