‘the future isn’t renewable,’ the journalist said. ‘There’s science and then there’s common sense.’
The presenter, who died last year, asked a question.
Sol, feet up on the coffee table, dipped his biscuit in his tea, and Trish, watching from the kitchen, willed it to break and fall. He’d only boiled enough for one cup.
Trish filled the kettle. One of them received a message. They had identical text alerts, the same phones. She remembered that day at Westfield, playing on the iPads with Jenny at Apple, and Sol surprising them: three brand new phones. In those days, Trish knew better than to ask where the money had come from.
The experts on the TV continued arguing. Trish wished they hadn’t gone open plan. She checked her phone: no messages. She went back to the kitchen table, where there were vendors to set up, POs to process. She looked over at her husband, ‘I don’t know why she doesn’t call.’
He paused the debate. ‘Who, Jenny? She texted earlier.’
‘You talked and you didn’t tell me?’
‘Talked, we didn’t talk. It was a text.’
‘How is she?’
‘She’s good.’
‘What did she say?’
‘That she’s good.’
‘Why can’t she just use the group?’
Trish tried to get back to work but was easily distracted with Sol home. The endless text alerts, discussions on the news, a tennis ball landing in their garden from next door, bright green on the dull lawn. She checked Jenny’s Instagram. No new posts, though she didn’t post often. You only had to scroll a few rows to see the photo of the two of them at the peak of Ben Nevis, the last summer before she left.
She remembered that long drive, Jenny playing Sketch’s The Rapture on repeat. The path up the mountain had been quiet, the wind making waves in the tall grass. Her fondest memories were in nature with her daughter. Sol didn’t get it, driving hours only to walk in the rain carrying a child who wouldn’t remember a thing. When Jenny was old enough to walk without help, Sol stopped coming on the trips and it became their time, the hiking, and with those long stretches without seeing anyone, it really felt like it could be just the two of them on the mountain, the whole valley theirs.
She wanted to chat with Jenny. She found a GIF of a cartoon plane skywriting ‘missing you’. She watched it repeat a few times and then deleted it. She typed: ‘loving the new Sketch album – have u heard?’
She sent it and clicked back into her messages. Under Jenny was a message from West London Monumental Masonry. It was a week old now and Trish was yet to reply.
West London Monumental Masonry was Tayo. He ran the account – it was his business – occasionally posting (as tastefully as possible) new additions to the extensive range of headstones he provided. She’d visited his studio a few weeks ago, works in progress held in vices: Lenuta Văduvă, Paddy McCarthy.
‘Have you ever made a spelling mistake on one?’
‘Everyone asks that. Why does everyone ask that?’
She watched him work for a few minutes. How ridiculous her desire seemed to her, how adolescent. She wondered if either of them would have been attracted to each other if they hadn’t known one another as teenagers, bored at the currency exchange. She wanted to feel guilty for wanting him, tried to think of Sol and Jenny.
She understood the undercurrents of her desire. Tayo was the path not taken, the fork in the road. Being with him might allow her to see the life she could have had, the person she could have been. Unfortunately, analysing the desire didn’t stop her feeling it.
At 19, Trish and Tayo used to get the same bus to and from Heathrow. Their manager at the currency exchange would split them up when they arrived. He didn’t think it looked good if they both worked the till at the same time. They looked forward to days when they could work together in the back. Tayo loved to pose with the stacks of cash, and, on multiple occasions, had made it rain. He was a boy in a man’s body, and Trish was old enough to know what she wanted. She wanted a man like Sol, who met them for lunch most days, a book in the pocket of his jacket. Sol talked slowly about politics and history. He was calm and measured about everything – except the NBA.
After she got her first accountancy job and Sol got his position in air-traffic control, they got married and Tayo exited the stage like so many people in her life would. But then Jenny finally set Trish up on social media and there he was. She surprised herself with how much she wanted to meet him.
‘Sol as in Sol Sol?’ he said.
‘Yeah. Almost twenty-five years.’
‘Kids?’
‘A daughter.’
‘Man, Sol. You know what he called me once? A human dumbbell.’
She laughed.
‘I can hardly remember those days. But I remember that name.’
They weren’t doing anything wrong, but Trish asked that they talk on Instagram and not on the Facebook account that Sol sometimes used. They talked on and off for a while. He wasn’t a very good texter. They agreed to meet in person. She invited him over for lunch. She had the house to herself during the days – she worked from home, Sol worked at Heathrow, Jenny had moved out.
She didn’t know what to cook. She didn’t want it to seem like she’d made too much effort, but she did want to impress him. Which was also why she’d tried on three different outfits. Everything seemed to send the wrong message. But what did she want to say? She cleaned the house, not that he’d notice. She put the family photos in the cupboard, not wanting to catch Sol’s eye when they did what they were going to do – what were they going to do? What on earth was she doing? Maybe he wouldn’t expect anything. It was just two old friends meeting up. Lunch. She poured herself a glass of wine, turning off the news that had been on since Sol left for work.
She let Tayo in. He smelled like aftershave. She realised she wasn’t wearing perfume. She poured him a drink and excused herself. Upstairs, she put on her Chanel and took a moment to reset. She hadn’t felt this insecure in years, but what use was security? Security was watching TV with Sol, calling the Paper Lantern and reciting the numbers of their Friday night takeout order by heart. On the rare occasions when they did have sex, they’d follow the same sequence of positions, the two of them quiet even after Jenny moved out. Sometimes Trish would try something new, and Sol would be game, but still, he could only ever finish the same certain way. A few weeks ago, there was a sex scene in the film they were watching, and Sol automatically changed the channel to the news, like he used to when Jenny was with them. He’d been a different man ever since starting Group. Which was a good thing, she knew, but she missed those nights when he’d come home having hit big, filled with energy and desire.
She headed back down and plated up the food. They talked about the old days, about their manager, the customers. Tayo had married not long after Trish and divorced a few years ago.
‘Best decision I ever made,’ he said.
Trish laughed.
The doorbell rang.
The doorbell rang again.
‘I – should I, like, hide?’ he said.
‘If it was Sol he’d use his key,’ she said.
A knock at the door. Trish’s phone rang: Jenny.
‘You smell nice,’ Jenny said, as they hugged. ‘I thought I’d surprise you. I missed you.’
‘I missed you, too,’ Trish said, and then paused. ‘We were just having lunch. I’ll make you a plate.’ She took a deep breath and walked through to the kitchen. ‘Jenny, Tayo. Tayo, Jenny.’
‘Early for wine,’ Jenny said.
Trish tried to keep a level head. They were two friends having lunch. They hadn’t even touched each other. Those were the facts.
‘It’s five o’clock somewhere,’ Tayo said. ‘You want some?’
There was nothing that Jenny could suspect. They ate, shared stories. She saw Tayo off at the door. She’d avoided something reckless, and no one was any the wiser. When she returned, Jenny was on her phone, and the family photos that she had hidden were back in their places.
Jenny had viewed her message. Trish watched the little dots as she typed. She hadn’t talked to Tayo since the visit. It was the last time she’d seen him or Jenny. Lockdown started a week later. With flights grounded, Sol was put on furlough, and here they were, spending more time than they ever had together.
Jenny heart-reacted to her message. Trish waited for an actual reply. She answered an email about an upcoming meeting, then checked her phone again. Nothing. Just a little heart next to her message – that wasn’t a reply, this wasn’t a conversation.
Another tennis ball landed in their garden.
Jenny had turned into so many different people over the years, and Trish had loved them all: the baby with that laugh, the toddler with all those questions, that precocious girl, setting up a tent by herself in the garden and then stubbornly spending a night out in the cold, Trish and Sol joining her, the moon turning green through the plastic. She missed the shy 11-year-old, even the mouthy 14-year-old. She just wanted to talk.
The doorbell rang.
Sol got up. Trish returned to her emails.
‘Who was it?’
‘Next door,’ he said. ‘The kids want their balls back.’
She watched him enter the garden. He picked up all the tennis balls and then threw them over the fence, one by one.
Kids didn’t even say thanks. Soon as the balls were over, they were back at it. Cricket bat making contact. The bone-crack of ball on brick as one of the kids hit a six. Couldn’t be much of a match in a garden that small.
Sol thought back to games on the common, West Indies vs India. Old Stevie who’d insist on joining in even though he could barely walk a chain, let alone run one. A real character, they used to say. Always dressed to a tee, Stevie would give Sol shit when he saw him in a basketball jersey. If you were fielding near him, he’d break formation to tell you about the time he trained with the Windies. And he’d come up with odds on the spot – 4/1 Jat goes out with a catch, 7/1 three fours this over. And Jat would get caught out after three fours and Stevie would say, ‘You see? If I had money, I’d be a rich man.’
There was a strange logic to the teams those weekends. Jonathan, who was Guyanese, played for the Indians. A few of the Pakistani boys asked to be part of the West Indies. Sol would often ferry between the two to make up numbers. Both teams wanted him to bat for them.
He’d much rather have been playing basketball. There weren’t any good songs about cricket, about West London. He felt like he’d been born in the wrong country. He could see himself going to see the Knicks, walking around Brooklyn and Queens, down Linden Boulevard, and all the places he heard in Tribe songs. Every memory of those years had A Tribe Called Quest playing in the background. The bus ride to work, for example, was the exact length of The Low End Theory, so that when the 140 pulled into Heathrow, ‘Scenario’ would be playing on his Walkman, Busta Rhymes going off. He’d take a detour on the way to the control tower, to ‘get a coffee’, to see Trish. Crush did not do it justice.
She was normally with that guy, Sol couldn’t remember his name. Was always making her laugh. To be in with a shot, Sol had to distinguish himself. He tried to become serious, clever. Man, he even started reading the books Old Stevie was always recommending. He worked hard, saved up. Felt himself becoming the man he’d been pretending to be. Got to the point he didn’t even mind about Trish, he just wanted to be better.
When she got her job at the firm, he was promoted to Aerodrome Controller. They got married the year Beats, Rhymes and Life came out, and Jenny was born a few weeks before The Love Movement. She was 18 by the time Tribe’s next album was released and Phife died. They both got up first thing the day that Parklife tickets dropped: A Tribe Called Quest were headlining.
He had to get three tickets – Jenny wanted her friend, Priti, to come. Sure, she was a nice enough girl, but the music had always been father/daughter time. They wouldn’t even invite Trish. But Sol paid for the tickets without complaining. He deserved to indulge; he’d gone six months without betting a pound.
Jenny and Priti stayed with some friends and Sol went to a Travelodge. They met in the queue the next morning. They went from tent to tent; the girls seemed to know every single act. He was turning into Trish, he joked, feeling out of touch. In the EDM tent, Sol was questioning his decisions when Jenny checked her phone and looked up at him.
Tribe had pulled out of the festival at the last minute. He went to get a drink. This had been Tribe’s final tour, and now he was a middle-aged man in a field full of twenty-somethings dancing to music he couldn’t even pretend to like. He left early.
He got a taxi to the casino he’d passed that morning. He barely took out anything. He set an alarm on his phone to go off in two hours, ‘LEAVE’, and warmed up with some Blackjack. At one point he was up a hundred but left the table down fifty. Still, what was fifty in the grand scheme of things? Like, two hours in the control tower? He sat down at a poker table. He got some looks, his shoes still muddy from the festival, his old Tribe shirt worn-out and faded.
He played cautious. Passing time. First few rounds, he folded at the flop or the turn. But then he was dealt the most exquisite pair of Queens and held out to the river for a three of a kind. The sound of chips pushed across felt. Little clacks as he stacked them up. Now he had enough for the petrol home, now enough to take Trish out, enough for the next few months of the mortgage. Hadn’t felt this good since that night in Bush, an all-nighter at Paul’s where Sol had cleaned up. He’d met Trish and Jenny at Westfield in the morning, and watching them play on the computers, bought them new phones on the spot. He wondered what he might get them now – he had a straight from five through nine and bet heavy. But Mr Cufflinks came out with a full house. Sol played steady a few rounds, until he felt a flush coming. His alarm went off and he apologised.
The sound of his phone brought him back to the present. The kids next door were arguing over an LBW. Sol checked his messages. It was his sponsor, Kaz. He’d been messaging her all morning. Kaz had hit her rock bottom a few years before they met at Group. She’d been planning to move to Spain with her husband for ages. When her son, Gujan, got to sixth form, they even went out there to look at places. They found a place near Vigo and returned home to get things in order before putting down any money. She was worried about spending so much, and not having enough to support Gujan. Or that’s what she told herself. She made some big bets.
The circle analysed Kaz’s story in a simple way: she was afraid of change and achieving something that had been a dream for so long. She self-sabotaged to maintain the status quo. Sol thought the circle’s diagnoses were overly simplistic. His problem, for example, was apparently straightforward. Every day, he worked long hours in the control tower, analysing the runway, giving clearance for take-off. He had to be stable and alert. After work, it was only natural he craved something where he wasn’t in control, where he could embrace the thrill of free fall.
‘I keep getting those ads,’ he texted. ‘I don’t want the apps but its also like what’s to stop me?’
‘Classic Sol,’ Kaz replied. ‘You pre-empt the urges to feel more in control of them.’
He didn’t know what to reply. After a few seconds, she sent another message: ‘how’s the news thing going?’
‘Still in 90s.’
Since starting furlough, Sol had been watching a few minutes of archival news footage from every month since the day he was born. Brought back all sorts. Like the other day, Michael Jordan scored forty, beating Philly, taking him up to 15,000 points total. He remembered taking Trish to a sports bar that night, rushing home when the game was over, desperate to be together. Ancient history.
One of the tennis balls landed back in the garden. He remembered the picnics they used to have when they moved in, Jenny’s first uncertain steps. Remembered that night they camped out in the green tent. When Trish and Jenny were asleep, he sneaked out and went to Paul’s. He arrived in the morning with croissants.
‘I went out to get you treats,’ he said, unzipping the tent. Could still remember their smiles.
‘90s good times,’ Kaz replied, with an emoji of someone dancing.
Trish started talking. Another meeting. Her jargon was foreign to him. She sounded so professional. He thought about whether he felt emasculated, her leading meetings while he was furloughed, but decided that was him pre-empting emotions again. What he really felt was curiosity. For years, she’d lived in this other world for eight hours a day. The meeting ended and another began. There was a bit of small talk and then someone mentioned the virus.
‘You can almost forget,’ Trish said. ‘Then it hits you. I’ve got a friend who works in the funeral business. He says he’s busier than he’s ever been.’
Sol didn’t know of any friends who worked doing funerals. He sat back down in front of the TV that Trish had muted. The historic broadcast was from March 1993. Blizzard in the US. Three hundred killed at the Air India building. North Korea leaves the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Unforgiven wins Best Picture. April 1993. A plane carrying the Zambian national football team to a qualifier in Senegal crashes, killing all thirty on board. Sol had no recollection of any of it. There was no doubt that he’d read about it when it happened. At what point had his brain decided it wasn’t useful information? He could recite almost all the lyrics on Tribe’s 1993 album, Midnight Marauders, but couldn’t remember any of these crashes and explosions and killings.
Another ball landed in the garden. Sol picked them all up and threw them back over the fence.
‘Thank you!’
Without missing a beat, the kids were bowling and batting again. He sat on the grass and listened to his wife’s meeting through the open backdoor. With Jenny gone, he wasn’t quite sure what it was that was keeping Trish with him. At times, love seemed such an intangible reason. Intangible didn’t mean insignificant, he thought. It was like the feeling he got when he was at work, looking out at the runway, clearing a flight for take-off, that feeling when that huge thing started to speed down the tarmac and somehow took flight. How something so heavy could fly never stopped looking impossible, but it was a series of intangible things, slight shifts in the flaps, all that invisible air passing through the turbines.
Trish sat down next to him.
‘The wifi cut out,’ she said. ‘I think I’m still frozen back there.’
‘Oh, what a shame. You can’t work,’ he said, drawing her closer.
‘What a shame.’
She handed him her mug and he took a sip of her tea.
He heard the meeting resume inside, the wifi returning. Before she could get up to go back, both of their phones rang. Jenny was calling their group chat. Trish quickly answered, all excited, and Sol leant his head against hers so that they could fit in the frame.
Jenny and Trish caught up, and he listened. Jenny wasn’t enjoying her new job. She was thinking about quitting, but no one was hiring. She couldn’t exactly go back to babysitting.
‘It’s just as important to know what you don’t want,’ Trish said. ‘If you hadn’t gone for this job, you’d never have known and would have always wondered. The only way to be certain is to try.’
They talked for a while longer, and then Jenny left. Trish ignored her meeting. One by one, the balls landed on the grass, the children laughing. Trish turned and rested her head in his lap, and they both looked up, not a cloud in the sky, not a single plane.