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  Meantime, I’m still quietly lodged in my original basement room, thinking about girls, playing on my XBOX, listening to Funkadelic; a tragic carbunkle hitched (like a bloated tick) on to the smooth heel of Solomon’s relentlessly advancing, righteously ideological, all-conquering life-style.

  I mean where’s the guy find the time, huh?

  Sometimes (if I’m lucky) he’ll bring me out and parade me around when some of his real friends are visiting (artists, musicians, accountants, decent people) and he’ll make me tell them the story of how I shagged a 55-year-old journalism lecturer for six months (to try and improve my grades at college), and then, when it came down to the crunch, she broke my heart and failed me (The bitch. And I shouldn’t have failed. I was on track for a B. It was my best fucking subject. I just wanted the A so bad I could taste it–although, in retrospect, that was probably just the dusty residue of her lily of the valley talcum powder).

  Yes that’s- ‘Ha ha ha. That’s very funny…A splash more Johnny W., Martha?…’

  So what does Solomon do, you’re wondering. Good question, but not good enough (Yeah. Maybe you’re getting a little taste of how it is to be me now, huh?). Because the only sensible question to ask in this situation is: ‘What doesn’t Solomon do?’

  If you asked him directly he’d probably fob you off with a sarcastic aside about being ‘a jobbing inkhorn’. His main gig (or one of them) is at The Economist, where he writes complicated stuff about Globalisation, world debt and branding.

  Imagine how it feels (just for a moment, if you wouldn’t mind) to actually be living with someone who read philosophy at university (the degree of choice for crackpots and losers), then graduates, then ‘reads a lot’, then ‘takes an interest in stuff’, then ‘asserts himself’, then ‘meets a few people’, then ‘kicks around some ideas’, then ‘gets proactive’, then ‘discovers a niche’, then ‘earns some respect’, then ‘makes shitloads of money’, then ‘blows it’, then ‘earns some more’, then ‘has a blast’, then…

  How the hell did he do that? I mean I was right here. I stood idly by and watched (half an eye on the Guardian review of the new Coen Brothers project, fantasising about Rose MacGowan, casually mauling a Pop Tart).

  How did he do that?

  Jealous? Jealous?

  Fucking hell! Wouldn’t you be?

  Solomon is the guy who the ‘ideas people’ in the advertising industry desperately want on board when they’re sourcing a new product. He’s the man who knows everything about ‘the newest kind of beat’, ‘the nastiest type of drug’, the ‘most beezer vitamin’, the ‘top colour’, the ‘most innovative fabric’. He’s the chap who gets invited to all the best parties but who is too fucking cool to ever turn up.

  Solomon is the only man I’ve ever met who can wear those ridiculously poncey Paul Smith shirts (the ones with the paisley and the frills and the photographic flower prints) and still ooze bucket-loads of raw machismo.

  Solomon is best pals with Chris Ofili. Bjork thinks he’s ‘a hoot’. He stole (I repeat he stole) Lenny Kravitz’s last-but-one girlfriend. He owns two early Jean-Michel Basquiats. He had a cameo in NYC art wunderkind Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 2 (or 3, or 4), where he appeared as a rampant black goat in a golden fleece and stilettos (coated in Vaseline).

  And you know why? Because Solomon is an archetype. Solomon represents something. Solomon is the Über-man.

  Solomon grew up–for a year–on the same estate as Goldie, and introduced him to his dentist. Solomon got a blow job he didn’t really want off a female MP in the locker rooms of the House of Commons (‘How could I refuse? It meant so much to her…’). Solomon told Puff Diddy that he should ‘seek redemption through sport’ (then Diddy promptly ran the New York marathon, for ‘Charidy’).

  Want me to go on?

  Okay. Solomon met Madonna (yes, that’s right) in a NYC bar, and she chatted him up and he turned her down (‘Too muscular,’ he sighs, ‘that bitch really needs to soften up’). He told Robbie Williams to be ‘more like Sinatra’. He predicted ‘a major downturn in MacDonald’s economic fortunes’–to the actual month, two years before.

  Solomon had a feud with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. Alicia Keys claimed he ‘broke my damn heart’. He calls Mario Testino ‘a sad, little turd’. The people who run The Late Review (BBC2, after Newsnight) consider him Public Enemy Number One after he casually accused them of ‘espousing the worst kind of tokenism’ (they asked him to appear, on-screen, to defend his position–of course they did–but he told them, ‘I’d rather get Meera Syal to lick the cheese off my knob’).

  Yup.

  Solomon’s a radical. And he’s vicious if he needs to be (‘the world never changed yet,’ he says, ‘through somebody asking nicely’). He has a whole bunch of theories about how The Culture is only really interested in rewarding (and exploiting) black mediocrity. ‘If they’re afraid of UK Garage,’ he says, ‘then they kill UK Garage. Simple as that. Blow the black-on-black violence issues out of all proportion, shit-up the promoters, deny it the radio-play. Stop spinning the discs on Radio One by creating 1-Xtra (Black Music for Black People), aural apartheid, and only available on Digital, remember…?’

  (Yeah. So that’s why I catch him listening to it, and with such obvious enjoyment, all the livelong day, eh?)

  ‘But then here’s the master-stroke,’ he continues, ‘they take with one hand and then they give Britain’s premier New Music Prize the Mercury–to Miss Dynamite-tee-hee, with the other, as an almighty Garage sop, when the person who’s innovating that year is The Streets, and he’s dynam-white-tee-hee. Laugh, Adie? Laugh?! I’ve cum all over my fucking joggers.’

  ‘But what about The Rasket?’ I ask (and very genially–since Rasket, or Dizzee Rascal–the hottest, most mischievous and cacophonous ‘urban-music’ pup of this Fresh New Century–has just won himself the self-same prize–last Tuesday, man. I mean, what to do with an ideology of exclusion when the cherry on the cake has just been cordially awarded–uh–the cherry on the effing cake, so to speak?).

  ‘A blip,’ Solomon avers, mildly, then ponders for a moment, then sniffs, and then he’s off again.

  ‘This kid’s eighteen years old,’ he rants ‘and he has a history, yeah? He’s an innovator, a genius, and yet his own people hate him. They’re full of envy…’

  (Dizzee was stabbed, earlier this summer, somewhere in Ayia Napa.)

  ‘And that’s what happens,’ he throws up his hands, ‘when a racial group is denied real opportunity. Because when success involves cherry-picking, bet-hedging, compromise, pretence, a subtle diminution of creative integrity, then a culture- a confused culture- turns in on itself. Instead of celebrating its achievements, it hacks them down out of jealousy. And can you blame them, Adie? Can you blame them?’

  ‘But I thought The Rasket was the real deal,’ I mutter, confusedly.

  ‘He is,’ Solomon confirms. ‘And they’re making him safe. By sanctioning his brilliance they hope to defuse him. This time is critical for Dizzee, see? He needs to stand tall. He needs to be unbowed. He needs to grab the initiative, be irreverent, be young, and black and fucking strong.’

  Uh. Okay, then.

  Solomon listens (you’re getting tired, yeah, me too, so let’s try and wind this up now, shall we?) to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Fela Kuti, Franco, Dancehall and R&B. He deejayed on a Pirate Jungle Station ‘back in the day’.

  Solomon is obsessed by black sci-fi. ‘The black man,’ he explains, ‘can feel a deep and strangely comforting resonance between his own experiences of slavery and the experiences of the UFO abductee…’

  Yeah. Enough already.

  So I get to live rent-free in this joint. But just imagine sharing your TV remote with this guy.

  Three

  Oh shit.

  Oh SHIT!

  It’s 2 a.m. I’m stewing in the bath having just briefly recounted–to a slightly-stoned Solomon–the perplexing tale of Aphra’s pudenda, when it comes back to m
e in a flash–I suddenly remember.

  I remember where I saw her. I actually remember Aphra!

  Now hold on a second…hold on…

  So it’s a ludicrously huge bathroom (to set the scene), made up, in essence, of the entire attic area. There’s a sloping roof, a wooden floor, a free-standing bath and a free-standing shower. Solomon is sitting in his favourite, ancient, red leather armchair, tapping his boot to the erratic beats of Wayne Shorter’s post-bebop masterpiece, Juju, smoking weed, sipping Rooibos tea, encircled by Dobermans (I’m uncertain of the collective noun here–Dobermen? Dobermens?–but suffice to say, that there are three of these viciously angular, prick-eared bastards, which–in my humble opinion–is three too-damn-many. Especially when I’m in the buff and they haven’t actually eaten since 8 a.m. yesterday).

  Solomon is currently (but of course) holding royally forth on his current subject of choice: David Blaine (seems like this canny illusionist is cheerfully perching on the tip of everybody’s tongue in this town right now).

  ‘You honestly think Blaine wants to be Christ?’ he asks, snorting derisively (in caustic response to something utterly uncontentious which I just idly tossed into the discussion-pot), ‘but you’re barking up the wrong tree entirely, Adie. Blaine doesn’t want to be Christ, he wants to be black.’

  ‘But what about…?’

  ‘He wants to be a brother.’ Solomon marches defiantly on, ‘That’s why he invented “street magic”, don’t you see? He wants to be “down”, yeah? He wants to be…’ (Solomon performs a satirical hand gesture) ‘where it’s at. Most fundamentally,’ he continues, ‘he wants to be the stranger in the room, the “unknown quantity”. He wants to be the mystery, the alien, the refugee…Because that’s what blackness denotes in this country, and in America, for that matter…’

  Even I (full as my mind is of Aphra, and Shorter’s maddeningly persistent sax, which is rather like having an irate wasp lodged inside your alimentary canal) can’t let this pass.

  ‘Well I’ve rarely seen,’ I state provocatively, ‘so many people, from such diverse ethnic backgrounds, in such constant attendance at a single, live event, ever. (Even En Vogue at the Hammersmith Apollo, 1993.) ‘And I think–by and large–that they’ve mostly come to show their support, not to mock or to denigrate. If they sense a fraud or a wannabe, then they’re certainly not making any big fuss about it…’

  Solomon waves me away. ‘We natives love a spectacle,’ he opines grandly. ‘We aren’t threatened by the theatre of life. Or by the pain of it, either. We embrace all that. Only Whitey shies away from the essentials. Whitey needs to live in his box, see? To make his point- to feel secure- he builds his own prison. And he fashions it with such apparent care, such deliberation- so fucking painstakingly- but then he forgets to include the windows, he forgets to include the doors. He builds these constructs out of fear, Adie, and then tries to make everybody else live inside of them. We Melanic* Peoples are different. We build our palaces out of language and music, sex and chaos. These palaces have no ceilings and they have no walls. The White Man may’ve caged our bodies, ruined our economies and appropriated our cultures, but our souls remain unencumbered and our spirits, vibrant. More than almost anything, the White Man loathes vibrancy…’

  ‘Guff,’ I say, and fart in the water. A neat row of bubbles rises to the surface.

  ‘Why so needlessly oppositional, Massa?’ Solomon enquires tenderly. ‘I mean why allow yourself to be restricted by that intellectually reductive configuration of either/or? It’s so pale, so obvious, so horribly predictable…’

  ‘Fuck off!’ I glug (over a frantic Elvin Jones drum solo), then sink down even lower in the water and drape my face with a flannel.

  Five seconds ‘silence’.

  Solomon inhales on his spliff, then exhales, with a little cough.

  I pull the facecloth off.

  ‘I remembered,’ I said, ‘while you were talking just now, where it was that I saw Aphra before…’

  ‘Aphra,’ Solomon muses, ‘Aphrah. “Declare ye it not at Gath, Weep ye not at all; In the House of Aphrah, roll thyself in the dust.” ’

  I sit up (the water sloshes), ‘What?!’

  Solomon remains impassive, ‘Micah, 1:10.’

  ‘The House of Aphrah?’

  He nods, ‘In Hebrew, the House of Dust, no less.’ (Does this dude have a well-manicured afro-cockney finger in every pie?)

  He sips his tea. ‘So where?’ he asks.

  I lie back down, musing, spreading the flannel across my chest. ‘Remember Day Five or Six,’ I say, ‘when I met that angry girl with the miniskirt and the terrible hair?’

  ‘No,’ Solomon says.

  ‘The girl,’ I continue, ‘with the corkscrew perm, who slipped on a stray tomato and nearly twisted her ankle?’

  ‘Ah,’ Solomon exhales.

  ‘Monday night. About twelve o’clock. There’s this nasty half-riot under way and we’re right in the middle of it. The police have just turned up…’

  ‘I remember.’ Solomon sounds very bored.

  ‘And I grab this girl and take her up the back exit…’

  Solomon snorts.

  ‘Of the bridge, you twat. The stairs out the back. And we got to that cosy little corner, halfway up…’

  ‘Spare me the gory details,’ Solomon groans.

  ‘But that’s the point,’ I expostulate crossly. ‘There were none. Things were just starting to get nice and steamy, up against that wall- she had her tongue down my throat, I had my hands up her skirt…when suddenly the girl freezes on me.’

  Solomon doesn’t look nearly as astonished by this revelation as I think he perhaps should. ‘Halitosis?’ he ponders ruminatively.

  I scowl.

  ‘Faulty technique?’

  ‘Thanks,’ I deadpan.

  ‘Someone’s coming?’ he finally offers (rather more helpfully), then ruins the effect by gently adding, ‘Prematurely?’

  ‘Yes,’ I nod (pointedly ignoring the ejaculatory slur). ‘Another woman. And instead of just walking by, like most people would, this other woman pauses and then whispers…’

  I pause myself, as I recollect (then I digress), ‘I mean obviously I have my back to her, and the girl has hers against the wall, so she can see her better. But we’re in a clinch…’

  Solomon slowly rotates his hand to move me on.

  ‘But when she hears a voice,’ I continue (ignoring him), ‘she pulls away slightly, opens her eyes, and she sees this other girl. This woman. And this woman in standing there, smiling, like something from Fatal Attraction…’

  ‘And she says?’ (Solomon obviously finds the film reference a step too far.)

  ‘And she taps me on the shoulder and she says, “You. In Bow. The VD Clinic. Six o’clock. Last Tuesday evening.”’

  Solomon snorts so hard that he spills ash on his trousers.

  ‘Fuck,’ he curses, and quickly taps it off.

  ‘But that was her,’ I say, ‘that was Aphra. I turned round and I saw her, from the back, retreating. But it was definitely her. I remember her hair, and her shoes. These strange green shoes. The noise they made…’

  Even Solomon is perplexed by this story. ‘But why’d she want to do that?’ he asks. ‘Out of sheer mischief, you think?’

  I scratch at my neck for a moment, saying nothing.

  ‘I mean you said she had an axe to grind…,’ Solomon continues musing. ‘When she approached you today she called you a whore-’

  ‘No,’ I interrupt, ‘she called me a pimp. Then she claimed that I was using Blaine to pimp for me…,’ I pause. ‘It was all a little confused, actually.’

  ‘Argh, pure semantics,’ he waves me away.

  ‘Although I suppose,’ I start off nervously, ‘I mean, I suppose she might’ve said it because…’

  I clear my throat, ‘Because it was true.’

  It takes Solomon a moment to catch up, but when he does, he starts, ‘What?! You got yourself cock rot, Massa?’
/>
  ‘Leave off! I had an appointment. Amanda–three exes ago–got chlamydia. She said I needed to get a checkup. But I’m clear, thank you very much.’

  Solomon’s still perplexed. ‘But how on earth did she know?’

  As Solomon speaks, one of his three Dobermans stands up, stretches, sniffs the air, trots over to the bath, dips its head down and laps at my water.

  ‘The million dollar question,’ I say, trying to push the dog away with my toe. The dog lifts its head and growls at my foot.

  Okay.

  The foot rapidly retreats.

  Solomon clicks his fingers and the dog, Jax (who completes the foul triumvirate with Bud and Ivor), trots mechanically back to his side again.

  Man. How’d he do that?

  ‘You think she’s following you?’ he asks, glancing towards the window (Solomon’s had three girl stalkers in his time, one of whom subsequently had a successful career in children’s TV presenting. See? Even his freak-followers are interesting).

  ‘What else to think?’ I say.

  ‘You believe she actually had a migraine?’ he asks.

  I pause for a second, mouth slightly ajar–

  Uh-oh–

  Head-fuck time…

  ‘She didn’t!’ Solomon jumps in, roaring with glee, slapping his thigh. ‘She just Ian McEwaned you, man, and you’re still none the wiser!’*

  (He seems indecently delighted by this thought.)

  But, fuck…

  My mind is racing.

  And the porter? Even the porter? Was he…?

  Nah!

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I really think she was sick. I honestly do. She seemed sick. She was sick. She smelled sick.’

  I remember the smell. Like rotten milk mixed with cheap lager.

  ‘And so you get her home, and she’s sick, like you say. And then you leave the room, and she takes off her skirt…’