Page 43 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“How else would you rent a film?”

“I’m not telling. It’s too much fun watching your prehistoric brain try and figure it out.”

They walked back by the scenic route, taking one of the crooked lanes that ran down to the sea. By the harbour, a knot of lads were laughing and spitting into the water. Joe’s guts froze with a stale fear he couldn’t reason away.

One of them looked up and saw him. “Aye, it’s Alfred Lord Tennyson! How’s the poetry?”

Esi looked between the lads and Joe. “You know them?”

He lifted his hand, walking on. “Aye. That’s the lads from school who used to shove my head down the toilet.”

“Why?”

“Oh, a million reasons. I was quiet, and weird, and I wrote poetry.”

“I don’t know. Some girls are into that. Not me, obviously.” She nudged closer to him, taking his arm. “But they don’t need to know that.”

One of the lads whistled. The rest laughed. Joe understood what she’d done, and his heart tingled with sudden warmth. “It didn’t start because of that,” he added. “At the beginning, it was because my dad’s English.”

She looked incredulous. “Is it that big a deal?”

He snorted. “Ask my grandparents. They were ready to disown Mum when she told them who she was marrying.”

She laughed. “Same story with my mum and dad. Her side is African, his side is Caribbean, it’s a whole thing. But their families got over it. Eventually.”

“Did you get grief about it at school?”

“Not really. It’s not such a big deal in my generation.” She looked back over her shoulder. “Who’s Alfred Lord Tennyson?”

“Victorian poet. They call me that because...” He closed his eyes. “Because that’s what I said when the teacher asked us to name our favourite celebrity.”

“Oh my God.” She leaned into him, shaking with laughter. “That’s so adorable I can’t accept it.”

He took her down to the beach, yelling his tourist spiel over the howling gale. She bent to examine a pile of seaweed, draping strands of it into spirals, her braids whipping around her head. He watched as she worked, building up layers that started out as nothing but turned incrementally into a woman’s face, calm and pensive, her hair a profusion of Afro curls.

“Your art,” he said. “It’s really good. You should do something with it.”

She looked up at him, amused. “First time I’ve heard that. My dad was always like,Esi, nice picture, but shouldn’t you be studying? No one gets paid to draw.”

“Aye, sounds familiar.” He smiled. “Did you point out some people do get paid to draw?”

“So that’s what you’re saying I should do with it? Try and sell it?”

“Not necessarily. Show it to folk. Give them something to remember.” He thought again of the statue of Byron in the Wren Library, gazed at by seven generations of watchers.

“But I’m not doing it for anyone else. I’m doing it because it’s fun. And because...” She looked up, as if searching for words in the overcast sky. “I like making things that didn’t exist before. Things only I could make. Even if I’m the only one who ever sees them.”

It felt like listening to himself three years ago. Where had it gone, that joy in just creating, without obsessing over what people would think, whether it would impress them enough? Could he ever get it back?

She shivered, turning to the lashing grey waves. “It never stops, does it?”

He laughed. “The sea? No, customarily the sea doesn’t stop.”

“How do you get used to it?”

“It becomes a part of you, I guess. When I first moved to Cambridge, I used to sit holding a glass to my ear, just to feel less homesick.” He closed his eyes, letting the sound pass through him. “Then I realised, it’s not really here I miss. It’s the fact I grew up here. All the versions of me it remembers.” He understood, as he was saying it, what it meant. “We’re all time travellers. Just, most of us don’t get to go back.”

They climbed the hill to the house, grimacing into the wind. He dropped the supplies on the kitchen table. A strangled meow announced the arrival of his grumpy fifteen-year-old cat, who padded in and rubbed his head against Esi’s ankle.

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