Forest Gate by Peter Akinti Read Free Book Online

not wear them?'
    'Why should I?' asked Ashvin as he spat a fresh glob of blood. 'I don't want to be friends with you people.'
    'You people? Don't lump me in with everybody else. I hate it when people do that. I'm different.'
    Ashvin lowered his eyes to James's feet, threw a hateful gaze at his footwear.
    'What?' asked James. 'I like Air Force 1s. It don't make me the same as everyone else. Seems to me you want to fight with everyone.'
    'Beats following the crowd,' said Ashvin.
    'Trying to be different is like vanity, no?' asked James.
    'Makes me feel free.'
    They were both quiet for a while as James watched Ashvin walking clumsily, wincing now and again as he struggled not to put weight on his left leg. James put his arm around Ashvin's shoulder to support him across Leytonstone High Road.
    'What's your star sign?' Ashvin asked, catching his breath.
    'Gemini.'
    'My mum's a Gemini.'
    They talked all the way to the corner of York Road where they had to split up to get home. But they didn't part. They stood and carried on talking. Ashvin had an air of authority that appealed to James. They talked about unsettling things, of war and of charcoal and diamonds. Ashvin spoke of artists whose music our father knew by heart. Nina Simone and Fela Kuti. Ash said their music 'set him free'. He told James about writers he loved, Zora Neale Hurston and Aimé Césaire. Mostly, James listened, absorbing new things with unusual intensity.
    They had eight pounds cash between them and at about nine o'clock they decided against going home, preferring to share a meal. It was beautiful and fatal – their immediate friendship was innocent, but they were tormented boys with troubled hearts. They shouldn't have been brought together. Not then.
    Together they were emboldened by thoughts they discovered they held in common. I have often wondered how different things could have been if they had been two teenage black girls blessed with peace and the hope of most women. Perhaps two girls would have accepted who they were instead of complaining about life and the things they couldn't change. Instead, like two old philosophers, Ashvin and James spoke of the ruin of their lives, their unfulfilled needs, their unanswered prayers and ultimately – over pizza topped with black olives, green peppers and sweetcorn – they were seduced by the phantom call to death by suicide: its science, its poetry, its violence, its art.
    Forest Gate Pizza Hut had recently been made over. It smelled pleasantly of baking dough and was full of bright colours and angles like a snakes and ladders board. The restaurant was very busy for 9.15 on a week night. A tattooed waitress with hair plastered to her forehead made a 'you're so lame' face when James used his Sean Connery voice and asked for his usual table. But the two boys bent over with laughter. They followed her to a middle booth between a Polish couple looking ill at ease and an elderly black man wearing a London Underground uniform who looked as though he had been born with a frown, and sat reading a tabloid while he ate.
    Directly opposite Ashvin and James were another two booths. A teenage couple huddled together in one. The boy wore a cool pair of sneakers with three fluorescent stripes. While his girlfriend ate garlic bread and cheese noisily, he masturbated his laces. Two women in their mid-forties with thick braids and thicker Bajan voices sat in the other booth. Every now and then someone would shuffle past the boys' table, different people, wearing a loud scent or using a mobile phone. At one point during their dinner, their waitress, a delicate Eritrean girl who James had been eyeing, interrupted to hand them both crayons. That had them both in stitches.
    They spoke intimately that night. I don't know all the exact details but I can just imagine how the conversation went:
    'Do you think it can get better?'
    'Not for the likes of me and you.'
    'What about religion? Do you have any faith in God?'
    My brother would