On Deptford High Street she bumps into Irwin, one of the organisers of the Keep Business Local campaign, coming out of Poundland. He looks faintly guilty. Irwin was one of the first people up in arms when Tesco Express moved in down the road and they are both part of groups that are protesting against The Blight. Payday lenders, betting shops, chain convenience stores, pound shops.
Worst of all now Tastee-Pound has come their way, against all their objections. Open till four in the morning, instant decisions on micro loans at an annualised 2,300% interest rate, a pawnbrokers, a betting shop and fast food joint all-in-one. A “one stop poverty and obesity shop”, one commentator had called it on Guardian Online just the day before, an observation instantly decried as typical snobbery in the comments box. Let them proliferate and let the people decide what they want! They are setting up in the shell of the White Horse pub, the Vietnamese landlord who’s run the place since the early Eighties finally selling up.
There used to be a couple of pubs on the High Street, nothing special but still, places for people to gather. Now they just have the Job Centre converted into a craft beer canteen sitting half empty, waiting for the flats around the station to fill up with young, aspirational City workers who can afford to pay £6 a pint. Soon the High Street, if they are not careful, will be nothing but Tastee-Pounds and estate agents selling studio flats above them for half a million pounds a pop, retro coffee shops and real ale pubs, Paddy Power and vintage vinyl cafes.
Just getting some batteries Irwin says, defensively, holding them out for her inspection. Paula nods. It’s chilly, yet Irwin is wearing a string vest dyed in the colours of the Jamaican flag, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms.
We have got the residents’ meeting tonight, remember?
Sure, I will be there, Paula says.
How’s the appeal going? I mean, Irwin says, laughs and grabs her arm, any, all of the appeals! Queen of the appeals!
Paula raises her eyebrows and widens her eyes. I have been advised to rest she says. I have been advised to take it easy for a while. She nods to Sissy from the Vietnamese buffet as she goes past with a bag full of vegetables. We’ve been granted a month’s delay on the flat, that’s nearly up and we have heard nothing back about an extension. Lee’s case we are still waiting to hear back about. I guess I have no choice but to …
What they are doing to this community is criminal. To the youth, to families.
How’s your boy?
Struggling, like we all are. Trying to buy a house, trying to feed his babies. I used to say, this is a land of opportunity. Not any more. No wonder people are getting restless.
Paula glances toward the station, the new development visible above the railway bridge, a hideous purple eyesore, safely behind Cathedral Group’s funky, urban billboards. She remembers when they brought in and funded the train café, a railway carriage converted into a coffee place, trying to give the place the right kind of vibe, drive up the area’s profile, bring in the artists from Goldsmiths College or the urban pioneers priced out of Shoreditch, or Hoxton, or Stoke Newington, or Peckham.
And as if by magic, as though summoned somehow, local legend Peckham Bob has ambled quietly up beside them. Irwin double-takes in mock surprise, claps him on the shoulder, grins.
That’s Irwin, there’s always some undercurrent of mirth there, waiting to bubble up, bubble over. Paula wishes she could find that, some subterranean stream, some wellspring of wit and warmth, but all she feels these days is dryly hollow, as though most of her is elsewhere, attached to the causes and the people she fights for, and she herself is just the empty centre from which her actions emanate.
Alright, Peckham Bob says. He’s tiny, must be what, late Sixties now? Fag permanently in his mouth, one of the indefatigable, unkillable children of the very poor. He hasn’t lived in Peckham for nigh-on 40 years. Still, that’s who he is, Peckham Bob, the name the overhang of an age, not so long ago, when people were more rooted, when shifting areas was a big deal.
Peckham Bob, bless him, can talk. He and Irwin together are an endless pantomime of obscure in-jokes, wild gags, remorseless ribbing. Peckham Bob is wearing a Stetson he picked up for a quid from Help the Aged. Keeps the rain off his big nose, he says.
Peckham Cowboy Bob! Irwin shouts. You come to clean up this dirty part of town? You got your work cut out cowboy!
This will be a long, possibly arduous exchange of banter and Paula Adonor politely excuses herself, but gets collared again down at Wavelengths by Tricia, giving out leaflets for a meeting at the Albany on Saturday morning to continue opposing the re-development of the Dockside, greenlighted now by the mayor and sold off to a Singaporean consortium, 80% of the forthcoming flats, released in eighteen months’ time, already sold off-plan on junkets through Asia and beyond, in Nigeria, Angola, Ukraine, Turkey, Argentina, all the crumbling BRICS, looking for solid steel, glass and concrete assets via SafeHaven Properties’ worldwide outreach programme.
She listens politely and nods. She knows it all, Tricia knows she knows it all, but the litany, the catechism of complaints and injustices, the incantatory qualities of repeating again and again their objections, the demands, addressed ultimately to deaf ears, to deals already done, to a world already sold twice over. These imprecations seem to soothe and bolster her, and Paula Adonor feels she needs to lend a supportive ear.
Be supportive, care. She feels a surge of anger she subdues with a smile. That’s where she’s ended up, when she was determined as a child, a teenager, not to be a caregiver, doling out reserves of emotional strength and compassion. A degree in physics for god’s sake and her time has been spent caring for kids, a dying husband, a crippled child, working in social services, in community support.
As she rounds the corner onto Giffin Street she glances into the gym and sees Louise in there, hood up, balancing on one leg with some dumbbells held out in front of her, grimacing as she tries to slowly lower herself and feels a little surge of relief. She is there, she’s OK, Joolzy hanging out chatting by the Smith machine. He will keep an eye on her, said he would. He’s a good guy. Lee is with Penny. She’s a good woman.
She can’t help it, she worries about her daughter, why wouldn’t she? It’s all she has left, and she’s apprehensive. So that’s still there, not completely emptied out yet at least. There’s still that love for her daughter.
Have a rest Paula, have a break if you can. You are feeling defeated. Some self-care is necessary, without that how will you fight on?
So, yes, she worries about Louise. Why wouldn’t she? Mothers worry about their children, about their daughters, their angry daughters, only seventeen, already seen the worst of it. Would it be better if she hadn’t been exposed, so young, to death, pain, the terror of the State. Is she coping with it all? Is Paula Adonor? Will they cope through what’s to come?
What is to come? There are vaguely hopeful signs she doesn’t allow herself to believe in, a sense that slowly the tide is turning, more protests, more sympathy, more solidarity, a few victories, the slow drip feed of confidence building. That’s how it can go perhaps, almost miraculously. It always seems impossible until it isn’t, until it was always inevitable. At first everyone feels alone, then there’s the lone figure, the tiny group, standing in a square somewhere, occupying a building, refusing to move along or comply, slogans aloft, broadly ignored, bypassers swell their numbers, see something shared, some point of connection and more and more people realise their condition, their misery is commonplace. Yes that’s what they need, a divided, demoralised people and she refuses to be demoralised, or divided from her neighbours, from her fellow sufferers, even though it’s hard, even though she’s tired. But that’s all she is, tired. She needs to recuperate.
It would be easier if she had more consistent help with Lee. Joolzy would be in like a shot if she let him, he has made that abundantly clear. She has thought about it, he’s a decent man, a lot more thoughtful and sensitive in private than he lets on in public. Practical, he seems to have money though she’s not exactly sure where he gets it from. Good taste in music, he was a bit of an adventurer back in his youth too, all the major raves back in the day. He insists he used to see her out at dances: not a lot of black faces, he would have spotted her, yeah he remembers clocking her and is always mock offended that she doesn’t remember spotting him. Maybe she did she tells him. How come you didn’t come up and say hello? Things could have been very different today, he says.
Well, getting together with Joolzy would make life easier, but, while she likes him, with certain reservations of course, there’s no spark there.
Stubborn, she has always been stubborn, oh her Dad would tell you that. He admired it in her though, she could tell, her refusal to shrug and lower her eyes and go with the flow. This stark attachment to the idea of justice she has. It seems hopeless perhaps, but she will remain quietly hopeful, will express optimism, even if those words sometimes seem dead on her tongue, because without that they have won.
Who’s this they? Who’s this us, who is this them you keep referring to? Am I an “us” or am I a “them”, I mean? One of her colleagues, Ralph, asked a week or so ago at an after work drink she had reluctantly agreed to. Her temper snapped at his lofty air, his puzzled face, wrinkled nose. Don’t be so fucking childish, she said, then went to stand in the toilet for a minute or two. When she returned her line manager suggested she perhaps ought to apologise as Ralph sat there, arms folded, eyebrow raised.
Ralph, she said, I am sorry. I have been under a lot of strain recently.
Well, he said, I don’t see what that has got to do with me, if you can’t handle social situations.
The Police crippled my son; we have been through a long court case in which those responsible were acquitted. We have been the focus of a concerted smear campaign by the media and we are also being evicted from our home. I have had my benefits cut and have had to return to work, meaning my daughter has had to leave school to care for my son and I don’t know when she will be able to go back.
She wants to say all this but doesn’t, just breathes out slowly and nods. She knows what Ralph will say: well what does any of that have to do with me? Why should your life impinge on mine, why should your suffering intrude into my world? She can see the anger in his face and is at a loss to know where it comes from, has seen it a thousand times before, read it in the death threats, the comments boxes, the tweets and Facebook messages, the murderous hostility you will provoke if you will not suffer silently, if you have the audacity to protest the world, to suggest that the contentment of some is predicated on others being condemned.
Well, she said with a smile as Ralph gently shook his head at her.
OK, he said with a grudging sigh, a long drawn out, well …
Object to anything and you will be playing the race card, have a chip on your shoulder, be obsessed, a racist yourself, a naïve, politically correct fantasist, a conspiracy theorist, a militant, a danger, an extremist, a failed woman, an irresponsible mother, someone who should put up and shut up, who should just leave if she doesn’t like it. Don’t you see? All your experience, everything you have seen, known, felt, read, discussed, understood, lived, is an illusion, the world as you have bitterly suffered it day-after-day does not and has never existed and for you to insist that it does will bring an almighty wrath down upon you.
Do not speak. Exist only as much as we will allow you and no more. Be visible only when and only in the ways we command.
Was it always like this? No, she doesn’t think so. It has got worse, surely since she was a girl. Perhaps back then she was just more shielded from it.
And yet, it felt when she was younger that things were coming together, the backdrop of her life was the assumption that somehow differences were evaporating, that we were making progress, that by the time her daughter was ready to go to University the world would be transformed. She thought those raves, the music, the attitude prefigured something, a more joyful, accepting, pluralistic form of life that was coming that would somehow just spring forth from these experiments, this collective effort at dissolving the structures of the world. Was that naïve? Was that naivety a consequence of her own relative privilege, going to University, having parents who were teachers?
As for Louise, well, no wonder Louise is so angry. Paula tries hard to be moderate and controlled but sometimes her own rage and despair are palpable, filling up that tiny flat. She imagines she can smell it, some acrid fumes that have come pouring off her, and she lights a perfumed candle, a gift from Joolzy she never imagined she’d use, to try and neutralise it.
People comment on her strength, Penny said it to her once; you have absorbed blows that a lot of people never recover from. She knows that’s true; some people are wounded, disappointed, see their hopes crushed early on and never readjust, recover. Vernon was one of those, damaged just by the act of being launched into the world, like a ship with its hull breached, taking on water from day one.
But you just keep on going, somehow, don’t you? Paula Adonor asks herself, looking at her face in the mirror in the morning as she cleans her teeth, wonders whether perhaps there isn’t something wrong with her, something pathological. To still be up and functioning – why hasn’t she been driven mad by it? People talk about how much she cares, but perhaps it’s that she hardly cares at all, and what drives her on, inures her, allows her to fight for justice is precisely a lack of compassion, an attachment to something more abstract than flesh and blood.
Is it bad luck, is she cursed, or has she invited all this into her life. Has she needed this, disaster after disaster, to thrive, to live, to give her a sense of self, a mission?
She remembers something Vernon liked to quote, she forgets who said it. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Or a curse, perhaps.
She rolls over in bed and hears, she thinks, her daughter rolling over, restless too in her room, the walls in these old flats so thin, and Lee, mumbling and crying out in his room, locked away forever inside himself.
She’s drifting off to sleep and moments return to her, swirling in, mingling and overlapping, a comforting confusion of place and time and persona, losses restored, the dead sprung to life, the past intensely and vividly present. Then sleep and muffled dreams backed by her son’s soft and continuous moaning.
She hates to ask Penny to keep Lee for an extra hour or so but she is keen to talk about Vernon and surprised to find herself so keen to do so.
This email message from Alex Hargreaves has come out of the blue, as so much does. Another sense of obligation, now, to the past, to those who have passed, remnants of what remains.
Still, it might help to take her mind of things, to remember something, if not exactly positive, then at least a period of optimism, when they were young and radical and filled with ideas about how they would change the world, hadn’t yet run up against the sheer, monolithic weight of money and power. She feels that if she was ever angry with Vernon that all that has evaporated over the years. At the time she believed they had answers to everything, back when they thought that truth made a difference or that it only took someone to point out how unfair it all was for those who benefitted to step aside abashed.
Pure innocence really, to believe that love and brotherhood would somehow sweep all the old world away. Will her daughter have any such moment of innocence now?
No, and perhaps that’s for the best. Of course, her daughter will be poorer than she was, has already grown up in a tougher area, Deptford, as opposed to her own childhood in white and leafy Wimbledon. Some of her friends from back then, from school, who she doesn’t have much to do with anymore except for the occasional obligatory likes or positive comments about kids or domestic triumphs on Facebook, occasionally console her for having ended up in SE8 and she knows she could never explain to them that she wanted to live here, chose it, for her, for her kids. They see it as just one more tragic outcome in her broadly tragic life.
And now they are getting kicked out anyway. Paula Adonor will be the last to leave, her situation a little more complicated than the rest, her resources, her grasp of how the system works a little better than most, and so she has forced them to find her something suitable before she ups and leaves her home of nearly twenty years. How she will cope once Penny isn’t around she has no idea. She can ask Sissy, Joolzy, but they have their own lives and once they are relocated, if Paula Adonor can’t find another job, then Louise will have to do the full time caring.
Swish new riverside homes. Up and coming. Breath-taking river views. A short hop across the Thames to Canary Wharf. Ironic, really, she remembers Vernon, Rob, Howard hanging on in Hulme Crescent twenty plus years back now, shifting along block by block as the place got demolished. Here she is doing much the same.
These thoughts are occupying her as she cuts out of the DLR and down Deptford Broadway to Greenwich High Road. She spots Alex Hargreaves immediately, his shining face and neat, Edwardian haircut, both slick and severe, and extends her hand.
Coming back from the doctor, just a check-up, everything fine, Paula Adonor is tired, dead tired, eyes raw, limbs leaden. She doubts she will make it to the gym today for her spinning class. An early night is what she needs. As she crosses the courtyard to the block she nods a greeting to the girl from Wardens who is occupying a flat on the floor above, there to keep an eye out for squatters, people trying to break in and strip flats of anything saleable, report problems. A nice girl, ex-sociology student who understands her role in helping USG force everyone out of the estate, but needs a place to live as she does her internship at Greencorp. No mum and dad to bankroll her, rent sky high. I am sorry, the girl said when Paula and Penny questioned her one day on the stairs, struggling down with Lee as she came trotting up, the lift deliberately decommissioned to make their lives more difficult. I am sorry; I just don’t know what else I can do.
I know, Paula said. I know. That’s how it is, we are all caught up, compromised, trying to balance demands, live the right way even as we figure out what that might be.
And as to compromise, well, people say that she should just accept what has happened to Lee. That her pursuit of justice is fruitless, will only bring more strain, stress, and pressure down upon her, calumny, despair. To bring a case against the Police is madness, futile, but she will pursue this futile action it seems beyond any appeal to health or sanity. The need for justice is savage, uncompromising, all consuming, as basic as hunger or thirst. She knows she is on some database somewhere, some set of blacklists, that her calls and movements will be monitored, that any preferences she might have as to where she will be relocated or transferred within work are sure to be ignored. Perhaps they should just up and leave of their own accord rather than hang around, contesting every package, refusing every offer.
If she dropped the whole thing, maybe life would be easier.
Maybe they could go to Wales. She remembers that day they drove down from Manchester to the Brecon Beacons for the big outdoor rave in ’94. What a beautiful day that was. How dazzled they were by the light and space, the clearness and openness of the sky. She was in love with Vernon of course, but with her friends too, with everyone in that field and with the times, the future. Coming up on the pill that Rob gave her she thought she might not stop, that they all might suddenly burst through their skins and atomise, a vast, misted dome of intermingled, multi-coloured drops. She cried out, hands above her head, feet pounding, and Vernon took off his sunglasses and leaned in to grab and hold her as the bass drop sucked all the air out of the world and catapulted them up, spiralling skyward through wave after wave of pleasure and release until night fell, a beautiful band of deepening purple filtering up from the earth, the stars, the air warm, the heat of bodies, the mountains, the sense that they would somehow, through sheer force of love, stop time and live there forever. The next afternoon, coming down in the back of the van, up after a few hours sleep and smoking a spliff, Rob cracking open a can of Special Brew and splitting it, watered down with lemonade, someone outside with a boombox was playing a tune that went, never lose that feeling, never lose that feeling.
How could they have had so much energy then, get by on so little sleep? After that it really started to fall apart. She remembers Vernon and Rob made a track sometime later where they took a sample of Queen’s Too Much Love Will Kill You and wove it in and out of a series of dark keyboard stabs and off centre, over-cranked percussion and she felt that was right, they had all understood, too much will kill you.
But then, so will too little.
Putting her health at risk, that’s what they say. Well, how different then is she in that respect from Vernon after all? At least she has people pulling her back, urging her to relent whereas with Vernon, Rob actively encouraged him in it, even when he began to self harm, though they didn’t exactly have a term for it back then. Rob was a bad influence, they had that competitive bravado she sees too often in young men, this pushing each other beyond all reasonable limits, the glee in each others’ destruction. She can’t forgive Rob for that, when she thinks back she sees something malicious in it that at the time, instinctively, she was uncomfortable with but which all their polemic and theorising swept away. She began to doubt her own judgments.
Why was she so stupid? Why didn’t she take a stand against it, especially when Vernon started turning up with his arms covered in burns?
Well, she was young, they all were, and she was under-confident in some ways. Rob was always antagonistic too, sexist, thought of her as a mere girl, not hardcore enough. That was Rob, not good with or comfortable around girls. He treated Fran appallingly. Wonder where she is now. She was fragile. Has gone down under the wheel of the world, as so many do, all the unrescued ones who but for a few kind words, a little thoughtful intervention, someone or something to live for, some trust or kindness, have withered away.
Well, come on Paula, making a cup of tea now, Earl Grey, always loved it, Lee parked in the living room, there was nothing you could have done about it.
She needs a break but even the idea of it fills her with guilt, even though no one would begrudge her one. She raises the tea and takes a sip. Small pleasures, should she deny herself even those? A cup of tea, a bath, a loving embrace, clean sheets, allowing her imagination and memory to roam.
Another day, up at 5.30 and bathing and changing Lee, getting breakfast for sleepy, sulky Lewis, checking Penny’s OK to have him for the afternoon and is stocked up with everything he needs, and then the quick, tense check through the post for all the demands and notifications and appeals and orders that she will read through standing up on the train as it crawls the few miles to London Bridge. All this before the day’s work has begun, then another journey home at rush hour, more delays on the Overground, with a box file full of legal papers she needs to trawl through clasped to her chest, no right to use the Soft Rail extension that whizzes the Wharf workers back and forth from their million pound riverside cubicles in Greenwich, Surrey Quays, Canada Water. The repeated delays and cancellations despite all the station upgrades and infrastructure investment and tax- payers’ money poured in to fund it all.
She collects Lee from Penny’s, chats briefly, fancies, oddly, a joint though she hasn’t smoked one for years and knows Louise would disapprove. They are quite puritanical, kids these days. That’s probably for the best. Her generation probably did too many drugs, and where did it get anyone?
Another early night, 9.25. How gorgeous to be in bed, between clean sheets early and tired enough to know that soon you’ll sleep, that there are eight blissful, restorative hours before the morning’s necessities. She has been reading Alex Hargreaves’ book, Gilligan’s Century, and finds it a little unengaging: smart, crammed with information and surprising turns of phrase, chock full of incident and detail but somehow hard to take in. She feels she should finish it, that sense of obligation again, but is tempted to return to the McFarlaine mystery she interrupted for this one, Quantum Homicide. Alex Hargreaves’ photo is displayed prominently on the back of the book and he is a nice- looking boy, a major selling point probably. He will do well.
She wouldn’t mind a man. She has been surprised to find herself warming slightly in her email exchanges with Alex Hargreaves and she chides herself; he’s a boy, he must be, what, 27, 28? Perhaps it is not so much him as the fact that she could see he was attracted to her when they met. And a young, blond boy, well spoken, very courteous, that’s not unappealing. He would, she is sure, be quite inexperienced in bed, like Vernon was, like Harvey was, like they all are really once they get over the idea they know what they’re doing. She wonders what they are like, this younger generation. They have seen things, online, she would imagine, that her generation had little idea about. Paula Adonor has had a look herself, on the odd occasion.
The book goes onto her bedside table, the box file unopened sitting on a chair against the wardrobe. Tonight, especially, she is too tired to concentrate. Drifting off now, a cotton soft lassitude threading her veins.
That day in Wales, the bouncy castles, the funfair, the light show, the music, the sense of a mass spontaneous effort whose only aim was joy.
Sitting with Vernon on the low wall one summer night in the shadow of the Crescent. He wanted her to explain it all to him, time, space, matter, multi-dimensionality. Do you think, he asked, that a person might end up in the wrong world, as time forked and branched, they might get stalled or stumble into a universe they were never meant to live in?
She can hear a small, high pitched voice, wafting in on a warm current from nowhere, singing over and over, Time dies when you are with me, Time dies when you are with me.
What tune was that from? She rouses herself, props herself up on one arm, wonders whether she should send Nick a message, squints at the clock. It is just after ten, but perhaps, well, if he is asleep it won’t wake him.
Sorry. Tune stuck in my head. What was that track that went time dies when you’re with me?
A few seconds later the message comes back with a YouTube link, Krispy Biscuit by Rufige Kru.
She laughs.
Where did they get these titles from?
I know. Great track, terrible title. It’s like they just didn’t care.
You awake/available?
The phone buzzes and she answers it.
What’s going on? Nick asks. You getting nostalgic? His voice is soft and welcoming.
Yeah, she says. She keeps her voice down. I keep thinking about that day in Wales.
Oh, yeah. He laughs. The Beacons. I played a set in a tent somewhere. Hardly remember anything about it now.
Thinking about Vernon.
A pause.
Yeah, that guy, Alex got in touch.
You don’t mind that I passed on your details do you?
Nah. I don’t have much time to think about stuff like that at the moment though. Work is crazy and getting worse everyday.
Same here. The kids?
Yeah, good. It’s good that Theresa stayed local, for all of us. How is it going with you and yours?
It’s a struggle. It’s a struggle.
I am sure.
Anyway.
Oh, one thing, well two things actually. There’s a little kind of nostalgia thing going on down here, end of next week, a mini-rave, a Back To 95 thing. I might even spin a few old tunes myself. If you fancy getting out of London for a bit, come down.
Well. There’s lots of things would need arranging even for a day trip let alone an overnighter. With Lee, obviously.
Bring him down too. We can arrange something.
I’ll let you know.
And also that lyric is time flies when I am with you.
Oh I see. All these years. She chuckles. Alright, sleep tight.
You too.
Don’t let the memory bugs bite.
She chuckles. Bye.
Bye.
Time flies? She is disappointed, time dying seems far better. Vernon got it wrong too then, misheard it. He used to sing it over and over.
The dead, she has heard someone say, must die twice; first the physical death, then the death must be recorded, ritualised, through periods of mourning, funerals, the scattering of ashes, acknowledged in stages. And perhaps they must die twice in order to live again. She remembers how for a year, perhaps more, they didn’t speak of Harvey, the father, the husband, for fear of the emotions they would provoke in each other, and so repressed him, kept him locked away, ghostly, gestating, until one day the conversation at the dinner table turned fleetingly to him and Lee remarked that now he could hear certain songs he associated with his Dad and not tear up. A few days later Paula Adonor had a dream that Harvey was sitting in the bedroom, waiting patiently as the kids hoovered up outside and made the place clean, as though in preparation for his return, and that in the dream she was Harvey too, and also the kids, and herself, watching. The room was full of light and there he was, quiet, patient, returned from his exile in death, a figure they could discuss, invoke, enjoy again.
In that sublime dream she was everyone and all things, both herself and others, the observer and what she observed. But in the telling of it language got in the way, broke things up, forced the dream to take on difference and contradiction, separation; when in that beautiful suspended moment, in that light of a life brought back from death, there was no time or separation, no words, only the holistic, perfect, uncompromised image and the wisdom to know we are outside life or death, space and time, self and others; and that words, words will divide us up and cage us and condemn us.
Well, what does that mean? Except that Vernon, poor Vernon, has not even died once, he still has so far to go before he can return, but perhaps this interest of Alex Hargreaves’ will help to speed his passage back to the world, let him mingle with us again, silent, contented, reborn.
And as she drifts off she finds herself gently lulled and lifted out of time into a realm where all borders become progressively more porous and dissolve. It all makes sense here on the threshold of sleep, the echo-memory of the bliss of the yet-to-be-born, a mounting babble of soothing nonsense that crowds out her thoughts, language that liquefies into pure tones and dim modulations, a soft flurry of half-forgotten scenes and…
She finds she’s talking about Hulme Crescent, Alex Hargreaves sitting arms folded in his car, heading North, Paula Adonor in bed, tablet resting on her knees. Twenty years ago they would have been amazed that such technologies were possible, yet perhaps something like Hulme Crescent might seem, to someone like Alex Hargreaves, equally fantastical, mythic, unreal.
And yet, well, she doesn’t want to admit it to herself even, but she used to hate going out to the Crescent. The dirt, the burned out cars, the dogs most of all, all these half-starved dogs running around, and the drugs, fun for a while but then the state of some of the people who had got locked into it, the people with obvious mental health issues, violent people, criminals and yes, she supposes she saw a lot of what was best in people too, but to live there long term, those damp, grey crumbling walls, the subsistence diets, the endless hustling and haggling.
Well, they criticised her at the time, especially Rob, of course, for wanting her own space, her own little enclosed world, her privacy and her things, her property, though she pointed out to them that they were quick to appropriate poor Nick Skilling’s computer equipment and keyboards, liberate them from his student flat and then lock them away in their own in the Crescent, padlocking a cupboard so no one would get in and take them. Yes, they exerted all this pressure on everyone else to be less bourgeois, less selfish, less obsessed with property, but they themselves were happy to secretly squirrel things away and appropriate other—especially better-off—peoples’ possessions for their own exclusive use, in the name of the art that they alone, the children of the sacred working class, could create.
Well, they had a point in some ways, but they were too easily persuaded, she and Nick and other people who fell into their orbit, bullied even. Poor Nick especially was pulled around by the nose, pressured into relinquishing things, space, hardware, time, money, into ferrying them about.
In that last year, 1995, when the place was getting demolished block by block, still they clung on in absolute denial of reality that the time had come for them to move on. And when they did, to Castleford, Rob and Howard were talking about how they would transform it, how a thousand cybernetic flowers would bloom in the slag heaps and the broken mines, in the gutted factories and warehouses, by which point she was tired, tired and did want, yes, a little bit of calm and stability, tranquillity, and a sense of a structure and order to the days, the coming years. Though that has never really come, pockets of reprieve perhaps, little islets of solid ground among the shifting sands and now, well, she is back in the situation they were in then.
You are beaten Paula, accept it, it’s time to go.
It is, she has started boxing things up, almost unconsciously, setting inessential things aside, has asked Lewis to look at what can be thrown away. Even if they haven’t been given anywhere yet she knows the interim accommodation will be smaller than what she has here, though that’s not much. There’s talk of Lee going into a temporary USG care facility but she has refused to allow it. She should go down, take up Nick’s invite, have a look around the place, maybe it won’t be so bad to be down on the coast, probably half of Deptford will end up down there anyway.
It will be nice to see Nick again. Yes, life moves if not in full circles, then half circles perhaps, slow crescents, waxing and waning.
Slow crescents. She thinks of Lee’s eyes. He had such beautiful, deep brown, soulful eyes, and now they are rolled back in his head as though he were caught permanently looking up in bafflement, lids half closed, iris invisible, his lips moving, softly muttering. As a boy he was …
No, no.
And so excited when she came home, standing in the hall waiting for her.
No.
And when Harvey was dying in the hospital he was so brave at the bedside in the last days, sitting with his arm around Louise.
No Paula, don’t look back, keep your eyes on the present, on the needs you have now, don’t let other people slip through the gaps. Guilt? She has nothing to feel guilty for. Is she being punished? Her husband, her son. Who next?
She pushes those thoughts away as her phone beeps a message at her. Nick has updated his Facebook page with a flier for the upcoming rave. Return to Dreamland. She closes her eyes. Holds his image in her mind.
Why not?
She hopes the past will not consume her, that she will not brood, dwell upon it. The great long, dizzying loops and returns, the cycling of time through the mind, its tides and seasons.
Back from work, dropping her things in the space behind the doorway and about to bring Lee in from Penny’s next door, she senses something is wrong with the flat, a change in the tension, poise, atmosphere of the rooms that only someone deeply familiar with them could detect, imperceptible to a stranger, even perhaps to someone who had lived there for years, but Paula has been here for getting on two decades now.
Her first thought is that it’s the Police again. They have been in, trying to find ways to discredit her, planting things. Perhaps they are still in here.
She steps quickly back through the door and taps on Penny’s window, after a second her face appears: you alright, darling?
Paula keeps her voice low; has anyone been in the flat today, did you see anyone, hear anything? The walls are thin enough.
No. Why? What’s wrong?
No one came past?
Come on, come in here, Penny says, running round to open the door. No one has been past, Lee and me have been watching like hawks, haven’t we?
Oh Penny, what am I going to do when you are gone? Paula asks, and laughs.
The bastards, Penny says, the bastards, lighting a Pall Mall. Don’t let them get to you, love.
Too late for that, she says and reaches out to stroke Lee’s head as she sits down at the table and accepts a cup of tea.
Louise about? In Wavelengths, I suppose, bossing everyone around.
She’s got a lot of energy that girl of yours, she’s a fighter. She told me that she will do it all, she told me she will study, work, look after Lee here. She said she doesn’t care how long it takes or what it takes. Penny laughs. She’s her mother’s girl, that one!
How is she Penny? I am worried she is going to get herself into trouble.
Penny looks confused and Paula laughs. No, not pregnant.
That’s the last thing I am worried about at the moment.
Oh she’ll be fine, she’s not stupid.
Neither was Lee.
Penny smiles. He is still a lovely boy, she says and rests her hand on his shoulder, he’s as much her son in many ways as Paula’s, in the way that Louise is as close to her as her own daughter. She remembers Paula and Harvey moving in and thinking what a good looking couple they were, what a beautiful family, Lee a tiny two year old, furious with energy, Paula all tall, pregnant and aglow, Harvey proud as punch and beaming, big arms full of clothes and boxes.
We have a lot of fun together, don’t we Lee?
Lee shifts in his chair, rolls his head around, one eye open, mouth slack, emits a moan. They both smile at him, a long pause, the sound of traffic and the endless building work.
Anyway, Penny says, sitting down at the table too and touching the brown envelope on its surface with a cautiously extended finger, as though it were something dead or toxic. All appeals rejected, I have to be out by the twenty first.
Of?
Oh, this month. Ten days. Then you will be the last one, holding the fort. She smiles. Well, we knew we were never going to win. At least we made it tough for them.
Where are you going?
South coast. Thanet. Enemy territory, but close enough to London. She laughs and lights a cigarette. Yes, that was a good ruse.
Paula smiles. They deliberately put down their relocation preferences on the consultation form in reverse order, knowing that they would be punished and allocated the choice they seemed to like least. With any luck she will get sent down there too and then they will be close. Nick is down there, might be good to have him nearby. He deals with this stuff, doesn’t he? Perhaps she could have a word with him. For the moment she is holding out for a review of her latest relocation plan, again on the grounds of inadequate facilities and care provision for Lee, but with Penny gone and the Homecare slashed there is only Louise left to look after him. Is it fair to burden a young girl with that, even if she says she loves her brother and wants to do it?
Outside, the noise of constant traffic, building work. You used to hear kids playing, the woman two floors up arguing with her husband, the father two floors down bellowing at his son, the couple next door having sex all hours of the day, god she howled, people greeting each other or cussing each other out, things boiling over sometimes into real trouble, doors slamming, keys jangling, extravagant ringtones, singing, laughter, sobbing, a patchwork of lived life, sometimes ugly, strained, sometimes comic, dramatic, despairing, raucous. But for the last six months or so it has fluttered away, and now there is just the cars and lorries on the road, the tractors, the builders barking, the dull pound and churn of machinery, none of it adequate to fill the slowly reverberating absence that sounds around the estate its mournful, muted knell.
Penny’s sitting at the table, fag in hand, half a bottle of white wine in front of her, living room piled up with boxes and bags. How do you accumulate so much stuff over the years, why can’t you throw it away?
She laughs, all those years in Australia, all those years as a social worker seem to have taught her nothing. She tells them again how they used to rehouse aboriginal families and that they wouldn’t take anything with them, just leave the furniture behind for the next people, how hard it was to keep track of people’s kids as they were always being given to other families. Nomadic peoples for whom objects are a burden, to whom objects are a mystery, who live in deep time, the dreamtime. She wishes she could be more like them, the aborigines, always connected to the land, to history, to lines of power, immersed in myth. She’s done a fair bit of roaming, but as for accumulating nothing, well. Maybe, she thinks, the younger generation are a bit more like that, they seem more self-contained, less materialistic, more interested in communication and sharing, living in their phones.
Lee moans in the chair, over by the fish tank. She calls out to him, Lee, Lee in a sing-song voice. Everything’s alright, darling.
It will be nice to be down on the coast. Bit of fresh air. You can see France on a clear day so they say. I’ll miss the High Street though.
Well, Paula says, you’d miss the High Street even if you stayed. It won’t look like that in a few years. Her phone beeps, she glances at it, Alex Hargreaves again, turns it off so she can concentrate on being with Penny.
Louise is sitting on the sofa going through Vernon’s box, flicking through the files and folders, taking out the tapes, sticking the CDs into a Discman she got from Help the Aged, occasionally asking her mum where such-and-such a sample comes from or Googling it then playing them songs from her phone.
An old eighties song comes creeping out of the tiny speakers. Oh yes I forgot, they sampled this, her mum says and laughs.
Vernon thought it was a song about revolution. Louise Googles the lyrics and snorts as the track plays. Maybe, she can see that. Then she goes back to listening to the CD on her headphones, the sample slowing down and snapping back from half speed to double quick as grainy beats scatter about everywhere and a hulking, rusty bassline drops in, makes the whole track shudder and skip around. The line, All the fear that I felt before, I just don’t feel it anymore, intercut with the streets are full of kids, taking over the night.
This is probably pretty good, she says. She doesn’t really like electronic music, probably she associates it too much with her Mum and Dad, though she has to admit the original is damn catchy and she likes the video. A quick couple of screen taps and she finds out it was directed by a woman. Yeah, makes sense.
Well, he was considered cutting edge at the time, her mum says. Lewis groans. Cutting edge; it’s this kind of talk she likes to avoid.
Well, I’ll tell you all about the place when I get back. I feel bad going on your last weekend here, Paula says.
Oh, I will be busy with all this, she says, gesturing at the packing. Anyway a romantic weekend away is just what you need.
Romantic? Louise looks up. Paula registers her raised eyebrows, sudden involvement.
Oh well, I don’t know that anything like that will happen.
No, no. I’m just messing about, Penny says quickly. Romantic? Louise asks, eyes down now, scrutinising one of Vernon’s old pads, pretending to be nonchalant.
More nostalgic than romantic, Paula says. But you know Louise, you are not the only one who needs to have a physical life, y’know?
Please, Louise says. Honestly, please.
Your sex drive doesn’t just disappear when you hit forty, she says. If anything.
But Louise has already jammed the left earphone back in, saying, thank you, thank you and the music is on another track now, sampling some hippy anthem. She knows this one, likes the song. Call you to mind.
Penny and her mum exchange a wry look and a smile. Her mum’s going to have sex. With a man. A horrible idea on every level. She feels a bit betrayed, not just as a child, a daughter, but as a women. She feels an extra surge of irritation that it is probably a white man. White men, like the ones who crippled her brother and closed ranks to deny them justice, white like the ones who are kicking them out of their home, white like the men who are signing deals to have the whole area sold to someone else, white like the men who are removing benefits and rights and loading up debt and discipline. She’s about to take her headphones out and say something but thinks better of it. She shouldn’t have a row with her mum in Penny’s place, and besides her mum is letting her stay here on her own for the weekend, after some protesting. Now she knows why, she doesn’t want sulky Louise getting in the way of her middle-aged, white-man dirty weekend. She smiles to herself, strokes her phone, sends Laura a message, gets one back straightaway.
I am worried I have forgotten what to do, Paula says in a quiet voice.
It’s like riding a bike, Penny says, and they both laugh.
I hope everything still works down there, she says.
For you or for him, Penny asks, and they laugh more uproariously this time as Paula inevitably says, both! Louise turns up the volume and scowls, the sample on the mix now repeating: we lie unburied yet / we’ve been dead all this time.
She breathes out slowly through her nose. She must control her rage, for her own sake, for Louise’s. She wants her to have as close to a normal life as possible, one with shades and contrast and variety, some optimism, hard won as that is.
The letter trembles in her hand as the tea steams on the counter in a shaft of sunlight through the window. She reads it again. She has been reported as a negligent or abusive carer and is to present herself and her son before a panel two-weeks from now to undergo assessment and possible sanctioning.
Unbelievable. First they remove any possibility of help or support, then prosecute you if you fail to meet some set of arbitrary standards.
She has Googled the three letter acronym on the letterhead and understands immediately, glancing through the discussion group on Resist: the company finds you negligent, the company fines and imposes a carer on you, it is part subsidised by the Government and the rest of the cost is to be met by the carer. She scans a linked article … Pilot schemes in the north-east … public services have been decimated … Joanna reported anonymously on a USG affiliated hotline after leaving her partner with ADS outside a supermarket for twenty three minutes … care monitoring imposed on her … unable to pay bill … converted into Give-back hours … partner taken into USG care facility, Joanna working in USG factory to pay for care costs. Accusations that USG’s care wardens are on a commission and target-based pay scale.
Once you are in the loop, they have got you for good. And they want you in there. That’s how they live.
She will fight it, of course, demand to know who this tipoff has come from, what evidence there is. She knows it’s another attempt to intimidate, pile on stress.
She is glad she has decided to go down and see Nick. He’s a decent guy, solid, dependable. She would just like to talk to someone, lie with someone she has no real history with, someone both familiar and anonymous, without expectations or presumptions.
She needs a little break, just an evening off, to recuperate, to pretend she is carefree. She won’t tell Louise, not about this new twist, this new strategy, this new assault on them. What time is it? Damn! She gulps down half her mug of tea and heads for the door patting all her pockets and double checking her bag, waving at Penny, smoking a fag in the window as she hurries past.
The first of the day’s noodl messages pings into her phone and she glances at it as she waits on the crowded platform for the delayed 8.02. Hargreaves again. She ignores it.
And throughout the day, more messages and missed calls from Alex Hargreaves. Eventually she relents, messages back. She doesn’t have much time, perhaps on Tuesday, early evening, they can have a coffee if he is willing to come over to Deptford. By now she just hopes that if she agrees to another meeting he will stop texting her all the time. She began to worry it was just her but Nick tells her he’s also receiving six, seven messages a day, many of which he finds impossible to understand.
He is willing to come over and so at 4.30 they meet in Kwofee. He seems a little different to the first time they met a fortnight or so ago, a little less polite, a little less polished, more intense, more ragged.
He tells her with a smile that he has had a lot of success tracking down Vernon’s work, packages arriving all the way from New Zealand. Yes, he has even managed to track down Sarah Peake.
So, Alex Hargreaves says. I just need your stuff now really Paula and –
Paula smiles, well, that might be tricky at the moment, she says, my daughter seems to have discovered it and taken an interest.
An interest, how so? He asks a little too rapidly, almost snaps back. Paula, he says, and she doesn’t like the patronising, chiding tone that has come into his voice and that he tries to moderate as the sentence progresses, everything needs to be brought together.
Well, she says.
An interest in what exactly?
The writing I think. All of it I suppose.
Alex Hargreaves smiles tightly. Is she reading things? What’s she reading? That’s interesting, he says. I’d really like to talk to her about that, I’d be very interested to know what her take was on something like that; it might really help us in getting Vernon’s name out there. When’s she around, could we arrange a meet up?
No, Paula says quickly, almost vehemently. Then it’s her turn to moderate her tone. No, no, I think all this interest in Vernon has gone far enough really, I think perhaps I’d prefer to keep it private, I am not sure whether I want it all out there, as you say.
Well, do you have the right to make that decision? On Vernon’s work you are going to …
Vernon’s not here she says. When he comes back he can decide on what happens to it.
But he’s never coming back is he?
Then it stays in limbo, I guess, she says.
A pulse is ticking away in his temple, he smiles. In limbo? The value of this work, he says, must be realised.
The realisation of value? She nods, well, she says. I am away this weekend. Perhaps we can think about this more next week.
Paula, Paula, really, his voice has got louder. I need this stuff now. Well, as I said. Next week.
Suddenly Joolzy’s at the table, leaning on it, head and torso turned toward Alex Hargreaves, bottom lip out, brows knit. Seriously, bruv, you are not trying to get heavy, in here, with a close friend of mine?
Alex Hargreaves sits back in his chair spreads his arms out wide and rolls his eyes back as if to say …
Say it, say it, say, you people, you people. Joolzy wants him to say it.
I just want to help everyone out but no one seems to get it, he says, his voice thick.
But Paula has made up her mind. She experiences a glimmer of doubt, almost, she thinks, a pre-cognition, it might just be easier if she gives it to him. He seems agitated, in a bad frame of mind. It might be wise, head off further trouble, conflict down the line.
But no, she has made up her mind and once she has she’s stubborn.
You can ask her Dad, he’ll tell you.