In Bell Green also there was cleaning. The windowsills, the shelves, the side tables, the floors. That life-usurping, burdensome act of servitude and futility that returned week after week to remind you of your never-ending domestic obligation and hopeless mundanity. Melissa despised cleaning. It was not therapeutic, refreshing or creatively stimulating, as some people liked to argue. It was just dust in your face, and she went about it with huge reluctance and discontent, wearing faded, paint-splashed dungarees and a top with holes in it, and a look on her face that gave vivid indication of what she would look like as an old woman. Now that there was a whole house to clean her misery was intensified, and dragging her cloth around the living room, halls and bedrooms she could hear millions of tiny dust particles laughing at her from their swirling microscopic freedom, screaming hilariously as she approached the static black sheen of the TV stand where dust settled even as she wiped, and dancing and tittering in the light from the skylight as she clattered over the stairs with the Hoover. Usher and Beres Hammond provided some comfort – music was power – but nothing could appease her until it was over.
It was unfortunate, then, that 13 Paradise Row was an especially dusty house. It was built circa 1900 upon a gently sloping plot of shrinkable clay sub-soil typical to much of south London and requiring homeowners to have insurance policies in place against subsidence. Because of this sloping, this possible shrinking and sinking, there was that sense of crookedness and a damp close to the ground, a feeling almost nautical. The floors tipped down in a faint eastward direction. Corners were not quite, skirting boards were jagged, struggling to sit fast against the walls in a mutual failure to make right angles. The dust nestled easily into the cracks of these failures. It settled on top of the dado rail along the upward tunnel of the staircase. It clung, through this moistness, this dampness in the air, inside the grooves of the wood-panelled wall in the dining area, where a row of kid-height hooks held the children’s coats. There was dust atop the door frames, the picture frames, the lamp shades. In the master court it was worst of all, the headboard of Camden was afflicted, the upper edge of the dancers at twilight. There was mildew in the wardrobes, which gave off a musty, ancient smell, and while Melissa bent to neaten the line of shoes between the two, she found for the second time a moist, white film of something on their soles, which came off on her fingertip.
Michael was out walking Blake. Ria was in the next room doing something with a cardboard box and muttering to herself, as she often did. The muttering stopped, she called out with a high-pitched urgency, ‘Mummy!’ Footsteps followed, she appeared at the door, hand on hip. ‘Mummy, why do you always throw away my things?’
‘I don’t always throw away your things.’ Melissa turned to look at her. She was a long-limbed, big-eyed seven-year-old, with coming and going teeth. The front top-left was missing, giving her a hag-like grin, usually quick to explode in her face though at this moment withheld. She had Michael’s rich, sharply defined lips, his long, slim, cumbersome feet, and a hint of her maternal grandmother’s Nigerian nose. She liked to wear one white glove, as she was now, on her left hand, and it still bothered her slightly that some things had two names, such as pasta and spaghetti and trousers and pyjamas. It was just quite confusing.
‘Yes you do,’ she said back. ‘Whenever I get something like a card or a leaflet or something I always try and find it and it’s gone because you threw it away.’
‘Well how am I supposed to know what’s rubbish and what’s not? We can’t keep everything you bring into this house.’ The twigs, the travelcards, the miniature London Underground maps, the double-glazing flyers, the stones, the leaves, the dirty hair clips, the coins, the badges, the flags, the fans, the bookmarks, the decrepit elastic bands, the soil. It was unbearable, the sheer avalanche and paraphernalia of object. ‘I’m just trying to keep the place tidy.’
‘My lottery tickets weren’t rubbish. I was going to use those.’
‘But you’re too young to play the lottery. You have to be sixteen.’
‘Oh, do you? I didn’t know that. Anyway I was collecting them. And they were mine. I needed them. I don’t throw your things away. If I threw something of yours away you’d shout at me and confuscate —’
‘Confiscate.’
‘Yes, confiscate, and so why can you throw my things away, but I can’t throw your things away?’ Ria waited for an answer, which Melissa was trying to arrange into a calm, authoritative diplomacy but she was taking too long. ‘Oh just forget it,’ she said, and stomped back to her room.
We have to remember that children are human beings too, so advised the parenting spokeswriter of Raise Them Right, which Melissa had bought one day in the throes of frustration about how she was going to manage the bringing up of a child without exercising corporal punishment, which she fundamentally did not agree with and anyway it didn’t work. The one time she had smacked Ria was when she had lain down on a zebra crossing when she was three because she didn’t want to walk any more, and it had not made the slightest bit of difference, she had continued to lie down on the zebra crossing and Melissa had dragged her across it. She had bought Raise Them Right shortly after that. It is destructive and unkind to impose our own tensions and personalities on to the lives of our children, it declared, who are engaged in the difficult task of trying to carve out their identities. They deserve patience. They deserve the space to be themselves. Avoid conflict. Praise them often. These fragments of considerate wisdom surfaced in Melissa’s brain, against a background of general resentment towards their presence, and she went next door to Ria’s room in the spirit of understanding and reconciliation.
Whatever it was that was in the next room, however, had lifted Ria from her grievance and she was again muttering to herself, in a busy, accelerated tone, the throwing away of important things apparently forgotten. She was kneeling on the vermilion rug in front of her cardboard box, around which were smaller cardboard boxes, bits of paper, Sellotape, scissors, foil, string, pencils, an old toothbrush, parking tickets. This room still made Melissa think of Lily, Brigitte’s daughter, lying hidden away while strangers looked around the house. She wondered sometimes if there was something wrong with it. It was rectangular, with a shaded, northern aspect. Ria’s bed was in the same place Lily’s had been, alongside the wall to the left of the window, Blake’s cot in the opposite corner.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘I’m making a house. It’s for when I shrink. I have to finish it today otherwise I might not get to shrink. Today only is shrinking day.’ Ria did not look up as she was talking but carried on arranging the flaps of the box into a roof.
‘Can’t you shrink another day? You know we’ve got people coming round soon. I don’t think they’d like it if you shrank. They might find it disturbing, antisocial even. Don’t you want to play with the other kids?’
‘What other kids?’
‘Jerry, Summer, Avril. They’re all coming.’
Ria paused to think. ‘That’s OK,’ she concluded. ‘They can shrink with me. That’s what I was going to use the lottery tickets for, for other people to get into the house. I’m the only person who doesn’t need a ticket. But I’m going to use these parking tickets now instead.’
‘I’m sorry I threw your lottery tickets away.’
‘It’s OK, Mummy.’
‘Next time I’ll ask you first.’
‘Thank you.’
As an afterthought, Melissa added, ‘Make sure you ask their parents before you shrink them. And ask them if they actually want to shrink.’
Damian and Stephanie arrived as the afternoon sun was abating and the morning’s rain returning, bringing with it a freezing wind to the east, Stephanie having endured the exact tense drive she had anticipated, with Damian reading the literary section of the Saturday Guardian and hardly saying a word to anyone. His mood seemed to lift, though, as they unloaded themselves from the huge decuma-grey estate and herded down Paradise Row, Jerry running ahead, always a difficult passenger now unleashed on to the wind, the girls following behind him. It was in such moments, beholding her family in some outside, neutral place away from home, that Stephanie experienced a broad and satisfying existential rightness. There was her gang, her team. They would withstand anything and none of it mattered, moods, grievances, sheets. They were going to have a nice time.
Michael answered the door singing ‘Hey!’, and they crowded into the little hallway, taking off shoes and coats, stuffing gloves inside hats and pockets. ‘God,’ Stephanie said, unwrapping her long, long scarf, ‘this city is getting more and more congested! We were stuck in traffic for ages, weren’t we?’
This was directed towards Damian but he didn’t respond, feeling that it wasn’t strictly a question but rather that jarring, needy conversational punctuation that Patrick used. Also, Melissa had just appeared at the top of the stairs, wearing an interesting black top with shiny tassels hanging off it. Her fro was a halo. Her muscular arms were bare. She was coming down, swaying, swinging in the tassels. ‘Hi all,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ he said, only to her. Then the outside forces pressed back in, Michael said it was probably the rain causing the traffic, Stephanie said ‘Whenever I come to London these days I just feel potty.’
‘Have some wine, it’ll chill you out,’ Melissa said. ‘Red or white?’
‘Well, I would like white, but I think everybody’s going to be drinking red, aren’t they? I was just saying this to someone the other day – no one drinks white wine any more. What’s wrong with it? I love white wine! But look, we brought red.’ Damian handed the bottle to Melissa with gravitas in a blue plastic bag. ‘Have you got any white?’ Stephanie asked.
‘Yeah, I like white too.’
There was Philadelphia soul playing on the system. The air smelt of nag champa joss sticks, which Michael had lit after his cleaning of the living room, celebrating its spotlessness. Jerry and Summer were towering over Blake, who was sitting in his recliner by the sofa clutching a rattle and beginning to whimper at the sudden influx of people. Ria asked Avril if she wanted to come upstairs and shrink, then remembering that she was supposed to ask first asked Stephanie if Avril could come and shrink with her. ‘Shrink? What? Shrink? Oh, shrink. Of course, go and shrink,’ Stephanie said, understanding Melissa’s explanatory look. Jerry cried, ‘Wait for me!’ and ran up after them. Summer was instructed to go as well to keep an eye on them all, which she did, sauntering, nonchalant.
‘As for you,’ Stephanie knelt before Blake as if he were a shrine. ‘Look at you. Oh, he’s gorgeous. He’s scrumptious. Can I hold him? … Look what we brought you,’ she said, full of a merry empathy, handing him the babygros, which he grasped and brought to his mouth. ‘It’s for you to wear, as you’re growing … as you get bigger and bigger and bigger, OK? That’s all you have to do, you lucky thing.’
‘Oop, someone’s broody,’ Michael said.
‘She’s always broody,’ said Damian.
‘I’m not broody! I just love babies, that’s all. So tell me, how was the birth, Melissa? Did it go well? I want to hear the whole thing.’
Blake was held in Stephanie’s lap at one end of the sofa, his club foot still pointing inwards though loosening with the months, while the nativity story was told for the fifteenth time, Michael joining in to make various exaggerations and elaborations. Stephanie listened with relish. It was her favourite subject, and she offered authoritative interjections about what should have been done at this or that point from an earth-mother perspective. Meanwhile Damian listened to the music and looked at book spines along the white shelves, spotting Carver and Hemingway, Tolstoy, Langston Hughes, getting that wakening feeling in the pit of him. In an attempt to bring him into the conversation, bored with retelling the story, Melissa broke off and asked him how life was, how was work, etcetera.
‘You know, same old grind.’
‘What was it you do again?’
And he told her, about the researching of the effects of solar heat on large glass areas in multistorey blocks of flats, also for the fifteenth time. There were no follow-up questions.
‘What about you?’ he asked, enjoying, while Stephanie and Michael carried on talking in the background, this private chat, which felt somehow special, meaningful.
‘It’s … um … precarious,’ she said, her tassels glinting in the light of the zigzag lamp next to her. ‘I’m freelancing now.’ Melissa had been the fashion and lifestyle editor at Open magazine, a glossy for urban women, for five years, but had decided while pregnant with Blake to ‘change her life’ and take full maternity leave. When Ria was born she had gone back to work after two months, leaving the baby with her mother. ‘It’s very different,’ she said. ‘I miss the buzz.’
‘You’re lucky. I’d love to stay at home and write,’ Damian said. ‘That’s my dream.’
‘What would you write?’
‘I’m not sure, whatever came to me.’ He dared not tell her about his novel, at least not here, not like this.
‘Dreams are meant for making,’ Melissa said, drawing from her ever-ready store of positive affirmations and wise poets, among them Paulo Coelho, Alice Walker, the Dalai Lama, and a few other random Buddhists via her sister Carol, who taught yoga. ‘I have been reading more, though,’ she went on, ‘which is one thing I planned to do when I left Open. I’m trying to read all the books I lost during my English degree – all that analysing them to death, having to write essays about them. It stopped me actually reading them, just reading, purely, you know, for pleasure’s sake. I’m reclaiming my literary innocence.’
Damian thought about this, inspired. ‘I’ve never looked at it that way before. I always wish I’d studied English … maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t.’
‘That’s how I ended up in fashion. I was basically fleeing from sentences.’
‘But you still have to write sentences.’
‘Yes, but they’re fabric sentences. Buttonholes. Thread. Tangible things …’ She embarked on a lengthy explanation about the distinction between Japanese denim and American denim, that while American denim gave that classic fade and vintage colour over an extended period of time, Japanese denim offered more varieties and textures, her point being that denim itself was a tangible thing, non-esoteric, non-invasive to creative whim. She read poetry sometimes after writing about clothes. There was space left in her head.
The music came to an end and Michael went to change it. There was an awkward moment when Stephanie and Damian both started saying something to Melissa at the same time, offering compliments about the house. They had always seemed to her a mismatched kind of couple, Stephanie being taller than him in the first place, but sometimes that could work, no, it was more than that, Damian so uncertain and introverted and floundering, then Stephanie so fixed and bold, sitting there in the pool of her long green cardigan, as if she never thought too deeply about anything. They were living in the shade of each other.
‘Sorry to hear about your dad, by the way,’ she said to Damian, at which Stephanie glanced at him, a kind, unsmiling look on her face, before returning to straightening Blake’s club foot with repeated downward strokes as Melissa’s midwife had advised.
From the kitchen drifted an aroma of curried chicken and fried plantain, rice and peas and scotch bonnet peppers. The chicken had been seasoned with Dunn’s River All Purpose, the rice with coconut milk and thyme. There were mango and halloumi strips as hors d’oeuvres, which Summer passed round, wanting to help, while Michael topped up Malbec and the glasses of white. The evening was thick and solid at the window twins. The wind was blowing harder, bending the birch trees backwards and forwards. There was even a clap of thunder. ‘Wow, this weather’s adverse, man,’ Michael said.
Gradually, as always, they drifted into their constraints of twoness. The men talked of sport (the boxing, the football), the women of Blake and his sleeping and eating habits. Melissa found herself going into lengthy detail about the difficulties of weaning, which Stephanie enthusiastically responded to (‘what I used to do was give them bits of food while I was cooking, some broccoli or carrot or something, so that they’d be having their lunch without even realising it,’ ‘yeah, I’ve started doing that too,’ Melissa said, ‘but as soon as I put him in his chair he won’t touch it, just sits there sucking his thumb. I say to him look, you were just eating this, just a minute ago. What’s changed?’, to which Stephanie replied, ‘Oh he’s just testing the boundaries. That’s what they do. They have to feel like they’ve got some control. Everything’s new and fascinating to them. And actually, if you look at the world through a baby’s eyes, it is fascinating. It is fascinating whether this pan will fit into that bigger pan, or whether this little pesto jar will fit into that big Thornton’s tub, and how wet water is, and just, you know, all of it!’).
Then the conversations joined again and they discussed together the things they all had in common, their fixed-rate mortgage packages and primary schools and home improvements, frequently using ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ to refer to themselves as individuals. ‘I’ was the lost pronoun in the language of the couple. They spoke queenly of themselves, including the other and undervaluing the self, so that they all became diluted. To escape, Melissa kept checking on the food and went upstairs to put Blake down and look in on the shrinking. Everyone was the same size as before.
‘Mm, this is delicious,’ Stephanie enthused at the dining table. ‘I love curry.’
‘Me too,’ Michael said. ‘Melissa made it.’
‘He made the rice.’
‘It’s interesting, isn’t it,’ Stephanie said, ‘how stew, or curry, is one thing all over the world. It’s the same thing, tomatoes and onions and some kind of stock all cooked together into a gravy. But at the same time they’re all different – in Russia it’s stroganoff, in Italy it’s bolognese, in India it’s curry, in Morocco it’s tagine …’
She was sitting next to Damian, who was sitting opposite Melissa, who was sitting next to Michael. Damian was trying hard to block out Stephanie’s voice and not look directly at Melissa because he was afraid he would stare at her and everyone would see him staring. Why was she so lovely now? Why did he have this bizarre feeling that he was supposed to be with her and the couples were the wrong way round? It was difficult to behave as if everything was the right way round. He lost track of the conversation in his absorption, and didn’t understand what she meant when she asked him, ‘What about you, Damian? Ever think of moving back?’
‘Back where?’
‘To London.’
The children were sitting on the rug on the other side of the ecclesiastical arch, having a dinner picnic. Amy Winehouse was singing in her way, as if she were not going to remember the next line, though she always did, she always returned.
‘I think about it a lot,’ he said. ‘I’d love to move back.’
‘Really? Why? It’s so rough,’ said Stephanie. ‘How many teenage stabbings or shootings or whatever have there been so far this year? Forty or something? Jerry, don’t wipe your hands on your top, use the napkin.’
‘Twenty-eight,’ said Michael.
‘Twenty-eight. Well, that’s enough, isn’t it?’
‘Those are the ones reported anyway.’
Damian took the last sip of his wine (he was driving home). ‘You shouldn’t hang on to every word of the news all the time,’ he told Stephanie. ‘It’s not a realistic picture. Just makes you paranoid, creates panic. You watch too much news, man.’
‘But there is a problem with gangs here. That’s a fact, isn’t it? I’ve seen them.’ She told them the story about the man with the rock at the mini-roundabout in Forest Hill and how that had been the last straw. ‘Some of these kids, they look as if they’d kill you. It seems like they’ve lost all scruples, all sense of boundaries. It’s not their fault, I know, it’s their environment. But what’s being done about it? What are they going to do about crime?’
As if in answer to Stephanie’s question, a siren whizzed by on the high street at the bottom of the road. ‘See. You don’t hear many of those where we are.’
‘There’s sirens everywhere, for all kinds of things,’ Michael said. ‘It’s not just about their environment. It’s about who they are, knowing who they are and what they could become, and having control over it. These are exactly the kind of kids I used to work with at the youth clubs,’ (when Michael was doing radio presenting he’d run workshops sometimes in youth centres around London). ‘Some of them were just plain bad, through and through, no lie. But most of them weren’t. They were just … inchoate.’
‘And that’s when they’re most in danger,’ Damian said.
‘Right. You can’t just round them all up and throw them in jail. What a waste. Let them find something they love, music, science, architecture. If they’re enthusiastic about something the gang life isn’t attractive any more.’
‘I read somewhere once that boys in gangs have homoerotic tendencies,’ Melissa said.
‘I want to be in a gang!’ cried Jerry.
‘No you do not,’ Stephanie said firmly, but laughing with everyone else, and going over to wipe his face. ‘This is what I mean, though. I’d hate them growing up around all this trouble and strife. London may be the centre of the world to some people,’ meaning Damian, ‘but I’m sorry, I just don’t think it’s a very good place to raise children.’
There was a cry from above, loud and insistent. ‘Blake’s crying,’ Ria said, still wearing her white glove on her left hand. ‘Can we go back up now?’
‘I thought you wanted to watch TV?’ said Michael. Melissa was getting up, but Stephanie asked, ‘Can I go? You relax, I’ll get him.’
She went, eventually the crying stopped. She came downstairs holding Blake, his face thick with sleep, his hair flat against the back of his scalp over the golden patch where he’d been lying. She was cradling him against her, soothing him with a soft murmuring, ‘you lovely, tired thing, you little blast of sunshine, look at you, such a prince, it’s all right, it’s all right,’ and he was content, languid, limp in her embrace. When he saw his mother his arms made a sudden glad song, his body jerked and flinched, a small smile exploded. Melissa took him.
‘I tried to put him back down but he wasn’t having it,’ Stephanie said. ‘I think he was cold. It’s quite cold in that room.’
‘Really? I find it cold in there too sometimes.’
‘Well if you find it cold, he’d definitely find it cold. Why don’t you give him another blanket?’
‘Isn’t that dangerous, too many blankets?’ Since the night of the bad omen, Melissa had been wary of too much heat. Now she was worried about too little heat. In motherland there was always something to worry about. She felt she was learning everything all over again. ‘I read something in The Baby Whisperer about —’
‘Oh, whisperer-shmisterer,’ Stephanie balked. ‘Don’t listen to those stupid books. He’s your baby, you know what to do. There’s so much literature around these days about how to look after your child, it’s just bossy, don’t you think?’
‘No. I find it quite useful.’ Sometimes Melissa peered into these books in the middle of the night when Blake wouldn’t stop crying. Sometimes she clung to them with both hands, desperately seeking a wonder sentence, a celestial bean of wisdom to get him back to sleep. Sometimes she reached for them before she went to sleep, instead of reaching for one of the novels she was trying to reclaim, or some good poems, and this seemed a dangerous thing. ‘I don’t read all of them,’ she said defensively, ‘just that one and the Gina Ford, to remind me …’
‘Gina Ford!’ Stephanie’s voice was getting louder from the wine. ‘That woman doesn’t know the first thing about being a mother. She hasn’t even got any kids! She’s a nanny, for god’s sake. What gives her the right to go around telling people how to look after their own babies, telling them they have to wake up at 7 a.m. and go back to sleep at 9 a.m. and have lunch no later than 11.30 and have their nappy changed at 2.24 p.m.? You can’t put a baby on a schedule like that, it’s cruel, it’s unnecessary. You change the nappy when? When it needs changing! You put him to sleep when? When he —’
She was interrupted by a knock at the window.
‘What was that?’
Michael went to look, pulling aside the venetian blind. ‘It’s Mrs Jackson. In this weather. Jeez.’
Mrs Jackson lived five doors down at number eight. She was in her seventies and lived alone, and she was in the process of forgetting herself, what her name was, where her coat was, what number she lived at. Every couple of days she would walk up and down Paradise Row, usually in her slippers, her hair wild and unkempt, trying to explain to people that she couldn’t remember where she lived, but they didn’t always understand what she was saying because her sentences got lost on the way and ended up in unrelated things.
‘I better take her home,’ Michael said, and went out into the darkness.
Mrs Jackson liked Michael because of his kind face and kind way. She was wearing only a green housedress, no coat, her thin brown calves poking out from the hem like sticks. The wind railed against them as they walked.
‘It’s too cold and late for you to be out like this,’ he told her. ‘It’s number eight, see? Here’s your house, this one, with the yellow door.’
‘Thank you.’ Mrs Jackson held his hand with both of hers and smiled up at him. ‘Thank you, darling. You are so kind. You look just like me son Vincent, he is coming back from America on Saturday, he always bring clothes and saucepans and shoes, he’s such a good boy …’
‘Someone needs to look after her,’ Melissa said when Michael returned. ‘It’s the third time this week.’
‘The poor woman,’ said Stephanie.
For dessert they had New York cheesecake with pistachio ice cream. Damian drove home in silence, the occasional fox appearing at the edge of the road, its flashing eyes making him think of the glinting tassels on her top, the curve of her neck where it met with her hair, the particular shape of her nose in profile. He did not write anything when he got home.
Later that night, Melissa lay awake in the master court. The children were asleep in the second room. As usual she had checked on them last thing, that Blake was breathing, the blanket was not over his face, and that Ria was unshrunk, which she was, her cardboard house closed for the night. Tomorrow she would play with it some more, and they would pass a long familial Sunday in the culture of the crooked house – a visit to her mother across the river, the roasting of a bird, anticipating Monday, when Michael would go back to work and she would stay here in Paradise with Blake.
Michael was also asleep. He liked the romance of recent rain, and he had reached for her amidst the red, his hands across her waist, asking, but she could not tune in to his eventual beauty, to the boomerang light next to his heart. Outside the fast wind was still blowing, shaking the raffia, most vigorously at the left-hand window where the draught was coming from. Melissa got out of bed and tried to open it again so that it would close properly, while doing so glimpsing the dark windows opposite, the front doors, the square front gardens. She missed the view of the sky from the old place. It had been on the seventh floor of a tower block. The stars had been so close there, the moon at the window. She had become used to an affinity with the Milky Way, and this view of the houses on the other side of the street felt like a theft.
No matter how much she pushed and tugged at the handle, the window would not budge. She began to have a strange sensation, as she was standing there, that there was someone standing behind her, very still – a night thing, her mother used to call them, beings who walk in the night hours, not quite human, who watch us. It had always frightened Melissa when Alice mentioned them. She turned around to look, but there was nothing there, only the shadows in the room, the door ajar, beyond it the landing, the skylight. The window shook and trembled in its frame. It was almost as if someone, or something, were trying to get in. Or possibly out.