Butterfly Fish Read Online Free PDF Page B

and its jagged base stared down my fluffy slippers in an unequal stand off. The cat circled, tail upright like an antenna drawing an invisible line in the air before approaching the bottle again. It leaned low, stretched its neck, shot its tongue out and licked, deftly avoiding shards.
    I slapped my hands together. “Stop that! You’re a bad boy.” I ran indoors, grabbed the plastic bag that was a green tongue poking out of the kitchen drawer. By the time I re-emerged, the troublemaker had disappeared into the shrubbery separating my house from the neighbour’s. The sky was shedding one darkening blue to reveal another. I scooped up the bottle by its neck, sniffed. It smelled like palm wine. Fermented wine was a sharp scent that lingered; I wondered if the smell would remain in my nostrils throughout the rest of the day.
    The bottle slipped, nicked my finger. My blood became a small red tide that ebbed down settling on the jagged rim in a circular, bloody kiss. I dropped the broken bottle inside the green plastic bag and shoved it in my wheelie bin. I locked the door, checked the post hatch. It was empty. The cut throbbed and the blood drop began to grow into a red bulb. I looked at my finger, noticed the tiny piece of green glass grinning inside the wound.
    I had a meeting planned with my mother’s old friend and solicitor Mervyn for later in the day. Mervyn and his family collected strays. He was the centre, a warm, pulsing nucleus people surrounded. You never knew who you’d see at their house; maybe a Jamaican cabbie with gambling debts needing an unlikely haven to lie low, or broken prostitutes with heroin babies needing rescuing, or a friend whose hands were disappearing, who needed help before his whole body vanished, reduced to a heap of clothes on a side road.
    I’d known him for as long as I could remember and it was hard to separate him from the things I associated with him. The smoothness of his bald head, like a crystal ball hiding the night, crumpled expensive suits, expressions of concern, large Cuban cigars dangling jauntily from the corner of his mouth. As a kid, I imagined he slept with one of those cigars firmly lodged between his lips, lit and burning with particles of the cases he’d taken home. I saw him tossing and turning without dropping that cigar, and winding curls of smoke twisting in the dark around him like flying white snakes.
    I used to play hide and seek with his sons as a kid. I hid so well behind the line of cushions on the soft, plum sofa I slipped into a world beneath where coins and old conversations hummed their approval. Mervyn was a great dad. I watched the way he threw his sons in the air as if they were the only suns allowed to set and rise back up with each catch and fling. In Mervyn’s home, the warmth and love was inescapable. Whenever I saw this, the well inside me deepened, lengthened. Only there was no water at the bottom, just stones thrown swallowed by silence. All this made me like Mervyn, even love him a little. I pictured my mother and me arriving in hislife as two stray winds creating small havocs for Mervyn and his boy’s but that story she’d never told me.
    I caught the train from Elephant & Castle to Mervyn’s in Harlesden. In a fairly empty carriage, heads unconsciously bobbed to its rhythm. I coughed and the coloured train lines flattened. The train paused for breath frequently at main station stops, and at pits in-between, the ones left off the map. It squeaked and sputtered, its sounds creating a low, dark horizon on tracks were mice flew. It shuddered along.
    At Harlesden, I moved with the throng of people spilling out of the station like a language. I spotted a young woman stealing a bouquet of blue azaleas from a flower stall right behind the owner’s back. Her arms were outstretched, mischievous grin in tow. Her body was arched and she was dressed in a yellowy brown African wrapper. Braided in multiple single