She looked up and straight into the sun, so that all she first saw against the dazzle was a dark shape. She took a step back, blinked and her vision cleared: ‘Banji. You scared me.’
He smiled and his eyes crinkled. Which she’d always liked. She smiled back.
He took the plantain she’d been reaching for, turning it over to expose a bruised underside. ‘If you have to shop here, you’ve got to shop clever.’ He put the piece back and picked through the pile. ‘This one’s fresher.’
As she took it from him, his other hand touched and held hers.
‘You’re so cool,’ she said.
‘I was born cool.’ He smiled again.
They stood for a moment not speaking, and she thought how mismatched they – a stout white woman and a tall black man, standing close – must look, and then she thought that she should take back her hand.
She didn’t want to.
‘How was Lindi this morning?’ he said.
‘Disappointed you weren’t there. And stroppy as hell.’
‘Can’t imagine where she gets that from.’ Another smile as he increased his pressure on her hand.
She looked down at his long brown fingers with their broad square-cut nails and the back of his hand with its raised veins. She saw her own hand in his, plump and white, as he continued, gently, to squeeze it.
It was fifteen years since he’d left, and his going had been so brutal and so final she’d neither expected to see him again nor hoped that she might. But now she found herself in the grip of some of the feelings she had thought long gone. He’s playing me, she told herself. And said, ‘Where did you go this morning?’, although she knew he wouldn’t like the question.
He took his hand away so abruptly that she was pulled forwards.
‘What the hell?’ She backed away from him. ‘Why do you always have to be so difficult?’
Not often that she shouted at him, and now she saw, in his rapid blinking, how she had taken him by surprise. Good, she thought.
‘Hey.’ He reached out to tap her, gently, on the nose. ‘I didn’t mean to unbalance you.’
If he thought he could win her over so easily, he better think again. She turned her wrist to look at her watch and, although she had nowhere to be, said, ‘I’m late.’ Plantain in hand, she went into the shop.
There was a queue by the till. She wandered through the narrow aisles, giving herself space in which to cool down and Banji time to make good his escape. But when at last she re-emerged, she found that he had waited for her.
‘I’m sorry.’ He was looking down at her, twitching his nose in that other way she had also always found appealing. ‘I was out of line.’
She couldn’t remember him ever apologising. Despite herself, she softened. Said, ‘And I overreacted. The heat’s doing me in.’ She even thought of stretching up to kiss him.
But his attention had already moved off. ‘Trouble,’ he said.
She followed his gaze and saw Ruben, who, six feet three and broad with it, his head covered even in this extreme heat by a hoodie, was cutting a swathe down the middle of the market as only Ruben ever did. He walked as if he was completely alone in an empty space, wind-milling his arms to accompany words that seemed to burst from him. ‘Option,’ Cathy heard. ‘Action. Traction. Mischief.’ To punctuate the last, he slapped open palms against his chest so hard it sounded like a gun going off.
‘He must be off his meds,’ Banji said.
‘He won’t hurt anybody. Not unless he feels threatened.’
‘No, but he might hurt himself. And . . . Oh shit.’
Banji had already seen what Cathy only now noticed – two uniformed policemen making straight for Ruben. She knew most of Rockham’s bobbies, but she had not seen these two before. And Ruben did not take to strangers.
‘If they try and stop him . . .’ Banji began.
She didn’t stick around to hear what he was going to say. ‘Come on,’ she called as she began to run.
By the time she reached Ruben, a group of onlookers, mostly young men who, for want of something better to do, hung around the market, had also been drawn to the scene. She could feel the heat coming off them, and she knew this wasn’t just down to the weather.
As a member of the police community liaison committee, she’d clocked the recent rise in confrontations between the police and Rockham’s youth, a result of the Clean-Up-Rockham campaign that the new borough commander had set in motion. It was a grand-sounding initiative that so far seemed to consist primarily of an escalation in stop and searches, with a corresponding rise in allegations of harassment. With the imminent closure of the estate upping the tension, the last thing they needed was another incident, especially one involving Ruben, who was a kind of Lovelace mascot. She pushed her way to the front.
‘I’m asking you nicely, sir,’ the older of the two policeman, a sergeant, was saying to Ruben. ‘Lift your hood away.’
‘Action,’ Ruben said. ‘Mischief.’ He windmilled his arms close to the policeman’s face.
‘Careful,’ the policeman said. ‘Hit me and there’ll be trouble.’
‘Action.’ Ruben sped up the agitation of his arms.
The policeman held his ground. ‘Under Section 60 of the Public Order Act, I am authorised to request that you remove your face covering. All you have to do, sir, is take it down and then, all things being well, we can go on our way.’
‘Mischief,’ Ruben said, and again, ‘mischief.’
‘Let him alone,’ came a shout from inside the crowd, and from someone else, ‘He’s not doing any harm,’ while the crowd moved closer.
‘Do what you’ve been trained to do,’ the sergeant told his junior.
‘Assistance required,’ the constable said into his radio as he turned to face the gathering. He was young, and new, and the hand that held the radio was trembling.
Not so his sergeant. A big man, and sure of his authority, he stepped close enough to Ruben for their noses to be almost touching.
‘Action,’ Ruben said. ‘Traction.’ He flicked both hands at the policeman as if trying to shoo away an insect.
‘No need to take the piss.’ The sergeant moved closer.
‘Don’t touch me.’ Ruben backed off until he ended up jammed against a stall.
‘Leave him alone!’ The cry was taken up by other members of the now growing crowd.
‘Sarge.’ This from the young constable.
But the sergeant was not prepared to listen either to his junior’s appeal or to the rumblings of the crowd. ‘Your choice,’ he said, and might have laid hands on Ruben had not someone darted from the crowd to interpose himself between the two.
‘Hold on, officer.’ It was Reverend Pius Batcher of the local Methodists and a fellow member of the liaison committee. Normally a soft-spoken man, Pius now used a voice built up by years in the pulpit: ‘You’re new to the area, so allow me to introduce you to Ruben, a member of my congregation. Ruben wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not unless you invade his personal space.’
‘I wouldn’t care if he was the Archbishop himself,’ the policeman said, ‘I would still ask him to remove