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I rented it for the week because I wanted it to be accessible to you. I asked your agent the easiest place for you to travel to. It’s handy too, because there’s a studio in the loft. A musician used to live here. If you say yes to my offer, I can rent it for three months and can make it our base.’
‘So, obviously, this situation is untenable. You have to turn it down.’ Malakai blinks at me before breaking into rolling laughter. ‘What’s funny?’ ‘You, Kiki. Your entitlement is hilarious. I rate it, actually. If you don’t back yourself, who will? But, in any case, I’m not turning shit down. Why don’t you?’
Ooop.
this. I don’t have my podcast, I just found out that SoundSugar have blacklisted me and my parents are selling Sákárà so, even if I wanted to quit it all and just continue the family business like this is some cute made-for-TV movie, I can’t!
Business has been slowing down for a couple of years now, and it’s getting too expensive to run. They want to move to Lagos. They deserve to rest and I’m happy for them—’ ‘But it’s still hard.’
Malakai has cut through my script – the one I tell myself and others – with a truth I’ve run away from. I’ve tried to strip sentiment from fact, because what good is it?
I get it, they see me and Kayefi as their true legacy, and after Mum’s health scare years back, they want to take life easy. They don’t need to revive a struggling business, so why should they? But for me the restaurant was more than a business, a conduit for our survival; it’s a testament to my parents’ ability to spin gold from grit, the way the restaurant would fill on Sundays after church, on Eid, the home away from home for international students, a way for people to connect with their roots over a soup, swallow and Supermalt special.
At seven years old, I would sit on the counter and watch the romance unfurl: the flirting, the easy glamour of the women with their fresh press and curls.
Sákárà was a place to commune, and even though our people are scattered now, they still exist. I know they do. The people who want to laugh and dance and eat at the same time. However, I had no idea how to present that to my parents without sounding like a child who doesn’t want to move house.
‘And, uh, I heard about The Heartbeat, but I had no idea about the blacklisting thing. That’s fucked. It was great work.’ I pause, unable to resist asking, ‘You listened to it?’ ‘Only on nights where I couldn’t sleep without listening to the dulcet tones of your voice.’
‘You know, his show Motown was my idea? I pitched it to him. Developed it with him.’ I sit back up, a shock of indignation spiking through me. ‘What? I had no idea—’ Malakai nods with a rueful smile. ‘Yeah, and that was deliberate on Matthew’s part. He “let” me direct a couple episodes, though.’
I tried to disengage, but it’s hard to ignore someone you used to love achieving a dream you wanted just as badly for them. Hard not to feel some kind of caged joy for them, a happiness that burns because you were supposed to be there next to them as they did it.
The general concept of the show is good too, straightforward, a deep dive into Motown artists, each season focusing on an era, exposing the glitz and the grit with a slight romantic sheen. It’s clever, but the concept outweighs the content – it often veers into kumbaya bubblegum.
‘Matthew said he would help me mould it. Guide it. He obviously just took over. Wiped my name from everything. Took over my story ideas, made them . . . just floppy, you know?
He told me I didn’t have the experience to make it into the great thing it could be. And I could have gone legal, but I would have lost and it would have followed me around.
He’s put me in a couple of his writers’ rooms, and brings me along to all these dickhead LA parties, introduces me as his mentee, but . . . it feels like smoke and mirrors.
Malakai’s ideas are so alive, so considered, weighty, multi-dimensional and I hate the idea of someone not only stealing them, but watering them down, robbing them of their magic – his magic.
I haven’t told anyone that, not fully, but you need to know that this isn’t just some sort of plaything for me. This project is a lifeline. A way for me to really be creative. To get back to me. Get my name really out there.
It’s an objective fact that Taré is special, but I’m wondering if he’s saying it with objectivity or because she’s special to him.
I want her to take my work at face value, not in the context of me being the ex of a guy she once had a thing with. I mean it’s not even relevant. I just want to be able to maintain professionalism and I don’t want our connection to affect that.
‘Are you high? You blink a lot when you’re high. I’ve only seen it once before, but that time you blinked a lot.’
‘Feeling better?’ ‘I didn’t need anything to feel better from, but thanks.’
The flame in his eye is like a flicker of a lighter. I won’t burn this time, can’t burn this time.
‘You got a fever? Because there ain’t no way Kiki Banjo’s conceding defeat to me so easy.’
‘So you say you want this song – “Lost Boys” – to feel more sparse than hollow, but to me I already get this sense. It feels like a hazy dream. It’s sensual, hedonistic, and listening to it feels like you’re high. It somehow separates psyche from body. What was your headspace when coming up with the feel?’
‘Man, my headspace was high. That’s how I felt. Disembodied from who I was and who I wanted to be and who people thought I was.’
‘When I made my first album, I was working primarily from a place of hunger, you know? I wanted to get my voice out there. I had shit to say. I wanted to show the world all my soul because I didn’t know if I would get another chance to. I was fearless because I had nothing to lose. And then when it was successful . . . there’s, like, a funny thing that happens when you achieve your dreams. All the fears you didn’t have come rushing through. You’re, like, stuck in anxiety. You second guess your instincts. Music is what I do, who I am, but you now have all these voices, this audience who is,
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I won’t lie – it felt really good for a while. I wasn’t me; I was just my senses. And one day I just started humming this tune, while I was in a fog, and it became “Lost Boys”. So I was in LA around two years ago, spent a couple of weeks locked in a hotel room with a cute boy who felt just as lost as me.
It wasn’t romantic in the traditional sense, but it was . . . special.
‘So, yeah, this song is about disembodied bodies finding each other, being lost together. It can’t feel hollow. It would defeat the purpose. There was no salvation in it, no, but there was some solace—
The plaque on the pillar at the gate named the mansion ‘House of Alkebulan’, which I find an intriguing name for a home in Hampstead Heath that looks like it’s owned by a tech billionaire in a murder-mystery caper.
My bones were starting to slip into the satin of our words, smoothing around each other even when they were jabbing.
We’re congenial colleagues, that’s all, professionals who are bonded by a zany boss.
Preternaturally sexy people step out of every other vehicle, dripped out in selectively styled designer, and I already know when I get out the car the air’s gonna smell like Francis Kurkdjian’s burp.
I feel full up to the top of my skin, like if you scratch me I’d drip gold. I’m feeling good, feeling like I look good and Malakai is looking at me like I’m what God was thinking of when He proclaimed that all He made was good.
I realise that Malakai has been carrying something heavy, because now he’s looking like he’s lost some emotional weight, some weariness from his face. What has he been running from?
It’s inexplicable, and the Unsaids still hang, the unargued threatens to choke, but our words have been tripping and falling over and around each other since Taré’s, finding home in the nooks of each other’s sentences. It’s almost, kind of, sort of, like we might be becoming friends again.
We pass a lively kitchen, gleaming white marble with an island that could double as a stage, filled with hors d’oeuvres. I spy a cooking range that my chef’s-daughter eye tells me is worth a smooth £16K and has never really been used domestically.
This is the kind of environment that in the past has made me want to crawl inside myself, not knowing where I fit in, how I got here and, right now, I begin to feel the telling itch.
Yes, I do know he always wanted kids, because at one point we took it as a categorical fact that we were going to have them together. We discussed names (Sisqo was vetoed by me, Knowles by him). We spoke about when we got married, not ‘if’.
Malakai and I have perhaps friendlied too close to the sun, but I decide to catch a tan instead of let it burn the understanding we have cultivated.
‘I’m Soraya Sackey – an exec at Akassa Productions. Been wanting to meet you for a while, actually. I’ve missed your podcast! I saw your sweet farewell post to your listeners on socials. Have to say I was surprised to see you weren’t coming back for another season, but I’m sure it’s for good reason. What are you up to now?’
Why can’t I talk like somebody who has interacted with humans before? Soraya Sackey squints her eyes in confusion, understandably, because I barely know what I’m saying, flustered by no longer having The Heartbeat to hide behind as my identity, not having a shorthand for success, legitimacy.
My scope? That’s a great question. What is my scope? Why can’t I scope my scope? I can’t believe I’m embarrassing myself like this in front of a woman with geometrically flawless winged-liner. I want to die. I’m also fairly aware that a production I can’t talk about sounds distinctly made up.
‘So you know how some people have a drink and start bragging? Kiki’s issue is the opposite.’ He gently touches my elbow and it steadies me, lances me of nerves – I’m here and I’m here. ‘She has a drink and forgets she’s a big steppa.’ He glances at me with such a blaze of affection that I feel convictions singed. New credos I set for myself such as One Must Not Get Too Close, and You Are Allowed To Vaguely Fantasise About That Tongue Thing He Used to Do, but These Fantasies Cannot Be Propped Up By Any Warm Feelings About His Person fray around the edges.
‘She’s actually a cultural producer, working on art that centres truth and craft – it’s kind of mad watching her work, actually. She’s almost like an artist whisperer and a surgeon at the same time. The way she connects the person with the art and gets them to pull out these . . . intricacies about music and culture . . . I don’t know anyone who does what she does like her.
Yet here I am, reminded that Malakai became a Brandy-esque vocal Bible when it came to singing my praises. He means it too, his words weighty enough to leave comforting, toasty indents on any doubts that I might have.
‘But Malakai’s direction is seriously beautiful, and it’s really fun for me to play in and find something to carve out of – it’s a great prism to work within as a storyteller, and so much of what I do is broken open by his direction. Really insightful, soulful stuff, finding magic in the mundane, the sacred in our culture. The project we’re working on actually comes out later this year – we’re under a nondisclosure, but it’s the kind of cultural deepdive we do.
He might swoon like a Victorian maiden in a romance novel. I look at him and see the effort it’s taking for him to pretend that the sentence that was just uttered has not completely decimated his chill.
‘She definitely meant Lamar, innit? As in, Kendrick Lamar?
Plumes of cigarette smoke mingle with weed and a melange of scents thick enough to choke, but I’m breathing easy in what feels like the first time in a while.
