Over the river to the north. River through the heart of this city. River of centuries, of black and white histories. The passage from the south. The river that divides the divide. Driving across in a red Toyota saloon, the spires of Parliament and the great slow eye of London that hardly moves when you are inside it. The quiet arches of the bridges and the water trembling through; and the trees on the bank behind you as you cross, and the birds as they soar.
Onwards to Victoria, along the high Buckingham Palace wall to the roar of Hyde Park Corner and the pricey tip of Knightsbridge, passing there, coming off the roundabout, Park Lane northbound. Melissa was going to see her mother. The children were in the back, Blake on the left, Ria on the right. On the passenger seat were a bag of fruit (mangos, apples and melon) and a bunch of pink roses (Alice liked pink). She took the North Carriage Drive off Marble Arch and they sped past the wild grass and the Sunday runners, the Serpentine lake in the distance and the ghosts of the summer bladers who rolled alongside it, weaving in and out of skittles. Now the cold sun of December glittered across the planes. The trees were so many expired afros and fallen weaves, only the roots left, brown and naked in the austerity of winter. Then out again into the traffic of Bayswater, up westwards, approaching Kilburn, where Alice waited in her pink flat in her house hat and dashiki, her cardigan and her slippers, calling ‘Is that you?’ when Melissa buzzed, and coming down to answer the door clutching her walking stick. There she was, a shrunken woman in a foreign land, yet home to her children when they most needed it.
This is where Melissa had come that time, when all the glass had fallen and the Sphinx had lost its nose. She had come alone with a suitcase and stayed for a week. This is where you come when you are lost, when you feel that you are never going to find the place. You go to the first place, the first country, to her net curtains and her singular food, to her safe and open door. You lie down. You eat. You listen to her. And you know that this house will not fall down. This house is sturdy and is made of bricks, and the wolf will not come and blow it down.
‘You cut your hair!’ Alice said. ‘Why you cut your hair? It’s too short!’
‘It’s not that short,’ Melissa said, touching the back of it. It was short. She had been to the hairdresser and truncated the fro. She wore it pasted down to her scalp with gel, giving a boyish, 1920s look; a new hair, a new her, with a grey streak. She had also been shopping with Hazel in Carnaby Street last week and dived into the clothes, feeling alive and fabricy again. She had bought a poncho, which she was wearing today.
‘You look nice,’ Alice smiled, but she did hate the cutting of fros, anyone’s, especially the good ones, when so many people struggle. ‘Why you didn’t dye that grey, though?’
‘I like it.’
Alice laughed. ‘You cannot walk around with white hair. It’s secret of age.’ This was a lost argument already and she knew it. ‘Go in,’ she said. ‘Mind the stairs with baby.’
She had come up these stairs, alone, in old clothes and her longer hair carelessly tied back. She had ascended to the pinkness of paint, the heavily ornamented, hand-cushioned living room, the cluttered kitchen where it was always warm, like a warm, dark womb, where the smell of egusi filled the room and Radio 4 was playing and her mother was heating up some akara for her under the grill.
‘Sit down, Omo,’ she had said, putting the akara in front of her. ‘Eat.’
And she did, because you do not refuse the voice of your mother at a time like this, in fact at any time, unless she is commanding something unreasonable or ludicrous, like ‘don’t talk to boys’ or ‘don’t go out at night’, when you are thirty-eight years old. She ate, neither of them talking much, just being comforted by the sound of Alice swishing and shuffling about the room, stirring the stew, mashing the eba, pouring the tea. The eba was fine eba, even through her tears which came here and there, even through the images that kept passing through her mind of that terrible night, her bare feet on the concrete, coming back to the quiet house and Michael waiting there, his face so drawn and resolute, Where’s Ria? Where’s Ria? She’s upstairs, she’s asleep, leave her be.
‘Her leg is better,’ Alice said now, having inspected Ria’s climb up the stairs. She went to play with Blake in the living room, where Alice had laid a piece of material over the carpet for them to mess up as they pleased. Blake especially liked the plastic telephone with the old-fashioned cord, which he dragged across the room with him making calls. Ria still liked the animal lorry that flipped down its door so that they all came tumbling out. Her hands were better too, smooth again.
‘I’m so glad to finally be out of that house,’ Melissa said, sitting in the same chair where she always sat at the kitchen table. Alice was putting the roses in water. The akara was heating under the grill and the eba was already mashed and separated.
‘One day you find a better house,’ her mother said.
But Melissa did not want another house. She was happier in the flat with the two bedrooms on the fourth floor in Gipsy Hill, high up again, the towers in the distance, which had become a landmark of home, a necessary reminder. She no longer wanted upstairs and downstairs and a view of the houses on the other side of the street. It had been a relief, the mountain of boxes ready for leaving, the packing of the Czech marionette and the Cuban moka pot, the emptying of her wardrobe in the master court, then leaving, up Paradise, left at the top, right at the end, away, away. (Behind the fridge, when she was turning it off for the last time, she had found a dead mouse, its face closed and faded, covered in dust. Someone had scribbled over the word ‘Paradise’ on the street sign at the top of the road.)
So today it was the four of them sitting down to eat the eba and stew on the plastic checkered tablecloth in the warm kitchen. Alice separated Blake’s eba into small pieces. She was adamant that they should eat with their right hands, that any sign of left-handedness in a child should be destroyed as soon as it became apparent. To be left-handed was virtually to be disabled, she maintained, even though Melissa regularly pointed out that Barack Obama was left-handed and it didn’t seem to have affected him in a negative way. Alice’s answer to this was that Barack’s achievements were increased by the fact that he had become president despite his handicap, that if he had been able-bodied, things would have been easier for him and he would have become president sooner.
‘How is new job?’ she said.
‘It’s OK.’ Melissa had started teaching journalism at an adult education college.
‘That’s right.’
‘Are you still going to your keep-fit classes?’
‘It’s too expensive,’ Alice complained. ‘At first it was forty pence. Then they said one pound. After that they say it’s two pounds. Now, five pounds!’
‘Thieves.’
‘Eh-heh!’
‘More, please,’ Ria said, and Alice got up, satisfied.
After the eba, in her old clothes and her eyes swollen from crying, Melissa had dragged herself next door into the living room, where the pinkness was at its peak. It was a huge Victorian parlour, big enough for a single bed on one side separated off by a curtain, where she had slept during that week. There was a cascade of turquoise butterflies hanging from the curtain rail at the window, and scores of photographs and ornaments, Warren and Lauren when they were little, Melissa and Carol at graduations, Alice and Cornelius on their wedding day, then two ebony elephants, a milkmaid, a sewing machine, various bunches of plastic flowers, crocheted doilies, fans, feathers, several cabinets. There was such a paraphernalia of object in this room that it was impossible not to lose some of the urgency of your own personality when you were inside it, and to let yourself sink into the world of Alice, her unbroken cord with the motherland, her individualness, her private whispering. Here Melissa had lain down on the sofa with its hand-sewn cushions, and even though it was summer then, Alice had put a blanket over her to keep her warm in case she got cold when she was sleeping. Before she went to asleep, Alice had also lent her her stress-buster brick, given to her by a church friend. It was soft and made of rubber. ‘You squeeze it in your hand and make you feel better,’ she said, and she demonstrated with her wrinkled, chocolate-coloured hand, offering it like a pusher, with the deepest and most sincere faith, as if she had invented it herself rather than appropriated it.
As Melissa had slept, alone in that room, Michael on the other side of the river and the children with him, she had dreamt of him, in dreams made of memories. They were making love on the forest floor on a summer’s day, the trees towering above her in the sky. He was sitting by her on the bed at Paradise as she was sleeping, watching over her, the great love, the early man, shining down, the sun coming up in the morning. And now they were walking together across the grass of the University of Greenwich, towards the bank of the Thames, he in a white suit, she in a strapless electric-blue dress. A memory of a possibility, a future that had never happened. A part of her still wanted that blue and white picture to happen. She wanted to see him in that white suit, to wear that electric-blue dress, to hold his hand and walk together towards the water. But the way was unclear now. She could not get there without losing herself, which she had still not found. What she was experiencing was a strange opening out of herself inside, so that she could sense what she truly, harshly was, the core of it, which was dark and empty and cold, waiting to be filled from within, and she must guard and hold on to it to stop it from breaking.
She was woken by the sound from the kitchen of her mother peeling apples. She woke with a purity of thought, blank and calm, the way she always woke in this room. Soon Alice came in with the apples and sat down in the armchair next to her. She offered Melissa a quarter. She had put sugar on it. Everything was still and quiet, the butterflies, the milkmaid, the elephants. There was a single candle burning on the mantelpiece for Alice’s stillborn child from long ago.
‘Mum, how did you feel when you left Dad?’ Melissa asked.
Alice leaned her head back in her armchair and thought. She had never articulated how it had felt.
‘It was the right way,’ she said eventually. ‘After a very long time, I was going in the right way. I couldn’t live with him any more.’
‘I’m not sure I’m going in the right way,’ Melissa said. ‘I don’t know what the right way is.’
‘You find it,’ said Alice.
‘How do you know?’
But there was no reply. Melissa went on to say, the calmness of a few moments ago disappearing, ‘I don’t know myself any more. I can’t seem to find the way back to who I was … before …’
‘Before the children,’ Alice said, nodding her head slowly. ‘Children change everything. Family change everything. You must cross the river, to the other side of yourself. After that you find it.’
When Melissa heard this, she became very alert, like a small animal caught by a light. She pictured that day, last year, driving across, their loaded red wings and the peace lily toying with Michael’s nostrils. She knew full well her mother meant more than that. ‘But I did cross the river,’ she said, in a higher, childish voice. And she knew also that her mother knew that she knew it was more than that.
‘You must cross it properly,’ Alice said, offering another piece of unnecessarily sweetened apple.
Alice still believed that Melissa and Michael would get back together one day, this month, this week or next year, just as soon as Melissa had crossed the river properly. She tried a little bit not to go on about it during these visits but she went on about it.
‘He is a good man, much better than your daddy.’
‘You get better house and live together as you supposed to.’
Today she didn’t offer the stress-buster because Melissa didn’t seem stressed or unhappy, but as it was winter, and your babies are always your babies even when they are thirty-eight, she did give her a hot-water bottle with a yellow and pink cover that she had crocheted herself, and order her to go and lie down in the living room, which Melissa of course obeyed. The hot-water bottle went behind her back. The blanket went over her. The children were next to her on the floor, extensions of her, separate though physically felt, like veins, like ribs, like cubs.
‘No, Mum,’ she said. ‘I think when I’m older I’d like to live on my own, like you, just like this, where I can be completely myself.’
Yet when she slept, the same image came to her. For it was true, she missed him, his boomerang smile, the light by his heart, the whirl of his mahogany waist. The image kept reappearing, waiting at the edges of dreams, drifting by the water, unfolding on the shore. That blue and white day. She in the electric dress and he in the white suit with khakis underneath. Out they walked from the vaulted room of the old colonial building of the university. Their families and friends stood and watched as they walked across the green and silver grass. As they approached the black railing that holds back the river, Ria and Blake ran out to join them, and the four of them became the fine silhouettes of the dusk, four black shapes against the water’s gleam. Boats went by. Bridges stood strong. Like a glittering evening shawl the river wore the night. There they stayed, until all was dark and all the lights had gone out.
On New Year’s Eve the Wiley brothers threw their annual NYE bashment. They put the chipboard over the bookshelves, the note on the bathroom mirror telling people that this was someone’s house and not a nightclub, and left the Ofili on the centre wall. Melissa and Hazel got ready together in Gipsy Hill. The town was red. They were going to paint it more so. They would shimmer in the notes. They were going to find the perfect meeting of beat and feet. Hazel in four-inch heels and her fingernails in fuchsia. Melissa with her new hair and charcoal jeans.
‘Ready,’ she said in the mirror.
‘Looking good,’ said Hazel.
Pete had come to nothing. He had cheated on her with a removal company administrator who went to his gym. She put on her new jacket, a white puffer with a silver zip. She wasn’t so sure about it, if it was for a woman of a certain age. ‘Is it too hip hop?’ she said.
‘You know you could wear a pleated skirt made of Tesco carrier bags and still pull a Pete.’
‘I don’t want to pull a Pete. Petes are prats. I want an ugly man who will be good to me.’
This ugly man turned out to be Bruce Wiley. He was infatuated. They danced together to Busta Rhymes and found the place where the feet met the beat. And while they were making this unexpected electricity Michael turned up, with a woman he had met at the CD shop in Catford. Melissa said hi, he said hey. She saw his eventual beauty and wondered whether it was also eventual to this new woman or whether it was straight away and therefore lesser. And Michael’s first instinct was still to smell her neck for chicken even though he knew it wasn’t there, but somewhere he permanently believed that it would come back and he wanted to be the one to find it.
‘He loves you,’ Hazel said.
‘It’s over,’ Melissa said.
‘Chocolate is never over.’
Now they were sitting on a wall in Stockwell at 4 a.m. eating chips. While they were sitting there they happened to witness the last lunar eclipse of the year. They saw the whole thing, the darkness, the intensity of that darkness, then the light coming back like a new time.
‘Amazing,’ Hazel said.
‘Like being hugged by the night.’
The salt, the vinegar, the cones were just so.
‘These are good chips.’
‘Yes. They are.’