Anna’s breaths were short and shallow now. She glanced at Julius, who was busy applying mint lip balm. Anna spluttered a laugh but it really hurt, so she stopped. She often laughed at him. AT him. Not with an ‘Isn’t he charming with all his quaint eccentric ways’ kind of laugh. More like an ‘I’d better laugh to dilute how awful he is for everyone else’ kind of laugh. Giving everyone permission to see him as a loveable buffoon, thereby defusing and allowing his frequent faux pas and insensitivities. He had recently been with her at her best friend’s father’s funeral. So disinterested and unmoved by the whole sad circumstance was he that afterwards, at the wake, spitting a mouthful of flakey pastry prawn vol-au-vent, he’d enquired of said best friend how her father was keeping …?
Even then, Anna had over-laughed to bridge the awful moment and to somewhat mollify her beloved grieving chum. It was fairly exhausting to be a constant smokescreen for his blatant idiocy, but she persisted. It was an exercise in damage limitation in which she failed to realize that she herself was the most damaged. The relationship was broken, but they were both clinging to the wreckage.
Well, she was clinging to the wreckage.
He WAS the wreckage.
Back in Hope and Quiet Isaac’s room, the air is starting to thicken.
The anticipation of an imminent arrival was quickening, as Hope’s breathing became deeper and she started a low, rhythmic moan. Quiet Isaac was stroking her hair and whispering encouraging words close to her ear: ‘You are amazing, Bubs, that’s it, nearly there, my beautiful girl.’
Hope and Isaac had always worked well together as a couple.
Quiet Isaac was an unashamedly emotional young man. He spoke of his inner thoughts easily and often to her. Hope was very attracted to this. It was not something that she’d experienced often in the Jamaican-based community she was raised in back in Bristol. Although her dad was white, she was always surrounded by her mother’s family, some of whom were born and bred in Jamaica, and swagger-proud of their roots. She loved those older uncles, with their hats and sass and sucky teeth. They were the ones who taught her to joust verbally in patois. They reminded her who she came from and why she should never apologize for it. Her nanna, Beverley, was their mother. She was long gone now, but she was so evident in Hope’s momma, Doris. In fact, she was emerging more and more clearly on Doris’s face every day. Hope only had the faintest memory of her, but it was as if she was slowly returning to remind them who started it all. Yes, Hope loved her loud, confident family. She adored their jokes and their teasing, but it was the very clatter of all that crazy volume which caused her to notice the quite different, dignified, calm nature of Quiet Isaac when she first saw him.
There had always been something other about him. He held his own in a slow, considered way. Nothing was ever going to rush Quiet Isaac and very little would cause him to be noisy. He was a stander-back, a ‘watch, learn and step up when necessary’ sort of man. Self-effacing. Reliable.
And handsome. Unmistakeably Liberian, after his father. Tall and striking with a high forehead, a wide-open honest face, and a curious pigment flaw on part of the iris of his right eye, which in certain lights looked like a tiny flash of green lightning, cutting across his dark brown, deep brown, brown brown eyes. Quiet Isaac was very noisy with his eyes. He could be on the opposite side of the room from Hope and speak to her very easily with only the looks he chose to give her. He didn’t even need to use his whole face, his eyes were so expressive. He joked with Hope about ifa mo, something his father taught him, meaning ‘do not speak it’. He told her that Liberians are predisposed towards secrecy, unlike his Krio mother born and bred in Sierra Leone, and that his dad was part of a male secret society called Poro, and it suited him to keep everything on the down-low, so signs and subtle eye movements were the stock-in-trade of his family on his dad’s side. He liked it. It was conspiratorial, mischievous and skilful. Hope got it. Hope got him. More than anyone he’d met before, which was strange considering how very different their backgrounds were.
It had been a huge shock to find that she was pregnant. They were still in the first year of their relationship and Quiet Isaac was a student and pretty much penniless. So much had been sacrificed at home for him to be here in London at Imperial College. There were scholarships available to international students like him, but it seemed that the Nigerians were the wisest to the process and all the scholarships for his master’s degree course in General Structural Engineering had been filled. So his family had had to provide as much as they could for his tuition fees and his living costs. An evening job in a coffee shop near King’s Cross Station helped a bit, but it ate into his study time and left him wrung-out-rag tired. Sometimes Hope met him after work at 2 a.m., and they went together, unallowed, back to the halls of residence where he lived. They sat side by side on his single bed and slurped noodles from paper tubs followed by slightly stale muffins he was allowed to take from work if they hadn’t sold. Usually honey muffins. They were the least popular, for some reason. Quiet Isaac had eaten so many that they were definitely his least favourite. Sometimes he moved a couple of the blueberry ones to the back of the glass dome where they were displayed, to try and hide them from customers in the hope they might survive
