The soft brown hill of Marsha’s shoulder is the first thing Ben sees when he wakes up. All he sees, in fact. He’s been sleeping tucked in so close behind her that his forehead is against her neck, and the skin of her back spreads as wide as a field, as wide as a map, when he comes blinking up to consciousness. He’s seeing it from so close to, it isn’t quite in focus. It is a deep caramel blur, stippled with the rose of freckles and the occasional dot of darker purple-black, which at the edge of his vision firms into the clarity of pores, fine down, tiny wrinkles, unrolling away from him around the cushiony curve of her shoulder blade, and seeming as inexhaustible as a real hill, a whole landscape he could browse across, kiss across, pore by pore, brown millimetre by brown millimetre. Blood warms it; it swells and shrinks minutely as Marsha breathes; it belongs to someone, is part of someone who, improbably, wonderfully, loves him. It is not it. It is her. It is all her. He lies in a glowing envelope that radiates from her, as if she is so full of life that it doesn’t stop at the literal edges of her but spreads around her, into the sheets, into the pillows, into the cave made by the quilt. She would say that they are keeping each other warm, but to Ben it is a kindness of hers, a gift she is giving and he is receiving. She smells of shampoo and last night’s supper.
He lifts his head to look, and though she stirs on the pillow, sleep still has her. She’s still within the fraying cocoon of the night, and does not know her mouth half-opens, half-closes; that she grimaces, a tiny bit, and rubs her lips on the blue cotton as if digging gently in it. In the day she is a talker, a doer, a person in motion, whose face shows constant quick laughter, quick irritation, quick bossiness. Only now can he admire her slowed, vague, languorous, with little impulses moving in her round face that come to nothing, but buffer back into stillness before they can expand into real expressions: the outward and visible sign that, within, the kaleidoscope of dream is shifting and sliding the panes of memory against each other, in combinations too strange and fleeting to call out definite reactions. She knows now (a knowledge made all out of ambiguous texture) what she will forget when she awakens. There is far more of her than there’s ever time to reckon with in the businesslike daylight. Marsha Adebisi Simpson is in the depths of Marsha Adebisi Simpson. But she is surfacing, getting closer to the light, drawn up, lured up, by Ben’s fingers.
He strokes her temple, where the wiry edge of her hair smooths away. She mutters. He draws the line on her scalp between two cornrows. She mumbles. He hunkers down, and addresses himself seriously to her beautiful back. With four fingertips he makes four parallel lines, slow as he can, dragging feather-light down from her right shoulder onto her shoulder blade, trying to move so that he makes only the faintest shivering trail in the down on her skin, teasing the envelope of her warmth. Then he does it again in exactly the same place, with his fingernails gently scratching, denting four paths southward, southward, southward.
‘Mm,’ she says.
And having scrived on her skin with this faint, faint harshness, this gentle abrasion, he turns back to softness again, and traces the profile of her side with a feather-finger that sets little shivers going. Down the soft skin under her arm, across the padding of her ribs, into the dimple of her waist (not a girl’s narrow waist but an honest middle-aged one) and up again around the flaring curve of her hip, and (getting to the end of his reach) onto the long roundness of her thigh. A soft touch and then a gentle scratch, soft and then a scratch. It’s as if he’s colouring her in, under the quilt, with a pencil that glides and shades and another one that etches and points. He’s making graphite love to her, or so it feels, 2B love and HB love. Only he’s not making her up, she’s really there. All those swelling riches, really being discovered. And astonishing all over again.
‘Mmm,’ she says, with much more emphasis, a waking person’s emphasis, and presses back against him. Ben stretches round and outlines her mouth with his artistic finger. Her lips have ridges on them like a brazil nut’s shell, if you look closely, but much much softer.
‘Hello,’ she says.
‘Hello,’ says Ben.
‘Who’s that?’ says Marsha.
‘Ben?’ he says, suddenly freezing.
She sighs a bit, and nibbles his hand. Then she reaches an arm back in turn, a strong and unambiguous arm, and holds him against her.
‘I know that, foolish man, lovely man,’ she says. ‘Don’t stop.’
‘Oh,’ says Ben.
‘Oh,’ says Marsha.
‘Ah,’ says Marsha.
‘Mmm,’ says Marsha.
‘Oh!’ says Marsha.
‘Oh!’ says Ben.
Among the things Ben didn’t know, until these last few years, Marsha having not till then taken him in hand and given him the chance to find out, was how after making love with your wife on a sunny Sunday morning in May, and going downstairs to put the kettle on, you find yourself wobbling, almost tottering, on the stairs. So much tension has been taken out of him, it’s as if his limbs have been almost unstrung. At elbows shoulders hips knees ankles, the strings are loose. Teetering across the spotless tiles of the hall, he feels like a young foal making its first parley with gravity, not the grizzled fifty-five-year-old he sees crossing the mirror. In the kitchen, it’s all bright. Marsha’s passion for cleanliness in the café gets even more so at home. The white blaze coming through the blind above the sink gleams on every surface. There are no grimy corners or lost spots where old envelopes or unmatched earrings gather dust. Everything is lifted and briskly scrubbed beneath, every day. You could lick the counter under the food processor or the coffee percolator and it wouldn’t taste of anything but fresh bleach. All the cups, all the plates, all the cutlery match. The sound of the water coming to the boil adds a terribly soothing music to Ben’s state of discombobulated comfort, and he props himself on the countertop while he fetches down tea things for the tray, in case he dissolves altogether into a puddle of happiness.
Under the circumstances, it seems entirely safe to make this the moment when he checks the floor of his mind for cracks, as he makes himself do at some point, explicitly, every morning. And it is. He stamps, internally, and nothing gives, nothing threatens, nothing cracks or creaks. It’s a crystal pavement inside him, metres thick. He is not afraid. He is not afraid. It sometimes seems to him that he is losing the ability to be as grateful for this as he should be. He doesn’t want to take it for granted. Surely he should be actively glad, positively and consciously jubilant, over such an enormous deliverance? But as the fear has faded, so in proportion has his sense of how far he has come, how much has changed in his soul’s weather. He could only really feel the measure of the change by being back as he was before: the last thing he needs or wants. Now and again, now, he catches himself shaking his head over his past self as if that man were someone else, someone mysterious. How could he have wasted the whole of his twenties and thirties, and much of his forties, on fear? And fear of what, exactly? It had something to do with … bones; but he can say the word now, in his mind, without the reverberations of dread it used to have. So it leaves him puzzled, and sad, and, yes, a touch exasperated, to think of the two wretched solitary decades on the buses, and their thousands of desperately stoned evenings.
The kettle boils. He pours the water on the teabags, mashes them, slings them neatly in the right bin, adds milk; takes his pill and puts the bottle back in the cupboard. Then upstairs again. No toast because Marsha doesn’t approve of crumbs in bed. His joints seem to be reknitting. He rises up to the landing as if propelled by a friendly gust of well-being, and when he comes through the door and finds Marsha sitting up with her riches on display, he feels a wild urge to frisbee the tray into the corner, jump back between the sheets, and do it (and her) all over again. The Hercules of Bexford!
But Marsha, though she pats the bed beside her, has her busy daylight face on now. Has her glasses on, and is looking at him over the top of them while she consults her to-do list.
‘Jerk chicken,’ she says. ‘Ewa Agoyin. Okra soup. Pepperpot soup. Goat curry. Potato salad. Rice and peas. Cocktail sausages for the little one. For desserts, ice cream and lemon meringue. We’ll have to get a move on after church.’
Always the lists, with Marsha. Always the sense that life is a campaign requiring meticulous planning. In fact, the chicken has been in its jerk marinade since last night, the clingfilm-covered steel tray filling a whole shelf of the fridge, the goat meat is soaking up its herbs and curry powder down where the vegetable boxes usually are, and the beans have soaked overnight too. She is well ahead of the game, as always. But there are going to be fourteen people eating lunch in the garden at three o’clock, and the shape of the extended family requires her to show out simultaneously at both Yoruba and Jamaican food. In the café she’s feeding strangers, and nothing is at stake but their livelihood. For this, her pride is involved.
‘It’ll be fine,’ says Ben. ‘You know it will.’
‘It will be fine because we make it fine,’ she says.
Ben could not say whether Marsha’s rescue of him counts as a departure from her usual practicality or an example of it – whether she saved him because she wanted to do something mad for once, or whether she only applied her methodical mind to his floundering soul the way she would have reviewed a menu, or gone through her monthly suppliers’ bills. He had been going from agency job to agency job in the terrible year after the 36C went driver-only, shifts doing shelf-stacking, warehouse-unloading, washing-up, any old thing so long as it was badly paid. And one day he got sent by the agency to Café Metro in the gentrified bit at the top of Bexford Rise, expecting from the swags and curlicues of gold on the glass that it was going to be some kind of deal with scurrying waiters in black aprons, where he would be banished to a sink far out of view, only to discover that it was in fact a one-woman band, operated by a small plump brisk dark matron who insisted that he started off by washing his hands, and stood over him while he did it, sniffing disapprovingly at the lingering reek on him of last night’s ganja.
‘Right, now do the bacon,’ she commanded.
He looked at the glistening mound of streaky, pale fat and pink flesh surely so close to human meat, and he blenched.
‘Why not?’ she barked.
He muttered something and prepared to flee.
But rather than accepting this, she put out a hand to his chin and turned his face so he had to meet her gaze. (‘Why did you do that?’ he asked her later. She said, ‘You looked like someone who thought no one could see them. But I could see you.’) It was the first time anyone had touched Ben kindly in longer than he could remember. Perhaps Marsha was the first person since his mother to have done it. It shocked him, it made his heart pound and his blood ring in his ears. But it also made him feel as if, for the first time in equally long, in a world of tormenting vapours where thoughts were always stronger than things, he had taken hold of something truly solid. Or in fact as if something solid had taken hold of him. He might flap, he might flail, he might panic, but where she touched him he was rooted, he was joined somehow to the strong ground.
‘Why not?’ she repeated.
And held in her grip as in her gaze, and exhausted by so much despair, Ben did what he had never done before. He burst into tears and told her. Tried to tell her, anyway. Obvious though his horrors were to him, they came out incoherent, and more puzzling than they had ever seemed inside. Yet the relief of even trying was intense.
‘I am a bad man,’ he finished. ‘I am full of … horrible things.’
‘A bad man,’ she repeated, but not as if she believed him. By this time they were sitting at one of the little round black tables. She’d had to release him when they sat down, but he had reached for her hand, so as to be able to go on talking, and she was letting him hold it. ‘You are a bad man. Okay. Tell me what bad things you have done.’
‘Are you a murderer?’
‘No.’
‘How many people have you eaten?’
‘… None.’
‘Are you a thief ? Do you go out and mug people?’
‘No.’
‘Do you hurt children?’
‘No!’
‘Well, then. I will fry the bacon, and you will do all these rolls. And then I expect I had better show you how to work the percolator. Hurry up, we open in twenty-five minutes.’
And she took him into her business; and she took him to her GP, to be prescribed anti-depressants; and she took him to her church, to have an evil spirit removed; and eventually, she having been widowed for two years at that point, she took him into her house and her bed and her heart.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because I liked the way you looked. A little bit like something that comes out at night, with big eyes, but nice. I’m shallow like that. Don’t keep asking, stupid man. I might change my mind. Ach, I’m teasing. Olorun a de fun e. God bless you and shut up.’
Marsha is a strong believer in Sunday best, and Ben is in a suit and tie and well-polished shoes as they drive over to the Assemblies of Salvation church, based in the old Odeon. That’s minimal, though, a bare masculine nod of respect to the day, compared to the full African glad-rags she has on. Today, a puff-sleeved number in violet, green and gold, with matching headcloth, regally folded and tucked till it climbs up nearly to turban height. Most of the splendour will be hidden when she puts her choir robe on, but that’s not the point. It will be there, visible to the good Lord. It will also have been clocked by all the other choir ladies.
Pastor Michael welcomes them in.
‘Curtis and Cleveland not with you today?’ he rumbles, genially.
‘All coming over for lunch later. The whole family,’ says Marsha, head high. ‘With Curtis and Lisa’s new baby.’
‘Splendid, splendid,’ says the pastor. ‘And does he have a name yet, the baby?’
‘Theo,’ says Marsha.
‘Ah yes, a godly name. Splendid. Brother Benjamin, how are you?’ the pastor asks, enfolding Ben’s small hand in both of his large ones.
‘Very well,’ says Ben.
‘I rejoice to hear it,’ the pastor says, and pats his hand proprietorially.
Pastor Michael disliked him, Ben thinks, when they first met, because Marsha as a widow lady with a prospering business would have represented a nice and natural prize for one of the older men in the congregation; who knows, perhaps for the pastor himself, judging by the odd appreciative glance Ben has detected. But all that has been wiped away by the glorious success of what the church has done for him, their stringy bedraggled interloping white guy. Now Ben is an object of pride, one of Bexford Assembly’s very own miracles. ‘Come out of him!’ Pastor Michael cried, and either then or round about then, either because of the hurricane of prayer they sent scouring through the house of his mind or at least for reasons that included it – out of him the evil spirit came. Ben has been lost, but now he is found. He has been dry bones, but now he lives. He has been wreckage, but the fiery gale of holiness has blown upon him, cleansed him, ordered him, set him upright, made him a man again. He is a walking, talking evidence of redemption – so it is all right that he is holding Marsha’s hand.
Some Sundays are Youth Sundays, with more or less continuous music interspersed with testimonies from the teenagers as they try to tread the straight and narrow way in Bexford among the temptations of crack and the gangs. Some Sundays see the under-tens on parade in their cherubim and seraphim uniforms. Many Sundays have guest preachers, rotating around the Assemblies of Salvation circuit. But today it is Pastor Michael’s own turn again, and the service is an hour-long discourse from him, prowling the stage and the aisles with a mike in his hand, sweating and earnest and increasingly hoarse, raising up devotion to a pitch from which the choir can raise it higher still, by means of gospel settings of old hymns, and a touch of Highlife for those nostalgic for Ibadan, and new worship songs from the sacred (but still funky) end of soul.
‘Except the Lord build the house,’ says Pastor Michael, ‘they labour in vain that build it. Psalm one-two-seven verse one. Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. What do they labour in? Vain! Amen. That’s right. You can build your house high and down it will fall, if the Lord don’t keep it for you. Down it will fall. Nothing but a load of bricks. All smashed up. Gone! Doesn’t matter how high it is, doesn’t matter how strong it is. It could be a ten-storey house. It could be a twenty-storey house, it could be a skyscraper, it could be a mighty tower, and if the Lord don’t like it, down it comes. What did the Lord do to the tower of – where? Babel! Amen. He put it down. Right down, tumbled down, nothing left. Think of that. Think of all the work the people do, to build up the high tower; all those days with the bricks and mortar, with the wheelbarrow. Now you know – maybe you don’t know – when I come to this country, I’m looking around for work, you know, and it’s not a very friendly place for a boy from Lagos, you know what I mean? And I got only fifty shillings in my pocket. But my arms are strong, you know, and I get a job on the building site. Man, it’s hard. (Amen.) Every day I push the barrow, and the barrow is heavy, and the plank is shaking. So I know this, that it’s a lot of work to build a house, just a little house, and the more tall the house the more the work. But God can pull it all down! Praise God, he can! And then all that work, all that sweating, it’s wasted. They labour in vain. Now that’s a hard word, isn’t it, brother? Isn’t it, sister? You work and work and it come to nothing. That’s hard, that’s desperate. But do you know why? Yes, you know why. Lord have mercy, the Lord himself tell you why. You forget to bless it. You don’t remember, you got to give it to the Lord to keep. Except the Lord build the house, it gonna come tumbling down. Except the Lord keep the house, you gonna lose it all again – all that work. Your childern gonna fail their exams, your daughter gonna get knock up, your son gonna do those drugs. No blessing, and your house, it’s like a magnet for the bad luck. A bad magnet for the bad spirits. So, get that blessing! We got to ask for that blessing! Bless us, Lord; bless us in our homes and in our hearts; bless us deep, bless us strong; bless us in abundance. And you know, when we ask, he answers. He always answers. You could have left me standing there … (Help me, sisters.)’
You could have left me standing there
With no one, no one to care
But you promised me you’d be there on time
And you did just what you said
(I gave it up) That’s when you bless me
(Oh I let it go) That’s when you bless me
(Lord you brought me through, now I’m brand new)
(I said have your way) That’s when you bless me
(Oh I’m here to stay) That’s when you bless me
(Lord you promised me you would hear my plea)
And you did just what you said
‘So you know what to do, don’t you, brothers? Don’t you, sisters? The Lord told you how to build your house, he told you himself. Matthew seven verse twenty-four. You’ve got to build your house on – what? A rock! That’s right. And you don’t build it on – what? The sand! That’s right. For the rain descends, and the flood comes, and the wind blows, and it beats upon your house, and if you’ve got sand down there in the foundation, oh man, uh-oh, that’s not good, that’s a disaster on the way. Down it falls, down it all falls, clattering and tumbling. But if you build it on the rock, then it don’t matter what comes, it don’t matter what get thrown at you. Bring it along! Let it all come. Let it rain, let the flood come, let the wind blow. You’re okay. You’re on the strong foundation, you’re on the strongest foundation in the world. “The house fell not, for it was founded on the rock.” That is a house that is safe from trouble. Don’t matter what trouble. Could be any trouble. Let it come: come on, bad luck, come on, diseases, come on, thieves, come on, police problem, come on, unemployment, come on, bad spells and conjuring, come on, anxious mind, come on, wicked heart. Come on, anything! No need to be afraid, sisters and brothers. No need to be afraid at all. Your house will stand. Your house has the strong foundation. Your house is built on – what? The rock! Amen. The rock. And what is the rock? The rock is the Lord Almighty. The rock is his holy word, in his good book. The rock is the Lord Jesus, strong to save. The rock is the mighty Spirit of the Lord God of Israel. That’s right. Because the Lord is my shepherd … (Sing it with me.)’
Because the Lord is my shepherd
I have everything I need
He lets me rest in the meadow’s grass
and He leads me beside the quiet stream
He restores my failing hands
and helps me to do what honours
That’s why I am safe
that’s why I’m sa-a-a-afe
sa-a-afe
in his arms
‘Safe today, brothers and sisters. Safe tomorrow. Safe forever after. Praise him for that! Praise his great name. Now that’s a lot! Isn’t that a lot to praise him for? Amen! But that’s not all. That’s not all. The Lord don’t just want your house to stand! He’s got you safe – you, sister, you, brother. But he wants more. He got bigger plans. He want to hold this whole wicked city in his hand. Listen to him! Psalm one-two-seven again, back we go. Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. You hear? The watchman wakes up in the night and he looks around. What was that sound? Was that a fox, you know, rummaging in the bin for the cold kebab? (You know that sound, eh, sister?) Or was it a burglar, breaking in? He doesn’t know, so he worries and he worries. But it does no good. It is in vain, unless the Lord keep the city. Unless the Lord take it all in his hand. Now Jerusalem, you know, was a city just like London. It had nightclubs. It had bad areas. It had dealers in wickedness. It had rich people, proud people, unrighteous people, with mischief in their hearts. But the Lord, brothers and sisters, what did he do? Did he want to burn it? To wash it away in a mighty flood? No. No. He went another way to clean up that dirty place. He loved it. He want to redeem it. And he did redeem it. He wash it with his blood. He wash it bright and clean. He make it new. The New Jerusalem, brothers and sisters, beautiful like a bride; think of that. And you know? It’s just the same with London. This dirty town, he want to hold it all safe in his hand as well. He want to build it again, on the rock of salvation. He want to make it new and holy. He want to wash the pavements till they shine like diamonds. He want to dress it in a shining robe. He want to bring it all to salvation. Do you think he can? Tell me if you think he can, brothers and sisters. I can’t hear you. Yes, he can! Yes, he can! He can take this great city, he can make it new. He can wash it clean. He can redeem it. He can make it sing and praise his name. Praise his name! Praise his holy name! Praise him, Bexford! Praise him, London! Praise him, Ess Eee Fourteen, and all the other postcodes! Praise him with the sound of the trumpet! Praise him with the psaltery and harp! Praise him with the timbrel and dance! Praise him with stringed instruments and organs! Praise him upon the loud cymbals! Praise him upon the high-sounding cymbals! Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord!’
And Ben thinks, dazed as he always is as the pastor reaches his climax and the choir ascends to ecstasy: I am safe. I am, though I don’t know how or why. Thank you.
By the time they get home it is twenty to one, and the tasks required to get lunch ready for three stretch ahead of them in unbroken sequence from the minute Marsha gets their church clothes back into their dry-cleaning bags in the closet. She whizzes up the soaked peppers and dried crayfish for the Ewa Agoyin, and starts the smoky business of bleaching the palm oil. Ben chops – onions, spring onions, okra. He washes and sets simmering the new potatoes. He beats up the egg whites for the top of the lemon meringue. He sous-chefs away, in short, making sure that each time she’s ready to assemble a dish, the bits are to hand, in drifts of chopped white, chopped green, chopped red, chopped yellow. This is how they work together in the café, and there’s a practised speed to it, a comfortable co-ordination of their two rhythms. (It has occurred to Ben that one reason for his peaceful mind, maybe not the whole thing but a contributory factor, is that life with Marsha is so continuously bloody busy, with zero brooding time.) But the quantities they’re cooking are bigger than domestic, with only a small home kitchen to do it all in, so the activities are constantly jostling up against each other, and they have to squeeze past each other on their way to and fro in a kind of controlled whirlwind. The feeling is nearer the edge of chaos than it would be in the café, though not of course over it, thanks to Marsha’s list. As he crosses behind her, he kisses the nape of her neck. ‘Get away!’ she says, and bats at him with a wooden spoon. But when she next passes behind him, she pinches his bum. She is nervous, he knows; she always is when her sister comes over. Soon he is washing up as well, to keep her supplied with fresh pans.
‘Right,’ she says, when the pie is in the oven, the curry is bubbling, the okra is done and waiting on the side, the Ewa Agoyin is savourously red-black, and the little sausages are popping under the grill. ‘Barbecue!’
Out goes Ben into the garden with the steel tray of chicken and a bag of charcoal. He drags the barbecue out of the immensely orderly shed onto the little patio, and while the firelighters catch and he waits for the little briquettes to begin to glow, he has a moment to look around. They need not have worried about the weather. It’s a lovely day, with that early-summer brightness to the green of leaves and the blue of the sky that makes them look as if they have just been washed. In the border, up against the fence that Ben creosoted a few months ago, the peonies bob in pink globes, the mallows are a mass of blowsy white, cored pink and gold, and the blue lobelia shine out sharp and electric. Everything looks fresh and new. In the sky overhead a plane glints, tiny as a metal cracker toy, and draws a roar reduced to a whisper after it, as it follows the flight path over Bexford Hill towards distant Heathrow. There’s always a plane up there if you look, near or far, visible or only betrayed by a line of vapour, but always moving westwards. It’s as if – thinks Ben, putting the first thighs and drumsticks onto the griddle – it’s as if the aeroplanes were part of the mechanism of the garden; a necessary part. As if this tidy patch of lawn surrounded by its fence, with its brilliant blossoms too many to count and its coiled yellow hose, together formed the bottom half of a machine of bliss, which required for its complete working the dome of sky above, and for the furthest component of its clockwork the timekeeping planes on their celestial track. Patiently they tick from east to west. Or perhaps they are joined to the sky, and it is the sky that is moving, a blue sphere studded with occasional silver that cranks around, and around, and around.
The chicken is sizzling. It’s ten to three. ‘Chairs!’ shouts Marsha.
The first to arrive is Marsha’s older boy Curtis and his family. Suddenly the hall is full of childcare clobber as Curtis helps five-year-old Ruthie off with her coat, and baby Theo is scooped up from his carry-cot to ride on Lisa’s hip, and then held up to be squooched, no hands, by Marsha, who is still in the last convulsions of the cookery. Ben takes the mixing bowl from Marsha, the carry-cot from Lisa. But at once the doorbell goes again, and there on the step are Marsha’s sister Gloria, regal in an outfit even more spectacular than Marsha’s churchwear, and beaming next to her in a three-piece suit, and holding out a bottle of champagne, her lawyer husband Julius Ojo. Their daughter Addie is parking the BMW just up the road. Gloria gives a slightly stagey cry of joy and hugs Marsha, who still is having to hold her hands up and out of the way of the silks.
‘Now, if you’re not ready, you must let me help,’ says Gloria.
‘No,’ says Marsha.
Ben takes the champagne and puts it in the fridge.
‘Good man,’ says Julius, his voice a reverberant courtroom bass.
Gloria offers Ben a cautious, eyes-averted cheek to kiss – she is not sure about her sister’s eccentric choice, or maybe she is sure, and not to his advantage – and he gets them all moving through the lounge towards the French windows. Marsha washes her hands, stacks plates. Just in time: up the garden path are coming the late-departed Clyde Simpson’s younger brother Otto, a pale-brown guy in glasses with a beret and a raincoat and a jazzman’s frizzy tuft of beard, looking very like the ceremonial picture of Marsha’s husband on the lounge wall, except for the beret and the beard, and except for the wary expression, which he shares with his partner Margaret, also a teacher. They both look braced and ironical round the eyes, as if already looking down on events from a prepared position somewhere to the rear of their literal bodies. This isn’t the look on the face of their daughter Grace, though. Grace is nearly fourteen and big with it, in the awkward place between child and teenager. Today she wants to be a child, and she hugs her auntie, and pushes on straight through the hall in search of Ruthie, who adores her. Ben picks up the coats that have fallen down.
No point in shutting the door again. Addie is coming up the road, twirling the car key round her finger; and in the other direction, under a tree, Curtis’s younger brother Cleveland is in sight, with his arms round the girlfriend no one has met yet. Not, by the look of his body language, having a snog; more a case, as he strokes her long fair hair, of calming her down, or nerving her up, for her meeting with the assembled clans. Here they come, Cleveland gently propelling her along. They meet Addie at the gate, and she says something that makes Cleve laugh and the girl smile, and then they’re in, twelve – thirteen – fourteen, and that’s everyone, the clans have assembled. High-achieving pots-of-money Tory-voting Ojos to one side, public-sector on-the-committee-of-Carnival brushes-with-the-law Simpsons to the other; in the middle, Marsha’s two boys, the shy accountant and the can’t-make-up-his-mind student. Not to mention Marsha herself, showing off to all sides a replacement for dead Clyde who is a spindly, weird, white, mental-patient sous-chef. So many possible disasters. So much that can go wrong.
Marsha serves up like a demon, plate after loaded plate dispatched into the garden. Ben runs about with beers, juices, the champagne, and a huge jug of Fanta tinted pink, which is a Nigerian thing, apparently. In between times he flips chicken. The whole of the backlog that he already barbecued is used up in a flash, and he gets the next lot cooking. The younger ones mingle, but their elders have picked out lawn chairs in separate encampments, Ojos by the French doors, Simpsons towards the shed. And there is no sign of Marsha. Sometimes she needs to be prised out of the kitchen. If he doesn’t fetch her now, she may decide to stay put in there until second-helping time, hiding from her own party. In he goes; and as he passes the Ojos, he hears Gloria grumbling about the seasoning of the Ewa Agoyin.
‘Well, I think it tastes exactly like yours, Mum,’ says Addie. ‘I mean: exactly.’
‘Well, of course it does,’ rumbles Julius. ‘They both learnt it from their mother. It’s the same damn recipe.’
‘Come on, love, come out,’ says Ben to Marsha. ‘Everyone wants to see you.’
‘All right, all right,’ says Marsha. But she takes off her apron and follows. There is an empty chair over on the other side of the garden, but as Marsha comes up, Addie gets up and pats her own seat next to Gloria.
‘There you go, Auntie,’ she says, and takes her own plate off towards Cleve and Curtis’s encampment. Marsha sits down with a bit more emphasis than is natural, doing an impression of a relaxed person.
Gloria lifts her chin towards her receding daughter. ‘She is doing really well, you know. Already a star in her chambers, they say.’
‘I’m sure she is,’ says Marsha.
They watch Addie go: heels high enough to make holes in the lawn, creakingly tight skirt, perfect curves and perfect hair and perfect cheekbones and perfect purple nails. Ben knows, from what Marsha has told him, that Gloria and Julius struggled to have babies, and that Gloria minded bitterly being the childless older sister while Marsha popped out boys, even if they were slightly inferior boys, conceived with the feckless Clyde. Addie’s perfection is supposed to represent a kind of devastating reply. Marsha is supposed to look at the future Adesina Ojo QC, and to mind that Curtis operates from behind a plastic fascia on West Bexford Hill, doing the books for one-lorry haulage firms. And yet the sisters also love each other. And yet Addie, as well as looking like some kind of West African goddess of success, is in fact a miraculously nice person, with a considerable soft spot for both her male cousins and no time at all for the status games Gloria tries to play against them using her. She’s over there now, flirting decorously with Cleve, ruffling Curtis’s hair as broken nights with the baby, and Marsha’s food, threaten to send him snoozing off. When she was a little girl, she was worshipfully fixated on Curtis the way Ruthie is on Grace now, and it still shows. The quarrel is stupid. The quarrel is stupid, but Ben has never dared to intervene in it. What would he say?
‘How is the café going?’ Julius asks Ben. (It’s the only question he can ask, Ben supposes, there being no other kind of professional achievement to ask safely about, where he’s concerned.)
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Really good, in fact. We’re thinking of taking on some more people.’ And this is true. Since they took the plunge and acquired the Gaggia machine that steams and hisses on the counter, they seem to have picked up a lot of trade from the incomers in the Rise’s Georgian houses. Café Metro is full of well-off twenty-somethings, reading the paper and happily paying more than a pound for a cappuccino.
‘Of course, it’s a very small business,’ says Gloria.
Ben has no idea what to say to this. Marsha’s hands are knitted together in her lap. Her empty lap.
‘You’ve forgotten to get any food for yourself,’ he realises, and retreats to the kitchen to load Marsha a plate. He isn’t fleeing; no.
But when he gets back he finds that things have already escalated to the point where the sisters have switched into rapid Yoruba. He doesn’t understand a word of it, but Julius’s jovial face is strained; Addie, sighing, is heading back over too.
‘Honestly!’ says Ben without forethought, standing over them with a knife and fork in one hand, a mounded plateful in the other. The two women, startled, look up at him. ‘Honestly!’ he repeats. ‘You always remember that you like each other in the end. Why can’t you remember it quicker? Why can’t you just remember it now?’
Gloria starts to say something, stops, looks at her lap. Marsha blushes.
‘Hmm,’ says Addie, leaning forward to study their faces. ‘Naive – but effective.’
Julius starts to laugh. Marsha covers her face with her hand, and groans. Gloria coughs, taps her sister on the knee, and says, ‘You know, this is delicious.’
‘Ben cooked it too,’ says Marsha.
‘Well, Ben, this is delicious.’
‘She taught me everything I know,’ says Ben, nodding at Marsha; and again everyone laughs, including him, though it is only the literal and absolute truth he is speaking.
After that it becomes one of those afternoons when goodwill, once established, goes on reinforcing itself, making a deeper and deeper groove down which the party happily rolls. Ben flips chicken pieces and more chicken pieces; Marsha produces, to applause, the vast pie, covered with soft brown peaks like a meringuified ocean in a storm; the men settle down and obediently eat, and eat, and eat. After a while Otto comes over, hands Julius a new beer, and starts a conversation with him about cricket. It expands to sports in general and absorbs Cleve. The women, more mobile, perch and travel, perch and travel, passing baby Theo from shoulder to shoulder, and periodically clearing away. Ruth runs about, looking over her shoulder to make sure Grace is following, and when Grace comes to rest, Lisa talks to her about school and makes her feel she has a junior spot among the matriarchs. Margaret hesitates at the edge of the group at first, but Addie draws her in and soon she is laughing and taking a turn with Theo.
Ben watches. He’s comfortable like that. Marsha catches his eye across the garden and he salutes her with his barbecue tongs. But Cleve’s girlfriend drifts his way and lingers, fanning the spicy-greasy smoke away from her face. (The weather is behaving itself too, bright blue only deepening as teatime goes by and the evening comes on.)
‘Chicken?’ says Ben, though she’s not holding her plate out.
‘Oh, no thanks,’ she says. ‘I’m a vegetarian.’ She gazes at the crisped and spiced skin, dripping fat that makes little gouts of flame. ‘Doesn’t it, you know, bother you? That you’ve got, like, all dead things on there?’
‘No,’ says Ben firmly. He looks at her again, and then he gets it: Cleve is busy and she’s anxiously presenting herself over here, despite all the evil carnivore-ism, because he’s the only other white person in the garden. It’s not that he forgets that himself, exactly. His sister was eloquent about it, when he announced that he was moving out to live with Marsha. It came up a lot, in a different way, between him and Cleve, who was still just about living at home then, and let Ben know that he minded, and that he was creeped out by his mother sharing her bed with ‘an albino fucking spider, man’, and that he didn’t expect Ben to get any ideas about fatherhood, step- or otherwise. But today he hasn’t been thinking about that, just now it’s the Ojo/Simpson difference that’s been the pressing one. Ben puts down the tongs and applies himself. ‘So, you’re at uni with Cleve? What are you studying?’
She is studying hotel and catering, she says. But she is not sure that it’s really right for her. It’s not what she really cares about. Mmm, says Ben. Has she found out what she does really care about, because it’s not always easy to tell, is it? No, she says, that’s right! Maybe, she says, it might be travelling. She feels really alive when she’s travelling. Mmm, says Ben, who has never been beyond London’s bus map, except to hospital. And there is a place she dreams of going, she says, somewhere that sounds completely magical, she says, and that’s Thailand. Really, says Ben. Oh yes, she says, it’s very spiritual. And of course the food’s amazing. Mmm, says Ben.
‘Hey there,’ says Cleve, joining them. ‘You bending Ben’s ear?’
‘He’s really easy to talk to!’
‘Isn’t he?’ Cleve says, grinning, and it’s probably ironic, but he doesn’t say it, now, in an unfriendly way. If anyone is being teased, it’s the girl (whose name Ben hasn’t caught).
‘D’you want some more chicken?’ asks Ben.
‘Nah, I’m good.’ Cleve pats his stomach and stretches. He’s the good-looking one of Marsha’s boys. ‘Looks like peace has broken out, man,’ he says, surveying the scene by the French doors.
Julius and Otto are smoking Julius’s cigars, Ruthie is riding on Grace’s shoulders, Gloria has said something which is making Marsha laugh and laugh.
‘Yeah, thank heavens,’ says Ben.
‘Mum’s looking happy.’
‘D’you think so?’ Ben asks, instantly anxious.
‘For sure. Probably,’ he adds, looking at Ben sidelong, wickedly, ‘’cause you let her boss you round all day long …’
‘Cleve!’ says the girl, not sure what Cleve means, only that it’s a wind-up.
‘No, it’s not that,’ says Curtis, who is coming over yawning, having surfaced from his nap and caught the end of what they were saying. He’s slighter than his brother, large-headed, mild. There’s sleep at the corner of his eyes, there are the yellows and greys of tiredness in his skin. You can see the middle-aged accountant in the thirty-year-old one. ‘Not just that, anyway. It’s because you’re not like our dad.’
Cleve gives Curtis a glance, not a joking one.
‘I know she misses him,’ says Ben. He doesn’t know that, but he’s thought a lot about the absent Clyde. The space he left seems unfillable to Ben, so surely it must to Marsha.
‘Yeah, well, everyone’s got stories about how great he was,’ says Curtis.
‘When he was up, yes. Then he was, like, officially, a Fun Guy. The Fun Guy. Life and soul. But he was bloody moody too. Sulks that lasted for days. “Get out of my face, boy.” “Can’t we have a bit of peace in here?” “Ah, don’t feed me no more of that African shit.” You remember, Cleve.’
‘True dat,’ says Cleve.
‘And the good times were mostly when he was out, and the bad times were mostly at home, so Mum had to, you know, soak them up. So you’d get this happy guy, this cool musician guy, with this weary-looking woman on his arm, and all his friends would be like, “Relax a little, darling, eh?”’
‘Like that ever helps!’ says the girlfriend.
‘Yeah,’ says Cleve, not looking her way. ‘And there’d be this … expression round her mouth, like she was always having to keep, like, a grip on her face, yeah.’
‘Haven’t seen that for a while,’ says Curtis.
‘No,’ says Cleve.
‘Because she’s not doing it any more. Because Ben here isn’t sticking his lip out, like, “I’m miserable, woman, and someone needs to pay for it.”’
‘Well, of course not,’ says Ben, puzzled. ‘She’s wonderful. Why would I be miserable?’
‘Yes, why would you?’ repeats Curtis quietly, as if he’s proved something. And he pats Ben on the arm.
‘Well,’ says Cleve, and he sounds almost embarrassed. ‘Well! You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to nip behind the rose bushes, and spark up a J.’
‘Great!’ says the girlfriend.
‘Fancy a smoke, bruv?’
‘Don’t let Mum smell it,’ says Curtis. ‘Nope, not for me; I’m trying to wake up.’
‘How ’bout you, Ben,’ says Cleve, studying the roses.
How to explain that for him the dope was always oblivion not pleasure, that now he doesn’t need his mind wiped. But then he realises that he doesn’t have to, he doesn’t have to give reasons. He just has to smile at them.
‘I’m good,’ he says.
Much later, when everyone has gone but Curtis and Lisa and the kids, and they’re packing up, he’s out again in the garden, raking out the barbecue before putting it away. It’s dusk, the blue of deep water stretching right around the dome of the sky except in the absolute west, where the last of the light stains a couple of puffball clouds red. There are burned chicken bones among the ashes and for a second something stirs but just as quickly is gone again. He gazes. A rose-coloured scratch is travelling on the blue, high and far. The last plane of daylight. The celestial clock is revolving and bringing on the night. Even happiness can’t stop it. Time is his friend now, but it goes by so fast.
Ruthie comes running.
‘Grandpa Ben!’ she cries, as if she’s caught him out in something. ‘Nana says come in right now!’
Ring, ring.
‘Hello, Samaritans.’
‘I, I. I don’t know if this is a good idea.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘I can tell you’re very upset.’
‘Yes!’
‘All right. Now, I need to just ask you this. Are you thinking about taking your own life?’
‘No? I don’t know? I’m just desperate. Am I still allowed to talk to you?’
‘Course you are. Course you are, petal. You can talk to us about anything. Why don’t we start off with you telling me your name.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Okay, that’s okay. It’s fine if you don’t want to. Well, can you tell me what you’re upset about?’
‘It’s so awful.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘I just can’t. I just can’t. I’m sorry, this was a mistake …’
‘Awful ’cause you’re embarrassed?’
‘Oh, I’m way past embarrassed.’
‘Ashamed, then?’
‘Yeah. Oh yeah.’
‘Let’s see, then – ashamed about something you did, or somebody else did?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Oh, love, isn’t it always? Might feel better if you got it out.’
‘I don’t see why. It’d still be true.’
‘Yes, it would. We can’t change it, whatever it is. Might help you see it different, though.’
‘I just don’t know if I can.’
‘D’you mind my asking, d’you work nights?’
‘No? Why?’
‘So you’re at home, then.’
‘If you can call it that. I just can’t sleep.’
‘Mm-hmm. And are you on your own.’
‘Yeah.’
‘All right, I’m going to make a suggestion. We’re really not supposed to give advice, so this is me officially breaking the rules. You ready?’
‘What?’
‘Go and make a cup of tea.’
‘You what?’
‘I’m serious. It’s three o’clock in the morning, and you’re just about to spill your guts to a total stranger. You need a cup of tea in your hand for that kind of thing. It’s like medicine, innit. Don’t hang up, mind. Just leave the phone, and go and get your tea. I’ll be here when you come back. Go on. I mean it.’
‘… Okay.’
‘…’
‘…’
‘…’
‘Hello?’
‘I’m here. Got your tea? Milk and two sugars?’
‘One, actually. Oh, oh, oh.’
‘What?’
‘You’re being so nice to me but you won’t be when you know what it is.’
‘You know what, love? Whatever you tell me, whatever it is – I absolutely guarantee you that I’ve heard worse. Probably done worse myself, for that matter.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. This isn’t dial-a-saint, you know. It’s just people helping each other out. Now: deep breath, sip of tea, and tell me what’s up.’
‘Well. It’s about a bloke.’
‘Oh, don’t make me laugh! I’ll start crying again, or the tea’ll come out of my nose or something.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Well, I used to be married. And I thought it was all right, you know? And we had two kids; we were just, like, a family? A normal family. But he met someone, and he left. And he was good about the money and all that, but he was gone, and it was just me and the kids. And Aidan was about – fifteen, then? And Marie was twelve. And I was really lonely. Least, I thought I was. It was nothing compared to this. Just – laughable, compared to this. Ridiculous, compared to this. I didn’t know I was born!’
‘Doesn’t sound ridiculous to me. Go on: you were lonely …’
‘Well – my friends said, you should get out there; enjoy yourself; meet someone new; you’re not that old. So I joined this computer dating thing, and – there was, like, a selection of weirdos and disasters, and I would have thrown the towel in, but then I met
– Andy.’
‘Andy.’ ‘Yes. And he was … really different from the others. He was so sure of himself. He said things like he was sure they were going to happen – and then they did, usually. He was, like, really calm, all the time? And he smiled a lot.’
‘Was he good-looking?’
‘I thought so. I mean, then. But, you know, I really don’t know? Maybe it was all the smile and the confidence. He was really well dressed too. Now I think, shouldn’t I have been seeing danger signs? But I didn’t.’
‘Well, you don’t really look for them till something goes wrong, do you?’
‘No. And it felt like it was going right? I was just really pleased that someone seemed to want me. My confidence wasn’t so great just then and this, this was like the sun coming out. So I didn’t really notice how fast everything happened. How fast he made things happen.’
‘But you’ve been thinking about it lately.’
‘I’ve been over it and over it. Because I know I should have seen something. Asked more questions. Something! But I didn’t. I brought him round, and he was … charming, that’s the word. He charmed me, and he charmed Marie, he was really clever about it, and he tried to charm Aidan, but it didn’t work, Aidan was the only one of us who didn’t take to him at all, not even at the beginning. I think he must have smelled something wrong. But I just thought, you know, old dog/young dog, you’re just upset ’cause it’s not your dad, you don’t like having a man about the place, you’re a teenage boy and you’re having a bit of a squirm about your mum having a boyfriend. I thought it would die down when he got used to him. When he moved in. But it got worse. And Aidan sulking – you know, grunting at Andy over the cornflakes; teenage-boy stuff – it didn’t make me sympathise with him, or think, this must be really hard for you, or, what doesn’t he like, then? None of that. It made me cross. A tiny bit first, then more. And Andy saw it, and he sort of worked on it, and it always sounded like sympathy, and I got angrier and angrier. Always me against Aidan. Andy stayed in the background. You know, oh you poor love – to me; and to Aidan this kind of quiet, couldn’t you try to be nicer to your mum? Oh my, you’re really upsetting her. Well, that I heard, anyway. Who knows what he was dripping in Aidan’s ear when I wasn’t around. So then we had an enormous row, like earthquake-size: and Aidan walked out. Went to live with his dad. Fact his dad rang up; he said, “Angela, what’s going on? Aidan’s telling me some weird stuff. Are you all right?” But I just told him to mind his own business. Didn’t I have a right to a bit of happiness? – that kind of thing. And then it was just me and Marie and Andy. He said, we don’t need anyone else. We’ll be a little family, just the three of us.’
‘Mmm.’
‘I thought he might want to try for a baby. I was young enough. But he didn’t want to; he closed that idea right down. Now I know why. I didn’t then. Oh, do I have to tell you the next bit? Come on, you know where this is going, don’t you?’
‘I can guess, love. But tell me anyway.’
‘…’
‘Go on, get it out of you. Blow your nose and tell me. You can do it.’
‘Well. Well. The next thing was, Marie had her thirteenth birthday, and Andy took her out and paid for her to have her ears pierced, which she’d been on and on at us to do, and got her these little gold sleepers – real gold, really expensive. Without talking to me. I was quite put out. He said, like it was a joke, don’t be jealous, love, I just wanted to show her that she’s a very special young lady. And then from then on, he was always talking like that, always, like, hinting that if I minded the way he behaved round her, it was because I was jealous. Or grudging. Or suspicious. Or something like that. And she did start to behave weirdly. She’d always been, you know, one of the good girls at school. Homework in on time, hair always brushed, coloured biros all in a row. Oh God, I miss her. Oh God, I let her down. Oh—’
‘Hang on to yourself, love, if you can. Don’t get stuck here. Get it all out. Tell me faster, if it helps.’
‘Well, he was interfering with her, wasn’t he, Andy. Of course. Obviously. Anyone could guess that, couldn’t they; except thicko here, I didn’t. But that’s not the awful thing. I mean, yes it was, what he did to Marie is the most awful thing, and I hope he burns in hell for it, and I don’t know if she’ll ever be all right. But. But …’
‘But it’s not the thing you can’t forgive yourself for.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘So what’s that, Angela?’
‘It’s that I didn’t do anything. Not when she started bunking off school. Not when she started cutting herself. Andy made it seem like it was all … irritating, you know; all, like, something I ought to be annoyed by. You know, “Oh, madam’s in a strop this morning”, that kind of thing. Always egging me on to be angry not sympathetic.’
‘Did she try to talk to you?’
‘A couple of times, yes. But I just flared up. She was like, “Mum, I wish it was just us again”, and I’d be, “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m entitled to a life too”; or later, she went all, kind of, apathetic? Like, limp and depressed, and I’m not surprised, poor scrap, but she refused to wash, and I kept getting rung up by the school, because she was missing again, and it played hell with my work; and I just said – no, I shouted it – “Pull yourself together, girl!” And Andy hung about, smiling and smiling. And now I can see it was so’s we wouldn’t get the chance to talk to each other. But there were chances. I just didn’t take them. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t notice because I didn’t want to notice. I didn’t save her, or help her. I just shouted at her. For being difficult!’
‘So you didn’t stop it.’
‘No.’
‘Then how did it end? It did end, didn’t it, Angela? This isn’t something that’s still going on?’
‘No, no, it’s over.’
‘What happened?’
‘The police turned up out of the blue, and arrested him for something he’d done before. Well, the same thing, in another family where he’d cuckooed his way in. And the WPC who was with them asked me, did he get up to anything like that here, and I said, no, no, of course not; and Marie said in this really strange quiet voice, yes he did Mum, and then again louder, yes he fucking did Mum, and then like screaming it, like it was tearing out of her throat, YES HE FUCKING DID MUM. And the police looked at me like they couldn’t believe me; like I was dirt.’
‘And then it all came out?’
‘Yeah. And then they took Marie off to the station to do the rape kit on her; and I said, I’ll get my coat and come with you, and she said, no Mum, and she asked the WPC, would you call my dad, please?’
‘Oh, love.’
‘And basically she never came back. She went to her dad’s. And I rang up to say, how’s she doing, and could I speak to her, to say how sorry I was, and her dad just went, are you joking? Are you joking? Do you think I am ever going to let you anywhere near her, after this? I’ve written her letters, and she never writes back, and I rang, when I couldn’t bear it any more, and they’d changed the phone number.’
‘Oh, love.’
‘And I can’t take it back and I can’t stop thinking about it, and it just goes on and on and on. Ah, ah, aarh aarh aarh!’
‘Are you hitting your head, love? C’mon, don’t do that. C’mon, Angela. Don’t do that.’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Because you should look after yourself, love.’
‘Why? What’s the point? They’re gone. It’s all gone.’
‘Yes, love.’
‘And now I know this terrible thing about myself.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That I’m the kind of person who’d let … that happen under her nose to her own daughter. I just am. They’re right to hate me. I hate me. Now you hate me too.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do. You’ve been trained to be all nice about anything anyone says, that’s all, but underneath you hate me too.’
‘I really don’t, love.’
‘You must do. I did a disgusting thing.’
‘Yeah, but you can do a disgusting thing without being a disgusting person, can’t you?’
‘I don’t know what that even means.’
‘Well …’
‘Look, thank you, you’ve been very kind, but I don’t think you can really help because I don’t think you get what this feels like. I don’t think anyone can. Good—’
‘Angela!’
‘What?’
‘I do get it, ’cause as it happens, I’ve been there. Or somewhere very like it.’
‘What did you do, then?’
‘No, love, this isn’t about me; this is about you. I just want you to know that you’re not alone, you’re not the only person who has to live with something really bad.’
‘I don’t believe you. You’re just making it up to make me feel better.’
‘I’m not.’
‘If it was true you’d tell me.’
‘Angela, that’s not what this call is for.’
‘I spilled my guts to you. I told you the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.’
Pause.
‘You amaze me …’
‘Hey, I made you laugh. That’s not so bad, is it?’
‘No, but go on. Please. It does help.’
‘We’re not supposed to.’
‘Please.’
Pause.
Something white flutters in front of Val. Father Tim, the other person on the Samaritans night shift in the crypt of St Saviour’s, is leaning over the hardboard partition of the cubicle holding out a piece of paper. ARE YOU OK? is written on it in marker pen. She considers, and nods. Really? he asks, in dumbshow, with hands and eyebrows. She nods again. Really.
‘All right. Angela? I was married to a violent man. He liked to hurt people. Not me, though. Men. Other men. He scared the hell out of me, and he kept me under his thumb, but I kind of adored him. He was beautiful. Stupid, mind you; very stupid; and scary; but gorgeous. I knew he was dangerous, and I sort of tried to manage it, and to point him where he wouldn’t do too much harm; but mostly, I just let it happen. And then one day he murdered somebody in front of me.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Yeah; and I didn’t stop it. Just this poor harmless student from Pakistan whose car had broken down, so he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘Oh my God. That’s horrible.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘What happened?’
‘Mike got sent down for murder, and I did six months as an accessory.’
‘You were in prison?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh my God. Oh. My. God. Did you divorce him when you got out, then?’
‘No. No, I didn’t. I was still thinking about it, and he just dropped dead suddenly in prison. It turned out he had this, like, dodgy vein in his brain? And it popped, and he was gone. So I never really said no to him, you see, right to the end. I can’t say I ever drew a line. And that’s why I really do understand where you are now.’
‘You’re, like, a murderer!’
‘Nearly. Yes.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘You don’t have to say anything, love.’
‘…’
‘Angela? Are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have I shocked you?’
‘Yes, you have a bit.’
‘There’s people who’ve done bad stuff all over the place, love. We walk past each other in the street, and we all say, I’m the worst person in the world, no one gets it, I’m all alone. All of us. And it’s not true.’
‘How d’you cope? What d’you do with it? I mean, you sound all right, you sound sorted out. I wouldn’t ever have guessed.’
‘Well, it was a long time ago for me, love. And it does take time. You just have to keep … getting up in the morning, I suppose. And you don’t try to feel better by telling yourself lies, ’cause that doesn’t work. And you’re patient. And you try to be hopeful, even though you don’t know what you’re hoping for. And even though you can’t make it up to the people you’ve hurt, you look out for little chances of being kind. ’Cause being kind to anyone at all helps bring on the lights a little bit, if you know what I mean. And you wait, and you hope, and you see what happens next.’
‘Andy’s written and asked me to come and visit him in jail.’
‘Don’t do it.’
‘I won’t. Better to have nothing than have that, right?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, you’ve been kind to me. Thank you?’
‘You’re welcome. What are you going to do now, Angela?’
‘I’m going to go to bed. What about you?’
‘I’m going to blow my nose, and answer the next call, I expect.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, Angela.’
There are next calls, of course. A Chinese kid from Hong Kong who has stayed awake for three nights straight, panicking about his college exams. Remedy: go to sleep. And a dawn example of the traditional helpline wanker. (‘Put away your Kleenex, love, that’s not what we’re here for. I’m going to hang up now, but remember you’re always welcome to ring back if there’s something you’re genuinely desperate about. Bye!’)
But at seven the next pair of volunteers arrive, and she is out smoking a ciggy on the steps of St Saviour’s while the light mounts in a petrol-coloured sky over towards Dartford, and a cold breeze blows the litter about. It is Saturday morning. Father Tim comes out and sits down next to her.
‘Ooh,’ he says, hugging his arms round himself, ‘is that a packet of Rothmans I see? Can I cadge a Rothie, please?’
‘Course you can,’ she says. He lights up, inhales, and combines the exhale with a stretch and a yawn and a sprawl, ending up leaning back on his elbows and gazing at her smokily from under his fringe. He has one of those posh male faces that stays boyish even when its owner is thirty-something or forty-something, and makes it hard to guess its owner’s age. Father Tim looks tired now, after an all-nighter on the phones, but he also, in some essential way, looks untouched: someone, you’d think, swanning their way gracefully through Bexford, and through the years. And yet he and Father Louis, who he shares the vicaring with, and shares the vicarage with too, are known to be people you can call, day or night. Trouble with a rent officer, son under arrest, school exclusion, court appearance, sudden death: any situation where a calm middle-class voice would help, and one of them will turn out uncomplainingly, looking poised in a midnight police station, whether you are in their congregation or not. Mike would have hated both of them, of course. But then Mike’s hatred – she worked this one out long ago – would partly have been envy. Father Tim liking men was presumably as much against his church’s rules, what little she knew about them, as Mike’s desire had been against the rules for a Bexford mod, a Bexford skin, a South London Nazi. And yet Father Tim seems to manage it without violence, without having to be attacking male bodies to get close to them, kicking and clawing and breaking them when he only really wanted to be pushing and nuzzling at them. When he only wanted to fuck them, she thinks – and is surprised by how easily that thought comes, now. Poor Mike. Poor me.
‘Are you here to tell me off ?’ she says.
‘Nope,’ he says. ‘Everyone gets a call now and then which gets to them personally; it just happens, it’s inevitable. And yeah, you went way over the line, but you didn’t do it self-indulgently, you didn’t do it at the caller’s expense, you were still thinking about looking after her, and in the end it was all right. If you ask me, you took a bigger risk with the tea thing. You could have lost her right then, you know.’
‘I just thought she needed to do something, something really ordinary, so she could concentrate on that instead of panicking?’
‘Yes, and it worked, but you did send her away from the phone.’
‘I won’t do it again.’
‘Really? That might be a pity. I’m just saying, use your judgement, and be aware. That’s all.’
‘Okay.’
‘Mmm,’ says Father Tim. He blows out smoke again, and they look at Bexford waking up: delivery vans backing, shutters rattling up, the smell of frying bacon coming from somewhere.
‘So, if this isn’t a bollocking …’
‘Well. No. Um. This was more in the nature of … a religious observation,’ says Father Tim, studying the glowing end of his cigarette and for the first time looking faintly embarrassed. ‘I know I don’t talk about God much, but one of the things He’s very good for is confession. I heard the end of your call, and it sounds as if you’ve been carrying some hard, hard stuff for a long time. And I wondered if I could tempt you to come and join us on Sunday morning, and see if that might help?’
‘Me, get religion?’ says Val.
‘Ooh, that makes it sound very untempting, doesn’t it? As if it’s some kind of unpleasant thing to wear. Or maybe an illness. “Poor her, she’s got religion.” No. To me it’s more … a way of thinking about what’s going on for you?’
‘It’s very kind of you, Father, but I don’t think so.’
‘Oh well, your loss. Ours too, of course.’
He doesn’t push it, and they smoke the rest of their fags in companionable peace. Then Father Louis pulls up in an elderly car, waving a fragrant paper bag.
‘Croissants!’ cries Father Tim, and jumps up from the cold stones as if he’s twenty. He looks back as he opens the car door.
‘D’you want to join us?’ he calls. ‘Louis always over-caters.’
‘No thanks,’ she says. ‘I’m having breakfast with my sister.’
The dinner jackets are like school uniform. They make all the men look the same. You can’t tell – at least from a distance – which penguin suits come from M&S and which from Savile Row. All the display, and all the competition, and all the shadings that tell apart different kinds of wealth, are in the clothing of the women. That blue velvet frock and discreet string of pearls, which clearly does multi-purpose duty for formal occasions: sensible, old-fashioned county posh. The watered-silk Italian jacket and paisley-print scarf: Hampstead. The drop-waisted ivory flapper dress, a beautiful recreation or conceivably vintage: City money. The hourglass magenta satin thing with matching fascinator: recent ascent to the big time, and here a bit of a faux pas. It would have been better suited to Ascot. Vern likes looking but he has no one female on his arm to identify him in turn. He glides along the garden terrace, massively monochrome between the fuchsias, and offers no assistance to the onlooker in working out that his dinner suit is indeed tailor-made (as it kind of has to be, given how egg-shaped he has become) but tailor-made by Manny Perlstein in the arcade behind Bexford station. He descends the brick steps, one leg at a time, and sets forth solitary and self-contained across the lawn towards the ha-ha. No wife beside him: he never wanted to remarry, after Kath, and these last few years he has preferred to handle that whole side of life on a straightforward cash basis. No daughter either. This isn’t Sally or Becky’s kind of thing, and he gave up trying to invite them years ago. He is, however, followed at a discreet distance by a waiter. Who, once Vern has selected a picnic spot under a pretty flowering tree, with a view towards the Downs in one direction and the new opera house in the other, sets him up with lawn chair, folding table, linen and cutlery, and then proceeds to serve upon it the first of many courses.
‘Hello,’ says Vern affably, tucking his napkin into his collar. The party next to him are having a more conventional déjeuner sur l’herbe, a middle-aged man and two middle-aged women of the County Posh genus sitting on a rug around a hamper, sharing a bottle of Moët in plastic flutes. They watch, fascinated, as the waiter cooks Vern an omelette on a silver spirit lamp. The blue flame is almost invisible in the June sunlight, but the smell of butter and chervil saturates the air. Vern sips at Pouilly-Fuissé.
‘I say,’ says the man on the rug, ‘that looks splendid.’
‘Well!’ says Vern. ‘Why not push the boat out, I say.’
‘I thought we had,’ says one of the women. ‘You know, bubbly and nibbles. But, gosh. It looks like you’ve pushed it out a lot further!’
‘I don’t do it every year,’ says Vern, factual rather than apologetic. ‘Wouldn’t have been a lot of point last year, fr’instance; place was still a building site.’
‘Oh,’ says the other woman, sounding ever so slightly surprised, now that she has clocked his accent properly. ‘Are you a regular?’
‘Haven’t missed the opening day of the Festival for, oh, twelve years,’ says Vern. ‘You?’
‘Now and again,’ she says. ‘Not as faithful as you, by the sound of it. But then we always have to drag Rory here away from Twickenham, don’t we, darling?’
‘Is that right,’ says Vern. He finishes the omelette and moves on to foie gras on toast triangles, with a salad of chicory and endives.
‘’Fraid so,’ the man is saying, jutting his square chin. ‘Lovely day out here, obviously: but I have to say, I know it’s heresy, but I have to say, I’ve never really got the point of opera?’
He says this comfortably. He says it as if, his whole squarechinned life long, he has been saying confidently stupid things, and the world has reliably responded by saying, good point, Rory old man.
‘No, I don’t expect you have,’ says Vern. And since he sounds just as genial saying it, it takes a minute before it sinks in; before the man looks away, and his wife flushes. Vern beams down at them, and applies himself to the creamy unction of the pâté, the bitter crunch of the leaves. But something about the confidence of Vern’s rudeness, his comfort as he dismisses them, turns out to have generated a reaction in good old Rory like a Labrador rolling over. He waits politely till the pâté is replaced by beef Wellington on a chafing dish, and the waiter is uncorking a half-bottle of claret, and then clears his throat with an attention-seeking noise, low and submissive.
‘D’you mind my asking what line you’re in?’ he says.
‘Property,’ says Vern.
‘Commercial? We do a bit—’
‘No, historic buildings.’ Vern sucks his fingertips, wipes them on his napkin, and pulls out a pair of gold half-moon spectacles through which he considers his neighbours. Probably not candidates to participate in the regeneration of architecturally significant South and East London. They look as if they are very firmly rooted in the Old Rectory, Little Fuddling, and likely to stay there. But you never know; maybe they have London-based offspring with a yen for architraves, and the kind of City job required to pay for them. Vern’s empire is still centred on Bexford Rise and its counterparts in Camberwell and Dulwich, but he has recently been doing more in Spitalfields and Shoreditch, from which his clients can walk to their dealing desks. Next will come Borough, all being well. He’s got his eye on a run-down eighteenth-century square just in the shadow of the Guy’s Hospital tower block, all black brick and white sills, which should respond beautifully to Vern’s rigidly cost-controlled, by now standardised spruce-up and restoration job. He should be able to get a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of value out of each house there, easy. And from there, the foot commute to the City he can offer will be a stroll across London Bridge. Seagulls, HMS Belfast, the Tower, St Paul’s doing its famous thing on the skyline: it’s amazing how much his business model is based on selling back to people a sanitised, touristic version of the grimy old city. He’s a tour guide, he’s a set-dresser. He’s a pediment pimp. He’s Mary Fucking Poppins. But he’s not knocking it. It works. He fishes in his wallet and passes across a business card. THE FEATHERSTONE ESTATE, it says, and then in italics: Conserving the Georgian Capital. He had them run up on a hand press by one of his anchor-tenant nutters, a man who takes his eighteenth-century lifestyle so seriously that he cleans his Persian carpets by scattering tea leaves on them, and plays the harpsichord in an actual wig. ‘The face is Baskerville, of course,’ the nutter said, ‘but you’ll like this, Mr Taylor: it’s original lead t—’ ‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Vern. Thick cream card and a slightly wonky handcrafted quality, to press the pleasure buttons of the upper middle class: that was all he needed to know. And indeed, when he hands it over now, Rory the rugby-lover takes it as reverently as he could wish.
‘D’you know, I think I’ve heard of you?’ says Rory. Impossible for someone like this, notes Vern, not to talk as if they’re conferring something, even in self-abasing mode.
‘We get a few write-ups,’ Vern agrees.
‘Yes – something in one of the colour supplements, just recently.’
‘The Observer.’
‘Yes; extraordinary stuff. Pictures of a chap who doesn’t believe in electric light …?’
‘That was the one. S’matter of fact, he printed those for me,’ says Vern, gratified.
‘Did he; did he.’
‘Oh, do leave the poor chap alone to eat his lunch, darling,’ says Rory’s wife, smiling tightly.
‘Sorry, of course I will. Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll just keep this. You see, we have had rather a good year ourselves, thanks to Lloyd’s, and we’ve, you know, wondered about the possibility of a – a little pied-à-terre, perhaps.’
‘Have we wondered that?’ his wife asks, showing her teeth.
‘Yes, we have. So maybe I’ll be in touch!’
Vern’s mouth is full of bloody beef fillet and flaking crust. It’s possible, of course, that this is one of those Hooray Henry men who is idiotic about everything except money, and that Rory through luck or skill has attached himself to one of the few syndicates at Lloyd’s which hasn’t run into trouble underwriting asbestos or hurricane risks. But from what Vern hears, it’s far more likely that the Old Rectory in Little Fuddling has already been inadvertently gambled away, and Rory simply doesn’t know it yet. Vern nods gravely, and swallows. The sun brightens the distant hills, dapples his tablecloth, and picks out all over the emerald-green grass the sombre or resplendent figures of his prey. He finishes the beef, and moves on to a lemon mousse, accompanied by a pipkin of Sauternes. Then, of course, the cheeses.
Vern has booked himself a box. Lately, ordinary-sized seats have come to feel rather constricting. And in any case, the point of today is as much to show off the new opera house as it is to unveil the new production on its stage, so why not get the effect at its best? As the five-minute bell goes, he wades his way patiently around a curving corridor of blond wood and finds his door. Oh yes, a very successful treat for the eyes. He has bought himself an elegant compartment at the foot of a vertical wall of other elegant compartments, a pigeon loft for opulence, and filling with the soft becking and cooing of wealth at play. The auditorium is deep, and very steeply raked, with the seats for those of slightly less wealth rising in semicircle stacked above semicircle. As a builder – as a builder obliged by his business model to spend his time among old stuff, and cunning simulations of old stuff – Vern enjoys how unashamedly new the look is. The wood is pale and fresh, the gold paint is bright, the exposed red bricks aren’t pretending to be anything but straight from the kiln. He prefers out-and-out modern himself, in steel and glass, like his own flat; but this will do nicely, this is a lovely job, and when he’s nudged the comfortably broad armchair around to face front, and settled there with his arms crossed over his belly, he’s floating just above the orchestra, mere feet from the front apron of the stage. The company will be singing to him. The lights will go down, and he will eat the music up.
And it is a really good production, that’s instantly clear. Mozart is not Vern’s favourite – he prefers something a bit more blatant and stormy – but this version of The Marriage of Figaro does the light/heavy mixture of the story beautifully. It’s a bedroom farce, and it’s about true love; it’s got jumping out of windows, and heavy-duty redemption; it’s a romp, and it wants you to take the love lives of servants as seriously as those of counts and countesses. It goes from silly to heartfelt and nimbly back again, and all of those strings doing their pinpoint golden thing under Vern’s feet, for the baton of the man in the white jacket, are the right sound somehow for the mobile moods of it. Actually buoyant, possibly sad! say the violins. Possibly buoyant, actually sad! reply the cellos. Whatever you feel, the woodwinds put in, it will be quite clear. Though subject to change! the violins reason. Though subject to change, the woodwinds concur.
Figaro the valet is a wry, quick, handsome, curly-headed bass, pulling faces and nipping up and down ladders. Susanna the maid, his intended, is a self-possessed soprano, a bit too skinny for Vern’s taste but lovely, no question. The Count, their master, is being played by a German baritone who is very good at a kind of sulky, spoiled sarcasm. His neglected wife the Countess has slightly more old-school plunging-nightgown heft to her, and Vern enjoys the scene where she sighs throbbingly amid her bedsheets. But all four of them are acting properly, not just trudging to their marks and letting go with the vocal cords, the way some big names used to when Vern started going. All of them have faces alive and communicative, all of them are witty. All of them are singing from somewhere fully inside the story of how the Count, who proudly abolished droit du seigneur in his domains, now wants it back again so he can have his way with Susanna on her wedding night. Laughter and indignation and fear chase each other through choruses in which they harmonise their disagreements while they’re having them, shaking off technical difficulty like someone smilingly brushing a sleeve. It’s glorious, it’s masterly. And the set, like an extra compliment to Vern in his box, is made of the same architecture as his London houses, reduced to lines and planes and airy gestures.
Why, then, with all this clever beauty laid out for him to banquet on, does Vern feel a thread of unhappiness tightening inside him, a faint faint signal, growing stronger, that something is wrong? Why, then, glancing back at the rapt and glimmering tiers of faces in the darkness, does Vern feel that, alone among the enchanted, he is being subtly got at by the pleasure he paid for? It’s not an abstract disquiet, this. It’s not just a thought in his head. It’s physical. He feels it as a gripe in his gut, an ache in his neck, a dull twinging in the nerves of his arms. In fact he wonders for a minute if he could be having a heart attack – which is indeed a fear of his. But nothing hurts in his chest, he has no pins and needles, nothing is afflicting him on his left side particularly, which is where they say you feel it. He remains solid. He is clad in slab armour. So what can be wrong, he thinks angrily. What can be wrong when nothing is wrong. Check the inventory: everything is all right. He is rich. He has the world where he wants it. He has a Bentley parked outside. He can afford to buy himself any pleasure. He is surrounded by delicacies, none forbidden. Death is still far away (surely). Yet something makes him ache; something coming from the stage. Perhaps it’s Cherubino’s song. Cherubino the page, played by a girl whose thighs look good in breeches, does comedy philandering mostly, like a for-laughs teenage version of the Count; but in Act Two he turns plaintive.
Ricerco un bene fuori di me,
non so chi’l tiene, non so cos’è
he sings, and up on the proscenium, where the subtitles are projected, the English text spells out
I seek a blessing outside myself,
from whom I don’t know, or what it even is.
Is it that? Certainly the misery eases when the song ends, and Mozart glissades back into farce mode. Cherubino hides in a cupboard; Cherubino jumps out the window; Figaro pretends it was him; just when he seems to be getting away with it, enter a comedy gardener. All’s well again, or at least better. But then, as the act ends, the Count comes bursting in with a pack of assorted minions, and suddenly Susanna, Figaro and the Countess are on the far side of the stage facing off against the Count and the minions, singing against each other like two opposing gangs. And the mysterious grip on Vern is back, the mysterious alarm. Over there, the forces of love singing their heads off, over here the gathered musical army of … what? Spite, vengeance, age’s anger with youth, and at the head of it, on the Count’s face and in his voice, a despairing greed. Perhaps it would be better if Vern were seeing it from the opposite cliff face of boxes, so it didn’t seem as if the lovers’ army were all singing at him. Perhaps that’s it: he booked the box in the wrong place, and now he is on the wrong side.
When the interval comes, Vern stumps to the garden, stumps to his waiter, ignoring the paper lanterns in the trees, ignoring the revellers, and those who happen to glance at his face step out of his way. He sits and waits to be served. This time, when the food starts coming, he eats as if he is entombing something. Burying it under shovels-full; spoons-full; forks-full. Mozart can fuck himself with all his fine balances. Vern eats the turbot. Vern eats the cream sauce. Vern eats the pheasant. Vern eats the morels. Vern eats the Roquefort. Vern eats the grapes. Vern eats the truffles. Vern eats.
‘Miss?’ says Hayley. ‘Is it true you used to be a rock star’s girlfriend?’
A Year 10 mixed-ability music class at Bexford Hill Comprehensive: twenty-eight faces looking at her without much hope of being excited by anything, but momentarily woken up by the chance of something juicy. Jo has no idea how they can have got hold of this rumour of her former life, unless it was brought into school via Marcus, but Marcus’s solution to the indignity of being the offspring of two teachers at his own school has always been a resolute pretence that she and Claude have got nothing to do with him from the moment he goes through the gates in the morning, head high, impervious, lips together in a clamping pout of irony. So it’s a puzzle.
‘Um …’ she begins.
‘Nah,’ says Tyrone, one of the cool kids in the back row, before she has settled on how she wants to deal with this. ‘Someone like that, they wouldn’t be here teaching us, would they? They’d be all, like, glamorous, wouldn’t they? No offence, miss.’
‘Oh, none taken, Tyrone,’ says Jo, milking the general laugh a bit. Tyrone grins. Jo, in her own estimation, looks pretty good at this point, weathered but still trim, dressed and hairdressed with knowledgeable guile about what suits her, and in possession of regular evidence that she’s still desirable, at least to Claude. But none of this adds up to attractiveness of a kind that computes for a fifteen-year-old boy. She’s not one of the women teachers in their twenties and thirties whose blouses’ top buttons are under constant teenage male monitoring. She’s invisible to Tyrone except as a mum; except, sometimes, when she can draw him out and hoodwink him into showing his intelligence, as a challenge, someone to cross swords with.
‘It doesn’t seem very likely, does it, Hayley?’ she says.
‘I suppose not, miss,’ says Hayley, crestfallen. She’s a lumpy, pale little thing, not in with the cool white girls, or the cool black girls, or the cool Asian girls. One of the nondescripts, the hangers-on; and seeing her face fall, Jo almost feels guilty. Who she’s been and what she’s done is none of Hayley’s business, but it’s clear that denying it (or letting it get denied) has extinguished one more little glint of possibility for the girl, has given her one more demonstration that the world is not, after all, exciting. Not likely to burst out into rock stars, diamonds, jacuzzis. At least, not anywhere near Hayley.
Impossible to tell her that, from Jo’s perspective at fifty-four, she shares a touching beauty with the cool kids; possesses it just as much as confident Tyrone, or Samantha and her hair-flick, or Jamila and her heavy-lidded Punjabi stare. These just-adult bodies are, all of them, so gallantly recent. Whether they’re one of the dewy-skinned lucky ones or are bursting out with zits, their flesh, all of it, is still soft, new, moulded onto their suddenly elongated bones like fresh marzipan. Whether they move gracefully or as gawkily as foals, whether they whack themselves against doorways like poor clumsy Simon over there or arc into pure curves like silent Hamid the football player, there’s a quality of surprise to all their steps, to all their occupations of space. This is me? their gestures keep asking, whatever else they may be meaning to mean – this tall thing, not quite under my control? Is it? Or am I just inside it somewhere, trying my best to pilot it? Sometimes the children they were yesterday can be seen looking out of their faces, amazed. And then a minute later they’re making first essays at strength or sexiness, approximate, amateurish, going all in on every bet like the naivest of gamblers.
It’s lovely to see; and also hilarious, and also from time to time terrifying, this last element in Jo’s response being supplied by her parent’s-eye view. Marcus isn’t quite there yet. He’s only twelve. But all this will happen to him, and while these boys and girls flower, the sellers of brown heroin roam about outside seeking whom they may devour, and all of the hungry adults who, seeing new legs new mouths new eyes, also see something to devour. But you can’t warn them, any more than you can tell them in terms that would make sense to them that their transformation is glorious. Youth isn’t visible to them, any more than air is. It’s the condition of their lives, but it isn’t a thing that they could imagine not having, and therefore could imagine as being desirable in itself. Jo remembers this – how the interest of male teachers, middle-aged men in the street and in the park, the gardener at the lido, registered only as an inexplicable creepiness.
Don’t hurry, she wants to tell Year 10. But they want to hurry. They long to hurry. Everything they are is oriented towards a future which they seem to themselves to be having to wait for forever, enduring the great teenage boredom in which first kiss, first party, first love, approach at maddening snail’s pace: but which if you’re old enough to count time in decades you know is going to be upon them in a flash, imminent, irresistible. In almost no time at all, possibility will be swapped for actuality. These bodies owned now like masks, envelopes, surprising vehicles, will become their everyday selves. This marzipan flesh will settle and start to collect scars, frown lines, stretch marks. Youth itself will stop being the common, invisible possession of the twenty-eight of them in this room. Bexford Hill is not a rough school by London standards, and contains a good fraction of middle-class kids of all ethnicities behind its 1950s plate glass. Those will thrive, unless they screw up badly enough to fall down one of the big snakes on the social game board. Those, and also the lucky ones, the energetic ones, the organised ones among the strivers, will go off into the long youthfulness of the prosperous, drinking wine and buying lampshades and able to treat turning thirty as a point in late adolescence. For the rest, though, this is it. This first flowering will be the only one. They’ll have their bloom, and that’s all. By the time they’re thirty, time will have stomped all over them. Sorry, Hayley.
‘Right,’ she says, ‘we’ve got forty-five minutes, and this week we’re spending it on voicework.’
Immediate chorus of groans. Singing is lame, singing is embarrassing, singing in front of your classmates and your teacher runs the appalling risk of exposing your raw green soul to the unfriendly world.
‘Can’t we do steel pan again, miss?’ asks Samantha, queen of the white girls. They had a class last week in which, though Jo does say so herself, they got something pretty good going, rhythmically speaking. ‘That was … all right.’
‘No,’ says Jo briskly. ‘Because (a) all the equipment is in the other music room down three flights of stairs and a hundred yards away, (b) the other stream are using it today, and (c) singing is good for you.’
Groans.
‘What are we going to sing?’ asks Hayley. For thirty confused seconds, despite their objections to the whole idea, Year 10 shout out their musical tastes, from Britpop to acid house, each of which is guaranteed to reduce its passionate advocates to despondent paralysis if it comes to actual, out-loud singing. The red National Songbook is decades gone.
‘No words at all,’ says Jo. Then, raising her voice to cut the hubbub: ‘No. Words. At. All. This week we’re just using voice as an instrument.’
‘My body … is my tool …’ croons clumsy Simon unexpectedly – being someone off the TV, judging by the comedy voice. He happens to hit one of the instants of hush and makes more of a splash than he meant to.
‘You’re a tool, bruv,’ says Tyrone into the disconcerted silence.
‘Tyrone!’ says Jo. ‘We have a volunteer! Up you come. Come on!’ She crooks her finger at him, wicked-witch-style, and draws him up from his lair at the back with her teacherly tractor beam. He saunters, tilting the tall cylinder of his hair from side to side, but he arrives. His version of school uniform naturally features a tie only three inches long.
‘Congratulations, Ty,’ says Jo, ‘you are today’s sample human being. Could you turn round sideways – yeah, facing me – and give us a noise? Just say “ah”, like at the dentist.”
‘Uh-huh, uh-huh; uh-huh uh-huh; aaaah,’ goes Tyrone. The thing about Tyrone, she happens to know by devious means, is that in the long-lost and long-ago days of about three years ago, he used to sing in his mum’s church. He was apparently a ‘Cherub’ in a dear little uniform. And he now possesses a rather pleasant tenor, which he can’t quite help showing off.
‘Okay,’ she asks the class, ‘where’s the sound coming from?’
‘Er, his mouth?’ says Tyrone’s wingman Jerome.
‘His arse, more like,’ says Samantha. (There is some history here, possibly involving events as much as a month old.)
‘His mouth, yes, but not just his mouth,’ she says swiftly. ‘That’s where it comes out, but where does it start?’
‘Down here somewhere,’ says Tyrone, pointing to a spot at the top of his stomach or the bottom of his chest. ‘That’s what it feels like, anyway.’
‘His diaphragm,’ says Jamila, who will be a doctor some day if her family have anything to do with it.
Instant derision.
‘I think you’ll find that’s got something to do with birth control, yeah?’ says Jerome.
‘Words can mean two different things, duh,’ says Jamila, with scorn so complete she doesn’t even need to lift her eyes from the floor.
‘“Diaphragm” is right,’ Jo says. ‘It’s a muscle just under the V in the middle of your ribs, and you use it to control the air you sing with. If you take in a deep breath, you can feel it moving down to make space. Go on, try it. Everyone, please.’ Sounds of panting, heaving, exaggerated puffing and blowing, but also real experiment. ‘Got it? Good. And up above it, you’ve got a flexible tube that goes up to your larynx here, in the middle of your throat. Your lungs are joined onto it, and your diaphragm controls how much of the air from your lungs goes into it, and how hard the air is pushing. But the important thing to remember is the flexible tube. It’s got ridges in it, like a vacuum cleaner hose, and it bends like one, only it’s pink and sticky. And that’s your musical instrument, when you’re singing. Right, Tyrone: remember you’re a flexible tube—’
‘We keep telling him that, miss,’ says Jerome.
‘We’re all flexible tubes for these purposes, Jerome,’ she says.
‘I’m not,’ says Simon, ‘I’m—’
‘Yeah, thank you, Simon: no. Ty, do us your note again, and then bend about a bit, so the tube bends, okay?’
Tyrone gives them the aaaah again – it’s an E – and twists sideways, backwards, forwards while he does it. They all listen, and they hear the way the sound varies; the way it chokes and kinks and alters in volume.
‘You see?’ she says. ‘You want to get the full note, you have to keep the tube as straight as you can. Tyrone, now stand up really straight, please: pretend there’s a piece of string from the top of your head down to the floor: that sometimes helps. Good. And now push your shoulders back – not too far, like this – and look straight ahead, with your chin up, but not too far, and give us the note again. Bit louder. Bit louder. Yes, there.’
A pure, unkinked, full-throated E. In Jo’s head, a warm equally pure yellow.
‘Lovely,’ she says. ‘Can we get a hallelujah in there, Ty?’ she adds wickedly, in a lower voice.
‘Get stuffed, miss,’ says Tyrone, but he’s smiling.
Jamila’s hand has gone up, for a miracle.
‘Yes?’
‘What happens at the top of the tube, then? Up in your throat?’
‘Good question. Complicated stuff. The air that you’ve got under pressure in the tube makes your vocal cords vibrate, and then the sound gets altered by your tongue and the shape you’re holding your mouth in, and finally it gets amplified by bouncing around in all the hollow places in your face.’
‘So your head’s sort of like a speaker, then?’ says Simon, not doing a silly voice.
‘Yes, exactly. A speaker made out of skin and bone and muscles. But if you just concentrate for now on keeping the tube straight, you get an instant improvement, and that’s enough for today. So up you all get, come on, thanks Tyrone, and sort yourselves out, boys over on this side, girls over there, no it’s not sexism: and this is what we’re going to do.’
When she first came back to England, when she first taught anybody anything, the hardest thing was learning to isolate, from out of the mass of things she knew how to do with music, one thing at a time to pass on. One thing at a time, separated, is not how you yourself possess a skill you are sure of. Everything interconnects with everything else, and the natural impulse is to try to impart it like that, pouring it out in a useless torrent. Only bit by bit do you master the unnatural act of taking your own knowledge apart again, and being able to see what needs to come in what order, to build that knowledge in other minds. Every lesson you prepare is madly overspecified to begin with – madly overfilled with stuff the kids can’t possibly assimilate. It’s astonishing how little a good lesson should contain, if they’re really going to take it in. One thing, done thoroughly: that’s all you need. So long as it’s the right thing.
Not that she expected to teach, when she came home. Or even to stay, necessarily. She flew back to London in the spring of 1980 because Val was on trial, and she wanted to be there in court, no matter how little good it did. Looking around for something to do meanwhile – something that paid – she looked up old friends in the session world and, instead of studio work, found herself drafted along as a freelance extra professional voice for a choir project run by the Inner London Education Authority over in Mile End. It was led by an expatriated American draft dodger a few years younger than her named Claude Newton. He was really good at it, in an intense, glittering-eyed way, and really attractive too, when he turned the same focus on her. Later, it became clear that this was partly because he was at the top of the manic part of a cycle which also included periods of darkness on the scale of a Siberian winter. But everything has the defects of its qualities and the days in Mile End were wonderful. Wonderful enough to offset the ugliness of the city; wonderful enough to keep her going through the awfulness of the trial, with its gallery of baying skinheads, and Val in the dock looking like an emaciated goblin. And Val refusing to let Jo visit her. And the Evening Standard running a photo of Val on the Old Bailey steps captioned NAZI DEATH QUEEN. She would catch the Tube east, and emerge from carriages reeking with smoke and filthy with litter into a wasteland of tower blocks – and watch Claude coax marvels from children who, to begin with, would barely smile.
‘Why don’t you stay?’ he said. And she did. Everything she cared to keep in LA, it turned out, fitted into three or four cartons, which she unpacked into Claude’s flat on Brixton Hill. ‘Why don’t you do teacher training?’ he said. ‘You’re good with the kids, you know.’ And she did, though it took longer than planned, what with her getting instantly and unexpectedly pregnant. ‘I suppose you want me to get rid of it?’ she said. ‘What?’ said Claude. ‘Why? It was obviously meant to be, babe.’ She stopped noticing ugliness. She noticed, instead, the way that the heights of South London greened, that pregnant summer. First as a dusting, a shading of the colour of life along the branches of the stubborn trees between the red-brick houses. Then as a canopy, a nodding roof of leaves over the broken steps and uncollected rubbish. She noticed the kicking in her belly. She noticed that something about being in the classroom took away the ominous awareness that had been coming on more and more in the studio, that she’d aged away from what the business of music wanted. The kids in the schools didn’t care about any of the stuff she had spent the last two decades doing – they’d barely heard of its biggest names – and she didn’t care that they didn’t care. It was if anything a relief, to be rid of all that. To replace it with the task of finding, every day, the one thing she needed to communicate.
And then Marcus was born. And looking at his crumpled little head, waxy with vernix, she felt love arrive in thunderclap form, unreasonable and total. It was love for the baby, yes, but it spread. It strewed light like a sunrise. It warmed like fine weather. It helped her persist through the discovery of Claude’s disadvantages. It kept her patient – mostly – through the slow, slow reviving of her relations with Val. On the face of it, the existence of Marcus made things worse there, for Val, out of prison and hiding in halfway houses under a blanket of shame, was painfully envious. For two awful years, she tried to get pregnant herself, by the sound of it with all comers; and failed; and failed at not hating Jo for getting what she herself lacked; and was ashamed again for hating her, shame twice over. But with Marcus in the world, Jo had a kind of assurance to call on. Perhaps it was selfish of her to feel that everything was ultimately all right just because it was all right for her. But knowing she could count on a solid happiness made her kinder. It let her wait and hope, and try to help in the small ways that Val would allow her to. And there came a point when he was about four, and had recently been given a football, when Val was with them in Brockwell Park, chain-smoking more than Jo would have preferred she do. ‘Go on, pass it to your auntie,’ said Val; and after a surprised moment, Marcus did, and off they ran together towards the swings, kicking the ball backwards and forwards to each other as well as very short legs on one side, and wheezing middle age on the other, permitted. They came back, Marcus giggling, and Val looked at Jo as if to say, Am I allowed? And Jo sent back, Course you are.
After that she was assiduous, buying him presents that she couldn’t afford, living on benefits. When Claude was having one of his spells in hospital, it was Val that Jo could lean on to cover the differences between Marcus’s primary school day and her own teaching day. It was Val, at those times, who was standing behind Marcus when they opened the door with the stained-glass panel in it, as she came home, and Val who said, ‘Shall we show Mum what you’ve been doing?’ I recognise this, thought Jo, hanging up her scarf and her beret, and following them along the hall towards the smell of shepherd’s pie. I’m back in the house of women, with Mum and Auntie Kay. Except now there are bits of Action Man on the floor, instead of those cardboard dollies with paper clothes. It was Val, on evenings like that, who brought her a glass of wine as she played the piano after Marcus’s bedtime. It was Val sitting at the kitchen table one particular midnight during one of those times, when they had sunk most of the second bottle, who suddenly told her the story of what life with Mike had been like. Then wept. One thing at a time; one piece of happiness fitting on top of another; one day telling its story to the next.
Now she’s got the boys on one side of the room split into two groups, singing a D and F respectively, and the girls on the other side, also split, singing an A and a D. They’re not singing their note in unison and then stopping, each group; they’re under instructions to sing until they need to breathe and then to start again, staying deliberately out of sync with their nearest neighbours, so that each group is between them producing a continuous note, in a sort of quick and dirty collective version of circular breathing. It takes them a while to get it, and she has to start them off, and occasionally to reinforce each group when they falter, by singing them the note she wants from them. They can’t find D, F, A or D by themselves, with the possible exception of Tyrone, but they can imitate, and even with the complication of the breathing and the stopping and the starting, they pick up confidence from hearing the one note they’re aiming for sounded out ringingly loud by the clump of people that surrounds them. Soon they can hold their shared note even when she starts to combine them, conducting each group in with a wave of her hand. D – F – A – D: it’s a minor chord coming (on and off and on again) from twenty-eight throats, and it sustains, it reverberates, it quivers in the knackered white soundproofing tiles in the music room. But it needs one more element, and she thinks they can handle the multitasking involved. She adds in rhythm. She gets the boys doing a slow Slap! – clap – clap, hands going down to thighs for the slap; and the girls, to avoid stereotypes, getting the faster football-ground rhythm, clapclap – clapclap – clap.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Now we’ll build it all together. I’ll conduct you in, one bit at a time. Boys clapping; girls clapping; then the two notes from the boys’ side, one at a time, lowest first; then the two notes from the girls’ side, one at a time, also lower one first, so we’re building all four notes up from the bottom, right? And when we’ve got it all going, don’t stop. Everyone keep singing. Mend it if it seems to be going wrong. Try your best, anyway. Let’s see how long we can keep it up. Everybody ready?’
And in come the different claps on top of each other, making new patterns and interference effects, percussive waves bouncing about. And then in she brings the four notes of the chord, climbing as they go. And yes, there’s wavering; yes, there’s faltering and moments of confusion. Part-singing is difficult for amateurs, even in this incredibly basic form. But through the wobbles, the chord steadies and persists. She’s tempted to put in something over the top, some freeform piece of soprano ululation, like Clare Torry’s thing on Dark Side of the Moon, not that anyone would recognise that. Tyrone’s eyes would widen satisfyingly. But she would put them off, wreck their momentary concentration. She’d ruin the structure, not add to it. Instead she just watches: their mouths opening and closing effortfully, the gasps for breath, as for a whole ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, forty seconds, Year 10 sustain the chord. Can they hear it, this immense organised sound they are making together? Can they hear the organ that they have briefly become, whose separate pipes are all those sticky pink organic tubes in teenage bodies? Imperfect pipes, made of damp twisted cartilage without a single straight line, pumped up by weird fluttering bladders, and yet capable of sounding a chord that seems to lay hold on some order in the world that already existed before we came along and started to sing. Making an order that matches an order. Music is strange, she wants them to see, and one of the things that is strangest about it is that it comes from our messy bodies. Sing, Hayley. Sing, Tyrone. Sing, Jamila, Simon, Samantha, Jerome. Don’t stop till you must. Notice if you can that your temporary orchestra of hormones and still-digesting Big Macs from lunchtime can be coaxed into playing the music of the spheres. If you let yourself be its instrument.
Then the bell goes, and they clatter away laughing.
At the end of the day, she drives home with Marcus. ‘How was your day?’ she asks. ‘’S all right,’ he says, staring at the road. This, from her pride, her joy, her last-chance late child who started the whole world anew for her when he came, who once lay so close to her, feeding, that they seemed to her to make one being, milky and whole. But then he angles his dignified, ironic, twelve-year-old head and for a microsecond bumps it against her shoulder.
‘Did you ever read a book called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists?’ asks Alec.
‘No, Mr Torrance,’ says Wayne the YTS trainee, warily. ‘What’s that, then?’
They’re prepping bare walls for the first layer of render in an upstairs bedroom in one of the big houses right at the top of Bexford Rise. Big brushes and a bucket of dilute PVA glue. It slops on and then sinks in, leaving only a glisten on the surface. Wayne has been given the PVA to paint on because he’s only just started, and Gary hasn’t initiated him yet into the mysteries of actual plastering. And Alec has been given it to do because that’s all Gary trusts him with, experience having proved that he and a float and wet plaster do not combine productively. (He can in fact also strip off old render reasonably well, with a hammer drill and bolster, but that part of this job is behind them.)
‘Call me Alec,’ says Alec, looking down at Wayne’s ginger flattop as the boy squats effortlessly to do the bits just above the skirting. But it’s a lost cause. Gary’s the boss; he’s the boss’s dad.
‘It’s about plastering, actually. Well – building work, all sorts, and painting and decorating, but it’s got plastering in it.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Mm-hmm. Probably the only novel in the English language where the author thought plastering was interesting enough to put in. Mind you, he could’ve been wrong there.’
Slop-slop, load up the brush. Wayne wishes he would shut up, this is clear. He has a hunted expression.
‘Anyway, these blokes are doing up a house – they all work for the same firm, you see, so it’s one big job – and some of them are really good. Talented, you see. Artistic, even. But to get it done on time, for the price their boss has quoted, they’re basically forced to do a crap job. Cutting corners, scrimping on the materials, bodging it up so it looks okay, but it’s going to fall to bits ten minutes after they get paid.’
‘So they’re like … cowboys, then?’ says Wayne.
‘No!’ says Alec. ‘That’s the point! They’re not setting out to rip anyone off. They’re not the ones who put in the low quote, they’re not the ones who’re making a profit off the deal. They’re trapped by a stupid system. There they are, with all the skills they need to do good work, and their tools actually in their hands, and instead they’re fucking it up. They’re having to fuck it up.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘And what the book’s saying is, that’s capitalism for you.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘Dad,’ says Gary, appearing in the doorway.
‘And maybe you’re going to tell me, that was just the olden days. But it’s the same now, isn’t it? Look at you, fr’instance. You’re doing a full week’s work, and you’re getting ten quid for it. How’s that fair?’
‘Dad,’ says Gary.
‘But I’m learning the job,’ says Wayne.
‘That’s right,’ says Gary. ‘Don’t mind him, he’s a wind-up artist.’
‘I am not,’ protests Alec. ‘I’m making a serious point here. I’m trying to—’
‘Dad! Would you please, please, pretty please, stop trying to sign Wayne up for the revolution?’ He’s exasperated, but it’s within the bounds of humour, just as Alec himself is vehement, but not with the old bitterness. It was different straight after Wapping, with his occupation gone, his skill suddenly and forever useless. The humiliation was fresh. He hated taking shifts on charity from his own son, he hated being cut down into a middle-aged dogsbody, good for nothing but fetching and carrying. And he showed it, all the time. Looking back, he’s amazed that Gary put up with him.
‘Well, you know,’ he says, meaning the joke to be a kind of apology, ‘I’m just keeping my hand in. For old times’ sake. It’s my last day, after all. Gotta leave with something to remind you how bloody awful it was, having me working for you.’
‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ says Gary.
‘But, but, that book?’ Wayne puts in.
‘What about it?’ says Alec, raising his eyebrows encouragingly.
‘If they’re doing a rubbish job, the guys in the book, ’cause the quote was too low – that’s, like, the customer’s fault, innit? They shouldn’t of taken the low quote. They paid for crap, so they’re getting crap. Right?’
‘You bloody Thatcher baby,’ says Alec.
‘You done downstairs, then?’ Alec asks.
‘Yep. Ready to get in here, if you two’ve finished.’
‘Yeah, we’re good,’ says Wayne: and it’s true, while Alec has been standing there brush in hand, the boy has finished his own share of the walls and quietly moved on to finish Alec’s.
‘Right, then. Time for lesson number one for you, I think.’ Gary nods at Wayne.
‘We’ll help you fetch everything up,’ says Alec.
‘No, no, no need, me and Wayne can do it. You should be moving, shouldn’t you? Aren’t you doing the handover with mum at twelve thirty?’
Alec looks at his watch. Bugger. Yes he is.
‘I better get going, yes,’ he says. ‘Well. See you tonight, son. See you, Wayne. Try not to grow up into a total Tory, okay?’
And off he thuds down the stairwell over the huddled dustsheets, careful not to touch the buttery brown of new plaster that surrounds him, that pales as he gets into the dryer, older work in the hallway to a biscuity terracotta. As they dry, the burnish marks where Gary did his deft swivels and slides with the float edge become mere specklings, faint blushes of red on an apparently smooth surface. Gary does good work.
‘He talks like a teacher, your dad, doesn’t he?’ he can just hear Wayne saying, cautiously, at the top of the house, and Gary replying, ‘Funny you should say that …’
Twenty past twelve. Out of the cool damp cave into August heat outside. Past the signboard saying FEATHERSTONE (in 10,000-point Baskerville) and the white van with TORRANCE BROTHERS on the side (sans serif, but he doesn’t know the font). For once, the job is near enough to walk home from. All he has to do is stroll – trot, rather – down under the big avenue trees from the top of the Rise to the point where the estate cuts into the right side of the street. Then the maisonette’s just round the corner. (Their maisonette, now, owned by them and not the council. He hadn’t wanted to do it but Gary insisted, and operating on benefits, operating on Gary’s goodwill, with nothing else to offer to the family economy, Alec didn’t feel he really had a leg to stand on.) Leaves still and heavy overhead; only the faintest stirring of the air. He feels the heat as he hurries in overalls. He feels the strangeness as he realises that, unless he takes to DIY, he’s not going to be wearing overalls again, ever. Not to work in. This is the end of him as a working man. Tomorrow morning he’ll be presenting himself in the staffroom in a suit and tie. Mr Torrance, indeed.
‘Sorry!’ he cries as he lets himself in.
‘In here,’ calls Sandra from the front room.
He can tell she’s got Gary’s little girl with her straight away, from the particular small-person-present smell in the house: a mixture of lotions and creams, the steam of boiled veg and a hint of used nappy. He missed it the first time round, thirty-two years ago. That was Sandra’s department then; he was always off at work in the ink and roar while Sandra did the kids’ lives. But he knows it now, intimately, and he feels the familiar bump of delight and boredom together, as he puts his head round the door and finds Vicky on the carpet with legs sticking out of the corners of her little red dress at right angles, and a plastic giraffe held up to her face to be given a talking-to. How can you be bored and delighted at the same time? Filled with love and conscious at the very same point of how many hours there are to get through till bedtime? You just can, that’s all.
What he’s not expecting to see is Gary’s Sonia’s dad Tony sitting on the settee as well. They don’t move apart from each other as he comes in or anything like that, but he has the impression somehow that they are, as it were, deliberately not moving apart. There’s a self-consciousness about them; about them being seen, and being seen by him. Oh.
‘I’ll just nip upstairs and change,’ Alec says.
‘Better take Vicky with you, love,’ says Sandra. ‘I’m out of time. We should get going. – Tony’s giving me a lift.’
‘I’m just giving Sandra a lift down,’ Tony explains, unnecessarily.
‘Right,’ says Alec. ‘Come on then, Your Majesty, come and help Grandad choose which shirt to put on.’
‘Can Horton come?’ asks Vicky. She must mean the giraffe.
‘Of course he can,’ says Alec. He takes the hand that isn’t holding the giraffe, and so it begins, the afternoon at child speed, where every task breaks down into a multitude of tiny sub-tasks. This one is Getting Up the Stairs. They have reached the fifth step by the time Sandra, with purse in hand, is heading out through the frosted-glass front door with Tony. Sandra’s part-time job on the check-outs at the Co-op has metamorphosed into something semi-managerial at the huge new Bexford Tesco’s, still on the shop floor but moving briskly around sorting out the teenagers and pensioners who run the tills. Her shifts start at one.
‘Isn’t Grandma coming upstairs with us?’ says Vicky.
‘No, Grandma is going with Grandpa Tony,’ says Alec, and wishes he hadn’t put it like that. ‘Wave bye-bye.’
‘Bye-bye, chicken,’ calls Sandra as the door closes. ‘See you later, love.’
Two more stairs, Vicky concentrating on the big steps up required. Then she stops.
‘Why do you say “Your Majesty”, Grandad? That’s not my name!’
‘Because “Your Majesty” is what you say to queens, and there was a very famous queen who did have your name.’
‘A queen called Vicky?’
‘Well, Victoria.’
‘I think Vicky is nicer.’
‘Mm-hmm. Up we go.’
When they reach the top, Vicky needs the loo, so they do that first; and there’s washing her hands, and drying her hands, small fingers and pearly nails wiggling in the towel, and then rescuing Horton, who has somehow fallen into the toilet, luckily after it was flushed; and washing Horton, and managing to stop Vicky from helping with that, and consequently needing her own hands washed and dried all over again. In the bedroom, she doesn’t help pick a shirt. She climbs into the bottom of the wardrobe and tries to hide among the dry-cleaning bags.
‘I’m a lion,’ she says. ‘Rawr!’
‘Rawr,’ agrees Alec. He succeeds in changing his clothes while being-a-lion lasts.
‘Now. Have you had your lunch?’
‘No. I’m a hungry lion! Rawr!’
‘Rawr. Then let’s go and see what Grandma made for you. Why don’t I carry you this time?’
‘No, I want to do it myself, on my legs. Horton wants to do it himself on his legs too.’ A microsecond’s pause. ‘Where is Horton?’ Another microsecond, which is quite long enough for happiness to transit all the way into wailing panic. ‘Where is Horton?’
‘Horton’s in the bathroom, I expect, petal. Let’s go and look, shall we?’
‘Horton is lost!’
‘No he’s not, no he’s not. Look, there he is.’ Horton is among the toothbrushes. When Alec passes him over, Vicky is so eager to grab him that Alec gets clouted on the side of the head with him in passing. She presses him to her cheek, trembling. Then the sun is out again as if it had never been eclipsed. Loss is total; then loss is totally cancelled.
‘I thought Horton was an elephant,’ says Alec, unwisely.
‘Horton-on-the-telly is a nellyphant,’ says Vicky with scorn. ‘My Horton is a giraffe. He has spots.’
‘So he does,’ says Alec. ‘Now, let’s go and find your lunch.’
‘Lunch,’ agrees Vicky.
They labour down the stairs.
‘Upsy-daisy!’ says Vicky on each step.
‘Downsy-daisy?’ suggests Alec.
‘No,’ says Vicky.
Three hours later, Alec is in the park, sitting on a bench with the pushchair beside him, enjoying a momentary respite while the bossy woman with the double-buggy parked at the other end spins Vicky on the merry-go-round along with her two. In between he has fed her her lunch of fish fingers, tried and failed to get her to go down for a nap, sat her in front of a video of Rosie and Jim, and had her go to sleep there instead. He meant to ease away from the small, hot weight of her leaning against him and to nip upstairs to check his lesson plans for tomorrow, but he dropped off himself. Now they are out in the high-summer heat, under the glowering sky of city August. He has remembered to put on her sun hat. They have worked their way from the swings to the climbing frame to the see-saw, and now he has a moment to look around him, and even to try to think.
He is, as usual, the oldest person in the park and also the only man. Apart from him, it’s all mothers, and young mothers too, busy with the business of fertility. A cloud of oestrogen surrounds him. His presence with Vicky most weekday afternoons has won him a kind of friendly half-admission to the club. He’s welcomed, and chatted to, but he is too male to quite belong. Yet at the same time – pass, friend – it’s insultingly clear that to them he’s much too ancient to count as male in the operative sense of the word. He’s not a boyfriend, a husband, a babyfather, one of the maybe desired or maybe resented but definitely visible impregnators who have helped bring about all this burgeoning and swelling. Under the circumstances a bit of middle-aged lechery is inevitable: but also kind of abstract. Self-limiting. Known to be pointless. Rendered remote and theoretical even as it happens, given that you’re only shown what you’re shown because you’re safely neutered. You’re allowed in because it doesn’t matter. Mrs Bossy here is never going to whip out her tits, but yesterday a red-haired girl sat next to him with her two-month-old on her knee. She hesitated fractionally, saw that Vicky was running to and fro bringing Alec sticks, and smiled decisively at him. She pulled out a big pale milk-swollen breast and plugged the baby’s mouth with a thick tender copper-coloured nipple. The baby sucked away, making little lip-smacking sounds of contentment. Far away, faintly, a part of Alec thought: I’m not surprised the kid’s happy, I’d be happy if I had that in my mouth. But only far away and faintly. It was like being a eunuch in the harem. Or what Alec imagines it would be like to be a eunuch in a harem. Or what he reminds himself he shouldn’t be imagining it would be like, because all that harem stuff is an orientalist stereotype. Orientalism was one of the set books on his Open University course.
He has never been unfaithful to Sandra. This is something he is suddenly thinking about, now that there is – is there? can there be? – a chance that Sandra is being unfaithful to him. With Tony, though. With Tony. Really? Tony who was dumped by Sonia’s mum Jean two years ago, and apparently can’t boil an egg for himself. Tony with his red face (though he still has all of his hair, the bastard). Tony whose conversation, all of it that Alec has ever witnessed, is limited to car maintenance. Boring Tony. Helpless Tony. Unbeautiful Tony. What can there be there that would tempt his Sandra, after all these years, that would make that long body draw towards, shift towards, want to shift towards, the pile of Tony on the settee? With his car-coat and his sovereign ring. Probably, nothing. Surely, nothing. Surely he’s just misunderstanding something, over-interpreting something, being paranoid about a situation where surely, surely, there can’t be any temptation operating.
Temptation, he thinks he knows about. He has certainly felt it himself. On the OU summer schools, in particular. Where, crudely, there were two women to every man and therefore all the middle-aged crumpet you could possibly want. You packed up your suitcase and you went away from home, and for two weeks you were living in a concrete student room on a college campus: an eighteen-year-old’s room, with an eighteen-year-old’s tiny bed, and it gave you anachronistic ideas when you went to the college bar in the evening. And all the other titchy, uncomfortable cubbyholes were also full of people temporarily cut loose from their lives, and having anachronistic feelings, and acting on them too, quite a lot of them. Seizing the chance. Doing the obvious with the temporary freedom. There was this lady who ran a B&B in Ramsgate who was very willing, very pressing; and she was all plump curves and freckles, the very opposite of Sandra, erotically speaking. And yeah, he wanted to. But he didn’t, not so much out of any virtue as from a certain idea he had of his life, and of what it was supposed to be like. (If he remembered rightly, she moved on with unflattering speed to an electrician from Salford.)
How did any of that apply here? I mean, thinks Alec, I suppose Sandra must be as prone as anyone to getting bored, and to those irresponsible moments you get where you wonder about what it would be like with someone else. But – Tony?
Maybe, says a malevolent voice in his head, it’s because Tony can’t boil an egg, or run a washing machine, or look after a child for an afternoon. You adapted. You lost your job and you got … domesticated. You learned to do women’s work. She said she didn’t mind, she said she appreciated it: but maybe, down deep, she didn’t like it at all. Maybe it’s made you less of a man to her. To her too. Eunuch grandad. Neutered Alec, good with the kids.
Shutup shutup shutup, he says to himself, and digs the fingers of one hand hard into his scalp, startling Mrs Hyphenated Double-Buggy as she brings her two and Vicky back.
‘Is everything all right?’ she says, making it clear by her tone that his licence to be fit company may be withdrawn depending on the answer.
‘Yeah, fine,’ he says. ‘It’s just so hot.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ she says, reassured. ‘Terribly. Might be time to get out the paddling pool when we get home. Dunk the little beasts.’
She clearly comes from one of the bourgeois battleships on the Rise. A banker’s wife; a surgeon’s. Tut-tut, bit of sexism there, Alec reproves himself. Who says she isn’t the banker or the surgeon, on her maternity leave and taking it terribly, awfully seriously? No reason to assume she’s the class enemy’s dependant. Give the lady her due, give her her dignity. She may well be the class enemy herself.
‘Think I’m going to give mine their snack,’ she continues. ‘Would your little girl like some?’
‘That’d be very kind. Vicky, say thank you to the lady.’
‘Than-kyoo,’ says Vicky, coming forward eagerly with her hand out. But when the top is popped off the Tupperware box, it turns out to contain only sultanas and sticks of carrot. Vicky’s hand drops, and she looks piteously at Alec.
‘Would you rather have your KitKat, love?’ Alec asks, cheering inwardly.
‘Yes please,’ says Vicky, performing good manners without having to be prompted.
Alec fishes out a two-bar KitKat from the multipack in his bag, and, August sun assisting, Vicky proceeds to get chocolatey. The other two watch enviously, carrot and sultana very clearly turning to ash in their mouths. Hah. The care of small people is understood to be a truce in the class war, bringing together people who would talk to each at no other time. But it’s a truce, not a peace treaty.
‘I’ve got two more,’ says Alec. ‘Can I offer ’em to your two?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ begins the woman, looking nutritional daggers at him.
‘Oh please, Mummy! Oh please!’ say her children, bobbing up and down.
Alec cheers inwardly some more.
Unfortunately, a last-minute run back to fetch Horton from his nesting place at the foot of the see-saw trips Vicky over a paving slab and she grazes her knee. It’s not a bad graze, just a white scrape with a tiny criss-cross of red in it on the immaculate pink of her kneecap, and the wipes he used to get rid of the chocolate smear on her face take easy care of the blood. He dabs her efficiently with Savlon, puts on a plaster and kisses it better. But partly because it’s sore, partly because of the scope for drama in the occasion, Vicky declines to walk back home, or to travel in the pushchair either.
‘Carry me, Grandad!’ she commands.
So they travel with her sitting on his shoulders, and his left arm clamping her dangling legs to his chest, while his right steers the pushchair along the pavement in a series of wobbling curves.
Nellie the ELephant packed her TRUNK
And said goodBYE to the CIR-cus
they sing together, and Vicky beats time with Horton on the top of his head.
Back at the house, his head aches from the sun and from the giraffe-strikes, and he’s got a cramp in his side. Vicky, on the other hand, is recharged. She doesn’t want to do drawing, or be read a story, or to play any of the quiet games he can think of. So he puts Rosie and Jim back on and she bounces on the settee like a jumping bean in front of it. He can keep an eye on her through the serving hatch, which means he can step far enough away from her to go through to the kitchen, put the kettle on and start making her tea. He can’t go upstairs, though, where the lesson plans are calling ever louder. Even being out of sight of her while he reaches down the tin of beans for her beans on toast, or bends to bin his teabag, fills him with an anxious picture of – of – but in fact he never gets any further than the ominous beginning of imagining her damaging herself on some hard corner. The idea is too horrible to permit a clear picture.
‘Be careful, love,’ he calls through the hatch.
‘Nellie the CIRcus,’ she sings, ignoring him and coming to no harm.
The bouncing tires her out nicely, and she lets herself be sat peacefully at the kitchen table to spoon up the little cut-up squares of the toast and the orange beans. It’s about half past five. The heat is going off a bit. A pulse of wind shakes the window by the sink, and there are clouds in the brassy sky. Rain would be nice. He sits opposite her, nursing his mug. She’s in what used to be Steve’s seat, when they were doing the previous version of family in this house. New curtains, new washing machine, but a lot else in the room is just the same, as if it’s been waiting to be put back to use. It isn’t the same, though, is it? The first time round, it feels like forever; but when it repeats a generation on, you know that the smallness of small people is strictly temporary, that home is a contrivance that only lasts a while. A shelter built of sticks as we go along the road. You can’t appeal to the elderly phone on the wall to save you, or the cream paint around the hatch: not when you yourself are about to rip up the pattern of your life and do a new thing. Not when Sandra, God forbid, may be about to tell him— Shutup shutup shutup.
‘How about that story now?’ he says once Vicky has finished, and been wiped and dried.
‘All right, Grandad,’ she says, as if she’s kindly doing him a favour. Maybe she is. Grandad and his books; no one else in the family feels the urge, really. He can’t excite Vicky about the library as an outing any more than he could get Gary and Steve enthusiastic. But she settles comfortably on his knee.
‘Mr Magnolia has only one boot,’ he tells her. ‘He has an old trumpet that goes rooty-toot. And two lovely sisters who play on the flute. But Mr Magnolia has only one boot.’
‘I’ve got wellies,’ says Vicky.
‘Yes, you have. What colour are they?’
‘They are yellow!’
‘Yes, they are. But poor Mr Magnolia hasn’t got any wellies. Look, you can see his toes.’
They reach the end, and Mr Magnolia is safely rebooted.
‘Now,’ he says, as if an internal alarm clock has gone off and he can’t wait an instant longer, ‘we’re going to go upstairs because Grandad needs to look at his work for tomorrow. At the big school?’
‘Don’t want to.’
‘’Fraid we’ve got to, love. Off we go!’
‘No.’
‘Yes, off we go. Come on.’
‘No!’
‘Vicky, yes. Be a good girl.’
‘No! Nononono!’
And all of a sudden the tantrum is upon her. She swells, she goes rigid, she turns red. A volcano of willpower has erupted inside her. Alec should at this point engage in distraction tactics, but he’s had enough of patience himself. He just picks her up, a yammering flailing armful, and carries her bodily up the stairs, and into what used to be Gary’s bedroom. There he lays her flat on the floor to wail, mutters something nominally soothing, and turns on the computer on the desk. Do I really want to spend all day every day with kids? he asks himself. Yes, he does, for all the familiar reasons. And seven-year-olds aren’t like two-year-olds. Mr Torrance the primary school teacher won’t be quite the same being, or stand in the same place, as Alec the tetchy grandad.
Vicky’s roars subside into sniffles. She is gazing at the screen, he sees. What force couldn’t do, the blue glow has accomplished.
‘Feeling better, pet?’ he says, and scoops her onto his knee. Ridiculously huge tears are hanging on her ridiculously long eyelashes, and he blots them with a pang. Together, they watch Windows start up. She does, anyway; his gaze wanders over his neat shelf of OU binders and coursebooks and set texts. Tools for a transformation he’ll have completed at 8.30 tomorrow morning, when he walks through the gates of Halstead Road School with a briefcase. Also, his comfort, his refuge, in a funny way his vengeance. He hunkered down in here with Ways of Seeing and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to remake himself and show the bastards.
‘Can we do the caterpillar?’ says Vicky. She’s talking about one of the games the machine came with.
‘Yes, in a minute, love,’ he says, and opens Word. More start-up time; strange whirs and bonks from the hard disk. And Alec thinks: Sandra and Tony, what if it’s got nothing to do with sex at all, or not much? What if it’s not about temptation. What if she’s just … lonely. I’ve been in this room, changing. And the more I’ve changed, the less we can talk about what’s on my mind. We can’t have conversations about Paulo Freire; I mean, we’ve tried, and it doesn’t work. So when we talk, and at least we haven’t stopped talking, it’s all about our day, and the boys, and now the grandkids, and what the latest is in the great non-stop soap opera at Tesco, and which of the people I’ve never met there has split up with which of the other people I’ve never met. And it’s kept us smiling at each other, for sure. But there’s this area of me I don’t share, and it grows. I’ve been thinking of that as a loss for me, but of course it’s one for her too. She knows there’s this big bit of me that’s out of her view, out of her reach, now. Maybe, and why on earth didn’t I think of this before, there’s an equivalent piece of her that’s been growing out of my sight, out of my reach? Maybe Tony is just … there. When he sits on the settee, he’s present. His head isn’t off in the clouds.
The file has opened. Bullet points and aims, probably too many of them. Vicky stares.
‘What does it say, Grandad?’ she asks.
‘Oh, boring stuff,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you what, let’s make the words bigger, and we’ll see if we can find a Vuh-for-Vicky.’
A move of the mouse, a couple of clicks, and he does what he could never do in his lost trade: blows the font up from 12-point to 72-point to 96-point just for the mere asking. Times New Roman, of course, for old times’ sake.
‘Look,’ he says, ‘there’s a Vuh.’
Vicky puts out a finger to trace it. Down below, a key turns in the front door: Sandra come home, to tell him he’s been imagining things or to turn the world upside down.
‘What is it made of, Grandad?’ says Vicky.
‘Light, love,’ says Alec. ‘It’s made of light.’