Derek Obama, President

The two men, strangers, stood at the checkout. They weren’t patient, but had not been queuing for long. Both white, both adequately clothed, both male, they queued with baskets of essentials, not luxuries, and thought about the better times, the times that were or may be, anything but the times that are. The younger of the two noticed the other, the heavy smell of cigarettes almost bitter among the dry food items, tea, coffee, jams. He was watching his younger male counterpart, smiling with it, as though a secret were about to emerge.

“Can I help?” asked the younger male, uncomfortable in the gaze of others. The shop assistant glanced up from service, disgruntled with the public use of her professional phrase. Pulling a packet of a forgettable biscuits into his basket the older man smiled further.

“You don’t recognise me, do you?” he said, apparently relishing the confusion which greeted his conversation.

“I... should I?” asked the younger man, looking to the other two members of the queue, behind them, as though for moral support, for unity against the interaction, for the shared humour garnered from weakened sanity.

“I should say so,” smiled the man. He looked about forty, his dark hair greying and shaved clumsily, close to his bulbous head. His ears were thick and long, his skin smeared dirty and cracked, his lips like sausages, his beard new and untidy. Thick green socks housed the tapered bottoms of blue sports trousers, his hands were yellow with a smoking commitment. “Look again. Think political. Look again.” There was something assertive about his tone, but comforting. The younger man looked, his face moved within an inch of the one he was inspecting. He let his eyes drift around the face, stopping at the ears; he pulled back and looked up and down the man’s five feet and five, then leaned in, closer still. An incredible intimacy had passed between them, but neither man made comment.

“Can I help?” queried the shop assistant rhetorically. The younger man looked toward her. She seemed impatient. The queue had grown behind him, the older smiled. He did look familiar, but why or where from was uncertain.

“Excuse me,” said the younger man and edged forwards, placing his basket down at the till point. The shop assistant looked at him, disgusted. Milk and toilet rolls, some canned meat. It was disgusting. He was saving his vegetarianism for another day, something to look forward to, the promise of vitamins somehow sufficient to get him through the weeks, the months. She rang a till-mounted bell, and another shop assistant appeared behind the neighbouring checkout. The older man approached it, laid his basket down. Biscuits and a handful of greetings cards, all for different occasions.

The two staff scanned the items robotically.

“You do, don’t you? Recognise me.” The shop assistants sneered to one another, the first mouthing a word that the younger man couldn’t identify. He felt panicked suddenly.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The older man’s eyes pointed towards the television that was kept next to the tobacco behind the counter. It showed constant news. “There,” he said casually. “There I am, recognisable me.”

It was Obama. The men both paid for their shopping in the silence that precedes further conversation. They left the shop but outside stayed together.

“Derek Obama,” said the older man, awkwardly shifting his plastic carrier bag between hands, extending the right in greeting. The younger man shook it.

“Samuel,” he said. “But people call me Goebbels.”

“Goebbels? Unflattering. Why Goebbels?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s because I worked in advertising.”

They watched the traffic together in the grey light of afternoon, the glare of the shop front warming in its way. Derek pulled a half-smoked roll up from a pocket somewhere underneath his jumper and lit it past a throaty cough.

“You’re not... I mean,” Goebbels struggled for words. “Are you really... Barack... Obama?”

“No. Derek Obama.” His reply was obvious, firm, somehow considerate.

“Then you’re equally not, I mean, not, of course, that it’s a question of status or rather, ho hum, identity, or, what have it, you’re not, therefore in association, the President, of, the United S. of A.?”

“On the contrary,” he replied, glibly relishing the cigarette. “President Derek Obama, leader of the free world. I am.”

“Shall we walk?”

They set off north at a pace, towards the heath. The traffic was annoyingly consistent, sparse but present, a mocking hum of mechanics through the residentially derelict streets. There was a distant rumble of children, school’s out, it approached like a solid mass, a tangible experience. At ‘King Wang’s Chinese Portion’, the two men stopped and consulted the sun-faded menu. The takeaway was closed, opened only once a week, its interior a mess of off-white plastic and leather-scuffed linoleum, the smeared ancient stainless steel of the hotplate somehow devastating in its sadness. The fridge cast the only light past garish New Year regalia, bottles of coke becoming somehow symbolic in their alien brightness. They left the sorry menu without a word, its Arial curves destined to forever alienate it from purchase.

Turning onto the heath the smell of dogshit drifted from the grass.

“The president, though,” Goebbels said tentatively. “The president is Barack. Barack Obama. Barack with a B.”

“And?” Obama had altered his walk when his thin soles reached the mud, his steps longer, quicker.

“And? And, he’s, you know.” He nodded sympathetically, euphemistically.

“I know?”

“Black,” he said quickly, “he’s black. The first black president Barack Obama. He’s black.”

“I am black,” said Derek. Goebbels laughter was out of place in the trees, the heath ached with unsatisfied need.

“He’s American,” he said. “I suppose that you’re American.”

“You know I am. I’m Derek Obama. Can we win it?”

“What?”

“Can we win it?” He shouted.

“Yes?”

“Yes. We. Can.”

They looked at each other blankly.

“You’re not Barack Obama.”

“No, I’m Derek Obama. Barack is my professional name. It was a media construct. Said it sounded more black, whatever that means.”

“I thought you said you were black?”

“I am.”

“What?”

“I am.”

“You’re not. Black.”

“I am. Look at me.”

“I am, and I can see you’re not black.”

“What does black mean?”

“What?”

“What does it mean to be black?”

“It means... you are... black.”

“I am black.”

“No you’re not.”

“I know I am. I’m Barack Obama, first black president of the free world America. I must be black.”

“You’re Derek Obama.”

“Derek’s my personal name. Barack Obama is my professional name. Sounds more black, they said. Important for demographics.”

“Demographics?”

“Voting demographics. Derek, Barack, doesn’t matter. I am Obama.”

“Look,” Goebbels felt frustrated and excited. Maybe he was Obama? Stranger things had happened. “I’m not saying you’re not Obama. All I’m saying is you’re not black.”

“How can Obama not be black?”

“He can’t.”

“But you just said I was Obama?”

“I...”

“Yes. I am black, and I am Obama. I think black. I dress black. I sleep black. I am black. That makes a black man.”

“Your skin though. It isn’t... black.”

“Racist.”

“What?”

“You’re a racist.”

“How?”

“You’re talking about my skin. ‘I will not be judged by the colour of my skin but by the kind of person, etc.’ M. Luther King. A very brilliant black man. I know me to be black and black I am and I will not be judged by the colour of my skin and I am Derek Obama, President, professionally known as Barack.”

A dog walker approached the two men, she stopped when she heard them talking. Obama smiled at her, a big smile. His teeth were very rotten.

“Don’t I know you?” she asked. He offered her his hand.

“Derek Obama, President.” She narrowed her eyes and looked at his face, clicked her fingers in recognition.

“That’s it,” she celebrated. “You showed Bush’s monkeys, sir, and congratulations.” She asked if she could take his photograph, and Derek Obama of course agreed. She had a camera phone, and asked Goebbels if he would mind taking it. He took two, portrait and landscape. The dog walker left them very happily, holding her phone like a trophy.

“This is insane,” said Goebbels when she had gone.

“The lights. The television lights make people look different.”

“It’s unbelievable. You’re not American. Chicago.”

“The thing is,” said Obama.

“What?”

“I am.”

“No.”

“I am American.”

“Then why are you here? Norwich, England?”

Derek Obama seemed surprised by the question. “I live here,” he said.

“Obama lives in Washington.”

“I am Obama and I live here. I commute.”

“You commute? To America?”

“That’s right. We came here for vacation a few years ago and decided to live here. It’s a fine city.”

“That’s as may be but you can’t commute to America.”

“It’s not so bad, off peak.”

“Off peak? It’s thousands of miles.” Obama shrugged. “And the president lives in the White House.”

“The White House? Have you ever been to the White House?”

“No.”

“No. No one has, and I’ll tell you why. It’s a symbolic property. It only exists in a symbolic context. Do you understand?”

“Symbolic?”

“It’s false. A model.”

“The White House is a model?”

“Yes. It’s a scale model of an imagined building. They house it in the pentagon and use it for news footage and as a symbol of American pride and patriotism.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t have to believe it, but it’s true. You ask any American if they’ve visited the White House and they’ll tell you ‘no’. Anyone who says yes is probably a paid actor. There are a few of those, used in stock White House footage. There’s no need to visit it, they’ll say. We can see it on TV. That’s the point.”

“TV.”

“Exactly.”

Goebbels opened his milk while he thought things through. He knew he’d regret it later, but his mouth felt dry.

“So you are American?”

“Yessir.”

“And black?”

“Uh huh.”

“And you commute to work in Washington and undertake most day-to-day presidential duties here?”

“Yup.”

“And you are Derek Obama, President of the U. States of A.?”

“One hundred per cent.”

He took a pensive sip of milk, refusing to doubt the veracity of a self-proclaimed black president. The intricacies of race issues were not his forte, and he felt sensitive about his colonial past, about his distaste for postcolonial literature at university.

“Pleasant to meet you, Mr President,” he said.

“Yes we can,” smiled Obama, his inspirational catchphrase already wearing thin.

*

He saw Obama a few days later, cutting the ribbon at a new existentialist hairdresser called “Outsider’s Hair Futility”, a by-line of “Where Epilation Precedes Essence” hand painted on the windows, most of the key vowels back-to-front. The walls were plastered with Xeroxed photographs – footballer Camus, gruesome Sartre, grave de Beauvoir, paranoid Kafka – and the place was run by a couple of Arab boys, who cut hair with cut-throat razors, highly polished to catch the glint of the bright salon lights, blinding and artificial. They heated the place to boiling, which made for a disorientating experience. Although they did not want to detract from the authenticity of the haircut, subtle signage read “Please do not kill the Arabs. Thank you”, in text barely legible from the styling chairs.

The computer-made poster in the window, which demonstrated little competence with the Microsoft suite, proclaimed ‘Derek ‘Barack’ Obama’ in a size twenty font, with the parenthetical exposition, ‘US President’, only worthy of an italicized size sixteen, the insignificance of the international title exemplified in software choice, in presentational decision, in Norfolk simplicity.

A small crowd of Norwich’s few ethnic minorities had gathered, seven, eight people, all keen for some kind of representation from the new president, Chinese and Indian men primarily, all smoking furiously, in silence. Obama was wearing a small paper thin suit, grinning obscenely at the opening buffet, halves of scotch eggs, sausage rolls, egg sandwiches, bowls of crisps, the ceremonial savouries of the working class. There was black grime under his fingernails, his beard was longer, more matted. White bread crumbs flew from his mouth while he spoke idly to the manager, who seemed pleased with the turn out, pleased with the presidential authority his new salon demanded. Obama’s visit represented the first of its kind in Norwich’s long history, and was to all there present a symbol of hope: of race, of future, of haircuts.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” started Obama, his voice rich in its quintessentially English tropes. “I am President Obama. One score minutes ago, this buffet lunch bridged a gap in your fine city. A gap between the races.” He saw Goebbels standing at the back, peeling the sausage meat from a scotch egg. “You’ve come here today because you believe. You believe in a better tomorrow.” The manager applauded alone. “As the new president of the United S. of America – and the first ethnic president to have” – his voice was drowned out by a passing bus, reluctantly headed towards Sprowston – “and that specific, defiant triumph, I thereby embrace my responsibility as figurehead, martyr, sage. I represent a future of tolerance to all men, and be you Chinese or Indian, Arab or English, I know without doubt that you will find this tolerance within the four honest walls of “Outsiders Hair Futility”.” He held the scissors above his head, smiling broadly. “Can they cut it?” he asked.

“Yes they can!” cried the manager, jubilantly, waving his arms like a conductor. The Chinese were nonplussed, the Indian’s bemused. Oddly, Goebbels was in tears as Obama cut the ribbon, standing back from the doorway to grant passage into the authenticity of the hair salon. The crowd dispersed. No one wanted a haircut.

“So,” said Obama, wandering over to Goebbels, who was drying his eyes with the back of his hands.

“So.”

“What did you think? Of the speech.”

“It was good it was... very English.”

“When in England,” said Obama, satisfied.

“I never imagined the president would open a hair salon.”

“It’s an important gesture to win the trust of the common man, to put politics in an everyday context that he can understand. These racially suppressed,” he said. “They’re the exact people my global policies reach out to. They need to know that their brother’s votes weren’t wasted, that their voices are heard, that someone is representing them, not just Stateside but here: Norwich.” The two men looked at each other. “I noticed your tears,” he said, like a punchline.

“They were for something else.”

“I see. Coy.”

“They were,” said Goebbels firmly. “Although you were terrific. Gave life to the corner.”

One of the Chinese men had returned and stood a few feet away from Obama.

“Can I do something?” asked the president.

The Chinese said nothing but pushed forward a picture.

“He wants you to sign it,” explained Goebbels. “The picture.”

Obama looked at it. A portrait of the Clinton’s, cut from a glossy magazine. He didn’t say anything, but wrote on it all the same. ‘Best wishes from Derek Obama’. His handwriting was very neat, practised. It looked unreal. The Chinese bowed his head and scuttled off. His friend would be waiting.

“Must happen all the time,” said Goebbels, eating an egg sandwich in layers.

“Yes. Part of my presidential lot.”

“How’s Washington?”

“Poor weather.”

There was not much else to say.

“I need an aide,” said Obama finally.

“An aide?”

“For campaigns. And diary management. Perhaps protection.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Racial tension. As a black president I have enemies and a full calendar. Interested?”

“In almost everything.”

“Perfect. You can start this afternoon. Let’s get you a haircut.”

Obama led Goebbels into the salon. His glasses steamed up immediately, he felt sick with panic, lost in blindness. The Arab boy led him gently to the seat.

“What can it be, sir?” asked the Arab boy, his razor glaring in a hundred watts.

“Short past and future please,” said Goebbels, short of breath and already dripping sweat under the heat lamps. “Bit of mousse on the freedom.”

*

The letter came a week later, although it felt longer because Obama had been making two or three public appearances a day around the city, giving readings and speeches, openings, encouraging massive support for his democratic ideals. People were very certain that he was Barack Obama, despite the physical discrepancies, and he spoke with all the flair of a dynamic young politician.

It was delivered by hand to Goebbels’ flat, envelope written in red ballpoint. ‘Abarma’. Goebbels tore open the envelope carefully. Obama was at an Italian restaurant, giving a short talk on pizza bases throughout American history. He read the letter, then read it again:

‘Abarma,
We’re kill you in a morning, boy.
Shoot you ded.
No blak presidens in Norwich.
Thursday be bye-bye that be.’

That was it, then. The threat had come. Goebbels punched the letter and picked up the telephone. Norwich wasn’t ready for Derek Obama.

*

Wednesday followed Tuesday and another package arrived, this one bigger than the last. Opening it together, Obama and Goebbels were surprised to find a sugar beet wrapped within the thick brown paper of the package, Norfolk’s unofficial agricultural mascot. The beet had a knife forcibly inserted through its hard centre. It was accompanied by another letter, exhibiting the same blatant disregard for vocabulary and syntactical accuracy:

‘Obalmer gonna be next beet.
He be beat. Beat up beet.
Real ded to morra boyo.
From,
THE VHS CREW.’

They had signed this one: the VHS crew. A small group of self-confessed luddites who refused to let their audio-visual entertainment systems progress beyond VCRs and video cassettes. Perhaps Obama represented something altogether too modern for them, and it was only through a violent act of assassination that some semblance of order could be restored to their distant isolated existences?

“We could contact the police,” Obama suggested.

“Pointless,” said Goebbels hopelessly. “This is Norwich. The VHS crew are the police. By day they keep steady jobs in high places. By night their luddite tendencies take on homicidal intensity. They’ll have an arrangement in place.”

“So then. The lists of history are being rewritten, here, tonight, Norwich Norfolk. Lincoln, Kennedy, Obama.”

“We can’t let it happen. We have to hope. They may be bluffing.”

“Bluffing? Look at this!” Obama thrust the sugar beet into Goebbels’ hand. Something about such wanton destruction certainly made it a serious act, intense, the work of madmen. Goebbels wept as he threw the sugar beet into the wastepaper basket.

“You’re a symbol of hope Mr President.”

“I will die a symbol of hope. Hope of the coloured of the free world.”

Derek’s bravery was deeply powerful, rooted in the absurdity of his overlooked Caucasian features.

“You can’t go out there tomorrow,” pleaded Goebbels, steeped in tragedy.

“It’s what I do, Goebbels, you know that. What kind of a man – what kind of a president would I be if I didn’t?”

“A living one.”

“Precisely. Who takes inspiration from the living these days? Death is the message, my friend. Death is the final policy.”

“But...”

“Nothing. Tomorrow is the Dragon Parade and this city needs me. The speech will go ahead as planned. It’s all I’ve got left.”

“What about me?” asked Goebbels inaudibly.

The men fell silent and the rain hit the window.

*

The crowd had gathered on the steps of the Forum. Local primary schools were competing for best dragon (by design and by theory), but the limits of their resources were clearly exhibited by the low quality of their materials, the ugliness of their dragons, the confusion of their participating pupils. Some local DJ played songs with a fire theme, but only seemed to have sourced two tracks, which he rotated among the ten competing schools, ‘Firestarter’ for some, and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ for the others.

Obama stood at the top of the steps behind a small microphone and a group of teenagers, his hands deep in his trouser pockets, fingering loose change, no more than pennies. Goebbels stood slightly behind him. After the eight schools had finished their poorly choreographed routines, the DJ introduced the Lord Mayor, a man long-faced and forgettable alongside Derek Obama, President. He wore full ancient regalia, somehow absurd in this context of steel and glass, the modernity so celebrated in the architectural specifics of the Forum building. Leaning towards the microphone, he spoke.

“My ladies and my gentlemen,” he said. “The dragons have danced!” A flutter of polite applause, like death throes, motor spasms, epileptic convulsions. “A spectacle of sorts it truly was!” The sound of sobbing children was pervasive in the acoustic trap created by buildings and concrete steps. “To announce our victor, I hereby introduce one: US President Obama, sir.”

The silence was disbelieving, confronted by D. Obama’s white English countenance. Odd claps sounded, as if by accident. There were four or five security dotted around the circular perimeter of the main performance area. They weren’t police but local heavies, football players, in reflective jerkins with thick shaved heads, white flesh bunched up at the peaks of their necks, matching short beards, all moustaches united with a chin-grown beard in some hirsute orbital, cheap aftershave for lewd effect. Unarmed, the threats to Obama had been dismissed by City Hall, the paid security revelling only in their physicality, their adeptness at hand-to-hand fighting and not their strategic disarmament of primed assassin luddites.

Who was this man they called Obama, pondered the unenthusiastic gathered? Surely not a president, of any land. But then a Mayor wouldn’t lie, and the television does change people, and no one in Norwich had ever met the new president before, that much was true and... and by Jove, it is him, it is Obama, and here, in our humble fine city. It is Obama! It is Obama!

“Oh-ba-ma!” chanted a fifty-something man in a wax jacket, his body possessed by an incredible excitement. “Oh-ba-ma!”

Others joined in, first a couple, then more, five, ten, all chanting, all clapping in measured solid beats, palms striking dead on the syllables, Oh-ba-ma, Oh-ba-ma. Passing pedestrians stopped, caught in the frenzy of communal experience, the need for unquestioned unity, and themselves chanted anew. Goebbels urgently looked, cold in the brisk air, desperate for a glimpse of a rifle barrel, but he saw nothing. The crowd was enraptured, the sightlines were clear. Maybe it had been a hoax.

“Norwich,” said Obama coolly, with the audible twang of a Herefordshire accent. The applause roared. He held his hands flat against his sides, apparently unfazed by the threats, the letters, the mutilated sugar beet now a forgotten memory. He was in his element. Goebbels couldn’t help but smile. Derek. “Norwich,” he said again, “I have a dream.”

The crack of the rifle was deafening in the silence of concentration, so loud it felt unreal. Goebbels saw the bullet go in, just one, through the forehead, and it felt like minutes before he heard the noise. Obama pirouetted with the impact, span around to face his aide, an arc of blood so red against the concrete. He was killed instantly but didn’t fall, Goebbels lowering his body to the floor in delirium, in tears. The flesh was warm from the exhilaration of public speaking.

No one had seen the gunman but the audience started to scream, everything happening with a delay. One of the security guards lifted the Lord Mayor into his arms and slowly jogged him towards City Hall, like a woman or a child.

Goebbels wept above his friend, held his dead hand, stroked his dead cheek. The bravest president, his Derek ‘Barack’ Obama. The crowd had dispersed quickly, children running in all directions clad in the odd single pieces of a larger dragon, eternally outshone, panicked parents rushing for the familiar sanctuary of the shopping centre. Several people remained before the Forum, now drowned in the din of active emergency vehicles, but all kept an unwritten distance from the body, from Goebbels, desperate not to feel the death of another, feel it on their skin. They watched quietly from their sanitised proximity.

He took Obama’s wallet from his trouser pocket, before the ambulance technicians moved the body and the police sectioned off the three concrete slabs that the death had infected. It was something he needed, a memento of his friend. He was asked a few questions by two police officers, but he realised that he couldn’t tell them much. He told them about the VHS crew, the two letters and the sugar beet, but they didn’t seem to take him seriously. It felt inappropriate to be talking about him like this: the deceased, the victim; he was neither of those things. He was Derek Obama, President, and now he was gone.

A technician from the radio station was dismantling the rig, carrying the speakers and PA to a red Transit van. The DJ had long since gone. The disco lights were still running, their blues, reds and greens illuminating the city’s history, distorting its future. The technician carried a bundle of promotional t-shirts to a bin and forced them in, struggling to push the white cotton material through the hole, designed for small amounts of personal refuse. He swore as he pushed, his cheap blue jeans slumping down the flatness of his buttocks, his belt a pointless artefact.

Goebbels watched, watched until the lights were eventually dismantled. It was near dark. He wondered where the news crews were, the mourning parties, wondered why the huge screen that crowned the glory of the shopping centre had not reverted to a primal reportage, the world dumbstruck and grieving by this heinous presidential assassination, trying to construct a narrative out of soundbites, interviews and hypothetical bullet trajectories. Defined by his sadness he opened the wallet. On the screen Obama toured Washington; he had a wife, a vice president, he shook hands. He did look different up there. The wallet held a driving license, the card of pizza place, scraps of paper. Derek Lush, it said on the driving license. It had a picture.

Goebbels put it back into the wallet and followed a family towards the shopping centre, buzzing under the weight of its own air conditioning, the shop fronts illuminated like neon hearths in the Norfolk night.

a father poem

Love,
I asked father
How do you tell when
you meet mom?
It was beneath an ole oak tree
It was beneath me.

out the front door, carefully

Once when I was very small my dad came home unexpectedly from work in the afternoon, which didn’t happen too often because he had a very busy position in his work life, and in his personal life, but he came home and asked me to go outside to the driveway with him. Being small and of a slightly guilty constitution I immediately thought that I must have done something really wrong.

Dad’s voice was always rather stern and he had the look of punishment in his eyes that were blue as the sky. Maybe he had found out that me and my sisters had spent the afternoon throwing chewed forbidden chewing gum onto our next door neighbour’s outside wall and making a mess that took days to clean up, or perhaps that I had busted the stem of the grand old conifer in one of my fantastical voyages behind its thickness. It was hard to tell with my dad’s expression.

My hands trembled with anticipation as he reached for the front door. We can’t be going far, I thought, because I still have my carpet slippers on. Dad stopped when he got to the door of his blue work van. It was a glum day and the air felt bland in my mouth, but I was probably swallowing more of it than usual because of my nervous stomach.

He pointed at the back of his van.

“Look in there,” he said. It was almost a whisper.

Lying half-wrapped in a blanket right there in the van was a seal. It was alive, I noticed straight away. It looked up at me with eyes like sparkling food plates and opened its mouth gently. I laid my child’s hand on its side and felt its heartbeat.

“It got washed up on the beach,” my dad told me. “I have to take it to the shelter.”

I could barely breathe as my dad drove the seal away.