Gotham

Gotham by Nick Earls Page A

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Authors: Nick Earls
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‘You heard the man.’ He takes another tissue from the box and wipes his hand before looking up at me. ‘We get final cut, yeah?’
    A beef Wellington is waiting when we arrive at the restaurant, but the next is two minutes away, so Nati decides to take that and give methe older one. The place is empty, the kitchen closed but for Nati’s production line. There is no suggestion that I be given a menu. A great beef Wellington that has spent a few minutes under a hot lamp is still, by my reckoning, likely to be a great beef Wellington. And it’s deep into the night, not near a meal time for me anyway.
    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 Nati 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 inPerrier 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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I met his mom, though,’ he says. ‘Ms Wallace. She call him Christopher, but.’
    â€˜So you talked about him with her?’
    â€˜No. It’s what I hear.’ He sticks his fork into the pink beef. ‘You don’t want this to get cold.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 Nati’s mother with the plum-coloured shoulder bag that she’ll never see.
    But Nati 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 thanat the start

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