Gotham (14 page)

Smokey is on his way to his new daughter, finally.

The table, set for two, has a bud vase crammed with small red plastic flowers and a tea-light candle in a bowl.

While my dinner spends its final minute under the light and his is being plated up, I ask Na
ti what makes this his favourite meal and he says, ‘It's just the best. The pastry's flaky, the duxelle…it tastes real good.' He lifts his chin a little and sets his hands on the table. I notice a tiny pilled ball of tissue lodged in his moustache, where Smokey dabbed a Kleenex dipped in
Perrier to clean away the blood. ‘It tastes refined. I believe they add cream, which many people don't. And the mushrooms are straight from Italy.'

There are no deep truths to be mined in his dinner choice, no heartfelt connections to bring to the surface. He's more concerned with sounding like an aristocrat, someone who has lived and Wellingtoned anywhere a person should.

As our meals are served, I ask him what music meant to him when he was younger and he tells me, ‘I liked the sound first, the way cool guys had it coming out of cars.' He picks up his fork. ‘Then I see that Jay Z come from Brooklyn and he the richest dude.'

‘Mos Def, Notorious B.I.G.—they were from Brooklyn, too, weren't they?' I can talk music endlessly. I want to look as if I'm doing just that, but it's Brooklyn I want to take us to—the past,
always the reluctant past and the light it might throw on the conflicted present.

‘Them too, but I only knew about Mos Def from when he worked with Kanye in 'bout 2010. Anyway, he got a different name now.' He cuts into his beef Wellington and a rush of steam comes out. ‘And Biggie, well, I was young then.'

Young when Biggie was shot dead in LA is what I think he means. By my reckoning, Lydell Luttrell Junior turned two that year.

‘I met his mom, though,' he says. ‘Ms Wallace. She call him Christopher, but.'

‘So you talked about him with her?'

‘No. It's what I hear.' He sticks his fork into the pink beef. ‘You don't want this to get cold.'

‘How did you know her?' I'm imagining a young Lydell, hand in his mother's, Voletta Wallace bending down to talk to him. She was a preschool teacher, maybe still is.

‘Just in the neighbourhood.' He lifts the fork to his mouth and sits back to chew, appreciate.

It's another in a series of probing moves that could lead him to his parents, but not one does. Whatever story there is, he's scrubbed it bare of detail and it's plain I've got all I'm going to.

It should mean everything, this picture I have of them in my mind—two mothers meeting on the street, one of a dead rapper, the other on her own downward path, her boy soon working his own rhymes. It should be a pivotal moment, with Biggie Smalls—Christopher Wallace—the Icarus of the tale, a parable from LyDell's own neighbourhood. I'm picturing Na
ti's mother with the plum-coloured shoulder bag that she'll never see.

But Na
ti gives me none of that. He keeps me at bay the whole meal.

His connection to Smokey is on his mother's side, ‘Some kind of cousin.' No more detail than
at the start of the night. Ms Willard, who granted him his rapper name by accident, is recently dead and thought him nasty to the last. He has some friends from the neighbourhood, though he doesn't see them much and won't give me names. As is his way, he leaves that recollection whirring in his head a while before diverting me to the present, always the present.

He tells me a story about the Grammys, which he's told in several other interviews, and one about a ski trip with Jay Z when he hoped the technique for snowboarding would be identical to skateboarding but it turned out it wasn't. He mentions a record label party on a yacht where Sean Puffy Combs had a red drink spilt on his white suit and left by helicopter from a pad on the rear deck.

Each anecdote is brief and unexamined. If he stares too closely at any of this big life, it might disappear.

He wants the present to write over the past, firmly and grandly. I am to judge him for his now, yet it's the journey to now that's of interest to me. A nineteen year old loose in the city, having sex, taking drugs and eating late is no story in itself.

But it will add up to enough for my purposes, even if it's served to me as a mixture of rapper's answers, dead ends and jagged edges. A story is a cohesive thing once it's written, but the path to it is not.

It's dawn when I arrive back at the Beacon. A street-sweeping truck is passing, skimming the kerb. Crates of fruit are being delivered to the supermarket on the other side of Broadway. The van smells of bodies now, of Na
ti and his girl, of men kept in a small place.
The last molecules of sanitiser have been defeated.

My eyelids feel as stiff as wallpaper. There's a sheen of grease on my skin. I'm not one for allnighters, even when my sleep reserves are okay.

The concierge calls out, ‘Good morning, sir' altogether too heartily. ‘How's that beautiful daughter of yours?'

Our circumstances make us everyone's business here, and he could not mean it more kindly.

It's not long after five, but Lindsey and Ariel are already up when I open the door. Ariel is in pyjamas, sitting with toys, watching
Frozen
, again, on DVD. She looks at me as if I've been gone no more than a minute, then turns back to the screen. I hear a bowl clunk on a countertop. Lindsey is warming the morning feed.

She's in the kitchenette, with her forehead against the cupboard above the sink. Her hair is
over her face, so I can't see if her eyes are open. She is squishing the packet of liquid around in the warm water, attempting to heat it evenly.

‘Here, let me do that.'

She jerks into a more vertical position when I speak, and she bumps the bowl. There's a red patch on her forehead from the cupboard door.

‘Didn't hear you come in,' she says, and steps back. She folds her arms and watches me press the liquid around in the packet. ‘All night. Did you know it'd take all night?'

‘Sorry. You know what they can be like, some of them.'

I hadn't the heart to tell her it was a twoto-three-day job, compressed into whatever hours last night would give me. No time in the planning of this trip or its execution was the right time for that. But the interview will end up delivering four pay packets, one of them a good one. In a simpler life I would have spread it
out, with time for sightseeing, maybe a baseball game. I can still remember the chickpea salad from Zabar's. We had no commitments that first visit, other than to squeeze as much New York out of it as we could.

‘Yeah.' She stretches her arms up and yawns. ‘My parents have transferred the last five thousand.'

This is what we have become, ledger-keepers and scroungers trying to pay for medical treatment. Across town, Na
ti is hooking up, getting high, dialing the present up as far as it'll go, and here at the Beacon we have to be about the future. You cannot live in the moment when the moment is a diabolical time.

‘Dad still thinks we should crowdfund,' Lindsey says. Her parents have given us twenty thousand. ‘You've got the contacts.' She looks past me, checking Ariel, who is still deep in
Frozen
, clutching her second- or third-best
monkey. ‘She's not…I don't want her to perform for it.'

Ariel scratches her cheek where the tape itches. The clamp on her tube sways up and down.

‘Neither do I.' I find the thought of the crowdfunding video hard to bear. We can't let a sick four-year-old plead. I can't write that script, or frame Ariel's face while she says it back to me a line at a time. She would do it, without a second thought. ‘I'll get people to push my payments. We'll make it, with that and the credit cards.'

The editors I'm writing for will pay early, on delivery if I ask them. We have a good history and they know Ariel, or know of her. Right now they are buying stories from me because I am offering them, simple as that. I'm crowdfunding in my own way, without Ariel doing a piece to camera.

If I told her I'd help her crowdfund for anything she wanted, she wouldn't say this. She might say stables. It's a real possibility. Stables
with at least one good chestnut pony. Stables, a grotto, a waterfall—she'd love all of those. We should be crowdfunding to buy Drake's place, not for exotic treatments.

But the signs are good. The fear is still there for Lindsey and me, but we have stepped back from its sharpest edge. Ariel's blood work is strong, her weight has stopped falling and, so far, every child in the program with her stats has made it. These are good odds.

The feed is ready. Lindsey can't help herself and touches the bag to check. The feed needs to be warm but not too warm.

‘I'll take this one,' I tell her. The pouch of liquid is body temperature in the palm of my hand, like a living thing. ‘You get some sleep.'

‘Really?'

She looks past me at the day blasting in through the window, the water towers and scrappy rooftops below us, New Jersey across the
water. She yawns again, a big jaw-dislocating python yawn. She gives me two thumbs up.

‘Excellent,' she says. ‘Not a great night here, but I figured there was no point in calling.'