Four

AFTER

Lily

When I was thirteen, I drank alcohol for the first time. I immediately loved the taste, the burn in my throat, the warmth in my belly and the tingle in my belly. I loved the sensation of walking on clouds after many swigs. It is a distant memory. 

The last time I went to Luc's happy place was months before her death. It is an abandoned building on a hill close to a small river. 

I was lying on my bed groaning like a woman in labour because of the terrible menstrual cramps I was suffering when Luc barged in with a thick cloud of vanilla around her. She looked at me and wrinkled her nose like I was the most irking thing ever.

"You smell edible," I said. It just flowed out my mouth, "like ice cream."

"It's my perfume." She walked to me and pulled me up, "get dressed, puppet. I want us to go somewhere special!" 

I was naked from the waist up. Then she did something weird, she pulled at my pinkish brown nipple and walked out. I wore my white romper and flip-flops to match with her red romper and flip-flops. Sitting next to her in her boyfriend's car, I avoided the mirrors in the car and ran my lips over my dry lips mentally scolding myself for forgetting lipgloss. Luc wore layers and layers of blood red lipstick and lined her eyes until they were the first thing you noticed but even without makeup, Luc was easily beautiful.

Joseph drove us to "Happy Place" and I was immediately disappointed, I thought it would be a restaurant or park. But Luc was all smiles as she kissed her boyfriend goodbye and sashayed into the building with a black glass bottle. 

"Come on, puppet!" Her voice echoed and I followed her.

The drink tasted like a mixture of full cream milk and  vodka, I guess that is what it was.

Luc promised me that alcohol was the antidote for menstrual cramps. We sat on a mat that Luc had left there on a previous visit, my head on her thighs as I drank huge swigs from the black bottle with the rusted roof over our heads, the ceiling had collapsed and the windows were gaping holes. On the walls were graffiti: "one love forever" engraved into the crumbling cement, "God is love" written with ink and profane words sprayed on. Luc and I turned it into a kind of game, searching for graffiti. We would run through the echoing rooms and scream out the words on the walls, we climbed upstairs too. The alcohol made me very happy and very lightheaded, I didn't even feel the cramps again and we drank it everytime we came to the abandoned building.

She called it her happy place because she could come here, think and drink alcohol. She said she found the place when she and Joseph needed a place for emergency make out. 

Now, I feel like a traitor taking James to Luc's happy place.

I'm surprised that the Mercedes makes it up the hill. James parks in front of the once yellow abandoned building.

"Are you sure you want to be here?" He asks looks at the place like he expects to see zombies run out of it.

"This was Luc's Happy place," I reply like it is the answer to his question. Somehow, it is.

The wind pushes the rusty swings beside the building. It brings back memories of Luc and I swinging on them, hearing them groan with wear until one of them collapsed taking Luc with it to the ground. The rusty swing cut into Luc's calf giving her an awful scar after the stitches healed. We told Dad that Luc fell in school and landed on a rusty piece of metal like it was  orchestrated, he drove her to the hospital to get tetanus shots immediately.

That was two years ago.

I don't know why I wanted to see James, maybe it was because of the hug we shared. So I sent him a text message this morning asking him to come pick me up by noon, his reply was, "I'll be there. Why are you using Luc's phone?"

I told him the pathetic excuse for why I can not let Luc's glittery red phone go on the ride here. He squeezed my hand like he understood, like I am not crazy.

Luc was my only friend which is pathetic now that I think about it, I have had numerous friends that have come and gone but Luc was constant. Esther and I became close when Luc and Joseph began dating which was  but since Luc died, I've been ignoring everyone and Esther wasn't patient to stick around like James and Jacob are. 

When I see Esther at school, I quickly look away and hope that she doesn't come over to talk. She doesn't. 

Luc's department wore black and processed around school with her photo singing hymns, I even saw some people crying and this surprised me because Luc only spoke to a handful of people. What surprised me the most is that Joseph and Esther joined the procession even when they weren't in Luc's department. Joseph looked sad and Esther was sobbing. I looked the other way and hoped that they didn't see me. 

The soft drizzle becomes urgent, tapping against the windscreen of the Mercedes. 

"Should we go in?" I ask gesturing to the building "or would you rather stay here?" I know James would prefer staying in the car but I desperately need to see the graffiti again.

"Do you have a marker?" I turn to James. He fumbles in the compartments of the car and finds a purple marker. Luc wouldn't have used purple but I have no choice. I open the door of the car and run to the building.

I catch myself laughing - really laughing for the first time in three months and I hear James behind me, he pulled his hoodie up and he is holding a hamper I didn't see in the car.

When we get to the building I ask him about the hamper.

"It was in the back seat," James says.

The odour of damp dust assaults my nose. The rain beings to fall with great intensity, it drums on the rusty zinc roof of the building and cold wind howls in through the naked windows. I'm grateful for the long sleeve turtleneck I'm wearing.

"You are beautiful," James blurts.

I turn to look at him. His  gorgeous hazel eyes are narrowed and staring down at me, his lips are pursed and he is holding the hamper too tightly so bones protrude through the thin skin at his knuckles. Why is he so tense?

"You think so?" I somehow summon my voice to ask.

"Yes, Lily." It is the first time James has called my name today and it stirs something inside me.

I feel a familiar stinging behind my eyes. "Thank you," I say.

James opens his arms and I walk into his embrace. As if on cue, the rain subsides. 

Gathering strength, I stumble out of James's arms and walk to a vandalized wall. I feel James's eyes on me as I uncap the marker and create my own graffiti.

Lucinda Amokeye Agioliwhu's Happy Place

James stares at it with a raised brow. "Not bad."

"What's in it?" I ask pointing to the hamper.

"Food," James says without missing a beat, "I thought we could have a picnic."

This makes me laugh. Only James would plan a picnic in the rainy season.

"There is a nice mat in the car . . . I'll just go grab it." He turns to leave.

"Let's just do it outside," I say. Luc's mat is at a far corner with something that looks like a used condom on it. This place is other people's happy place too. "There are too many ghosts here."

We spread the mat on the damp ground under a tree, metres from the river. Damp brown leaves fall on my hair and James's. 

He unpacks coconut cake wrapped in tin foil, egg sandwiches, bottles of plain yogurt and two apples. I want to kiss him for being such a sweetheart.

"Thanks a thousand, James," I say breaking off a piece of cake.

He smiles and then shrugs like it say 'it is nothing.'

James doesn't say much during our picnic, he is the quiet twin. I tell him how Luc and I were like two peas in a pod when we were little. People used to think that we were twins. We were notorious and were famous for causing trouble. 

Once when we had power blackout for almost a month, Lucie yelled "NEPA!" So all our neighbours thought the power was back on, they were livid when they realized that it was a prank. They cursed Lucie when they saw her for a whole week afterwards.

I recount how we would sneak into our neighbour's garden and pick at her veggies or stomp on our Mum's aloe vera patch whenever she did something we didn't like. We always got spanked when she found out or when the neighbour told on us but that didn't stop us.

In between gulps of yoghurt and laughing at James's yoghurt moustache I tell him how Lucie and I hunted down cockroaches in our backyard with lamps at hand and stomp on them before Mum calls us in for dinner. 

He smiles when he hears how Luc defended me from bullies in secondary school, all the boys were scared of her.

"Luc was immortal, James." I feel the familiar heaviness in my chest when I think or talk about Luc.

He leans in and kisses my cheek so lightly that I almost didn't feel it. 

After we have cleared all the food, James turns to me and asks what happened in my last moments with Luc. Then he goes red in the face and says I don't have to answer it if I don't want to. I tell him I will.

"She said a lot of hurtful things to me when we were outside, not by the hall but on the beach."

James doesn't ask me what those things are so I continue. "Then I got tired and told her I needed to get back to the hotel. I said 'let us go back inside' but she didn't want to. She said 'go I will be right behind you' then she started walking deeper and deeper into the ocean and I told her to stop but she just started laughing and called me a scardy cat. She finally cut it out and we left together but when we got to the room, she gasped and said she forgot her bag of seashells on the beach and she ran out. It's weird that her body was floating so close to the bank, don't you think?"

James says nothing.

I suck in a deep breath and remember that we forgot the seashells in the hotel room. Don't cry, don't cry. 

After what seems like a lifetime, James looks at me and smiles. "Mind being my muse?"

"Not at all."

He goes and gets his camera that costs a fortune from the yellow Mercedes and takes lots of pics of me standing by the river, barefoot in the river, with my hands in the air, of me jumping in the air and laughing—really laughing.

And rain starts to drizzle. Only it's not a drizzle but a downpour and we are laughing as we pack up and race each other to the yellow Mercedes.

                

I cannot see more than a foot in front of us and what I can see are blurry, watery forms through the frosty windscreen.

James keeps cursing under his breath and I feel terrible that I can't control the weather. I love rain but it seems like this is going to cause a flood. I flinch whenever I hear the deafening roar of thunder and James keeps asking if I'm okay.

I'm not.

Outside, the forms of pedestrians are running helter skelter, some of them have trays on their heads and some are lucky enough to find a place to stand and wait the ran out. The road is quickly getting flooded, the gutters are pouring out into the road. Some people are parking their cars.

The sky is weeping.

My mum is going to lose it when I get home. The rain drums persistently on the windscreen and I'm not suppose to see her but I do, I can't mistake that grey cashmere sweater anywhere even though I just got a glimpse of it because I gave it to her, it was mine but she saw it and fancied it. She looks like a wet rat, drenched to the skin under the rain. 

"Stop the car, James!" Obedient James does as I say. He could be my puppet. Luc would have been proud.

I open the door and yell out her name, she doesn't hear me. I will have been surprised if she does. So I run after her, I think I hear James calling my name. I past a man carrying a toddler in his arms and a woman in an ankara dress with a baby strapped to her back. When I reach her, I pull her by the sleeve of the sweater and tell her to follow me. She does.

James regards her quietly as she slips into the backseat. I give him an apologetic smile, she'll soak his precious faux fur upholstery.

"Lily." Her thin lips stretch and her eyes light up.

"Esther." I'm glad to see her too.